The Plants are Plotting: Political Orders in Ostenso’s Wild Geese

Abstract

This article attends to non-human agency and plant communities in Martha Ostenso’s 1925 novel Wild Geese. As non-humans shape the novel’s setting and plot, they are entwined with human action but not subordinated to human agency or political systems; on the contrary, plant communities are political forces who ally, resist, and clash during the implementation of European agricultural practises in the early twentieth century. Thus, the setting details of this CanLit novel can be repurposed to think about the possibilities of community beyond colonial control. This article begins by drawing on Vanessa Watts’ articulation of ecosystems-as-societies as a framework for plant agency. It then follows Margret Boyce’s eco-critical engagement with Wild Geese to examine how the farm’s monocrops are connected to, but not determined by, the heteropatriarchal family and the colonial state. Further, by considering how homoeroticism emerges against colonial heteropatriarchy in non-agricultural settings, queerness is shown to pre-exist and resist the organizing tendencies of settler colonialism. Finally, this article turns to non-human alliances in the novel’s finale to demonstrate the ongoing struggle between political powers. To grapple with colonialism and its legacies, non-human agency and political power must also be recognized.

Keywords

• plant agency
• ecocriticism
• settler colonialism
• canadian literature
• agriculture
• queer