Gleaning the Tideline: Elodie La Villette’s Ecocritical Painting

Abstract

ABSTRACT Elodie La Villette is an understudied late-nineteenth-century French marine artist who had an exceptional ecological sensibility. Her images of the interstitial world of the coastlines of Brittany and Normandy depict transformations and exchanges between the labour of human maritime communities and the materiality of the landscape in shoreline commons. Using the tools of material ecocriticism and ecofeminism, this article analyses her painted North Atlantic ecologies of the human and more-than-human, and finds affinities between her visual attentiveness and emerging marine ecological sciences in France.