IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB303628520

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

Kimberley Dimitriadis (Author)

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 11
Issue: 1
Pages: 1-19
Publication date: 2018
Language: English

DOI: 10.12929

URI: http://www.literatureandscience.org/volume-10-issue-2-2017/

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Science and literature Astronomy Geometry Telescopes 19th century Eliot, George

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.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB303628520

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Ruston, Sharon; (2008)
Literature and Science (/p/isis/citation/CBB000850387/)

Thesis Henchman, Anna Alexandra; (2004)
Astronomy and the Problem of Perception in British Literature, 1830--1910 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562098/)

Book Peter D. Usher; (2010)
Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science (/p/isis/citation/CBB396172645/)

Article Peter D. Usher; (2002)
Shakespeare's Support for the New Astronomy (/p/isis/citation/CBB799349495/)

Chapter Hamel, Jürgen; (2007)
Eine Fernrohrdarstellung aus dem Jahre 1711: Himmelskundliche Allegorien des Maybauer-Epitaphs in der Anklamer Marienkirche (/p/isis/citation/CBB000930918/)

Book Michael Davis; (2006)
George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (/p/isis/citation/CBB890472950/)

Article Peter M. Lee; (2016)
George Eliot and Mathematics (/p/isis/citation/CBB081980225/)

Article Alexis A. Ferguson; (2024)
On knowing nature's syntax: Preliminary cisness, victorian physiology and George Eliot (/p/isis/citation/CBB501171934/)

Book Davis, Michael; (2006)
George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (/p/isis/citation/CBB000610326/)

Article Ryan, Vanessa L.; (2009)
Reading the Mind: From George Eliot's Fiction to James Sully's Psychology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030594/)

Article Helen Small; (2020)
Artificial Intelligence: George Eliot, Ernst Kapp, and the Projections of Character (/p/isis/citation/CBB851762854/)

Chapter Rowlinson, Matthew; (2013)
History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson's “In Memoriam” (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422073/)

Article Duncan, Ian; (2014)
George Eliot's Science Fiction (/p/isis/citation/CBB001450270/)

Article Derek Ball; (2015)
‘Thick-Rinded Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge’: Mathematics Education in George Eliot's Novels (/p/isis/citation/CBB452759896/)

Book Buckland, Adelene; (2013)
Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320420/)

Article Cameron, Lauren; (2015)
Spencerian Evolutionary Psychology in Daniel Deronda (/p/isis/citation/CBB001550453/)

Chapter Banfield, Marie; (2011)
Metaphors and Analogies of Mind and Body in Nineteenth-Century Science and Fiction: George Eliot, Henry James and George Meredith (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201380/)

Chapter Levine, George; (2014)
Paradox: The Art of Scientific Naturalism (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422047/)

Article Vallone, Lynne; (2000)
Fertility, childhood, and death in the Victorian family (/p/isis/citation/CBB000110473/)

Book Rylance, Rick; (2000)
Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000102109/)