Imperfect Fiction and Criticism im Stillstand: A Reading of The Mill on the Floss

This chapter of The Mill on the Floss combines Ramon Fernandez’s theory of personality with Walter Benjamin’s anti-subjectivist philosophy to propose a different interpretation of George Eliot’s novel, one that engages with the critical strategy of surface reading. While a less tragic light is shed on the novel’s ending, my approach entails the reader’s recalibration of both the character of the protagonist and the personality of the narrator. Both reveal fractured identities in the course of the story. The uneasy relationship of Maggie Tulliver with her affections is reflected in the ambivalent tale of her moral progress and choice as told by an equally multifaceted figure of the narrator.