Speaker
Description
With droughts, freezing temperatures, and hailstorms, the French population experienced great loss often due to lack of resources like flour, timber, and crops before the revolution of 1789. In 1788, if the already famished people had managed to survive, they led revolts, protesting the financial crises that the King and the elite wrought on with political reforms. Shifts in climate conditions thus aided in shaking the weakened roots of French autocracy. This is what most historians and political philosophers suggest, recording the many facets of this momentous event. Charlotte Smith, however, in her first epistolary novel Desmond (1792) provides a counterpoint to this narrative with reports on the state of the land. She records the eventful years of 1790-92 in four voices who intimately observe and react to life in the French villages and landscapes. Relying on her personal experiences in France, Smith gives voice to Geraldine Verney, whose letters expose wrongful assumptions about the natural atmosphere and political conditions of post-revolutionary France. Writing her letter in 1791, Geraldine records an “appearance of plenty” in the fields that survived “the disadvantages of bad cultivation, and the tumults existing these last two years,” as the land “laugh[s] and sing[s]”. The land, she finds, is resistant to adversity. Geraldine’s records of her environment move from a prospect view of the land to an intimate kinship of plant life. Such scrutiny of the landscape leads her to question the intention of the king and the elite in “monopolizing sales” and the accuracy of “the deficiency of bread” that lead to revolts. Thinking further, she critiques facts about how, for instance, cutting corn incorrectly may lead a whole nation to famine. By noting these and other forms of entanglement between the land and nation especially in Geraldine’s letters, I argue, Smith politicizes natural observation and guides towards a critical reading of other historical records.
| Keywords | ecocriticism, revisionist history, french revolution, land studies |
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| bernaa@istanbul.edu.tr |