Domestic ecologies: household management and environmental entanglement in nineteenth-century British literature
Date
2022
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Domestic Ecologies: Household Management and Environmental Entanglement in Nineteenth-Century British Literature offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century British domestic culture by uniting conversations of gender, identity, and family with ecological thinking. This project reads across different genres of fiction and nonfiction to examine how nineteenth-century writers and readers used domestic work—from practicing medicine to keeping houseplants to creating pet taxidermy—to redefine the relationships between human and nonhuman bodies. Those relationships between bodies could reimagine the household, with authors envisioning compassionate modes of care and inclusive family structures that rewrite the social norms of housekeeping and invite nonhuman beings into the household in emotionally significant ways. Those relationships could also be gruesome, troubled, and unsettling; from a beloved pet transformed into taxidermy object, to the troublesome houseplant extinguished by its gardener, to the sick family member bled at home via a household knife, bodily entanglement provides countless opportunities to recast ideas of power and modes of control. This project draws on ecological concepts that think about material networks and alternative forms of companionship to offer pathways into reading these disparate scenarios, not only as important representations of domesticity and domestic life in the nineteenth century, but also as models that navigate some of the many forms that ecological entanglement might take. ☐ Furthermore, in its approach, Domestic Ecologies offers a way of reading that centers different types of bodies over genres or literary forms. This project consists of an introduction and four chapters, each of which is centered on a different body or nonhuman being in the home: humans, plants, water, and animals. In doing so, it demonstrates how bodies travel across contexts and genres, carrying with them the capacity for relation. By tracing the wool in a cow’s suit, or the physical closeness of plant labor, this project shows how reading bodies across their material existence and written representations generates avenues for understanding ecological entanglement.
Description
Keywords
Domesticity, Environmental humanities, Victorian