The Tension between Individual Desires and Societal Expectation: George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

Abstract

George Eliot (Mary Anna Evans) is considered to be one of the greatest female writers of all time. She was an extremely brilliant woman, and her writing style reflects this. She was an avid reader who deconstructed the characters as she read. She also employed this strategy in her writing style. She describes everything that is going on in the character’s thoughts, and his or her psychology is presented to the readers without any effort. Her presentation of psychological qualities in characters, according to some critics, brings life to her lifeless characters and produces distinctiveness and beauty in her works. If we remove the psychological components from her characters and works, they will perish and her work would be rendered useless. This paper examines the constraints and inequities that paralyze and confine Victorian women in George Eliot’s renowned novel The Mill on the Floss, with an emphasis on the heroine Maggie Tulliver. Initially, background information on the author is presented, and then the novel is handled from the perspective of a woman question in the Victorian Era, juxtaposing the circumstances provided to male and female children in the Victorian era, in which cleverness is regarded as a hindrance rather than a virtue. Maggie, the protagonist, scrutinizes the attributes of New Woman. The paper reveals that Victorian women were regarded as the angels in the house who needed to be protected by men, highlighting the protagonist’s dilemma between her duties and desires in a patriarchal society that limits women from educational, intellectual, and social aspects, allowing them no pleasure of life. To summarize, this paper treats The Mill on the Floss as a critique of Victorian society, which suffocates women, leaving them with little space for pleasure, intellectuality, or uniqueness, and underlines that such a culture is bad for both males and females.