He has very little book-smarts but he is practical, determined, and willing to sacrifice everything to regain his family’s honor. He is athletic, prideful, obsessed with justice, and usually rather unforgiving. Tom is Maggie’s older brother by four years. Even when she chooses based on her desire, though, as when she starts to elope with Stephen, she ultimately feels the pull of her family and community too strongly, and can’t bear to follow through on gaining happiness at their expense. The strong pull of both means she is often indecisive, and though she tries to find peace in renouncing all desire - for education, music, love, literature - in the end this only makes her feelings stronger. As she grows up, she regularly feels conflicted between acting how her extended family and community would want her to, and following her own desires. When the novel begins, she is young, clever, imaginative, adoring of her brother, and always getting into trouble. Maggie is the very intelligent, very conflicted protagonist of The Mill on the Floss. The narrator is reflecting on the lives of the Tullivers from thirty years after Tom and Maggie died. He or she has a sense of humor which is very satiric.
The latter style is predominant, and his or her use of the first person is rare. The narrator, unnamed, narrates both as an individual remembering Dorlcote Mill as it was in Maggie’s lifetime, and as an omniscient narrator who clearly knows more than any individual could of the thoughts and motivations of the characters.
0 kommentar(er)
