Is The Mill on the Floss a feminist novel?
Answer for Study Question 1
It is Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.
. The movement organized around this belief
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The Mill on the Floss is a feminist novel in the sense that it reveals the difficulty of Maggie's coming of age, and that difficulty is shown to be made harder by her society's narrow views about women. Especially during Maggie's childhood, we are constantly confronted with older characters ignoring or devaluing Maggie's obvious intelligence because she is a girl. Even Tom is shown to participate in this narrowness—he considers it his right to keep Maggie in her place, as well as care for her. In scenes such as the one in which Mr. Stelling pronounces the cleverness of women to be shallow, we are clearly meant to become angry at this pronunciation and know automatically that the pronunciation is wrong. Significantly, society's mistaken views about the shallowness of women are shown to adversely effect men as well—it is Tom who suffers just as much as Maggie, through his miseducation. The structure of the novel itself presents Maggie as constrained and unable to move outside of her family circle. We are significantly not shown the chapters in which she is on her own, teaching, and are made to focus, instead, on scenes with Maggie and her family and friends, in which Maggie's subjection, or non- subjection, to their will is at issue. The passages dealing with the hypocritical morality of St. Ogg's society are unsparing in relation to women—the town's females are revealed as the most self-serving and shallow of the population—yet, this harsh realism does not change the basic feminist tenor of the novel
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