Abstract
DISSATISFACTION WITH ending of The Mill on Floss has provoked a number of interpretations of George Eliot's purposes and methods. William Steinhoff has interpreted last portion of this novel as a falling-short of author's intention to make full use of river Floss as a symbol, associated, if not identified, with freedom from convention and authority which hamper adventurous individual.1 Bernard Paris, writing in these pages,2 has posed drowning of Maggie Tulliver as only culmination of her search for calm. According to this critic, mass of floating machinery which upsets her boat symbolizes the cold, unfeeling materialism of St. Ogg's; and river has a significance somewhat opposite to that which it holds for Steinhoff: In death Tom and Maggie become part of long river of tradition of human love and pain, hope and struggle that flows into future with an ever increasing beneficent power. Both of these writers have contravened, perhaps very consciously, F. R. Leavis's conclusion that the flooded river has no symbolic or metaphorical value.3 Leavis's own explanation of ending of The Mill on Floss directed our attention to George Eliot's dangerous propensity for imaginative participation and unqualified self-identification with Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch as well as Maggie Tulliver.4
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