Dark Spirituality as a Symbol of Female Frustration:

Voodoo Gothic and the Mill on the Floss

George Eliot's The Mill On the Floss is arguably one of the most widely read novels of the Victorian period. Although many differ as to just why this is the case, one thing is clear -- what was once a rather straightforward tragic tale, tinged with the time's popular romantic/gothic influence, has become a bastion of feminist criticism. Although many readers, especially those contemporary to the work's publication, expressed strong disappointment with the fate of Maggie -- especially at the end of the novel, the advent of feminist criticism brought many readers to begin to strongly identify with the fate, and the message, George Eliot was trying to convey. (Jacobus 62) Maggie Tulliver's representation of the tragedy of intellectual womanhood mired in the doom of repressive Victorian society -- is particularly satisfying. For these...
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