Landscape and Identity: Utopian/Dystopian Cumbria in Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army

What is it about?

In 2007, Sarah Hall published The Carhullan Army, a speculative narrative of environmental collapse and state repression. This paper examines how the author’s native region of Cumbria is used as the matrix of both utopian and dystopian speculations to consider the author’s persistent exploration of landscape and identity. Sarah Hall uses the Cumbrian “feuding territories” to debate current human struggles with the climate, gender equality, and fundamentalism. The article engages with the novel’s retrospective and prospective deliberations through a survey of its post-pastoral poetics and retro-feminist politics to highlight Hall’s simultaneous re-inscriptions of the cultural constructs of landscape and gender. Key words: critical dystopia, post-pastoralism, retro-feminism, spatialisation, Cumbria

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Sarah Hall is in the process of becoming a novelist of note in contemporary British fiction. She is the award-winning author of five novels and three collections of short stories. All of her novels are set partly or wholly in Cumbria and she has said in an interview that the landscape was the source of her inspiration. The speculative specificity of The Carhullan Army, published in 2007 and originating in the catastrophic Cumbrian floods of 2005, allows for a combined reflection on climate change, political power and feminist empowerment. I use Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini’s work on critical dystopia to describe the first-person account of Sister as “a counter narrative of resistance”. This counter narrative is further connected to the 1970s development of feminist utopian fiction and the politics of radical feminism as Hall depicts an agricultural lesbian separatist commune. I demonstrate the originality of Hall’s approach which consists in inscribing the feminist struggle regionally. I use Terry Gifford’s work on the pastoral to single out Hall’s post-pastoral rewriting of regional cultural tropes. Finally I call on Rob Shields and his concept of spatialisation and “place-myths” to highlight how the novelist’s metaphoric use of the contested border region of Cumbria serves to debate the dividing lines of social, cultural and political inscriptions.