Franco Moretti has claimed that the European bildungsroman depends on the hero's breaking with, rather than remaining faithful to, youthful impressions. The essay suggests that the nineteenth-century development of educational theory was shadowed by a prescient fictional vision of childish destructiveness emblematized in the broken toy, and it asks what this might mean in particular for the bildungsroman and its educative telos. Using Melanie Klein's play theories, it argues that the child's toy is the archetypal object of the “prosaic imaginary,” at once material and symbolic, internal and external, partial and whole, destructive and therapeutic an everyday object that is not simply typical high realist ballast but also the stuff of dreams. GradeSaver, 30 April 2012 Web.“Toy Stories” takes Maggie Tulliver's “grinding and beating” of her broken doll in The Mill on the Floss as a starting point for thinking about manifestations of childish distress, rage, and shame in the nineteenth-century novel. Next Section The Mill on the Floss Summary Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Cullina, Alice. The Tullivers are not meant to represent Eliot’s parents, but Tom Tulliver is very reminiscent of Eliot’s brother Isaac Evans, and the Dodson aunts are reminiscent of Eliot’s aunts, the Pearsons. Although the plot points do not explicitly mirror events from Eliot’s life, the character of Maggie Tulliver is the closest approximation of Eliot to appear in her fiction, and she faces many of the same struggles that Eliot did.

The Mill on the Floss is Eliot’s most autobiographical novel. Many critics vastly preferred the first half of The Mill on the Floss, which focuses on Maggie and Tom Tulliver’s childhoods, to the second half - and especially the ending. It was not as uniformly praised as Adam Bede had been upon publication, but it was also a more ambitious work. The novel was eagerly anticipated, as Adam Bede had been very successful, and it ended up being well-received for the most part. She began writing the novel in 1859 and it was first published in 1860, with a few subsequent revised editions. The Mill on the Floss was George Eliot’s third book, after Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Adam Bede (1859).

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