The Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012)

Abstract

News of the discoveries of natural grottos filled the pages of newspapers and journals throughout the nineteenth century. Additionally, artificial grottos opened regularly for the entertainment of the public and were commonplace in the cultural and literary products of the period. In this article, I analyse neo-Victorian appropriations of nineteenth-century grottos as Foucauldian heterotopias through two case studies: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012). Overall’s and Fox’s novels illustrate how the heterotopic features of the Victorian grotto are expanded in neo-Victorian fiction as counter-spaces of emplacement that enable heterochronic forms of resistance.