Revolutionary Objects in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art

Abstract

Following a feminist/materialist concept of “choratic reading,” this chapter argues that Elizabeth Inchbald's English Jacobin novel Nature and Art highlights environmental agency in the context of political and social injustice. Inchbald’s use of chiasmic irony further reveals how the disavowal of non-human agency acts as the very condition for exploitation of both non-human and human actors, particularly the unpaid menial, reproductive and nutritive work of women in late-eighteenth-century England. In this sense, there is nothing more “environmental” than the laboring, gendered, and exploited female body. This chapter suggests that future study of Inchbald focus on the networks of human and non-human agents in her work and how these networks gesture towards a radical political ecology.