Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros97 PrintempsRecensionsBarri J. Gold, Energy, Ecocritici...

Recensions

Barri J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 215 p. + xiii.
Xu Xiao
Référence(s) :

Barri J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 215 p. + xiii. ISBN: 978-3-030-68604-8

Texte intégral

1While the interdisciplinary divide between science and literature is a twentieth-century notion, boundaries between disciplines in the nineteenth century were more porous than we might expect. With a background in physics, Barri J. Gold has been recently devoting herself to bridging the divide. Her first book, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (2010), the first book-length studies on the reciprocal relationship between Victorian literature and thermodynamics, has opened a new space for examining energy in Victorian literature. She continues such a conversation in her recently published work, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies, in which she aims ‘to develop experimental practices of reading and thinking as we strive to better understand ourselves as ecological beings’ (16).

2The term ‘thermodynamics’ was first formulated by British physicist William Thomson in 1854, and in public awareness, the first law of thermodynamics designates the conservation of energy, while the second law, stating that entropy is always increasing, is related to decay and dissipation. However, the laws in Gold’s volume exist not only as a set of principles of physics but also as a cultural form that allows for a reimagining and reconsideration of our much-disputed relationship with nature. For in its cultural inception, thermodynamics has a specifically Victorian pedigree and the nineteenth century witnessed the burning of fossil fuels for energy at an increasingly fast pace, foreboding our current energy culture to cause the ecological crisis.

3The book consists of one prologue, seven chapters, and one afterword. The first half of the book provides theoretical and scientific backgrounds that in turn support Gold’s literary analyses from the angle of energy in the second half. As she states clearly in the Prologue, energy is presented ‘as a concept, a form or structure, a way of thinking about the world’ (15); and she argues that her readings with the discourses of energy ‘could actually help address some of the deeply ingrained and problematic patterns of thought that contribute to our current ecological crisis’ (2).

4In Chapter 2, ‘Energy, Form, and the Novel’, Gold provides a brief survey of the laws of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics, as she contends, presumes a system of closure, which ‘reflects and reinforces a culture that perceives genes, cells, individuals, species and nations’ (24‒25). This awareness of closure has also framed the novel genre, in which characters were bounded within a closed system, dissociable from the environment. In this sense, the novel corresponds to multiple structures of classical thermodynamics. As Gold suggests, science and the novel both contribute to reframing a larger cultural pattern and to imagining a system as closed, from the smallest biological cell to the individual, the family, the nation, and humanity.

5Chapter 3, ‘The Physics of Life’, reexamines the claims of some scientists in energy science and their intersections with Darwinian biology, highlighting some implications that have been long disregarded by some energy scientists so as to find alternative ways of thinking about the world and to facilitate the re-evaluation of novels with which most of us are already familiar. In contrast with Darwin’s emphasis on evolutionary ecology, William Thomson presumes nature is stable and will not change. James Joule and Ludwig Boltzmann build on Darwin’s claim of the ecological system as a closed one to initiate machinery as a key image in the nineteenth century. The machinery paradigm found its way into nineteenth-century novels, in which the natural world as well as the human world tends to be considered as a mechanical system, demonstrating that scientific discourse may foster cultural discourse. The discovery of fears regarding these models of sufficiency and closure contributes to Gold’s aim to ‘embark on a project of experimental reading to see what the novel can become and what it can help us make of ourselves’ (67).

6In Chapter 4, ‘Experimental Reading’, Gold demonstrates that ‘how we read the energy we find in the natural world is informed by the energy we have read in novels’ (70). Nineteenth-century novels are perhaps resistant to ecocritical analysis: often set in the urban and domestic environment, they tend to manifest a distinctive trait of intractable anthropocentrism, and depict nature as a stable background. However, Victorian novels, with their happy ending, a sense of completion, and finality, are ‘implicated in our desire for closure as well as a rather unproductive nostalgia’ (70). In this sense of closure, the novels in the era correspond to the mechanism of the laws of thermodynamics. Hence, in the chapters thereafter, Gold sets up a reading practice from an energy perspective, focusing on four novels that foreground a different system that they unsuccessfully struggle to close: the family in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), the individual in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the nation in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860), and the planet and species in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). She considers the forms of the novel as forms of ecology in a metaphorical way, from aspects such as the ‘illusion of closure, the complex networks within, and the multiple entanglements it suggests’ (79).

7From Chapter 5 to Chapter 8, Gold thus opts to practice her energy-informed reading through two novels that precede the consolidation of the laws of thermodynamics, and two that follow it. The first part of Chapter 5 explores the concept of nature or the natural by way of Mansfield Park’s natural objects—apricots, oak trees, and the wilderness, to reveal the underlying chains of energy; the second part analyzes this pre-Victorian novel’s association with energy principles from three aspects: a pervasive anxiety of scarcity, an ambivalence about closure, and the habits of circumlocution that will come to dominate the Victorian discourses of energy. In Chapter 6, Gold explores numerous subplots within Jane Eyre to investigate how they obscure and reveal the flow of natural as well as energetic resources. Her analysis demonstrates that the heroine suggests a revised relationship between humans and nonhuman others: ‘Jane’s participation in various social and/or natural ecologies can leave us with a more developed awareness that we cannot distinguish one from the other, . . . and that our treatment of the natural world is inseparable from our treatment of each other’ (135).

8Taking a cue from Laurence Buell’s notion of ‘toxic discourse’, in Chapter 7, Gold coins the term ‘toxic obfuscations’ to refer to the fascination for the social and verbal processes that create and sustain a belief system in Great Expectations. Though not explicit about ecological problems of energy and resource distribution, Great Expectations focuses instead on the rhetorical patterns, the discursive mystifications, and the production of beliefs and attitudes that support toxic behaviors and obscure human accountability, showing ‘how it ties further to the wish to secure distinctions of class, place and nation’ (144). The unspoken emphases on closure and pervasive anxieties regarding degradation in the novel are definitely internal to the laws of thermodynamics.

9Unlike the novels addressed in previous chapters, The War of the Worlds is explicitly concerned with thermodynamics. So, in the eighth and final chapter, Gold first intimates that the Martians’ ecological catastrophe in the novel is driven by natural limits on available resources, a kind of thermodynamic inevitability, alluding to the rapidly growing industrial culture in the Victorian era. Second, she analyzes the ineffectiveness of the narratives in the novel to shape our responses to disaster. Last, she demonstrates ‘how the form of this novel suggest[s] a potential corrective to a world view that clings catastrophically to illusions of energetic closure and self-sufficiency’ (164). Through its increased agility of perspective, The War of the Worlds might offer ‘a corrective to certain habitual, anti-ecological modes of thought that have helped create and that continue to grow the crisis’ (164).

10One of the main strengths of Gold’s volume is its intersectionality, as Gold not only bridges energy science with literary studies but also cross-pollinates her thermodynamic approach with narratological as well as cognitive approaches, illustrating its high compatibility. The second strength is that she offers guidance to scholars who may work with her approach both in theory and in textual analysis. Her theorization of thermodynamics as a cultural discourse testifies to her claim that ‘scientific discourse is itself an act of, and subject to, interpretation’ (38), and that it may have interacted with social and literary discourses. In terms of textual analysis, she contributes abundant new interpretations of seemingly old texts by virtue of energetic and entropic readings, manifesting that new methods can generate new meanings. For instance, her discovery of the flow of energy in Jane Eyre and of the pervasiveness of energy in The War of the Worlds opens up a new field in ecocriticism. Besides, her selections of texts across genres, genders and subjects attest to the strong explanatory power of her thermodynamic approach to literature. Moreover, Gold raises useful caveats for scholars as regards following in the steps of our predecessors on the established understanding of certain theories, and demonstrates instead that their relocation within the context of their inception and reception may allow for new discoveries. This claim may be illuminating and inspirational not only for scholars in literary studies, but also for those in scientific studies.

11With its systematic theorization, in-grained textual analysis, and conversational writing style, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies pushes back the frontiers of ecocriticism and is undoubtedly a significant contribution to the intersectional studies of energy science and nineteenth-century studies.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Xu Xiao, « Barri J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 97 Printemps | 2023, mis en ligne le 21 mars 2023, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/12691 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.12691

Haut de page

Auteur

Xu Xiao

Xidian University

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search