Tom Tulliver

Tom Tulliver is Maggie Tulliver’s brother in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. In Simone de Beauvoir’s reading, he represents the stubborn defense of conventional wisdom: where Maggie tries to revive moral life by questioning inherited rules, Tom and the other male heroes keep morality fixed in formal conventions.

Identity and Narrative Role

Tom’s significance here is primarily interpretive. He stands among the novel’s male figures who affirm established ideas rather than testing them, providing a counterpoint to Maggie’s doubts and rebellions. The contrast makes him a representative of an immobilized moral order, not the focus of an independent plot trajectory in the supplied account.

Conflict with Maggie’s Rebellion

Maggie’s resistance takes shape against the conventional wisdom Tom particularly insists upon. She overturns formal rules and refuses the reassuring certainties that make morality seem settled. Her challenge is not simply a rejection of every value: in de Beauvoir’s formulation, she attempts to bring a breath of life back into a world where rules have become fossilized.

Tom’s position sharpens that conflict. The contrast between his adherence to convention and Maggie’s questioning reveals how a supposedly universal moral order can preserve the male world’s authority by treating its own rules as unquestionable. Maggie pushes beyond sterile protest toward solitude and freedom, while Tom’s insistence helps define the resistance she must confront.

Thematic Significance

The contrast between Tom and Maggie gives concrete form to the difference between formal morality and a living, self-questioning freedom. De Beauvoir presents Maggie as testing the ambiguity of her situation and challenging established optimism, preconceived values, and hypocritical morality; Tom’s attachment to conventional wisdom makes those structures visible as constraints rather than neutral truths. His role is therefore relational and thematic: he helps expose the male universe against which Maggie’s rebellion acquires its force.