The River Remembers: An Ecocritical Analysis of Nature, Landscape, and Feminine Identity in George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss
Gavkhar Akhmedova 
Abstract. This article applies an ecocritical perspective to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), asserting that the novel’s natural landscape—primarily the River Floss and St. Ogg’s pastoral environment—acts as more than a decorative backdrop, serving instead as an active, ideologically and narratively charged element. Drawing from the theoretical tools of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and place studies, the article identifies four overlapping aspects of Eliot’s environmental imagination: the river as agent and symbol of narrative fate; nostalgic pastoral longing as a critique of industrial modernity; a homologous positional status of nature and woman within a single framework of social control; and the ambivalent environmental politics of the novel’s catastrophic flood conclusion. The methodology employed includes close textual analysis of the novel and examination of its intertextual relationships to Victorian geological discourse, Romantic nature writing, and the period’s debates about land enclosure and industrial change. The research demonstrates that Eliot develops a complex ecological awareness which anticipates many contemporary ecocritical concerns, such as critiques of nature/culture binaries, the politics of place attachment, and the gendered dimension of environmental exploitation. The study also argues that the novel’s final flood functions on multiple levels: as an ecological event, as a social judgment, and as a structural statement about the irresolvability of the natural versus the social determinisms the novel probes. This analysis contributes to the growing body of ecocritical work on Victorian fiction and establishes The Mill on the Floss as a key reference point in the history of literary environmental thought.
Keywords: ecocriticism, ecofeminism, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, pastoral nostalgia, river, flood, Victorian literature