Women on the wastes: reimagining "empty" environments in the Victorian female bildungsroman ...

• Main Author: Rose, Kristin
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: No Publisher Supplied 2023
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7282/t3-2565-e130; https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/70085

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 ...