Lits, souches, camps : circulations et proliférations écoféministes dans deux romans de Jean Hegland

Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (1996) concludes with two sisters and their infant Burl abandoning their family home to embrace life in a neighbouring forest. Western domesticity, symbolised by private bedrooms, is replaced by the plural, biotic community of a centuries-old redwood forest. By taking refuge in a hollow stump, the trio attempts to shed their now obsolete social identity and adapt to a postapocalyptic American West. This process of redrawing the border between inhabited and uninhabitable spaces continues twenty years later in Here in This Next New Now (in French, Le Temps d’après). Burl, now a non-binary “arboreal boy,” undertakes to recount their life within an ecosystem saturated by the non-human. Yet, the character resents their entrapment in the hollow stump chosen by their mothers for protection. Instead, they attempt to reconfigure the entire forest (and beyond) into a potential shelter for human and non-human life. The figure of the bed-stump thus evolves into that of the encampment. In exploring the bed and its redefinitions, this study not only traces the reintegration of the characters into a multispecies world, but also invites readers to consider Hegland’s narrative practices as a refusal to enclose the text in a fixed or stable cartography. On the contrary, the novel ultimately overflows the book as a medium.