Telescopes in the Drawing Room: Geometry and Astronomy in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (2018)
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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