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Quote 10. While Maggie’s life-struggles had lain almost entirely within her own soul, one shadowy army fighting another, and the slain shadows for ever rising again, Tom was engaged in a dustier, noisier warfare, grappling with more substantial obstacles, and gaining more definite conquests. Explanation and Analysis. Both Tom and Maggie struggle a great deal in the aftermath of Mr. Tulliver's bankruptcy. However, the narrator draws a sharp contrast between their two experiences. Maggie's struggle is interior, “almost entirely within her own soul,” and involves an inward battle to subdue her emotions and desires. Tom, by contrast, has the more straightforward task of going into the working world and trying to earn enough money to pay back the family's debts. Because of her gender, Maggie experiences the world after the bankruptcy in a very different way. Unlike Tom, she can't work a job to earn money (other than taking in sewing), because very few jobs were available to women in nineteenth-century England. She has to remain at home and wait passively, whereas Tom can win “more definite conquests” and take control of his own fate.