The Influence of Gender Roles on Destiny in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss
- Regan Reiners
- Aug 27
- 2 min read
Author Bio:
Regan is a third year undergraduate English Literature student at the University of Edinburgh, currently completing her year abroad in Sydney. Her literary interests are broad in scope, but she has recently been drawn to Victorian literature, encouraging her to examine George Eliot’s work from a retrospective, feminist framework. During her year abroad, her studies have focused on the intersections between Victorian literature and psychoanalytic theory. This essay emerges from that focus, drawing on Bion’s theory of containment to explore how the dynamic of the ‘container’ and the ‘contained’ is not only present in George Eliot’s narrative, but are inseparably knit to the fabric of Victorian prose itself.
Essay Abstract:
This essay explores how restrictive gender roles shape individual destiny in George Eliot’s novel The Mill on The Floss (1860), with a particular focus on the interaction between external societal pressures and internal, psychological conflict. Drawing on Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalytic theory of containment, this essay examines the ways in which Maggie Tulliver’s intellectual and emotional ambition exceed the narrow confines of Victorian propriety, culminating in the novel’s tragic conclusion. The first section argues that Eliot portrays emotional ‘overflow’ as a direct consequence of patriarchal repression, through a consideration of Maggie Tulliver’s psychological development under a feminist and psychoanalytic framework. The second section examines Tom Tulliver as a product of Victorian masculinity, whose moral absolutism and emotional rigidity exacerbate Maggie’s subjugation. Bion’s theory is used to analyse the narrative and metaphorical significance of Eliot’s flood, revealing how Eliot’s prose stages the collapse of the ‘contained’ as both a physical and psychological event. Ultimately, it is concluded that Eliot presents true autonomy as unattainable within the Victorian realist canon, yet gestures towards the possibility of posthumous reconciliation, where ‘in death, they were not devided’ (Eliot 1).
Read the full essay here:
Comments