This means it also resists unitary readings. But the novel, as I mentioned earlier, resists neat generic containment. One answer might be that The Inland Sea rehearses these tropes with a certain amount of ironic distance. The moments of sexual violence in The Inland Sea, when taken together with the historical feminization of terra incognita and the narrator’s implicit parallels between personal and climatalogical disaster, sit in uncomfortable proximity to those old tropes. This is a symbolic equation so well established that the feminist critique of the trope has become its own scholarly cliché. This gendered squeezing is an instance of that classic figurative illusion where inhabited lands become female, empty, inert. The narrator’s personal analogies between land and self are often left implicit. The Inland Sea joins recent efforts like Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Jenny Offill’s Weather.
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