Discuss the ending of mill on the floss as a manipulated to narrative directed by cause and effect?

The ending also seems to resolve Maggie and Tom’s troubled relationship, but this too feels insufficient to many critics. It is abrupt and a repetition of the pattern common throughout the novel - in the face of great trouble and tragedy, Maggie and Tom are overcome with their love for each other. Yet in every other instance in the novel, this mutual regard would soon fall apart in the face of their very different characters and desires, and it is unclear whether their final union would have held if they had survived long enough to test it.

In addition, the final image of the siblings finds them “living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together” (422). This idealized vision of childhood rings clearly false to the reader, who better remembers incidents when, for example, Tom told Maggie he didn’t love her, or ignored her while he played with Lucy, or laughed at her for cutting her own hair. Though they did have happy moments of love and reconciliation in their childhood, they were fleeting, and so imagining them in such idealistic terms makes the whole resolution feel oversimplified.