The Mill on the Floss and Antigone

Abstract

The Mill on the Floss, like Sophocles' Antigone, illustrates George Eliot's belief in the recurring conflict between the individual moral vision and social convention. The central problem in Antigone, she wrote, lay between “reverence for the gods” and “the duties of citizenship: two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each.” Whenever man's moral vision collides with social convention the opposition between Antigone and Creon is renewed. Her words seem applicable to the dominant conflict in The Mill. An honorable but unimaginative person, Tom Tulliver clashes with his sister Maggie when she refuses to abide by conventions which seem inhumane or hurtful to those she loves. As Antigone espouses a higher law by burying Polynices in defiance of Creon, so Maggie espouses a higher law in opposing the vengeance against Wakem. Although Tom and Maggie are both partly right in their quarrel over Maggie's secretly seeing Philip Wakem, Tom, like Creon, is foolishly overconfident in crediting his conventional honor, which is simply no measure of the case. The conflict between Maggie and her brother is further aggravated by the tendency of the practical-minded Tom to domineer over his imaginative and (to him) inconsistent sister.