[Here, Ermarth explores the influence of restrictive societal norms on the character of Maggie Tulliver.]

George Eliot makes it clear in The Mill on the Floss that the social norms of St. Oggs exert a heavy influence on Maggie's development. This fact has long been obvious but less obvious, perhaps, is that fact that the norms Maggie struggles with are sexist. They are norms according to which she is an inferior, dependent creature who will never go far in anything, and which consequently are a denial of her full humanity. Years of such denial teach Maggie to repress herself so effectively that she cannot mobilize the inner resources that might have saved her. By internalizing crippling norms, by learning to rely on approval, to fear ridicule and to avoid conflict, Maggie grows up fatally weak. In place of a habit of self-actualization she has learned a habit of self-denial which Philip rightly calls a "long suicide." Both she and Tom feel the crippling influence of these norms but we will focus here on Maggie and on how being female is an important key to her tragedy.

George Eliot said several times that the first part of this novel, which deals with Maggie's childhood development, had such importance for her that she devoted an amount of time to it that might seem disproportionate. Maggie's fate develops out of her social experience, particularly out of the local attitudes toward sex roles and out of the assumptions behind those attitudes. We can begin with the Dodsons' emphasis on rules and measuring and with their correlative faith in the clear difference between right and wrong.

The Dodsons' "faithfulness to admitted rules" results in two equally dangerous habits: an utter inability to question themselves and a correlative habit of questioning everybody else. The Dodson sisters have codified their need to feel "right" into a whole social and economic position. I am what I am, they day, because I am not that inferior thing. One is either a Dodson or not a Dodson, but the category of not-Dodson contains no valid or interesting possibilities. To be not-Dodson is simply to be wrong or at best unfortunate. Of course, the harmony established on the basis of such narrow exclusiveness is constantly threatened both from within by atrophy and from without by excluded forces. It is Mr. Tulliver's keen consciousness of being "right" that prompts him always to be "going to law" with his neighbors and finally to ruin himself and his family; it is Maggie's sense of being continually "wrong" and her need always to measure up to standards not her own, that encourages the disaster. However, during Maggie's childhood at least, the family and communal rules are strong by their very negations. Nearly everyone is bent on being "right": from little Lucy Deane with her perfect dress and demeanor to the Rev. Walter Stelling who teaches his pupils in the "right" way: indeed, the narrator tells us, "he knew no other".

This emphasis on rules and measuring connects naturally with a tendency to value the measurable, a tendency which is expressed in the materialism of St. Oggs, where most of the respectable citizens are in trade, and which finds its most grotesque elaboration in the Dodson sisters' household religion. Their peculiar view of human priorities puts a premium on physical manifestations and leaves little room for deviation. The important differences between people are usually physical, as with the Dodson kinship which is an affinity of blood not spirit. "There were some Dodsons less like the family than others—that was admitted; but in so far as they were 'kin' they were of necessity better than those who were 'no kin'." In a similar way the correct appearance and behavior for little girls is already established, too rigidly to allow for the internal, individual imperatives Maggie feels. Maggie's physical characteristics—her unruly hair, her unruly manners, her physical robustness as a young woman—all inappropriate for a Dodson girl, generally convince her relations that she is a "mistake of nature": a deformity just as surely as Philip Wakem with his hunchback.

The same logic of right and wrong that holds in social and economic matters also holds for the sexes. If one is either right or not right, of course the second alternative merely means to be wrong. In St. Oggs one is either male or not-male, and while there may be a way to be a proper female, in a deeper way to be not-male means merely to be wrong or inferior in some essential way. For a woman in this society to be "right" means accepting a place that is defined for inferior creatures, always adjunct to the more significant activities of men. As the hard-headed Wakem says bluntly, "We don't ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to".

Most men in the novel have a deep, unselfconscious belief that they are innately superior to women, even to the women they most care about. Although Maggie is Mr. Tulliver's favorite child, he deplores her acuteness. In discussing the important question of a child's education he says of her simply, it's a pity she wasn't a boy, she is "too 'cute for a woman.… It's no mischief while she's a little 'un, but an over-'cute woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep—she'll fetch none the bigger price for that." Both Mr. Tulliver and Stephen Guest look for a certain weakness when choosing their spouses. Mr. Tulliver confides to Mr. Riley, "I picked the mother because she wasn't o'er 'cute—being a good-looking woman, too an' come of a rare family for managing; but I picked her from her sisters o' purpose, 'cause she was a bit weak, like; for I wasn't agoin' to be told the rights o' things by my own fireside". Mr. Stephen Guest, the "odiforous result of the largest oil mill and the most extensive wharf in St. Oggs", is a "patronising" lover who finds charm in silliness. When Stephen directs Lucy to sing "the whole duty of woman—'And from obedience grows my pride and happiness'," his banter has a point. He chooses the wife "who was likely to make him happy," which means that he has a norm Lucy happens to fit, not that he derives his norm from knowing her qualities. "He meant to choose Lucy: she was a little darling, and exactly the sort of woman he had always most admired".

As a growing boy Tom struggles anxiously to be superior. For him equality is confusing and inferiority insupportable. He is baffled by Bob Jakin's different ways and standards and by the fact that he cannot assert mastery because Bob does not care for Tom's approval. Tom makes the most of his opportunities with Maggie, who does care. He feels the flattery of her emotional dependence on him and he gives his affection chiefly as a reward for submission. "He was very fond of his sister, and meant always to take care of her, make her his housekeeper, and punish her when she did wrong". When Tom takes an equal chance with Maggie for the unevenly divided jam-puff, he cannot accept either the fact that she wins the big half or the fact that she offered it to him anyway, so he turns the incident into another instance of Maggie's inferiority. She is made to feel that she is somehow mysteriously at fault: a "fact" she knows for certain because Tom withdraws his affection as punishment.

Tom's affections for his absent sister are strongest when his ego is most in jeopardy, under his tutelage at Mr. Stelling's. His difficulties with Euclid and Latin and the long lonely evenings crush his spirit and give him a "girl's susceptibility." "He couldn't help thinking with some affection even of Spouncer, whom he used to fight and quarrel with; he would have felt at home with Spouncer, and in a condition of superiority". When Philip Wakem arrives it is even worse for Tom since Philip is much more accomplished, and so Tom is delighted when Maggie arrives to visit. Now he can measure his ability in Latin against her non-existent one. How important condescension to "girls" is to Tom, and how readily he gets corroboration in this from adults, appears in this exchange with Stelling:

"Girls can't do Euclid: can they sir?"

"They can pick up a little of everything, I daresay,
" said Mr. Stelling. "They've a great deal of superficial

cleverness; but they couldn't go far in anything. They're
quick and shallow."

Tom, delighted with this verdict, telegraphed his triumph by wagging his head at Maggie behind Mr. Stelling's chair. As for Maggie, she had hardly ever been so mortified. She had been so proud to be called 'quick' all her little life, and now it appeared that this quickness was the brand of inferiority. It would have been better to be slow, like Tom.

"Ha, ha! Miss Maggie!" said Tom, when they were
alone; "you see it's not such a fine thing to be quick.

You'll never go far in anything, you know."

And Maggie was so oppressed by this dreadful destiny that she had no spirit for a retort.

At the end of a scene like this Tom's prophecy promises to be self-fulfilling. Mr. Stelling, so long as he can patronize her, actually enjoys her talk; and Tom actually learns through Maggie to take more interest in Latin. But neither Tom nor his teacher can admit to themselves that she has intellectual potential, and when Maggie demands recognition they resort to that old and effective cruelty, ridicule: Tom with conscious delight and Mr. Stelling, at his more advanced stage of masculine development, without thinking.

The women in the novel accept their place willingly. Lucy knows her lover thinks her silly and that he likes insipid women, but she does not think of challenging this view of her character. She is complacent in her "small egoisms" and "small benevolences", fond in her turn of patronizing dependent creatures like Mrs. Tulliver and even Maggie. The most Lucy's talents run to, given the limits of her options, is to manage and manipulate people by strategem into better dealings with one another: not a bad cause, perhaps, but in her case pitifully circumscribed. "I'm very wise," she tells her papa, "I've got all your business talents". She probably does, poor thing. Within her scope she manages but her scope is small and her influence peripheral to the real business of people's lives. She derives her strength from her security and hence does not dream of asserting herself.

Like Lucy, Mrs. Tulliver was a good child. She never cried, she was "healthy, fair, plump, and dull-witted; in short, the flower of her sex for beauty and amiability." She is like the early madonnas of Raphael, says the narrator (reminding us of the venerable age of this tradition of feminine virtue) with their "blond faces and somewhat stupid expression" who were probably equally as "ineffectual" as Mrs. Tulliver and Lucy. Mrs. Tulliver's view of the whole duty of women befits a Dodson sister: it is to make beautiful elderflower wine; it is to keep her clothes tidy so no one can speak ill of her, for she does not "wish anybody any harm" (implying with her usual logic that if she keeps her clothes neat she will somehow be wishing her neighbors well); it is to make pie fit to "show with the best" and to keep her linen "so in order, as if I was to die tomorrow I shouldn't be ashamed." As she concludes with unwitting penetration, "a woman can do no more nor she can."

Maggie, too, learns the family pieties, though not so willingly. She is strong enough to be suffocated by her narrow life, but not strong enough to escape it. Responsive and flexible, she resents the narrow restrictiveness of her environment and she struggles valiantly against it. But because she is completely alone in this struggle her small force is too feeble to prevail. Her family's constant opposition to her aspirations gradually teaches her a habit of self-distrust which over-powers her better self and which perverts her energies. This habit is already well-developed on the morning she goes off to fish with Tom. "Maggie thought it probable that the small fish would come to her hook, and the large one to Tom's." Soon Tom sees she has one and he whispers excitedly,

"Look, look Maggie," and running to prevent her from
snatching her line away.

Maggie was frightened lest she had been doing
something wrong, as usual.

The family pieties, unflattering though they are and in conflict with her inner imperatives, are inseparable from her sense of identity. She feels she must be wrong, not according to any standard of her own but according to some external authority which she barely understands and yet which, as a child, she implicitly trusts more than she trusts herself.

She has already learned to defer to others in place of developing a sense of her own authority; hence what she learns to fear most is the withdrawal of approval. In the jam-puff episode this is Tom's device for enforcing her submission and he has learned it from his elders. Maggie's mother uses the same device to control her troublesome daughter. On the morning Tom is to be brought home from school, for example, Maggie is prevented from going along because the morning was too wet "for a little girl to go out in her best bonnet." When Maggie tries to assert herself against these unfair restrictions by ducking her curls in water, she gets the following response: "'Maggie, Maggie,' exclaimed Mrs. Tulliver, sitting stout and helpless with the brushes on her lap, 'what is to become of you if you're so naughty: I'll tell your aunt Glegg and your aunt Pullet when they come next week, and they'll never love you any more'." Of course, Maggie and Tom are none too fond of their aunts—their mother says this is "more natural in a boy than a gell"—but the important point is that Maggie is threatened with the withdrawal of approval or love as punishment for being the wrong kind of little girl. She is referred to a standard she does not accept or understand (the value of her aunts' love) and for which her own mother will betray her or "tell" on her.

Insulting behavior causes dependency, as Bernard Paris has shown in his "[The Conflicts of Maggie Tulliver: A] Horneyan analysis" [Centennial Review, 12, 1969] of Maggie's neurosis. With her pride constantly knocked away from under her, Maggie responds by becoming self-effacing and dependent, buying her identity at the price of her autonomy. The narrator suggests in the first Book that "the dark-eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl may after all turn out to be a passive being compared with this pink-and-white bit of masculinity with the indeterminate features". If Maggie wants to be accepted she must learn to submit to the control of others who will then reward her obedience with affection. Without this affection Maggie has no identity, and so it happens that "the strongest need in poor Maggie's nature" develops, the "need of being loved".

As a child Maggie has no adult reserve about her feelings so it is then that her need to be loved is most apparent. Tom has no sooner arrived from school than he is teasing her and she is having to beg, "Please be good to me". When he wants to punish her for not being sure his rabbits were fed, he says, "I'm sorry I brought you the fish-line. I don't love you". And Maggie begs: "'O, please forgive me, Tom; my heart will break,' said Maggie shaking with sobs, clinging to Tom's arm, and laying her wet cheek on his shoulder.… What was the use of anything, if Tom didn't love her?" Alone in her attic, just as "her need of love had triumphed over her pride" and she is going down "to beg for pity" she hears Tom's step on the stair. "Her heart began to beat violently with the sudden shock of hope. He only stood still at the top of the stairs and said, 'Maggie, you're to come down.' But she rushed to him and clung round his neck, sobbing, 'O Tom, please forgive me—I can't bear it—I will always be good—always remember things—do love me—please dear Tom!"' Her need for love, inculcated by her bitter experience, overthrows her pride so completely that it also overthrows her integrity. She cannot exercise independent judgment. She will promise to be something she cannot be (always good, always remember things): anything, so long as the essential support is not withdrawn. Her need for love is a morbid dependency, and Tom uses it to master her, threatening to hate her if she is not just what he requires.

Maggie's dependency is re-inforced continually by ridicule and disapproval. When she shows her precious picture book to Mr. Riley she has the sense, not that he thinks the book silly but that she was "silly and of no consequence." No matter what Maggie does on her own initiative she usually regrets it. For example, on the visit to aunt Pullet, while Lucy characteristically waits without eagerness until she's told to eat, Maggie "as usual" becomes fascinated by a print of Ulysses, drops her cake underfoot, and earns the general disapprobation once again. The next minute, when the musical snuff-box excites her feelings, she runs to hug Tom and spills his wine.

"Why don't you sit still, Maggie?" her mother said,
peevishly.

"Little gells mustn't come to see me if they behave in
that way," said aunt Pullet.

"Why, you're too rough, little miss," said uncle Pullet.

Poor Maggie sat down again, with the music all chased out of her soul, and the seven small demons all in again.

When she resolves on a "decided course of action" in regard to her troublesome hair and cuts it all off, she is again met with disapproval and ridicule. "She didn't want her hair to look pretty—that was out of the question—she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her." But Tom's response brings an "unexpected pang" of regret. "'Don't laugh at me, Tom,' said Maggie, in a passionate tone, with an outburst of angry tears … ". The impulsiveness of her actions and the rapidity of her regret seem to be consequences of her persistent sense of inferiority, a sense which is further reinforced on this occasion. She is met in the dining room with "a chorus of reproach and derision" so that, when Tom unexpectedly adds his own, "her feeble power of defiance left her in an instant, her heart swelled, and, getting up from her chair, she ran to her father, hid her face on his shoulder, and burst out into loud sobbing". Nearly the only source of sweetness in her early life comes when she throws herself on this source of support, never from her own powers, which only bring her ridicule and shame. The love she gets is nearly always payment for humiliation. It is not surprising, then, that she learns to distrust her own powers and to develop a fatal sense of the sweetness of submission.

Maggie's rapid shift from defiance to despair suggest the fatal instability that is developing in her. Potentially she could develop a strong, flexible character, given her inclinations and her gifts; but actually she is preparing for disaster because she never has an opportunity to make her own choices or to develop her own judgment. Whatever she attempts, the withdrawal of approval is so great a threat—almost an ontological threat—that she cannot proceed in the face of contradiction. In her later struggles with St. Oggs Maggie does not struggle like Antigone to hold her own against social norms because, in a fundamental way, she has no force of her own. She has assimilated the social norms and if she fights against them she must fight against herself. She believes the lie, that she is inferior, or wrong, or not to be taken seriously. She has learned to collaborate in her own defeat.

The same self-defeating habits occur in the second stage of her life, when Maggie must face the family disaster and when she establishes important relationships outside her family (with Philip and Stephen). As a child Maggie gives up her will for the reward of acceptance and affection; after the downfall when her family seem like strangers and she is driven more into herself she develops a new rationale for the old habit, she gives up things on principle. It is perfectly in keeping with her childhood need to be loved that an adolescent Maggie resolves to meet the family misfortune by "plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness" (notice the familiar connection between devotion and the necessity for self-humiliation). She succeeds so well that her mother is amazed "that this once 'contrary' child was become so submissive, so backward to assert her own will". But the motives are still what they were. As the narrator warned, her rebelliousness was weaker than her need to be loved and it has turned into a strange passivity. She likes to give up her will or, rather, to exert her will only against herself. She now can do to herself what others used to do to her, and it gives her the sense of being "right" for the first time in her life. Being "right" requires Maggie to turn against herself.

The morbidity of her so-called renunciation is obvious to Philip Wakem. She refuses even to read or hear music because "it would make me in love with this world again, as I used to be—it would make me long to see and know many things—it would make me long for a full life". Philip tells her she has "wrong ideas of self-conquest". "It is mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day, and then every rational satisfaction of your nature that you deny now will assult you like a savage appetite… It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide". Philip's own self-interest in the matter does not invalidate the accuracy of his observations on her "wilful, senseless privation" and "self-torture". He perceives that the fatal weakness Maggie is cultivating is a form of suicide.

Of course self-privation suggests there is something of which to deprive herself. Unlike Lucy, who renounces personal desires so completely that she effectively has none, Maggie has desires that might be fulfilled. She is responsive to the appeal of books, of music, of conversation with Philip, and she feels her life growing again through these experiences. In particular she begins to feel need for a life outside love, as if she is beginning to understand that what she has called love is really a self-defeating, neurotic compulsion. "I begin to think there can never come much happiness to me from loving. I have always had so much pain mingled with it. I wish I could make myself a world outside it, as men do". A true prompting, this wish for a life outside affection. George Eliot wrote to her friend Mrs. Robert Lytton:

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life—some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed—because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

The important themes of the novel are recapitulated here: the importance to a woman of a life outside love, the danger of ridicule in pursuing it, the unhealthiness of confinement to the affections. Maggie might have become a woman who, like Madame de Sablé [in "Woman in France: Madame de Sablé," Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney, 1963], was a woman "men could more than love—whom they could make their friend, confidante, and counsellor; the sharer, not of their joys and sorrows only, but of their ideas and aims." But to make a life outside love one needs experience of actual dealings with the actual world, experience from which Maggie has always been cruelly "protected." Even in her statement to Philip it is clear that she has in mind vague hopes but no real alternative.

While Maggie's inner promptings to a wider life do exist, they are not stronger than her habit of self-denial as, I think, her rejection of Philip shows. Maggie obeys Tom's insistence that she break with Philip ostensibly out of duty to her father, but there may be some argument about her motives. She feels an unaccountable relief when her relations with Philip are cut off, a relief which seems to me to have reference to the demands Philip has been making on her: that she be herself and trust her interests. But responsibility for herself is something she has learned to avoid, and so her relief seems a clear assertion of an old reluctance to assert herself and not, as has been thought, a sexual repulsion to Philip. George Eliot has spent most of her time showing that Maggie is not chiefly a sexual creature but a social creature, and so it is plausible, given the whole direction of the novel, that Maggie is simply glad the inner conflict and need for decision are over.

Much as she may wish for a life outside love, the undertow of her dependency is too strong a force with her, preventing her from dealing with the conflicts of adult life. Her clandestine association with Philip, which by definition is a separate reality from her home life, inevitably results in a conflict with her family once the protection of secrecy disappears. Yet she is emotionally unprepared to accept the fact that her two worlds are separate and unreconcilable. Tom says that since she can do nothing in the world she should "submit to those that can," still assuming that it is her nature to depend and be capable of nothing. Maggie cries, "you are a man, Tom, and have power, and can do something in the world"; but these poignant words are lost on Tom Tulliver and, with Maggie's acquiescence he makes her choice for her, literally requiring her to speak the words he gives her: "'Do as I require,' said Tom. 'I can't trust you, Maggie. There is no consistency in you. Put your hand on this Bible, and say, I renounce all private speech and intercourse with Philip Wakem from this time forth'." Maggie gives her word, although in this context it hardly can be called hers. Her private reflections after this scene reveal how fully she wishes to escape from conflicts she cannot resolve:

She used to think in that time that she had made great conquests, and won a lasting stand on serene heights above worldly temptations and conflict. And here she was down again in the thick of a hot strife with her own and others' passions. Life was not so short, then, and perfect rest was not so near as she had dreamed when she was two years younger. There was more struggle for her—perhaps more falling. If she had felt that she was entirely wrong, and that Tom had been entirely right, she could sooner have recovered more inward harmony.…

She would rather be "wrong" and submit to the "right" than to continue in a struggle she is unequipped for, or to support the painful consciousness that she is responsible for defending a valid position, but that, at the same time, she is without the resources necessary to the task.

Maggie seems to acknowledge that this promise she made for Tom was not really hers when she asks him to release her from it, two years later. But the scene in which Tom gives her her freedom has a bitterly ironic quality, since it actually confirms in other ways how little strength she has for bearing freedom. "When Maggie was not angry, she was as dependent on kind or cold words as a daisy on the sunshine or the cloud: the need of being loved would always subdue her, as, in old days, it subdued her in the worm-eaten attic". It subdues her again. Tom releases her, but with resentment and criticism. She sees the "terrible cutting truth" in Tom's remark that she has "no judgment and self-command" without seeing that this is true because she has always been commanded, that even now she is seeking to be commanded to do what she herself wants to do. Her one clear response, through the confusion of inner voices which condemn both herself and Tom, is despair at being shut out from acceptance by Tom.

The same weakness for substituting another's will for her own plays a crucial role in her relationship with Stephen, when she falls in love with him as well as when she leaves him. Initially she feels a sense of relief at being able to depend on Stephen, first when she slips in the boat and is supported by his firm grasp, and later when he takes her arm in the garden. "There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm: the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help—the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs—meets a continual want of the imagination". Being used to treatment that is indifferent and pre-emptive, Maggie is more at the mercy of such flattery which, when it comes "will summon a little of the too-ready, traitorous tenderness into a woman's eyes, compelled as she is in her girlish time to learn her life-lessons in very trivial language". Maggie's love for Stephen is traitorous dependence because it fulfills her need to be supported from without, rather than from within, and it thus acts as one further encouragement to deny herself.

In the light of her development it seems clear that Maggie rejects Stephen out of the same weakness that made her accept him. She rejects him, not out of moral principle, but out of the same, deep-rooted, unhealthy instincts that made her give up Philip and music and books. Both Philip and Stephen ask in different ways that she assert her will against the wills of others and that is what she cannot do (of course, Stephen also asks for a personal submission to himself that Philip does not ask). Now, far from being a virtue in Maggie this unassertiveness is perverse. George Eliot makes it crystalline in her novels and letters and essays ["The Antigone and Its Moral," Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney, 1963] that one must not only learn to renounce (i.e., submit to actual conditions that cannot be changed) but also to act (i.e., shape the conditions that can be changed). One must even "dare to be wrong." So when Maggie returns to St. Oggs for the third time, when she clings to those who ostracize her, saying—"I have no heart to begin a strange life again. I should have no stay. I should feel like a lonely wanderer—cut off from the past"—George Eliot is not praising Maggie out of Maggie's own mouth for acting on principle or for respecting the past. While George Eliot valued those things, she also valued realism. Maggie is merely expressing her insistence on having what, by definition, she cannot have: acceptance of herself by her brother and by St. Oggs.

The confusion and ambivalence we feel so keenly in the final chapters reflects accurately Maggie's own confusion and ambivalence at the painful conflict in her life between aspiration and fact [as stated by R. T. Jones in George Eliot, 1970]: "It is no moral philosophy that determines her decision, but a far deeper moral sense, which turns out to be hardly distinguishable from a sense of what she is. It is a clear recognition that there is no escape from what she is, however bitterly she might wish there were." This interpretation makes clear the essential importance of the full portrait of Maggie's childhood. It is not the happiness of her childhood that finally brings her down but the intensity of it. She speaks to Stephen of Philip's claims, yet neither she nor Philip ever recognized the kind of formal relationship she implies; she speaks of the past that sanctifies one's life, but we know her past has hardly done that; and finally, when Stephen presses her, her reasons disappear and she responds just as she did to the prospect of leaving St. Oggs: her "heart" won't let her. "'O, I can't do it,' she said, in a voice almost of agony—'Stephen—don't ask me—don't urge me. I can't argue any longer—I don't know what is wise; but my heart will not let me do it'." The past is her "stay": from which it does not follow that for her this is the best, but merely that it is for her the case. She is still looking to the same source for resolution of conflict, for rest from the too-feeble effort that always seems to turn back on itself and achieve nothing. When she leaves Stephen her mind is

unswervingly bent on returning to her brother, as the natural refuge that had been given her. In her deep humiliation under the retrospect of her own weakness—in her anguish at the injury she had inflicted—she almost desired to endure the severity of Tom's reproof, to submit in patient silence to that harsh disapproving judgment against which she had so often rebelled.… She craved that outward help to her better purpose which would come from complete, submissive confession—from being in the presence of those whose looks and words would be a reflection of her own conscience.

Given other conditions these instincts might not be entirely wrong (although the masochistic note here is hard to miss), but she has chosen the wrong object in Tom, and she perseveres, like the goldfish still endeavoring to swim in a straight line beyond the glass, in spite of the actual condition.

When Tom rejects her, she looks for some other "sure refuge" or stay to "guarantee her from falling", and lacking any, she only continues to vacillate between her conflicting feelings. She denies Stephen and then is inclined to yield because she begins to "doubt in the justice of her own resolve"; then, having decided to accept him, "close upon that decisive act her mind recoiled; and the sense of contradiction with her past self in her moments of strength and clearness came upon her like a pang of conscious degradation. No—she must wait … for the light that would surely come again". The confusion in interpreting this part of the novel is owing partly to Maggie's confusion. Her course is as erratic as a boat loose on the flood. Philip does have a claim, and so does Tom and even Stephen; but their claims conflict and Maggie has not learned the strength to do what she must, which is to choose one particular course and let another go. Her only instinct is to wait passively for help.

"'O God, where am I? Which is the way home?' she cried out, in the dim loneliness." In the flood, at night, her boat leaves its mooring at Bob Jakin's and floats away: a "transition of death" which is only the last in a series of fatal transitions which began in her childhood and which in a few moments will finally carry her under. As she floats and then rows towards home she is finally able to see the "light" she waited for: "the dawning seemed to advance more swiftly, now she was in action". What seems to be a dawning is a fatal illusion, because it is death she is heading for. Maggie is looking for a "reconcilement with her brother: what quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity … ?" The undertow of dependency carries her back, and only with it can she act decisively: "as if her life were a stored-up force that was being spent in this hour, unneeded for any future".

The final scene where Tom reverts to the "childish" nick-name for his sister, the scene which ends in a recollection of "the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together" seems not saccharine and sentimental but, in light of the present interpretation, harsh and grim. Such sentimentality as there is echoes Maggie's longing for an impossible reconciliation. (When did they ever roam the fields in love?) And the words suggest that, since she was shaped to be a child by the family pieties, it is fitting that her life ends in a reversion to childhood where her energies to be an adult, tragically, are "unneeded."

George Eliot, born the same year as Maggie, left her brother Isaac, who was born the same year as Tom; she left her home of thirty years for London and despite the hard and lonely beginning she never went back. Maggie went back and her fate is the strongest possible argument and justification for doing the opposite: for doing precisely what George Eliot did in leaving her home behind. George Eliot does not try to disguise the tremendous difficulties in making the endless, painful effort required of such a woman, nor does she disguise the importance to such a woman of some support in making the effort; but in counterpoint she offers a grim warning as to the consequences of avoiding that effort. For Maggie the price of "feminine" affection and "feminine" self-sacrifice is suicide. Just as a fully human life is constituted of mind, imagination, and feeling, not only biological conditions, so equally, human death comes not only with the deprivation of oxygen but with the deprivation of mental, imaginative, and emotional life. Maggie's literal drowning is merely physical corroboration of the more important disaster.