Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6466-0126

Date Available

5-6-2025

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

English

Faculty

Jill Rappoport

Faculty

Matthew Giancarlo

Abstract

In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a group of fallen women see “themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other” (65). As relational, boundary-dissolving, ecological subjects, these women are empowered above society’s judgment, made “sublime as the moon and stars” (65). By analyzing such representations of ecological relationality in Victorian fiction, my dissertation reveals new forms of agency for women and racialized others. While many ecofeminists have historically disavowed the nature-gender link as reinforcing the shared oppression of nature and marginalized groups, I depart from this standpoint, as it privileges the masculine-coded ideology of differentiation from the environment and others. I argue that rather than simply raising oppressed groups above other species or separating them from nature to grant them agency, Victorians often recognize the material self as interconnected with nature in moments of liberation and survival. I use the concept of preservation—the arrest of decay, protection from pollution, and containment within landed boundaries—as my analytical lens, recognizing conflation with nature as both a tool of patriarchal and imperial control and a mode of resistance.

Reclaiming nature as a potentially feminist space by collapsing the boundaries between nature and culture, as scholars such as Stacy Alaimo and Donna Haraway have done, I also borrow from Black feminist and ecologies scholars such as Tiffany King, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Kathryn Yusoff to show the environmental logic undergirding both patriarchal constructs and racialized biopolitics in the 19th century. Using works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler, and Rider Haggard, my dissertation’s case studies illustrate the potential and the limits of nature as a liberatory construct.

In the first chapter, I claim that Browning’s Aurora Leigh uses the language of forced cultivation, containment, and hunting preserves to domesticate women and presents liberatory potential in devolution. The second argues that the gendered power dynamics of greenhouse plant cultivation informs women’s sexual and romantic maturation in Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. Here, empowering marriages that follow nature’s rhythms reveal an alternative feminist autonomy. In the third chapter, I assert that Hardy’s Tess corrupts the “purity” of Tess and nature to suggest that identity-formation—for a nation, family, and woman—is a palimpsestic process that mirrors nature’s cyclical endurance. The pastoral, social progress narratives, and the 19th-century realist novel thus become fictions of temporal control that crumble when scaled to nature’s time. The final chapter takes up Butler’s Erewhon and Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines; by considering the narrators as protective hunters, I argue that Butler and Haggard write against the ecological imperialism of colonial adventure. In both, the native peoples are preserved in a state of human animality, but this ultimately fails to protect them from the violence of imperial perception, resource extraction, and racial hierarchies.

I challenge assumptions about what an ecofeminist engagement with nature looks like in the Victorian period by proving that nature is within the sphere of influence of these oppressed groups due to their culturally-constructed link to nature and that this link, rather than being solely abject, is appropriated to resist domination. The Victorian impulse to preserve nature in the face of the accelerated rhythms of modernity resonates with the 21st-century experience of the Great Acceleration and current preservationist environmental politics. However, my analysis reveals how Victorian representations of ecological relationality deny such anthropocentrism and offer an environmental politics that recognizes humanity and nature as contingent on each other.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.78

Funding Information

This dissertation was supported by a Graduate Summer Funding Award from the University of Kentucky Department of English in 2024.

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