This session presents work from both emerging and established scholars in the related fields of English Literature and Linguistics on a transtemporal topic. The panel grew out of intersections between the presiders’ distinct research areas—Victorian gardens and contemporary dystopian fiction—both of which have proven fertile ground for rethinking the historical relationship of human beings to their environments and how this relationship is represented in the novel. As symbolic spaces, landscapes are rich sites for interpretation and scholarly collaboration.
All of the papers here proceed in light of two important shifts in literary thinking about space: first, the spatial turn of the 1970s, which acknowledged the historically constructed nature of places, geographical and symbolic; and second, the subsequent “waves” of ecocritical thought that have, as Greg Gaard maintains, amounted to the “historicization of ecology and the ecologization of history” (Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, 3). Each paper here reacts, implicitly or explicitly, to these theoretical shifts and to canonical thinking about the Romantic sublime by demonstrating a range of thinking about humans in nature and humans as natural. Where the Romanticism of Wordsworth or Coleridge juxtaposes the human to a nature that is terrible and objectively separate, these papers direct attention to border-blurring spaces—the garden, the farm, and even the psychic landscapes of individual characters. In this way, the panel provides a nuanced view of nature in works as generically diverse as Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Clarissa and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
Lisa Robinson will open the discussion with Clarissa (1748), rooting our exploration of landscape in the world of early British novels and the changing narratives of eighteenth-century garden spaces. Utilizing work on (queer) ecocriticism by scholars Vin Nardizzi, Lowell Duckert, and José Esteban Muñoz, Robinson argues that Clarissa’s body transitions from one of gendered limitation to queered possibility once she recognizes nature as a space of safety. Whereas the materiality of the designated home space orders bodies from least to most useful, the natural environment of Harlowe Place’s garden provides Clarissa with a vocal and physical escape. With her state at the end of the novel, her queer future lies within the posthuman potential of her words. In death, Clarissa’s body disrupts the boundaries of binaristic gender normativity, and this moment creates the only productive relationship within the text. Robinson’s connection here provides a posthuman analysis that reads as queerly productive.
Building on the transgressive potential of domesticated spaces, Eliza Holmes then focuses on the mid nineteenth-century domestic novel, what she calls “perhaps the most ecologically engaged genre of all,” as a liminal space between the “unnatural” sphere of human habitation and the inscrutable nature of much Romantic literature. She argues that, for all of their interiority, novels written by George Eliot, Emily Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell were deeply tied to the environment around them. They are often set in rural environments where the borders of the house are porous: crossed daily or seasonally in the action of harvest. When the hay is gathered, or a pig slaughtered, the human world of the house mingles with the nonhuman worlds present on the farm. Instead of the wilderness of the Romantic sublime, Holmes suggests that we ought to turn our attention to the farm and the kitchen garden. Where the wilderness inspires awe from a distance, the action of harvest is necessarily an intimate one: the domestic novel, she will argue, is shaped not only by the rhythms of marriage, birth, and death, but also of the turning of the seasons and the work of the land.
Finally, shifting from a focus on thematic content to an exploration of linguistic form, Prof. dr. hab. Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska explores the legacy of Romantic wildernesses, using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as the root paradigm. She argues that the deformation of landscape and its constitutive parts (terrain, creatures, vegetation) is fundamental in creating atmospheres of desolation and terror—conspicuously present also in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Earthsea Trilogy. Chrzanowska-Kluczewska’s semantico-stylistic analysis of two exemplary excerpts drawn from Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954) and Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore (1972) demonstrates, in turn, a striking conceptual and linguistic regularity in the construal of nightmarish effects with the deformation of natural scenery. The setting of Frankenstein, however, in the Swiss and French Alps, presents us with the Wilderness Sublime—pristine, grandiose, divine, at times severe and frightening in its majesty. Deformation of the natural setting, in this model, is noticeably lacking: the source of terror does not spring from natural scenery but from the monstrosity of the creature within it and Victor Frankenstein’s inner landscape. It is this inner landscape that effectively blights the beauty of nature surrounding the protagonist and influences the future novels. This relationship between human and landscape is rendered unique and particular to the form of the novel.
In refocalizing the relationship between human and landscape through different, but nonetheless related, texts and theoretical perspectives, all three of these papers gesture to Yi-Fu Tuan’s assertion that “Each intimate exchange has a locale which partakes in the quality of human interaction” (Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, 141). In asking us to ponder the unique ways in which sites—gardens, farmyards, wildernesses—have been used to cite and situate the human at different points in literary history, these presentations testify to the ubiquity and variance of literary thinking about space.