Woman, Nature, and Observer in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and To the Lighthouse: An Ecofeminist Approach

Abstract

This thesis discusses narration as a tool that mediates the portrayal of women and nature by subjecting both to the perspective of an observer. Realist fiction provides us with material to study this phenomenon in depth because of its intention to reflect reality. Accordingly, Miss George argues that there are ecological stakes in narrative technique because the way we narrate fictional human relationships to nature reflects and influences actual human relationships with the environment. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, massive shifts were occurring in those relationships. This period also saw the end of one literary tradition (Victorian realism) and the start of another (modernist experimentalism). Miss George believes that the two are related, that transformations in narration techniques coincided with a consciousness of planetary change.