George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) has traditionally been considered by critics as a biographic working-through of Eliot’s life, and is very rarely studied as a novel with a scientific dimension. This critical treatment contrasts with the many studies that situate Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) as novels informed by Victorian science. This article, however, proposes that Eliot engages both thematically and structurally with the science of astronomy in The Mill on the Floss. Eliot’s novel confronts the notion that women should be excluded from the science of astronomy: an ideology transmitted in The Mill on the Floss through masculine modes of pedagogy. The telescope is central to how the novel considers astronomy: perspective in the text develops in relation to the observational capabilities of the telescope, how it transformed proximity and enabled distant objects to be viewed closely. In his “Studies in Animal Life,” George Henry Lewes advocated for the study of minute things – frogs, parasites, insects and aquatic microorganisms – by stating that “they have a less imposing appearance than planets and asteroids, I admit, but they are nearer to us, and admit of being more intimately known” (61). In contrast to this sentiment, this article shows that Eliot applies astronomical modes of observation to the intimacy of the domestic sphere, where bodies stand in for celestial objects, and observation is assisted by telescopic apparatuses. By reading Eliot’s novel alongside nineteenth-century astronomical documents, I show that an affinity is created between the astronomical and the domestic in The Mill on the Floss, a manoeuvre that allots complex human relationships in the form of the novel a legitimacy that merits scientific modes of observation.
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Thesis
Henchman, Anna Alexandra;
(2004)
Astronomy and the Problem of Perception in British Literature, 1830--1910
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Ruston, Sharon;
(2008)
Literature and Science
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Thesis
Coriale, Danielle;
(2009)
The Naturalist Imagination: Novel Forms of British Natural History, 1830--1890
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Article
Vallone, Lynne;
(2000)
Fertility, childhood, and death in the Victorian family
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Banfield, Marie;
(2011)
Metaphors and Analogies of Mind and Body in Nineteenth-Century Science and Fiction: George Eliot, Henry James and George Meredith
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Picker, John Martin;
(2001)
Hearing things: Sound in the Victorian imagination, 1848-1900
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Cameron, Lauren;
(2015)
Spencerian Evolutionary Psychology in Daniel Deronda
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Davis, Michael;
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George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country
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Ryan, Vanessa L.;
(2009)
Reading the Mind: From George Eliot's Fiction to James Sully's Psychology
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Helen Small;
(2020)
Artificial Intelligence: George Eliot, Ernst Kapp, and the Projections of Character
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Article
Peter M. Lee;
(2016)
George Eliot and Mathematics
(/isis/citation/CBB081980225/)
Book
Buckland, Adelene;
(2013)
Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology
(/isis/citation/CBB001320420/)
Thesis
Heather Laura Brink-Roby;
(2015)
Typical People in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
(/isis/citation/CBB154143219/)
Thesis
McCabe, Elizabeth Caitlin;
(2013)
How the Past Remains: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Victorian Anthropological Doctrine of Survivals
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Article
Derek Ball;
(2015)
‘Thick-Rinded Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge’: Mathematics Education in George Eliot's Novels
(/isis/citation/CBB452759896/)
Book
Michael Davis;
(2006)
George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country
(/isis/citation/CBB890472950/)
Chapter
Levine, George;
(2014)
Paradox: The Art of Scientific Naturalism
(/isis/citation/CBB001422047/)
Chapter
Rowlinson, Matthew;
(2013)
History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson's “In Memoriam”
(/isis/citation/CBB001422073/)
Article
Peter D. Usher;
(2002)
Shakespeare's Support for the New Astronomy
(/isis/citation/CBB799349495/)
Thesis
Elizabeth Badolato;
(2018)
Identity and Morality in a Finite-Infinite World: Redefining Infinity in Nineteenth Century Novels
(/isis/citation/CBB912416245/)
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