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Real Estate as a Geographic and Literary Site in D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss
Katarina Hraste
; Umjetnička akademija Sveučilišta u Splitu
Sažetak
The opening description of the fictional East Midlands valley of Netheremere in the novel The White Peacock by D. H. Lawrence overwrites the description of the plain of the river Floss at the beginning of The Mill on the Floss, anticipating the modernist strategy of rewriting the tradition one apparently continues, which he will continue doing throughout his first novel. At the same time, the difference between the two visions of the same geographic region corresponds to transformations which real geographic places undergo. The other thing the two novels have in common is that both, Dorlcote Mill and Netheremere estate with Strelley Mill, are estates under threat, drawing, sometimes in quite different ways, on the country house and gothic literary traditions. An even more dramatic difference between the two places lies in the conception of territorial continuity and borders. While the Victorian novel follows the imperial, diffusionist model of the world, with a magnetic centre and divided into belts which succeed each other from the centre to the periphery without obstacles, the valley of Netheremere displays a series of borders which symbolically, rather than factually, divide the rural and the industrial sectors. Two of them recall the internal borders of the national state in Scott’s nineteenth-century historical novels, whereas the third one, which is set deepest into the estate, has the character of an external border. Yet another thing that connects the Dorlcote Mill farm with the Netheremere estate and the Strelley Mill farm is that they are not solely estates under threat but also pastoral places and a metaphorical Lost Paradise. Following in the constructs of estate under threat and pastoral Arcadia the country house tradition, in the latter they both embrace the modern idea of a rural place. Yet, while these interpretations of Dorlcote Mill are only there to give concreteness to its people as required by the universalism of the imperial history, Lawrence develops his Netheremere into a geographic and literary palimpsest with variable hierarchy of layers which—as sets of established ideas about English rural place—could also be considered spatial myths. Two of them (estate under threat and pastoral Arcadia) are intrinsic to the county house tradition which they overwrite, while the third one tells of the influences of Thomas Hardy on the representation of English rural landscape in Lawrence's first novel.
Ključne riječi
estate; D. H. Lawrence; George Eliot; East Midlands; The White Peacock; The Mill on the Floss; the country house novel; internal border; place as palimpsest
Hrčak ID:
225907
URI
Datum izdavanja:
7.10.2019.
Posjeta: 744 *