Post-extraction Possibility: Genre and Landscape in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

Abstract

Abstract Set in an era of increasing global extraction, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) explores the coproductive relationship between humanity and nature in Victorian fiction. Victorian texts frequently depicted mines and quarries as dystopic sites of environmental exhaustion and human suffering. However, The Mill on the Floss centers an exhausted quarry, called “the Red Deeps,” to imagine utopic alternatives to environmental and human ruin. In Eliot's experimental bildungsroman, Maggie Tulliver's coming of age is doubled with and embedded in the Red Deeps’ vibrantly regenerating landscape. Though Eliot's novel famously ends with a tragic flood, Maggie and Phillip Wakem's mid-novel meetings in the Red Deeps entwine feminist and environmental possibility into a narrative arc that looks beyond the spatiotemporal limits of its immediate ending. The result is a mutually open-ended sense of futurity for post-extraction sites and their inhabitants. At the dawn of the Anthropocene, Eliot's redevelopmental bildungsroman counters the capitalist fantasy of endless, extractive progress.