"“World without end”": a reading of Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army as an eco-feminist postapocalyptic dystopia

• Autores: Susana Onega Jaén
• Localización: The posthuman condition in 21st century literature and culture: interdisciplinary Insights / María Ferrández Sanmiguel (ed. lit.), Esther Muñoz González (ed. lit.), Carmen Laguarta Bueno (ed. lit.), 2025, ISBN 978-3-031-83701-2, págs. 105-122
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) is set in Cumbria in a near future ravaged by environmental disaster, global warfare and totalitarian state repression. The narration is the statement made in prison by Sister, a member of an only-woman community of upland rebels. After her arrival at Carhullan, Sister was submitted to an atrocious process of dehumanisation and adaptation to wild nature that transformed her from sexually repressed married woman and submissive factory worker to a powerful member of the Carhullan army evocative of the Amazons and the enhanced transhuman subjects of an eco-feminist future. The fact that the transcript is incomplete and that the events set in the future echo what is happening in England disrupts the ontological barriers between fiction and reality depriving the ending of the sense of order, closure and revelation of traditional apocalyptic narratives. This lack of “the sense of an ending” (Kermode. The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction. London: Oxford University Press, 1966) begs for a reading of the novel as a piece of environmental postapocalyptic fiction based on an experience of irreversible or unavoidable loss “that is neither nourished by a strong sense of hope, nor of a future disaster, but a sense that the catastrophe is already ongoing” (Cassegård and Thörn. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space vol 1, no. 1, pp. 1–18, 2018).