The Place of Objects: The Female Body, Nature, and Entanglement in Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss

The biome is a “web of relations,” as Stacy Alaimo states, co-existing yet enmeshed in “co-constituted” interdependence.² As feminist and ecological criticism developed in the 1970s, scholars began to draw attention to gendered observations of the natural world. Entities in the geophysical realm occupy space that is often feminized,³ such as rivers, bowers, or caves. As feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar noted: “A cave is—as Freud pointed out—a female place, a womb-shaped enclosure, a house of earth, secret and often sacred.”⁴ If a cave is a “female place,” then that place denotes not only a gendered