The Revenge of Swamp Thing: Wetlands, Industrial Capitalism, and the Ecological Contradiction of Great Expectations

Résumé

This essay places Charles Dickens' Great Expectations in the context of nineteenth-century understandings of England's wetlands. By offering a new reading of a well-known novel the essay seeks to understand the ecological inflection of Dickens' work, and more broadly the Victorian novel's mediation between environmental and socio-economic history. Focusing on the marshes as a space of criminality and liminality, composed partly of land and partly of water, partially industrialized and partially "wasted," this study argues that the construction of this space and its subjects as "criminal" derives from its very resistance to being made useful and (re)productive. More broadly, the essay suggests that a perspective combining ecocriticism with cultural materialism reveals how the novel's contradictory representations of nature are intimately related to the contradictory status of these peripheral spaces under the regime of industrial capitalism.