Maggie lives in a culture, controlled by men. Even the unity, in the end, is initiated on behalf of Maggie, who by coincidence gets the chance of meeting her brother Tom, whom she loves the most, but this coincidence is brought to them by flood, in which death is their ultimate destination. The structure of the story takes a commonplace to develop as Tom and Maggie grow, which sets them within the framework of a traditional family and a middle-class society which extensively determine what they become shows the inevitable development of their characters according to the pressures of heredity and irrevocable events, and traces their destinies chronologically from love, through division, to unity in death. With a feminist perspective, Eliot depicts feminist determinism in the major themes of The Mill on the Floss, i.e., none other than the character of Maggie Tulliver. What Eliot tries to depict through Maggie, is the revelation of an ungendered social arena, disclosed by the interference of other male dominant characters. Right from the beginning, however, it is evident that Eliot’s character sketch of Maggie portrays a passionate and intelligent young woman, who is also problematic, because of the struggle she keeps on to construct and defend a sense of self, which is overcast by a dark certainty that familial and a middle-class life cannot accommodate.
In fact, this is a story of hardships and determinism in the context of a feminist, in which Eliot revisits her own quandary and starts the story of a restricted, poorly-educated female child in a male-dominated culture (Dee, 1999).
The Mill on the Floss (1860) tells the story of a young woman, Maggie Tulliver, who despite contriving hard to keep everyone contended, remains unable to conform to the traditional society. George Eliot, as a moralist emphasizes what makes a woman, an object of sympathy while keeping in a traditional line of interpretation, and this is what has made Eliot to be considered among the greatest creators of woman characters.
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