George Eliot

Prompts: The Mill on the Floss (1860)
pagination from 2007 Broadview edition
edited by Oliver Lovesey

“The persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours,
are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you on the ground
of an unjust judgment; because they will not believe in your struggle” (626).

Week Four: chps 30-39 (Bks 4 & 5)

1. why does George Eliot’s narrator think it so important that her readers “feel” and “understand” the experiences of the Tulliver family (363)?

2. which of the four Tullivers changes the most dramatically in the wake of their troubles?

3. what do the writings of Thomas `a Kempis provide Maggie which other books have not?

4. Maggie, who has been searching for “some explanation of this hard, real life” (379) finds an answer of sorts in what?

5. does Maggie appear to have found a stable, lasting salve for her unindulged passions in the self-mortification and mild asceticism to which she has resigned herself?  Is she at peace, consciously and unconsciously, with the self-restraint she has imposed on herself?

6. Philip feels pity for Maggie (404).  Do their feelings concerning the other person mirror one another?

7. what strategy does friend and “pack man” Bob Jakin employ to convince Mrs. Glegg to buy some of his product and invest some money in his small-order business venture?

8. what does Philip mean by the claim “‘a passion answers as well as a faculty’” (426)?

9. what motivates Philip’s attempts to pull Maggie out of her self-imposed asceticism?

10. why does the narrator bother telling us that Philip had never experienced the love of a mother (431)?

11. in the following passage, the original editor of George Eliot’s novel replaced “plain” with “ugly.”  “Ugly and deformed people have great need of unusual virtues . . .” (430).  How does this emendation alter/complicate George Eliot’s characterization of Philip, the reader’s perception of Philip, and the pervasive social ethos of the text?

12. what guiding principle(s) motivate(s) Tom Tulliver’s actions?  Does he ever falter, waver, or reconsider what he is doing?

13. is Maggie correct in the angry assertion she directs at Tom, that “‘I have feelings that you would be the better for if you had them . . . feelings by the side of which your shining virtues are mere darkness’” (450)?

14. other than initially preventing speech, what effect does the “flood of emotion” which hits Mr. Tulliver have on him (chp. 38)?

15. does Maggie’s desire for familial love finally find fulfillment in chapter thirty-nine (chp. 39)?

16. does Tom make his own life easier or harder by asking his father, once again, if there are any wishes he (the son) can fulfill?

Week Five: chps 40-49 (Bk 6, chps 1-10)

1. why has Maggie been teaching in a school for the last two years?

2. do the different male characters in this novel, including Stephen Guest, grow romantically fond of women for the same reasons?

3. what characteristics make Maggie Tulliver such an attractive spectacle in chapter forty-one?

4. who employs the visual gaze more often, Maggie or Stephen?  To what end?

5. why does Lucy think it would be so romantic, so like a “fairy tale,” for Maggie and Philip to end up together?

6. it appears that Bob has become convinced that Tom Tulliver was in love with Lucy (501).  Is there any evidence that this is true?

7. why might Tom put “work” first and foremost in his life?

8. does Tom’s confrontational disposition--which manifests as violence when a child--bring him worldly success?

9. what does the narrator mean by that “passionate sensibility which belonged to her [Maggie] whole nature and made her faults and virtues all merge in each other” (514)?

10. why is Maggie so susceptible to the romantic quandary in which she finds herself?  What about her experience and character have made her so vulnerable to this situation?

11. why is Maggie eager to see Philip at the opening of chapter forty-five?

12. what role does music play in chapter forty-six (book 6, chp 7)?

13. is Mr. Wakem more, or less, reasonable than his counterpart, Mr. Tulliver?

14. is the narrator convincing in his defense of Stephen’s actions (552) as not the result of “deliberate doubleness” (552)?

15. why does Maggie turn in her imagination towards Philip—instead of someone else—as a refuge from her inner conflict?

Week Six: chps 50-conclusion (Bk 6, chps 11-14 & Bk 7)

1. are Maggie’s words to Stephen about the importance of feelings (454-55) consistent with what she told her brother earlier (361)

2. what do Maggie’s aunts make of the possibility of her returning to work, either as a teacher or a governess (chp. 51)?

3. unpack the meaning of the following passage: “to minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity – strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control and a disposition to exert control over others – prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth” (579).

4. what does George Eliot suggest about the powers of the unconscious in chapter fifty-two (Book 7, chp 13)?

5. why does Philip not arrive at Lucy’s to join the party in a rowing expedition (chp. 52)?

6. do Maggie’s powers of sympathy and pity prove a practical good, or a dangerous weakness (chp. 52)?

7. were the following words, spoken by Philip earlier in the novel, prescient? “‘no one has strength given to do what is unnatural. It is mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day, and then every rational satisfaction of your nature that you deny now, will assault you like a savage appetite’” (428-29).

8. Maggie notes that there is, at least temporarily, “an unspeakable charm in being told what to do, and having everything decided for her” (592).  Have any other characters likewise benefited, psychologically, from following others’ directives and not acting for themselves?

9. does Maggie ultimately make a life choice consistent with Tom’s own way of looking at the world?

10. is Maggie’s rejection of romantic love/passion (603) inconsistent with her life-long desire for and devotion to love?

11. why does Tom fault Maggie more than he does Stephen (613)?

12. what oblique message about the social hierarchy is George Eliot delivering through her description of the way Bob Jakin thinks of and interacts with Maggie, post-disgrace?

13. does this week’s reading unveil any exceptions to the following rule?  “We judge others according to results; how else? – not knowing the process by which results are arrived at” (Penguin 619, Broadview 488).

14. how do the inhabitants of St. Ogg’s manifest the gender bias of the time as they discuss Maggie and Stephen (chp. 55)?

15. does Maggie’s love of independence sustain her, or remove her from those who could help her?

16. does the narrator convince the novel’s readers to join with him/her in forgiving Tom his harshness by thinking him “imprisoned within the limits of his own nature” (497)?

17. are there any earlier clues which anticipate Aunt Glegg’s surprising behavior towards Maggie in chapter fifty-six (Book 7, chp 3)?

18. to what might Lucy be alluding in the final lines of chapter fifty-seven (Book 7,  chp 5)?

19. is what happens following Maggie’s desperate prayer to God (chp. 58) an answer to her prayer?

20. early in the book, Maggie’s friend Luke disparaged Maggie’s preoccupation with books and reading as trouble (81).  Was he correct?

21. look back at Tom and Maggie’s first interactions, earlier in the novel (84-89). How does their relational dynamic in this scene prefigure their later relations? What elements are dropped, piecemeal, into the book’s closing action?

22. have Maggie’s love of books and her powers of imagination served her well in this patriarchal world?

"Portrait of Julia Foster" (1880)
Jules Joseph Lefebvre

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu