Uprooted by modernity

Abstract

Through a close reading of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, this paper argues that the genre of the Bildungsroman is particularly suited to an ecocritical interpretation. As a realist Antibildungsroman depicting the tragically problematic Bildung of Maggie Tulliver and her family, The Mill on the Floss counters conventional nineteenth‐century coming‐of‐age novels, which tended to become scripts of industrial capitalism and bourgeois culture. Eliot's portrayal of life at Dorlcote Mill confirms that the human and the natural worlds are inherently intertwined, but also demonstrates that capitalist modernity constructs nature as an entity separate from and inferior to man, thus estranging people from their roots.