| Struggling with the conflicting demands of an androgynous nature in a rigidly gender-defined society, Mary Anne Evans eventually actualized her powerful intellect and ambitions in her career as George Eliot, a female writer using a male pseudonym and, in the beginning, a male persona as narrator. She reached beyond restrictive social mores through creative explorations of androgynous consciousness.;In The Mill on the Floss Eliot's depiction of the Tullivers and Dodsons reveals that they are victims of artificial sex-roles that distort human judgment and fragment the psyche. Against this background of gender-distinctions, Eliot traces the psychological development of the Tulliver children, whose natural androgynous impulses are repressed and modified by their culture. As the emerging patriarch, Tom Tulliver finds positive reinforcement and a free range for self-expression. Maggie, on the other hand, meets continual resistance to self-actualization and suffers debasing lessons in the supposed natural inferiority of women. Nevertheless, through painful experience she develops a positive empathic ability. By mid-novel, the Tulliver children have learned to view the world from gender-defined perspectives.;The second half of The Mill on the Floss is a powerful symbolic expression of androgynous fulfillment. Maggie fully realizes her androgynous nature through her spiritual rescue of Tom during the flood, the symbolic equivalent to those forces against which she has struggled throughout the novel. In an act of human fellowship, this modern Antigone awakens Tom to a higher consciousness that fuses undifferentiated feeling with differentiated reason. Nevertheless, Eliot's vision remains essentially tragic. Eliot's short description of the continued strength of established roles and her ironic epitaph at the end undercut the novel's transcendent moment, implying that androgynous conciousness is powerless to be born in the time-bound, historic patriarchy, which ultimately is as indifferent to human spiritual development as nature.;After working through her tragic view of mankind's inevitably slow evolution in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot expressed the possibility for androgynous fulfillment on a personal level in Middlemarch and on a personal and public level in Daniel Deronda. |
