Nature in Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

The title of Eliot’s second novel, The Mill on the Floss, is indicative of the setting where the story takes place: Dorlcote Mill by the River Floss. What is particularly interesting about this site is that it serves as an intersection where the man-made meets the natural world. In fact, the narrator depicts the two as intertwined entities. This is apparent in the description she gives of Darlcote Mill, a comfortable “dwelling house, as old as the elms and chestnuts that shelter it from the northern blast” (I, I). From this, either of two things can be surmised (although these are not necessarily exclusive):

1.) the man-made and the natural world “sprung up together”, as Hakce puts it, in that so far as Human history and memory are concerned, the two materialized alongside each other (119)

2.) because the man-made object is itself a product of the natural world, the dwelling house is just “as old” as the trees that surround it.

In any case, it is clear that the boundary between the man made and nature is not so distinct as to indicate where one starts and the other ends. The resulting dilemma is that “it becomes extremely problematic to separate natural history from social history” (William, 76). Despite the convergence of man and nature in The Mill on the Floss, the people of St Ogg are “a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on which they live” (276). This is an observation that stands true outside of the fictional world that Eliot conjures in her story and extends to the real world we occupy. Is this discord a result of human nature? Thus we are prompted to explore the interrelationship between people and nature in The Mill on the Floss; more specifically how Tom and Maggie each develop alongside the natural world they both call home.