‘Shattering’ and ‘Violent’ Forces: Gender, Ecology, and Catastrophe in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-57
Author(s):  
Barbara Barrow
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Oliver Goldsmith ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Natural Catastrophe ◽  
Ecological History ◽  
Georges Cuvier ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Planetary Processes

This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.

The Place of Objects

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Dewey W. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Open Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Mill On The Floss

As British female writers, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot perceived their environs with keen awareness of the intra-action of the female body with matter. The environs, often linked to the materiality of natural phenomena, is open space, which is inhabited by animate and inanimate entities as objects intra-relating with each other. Through an interpretive reading of Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), my objective is to reconsider the female body in the novels as part of an assemblage of distinct objects (i.e., subject treated as object) in the context of a neo-materialist approach to ecofeminism. My attempt is to read the female body in relation to entities, yielding a perception of the body, which examines the body-as-matter within narrative discourse. The female body, however, is not meant to be constituted as a subject-less object without agency that, in effect, results in disempowerment. Instead, my discussion examines selected instances by which the female body has been entangled with more-than-human nature, revealing the vibrancy of the female body and its agential link to matter.

2. Geology: the early days

2018 ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Geological Time Scale ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The Song Dynasty ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Georges Cuvier ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vedic Period

‘Geology: the early days’ provides a brief history of ideas on the Earth and its processes. Among the earliest recorded scientific speculations on the Earth were those of the ancient Greeks, such as Anaximander of Miletus and Pythagoras. Other cultures that independently developed ideas include the Vedic Period of India (c.1300–300 bc) and the Song Dynasty of China (960–1279 ad). Huge strides were made during the Enlightenment period, and the key contributions of figures such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, James Hutton, Baron Georges Cuvier, Mary Anning, William Buckland, Charles Lyell, Abraham Gottlob Werner, and Adam Sedgwick are discussed, with the creation of the Geological Time Scale.

Geology and Orthodoxy: The Case of Noah's Flood in Eighteenth-Century Thought

1978 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhoda Rappaport
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
System Building ◽  
Georges Cuvier ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
The Way

The view that religious orthodoxy stifled geological progress has had many distinguished exponents, one of the earliest being Georges Cuvier. To Cuvier, however, efforts to combine Genesis with geology ended before the middle of the eighteenth century, and opened the way not for progress but for wild speculation. We may admire the genius of Leibniz and Buffon, he declared, but this should not lead us to confuse system-building with geology as ‘une science positive’. While Cuvier's younger contemporary, Charles Lyell, agreed that ‘extravagant systems’ had retarded progress, he insisted that ‘scriptural authority’ had had a similar effect until late in the eighteenth century.

Men’s Hunger, Food Consumption, and Preferences for Female Body Types

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 495-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Guéguen
Keyword(s):  
Food Consumption ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Slender Body ◽  
Mediation Effect ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
Body Type ◽  
Experimental Conditions

Nelson and Morrison (2005 , study 3) reported that men who feel hungry preferred heavier women. The present study replicates these results by using real photographs of women and examines the mediation effect of hunger scores. Men were solicited while entering or leaving a restaurant and asked to report their hunger on a 10-point scale. Afterwards, they were presented with three photographs of a woman in a bikini: One with a slim body type, one with a slender body type, and one with a slightly chubby body. The participants were asked to indicate their preference. Results showed that the participants entering the restaurant preferred the chubby body type more while satiated men preferred the thinner or slender body types. It was also found that the relation between experimental conditions and the choices of the body type was mediated by men’s hunger scores.

Darwin's two competing phylogenetic trees: marsupials as ancestors or sister taxa?

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. David Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Fossil Record ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Phylogenetic Trees ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Single Origin ◽  
Molecular Studies ◽  
Richard Owen ◽  
First Time

Studies of the origin and diversification of major groups of plants and animals are contentious topics in current evolutionary biology. This includes the study of the timing and relationships of the two major clades of extant mammals – marsupials and placentals. Molecular studies concerned with marsupial and placental origin and diversification can be at odds with the fossil record. Such studies are, however, not a recent phenomenon. Over 150 years ago Charles Darwin weighed two alternative views on the origin of marsupials and placentals. Less than a year after the publication of On the origin of species, Darwin outlined these in a letter to Charles Lyell dated 23 September 1860. The letter concluded with two competing phylogenetic diagrams. One showed marsupials as ancestral to both living marsupials and placentals, whereas the other showed a non-marsupial, non-placental as being ancestral to both living marsupials and placentals. These two diagrams are published here for the first time. These are the only such competing phylogenetic diagrams that Darwin is known to have produced. In addition to examining the question of mammalian origins in this letter and in other manuscript notes discussed here, Darwin confronted the broader issue as to whether major groups of animals had a single origin (monophyly) or were the result of “continuous creation” as advocated for some groups by Richard Owen. Charles Lyell had held similar views to those of Owen, but it is clear from correspondence with Darwin that he was beginning to accept the idea of monophyly of major groups.

The status of Gideon Mantell's “first” Iguanodon tooth in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN C. YALDWYN ◽  
GARRY J. TEE ◽  
ALAN P. MASON
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gideon Mantell

A worn Iguanodon tooth from Cuckfield, Sussex, illustrated by Mantell in 1827, 1839, 1848 and 1851, was labelled by Mantell as the first tooth sent to Baron Cuvier in 1823 and acknowledged as such by Sir Charles Lyell. The labelled tooth was taken to New Zealand by Gideon's son Walter in 1859. It was deposited in a forerunner of the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington in 1865 and is still in the Museum, mounted on a card bearing annotations by both Gideon Mantell and Lyell. The history of the Gideon and Walter Mantell collection in the Museum of New Zealand is outlined, and the Iguanodon tooth and its labels are described and illustrated. This is the very tooth which Baron Cuvier first identified as a rhinoceros incisor on the evening of 28 June 1823.

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