Victorian Literature: Gender in Mill on the Floss How is moral and emotional life in George Eliot's the Mill on the Floss shaped by gender?

The romantic narrative of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss is dependent upon a series of contrasts. The heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is forced to choose between two men, Phillip Wakem, a poetic dreamer who is deformed, and Stephen Guest, who is dashing but somewhat shallow. The two men represent the different sides of Maggie's character. On one hand, Maggie is extremely intelligent and forthright, more so than anyone else in the novel. She is an unsparing critic of the society around her and seems marked from birth as dark and different like Phillip. On the other hand, Stephen's exciting nature attracts her. However, Maggie, unlike a man, is unable to leave the area of her birth and strike out on her own. Ultimately she chooses by not choosing at all, or choosing her brother. She returns to the Floss and dies with Tom, drowning to death with him, and leaving the more conventional characters in the novel with a happy ending.

Maggie's difference from others is manifested early on in the novel. Her mother criticizes her disobedience and willful nature, which is starkly in contrast of what is expected of a girl. The only mediating, disciplining aspect of Maggie's character is her love for her brother. Maggie's eventual end and her adult relationship with Tom is prefigured early on during a childhood quarrel:

"Oh, Tom, it's very cruel," sobbed Maggie. "I'd forgive you, if _you_ forgot anything -- I wouldn't mind what you did -- I'd forgive you and love you."

"Yes, you're silly; but I never _do_ forget things, _I_ don't."

"Oh, please forgive me, Tom; my heart will break," said Maggie, shaking with sobs, clinging to Tom's arm, and laying her wet cheek on his shoulder (I.5).

Maggie's emotional agitation and her affection for Tom far outweighs his. Tom is obsessed with practical matters, although he clearly loves his sister early on in the book. At one point, Maggie even contemplates running away to the gypsies. Although she is saved from this fate, the reader later questions if she might not actually have been better off doing so, or at least finding somewhere else where her passionate and emotional nature could find a better resting-place. Maggie's restlessness and mobility is constantly contrasted with the doll-like Lucy Deane. Unlike tall Maggie with her dark complexion and wild hair, Lucy is small and will sit for hours like a good girl if she is told to do so. However, although Maggie is not conventionally feminine according to the traditionally-accepted tropes of Victorian womanhood, she is also extremely emotional, again in contrast to Tom.

It is not entirely accurate, though, to say that Tom is the 'thinker' of the two and Maggie is the 'feeler.' Maggie is intellectually brighter than Tom, more capable of learning abstract ideas (which Tom finds particularly difficult, including the Latin grammar which he as a gentleman is supposed to learn while at school). Tom is equally passionate about irrational ideas, such as the need to recover the family name and make good the family debts after his father is ruined. He refuses to listen to what Maggie has to say after Maggie is supposedly 'ruined' for running away with and ultimately deciding not to marry Stephen. These decisions are based in emotion just as much as Maggie's earlier, passionate love of Phillip is and her conviction that she ought to run away to the gypsies as a little child.

Throughout the novel, Tom is unable to set aside conventional morality and place his sister's needs first and foremost. Tom believes in the need to obey the law of society far more than the need to temper that law with humanity and feeling. When Maggie develops her early crush on Phillip, Tom endeavors to break up the relationship because of the acrimonious feelings between Mr. Tulliver and Mr. Wakem, regardless of what Maggie feels, even though the relationship does not materially affect him, and even though Phillip was always kind to him when the two boys were at school. Tom has an innate sense of confidence that Maggie, for all of her wildness lacks because he is a man.

Even when he does poorly in school, Tom blames the system of learning, not his inability to grasp higher learning and abstraction: "When people were grown up, he considered, nobody inquired...

In contrast, Maggie is continually called upon to doubt herself and her essential goodness. Maggie herself notes that the conventions of most novels and romantic tales suggests she will have a bitter end, because of her unconventional beauty and darkness. When Phillip gives her a volume of poetry of the tragic tale of Corinne, a woman poet, she notes: "I foresaw that that light-complexioned girl would win away all the love from Corinne and make her miserable. I'm determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness." (IV.4).
Maggie thus questions what she is 'supposed' to feel quite often, such as the notion that she is 'supposed' to want to be fair-skinned and delicate. Tom does not challenge conventional notions like Maggie. While Maggie frequently asserts the essential difference between women's love and men's love as rooted in emotionalism (such as her feelings of pity for Phillip), Tom is extremely prone to acting upon his emotional gut instinct. Early on, it is said "Tom never quite lost the feeling that Philip, being the son of a 'rascal,' was his natural enemy; never thoroughly overcame his repulsion to Philip's deformity" (II.4). Not only does Tom believe in some primeval way that his father's enemy must be his enemy, there is also something about Phillip's physical weakness he finds repulsive. Once again, the end of the novel is foreshadowed in this prejudice: Tom is unwilling or unable to leave conventions behind and literally becomes dragged down by the issues of the wet morass surrounding him, unable to leave childhood impressions and his childhood home. Maggie, in contrast, is able to feel affection and pity for Phillip. Similarly, Tom will later cut his own sister out of his life simply because society says that what she did was immoral, even though she and Stephen engaged in no transgressions and ultimately Maggie decided not to marry Stephen because of his promise to Lucy.

It should be noted that even Maggie is not above some of the conventional prejudices of her brother. As a woman, she seems unable to leave her childhood home and escape the pull of the Floss just like her brother. When Phillip reproaches Lucy, Maggie says she cannot be compared to her conventional, ordinary cousin. "As if I, with my old gowns and want of all accomplishments, could be a rival of dear little Lucy, -- who knows and does all sorts of charming things, and is ten times prettier than I am, -- even if I were odious and base enough to wish to be her rival" (IV.4). In a book, Maggie can spiritedly critique the rival of Corinne as insipid, but in her own real life she sees herself as inferior to Lucy because of Lucy's docile nature and her blonde, delicate beauty. Although Maggie contains impulses towards social critique and transgression, she ultimately cannot allow herself to deny them altogether. This is her downfall: ironically, if Maggie had married Stephen Guest she might have been rehabilitated in the eyes of society eventually. Maggie takes a half-measure, half-running away with Stephen out of weariness and passion and then changing her mind, leaving her in a kind of borderline state for a woman -- neither able to get married on one hand yet also unable to be accepted back into the social fold.

It is Phillip who senses that Maggie is torn within: on one hand, she as a free-thinking nature but there is an emotional part of her that still obeys the conventions of femininity and social expectation. As a young girl, Maggie is attracted to Phillip because of his physical vulnerability, his intellectualism, and his ability to draw well. However, she refuses to entertain the possibility of having a relationship with him in part because of what it would mean to her relationship with Tom:

"You know we couldn't even be friends, if our friendship were discovered…"

"But no evil has come, Maggie…"

Maggie shook her head. "It has been very sweet, I know, -- all the talking together, and the books…But it has made me restless; it has made me think a great deal about the world; and I have impatient thoughts again, -- I get weary of my home; and then it cuts me to the heart afterward, that I should ever have felt weary of my father and mother. I think what you call being benumbed was better -- better for me --…