Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers

How do recent turns in ecocritical, feminist, and New Materialist theories affect the study of nineteenth-century women writers? Gendered Ecologies invites us to explore this question and attend to the lively ecologies, vibrant matter, and distributed agencies of the nineteenth century. This wide-ranging collection of essays offers two major interventions. First, it demonstrates the importance of nineteenth-century women’s writings to New Materialist and ecocritical conversations, which have tended to focus largely on twentieth-and twenty-first-century literature and culture. As editors Dewey W. Hall and Jillmarie Murphy emphasize in the introduction, nineteenth-century women writers “were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter” (7). Second, it advances ecofeminist studies of nineteenth-century literature, challenging the essentialist woman-nature association by applying posthuman, de-essentialist, and queer ecological perspectives. As these essays demonstrate, nineteenth-century women’s writing represents the more-than-human world not as a romanticized site for masculine leisure, contemplation, and domination but rather a “democracy of objects,” a series of assemblages, an entangled mesh with “no clear foreground or background” (84, 64).

The essays in Gendered Ecologies explore an array of spaces, such as gardens, [End Page 180] medieval towers, and ancient Greece, where readers will find exhumed skulls, chlorinated lime, and Charlotte Brontë’s fern collection, among other entities. Organized into two parts, “British Female Voices” and “American Female Voices,” bookended by Stacy Alaimo’s foreword and Jane Bennett’s afterword, this volume examines the ecomaterialist imaginings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child. Contributors draw on diverse theories such as object-oriented ontology, vital materialism, agential realism, Anthropocene studies, and the intersectionality of third-wave feminism.

While these essays examine a range of theories, writers, and topics, they share a distinct set of critical priorities, central concepts, and argumentative aims. Many of them draw on the work of feminist physicist Karen Barad, whose theory of agential realism highlights the significance of entanglements and intra-action among entities. For Barad, entities are relational rather than self-contained. Drawing on Barad, Adrian Tait emphasizes that “matter is ‘not a thing but a doing’; its ‘purpose’ is not defined by any particular end state” (101). Often paired with Barad’s work in this volume, Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality informs and shapes many of the collection’s readings. For Alaimo, the biological body is trans-corporeal because it is porous and permeable, intra-acting with other entities and substances. The contributors are also influenced by Bennett’s work on vibrant matter, which challenges the divide between subjects and objects and conceives of human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as participants in an ideally egalitarian assemblage. The concepts of intra-action, trans-corporeality, and assemblage populate the pages of Gendered Ecologies, as the essays inventively combine New Materialist theories with historicist methodologies and close reading tactics more familiar to nineteenth-century literary critics. They do so to supplant patriarchal conceptions of nature with animated, material ecologies, challenge hierarchal distinctions between civilization/man and nature/feminized other, and think beyond the human/nature and subject/object divides.

Even as the essays share a critical framework and theoretical orientation, they each make their own enlightening and useful contributions to the fields of ecofeminism, New Materialism, and nineteenth-century literary studies. Lisa Ottum’s essay, “The ‘vast prison’ of the World: Counter-Anthropocenes in the Works of Mary Shelley,” locates Wollstonecraft and Shelley as early Anthropocene thinkers. Taking into account feminist critiques, which contend that Anthropocene discourses reinscribe human exceptionalism and elide human differences, Ottum shows how Frankenstein registers the [End Page 181] Anthropocene through affect—through a trembling and anxiety “provoked by contemplating the future geosphere” (31). Heather Braun’s “Beyond the Bower: The Garden, the Tower, and the Fate of the Embowered Woman,” levies a different ecofeminist critique, contrasting the concept of the bower, a space of male Romantic contemplation, with embowered female characters in Romantic literature. Braun shows how Caroline Norton’s writings “open up a new space to create beyond oppressive boundaries and ecological spaces designed for male poets” (58). Continuing with the theme of women’s agency, Louise Willis’s “A Space of ‘unwonted liberty and pleasure’: Charlotte Brontë’s Treatment of Gardens in the Bildungsromans of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe,” highlights gardens as trans-corporeal spaces that are central to a “biodynamic model of personal growth for the bildungsroman form” (62). Dewey W. Hall also discusses Charlotte Brontë’s writing in “The Place of Objects: The Female Body, Nature, and Entanglement in Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss.” Hall reinterprets both novels to present an object-oriented ontology of the female body that privileges intra-relations and the vitality of matter. Closing part 1 and sharing Hall’s theoretical orientation, Tait’s “The Manifold Ecologies of Lady Audley’s Secret” shows how Braddon’s novel challenges “the longstanding negative association of women and nature” by representing assemblages of entities with distributed agency (114).

The essays in part 2, “American Female Voices” attend closely to the colonial, regional, and racial differences that shape gendered and material ecologies. Exemplifying this approach, John J. Kucich’s “Ecocultural Contact and the Panarchy of Place: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and Margaret Fuller in the Great Lakes” reveals Schoolcraft’s and Fuller’s intersectional feminist analyses of gender, race, colonialism, and the more-than-human world. Drawing on Alaimo and Bennett, Jillmarie Murphy’s “Beyond the Binary: Transforming Ecologies in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isle of Shoals” argues that these writings vibrate with “mutuality, inclusivity, and intra-connectedness” where human bodies are enmeshed with rural and island materialities (149). Elif S. Armbruster’s “Ants Become Giants: Laura Ingalls’s Pioneering Perspective in the Little House Books” recovers Ingalls’s place in the literary canon while offering an ecofeminist reading of the immense American frontier—a realm long associated with masculinity. The final essays in the collection engage with the writings of Lydia Maria Child, among other topics. Matthew Duquès’s “Animating Athens: Frances Wright and Lydia Maria Child’s Hellenic Haunts” reveals how Wright’s and Child’s Hellenic romances and representations of natural and built environments contribute to transatlantic disaster discourses. Finally, Lisa West’s “Toward a Political Ecology in Lydia Maria Child’s ‘Chocorua’s Curse’” analyzes Child’s counter-aesthetic, which [End Page 182] “focuses on the materiality of nature and not metaphoric understanding” (193). West’s essay contains a striking example of an assemblage in Child’s tale, one that profoundly challenges the notion of self-contained, autonomous selves and subject-object divides.

As a whole, Gendered Ecologies models New Materialist and ecocritical reading practices for nineteenth-century literary critics interested in women’s writing and feminism. With its stirring, theoretically robust, and accessible analyses, this collection also illustrates the value of nineteenth-century women’s writing to posthumanists, New Materialists, and ecocritics. In this regard, Gendered Ecologies unites two largely distinct fields and scholarly communities, paving the way for future conversations about nineteenth-century entanglements and vibrant materialities.