Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Maggie Tulliver. Maggie is Mr. Tulliver and Mrs. Tulliver’s passionate and high-spirited daughter and Tom’s younger sister. From a young age, she shows a marked aptitude for reading and learning—what her father calls “acuteness.” However, her intellectual abilities are largely underappreciated. Her brother thinks that all girls are “silly,” while her mother laments Maggie’s rebelliousness, messiness, and lack of concern for her clothes, hair, and household domestic tasks like sewing. Maggie’s aunts, Mrs. Deane, Mrs. Pullet, and Mrs. Glegg, think that she is a “contrary” child with peculiar habits. In this sense, most of the adults in Maggie’s life do not understand or encourage her intellectual interests, focusing instead on her lack of traditional feminine graces. When she is a child, she feels so rejected by her family and community that she tries to run away to the gypsies (who she thinks will have long black hair, like her, thus ensuring her acceptance among them). As an adult, Maggie finds herself similarly out of step with social convention. In an era when marriage was the ultimate goal of a woman’s life, Maggie goes against the societal grain by working independently as a governess and rejecting Philip’s marriage proposal. Most notoriously, she elopes with her cousin’s lover, Stephen Guest, but refuses to go through with the marriage due to her own moral scruples—a decision that makes her an outcast in town. This decision is typical of Maggie’s determination to abide by her own internal moral code rather than that of society. Tom is the emotional center of Maggie’s life, and her love for him is the motivation and principle that guides many of her decisions.