Maggie, an Anti-type of a Victorian woman - The Mill on the Floss

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Maggie, an Anti-type of a Victorian woman

The background of The Mill on the Floss is the Victorian society that is steeped with values of money, pride and prejudice. Women, in such a society with such low values have been considered simply as ornaments that were supposedly, as depicted clearly by the Dodson sisters in the Mill on the Floss, narrow minded, snobbish, materialistic and uncompromising. George Eliot herself has been living in this Victorian society, and has been successful in depicting very clearly the sufferings and pains of an individual female who is not born to live according to such low values; a rebellious woman that is not able to come along with the conventionalities of the Victorian society and so is to be crushed by the holders of such empty ideals.

Maggie Tulliver, as we see her first as a nine year old girl, has been an antitype of a Victorian female. As a little girl, Maggie steeps her self in books much beyond her age, The History of Devil, and Pilgrim's Progress are examples of these early studies. In the Victorian society, women who are supposed to be the ornamental objects of a man-oriented society do not need much reading. They are supposed to stay at home and do embroidery and keep in fashion, rather than go to the real world and learn or study as Victorian men do. She is also very clever unlike the other Victorian women who seem to be foolish and easily tricked as her Aunt Glegg is when Bob Jakin easily persuades her to buy his useless objets. Eliot presents Maggie's great enthusiasm for learning and studying, and we can observe her high intelligence when she goes so far in her imaginative ponderings on whatever she hears or sees,

"I gave Spouncer a black eye, I know; that's what he got by wanting to leather me; I wasn't going to go halves because anybody leathered me."

"Oh, how brave you are, Tom! I think you're like Samson. If there came a lion roaring at me, I think you'd fight him, wouldn't you, Tom?"

"How can a lion come roaring at you, you silly thing? There's no lions, only in the shows."

"No; but if we were in the lion countries-I mean in Africa, where it's very hot; the lions eat people there. I can show it you in the book where I read it."
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"Well, I should get a gun and shoot him."

"But if you hadn't got a gun,-we might have gone out, you know, not thinking, just as we go fishing; and then a great lion might run toward us roaring, and we couldn't get away from him. What should you do, Tom?"

Tom paused, and at last turned away contemptuously, saying, "But the lion isn't coming. What's the use of talking?"

"But I like to fancy how it would be," said Maggie, following him. "Just think what you would do, Tom."

"Oh, don't bother, Maggie! ...

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