The Entanglement of the Human and Place as a “Storied Matter” in the Womb: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell

Ian McEwan’s (1948- ) Nutshell (2016) has drawn the attention of academic spheres as a modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet since its publication. That is why the novel has been mostly studied as a rewriting in which the existential questionings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet are attributed to a modern-day foetus. Employing a foetus as a narrator and protagonist in the novel, McEwan demonstrates the reflections of Hamlet’s existential crisis on a contemporary foetus who is oscillating between being human and nonhuman. As helpless as Hamlet for his modern-day problems, the foetus narrator talks about his consciousness, human side, morality and, most importantly, his role in this world which is devastating gradually due to various reasons such as environmental problems, climate crisis and wars. In that respect, it can be asserted that the novelist raises questions about human-nonhuman, ethics and morality through the story told by a foetus protagonist. Even though McEwan touches upon the environmental crisis through the foetus’s narration, Nutshell has never been studied from an ecocritical perspective. However, the foetus’s entanglement with the womb and the story originating from this bond are the instances of human-place entanglement. From the perspective of material ecocriticism, with the “narrative agency” given by the material environment, the foetus becomes the text that narrates his story of birth and becoming human. Accordingly, this study aims to analyse the foetus in Nutshell as a “storied matter” by emphasising the human-place entanglement in the womb.