Aquatic Matter in Victorian Fiction

This essay looks at water in Victorian fiction and argues that it is important not just as
motif or symbol—which is how literary criticism has traditionally approached it—but as
a metamorphic substance. I propose a material ecocritical framework in order to
conceptualise water as literary matter, and I analyse selected passages from four
canonical Victorian novels through a focus on aquatic materialisation and
transformation. I argue that through the emphasis on these processes in a variety of
water scenes from Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Dracula,
water emerges as not inert but agential. Through a material ecocritical approach which
rejects intentionality as a precondition of agency, representations of nature as animate
can be reconceived as not necessarily anthropomorphic or as instances of the pathetic
fallacy, but as bearing witness to how agency is shared by humans and their
environment.