"Between the inward impulse and the outward fact": tragedy in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

Abstract

Moral dilemmas, human sympathy and sense of duty are the central themes that pervade George Eliot's oeuvre. Her interest in these issues led her to find in the idea of tragedy a suitable means of artistic expression for her moral and aesthetic concerns. The present work lies in the area of English Literature and aims at investigating how George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss ([1860]2012) brings about a modernization of the classic Greek concept of tragedy. Based on the readings of Aristotle (2013) and Eliot (1990a), we analyse how the writer incorporates and modernizes the concept of tragedy in her novel and in which ways the protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, can be considered a tragic heroine. Through the study of the tragic aspect of her novel, it is noticeable that Eliot departs from the formal elements of the Aristotelian tragedy but keeps its essence. The novelist also redefines the concept of the tragic hero: she wrests tragedy from the sphere of kings and gods and places it among the ordinary people.