The Mill On The Floss - 2372 Words

In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, one of the long, resounding themes of the novel is the nature of love and how it changes people over time. While a loving nature is generally regarded as a noble if not redeemable trait in literary characters, especially in Victorian literature where the idea of marrying for love was gaining popularity, protagonist Maggie Tulliver subverted that idea. It was because of Maggie’s all consuming familial love for her brother Tom, platonic love for Philip, and romantic love for Stephen that directly caused her ultimate downfall and death. At the heart of the novel, Maggie’s relationship with her older brother Tom was without a doubt the most important in her life. The two were incredibly close as†¦show more content†¦To be fair, Tom was a child who had just found out his pets were killed, so it’s understandable that he would be angry and lash out. However, this was the first of many times throughout the novel that Maggie displease Tom in some way, be swiftly and harshly punished for it, and return to Tom wholeheartedly whenever it suited him to apologize. The next time that the two siblings fought was the infamous pastry debacle, in which Tom had stolen two pastries for them to share and let Maggie decide who would get the bigger one. Maggie insisted that he take the bigger pastry, but Tom countered by telling her it was alright for her to take it. He then seethed in anger as they ate together when she did indeed take the prefered pastry and he called her greedy. Tom’s motivations for doing this are never made entirely clear. Was it a trick question? Was he testing Maggie to see if she would still put him first even when he said not to? But that was the trick, that she thought she was being respectful and putting Tom first by taking his permission to accept the larger pastry for herself. Maggie could never seem to win with Tom because of his strange logic and sense of justice, and their strained relationship finally boiled over in childhood when she ran away to live with gypsies -anything to not have to deal with Tomâ€℠¢s disappointingly on-again, off-again