Abstract
Abstract This essay looks at water in Victorian fiction and argues that it is important not just as motif or symbol—which is how literary criticism has traditionally approached it—but as a metamorphic substance. I propose a material ecocritical framework in order to conceptualise water as literary matter, and I analyse selected passages from four canonical Victorian novels through a focus on aquatic materialisation and transformation. I argue that through the emphasis on these processes in a variety of water scenes from Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Dracula, water emerges as not inert but agential. Through a material ecocritical approach which rejects intentionality as a precondition of agency, representations of nature as animate can be reconceived as not necessarily anthropomorphic or as instances of the pathetic fallacy, but as bearing witness to how agency is shared by humans and their environment.
Highlights
This essay looks at water in Victorian fiction and argues that it is important not just as motif or symbol—which is how literary criticism has traditionally approached it—but as a metamorphic substance
The methodological framework on which I draw in order to conceptualise the role of water in Victorian fiction is material ecocriticism
As Jules Law observes in his discussion of blood, milk, and water, a study of Victorian engagements with fluids must look beyond the symbolic: “fluids in the Victorian period were not a metaphoric or symbolic means of negotiating the relationship of the individual to an increasingly complex and rationalized public space, but a principal medium through which social relations were negotiated” (12)
Summary
Water has long been perceived as a potent literary symbol, and as Hartmut Böhme emphasises, water myths, water images, and water symbols form an extraordinarily rich field in all cultures (10). Böhme deplores that the richness of water myths, images and symbols lies waste and no longer flows into a productive philosophy of water (10). He relates the interruption of this tradition to the separation between subject and object in the early modern period (11), as well as to a more general shift from natural philosophy to the philosophy of science in the nineteenth century (10). As technologically valuable information became more important, he argues, the knowledge of nature conveyed in art and philosophy lost influence This is related to the change of attitudes towards nature during the industrial revolution. Though the scientific tradition underlying the “mechanical order” (Merchant 192) implied in this shift of perspective reaches back much farther than the nineteenth century,[2] this is a crucial
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