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:

1.TULLIVER FAMILY BIBLE. With its soiled pages and notes in the margins from past Tullivers, the family Bible symbolizes family history, continuity, and loyalty. In many nineteenth-century British homes, the Bible was at the center of the household. In The Mill on the Floss, the Tulliver family Bible is no exception. Maggie describes the book as being heavily annotated by several generations of Tullivers, linking the physical object of the book to the family’s long tenure at Dorlcote Mill. Maggie and her family are attached to the book precisely because it has been heavily used. It is no accident, then, that when Mr. Tulliver wants Tom to swear to take revenge against Mr. Wakem (the lawyer who financially ruined the family), he asks Tom to write his promise in the family Bible. For Christians, the Bible is a sacred text, so Tom is making a serious, faith-based commitment when he promises to take revenge on the Wakems by writing it in it. However, the family Bible does not only symbolize the power of religion and tradition in the lives of people like the Tullivers—by writing in this book, a prized family possession, Tom is symbolically expressing his loyalty to the five generations of Tullivers who have lived at Dorlcote Mill. Mr. Wakem has threatened this legacy, so it is fitting that Tom makes this promise by writing in a book that symbolizes the Tullivers’ strength and continuity. 2.MAGGIE’S HAIR . Maggie’s dark hair symbolizes her rebelliousness against the standards of female dress, behavior, and appearance that dictate her life. From a young age, Maggie’s long, dark, and unruly hair marks her out as different from her mother’s side of the family, the Dodsons. Indeed, Mrs. Tulliver constantly laments that Maggie doesn’t have curly blonde hair, like her, Tom, and her Dodson sisters. In nineteenth-century Britain, blonde curls were idealized and associated with femininity, grace, and beauty. Maggie’s muchpraised cousin Lucy Deane, for instance, has perfect blonde curls. In contrast, Maggie’s hair physically refuses to be bound up in the tight curls in which her mother tries to dress them, just as Maggie chafes against the restrictions placed on her gender. As a child, in a fit of anger, she cuts off her hair with scissors, symbolizing her desire to be free from those gendered requirements to be clean, neat, and pretty. The young Maggie even runs away for an evening to join a caravan of gypsies, convinced that she will find a home with people who have dark hair and dark coloring, just like her. That Maggie would run away from home for such a seemingly trivial reason suggests that she felt radically excluded and out of place as a child because of her hair. Her long dark hair is later regarded as beautiful by several of her admirers in adulthood, like Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest. Here, too, both men admire her hair because it makes her intriguingly different from other women. Whether praised or condemned, Maggie’s hair thus always symbolizes her unconventionality and reluctance to conform to the restrictive standards that govern women’s behavior and appearance in this period.