DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

'The Generations of Ant and Beavers': Classical Economics and Animals in The Mill on the Floss

Authors

Andrew Lallier

Date of this Version

2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Before any named characters find their way into The Mill on the Floss, the narrator introduces us to two sets of animals (aside from a human driver): white ducks dipping their heads into the stream and horses pulling a covered wagon. The ducks are characterized as being 'unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above' (24). This characterization serves a comic purpose, indicating a disparity between the mentality of the unreflective animals and the implicit judgement of the narrator's gaze. By contrast, the horses seem to possess a surprisingly developed interiority (however conditioned by the narrator's 'fancy'), as we hear of the 'mild reproach' they feel for the driver's unnecessary whipping and their energetic exertion at being 'so near home'. The horses' very bodies are endowed with interior attributes, from their 'struggling haunches' to their necks possessing 'patient strength'. These horses even take precedence over their driver: while the driver is thinking of his dinner, he will first feed his horses, and the narrator anticipates the horses neighing 'over their hardly earned feed of corn', but leaves the driver's dinner 'getting sadly dry in the oven'. The implication that the horses are in the laborious process of earning their feed figures them as economic beings, driven by the same motivations that drive their driver. In this paper, I will argue that George Eliot's use of animals in this text, both with reference to motivation and more generally in connecting human and animal realms, presents a challenge to the conceptions of animals and the distinctions drawn between animals and humans in classical economics.

Although critics have shown significant interest in economics and animals in relation to George Eliot, there has been as of yet no major attempt to relate these two fields. Elsie Michie's 'Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance' probably comes closest to such an attempt, relating horses in Eliot, Gaskell and Hardy to social class - and more particularly discussing the disruptive appearance of members of the 'newly enriched' commercial classes on horseback. Works by J. Hillis Miller on rhetoric and animals in Mill, and by Beryl Gray and Rosemary Ashton on Natural History in Mill are of particular interest with respect to this paper and will be returned to later.! I follow the work of critics like Deanna Kreisel and Kathleen Blake in reading economic import both in the overt content (like Bob Jaken's shipping, Mr. Tulliver's bankruptcy) and the less obvious content (Maggie's romantic plots, narrative digressions about education). I will also be taking as a starting assumption Dermot Coleman's argument that Eliot was highly knowledgeable of and engaged in the conflicts of classical economics, both from direct familiarity with the works of political economists as well as through her work with The Westminster Review.' Before turning to Eliot's engagement with animals in The Mill on the Floss, I want to sketch out a brief account of animals in classical economics, as an important background for understanding this engagement.