Hilary Cunningham Scharper

Canadian author Hilary Scharper.

Hilary Cunningham Scharper is a novelist and 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 associated with a new and emergent literary genre called the "eco-gothic."

The Ecogothic and Bioscapes

Gothic landscapes feature prominently in Scharper's eco-fiction. Generally speaking, these are landscapes that often act as counterpoints to portrayals of "civilized" or "domesticated" landscapes. Ecogothic landscapes additionally challenge the idea of "wilderness" as a pristine, unspoiled place which inevitably fosters curative and healing effects on human beings. As a literary genre, the ecogothic features bioscapes that are more affectively difficult and morally complex (including bioscapes which generate anxiety and terror, anger and yearning, courage and fear).

Biophilia

Aspects of Scharper's fiction have explored E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis in the context of "lost" (or suppressed) Western narratives about Nature. In Perdita, biophilia is explored through an deliberately 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.

Plot of Perdita

Born in 1878, 19-year-old Marged Brice is at odds with the dominant worldviews of her times. For her, Nature is both an "other" and "another", i.e., a living, acting, creating Presence 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 as belonging to an elderly woman who claims to be the Marged Brice who wrote them (thus making her 134 years old). This claim begins to seriously 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.

Selected works

Fiction

• Perdita (2015) ISBN 1-4926-0244-2, ISBN 978-1-4926-0244-6
• Dream Dresses: Stories (2009) ISBN 978-0-9808879-5-2

External links

• University of Toronto Anthropology Department Website
• Hilary Scharper's website