Hospitality and liminality in the time of the Anthropocene: Jenn Ashworth’s Fell

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jenn Ashworth’s Fell (2016) is written as a response to the legend of Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple who take in a mysterious stranger. Ashworth’s novel shifts between 1963, when Netty and Jack take in a lodger who appears to have messianic powers over life and death, and the present day when their daughter, Annette, is attempting to come to terms with the legacy of those events. Both time periods are seen from the perspective of Netty and Jack who haunt their decaying home in Grange-upon-Sands located near to Morecambe Bay. Ashworth’s novel is no simple rewrite but uses the legend as a platform for analysing themes of borders, boundaries, power, and control as well as the motifs of time, history, geography, and alienation. This article argues that, although the novel makes no explicit reference to the Anthropocene (the geological period proposed to describe man-induced phenomena such as climate change), its meditation upon the idea of hospitality and the navigation of liminal borders reflect upon the extent to which anthropogenic climate change entails new relationships between humans and the non-human world. To that end, the article pays particular attention to the shifting and dangerous sands of Morecambe Bay itself.