'Holiday House': Grist to 'The Mill on the Floss', or Childhood as Text

2002 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein
Keyword(s):  
Mill On The Floss

George Eliot’s Promise of More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Literary Description ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter recovers the aesthetic significance of a reader’s mediated relation to the objects and experiences represented in realist fiction. When George Eliot’s intrusive narrators in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch cue readers to form impressions that are as distinct as possible, they expose the indeterminacy that persists in the most concrete passages of literary description, alerting us to the limits of how much we can ever know about a fictional world. By drawing on the aesthetics of indeterminacy advanced by Edmund Burke, this chapter reveals that Eliot’s commitment to narratives of disillusionment exists in tension with a surprisingly Romantic aversion to finitude, and that literary realism enchants ordinary things by freeing them from the solidity and determinacy they possess in everyday life.

‘Shattering’ and ‘Violent’ Forces: Gender, Ecology, and Catastrophe in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-57
Author(s):  
Barbara Barrow
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Oliver Goldsmith ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Natural Catastrophe ◽  
Ecological History ◽  
Georges Cuvier ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Planetary Processes

This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.

Being torn:The mill on the floss

2001 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-379
Author(s):  
Annette R. Federico
Keyword(s):  
Mill On The Floss

scholarly journals A Broadening of Prospects: Female Progression in Austen and Eliot

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lydia Verschaffelt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Development ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
National Importance ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
Landed Gentry

<p>Austen and Eliot register the turbulence and transformation of their respective historic moments in the portrayal of a young heroine on the cusp of adulthood with a number of potential paths ahead of her. The heroines, like their societies, are caught between old and new as they seek to acknowledge the ties that bind them to the past and simultaneously create a future of their own. This dilemma reveals the nineteenth-century novel’s concerns of the individual’s ability to grow while being enmeshed in a network of relationships, and the place of the past in an increasingly unstable future.  Beginning with Emma (1815) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), and concluding with a comparison of Persuasion (1817) and Middlemarch (1871), this thesis tracks Austen and Eliot’s depiction of female development which moves from a focus on the centrality of the childhood home, and in particular the heroine’s relationship with her father, to a narrative which ends on a more conscious note of ambiguity and broadening prospects. Emma and Mill both depict heroines who find their future in their past. Emma and Maggie develop and assert their own agency, but their circumstances and experiences of childhood bind them to their site of origin.  Conversely, both Austen and Eliot’s later works enact a deliberate loosening of the hold the heroine’s childhood has on her, and Anne and Dorothea end up in very different places to where they began. They both reject their position as part of the rural landed gentry to instead gain entry into a more dynamic and inclusive community. This personal transition is accompanied by a more explicit delineation of the evolving socio-political landscape, an increase in the heroine’s mobility and fluidity, and an ending that frustrates a sense of stable closure in preference for one of more open possibility. Thus, so far from being read simply as ‘marriage plots’ Austen and Eliot subversively depict the young woman’s changing position and prospects as a matter of national importance.</p>

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