In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Dewey W. Hall and Jillmarie Murphy and; Christina Rossetti's Environmental Consciousness by Todd O. Williams
  • Serena Trowbridge (bio)
Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Dewey W. Hall and Jillmarie Murphy; pp. xii + 262. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2020, $120.00, £85.00.
Christina Rossetti's Environmental Consciousness, by Todd O. Williams; pp. xiii + 161. New York and London: Routledge, 2019, $160.00, $48.95 paper, $44.05 ebook.

The contribution of women to the environmental movement is one which is deservedly receiving more attention across all disciplines, and it is encouraging to see this happening particularly in the environmental humanities. Writing about nature and the environment is a growing area, paving the way for fruitful scholarly work on women's writing about the environment. The long nineteenth century is a conflicted and productive site for this examination: women's lives and work were, then as now, enmeshed in the confining ecosystem of a patriarchal culture which failed to take their work—both creative and scientific—seriously, and so it is promising to see books such as Dewey W. Hall and Jillmarie Murphy's Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century breaking new ground. As the introduction makes clear, this collection of essays is intentionally diverse and pleasingly intersectional, negotiating complex boundaries not only across genders, but also between the human and nonhuman, and additionally between women's bodies and their material environments. In the process the essays offer some exciting new ways of reading women writers. The title sets out the editors' aims clearly, and the essays contained within juxtapose critical approaches—gendered readings, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, new materialism—which successfully provide fresh approaches to the writers whose work is analyzed. These include Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Fuller, Laura Ingalls, and Lydia Maria Child, among others.

The editors state in the introduction that "Gendered Ecologies focuses on the perspective of literary women writers in reshaping the female body-as-matter in a network with nonhuman and nonliving entities," and the essays engage closely with recent theoretical work in the field, including that of Greta Gaard, Tina Gianquitto, and Karen L. Kilcup (18). The book is divided into "British Female Voices" and "American Female Voices," which is perhaps practical, and some suggestive cultural divisions are apparent, such as Lisa West's acknowledgement that in the work of Lydia Maria Child "colonial conflict between English settlers and Native Americans cannot be understood except in a framework that pays attention to the more-than-human world," as well as the environmental regional and geographic variances the writers depict, including terrain, weather, and fauna (192). Yet the British and American writers also offer parallels: most are concerned with the gendered and environmental dynamics of space, of belonging to and even reshaping a landscape, for example. In her chapter "Beyond the Bower," Heather Braun points out the difference between the meaning of a bower to a man (a Romantic poet, for example), as a "lush space reserved for quiet introspection and poetic creation," and to a woman, such as the Lady of Shalott or the heroines of Caroline Norton's poems, for whom bowers are "domestic spaces" in which women may be confined and creativity stifled (41). The argument that Norton's "bower poetry" [End Page 601] causes readers to "reimagine natural as well as manmade spaces that are habitually relegated to men" provides an illuminating example of how literary engagement with environments of all kinds can be refigured and recast by the work of the female imagination (59).

Elif S. Armbruster explores "Laura Ingalls's Pioneering Perspective in the Little House Books" in a chapter that also explores the female imagination's engagement with the world around it—specifically the relation of women to "large open spaces" (158). Ingalls parallels herself with her father's fearless "desire to be outside" rather than "her mother's domesticity, femininity and order" (164). Like Braun and the other writers in Gendered Ecologies, Armbruster indicates Ingalls...

pdf

Share