Victorian Waters and Modern Storms: Re-spatializing the Flood Novel as Narrative Form

Abstract

The aftermath of alluvial disasters reorders the micro-genre of the flood novel, such that works as disparate as George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) trace new ways of thinking about the bedrock of fictional world-building. I argue that this triangulation reconfigures transatlantic climate catastrophe by re-spatializing categories of literary regionalism. Environmental flooding emerges across all three texts, each contributing in unique ways to the formation of a greater flood genre. While Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss engages with the material and physical presence of water, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God explores water through more metaphorical and symbolic registers. Morrison’s Sula offers a geospatial understanding of the novel, situating water within the lived, mapped, and socially charged landscape. Moving from Eliot’s exemplary flood text to Hurston, who operates within the traditional mode of literary regionalism as she maps the effects of modernism, I end with Morrison to show how the effects of floods and storm surge challenge our understanding of mappable or stable terrain. Through an environmental reading, I examine perspectives from low and high ground, consider the idea of structural axes, and show how the dynamics of rise, overflow, and spillage expose the novels’ groundwater.