The Agentic Earth and the Embodied Healer: Material Feminism and the Plague in the Year of Wonders

Abstract

This study takes a new look at Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders (2001) by using material ecocriticism and material feminism. It challenges the standard view that the novel’s natural world is just a passive background. Instead, it argues that the plague is an ecological event caused by humans, brought on by global trade and spread through a contaminated piece of cloth. This approach views the epidemic as a necropolitical crisis in which the human body and the environment are closely connected, and both become sites of power struggles. The article shows how Brooks’s language blurs the line between bodily decay and environmental processes, treating both as active forces. In response, the novel offers a new way of understanding grounded in embodied, feminine knowledge. As Anna Frith becomes a herbalist and midwife, the story highlights a give-and-take relationship with nature, showing that care and ecological awareness help people survive and heal. In the end, the novel makes the environment a key force for change and a source of holistic understanding during a human-caused disaster.