Refusing Interpretation: Waste Ecologies in Victorian Fiction and Prose
Abstract
This dissertation examines the waste ecologies that appear in Victorian literature, from the canonical realist novel, to the Irish Imperial Gothic ghost story, and to practical prose works on garden designs and amateur horticulture. Specifically, I discuss two of Dickens’s novels, Our Mutual Friend (1865) and Bleak House (1853), alongside Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1869) and a selection of William Robinson’s horticultural prose and journalism that appeared between 1869 and 1892. The primary texts examined in this dissertation all suggest a profound fascination with and awe of emergent and complex ecological structures over self-contained, ordered systems. My chapters can be grouped conceptually into two halves: the first dealing with Dickens’s representation of social structures that function as large and small waste ecologies; the second, with the individual interactions with waste ecologies that in Le Fanu’s and Robinson’s works manifest as both occult and apocalyptic. Chapter 1 reads Our Mutual Friend for the strange material entanglements surrounding the Harmon dust-heaps and the River Thames, offering a portrait of waste that is uncontainable, is uncategorizable, and develops agency. Chapter 2 takes up Bleak House’s depiction of three social systems that function as waste ecologies—Krook’s rag-and-bottle shop, the High Court of Chancery, and Tom-all-Alone’s—as loci of excessive accumulated material that in their rampant proliferation objectify, devalue, and homogenize everything within. Chapter 3 examines “Green Tea,” which depicts the human body’s spectral reaction when it itself is the intersection of the indigestible waste ecologies involving the contaminated tea panic, the counterfeit tea trade, and the mingled nationalism and Orientalism orbiting a product of imperial trade that was both prized and held in suspicion. Chapter 4 takes up Robinson’s prose and follows the logic of his aesthetic to the inevitable conclusion that human life cannot truly join the garden ecology except in death. Moving from broad ecosystems that influence all of Victorian London down to the individual British subject, tea-drinker, or plant, this project situates waste ecologies at the rich analytical intersections of Victorian literary criticism, the new materialisms, and the environmental humanities.