Ecological Interactions: The Sense of Place in E. M. Forster’s Howards End, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, And Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to examine how E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf’s place-conscious narratives, respectively Howards End (1910), The Rainbow (1914), and Mrs Dalloway (1925) reflect an ecoconscious approach in their contextualisations of modernist sense of place. For this purpose, this dissertation engages itself with a theoretical background that discusses various conceptualisations of place from philosophical to ecocritical studies. The main critical focus is on the writers’ modernist depiction of the relationship between the characters and the environment, employed within a different mode that can be relatively associated with the notions of place as constructed by the theories of bioregionalism, dark pastoral, and urban ecocriticism. Due to their special interest in depicting the sense of being environed or emplaced as a primary concern for the characters, the selected novels display a sense of place that introduces an ecologically informed perspective on human-place connections, and constructed through subjective, experiential, and dynamic interactions between the characters and their environment. It is demonstrated that each novel develops a sense of place that point to an ecological interconnectedness through their literary representations of the sense of place.