A Return to Nature: George Eliot’s Human and Ecological Philosophy in

The Mill on the Floss

19th Century Women’s Literature

31 July 2013

Presenter: Yi-Wei Evan Chin

Outline

• I. Introduction• II. Part One: Woman, Gypsy and Nature as the

Other a. The Dominant’s Oppression of Women and Nature

b. The Gypsy as a Symbol of Escape

• III. Part Two: George Eliot’s Life Philosophy a. Val Plumwood’s Ecofeminist Theory

b. The Flood as a Pun

• IV. Conclusion2013/7/30 Yi-Wei Evan Chin 2

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 3

John Constable(1776 - 1837)

• John Constable is one of the major European landscape artists of the 19th century, whose art was admired by Delacroix. To a greater degree than any other artist before him, Constable based his paintings on precisely drawn sketches made directly from nature.

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 4

John Constable's Discourses

• Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 5

A Mill at Gillingham in Dorset (1826)

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 6

I. Introduction

• Margaret Homans’ article “Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters‘ Instruction”, she mentioned that Donald Stone called The Mill on the Floss is Eliot’s “most Wordsworthian novel” (226).

• My paper provides an ecofeminist approach to read Eliot’s philosophy of humanity and nature in The Mill on the Floss.

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 7

• One of feminist critics Zelda Austen criticizes Eliot in her article “Why Feminist Critics are Angry with George Eliot” that “the particular anger against George Eliot rises from her failure to allow this freedom for her heroines even through she achieved it herself” (551).

• Since this paper is an ecofeminist reading of The Mill on the Floss, I also defend the ending is Eliot’s manifestation, which is as Virginia Woolf says “Eliot gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature…[and keeps] her figures fresh and free” .

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 8

Part I. Woman, Gypsy and Nature as the Other

• Following Simone de Beauvoir’s demonstration, Susan Gubar indicates that woman’s self has been turned into “the other” by the phallus (244).

• Like Woman, the Gypsy and the nature are also treated as the other or the object.

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 9

a. The Dominant’s Oppression of Women and Nature

• Example for Woman

“Go, go!” said Mr. Tulliver, peremptorily, beginning to feel rather uncomfortable at these free remarks on the personal appearance of a being powerful enough to create lawyers; “shut up the book, and let’s hear no more o’ such talk. It is as I thought—the child ’ull learn more mischief nor good wi’ the books. Go, go and see after your mother.” (17)2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 10

a. The Dominant’s Oppression of Women and Nature

• Example for Nature

It seems hard as my sister Deane should have that pretty child; I’m sure Lucy takes more after me nor my own child does. Maggie, Maggie,” continued the mother, in a tone of half-coaxing fretfulness, as this small mistake of nature entered the room, “where’s the use o’ my telling you to keep away from the water? You’ll tumble in and be drownded some day, an’ then you’ll be sorry you didn’t do as mother told you.” (12)2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 11

b. The Gypsy as a Symbol of Escape

• The Gypsy is also “the other” in British society; hence, many woman writers would connect the relationship between women and gypsies.

• In Abby Bardi’s article “The Gypsy as Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature”, she contends “the Gypsy is a ubiquitous figure in British literature, often functioning as a symbol of escape from the dominant social mores governing sex and gender roles and the ownership of capital” (31).

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 12

III. Part Two: George Eliot’s Life Philosophy

• As Constable’s philosophy of art, Eliot also presented a “natural philosophy” in her literary works, especially The Mill on the Floss.

• Eliot uses her pen to criticize the human ideology and social structure, which I would suggest that it is Eliot’s philosophy of human and ecology.

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 13

What is Ecofeminism?

• According to Joni Seager, men of science struggled to subdue nature/woman. Thus the scientific revolution is seen by many ecofeminists as heralding the era in which women, as well as nature, came to be dominated, controlled and exploited.

• As Seager notes, the literature of male exploration is rife with metaphors of raping the wilderness, penetrating virgin lands, conquering a capricious Nature, mastering the wild and subduing untamed lands.

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 14

a. Val Plumwood’s Ecofeminist Theory

• In her her book, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, an ecofeminist Val Plumwood states in the second chapter that “both feminist philosophy and ecological feminism have given a key role in their accounts of western philosophy to the concept of dualism, the construction of a devalued and sharply demarcated sphere of otherness” (41).

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 15

a. Val Plumwood’s Ecofeminist Theory

• There exist no occult forces in stones or plants. There are no amazing or marvellous sympathies or antipathies, in fact there exists nothing in the whole of nature which cannot be explained in terms of purely corporeal causes totally devoid of mind and thought.

- Descartes

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 16

a. Val Plumwood’s Ecofeminist Theory

• To understand Cartesian mind/body dualism requires “an understanding of its intimate connection to human hyperseparation and to the dualisms of human/nature, male/female and subject/object, as well as its political origins in the wider network of reason/nature dualisms” (120).

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 17

Example

• The Dodsons were a very proud race, and their pride lay in the utter frustration of all desire to tax them with a breach of traditional duty or propriety—a wholesome pride in many respects, since it identified honour with perfect integrity, thoroughness of work, and faithfulness to admitted rules: and society owes some worthy qualities in many of her members to mothers of the Dodson class, who made their butter and their fromenty well, and would have felt disgraced to make it otherwise. (223-4)

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 18

b. The Flood as a Pun

• Eliot uses the flood as a pun and metaphors to instruct the problems in the reality.

• On the one hand, the flood is the revenge from nature, and on the other hand, Eliot realizes that the industrialization is a kind of flood, people in that time cannot resist its destruction.

• Bardi even interprets that the Gypsy is another kind of flood, which can be seen as a threat to the society (36).

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 19

IV. Conclusion

• Plumwood provides her philosophical concept of holism as a solution to human/nature dualism. Breaking down dualism is the resolution, which involves “remaking the relationship so as to remove the features of denied dependency” (123).

• In my conclusion, the flood represents nature, and nature is holistic. Eliot is more realistic to make such kind of ending due to she knows that the industrial flood cannot be avoid.

2013/7/30

Yi-Wei Evan Chin 20

IV. Conclusion

• Furthermore, the ending is another pun, that is, Maggie and Tom is a representation of dualism, and Eliot makes the ending holistic. Human and nature cannot be separated.

• The ending of the novel is Eliot’s manifestation, which can be considered as an ecofeminist philosophical idea of life: a return to nature.

2013/7/30