A review by j3mm4
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This is such a beautifully evocative novel, centered around a deeply sympathetic protagonist in Maggie Tulliver, and the tragedy of its ending is only outranked by the shallow derision with which editor A. S. Byatt treats her development. From childhood, she is deeply sensitive and wants very much to be and do good, and her best attempts as a little kid to fight against both the totally developmentally appropriate forgetfulness and emotional explosiveness and the predetermined conclusion of her "wickedness" by every relative with regular access to her besides her father come entirely from her limited understanding of the world because she isn't being given the care and guidance necessary to understand herself, her circumstances, or the world in which she must live. Through lack of adequate modeling and constant unkindness from her own family (even her father's forgiveness and doting doesn't protect her from or come near preventing her brother's, her aunts', her mother's early mistreatment), she grows up a genuinely good person who gets treated like a monster by her own brother for the grievous sin of making a single friend, and then when she tries to let herself be happy after years of deliberate deprivation to atone for upsetting her brother, she gets repeatedly groped and harassed by her favorite cousin's would-be fiancé who then deliberately kidnaps her to force her to marry him, tries to manipulate her into marrying him despite her repeated reiterations of her non-consent, and then just fucks off to avoid the fallout both of publicly "ruining" a girl who has no context for the consequences of his actions on her life and of abandoning his presumed fiancée. Maggie dies trying to save her brother, who at that point had completely rejected her and wouldn't even listen to her side of the story (as he has done their entire lives for literally no reason except liking to have power over a child who had no other companion but him), in deliberate parallel of a local legend about the Virgin Mary and all she gets for her troubles is a shared grave and visits from both the childhood friend she would've married if she had the choice and the predator who manipulated both her and her favorite cousin. And it works! All Maggie has ever wanted was to be loved and to be good enough, especially in her brother's eyes, and he forgives her because she saves him from a flood and then grabs onto her to try and save them both from debris following them downstream and they're buried together as family. She gets what she wanted most in the most horrible, painful, limiting way possible, and it works. This book is insane. Maggie Tulliver did nothing wrong and I will die on that hill.
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