“She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady
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Katharina Andrea Kalthoff
Abstract
H. G. Wells’s serial fable The Sea Lady (1902) offers a satirical commentary on the Victorian Age: It draws a societal allegory that criticises both a cohesive conception of the natural world, and Victorian notions of the domestic realm – in the private and national sense of the term. Yet the story has long been regarded as an oddity in the author’s oeuvre. Wells’s Victorian contemporaries criticised its lack of scientific detail so characteristic of his more successful scientific romances. The reason for this appears to be the story’s eponymous central figure – a mermaid, supposedly rather the stuff of legend, folklore and fairy tales. However, by opening up a utopian realm in which ‘better dreams’ await, the figure of the sea lady destabilises Victorian moral orders as a potential discovery of the future lingers on the horizon of the century’s turn. In this article, I foreground the story’s ecofeminist potential by analysing the intersections between its unconventional form, the ‘untameable female’ protagonist at its centre, and the specific oceanic and littoral environments it presents.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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.
