Name Hilary Scharper | Role Novelist | |
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Hilary Cunningham Scharper is a novelist and associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. Scharper's fiction, teaching and research focus on cultural approaches to Nature. She writes historical fiction, multi-species fiction and is also is associated with a new and emergent literary genre called the "eco-gothic."
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Her work
Critics have suggested that Scharper's fiction has affinities to several well-known Victorian gothic landscapes, including the wild and wilful moorlands of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (both published in 1847). Her ecogothic novel, Perdita (2015) is set at a late 19th-century lighthouse on the Bruce Peninsula in northern Ontario, Canada. (The fictional lighthouse is based on the Cabot Head Light-Station and Cove Island Lighthouse.) For 19-year-old Marged Brice, Nature is both an "other" and "another", i.e., a living, acting, creating Nature "who" is not only capable of influencing events though the creation of weather (one of its main forms of expression), but is also noble, reckless, forgiving and jealous. Marged's Nature is therefore not merely a landscape in the traditional sense, but a world of morally-complex players who will sometimes act as background and foreground, but are nevertheless always between, amidst, and enveloping. Marged probes her unique relationship with Nature in a series of diaries and these resurface in the 21st century to complicate the world of a historian who is on a mission to find the oldest living people on the planet. A ghostly, gothic hybrid—the figure of a lost child or a "Perdita"—ultimately brings the two time periods together.
Biophilia
Aspects of Scharper's fiction have explored E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis in the context of "lost" (or suppressed) rather than dominant Western narratives about Nature. In her first novel, "Perdita" (meaning "the lost one"), biophilia is explored through an "unremembered" figure from Greek mythology. Perdita is a mythological figure, an illicit child born to Hephaestus and Pandora. She is hidden away among the Three Fates where she is given the task of gathering up the "lost threads of life." It is here that she acquires four different kinds of love: friendship (philia), erotic love (eros), unselfish love (agape), and the love between humans and the natural world (biophilia). Perdita is eventually given to Prometheus who promises to conceal her among humankind. Perdita brings with her the four loves in a doll-like bundle made up of "lost threads." Along with Prometheus' gift of fire, Perdita's four loves are given to humankind. In the mythological version, humans seize upon fire and begin to use it to control the natural world, but they neglect and eventually abandon Perdita after accepting only three of her threads. The fourth love, biophilia, is thus lost to the modern Western tradition—but can always be rediscovered, gift-like, and redeemed into the present.