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Victorian Atlantis: Drowning, Population, and Property in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

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Victorian Atlantis: Drowning, Population, and Property in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Victorian Atlantis: Drowning, Population, and Property in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Alexander McCauley A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2020 Reading Committee: Jesse Oak Taylor, Chair Marshall Brown Charles LaPorte Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2020 Alexander McCauley University of Washington Abstract Victorian Atlantis: Drowning, Population, and Property in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Alexander McCauley Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Jesse Oak Taylor English This strange document examines drowning, floods, and property in the nineteenth-century novel. Its four chapters are organized around four particular images: drowned corpses, liquefying crowds, sunken cities, and swamps. I read the drowned first as a neglected nineteenth-century population, visible only when looking back and forth between many different texts. They are united not through a shared origin, territory, class, race or ethnicity but through a shared ending in the abyss. The second chapter is a different take on population, looking at liquefying crowds, waves of people, floods of workers. These common metaphors offer a new way to approach nineteenth-century degeneration theory and, as well, a reconsideration of interpretive debates regarding surface reading. The second half of the dissertation discusses flood and property. There is a tendency in the nineteenth century to look at the city and see it threatened by flood or already sunk into the ocean. I call this hydroscopic vision and discuss the strange conditions in which a flooded city can look like utopia. The final chapter turns to the fear of swamps in nineteenth-century literature, and the surprising consensus among otherwise contrary figures that swamps were useless, needing to be drained and turned into profitable land. Table of Contents Introduction: Into the Whirlpool 1 Population Chapter One: The Dream of the Drowned 46 Chapter Two: The Form of the Wave 92 Property Chapter Three: Dreams of a Drowned City 122 Chapter Four: Swamping the World 150 Coda: Atlantis Looming 176 Acknowledgements 182 Works Cited 186 McCauley 1 Introduction: Into the Whirlpool Never trust what writers say about their own writings. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them? Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” I feel as if we were all being swept into a ghastly whirlpool which roars over the bottomless pit. George Gissing, The Whirlpool Drowning in the nineteenth-century novel seems to offer clear passage to the disasters of the twenty-first century: the Salvadorian father and child washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande after trying to cross into the United States; the thousands of refugees sinking into the Mediterranean each year; the great cities of the world brought to a halt by storms; distant islands overwhelmed by hurricanes; the same cities, sinking into depleted water tables and rising sea levels; the same islands, in many cases, in danger of following Atlantis into the abyss and taking their part in the drowned world. But clear passage, if it is possible at all, rather seems to be in the opposite direction. The storms of the present materialize nineteenth-century dreams of drowning, flood, and property. But it would be false to point to these common examples and act as if they form the genesis of a project that, as related as it is to these concerns, flows from elsewhere. First it comes from hermeneutical training in the church where, at a very young age, I was introduced to the mysteries of the first rain and first flood in which, as the story goes, Noah and his family were McCauley 2 preserved on an ark with representatives of every species while the majority of life on earth was wiped out in the deluge. Read a little further and there is another flood as Moses and the Israelites escape from slavery while Pharaoh’s army are drowned in the Red Sea. Even before I could read the text of the scriptures, I was trained to believe that storms expressed meaning and that a flood could be read, and that the drowned were the dead who deserved to be dead. The hermeneutics of cruelty are familiar to anyone who has ever encountered the church. It is encapsulated in an imperative to read literally and, in doing so, to defend all sorts of inequality and abuse. Yet the primary lesson of the church’s literal reading is nothing to do with a methodical reading practice. Literal reading is malleable, here nodding to the historical conditions of textual production while there abstracting familiar truths from verses completely isolated even from the context of the surrounding chapter. Flip open a page at random and find there, reader, thyself. No, the primary lesson of literal reading is that there is a direct link between interpretation and life. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor – a verse contextualized to mean anything other than its literal meaning, precisely because taking it seriously would mean the inconvenience of selling what you have and giving it to the poor. In the church, the reader’s life and livelihood is always threatened by the book. And so it came to pass that my parents made the mistake of reading the book. They sold what they had and moved our family to Chiang Rai, Thailand, where they spent the next twenty years working with ethnic minorities that could not even be referred to as second class citizens, namely because of the difficulties they encountered in actually acquiring citizenship. It was only after a few weeks of moving to Chiang Rai that we woke up to a world transformed. After the heavy rains of the monsoon season, an earthen dam in the hills above us broke through and flooded the area, including our home, with the brown, mineral-rich water so characteristic of McCauley 3 northern Thailand. Streets became, overnight, fast-flowing rivers that we could wade through only by linking arms. The flood waters receded, leaving damaged goods and a dry world functionally the same as the drowned one—but what remained was a lingering sense that lurking in every monsoon was the possibility of a flood that could ruin property while, at the same time, revealing to all the vision of a new earth. These abstractions followed later, of course, manifesting first in my persistent dread of leaving books on low shelves where they might be ruined by the next flood. I slept through the earthquake that, on December 26, 2004, triggered a series of tsunamis throughout Asia, killing a quarter of a million people. With other students from my school, I traveled to the coastal town of Khao Lak to help with relief work. By the time I arrived, most of the bodies were already collected from the wreckage. What remained of the drowned was visible in what they had left behind, plane tickets and baggage and scraps of clothing in the ruins of sea- side resorts. The floodgates of memory open up here in a dizzying series of impressions: playing takraw at sunset in the refugee camps after days of amusing the children; the horror of sitting down with locals to watch home videos of the tide receding far, far back from the beach before rushing back in on everyone who had idly walked out to witness the mysteries lurking on the ocean floor; the salt line high up on the palm trees that showed exactly how far the water had reached; the beached boat, deposited by the wave, tilted in a field a mile inland; the laughter of the locals as we tried to bag garbage out of their ruined neighborhood; warnings not to eat seafood because we might be eating the dead; injunctions to buy seafood to help the struggling fishermen; the charities and volunteers fighting over who would control the influx of donations and aide; the warning from a Thai friend to watch out for one of our hosts who, demon- possessed, was wandering around that night with a machete; the photos of hundreds of bloated McCauley 4 and mangled corpses—perhaps even photos taken by my father, who has been assigned to that unsavory documentation—where people could check for their missing loved ones. A whole museum of the drowned that, gathered on one wall, looked like a new, monstrous population. Hermeneutics first introduced me to the flood and, in proper dialectic fashion, the flood returned me to hermeneutics. Years later, as one of the leaders of a religious service at my university, I wrote a reflection on the deluge indicating that it is a story of divine error from beginning to end as god regrets creating humanity, massacres its majority, and then promises to never do so again. It is an ineffectual cataclysm. The world of wickedness that exists before the flood is the same as the one that arrives after it departs. One way or another, god makes a mistake – a reading that, in its literal simplicity is utterly antithetical to orthodox theology. A representative from campus ministries met with me to explain that although, yes, my reading was right, it was irresponsible to share with the faithful who would so easily be led to doubt. This is the history of my life as a series of floods. There is a tendency in literary criticism to look at the present and retreat in despair from one’s own work. Alongside present and future deluge, in the disaster catalogue, there is endless war, mass extinction, debt and inequality, climate collapse, regimes of cruelty, violation, dispossession, and abuse.
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