Two ecological female coming-of-age novels: a comparative reading of La Petite Fadette and The Mill on the Floss

Author(s)

  • Apolline Pernet Princeton University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51777/relief19407

Keywords:

George Sand, George Eliot, nature, coming-of-age novel, zoopoetics

Abstract

This article proposes a joint re-reading of George Sand's La Petite Fadette and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss as ecological coming-of-age novels. On the one hand, the rich and dynamic representation of a natural environment is compared with portraits of women in movement. Secondly, we examine how the two heroines’ learning process results in decisive conflicts between animal instincts and moral imperatives. A number of ideas are then put forward for teaching these two novels at secondary school level, by linking the environmental issue to social issues and a reflection on gender.

Author Biography

  • Apolline Pernet, Princeton University

    Apolline Pernet is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She works on the association between the idea of nature in the 19th century and the representation of female characters in French and British novels. Authors studied include the Brontë sisters, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, on the British side; and George Sand, Charles Nodier and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam on the French side.

     

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Published

2024-07-15

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2024): At the School of Life: teaching literature with environmental humanities

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Apolline Pernet

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

Pernet, A. (2024) “Two ecological female coming-of-age novels: a comparative reading of La Petite Fadette and The Mill on the Floss ”, RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 18(1), pp. 143–154. doi:10.51777/relief19407.