'Water would be kept, used, driven. Water would be built.': Hydromodernity in Sarah Hall's Haweswater (original) (raw)

Abstract

Paper delivered at Gardens in the Gorse: A Northern Modernism seminar, University of Newcastle, October 2022. Sarah Hall’s novel Haweswater addresses the history of Mardale Green, a small Lake District farming village that was drowned in the 1930s for the construction of the Haweswater Reservoir. Hall’s novel is ostensibly a nostalgic story of forbidden rural romance, between a farmer’s daughter and a water board employee come to inform the villagers of their fate. Yet as Dominic Head notes (2020), Hall renews the traditional genre of rural writing by integrating contemporary concerns. In this paper, I argue that Haweswater offers a nuanced portrait of the impacts of hydromodernist (Swyngedouw 2015) projects on British rural communities. Hall connects the fate of the villagers and dam workers to the sacrifice of working-class British soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, and hints, through references to the shifting fortunes of the British Empire, to the impacts of colonial hydromodernism elsewhere. The publication date of Hall’s novel is significant to my argument. Published in 2002, Haweswater followed the backlash against megadams of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as Britain’s first post-privatization drought, in 1995, during what was then one of the hottest summers on record. Through returning to the 1930s, Haweswater offers a pointed critique of a lack of democratic participation in water management in the 1990s, that resonates more strongly than ever in our parched present.

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