Mill On The Floss Analysis

This essay compares how George Eliot’s ‘The Mill on the Floss’ and E. M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’ uses personification and metaphor, temporality and tense, perspective, allusion to external texts, and we examine some of the methods used to link the beginning and end of the text. First, we consider personification and metaphor which is employed to bring nature to life in both. Second, we look at temporality and tense formed by the grammar and nuances in diction. Third, narrator perspective and the effect it has on the reader and the theme. Finally, we examine the methods used to link the beginning and end of the texts and comment on allusions to external texts.

Eliot describes how the river “hurries” to the sea and “the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace”. The river is given agency by the verb “hurries”. Equally, there is an implied level of consciousness where the sea is given the capacity to love. Furthermore, the adjective “loving”, and the verbs “meet” and “embrace”, are semantically related; all three imply a relationship. And, in this case it is romantic. To finish off his personification Eliot describes the river as “like a living companion”. Hence, the river is a metaphor for a romantic relationship the narrator is trying to recall. The other party is “deaf and loving”, they cannot hear because perhaps they are dead. The water is anthropomorphised in a way that has it interact socially, “listen to its low, placid