Eliot et le Mitwelt: environnement et productivité dans The Mill on the Floss et Middlemarch

Abstract

This article shows that The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871), both set in the late 1820s and early 1830s, bring work and wider activities of production together with an ecological or “with-world thinking” (Mitweltdenken in ecolinguistics), a concept which has its roots in Montaigne, Spinoza and early environmental theories. Eliot is able to imagine how industry, in the widest sense of a collective making or producing of things, might function if based on sympathy and being with the world rather than being surrounded by it and dominating it. In her fiction, she experiments with contrasting modes of production: we find ideal or dream oikoi as well as the darker realities of exploitation. The descriptions of goods waiting in ships at St. Ogg’s or Caleb Garth’s vision of working cooperation which position work outside of either feudal oppression or capitalistic gain are set against the often violent transition from water-driven energy to coal or “fossil capital” (Malm), from slow “natural history” to fast production. Avoiding the bucolic and the picturesque, Eliot shows how provincial lives are dictated both physically and linguistically by the forces of surplus value, primitive accumulation and extractivism and reveals that the answer lies not in revolutionary upheaval, but within close working communities and a gentle dialectics of change.