The Mill on the Floss

By George Eliot

It is astonishing what a different result one gets by changing the metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one's ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing. But then it is open to some one else to follow great authorities, and call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one's knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being "the freshest modern" instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,–that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?

I have read few books with such insight into the ludicrous workings of this inflated thing we call society. George Eliot has one of the most deft hands at sarcasm which I have yet felt at work. Talk about smooth and subtle criticisms, she exposes the many faults of 19th century British society to the open glare of a modern reader. I would also commend her superb characters. Most notably is the amazing Maggie Tulliver, I do not know if i have ever encountered such a vivid and real and interesting character. It is something more then her constant indecision and torment of being drawn between things she does not understand in the world. Maggie transcends into the realm of depicting how incredibly difficult it is to get along in this world. Her difficulties are not merely the difficulties of social life, not merely those of love, but they are the difficulties of self. Her inner struggle with desires is one of the most vivid depictions of the contortions a human soul will go through merely because it cannot be other than itself.
As far as the plot of the book goes, Eliot's ending was disappointing, almost as if she backed herself into a corner and had no tricks left with which to escape. But flaws are always bound to creep into one's tale, and her ending is not unnatural, only more abrupt than perhaps it should have been. The story of the Tulliver family though is a grand one, if it is tragic. And the various twisted manifestations of society as represented in St. Oggs are scary to the mind of a modern reader--only because we have our own different ways of quietly murdering our societal foes. Not to take the pulpit, of course--Eliot achieves that more beautifully than I could. 7/10