Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley: From Local to Global Ecology

Abstract

his thesis undertakes an ecofeminist analysis of two prominent novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century: Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) and Mary Shelley (1797-1851). The six primary texts that I put under an ecofeminist lens are Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), along with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831) and The Last Man (1826). Ecofeminism investigates the dual marginalization and exploitation of women and nature. It seeks to expose the mechanisms whereby nature is feminized and women are naturalized, in order to rationalize the secondary position of women and nature in patriarchal cultures. Radcliffe and Shelley both demonstrate the ways in which binaries of man/woman and nature/culture are constructed. They also reveal the subversive potential that women can exploit to reformulate the gender-biased dualities. Through this analysis, I argue that the footprint of modern environmental philosophy can be detected in these two Romantic writers who argued for developing an eco-identity whose existence is bound with physical nature and the environment. By revisiting these dichotomies, they advocate for a liminal space where old binaries merge dialogically and a new concept of being, a non-hierarchical ontology, is born. This emergent ontology shatters binaries such as human/nonhuman and natural/artificial, reminding us of our interconnectedness with the earth and all its inhabitants. Furthermore, the historical distance between Radcliffe and Shelley marks the transformation of England to a more industrialized and urbanized society which is well-reflected in their conception of nature. Radcliffe’s local place-bound environmental ethics shifts to a more cosmopolitan idea of environmentality in Shelley, where issues of pollution and global warming are more explicitly expressed, pointing to the advent of a new geological epoch for the earth called the Anthropocene. This research accentuates the significance of environmentalism as a cultural phenomenon which must be explored and communicated through the stories we tell about our planet.