Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | The Mill on the Floss - Bernard J. Paris (essay date 1969)

Bernard J. Paris (essay date 1969)

SOURCE: "The Inner Conflicts of Maggie Tulliver: A Horneyan Analysis," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XIII, No. 2, 1969, pp. 166-99.

[In the following essay, Paris examines the psychology of the character of Maggie Tulliver using Karen Horney's theories of neurosis.]

I

In The Great Tradition [1950] F. R. Leavis argues that Maggie Tulliver's "emotional and spiritual stresses, her exaltations and renunciations, exhibit… all the marks of immaturity," but that George Eliot, because her own needs or hungers lead her to over-identify with Maggie, has little awareness of the inadequacy of her heroine's solutions:

There is nothing against George Eliot's presenting this immaturity with tender sympathy; but we ask, and ought to ask, of a great novelist something more. 'Sympathy and understanding' is the common formula of praise, but understanding, in any strict sense, is just...

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