Florence Marryat’s Sensational Ecologies of Empire, 1865–1897: Imaginary Tropics, White Proto-Feminism, and a Comforting Plantationocene
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Felipe Espinoza Garrido
Abstract
Among Florence Marryat’s vast canon of work, scholars have mostly focused on her spiritualism, her alleged proto-feminism, and, not least, the racial politics of her most famous novel, The Blood of the Vampire (1897). Little attention, however, has been paid to the role of her abundant nature imaginations that infuse most of her colonial fictions. Among these, Marryat’s decades-spanning engagement with ‘the tropics’ stands out, ranging from the miasmic and deceitful Caribbean in Too Good for Him (1865), the lush Brazilian jungles of Her Father’s Name (1876), the glimpses of post-revolutionary Haitian Voodoo in A Daughter of the Tropics (1887) to the plantation settings of A Crown of Shame (1888) and The Blood of the Vampire. With attention to Marryat’s ecological fictions, I argue that these novels’ allegedly liberatory rhetoric marks the tropics of the Caribbean and the Americas as a distinct epistemic problem for the imperial project, in that they confound the affective balance of white, English perception, and colonial desire. As a result, charting, understanding, and thereby re-mastering ‘nature’ are framed as foundational processes for white – often specifically female – self-awareness. Written in the wake of the brutally curbed 1865 Jamaican Morant Bay Rebellion, Marryat’s tropics thus lament not women’s social exclusion per se but specifically white women’s exclusion from the imperial project. Ultimately, the nature encounter in Marryat’s tropics offers proto-feminist empire fictions as a remedy for the perceived erosion of the late nineteenth-century plantation ecologies.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments
- “In the Midst of Smoke and Flame”: Extraction Ecologies and Industrial Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
- Florence Marryat’s Sensational Ecologies of Empire, 1865–1897: Imaginary Tropics, White Proto-Feminism, and a Comforting Plantationocene
- “She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady
- “Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots
- “Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets
- Blurring Reality and Blurring Gender: Fashion and Attire in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- The Narrative Ordeal of Enduring Love: A Divine Comedy Recast
- Treading the Spiral: Intermediality, Spatiality, and Materiality in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting
- The Inability to Mourn: Representation of Collective Psychology in the “We”-Narrative of Yiyun Li’s “Immortality”
- Reviews
- Claire Hansen. 2017. Shakespeare and Complexity Theory. New York: Routledge, xi + 222 pp., 10 illustr., 1 table, £35.99.
- Mathias Mayer. 2022. King Lear – Die Tragödie des Zuschauers: Ästhetik und Ethik der Empathie. Göttingen: Wallstein, 184 pp., €20.00.
- Eva Ries. 2022. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction. Anglia Book Series 76. Berlin: De Gruyter, 298 pp., €114.95.
- Helmut Pfeiffer. 2021. Das zerbrechliche Band der Gesellschaft: Diagnosen der Moderne zwischen Honoré de Balzac und Henry James. Paderborn: Brill, xxix + 375 pp., €79.00.
- Sämi Ludwig. 2020. Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, xiii + 270 pp., 20 illustr., $79.95.
- Mahshid Mayar. 2022. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, xiii + 239 pp., $32.95.
- Marie-Laure Ryan. 2022. A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, x + 226 pp., 6 illustr., 3 tables, $89.95.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments
- “In the Midst of Smoke and Flame”: Extraction Ecologies and Industrial Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
- Florence Marryat’s Sensational Ecologies of Empire, 1865–1897: Imaginary Tropics, White Proto-Feminism, and a Comforting Plantationocene
- “She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady
- “Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots
- “Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets
- Blurring Reality and Blurring Gender: Fashion and Attire in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- The Narrative Ordeal of Enduring Love: A Divine Comedy Recast
- Treading the Spiral: Intermediality, Spatiality, and Materiality in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting
- The Inability to Mourn: Representation of Collective Psychology in the “We”-Narrative of Yiyun Li’s “Immortality”
- Reviews
- Claire Hansen. 2017. Shakespeare and Complexity Theory. New York: Routledge, xi + 222 pp., 10 illustr., 1 table, £35.99.
- Mathias Mayer. 2022. King Lear – Die Tragödie des Zuschauers: Ästhetik und Ethik der Empathie. Göttingen: Wallstein, 184 pp., €20.00.
- Eva Ries. 2022. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction. Anglia Book Series 76. Berlin: De Gruyter, 298 pp., €114.95.
- Helmut Pfeiffer. 2021. Das zerbrechliche Band der Gesellschaft: Diagnosen der Moderne zwischen Honoré de Balzac und Henry James. Paderborn: Brill, xxix + 375 pp., €79.00.
- Sämi Ludwig. 2020. Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, xiii + 270 pp., 20 illustr., $79.95.
- Mahshid Mayar. 2022. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, xiii + 239 pp., $32.95.
- Marie-Laure Ryan. 2022. A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, x + 226 pp., 6 illustr., 3 tables, $89.95.
