![]() Eliot in The Mill on the Floss draws out the ecological potential of this new biological concept by imbuing the described backgrounds of her novel with a lyrical affect I call “environmental desire,” a diffuse longing for ambient contact with one’s formative medium that offers an ethical alternative to the possessive and object-driven forms of desire that drive the plot of a traditional Bildungsroman. ![]() Lewes redefined biological life as dependent on an abstraction called a “medium” or “environment”-a term that united all the objects, substances, and forces in an organism’s physical surroundings into a singular entity. In the 1850s, scientific writers including Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and G. This essay argues that George Eliot’s expansive use of landscape description in The Mill on the Floss (1860) represents an engagement with the emerging concept of a biological “medium” or “environment” in the nineteenth-century sciences. Jayne Hildebrand, “Environmental Desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss” (pp. ![]()
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