Bully Worship in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

A cursory reading of George Eliot's classic novel, The Mill on the Floss, might leave its audience feeling the same brotherly affection as Maggie does for her older sibling Tom Tulliver. The two are playmates in their childhood, even though Tom is a half a dozen years older. Maggie looks up to him as many little sisters do, in spite of Tom's occasional rudeness toward her.

A closer inspection of the novel, though, reveals that his behavior too often crosses from mere rudeness into abuse. The actions and words of Tom Tulliver are clearly those of a bully, whose victim in this case is his little sister.

As early as chapter five Tom Tulliver speaks abusively to Maggie. After she fearfully accepts Tom's offer of one of his two pudding cups, he immediately confronts her. He screams, "O you greedy thing! . . . I wouldn't be a greedy!" (p.46). He then left his sister standing alone, and "The tears flowed so plentifully that Maggie saw nothing around her for the next ten minutes"(p.47).

The cruel words continue in chapter 7. After Tom criticizes Maggie's thick hair, he coerces her into cutting it. Subsequently, he chides Maggie about her lack of hair. "O Maggie, what a queer thing you look! Look at yourself in the glass - you look like the idiot we throw our nuts to at school," Tom says, "jumping round her and slapping his knees as he laughed" (p.64.

The presence of a third party gives Tom the opportunity to further demean his innocent victim. Their cousin Lucy was building house of cards with them until Maggie's collapsed. "Tom had inconsiderately laughed when Maggie's house fell, and told her she was a stupid." When Maggie begs him to stop laughing at her, Tom responds by saying, "O, I daresay Miss Spitfire! I'd never be such a cross thing as you - making faces like that. Lucy doesn't do so. I like Lucy better than you: I wish Lucy was my sister" (p.86).

When Maggie comes to see Tom at school, a visit she had been awaiting for months, his response to her is mean. After Maggie mistakenly worked one of Tom's algebra problems, he reacted with scorn. "Ha ha, Miss Maggie! You see you're not such a fine thing to be quick. You'll never go far into anything, you know" (p.150).

Tom completely breaks off his relations with Maggie, which makes the poor girl miserable. Her worship of her brother remains strong, though, even to the point when she sacrifices her life in hopes of saving his. The so-called reconciliation at the end of the novel, where Tom condescends to forgive his sister as they try to survive drowning, is by no means the happy ending first-time readers often find it. Rather, it's always a tragedy when a victim dies trying to save the bully who abused her.