Maggie's Quest--On The Clashes In The Mill On The Floss

George Eliot is an enormously intelligent and prolific English Victorian writer, who stands out in the British literary scene by her male pseudonym, her doubt in religion, and her rebellious relationship with George Henry Lewes. Her highly autobiographical novel, the reminiscence of the poignancy and charm of her childhood and the England of her young days, The Mill on the Floss (1860), is one of her early works. Critics have embarked on the study of this novel since its publication and The Times acclaims it as a "silk purse". Henry James highlights the dramatic continuity of the novel and holds that the scientific manner George Eliot used to classify the Dodsons socially could compete with Balzac. Virginia Woolf never hesitates to pour high praise on the width of the prospect as unfolded by Eliot, and the ruddy light of her novel. F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams both speak highly of the greatness of George Eliot and canvass the merits and defects of her early works. They develop a careful definition of George Eliot's central weakness in this novel claiming that one of the main characters, Stephen Guest, is a significant lapse in The Mill on the Floss. They criticize that Maggie's entanglement with Stephen Guest is a discordance, discrepancy, and a significant failure in George Eliot which shows her immaturity in development and she is earnestly moral and indulged in her agonized conscience, religious need and self-realization while lacking complex impersonalized whole like Conrad. The present dissertation is an endeavor to trace George Eliot's deep concern for lower-class people, consciousness of social changes, active response to industrialization, and painstaking efforts to save human soul as a writer.The first chapter of this dissertation tries to cover George Eliot's enlightenment in her youth, the impact of Positivist Epistemology, Determinism, and Religion of Humanity on her. The second chapter attempts to probe into the novel, the inner world of Maggie who is the major character in The Mill on the Floss, through the contextual analysis of the clashes and tensions between her and the other primary characters, and the agonizing spiritual conflict within herself. It is also our aim to explore the traces ofindustrial revolution in The Mill on the Floss and its effects on the major characters that mirror the social values and ethical code prevailing in the course of industrial revolution.Questioning Leslie Stephen's and Henry James' conclusion that Stephen Guest is a significant lapse in The Mill on the Floss and an immaturity in George Eliot, in the second and third chapters, I propose to analyze the development of science, the change of economy, and history at her times and point out that Maggie's anxiety and predicament is undoubtedly the product of the social change, and her dilemma between Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest is actually the split-self within her caused by the clashes of social values in the course of industrial revolution. In the fourth chapter, I propose to find a hint of George Eliot herself in Maggie and have a more close-up look at the link between Maggie's quest and the quest of George Eliot in the aspects of her social concern, the search for knowledge, for shared values, and her longing for love. A further attempt will be made to find out what is troubling the writer and her predicament at her times. The conclusion is that Maggie's challenge to the society is actually Eliot's own efforts in pursuit of knowledge, humanity, love, and shared values and her quest for the rescue of human soul is actually that of Mary Ann Evans her own.