Telescopes in the Drawing Room: Geometry and Astronomy in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.”

摘要

George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) has traditionally been considered bycritics as a biographic working-through of Eliot’s life, and is very rarely studied as anovel with a scientific dimension. This critical treatment contrasts with the manystudies that situate Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) as novelsinformed by Victorian science. This article, however, proposes that Eliot engages boththematically 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 ofastronomy: an ideology transmitted in The Mill on the Floss through masculine modesof pedagogy. The telescope is central to how the novel considers astronomy:perspective in the text develops in relation to the observational capabilities of thetelescope, how it transformed proximity and enabled distant objects to be viewedclosely. In his “Studies in Animal Life,” George Henry Lewes advocated for the studyof minute things – frogs, parasites, insects and aquatic microorganisms – by statingthat “they have a less imposing appearance than planets and asteroids, I admit, butthey are nearer to us, and admit of being more intimately known” (61). In contrast tothis sentiment, this article shows that Eliot applies astronomical modes of observationto the intimacy of the domestic sphere, where bodies stand in for celestial objects, andobservation is assisted by telescopic apparatuses. By reading Eliot’s novel alongsidenineteenth-century astronomical documents, I show that an affinity is created betweenthe astronomical and the domestic in The Mill on the Floss, a manoeuvre that allotscomplex human relationships in the form of the novel a legitimacy that meritsscientific modes of observation.