The Mill on the Floss

“The rush of the water and the booming of the mill bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sound shutting one out from the world beyond.”

Eliot’s imagery evokes the beauty of the English countryside and romanticizes the childhoods of Tom and Maggie growing up by the Floss. The description of the mill and its setting also foreshadows the important role the mill will play as both a setting and as a symbol throughout the novel.

“Maggie’s cheeks began to flush with triumphant excitement: she thought Mr Riley would have a respect for her now—it had been evident that he thought nothing of her before.”

This quote highlights Maggie’s desire to be respected instead of disregarded. As a girl, people tend to ignore Maggie unless they are criticizing her for not being ladylike enough. Though Mr. Riley is a minor character and a minor person in Maggie’s life, her desire for him to respect her and acknowledge her demonstrates her awareness at a young age of how people view her, and her belief in herself that she is more than a silly little girl.

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?”

Eliot’s novel explores the connections between land and identity. In Eliot’s view, setting impacts characterization because of the experiences people have growing up in a certain place during a certain time. The quote also juxtaposes the subtle tensions in the novel between the traditional rural society the countryside represents—full of “sweet monotony”—and the novelty of the rapidly changing, industrializing urban world beyond the town.