But it couldn’t have been credible enough. Some critics view that despite being drowned in the Floss, Maggie could have been killed by some other way. The end is valid at the symbolic level, too, where River Floss stands for the cause of sustenance as well as ruin for the Tullivers. So she had to pay for the disharmony in human nature through death. If she married Philip, she would be disloyal to her family. Her impulsiveness swayed her to marry Stephen but her sense of duty asked her to be faithful to Philip and Lucy. But the conflict of her mind had become so strong that she couldn’t go either way. Maggie should have been given a chance to make a moral choice. Maggie was torn amid two extremes – impulsiveness and sense of duty. With the extinction of the Tullivers, she showed the death of an epoch and introduced material age through Wakem who is the representative of the materialistic age.Īt an allegorical level, the end also implies that lack of harmony in human personality is fatal. The Tulliver stands for that pure life of 1830’s. In the span of twenty years, its purity was greatly affected by urbanization and materialism. In 1850’s, Eliot portrayed the simple and pure life of 1830’s, which was no longer in Eliot’s age. The novel is, in fact, written in the retrospect. The end may have some defects yet it can be defended and justified on subsequent levels.įirstly, the end can be justified at an allegorical level. To be curt, the critics blame that the end seems abrupt and imposed and does not flow from incidents. Eliot ‘cut the knot she was unable to unravel’.

Bennet views that ‘the end indicates the novelist’s desire to bring about poetic justice’. To Henry James, the end is ‘defective and shocking’.

Lytton spots that “the end is weakly prepared”. It has been subjected to biting criticism as it is alleged to be illogical, unnatural and rapid. The end of George Eliot‘s The Mill on the Floss is the most controversial issue of the novel.

Mill on the floss novel