Unsettling: Settler Colonial Environments in Neo-Victorian Fiction
Date
2018
Authors
Hewenn, Jessica
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Abstract
In the introduction to the first issue of Neo-Victorian Studies,
Marie-Luise Kohlke specifically emphasised neo-Victorian texts
concerning ecological trauma, and called for an examination of
how such texts represent “the commodification and destruction
of the natural world and its biodiversity, and the resulting
alienation of humankind from its environment” (2008, 8).
Neo-Victorian fiction concerned with colonialism and its
environmental impact is abundant, with three of the ten Costa
Book Awards since the turn of the new millennium granted to
novels taking this as their subject. Yet to date scholarship has
largely foregone examination of environmental concerns.
Neo-Victorian scholarship that has explored the representation of
natural history has done so by focalising through the
religion/science dichotomy, examining texts that are concerned
with the crisis-of-faith provoked by Darwinian theories of
natural selection. This has missed what I argue is the
significance of many of the post-millennial British novels set in
the colonies: that they are staged not at the frontiers of the
expanding empire, or at the forefront of the intellectual
disruption caused by Darwin’s theories, but in the literal and
figurative settlements that follow. By reimaging the process of
settling, particularly the way in which settlers assume a form of
indigeneity to the new landscape and reshape their identity
through it, these novels grapple with the ongoing issues of
identity in a world of dislocation, both literal and
metaphorical, from the natural world.
This thesis takes up Kohlke’s original call for engagement with
colonialism’s environmental impact as is represented in
neo-Victorian texts. Drawing on settler colonial theory in order
to redress the occlusion of the specific and ongoing politics of
settler colonies in existing debates, I argue that
post-millennial British neo-Victorian fiction is returning to
sites of settler colonisation to question the settlement
narrative, often disrupting it by forestalling the possibility of
remaining unsettled. Examining Matthew Kneale’s English
Passengers (2000), Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves
(2006), Jem Poster’s Rifling Paradise (2006), Nicholas
Drayson’s Love and the Platypus (2007), Jeremy Page’s The
Collector of Lost Things (2013) and Rebecca Hunt’s Everland
(2014), this thesis explores texts set in Australia and Canada,
and extends to the polar regions as the limit of Victorian
settlement, in which the landscapes are simultaneously beyond
human encapsulation and profoundly susceptible to human impact.
Taken together, these analyses demonstrate that settler colonial
neo-Victorian novels incorporate and disrupt the process of
identification with the colonial natural world, and in doing so
present settler colonial ecological identity as unresolved.
Moreover, I argue that it is by reading these texts with a focus
on their representations and interrogations of the natural world
that their ambivalence about belonging becomes evident, and that
this unsettled effect is a reflection of postmillennial concerns
about ecological awareness. In their witness-bearing to the
trauma of settlement and their questioning of what it means to
belong to an environment, these texts are willing to face the
possibility of permanent unsettlement.
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