Beyond the Limits of the Bildungsroman: Love, Sympathy, and Affective Formation in The Mill on the Floss

Abstract

This article reads George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) as a Victorian bildungsroman that stretches rather than rejects the conventions of the genre. Critics have frequently classified the novel as an anti-bildungsroman because Maggie Tulliver fails to achieve social integration. I argue instead that Maggie’s development takes the form of an affective formation grounded in love and sympathy. Bringing Gilles Deleuze’s conception of love into dialogue with Eliot’s ethics of sympathy, the article examines how Maggie’s childhood experiences of disciplinary love, shame and self-negation produce an alternative mode of subject formation. Focusing on Maggie’s relationships with Tom Tulliver, Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest, this paper shows that love in the novel does not stabilise identity through marriage or social reconciliation. Rather, it unsettles the boundaries of both the subject and the genre by expanding the capacity for sympathetic relations. From this perspective, Maggie’s death in the flood appears not as the failure of development but as the culmination of an ethical-affective bildung. The article therefore positions The Mill on the Floss as a text that reimagines maturation as affective transformation rather than social integration.