The Mill on the Floss Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 108 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Mill on the Floss.
Study Guide

The Mill on the Floss Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 108 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Mill on the Floss.
This section contains 4,687 words
(approx. 12 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Mill on the Floss Study Guide

In the following essay excerpt, Hagan discusses what he considers the questionable interpretation of polarity in Mill on the Floss by various critics.

One of the reasons the critics I have been considering offer a questionable interpretation of the novel's tragic central subject is that they narrow the range of George Eliot's outlook and thus create a polarization which does not exist in the novel itself. Each reading ignores the explicit indication of her perspective which she provides near the beginning of Book IV, where, after explaining that she has been depicting the "oppressive narrowness" of Tom's and Maggie's environment in order that the reader may understand "how it has acted on young natures in many generations," she identifies the young natures with whom she is specifically concerned as those "that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation...

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This section contains 4,687 words
(approx. 12 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Mill on the Floss Study Guide
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