The Animal That Remembers: History, Hauntology, and Animality in Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers and Ian McGuire's The North Water

This essay compares two historical novels, one set in the Victorian period that suggests connections between the Victorian and contemporary eras and the other written in the Victorian period but looking back to a similarly unfinished past. The novels in question, Ian McGuire's The North Water (2016) and Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863), are both whaling narratives of a kind, but whales feature only infrequently in them: they are largely absent presences—if also important vehicles for memory—in the texts. The essay takes a hauntological approach to explore how the figure of the spectral animal forces readers to reflect on the systematic violence that the human world has historically inflicted on the nonhuman; the texts also open up a colloquy with the dead, both human and nonhuman, that is as much a reckoning with the present as a confrontation with the past.