The Mill on the Floss | A Reinterpretation of The Mill on the Floss
In the following essay excerpt, Hagan discusses what he considers the questionable interpretation of polarity in The 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...
[The entire page is 4728 words long]
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