George Eliot’s Wetland Form

Abstract

Margaret A. Miller, “George Eliot’s Wetland Form” (pp. 291–320) This essay relies on the 1747 Lincolnshire bog-woman and her porosity of bodily boundaries as a useful heuristic to historicize the ontological unity between gender unconformity and the environment. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), which shares its setting with the Lincolnshire bog-woman, is a novel of wetlands and women, of gender and drainage, and of femininity and floods. This essay reads the novel’s bog-women, including protagonist Maggie Tulliver and an oft-forgotten minor character, the widowed Mrs. Sutton, alongside nineteenth-century agricultural records of Lincolnshire, including manuals on the locally specific land-improvement technique—warping—used to drain the county’s various wetlands. In doing so, the essay argues that The Mill on the Floss reveals land improvement, particularly the postenclosure acts of drainage and warping, as a negative form for female Bildung. In negotiating how to write female development within a patriarchal society, Eliot exposes the violent limitations that ideas of arbitrarily redefining and reclaiming environments as arable and usable “land” during an era of enclosure and nascent global capitalism impose upon female futurity. Ultimately, Maggie’s alignment with wetland ecologies renders her an anachronistic figure of a preindustrial, predrainage past. In a present climate crisis moment of increased urgency to restore wetlands worldwide for their carbon storage capacities, what does it mean to read Maggie’s story not in spite of her death and foreshortened life, but instead as that of an incipient bog-woman who refuses to be drained?