Maggie, an Anti-romantic character in George Eliot's the Mill on the floss

Abstract

Abstract

George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is a realist novel that traces the development of Maggie Tulliver, a character who finds herself caught in a web of conflict with her family and community as a result of both circumstance and her unique and spirited disposition. The narrative casts Maggie as a tragic heroin as she struggles between impulse and duty to define herself as an individual as at one time she takes pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another she has no solution to resist a thing that she knows to be wrong. Maggie struggles herself to be a member of a society in which reputation, respectability, and tradition are paramount; values which shape many of the characters’ actions throughout the novel, and which Maggie, in the eyes of her family and community, constantly fails to uphold. However, she cultivates spiritual aspect with under the guidance of Dr Kenn and the Thomas Kempis’ book, The Imitation of Christ. This brings a turning point in her life and she achieves redemption as she gets drowned in the river. All this shows that Maggie is an anti-romantic and thus a realist and tragic character of the Victorian period