Novel: The Mill on the Floss

Overview
George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss follows Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom from childhood into early adulthood in the provincial town of St. Ogg’s, where their family’s mill stands on the river Floss. It is a family chronicle and a tragic bildungsroman, charting the clash between Maggie’s ardent intellect and affections, Tom’s rigid sense of duty, and the constraining currents of class, economy, and respectability. The river and the mill supply livelihood and symbol alike, their ceaseless motion echoing forces of temperament, memory, and fate that the characters cannot quite master.

Plot
Maggie grows up clever, impulsive, and starved for the education given her brother. Tom, less quick but iron-willed, is sent to school under the pedant Mr. Stelling, learning Latin and Euclid that will never serve his practical aims. Their father, Mr. Tulliver, a proud miller tangled in a lawsuit that puts him at deadly odds with the lawyer Wakem, is ruined by legal costs and loses the mill. The family falls into debt; Mrs. Tulliver’s Dodson kin rally with small mercies and large humiliations. Maggie hungers for a life of mind and love, while Tom vows to repay every creditor and restore the family name.

Wakem buys the mill and keeps Mr. Tulliver on as manager, an arrangement that preserves bread but corrodes pride. Maggie befriends Philip Wakem, the lawyer’s sensitive, deformed son, who reveres her intelligence and awakens an inward life that her mother and aunts mistrust. Forbidden by her father and brother to see a Wakem, Maggie undertakes a self-denying renunciation shaped by her reading of Thomas à Kempis, yet the bond endures. Tom, aided by the loyal packman Bob Jakin, begins trading and slowly redeems the debts. Mr. Tulliver, unable to bear dependence on his enemy, publicly assaults Wakem with a whip and soon after dies, leaving Tom the mill’s steward and avenger.

Temptation and Scandal
As Maggie seeks a modest sphere of usefulness, she visits her cousin Lucy Deane, beloved of Stephen Guest, a prosperous young man whose urban polish charms St. Ogg’s. Stephen and Maggie are drawn to each other despite their scruples and Lucy’s claim. A summer excursion on the river turns into a drift downstream, half accident, half surrender, ending at Mudport, where Stephen presses marriage. Maggie refuses to found happiness on betrayal, returns alone, and faces the town’s swift verdict. Respectable St. Ogg’s, eager for a tale that confirms its codes, brands her a fallen woman. Tom, absolute in honor and injury, casts her out of Dorlcote Mill. Lucy and Philip, wounded, gradually understand Maggie’s refusal and move toward forgiveness, but reconciliation cannot undo the scandal’s stamp.

Flood and Fate
A catastrophic flood swallows the lower town. Maggie, sleepless and solitary, takes a boat onto the raging Floss to reach the mill. She rescues Tom from the upper room where the brothers’ childhood once unfolded; in the boat they clasp hands in a mute reconciliation that joins feeling to duty at last. The waters overturn them, and they are found together after the torrent subsides. The epitaph reads, “In their death they were not divided.”

Themes and Style
Eliot’s compassionate realism binds private desire to public consequence: the ethics of kinship and debt, the gendered strictures that punish a gifted woman’s hunger, the way prosperity and law can grind character as surely as millstones grind grain. The narrator’s reflective voice threads personal memory with social history, and the river’s recurrent imagery supplies both continuity and doom. Maggie’s story becomes the measure of a society that cannot accommodate her largeness except by tragedy, while Tom’s hard virtue proves as limiting as it is admirable. The mill turns, the Floss flows on, and the human lives bound to them find their meanings within that inexorable movement.