Surviving Girlhood: Wild Girls in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Although increasing urbanization and environmental shifts have made so-called “wilderness” spaces less prominent, and despite contemporary concern about girlhood revolving around technological developments like social media, a number of recent novels have tied girlhood explicitly to wilderness spaces, and more specifically, to girls’ abilities to survive in those spaces. Beth Lewis’s The Wolf Road (2016), Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (2017), and Karen Dionne’s The Marsh King’s Daughter (2017) follow a similar plot: a young girl is raised by an abusive father in a wilderness space and to survive, she must kill her father and learn to adapt to a new way of life.1 The uncannily similar narrative arc shared between these novels seems to offer a particular response to the emergent realities and ecological crises of the Anthropocene. Their narratives indicate the necessity of embracing an Anthropocenean girl-subject who must process a peculiar kind of ecological grief and, in so doing, (re)negotiate various gendered and spatial modes of being in the world, which have been traditionally viewed as separate. For instance, each of the girls grapples with seemingly opposed allegiances, as they struggle to reconcile their sense of masculinity and femininity, their existence in wild and domestic spaces, and their relationships to human and nonhuman others. As Anthropocene narratives, what is ultimately at stake in these novels is the emphasis on leaving behind a violent, destructive way of life that is rooted in patriarchal and settler colonialist conceptions of the wilderness that can no longer be sustained.