The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
In the ‘Mill on the Floss’ the persons on whom the chief interest is supposed to depend are Tom and Maggie Tulliver, the children of a rough, honest, hot-tempered, obstinate, litigious miller. Old Tulliver is ruined by a lawsuit about “erigation,” and has a stroke of paralysis, from which he recovers so far as to carry on the management of the mill under the new owner, Wakem, a lawyer whom he regards as the cause of his misfortunes. But, although determined to serve Wakem faithfully, he makes a solemn resolution of vengeance against him and his, and causes Tom to record it in the family Bible. Tom suits himself to the change of circumstances, and, by means of his aunt’s husband, Mr. Deane, who is a partner in the firm, he finds employment under Guest and Company, the principal merchants in the neighbouring town of St. Ogg’s. After a few years, by means of Tom’s earnings and his father’s savings, the Tulliver creditors are paid in full; but the old miller, in returning triumphant from a dinner given on the occasion, falls in with his master and enemy Wakem, quarrels with him, horsewhips him, and dies of the excitement and exertion…
The Mill on the Floss
The Mill on the Floss.
ISBN: 9783849673826.
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Plot summary of The Mill on the Floss (from Wikipedia):
The novel spans a period of 10 to 15 years and details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, siblings growing up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss at its junction with the more minor River Ripple near the village of St Ogg’s in Lincolnshire, England. Both the river and the village are fictional.
The novel is initially set in the late 1820s or early 1830s – a number of historical references place the events in the book after the Napoleonic Wars but before the Reform Act of 1832.(In chapter 3, the character Mr Riley is described as an “auctioneer and appraiser thirty years ago,” placing the opening events of the novel in approximately 1829, thirty years before the novel’s composition in 1859. Additionally, in chapter 8, Mr Tulliver and Mr Deane discuss the Duke of Wellington and his “conduct in the Catholic Question,” a conversation that could only take place after 1828 when Wellington became Prime Minister and supported a bill for Catholic Emancipation). The novel includes autobiographical elements, and reflects[citation needed]the disgrace that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) herself experienced while in a lengthy relationship with a married man,[citation needed] George Henry Lewes.
Maggie Tulliver is the central character of the book. The story begins when she is 9 years old, 13 years into her parents’ marriage. Her relationship with her older brother Tom, and her romantic relationships with Philip Wakem (a hunchbacked, sensitive, and intellectual friend) and with Stephen Guest (a vivacious young socialite in St Ogg’s and assumed fiancé of Maggie’s cousin Lucy Deane) constitute the most significant narrative threads.
Tom and Maggie have a close yet complex bond, which continues throughout the novel. Their relationship is coloured by Maggie’s desire to recapture the unconditional love her father provides before his death. Tom’s pragmatic and reserved nature clashes with Maggie’s idealism and fervor for intellectual gains and experience. Various family crisis, including bankruptcy, Mr Tulliver’s rancorous relationship with Philip Wakem’s father, which results in the loss of the mill, and Mr Tulliver’s untimely death, serve both to intensify Tom’s and Maggie’s differences and to highlight their love for each other. To help his father repay his debts, Tom leaves school to enter a life of business. He eventually finds a measure of success, restoring the family’s former estate. Meanwhile, Maggie languishes in the impoverished Tulliver home, her intellectual aptitude wasted in her socially isolated state. She passes through a period of intense spirituality, during which she renounces the world, spurred by Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.
This renunciation is tested by a renewed friendship with Philip Wakem, with whom she had developed a friendship while he and Tom were students together. Against the wishes of Tom and her father – who both despise the Wakems – Maggie secretly meets with Philip, and together they go for long walks through the woods. The relationship they forge is founded partially in Maggie’s heartfelt pity for broken and neglected human beings, but it also serves as an outlet for her intellectual romantic desires. Philip’s and Maggie’s attraction is, in any case, inconsequential because of the family antipathy. Philip manages to coax a pledge of love from Maggie. When Tom discovers the relationship between the two, however, he forces his sister to renounce Philip, and with him her hopes of experiencing the broader, more cultured world he represents.
Several more years pass, during which Mr Tulliver dies. Lucy Deane invites Maggie to come and stay with her and experience the life of cultured leisure that she enjoys. This includes long hours conversing and playing music with Lucy’s suitor, Stephen Guest, a prominent St Ogg’s resident. Stephen and Maggie, against their rational judgments, become attracted to each other. The complication is compounded by Philip Wakem’s friendship with Lucy and Stephen; he and Maggie are reintroduced, and Philip’s love for her is rekindled, while Maggie, no longer isolated, enjoys the clandestine attentions of Stephen Guest, putting her past profession of love for Philip in question. Lucy intrigues to throw Philip and Maggie together on a short rowing trip down the Floss, but Stephen unwittingly takes a sick Philip’s place. When Maggie and Stephen find themselves floating down the river, negligent of the distance they have covered, he proposes that they board a passing boat to the next substantial city, Mudport, and get married. Maggie is too tired to argue about it. Stephen takes advantage of her weariness and hails the boat. They are taken on board the boat, and during the trip to Mudport, Maggie struggles between her love for Stephen and her duties to Philip and Lucy, which were established when she was poor, isolated, and dependent on them for what good her life contained. Upon arrival in Mudport she rejects Stephen and makes her way back to St Ogg’s, where she lives for a brief period as an outcast, Stephen having fled to Holland. Although she immediately goes to Tom for forgiveness and shelter, he roughly sends her away, telling her that she will never again be welcome under his roof. Both Lucy and Philip forgive her, in a moving reunion and in an eloquent letter, respectively.
Maggie’s brief exile ends when the river floods. Having struggled through the waters in a boat to find Tom at the old mill, she sets out with him to rescue Lucy Deane and her family. In a brief tender moment, the brother and sister are reconciled from all past differences. When their boat capsizes, the two drown in an embrace, thus giving the book its Biblical epigraph: “In their death they were not divided”.
(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
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