Female Desire for Flight and the Narrative Strategy of the Anti-Bildungsroman in The Mill on the Floss

This paper examines Maggie Tulliver’s desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of flight. Challenging readings that view her desire as merely repressed, this study argues that it functions as a form of deterritorialization that disrupts nineteenth-century British patriarchal norms. Drawing on the concepts of territorialization, deterritorialization, and becoming, this paper traces Maggie’s flight from oppressive environments such as Dorlcote Mill and St. Ogg’s. Her interactions with Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest suggest a movement toward becoming-nature and the formation of rhizomatic connections that allow her to exceed social and familial boundaries. Her fraught relationship with her brother Tom operates both as a source of repression and as a catalyst for her flight. By framing the novel as an Anti-Bildungsroman, this study highlights its function as a socially engaged critique that reconfigures conventional paradigms of growth and integration. Maggie’s death can be interpreted as a moment of radical deterritorialization, exposing the constraints Victorian society places on female subjectivity. Ultimately, this paper offers a renewed reading of Maggie’s narrative trajectory and contributes to broader discussions of desire, gender, and subjectivity in Victorian literature.