Women on the wastes: reimagining "empty" environments in the Victorian female bildungsroman
Creators: name: Rose, Kristin
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century female Bildungsromane use an imaginatively charged landscape—the waste or wasteland—to reimagine narratives of development beyond expropriative notions of British “progress.” By the nineteenth century, a long history of enclosure had cast wastes as unruly landscapes that could only be tamed by the protestant work ethic of agrarian capitalists. In a complex world-system that has been developing since the sixteenth century, this British vision of environmental cultivation and control spanned from the Yorkshire moors to the colonial southern African karoo and even to the unconquered high Arctic wastes. However, from the “wastes” of British enclosure to the man-made “wastelands” of industrial excess, the wasteland came to signify a story of resistance to human instrumentalization. Since the female Bildungsroman is an inherently subversive form—actively seeking counternarratives to the traditionally male Bildungsroman—it makes sense that this popular nineteenth-century genre was deeply engaged with the wasteland’s competing energies of idealized “improvement” and its utopic alternative. I argue that this capacious category of place is a central tool for generic experimentation in the nineteenth-century female Bildungsromane of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Olive Schreiner. In conversation feminist literary critics, environmental humanists, and genre theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin, this dissertation explores the dialectic of genre and place—in which literary landscape informs generic conventions and possibilities, and vice versa. In the female Bildungsroman, a genre intimately concerned with finding more liberating coming-of-age narratives for Victorian women, literary landscapes tell important histories of British exploitation on local and global scales; at the same time, they explore landscapes imbued with multiple temporalities to reimagine new narratives of development for women, men, and nature alike. This dissertation’s chapters are arranged chronologically, each centering on a different author and literary waste. In each chapter, I discuss a novel that imbues its literary wastelands with a unique sense of narrative possibility, even as they reveal their embeddedness in a world-system that includes histories of imperialism, capitalism, globalization, and the dawn of anthropogenic climate change. I begin with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), because it elucidates the historical problematics surrounding local and global wastelands. By triangulating the Yorkshire Moors, West Indies, and high Arctic wastes, Brontë shows how women’s Bildung can become dangerously entangled in masculinist fantasies of wilds as wastes to conquer. In my second chapter, George Eliot’s novels further emphasize how Britain exported environmental and human harm abroad. Yet, Eliot uses local Midland wastes—an exhausted ironstone quarry called “the Red Deeps”—to imagine less expropriative relationships between humanity and the environment. For instance, The Mill on the Floss (1860) stages Maggie Tulliver’s countercultural Bildung in the Red Deeps’ regenerating post-extraction site to suggest that new narratives of development—leading to “brilliant womanhood”—can arise in a time and place beyond environmental instrumentalization. My third chapter builds on the tension between legacies of agrarian capitalism and new extraction economies by turning to the barren farmlands and bloodstained diamond mines of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). The novel’s protagonists, the idealistic Waldo and sexually awakened Lyndall, enact remarkably mobile (yet disorienting) coming-of-ages that highlight two landscapes that equally dispel capitalism’s myth of progress. Finally, to explore the legacies of experimental women’s Bildung on the wastes, my fourth chapter reads Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015) alongside its intertext Wuthering Heights (1848). Partly a reimagining of Heathcliff’s origin story from Emily Brontë’s novel, The Lost Child explores the longue durée of violent histories on the Yorkshire moors—from the Atlantic-slave trade to the Moors murders of the 1960s. The Kittian-British author interrogates the literary legacy of British heroines on the wastes and, in doing so, illuminates how the literary wastelands remain sites of danger and possibility for the next generation of Britain’s most vulnerable subjects: mixed-race children growing up with the visceral ghost of the British Empire.