Accommodating the Anthropocene: the home as a site of ecological significance in climate fiction

ABSTRACT

In its analysis of the home as a site of ecological significance in twenty-first-century climate fiction, this article focuses on three novels that explore the interstices of a changing climate, economic vulnerability, and the loss of the physical home. Using Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, the article explores the ways in which the domestic effects of climate change challenge both apathy and denial of the current climate emergency. The destruction of the home in all three novels raises questions surrounding precarity and perishability, and affords us an opportunity to explore what is meant by survival in light of climate change and the domestic and ecological effects of the Anthropocene. In doing so, we move beyond discussions of simply surviving in times of economic austerity and environmental uncertainty, and question whether seemingly bleak narratives also contain messages of hope and resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• The home
• domestic narratives
• solastalgia
• climate change
• resilience

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the ‘Beyond Survival’ conference at the University of Tasmania in 2018. I am grateful to Dr Naomi Milthorpe and her colleagues for providing me with the opportunity to present this study in its nascent form and to frame its development, and to my fellow contributors for their feedback on aspects of this research. I am also indebted to the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, for the provision of a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellowship in 2019 to work on the lived experiences and domestic effects of the Anthropocene in twenty-first-century literature, including this present paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A neologism intended to convey a nostalgia or homesickness for the ‘solace or comfort derived from [a person’s] present relationship to “home”’, Albrecht first introduced the term at the 2003 Ecohealth Conference in Montreal, Canada, and published the concept in 2005 in the journal Philosophy, Activism, Nature.

2. Such urban climate narratives include J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2041 (2017), amongst others.

3. In catastrophic rather than anticipatory novels, to borrow again from Mayer, austerity and poverty can instead be the product of climate change (e.g. Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road (2006)).

4. Home ownership is a particularly prominent issue in The White Earth because the Native Title Act of 1993 calls into question whether John McIvor can in fact lay claim to ownership of the ruined house and the land on which it lies, or whether the station should be returned to its original Aboriginal occupants.

5. The consequences of Hurricane Katrina were, as Christopher Clark argues, compounded by racial and class-based discriminations that existed beforehand in the southern United States (Christopher Clark 2015, 341). For more on race, class, and poverty in the novel, see Clark (2015) and also Brian Railsback (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joanna Wilson-Scott

Joanna Wilson-Scott obtained her PhD with scholarship from the University of Leicester, and has an MA in Comparative Literature and an MSc in Social Anthropology, both from University College London. She has lectured at the University of Leicester, the University of Gloucestershire, and currently at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, and in 2019 was a postdoctoral visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford.