SOURCE: Carlisle, Janice. “The Mirror in The Mill on the Floss: Toward a Reading of Autobiography as Discourse.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 23, no. 2 (fall 1990): 177-96.

In the following essay, Carlisle analyzes the autobiographical structural patterns, action, and characterization of George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss.

When in the fifth book of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver glances instinctively toward an inverted mirror, “the square looking-glass which [she has] condemned to hang with its face towards the wall,”¹ her gesture renders suspect the strength of her impulse towards renunciation. The mirror, like a naughty child, has been made to stand facing the wall, and it figures forth, as the narrator later explains, more Maggie's “abandoning all care for adornment” than her “renouncing the contemplation of her face” (264). Maggie remembers where the mirror is located; she remembers that she would see her face displayed before...