MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Although we wouldn't normally associate modernism with beach reading, Hannah Freed-Thall's Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons shows how modernism was highly effective at reading the beach as a "vexed and contradictory setting" (2) that challenges the way we think about ourselves and the nature that surrounds us. Modernism itself looks different here: if modernist studies has long been dominated by the divide between city and country, Modernism at the Beach introduces the coastal zone as a third space where modernists explored their connection to the "more-than-human world" (3). The book's real accomplishment, though, comes in how it uses modernism and its associated media to arrive at a deeper, more complex appreciation of an environment in which we all have a stake.

"The beach is not one thing here" (4), Freed-Thall announces in her introduction. Recent history may be filled with efforts to "fortify a vanishing coastline" (11) and preserve our "natural" (10) beaches. However, even these endeavors belie the "constructedness" of the beach as a human fantasy. The reality is much different: this is a place of mutability, always eroding and shifting. And it's this ever-changing scene, Freed-Thall argues, that makes the beach a "queer sanctuary" (20). Here, it should be noted that "queer" doesn't always describe aspects of sexual orientation or gender identity in this study. Rather, drawing from theorists interested in a broader set of social formations and ontologies, Freed-Thall uses the term to signal how the coastal sites she examines disrupt the regulation of order and therefore open up a range of "improvisational possibilities" (21). "The beach is a zone of horizontality, both literally and figuratively," Freed-Thall writes. "It's a space that facilitates lateral growth—outward branching into other bodily forms and sensory configurations."

One of the most enticing qualities of Modernism at the Beach is its assembly of a diverse media ecology. In this, it reflects one of the most important trends in modernist studies. Freed-Thall analyzes canonical modernist novels by authors such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Claude McKay alongside other types of literary genres and media forms, including film, theater, painting, guidebooks, and photography. One effect of this admirably wide net, though, is that it throws into relief the absence of poetry: a brief examination of Stéphane Mallarmé's skipping-stone poems stands in for the entire genre. With such a rich study, this hardly seems like an issue worth [End Page 754] mentioning—except for the fact that so much of modern poetry takes place at the beach: H. D.'s sea gardens, Marianne Moore's oceanic graves, Langston Hughes's port calls, and T. S. Eliot's mermaid laments all come to mind here. But perhaps the larger point is that some additional reflection on genre's entanglement with environment is probably warranted: why do so many of us tote novels down to the beach?

Such a question aside, Modernism at the Beach is praiseworthy for the extreme care with which it sifts through the granular details of various coastlines, both real and imagined. The book is primarily organized by these different sites. The subject of the first chapter is Proust's Balbec, a fictional seaside town that makes up the setting in Within a Budding Grove (1919) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1921–22). Freed-Thall explores this resort town—with its hotel and casino—as a "place of accident and improvision" (36), where hierarchies tend to fall away amid the beach's atmosphere of contingency. Proust's embrace of this contingency is embodied in a character's seaside "leap" (51)—an improvisatory gesture of "fluid, unscripted mobility" and "queer style" (52) that Freed-Thall compellingly compares to Charlie Chaplin's slapstick comedy and Jean Cocteau's acrobatic ballet. The next chapter, centering on Woolf's fictionalized mixture of Cornwall and the Hebrides in To the Lighthouse (1927), isn't enlivened by such comparisons. But the chapter nevertheless delivers a powerful reading of the way the novel contrasts the patriarchal rhythms of "the house and its economies" (83) to the "adventure-laden, coastal outskirts of that orderly space."

The third chapter then relocates to the Atlantic Coast as it follows Rachel Carson in intimately documenting "the interconnected animals and plants that inhabit small swaths of shore" (100). Freed-Thall puts Carson's guidebook The Edge of the Sea (1953) in meaningful conversation with her longtime epistolary relationship with Dorothy Freeman, illustrating how her love letters and ecological descriptions both come back to an appreciation of "quiet refuges" (105) and "care-at-a-distance" (106). The fourth chapter, on McKay's moveable beaches in his itinerant novel Banjo (1929), returns in some sense to the first chapter on Proust in its attention to developed—in this case, industrial—sites not typically associated with the so-called natural beach. The chapter studies how, for McKay's Black vagabonds, the beach is a verb that means finding freedom from the imperial and racist violence that structures the "surveilled colonial portscape" (136). The chapter also connects McKay's search for egalitarian spaces to the reclaiming of derelict New York City piers in the 1970s [End Page 755] as "experimental gathering places" (137)—and the record of such places left to us by photographers such as Alvin Baltrop and Shelley Seccombe.

The final chapter of the book departs from the larger organizational method in being about no beach in particular, but it also stands out for its dynamic interplay of examples. It explores the beach as a place of exhaustion: while the contemporary beach supposedly offers us a reprieve from the "relentless on-ness that makes late capitalism feel like a perpetual state of emergency" (162), its "continual erosion and artificial replenishment" (161) instead mark the inescapability of our own fatigue. Freed-Thall reads Winnie's progressive sand burial in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (1961) as a sign of this ceaseless tide—the constant ebbs and flows of late-capitalist labor that especially affect women. From Beckett's beach, Freed-Thall finally looks out onto several contemporary performances, the most striking of which is Sarah Cameron Sunde's 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013–22). Sunde stands at the edge of the sea for a full tidal cycle, allowing the water to rise all the way up to her neck so as to perform a "material bodily understanding" (175) of the slow catastrophe of climate change.

Modernism, ecology, queerness—Freed-Thall's Modernism at the Beach brings together several important strands of contemporary critical thinking in contending with the shifting shape of the beach. There's a real danger that this layering of imposing theoretical terms could create a rather convoluted vision, one that obscures the very place we're trying to see more clearly. But, notably, that doesn't happen here: Freed-Thall uses theory to carefully comb the beach with us and to gently lift up and examine all the precious things we find there. [End Page 756]