George Eliot, as a moralist emphasizes what makes a woman, an object of sympathy while keeping in a traditional line of interpretation, and this is what has made Eliot to be considered among the greatest creators of woman characters. The Mill on the Floss (1860) tells the story of a young woman, Maggie Tulliver, who despite contriving hard to keep everyone contended, remains unable to conform to the traditional society. In fact, this is a story of hardships and determinism in the context of a feminist, in which Eliot revisits her own quandary and starts the story of a restricted, poorly-educated female child in a male-dominated culture (Dee, 1999). Right from the beginning, however, it is evident that Eliot’s character sketch of Maggie portrays a passionate and intelligent young woman, who is also problematic, because of the struggle she keeps on to construct and defend a sense of self, which is overcast by a dark certainty that familial and a middle-class life cannot accommodate.
What Eliot tries to depict through Maggie, is the revelation of an ungendered social arena, disclosed by the interference of other male dominant characters.
With a feminist perspective, Eliot depicts feminist determinism in the major themes of The Mill on the Floss, i.e., none other than the character of Maggie Tulliver. The structure of the story takes a commonplace to develop as Tom and Maggie grow, which sets them within the framework of a traditional family and a middle-class society which extensively determine what they become shows the inevitable development of their characters according to the pressures of heredity and irrevocable events, and traces their destinies chronologically from love, through division, to unity in death. Even the unity, in the end, is initiated on behalf of Maggie, who by coincidence gets the chance of meeting her brother Tom, whom she loves the most, but this coincidence is brought to them by flood, in which death is their ultimate destination.
Male-dominated culture
Maggie lives in a culture, controlled by men. This she has witnessed since childhood. However, there has been some progress when she steps into youth and accepts that Tom being her adorable brother, lacks an idealistic attitude and unlike Maggie is rational to confront the truth in a much better way. Her relation with Tom goes smoothly until the arrival of Philip Wakem, a hunchbacked but sensitive person who proves to be a good friend of Maggie. Since Wakem’s father is an opponent of Mr. Tulliver, it is Wakem’s family responsible for the death of their father. Therefore, Tom never allows Maggie to befriend Wakem. In the novel, Eliot can no longer afford to ignore women and gender divisions, so she has persuaded her characters to undergo through various changes needed for the male-stream bias to be overcome. While perceiving the story through a sociological point of view, indeed, there has already been a steady flow of books on the subject of feminism, published by women authors, and even most academic social science publishers have a feminist, gender, or women’s studies list, but the way Eliot has portrayed feminism in The Mill on the Floss is exceptional, for it highlights upon the hidden factors of the then epoch, which represented a male-dominated culture. This story is an illustration of how feminist research continues to focus on males and to ignore women and girls or to incorporate women but without modifying the theories that justified their subordinate status.
Maggie in a male-dominated culture tries to create a family which has not as yet moved beyond the egoism of man’s inhuman beginnings to the sympathy and benevolence which many philosophers believed would grow out of egoism. Among other things, the frequency with which all the male characters are shaped is in comparison to other beings that highlights that George Eliot wants to see the society entailed with intellectual and moral development from egoism to intelligent sympathy towards which she aspired. It is the egoism of the male characters, that bought destruction to Tulliver’s family, from the commencement of the novel till the end, when Tom and Maggie get drowned in flood. Mr. Tulliver’s egoism initiated a rivalry between him and Wakems, escorting them to a situation where Tullivers had to renounce their Mill, and Tom’s egoist character affects Maggie in a pessimistic manner, where she had to renounce her relationship with Philip.
A triangle of relationship is formed when Maggie visits Mr. Stelling’s school the second time where she finds Tom, and Philip rehearsing their roles as rivals in triangular desire, Maggie being unaware of their despise while watching the two of them, constructs in her subconscious a spatial metaphor as a triangle. As the visit progresses, the feminist perspective considers it that Tom is the mediator, Philip the desiring and envious subject, and Maggie the object of their affections. Thus the feminist challenge to male-stream society requires a radical rethinking of the content and methodology of the family, one that recognizes the need to see society from the position of women, rather than from the standpoint of men as in this novel.
Woman – an object of Self-Sacrifice
Being a middle-class Victorian girl, Maggie was inculcated from an early age with ideas of self-sacrifice and service while Tom was encouraged to be independent. At this point the novel discloses that middle-class Victorian boys and girls were separated at puberty, and girls were forced to cease any vigorous exercise, to dress in a more feminine way, and to cease educational activity. This again was a reflection of a male-dominated community where it was assumed that women were inherently weak and needed to reserve all their energies for their natural function of bearing children. Tom, like other Victorian boys, entered the all-male world of work because he despite being subjected to attend desultory schooling, was encouraged to increase his physical and intellectual activities and to become more active and independent, to help out Mr. Tulliver. This also presents before us a preview of how middle-class young people had a prolonged period of education, but while boys went into employment young women were kept at home and prepared for domesticity in the name of sacrifice.
Eliot points out in The Mill on the Floss that “Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love, and that Tom and Lucy should do or see anything of which she was ignorant would have been an intolerable idea to Maggie” (Eliot & Susan, 2003, p. 107). George Eliot has portrayed Maggie as a symbol of self-sacrifice which till the end of the novel, does not hesitate to sacrifice her life for the contention of Tom and Philip. It is this self-sacrifice of Maggie that brought her in the end, the rivalry against the flood, in which Eliot tries to express her gratitude for Maggie, as she wins her brother in the flood, but in arms of death. It is likewise that Maggie’s sacrifice to lend a wider meaning to the little family ignobly lost through Mr. Tulliver’s recklessness where the miller’s gradual ruin and self-destruction are deftly handled by Eliot as sure of her control. After Mr. Tulliver’s death, Eliot displaces Tom and Maggie while being a tiny girl of the earlier portions of the novel is now aggrandized into a ‘fallen princess’ who is denied her regal robes by her unheroic inferiors.
Maggie, from the moment when Philip declares his love, is torn between gratitude and affection for Philip, who has given her a fuller life when she was in need to be understood, and the inability to return his passion. Maggie, though answered humbly to Philip’s love, as long as it was limited to friendship, but sexual desire has complicated the triangular relation because once Maggie experiences the erotic fascination of Stephen, she can only envision a marriage to Philip as a sexual sacrifice. Many critics claim that this was eased by Tom’s authoritarian decree, who rescues Maggie from the dilemma of sexual choice, his proprietary and inflexible manner trouble the sibling relation. The concluding lines of the novel ease the situation which Eliot has constructed through a triangle, that Stephen, visiting the grave with his wife; Philip, author of Maggie’s desire, a solitary visitor; and Maggie, for whom the consequences of liberated desire have been fatal. Dee (1999) points out that moreover, Eliot sacrifices Maggie for the unnecessary reason of creating triangular desire in her image, but even that of a strong woman (Dee, 1999).
Feminists fascination
The passage that Maggie covered from the possibility of her love for Stephen and from what was seen as the sensuality of George Eliot’s writing is a common response towards feminists conjuring the sensations of the opposite sex.
But the kind of love-making which seems to possess a strange fascination for the modern feminist novelist is that all like to dwell on love as a strange overmastering force which, through the senses, captivates and enthralls the soul. Maggie fascinates what lingers on the description of the physical sensations that accompany the meeting of hearts of love on one hand, while her unique fascination for her brother Tom elucidates her eagerness to satisfy all aspects of her love life. This also reveals Maggie’s fascination of sensitivity that she neither wants to displease her brother Tom, nor other relationships in the context of love that includes Philip and Stephen, to whom she feels she has fallen in love. But just because the fact that Philip provided her moral support after Tulliver’s death, made her realize that she had to pay back Philip in the same coin and must not marry Stephen.
From a feminist perspective, many believe that Maggie assumed that her personal is political, and since she possesses a welcoming attitude towards all male characters surrounding her, she has given them the authority to be active agents who ‘do the oppressing’ and that it is necessary to give credence to women’s concrete experiences of oppression, ones occurring in personal, everyday encounters as well as those at the collective and institutional level. Critics claim that men and women, oppressors and oppressed, confront one another in their everyday lives, so they are not just role-players acting out a prepared script. They possess the right to exercise other human actors in specific social contexts who can and do oppose each other like men do exercise power and women do experience pain and humiliation. This is not a new phenomenon for the power of men over women is collective and society’s sexist assumptions advantage all men, as feminist ideologies support and sanction the power of men over women. Feminist sociologists, view Maggie in the context of examining the relationship between individuals and the social structure that promotes women as a symbol of devotion.
Feminism vs. anti-feminism
Tullivers family best describes the debate over anti-feminism in which after the miller loses a lawsuit in which he has unwisely supposed that he can hire best Lawyer Wakem on the lawyer’s own terrain, his wife takes up her husband’s cause by making a foray into the enemy camp. But since her undiplomatic efforts to persuade Wakem from bidding for her husband’s land only put a new thought into the lawyer’s mind, she is the subject of an anti-feminist approach. This is because before her visit, he had no intention of bidding against Mr. Deane but later, however, he decides on the very course of action she had set out to prevent. This way Eliot probes into the lawyer’s motives and suggests that he is only an agent for the fate brought on by the miller’s own rashness. Lewis Levine suggests that Eliot has failed to portray as a feminist because her fiction provokes strong criticism of women which at the heart of the problem emphasizes on woman’s sympathy, a condition that seems to demand not only self-sacrifice but a sacrifice of life itself (Levine, 2001, p. 216).
Feminism vs. anti-feminism debate elucidates the extent to which Eliot challenges the boundaries of woman’s role by her insistence that the woman novelist should not be confined to imaging women. Eliot’s illustration of the woman’s role also appeals to some sort of anti-feminism when she denies any exclusive bond between Maggie and her own sex, even while she acknowledges kinship. Bloom (1988) points out that Maggie’s and George Eliot’s capacity to dissolve experience into its constituent vivid moments and sensations looks forward to an emotional vividness, where Maggie’s renunciation to either of the male characters seems as gratifying as her abandonment to passion (Bloom, 1988, p. 44).
Maggie’s creation, many feminists believe is the creation of a tension between agency and structure, which examines the extent to which women’s actions are determined by the structures. Maggie, as a woman is determined to believe in and remain to adhere to ‘love of free will’, which takes away from people the responsibility for their actions and suggests that we all are puppets.
Objects of Masculine Desire
Eliot, though Maggie points out that men’s domination is due to masculine subjectivity which is evident through providing a greater understanding of how men gain, maintain, and use power to subordinate women. This also proves masculinity as an object of pessimism which we can view through analyzing Stephen’s low tolerance for melancholy, which helps explain the negative turn of his concluding judgment of the partial misdirection of her powers. Other objects of pessimism and selfishness include Tom, because he as the brother of Maggie, is desperate to see her unhappy and to some extent Philip; who though forgives Maggie in the end but presents a self-centered character, always looking to be paid back. So, poor Maggie has been a central object of masculine desire in distinct ways. First, the way she was treated as isolated in childhood, secondly when she got spiritual and felt lonely, no one, not even Tom came out to help her, and at last, when she found someone to share her feelings, she was morally discouraged and disapproved for such relationship.
While marking distinct lines between feminine and masculine, The Mill on the Floss uncovers the divide between the language or maxims of the dominant culture and the language itself which undoes them. In the course of their lifetime, Maggie and Tom remain divided indeed, death was the price of unity set by Eliot, and feminist criticism might be said to install itself in the gap. Feminist critique defends the challenge representing the norms and aesthetic criteria of the dominant culture, claiming, in effect, that ‘incorrectness’ makes visible what is specific to women’s writing. Bloom (1988) points out that the culturally imposed or assumed oversights of Eliot’s writing are turned against the system that brings them into being a system, women writers necessarily inhabit (Bloom, 1988, p. 67). So, might be what Eliot presented is a true picture of cultural predomination over femininity.
Gender inequality
Liberal feminists argue that Eliot being the creator of Maggie must have given her equal opportunity as that of men, since childhood. But since she was living in a conservative community setting where men hold the upper hand, while women are obliged to obey them, Maggie prestige what was available to her in the form of Tom, Philip, and later Stephen, whom she sacrificed in the name of love. However, radical and Marxist feminists perceived Maggie as an object of gender inequality to whom giving equality of opportunity is simply not enough. Here, a liberal feminist perceives Maggie as not only having the capability of perceiving things more clearly but also she is forced to these reflections by the power of nature over the merely ‘artificial’. Because artificial is her intention of sacrificing one love, in favor of another, she is not true to nature. Maggie withdraws one love to keep another. Therefore, in the death which follows, consciousness is invalidated, but only after, Tom avers the love which dominated in the natural state of childhood. To Eliot, it seems like a happy ending in which the death is a source of purification of both Maggie and Tom. This is George Eliot’s attitude towards the final catastrophe in which she has portrayed Tom and Maggie to achieve the first, though the lowest of virtues because even now neither they nor St. Ogg’s is ready for the higher and creative virtues of man’s full consciousness and power. On the other hand, Eliot has participated in gendered inequality, criticized by feminists, because from beginning till the end, she has empowered Maggie to initiate all-wise acts, a fulfillment of self-sacrifice, and an object of devotion, whereas to the male identity Eliot has reserved all the follies. This is of course gender inequality that rephrases the concern whether there be a politics of women’s writing and if so, what does it mean to say that women can analyze their exploitation only within an order prescribed by the masculine? Sexual difference predicted by Eliot speaks as feminist critics speak of a specifically feminine practice in writing where such concerns mark a current impasse in contemporary feminist criticism.
The logic of discourse itself elucidates and identifies a specific practice, in other words, such a feminist politics would attempt to relocate sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the repression of the feminine in all systems of representation for which the other woman must be reduced to the economy of the men. This is what Eliot tries to convince the reader that though women are of various types, Maggie and Lucy are distinct examples of the types that appeal to masculine systems of representation. Femininity comes to signify a role in the form of Maggie, an image, a value imposed on women by the egotistic logic of such masculine systems, that are dominant.
Feminist criticism
Many critics believe that though Eliot never portrayed successful women, she was exemplary for women’s achievement. Feminist criticism has long complained that George Eliot never created a heroine who resisted the conventions of society while making a creative and genuine life for herself. Thus on certain feminist grounds, Eliot’s Mill on the Floss depicted a rational program, which served more than even being potentially politically conservative (Levine, 2001, p. 12). Feminist criticism, pointing towards George Eliot has invoked as its starting point this underlying political assumption that theories are based on the specificity of language or literary tradition or culture, if not already to have begged the question, since by then one is confronted by what Maggie has called her relationships. Perhaps that is why, Eliot has been bewildered in her attempts to specify the feminine, feminist critics have so often turned to an analysis of this relationship as it is manifested in writing by and about women. The novel is a conflict between rational and ideological concepts which in the form of Maggie and Tom intersects in the end. In context with feminist systems of discourse and representation, Eliot represses the feminine, the woman can only resubmit herself to them but by refusing to be reduced by them, she points to the place and manner of her exploitation. Thus, a possible operation of the feminine nature in terms of obsession becomes, then, the revelation of its repression, through an effect of playful rehearsal, rather than a demonstrably feminine practice.
George Eliot though has been able to present herself as one of the successful creators, but with the dilemma that all her heroines have tragic endings. This is what makes feminists in a questioning condition that why women are always portrayed by Eliot as an icon of self-sacrifice? Why Eliot is contended to demonstrate in her context the women as vulnerable creatures, dividing by masculinity, class, and culture? These are the questions that might if asked, help Eliot to elucidate her precise opinion about women.
Work Cited
Bloom Harold, (1988) George Eliot’s the Mill on the Floss: Chelsea House: London.
Dee Phyllis Susan, (1999) “Female Sexuality and Triangular Desire in Vanity Fair and the Mill on the Floss”, Papers on Language & Literature, pp. 391.
Eliot George & Susan Byatt Antonia, (2003) The Mill on the Floss: Penguin Classics.
Levine Lewis George, (2001) The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot: Cambridge University Press.