Women, Marriage, and Selfhood: A Feminist Reading of George Eliot’s the Mill on the Floss

Abstract

The present study is a feminist interpretation of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) with particular emphasis on the inter-connections of women, marriage and selfhood in Victorian patriarchal society. The paper makes a case that Maggie Tulliver's battle for identity reflects the constrictions imposed on women in educational, moral, emotional, and social realms. In Eliot's portrayal of Maggie, he does not simply cast her as a tragic woman but also as a vehicle through which he can expose the double standard by which women are harshly condemned for similar emotional or social lapses, whereas men are given social mobility and moral protection. The study looks at how Eliot criticized Victorian gender norms through textual analysis of Maggie's intellectual curiosity, her rebellion against the authority of Tom Tulliver, her social punishment after the Stephen Guest episode, and Maggie's death at the end of the novel. The paper further relies on feminist theories of Maggie that are based on the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler to demonstrate that when Maggie does not perform femininity, she is positioned as the, Other and disciplined. Eliot is not a novel that gives Maggie full freedom, but nonetheless, it was a novel of immense import, one that revealed the social institutions that limited female selfhood, and that continues to offer insight into feminist concerns of gender equality, education, and female independence.