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

• Other Authors: Rose, Kristin (author), Kurnick, David (chair), Goodlad, Lauren M. E. (member), Kucich, John (member), Miller, Elizabeth (member), Rutgers University, School of Graduate Studies
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: English literature; British literature; Environmental humanities; Gender; Genre; Landscape; Victorian; Arctic
• Online Access: http://dissertations.umi.com/gsnb.rutgers:12416

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 ...