First Place in Oral Presentations, Information Literacy Excellence Award Runner-Up

STUDENT: Marie LaRosa
ADVISOR: Jody Griffith

The Mill on the Floss illuminates the triangulated relationship of Victorian society, the home, and the individual. The pressures that Victorian society places on the home and therefore the individual catalyzed a compromise of morals in the society’s most crucial members-the youth. The two young protagonists, Maggie and Tom, face the brunt of the impossible ideal that Victorian society places on them. Through their involvement with the strict patriarchy, conflictions in a Victorian home, and the hypocrisy of what it means to be an individual, Maggie and Tom are forced to submit to society. Research shows that this is not a product of Elliot’s story about a family, but it is a product of Victorian history that Eliot brings into her novel. Readers are left with nothing but questions as the youth are molded into a an ideal that they are made compliant to by force. This trickles forward through the generations as past experiences with Victorian society are forced through the generations.