by Robyn Kirkey Walker

Created on: June 15, 2009

"The Mill on the Floss," by George Eliot reveals Maggie Tulliver's hypocritical family's undoing that helps her to become a stronger person. Maggie is a young girl in the very beginning of this novel. We are introduced to her as an intelligent girls who seeks knowledge. We find out that her brother is in boarding school and her father is looking for a school where he will learn to do more than be a miller or a farmer. We meet Tom as a character who can be quite mean at times and who is not interested in education the way that Maggie is. Maggie s's thirst for knowledge is not favorable for her, as it would be for Tom, and therefore Maggie is not encouraged in her studies. As Maggie grows into her teenage years, she still yearns for her bother Tom's acceptance of her, but in the end realizes that he will never accept her. Her relationship with men becomes a problem for her throughout her life, and she never seems to gain the respect that an intelligent women like her deserves. She is always put aside and not listened to by men. The one man that seems to listen to her, Phillip Wakem, is the son of her father's enemy and she is banned by Tom from seeing him. She ends up running off with Stephan, her cousin's man, and shames herself and her family. It seems that nothing she does is right in her society's view.

Maggie's father ends up losing a court battle over the water dispute with Phillip's father and ends up becoming very ill and dying. Maggie s's mom realizes when her father loses in court that she shouldn't have been so submissive and instead she should have spoken her mind, but it is too late. The reason her father married her mother is because she was the most submissive of all her sisters. It is apparent that a woman having her won mind in not admired in this society. It seems that if the father would have valued Mrs. Tulliver more, they may not have ended up broke and in debt.

Maggie is looked don on because of her looks. She is darker and has dark hair that won't curl right. Everyone, including her parents ans aunts and uncles, make fun of her. They don't seem to care that it bothers Maggie. Poor Maggie is made to feel like nothing by her family. She doesn't live up to society's values at all, even at the very end of her short life. She is an outcast when she tries to redeem herself after she runs off with Stephan. Her family really doesn't want her around. They are afraid of what of what people will think if she stays with them.

The end of the book is so very sad. Tom and Maggie die together in a flood. After years of idolizing Tom, Maggie ends up dying with him. At least they are together. Everything that society did to them to keep them apart and make them feel that they should be apart did not work. All the hypocrisy led to the undoing of the family but in the end, Maggie learned to be stronger and ended up getting what she always wanted- to be near her brother.

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