ABSTRACT
In Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, the original pastoral home of the female protagonist is attached to, in fact inseparable from, a provincial market town. The two pivotal images of bridge and mill, prominently placed in both Gaskell's Milham Grange and Eliot's Dorlcote Mill, attest to a mid-Victorian landscape of the pastoral which has been so long encroached upon by its urban "masculine" surrounds that it is scarcely distinguishable as either conventionally pastoral or aligned with the "feminine" principle. Ruth's tendency toward regression, imaged in the fixed wheel and made explicit throughout her fifteenth year by ongoing bouts of dreamy abstraction and unconscious reverie, attests to an internal, psychological world which has failed to keep pace with external, biological maturity.
