Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Property and Ecological Networks in Sophie von La Roche’s Erscheinungen am See Oneida

Abstract

In Sophie von La Roche’s novel Erscheinungen am See Oneida (1797/98), property not only functions as a category that assists the “imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere” (as G. C. Spivak postulates for the processes of globalization); La Roche also emphasizes the bioconnective dimensions and the corresponding ethical limitations of access. La Roche’s valiant settlers and their environment are emphatically understood as a holistic, living entity with a shared ecology. A specific form of early ‘global’ property and its (quasi planetary) modification are instructively intertwined here. In view of the ‘planetary turn’, the different layers of La Roche’s complex understanding of property, on the whole indicative of the eighteenth century, are worth revisiting in order to better understand where systemic and scalar shifts, ruptures and/or continuities occur.