The Mill on the Floss Lesson Plan

Although little happens in Book 4 to move the plot forward, it is still full of thematic significance. Discuss this.

The fourth book of The Mill on the Floss is the shortest and least important to the plot, but it is very significant thematically. The first chapter of Book IV is the true center of the novel, with 29 chapters on either side of it, and this combined with its irrelevance to the plot of the story marks it as important thematically. Indeed, the narrator even says directly that “it is necessary that we should feel” the “sense of oppressive narrowness” that she highlights in the example of the Rhone ruins to understand the story of Maggie and Tom. The major...