“An Unwarrantable Liberty”: Entitlement and Consent in The Mill on the Floss

This essay reads narratives of gendered exchange in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) via intersecting vocabularies of entitlement and consent as articulated by Victorian social theorist John Stuart Mill and reframed by modern feminist philosopher Kate Manne. In Eliot’s novel, heroine Maggie Tulliver finds herself bound by conflicting patriarchal scripts that compel her deference to entitled men and punish her for seeking masculine privileges like free movement, formal education, and self-determination. Even more insidiously, Maggie is expected to consent to these harmful social bargains. Unlike typical fallen woman novels of the period, Mill uses conventions of the Bildungsroman to treat Maggie’s ultimate social fall as a near-inevitable outcome of growing up in a society that conditions her to accommodate the masculine entitlements of father, brother, suitor. Eliot highlights Maggie’s impossible dilemma, thus implicating Victorian society in her tragedy. This intervention gains clarity through Manne’s theoretical framing. The essay closes with a reflection on Manne’s concept of “himpathy” – the tendency to sympathize with male perpetrators and blame female victims – as exemplified in the fictional town of St. Ogg’s, which ruthlessly judges its heroine for controverting the patriarchal order.