Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons by Hannah Freed-Thall

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

Beaches occupy an interstitial position between water and land; their contours are rarely fixed but are rather subject to the vicissitudes of time and tide. The liminal quality of the beachscape as a geophysical formation is curiously echoed by its “vexed” and “contradictory” position as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon (2). For while the beach is the privileged object of the touristic gaze, its longstanding association with otium and leisure, with rest and reprieve, belies its more ambivalent history as a site of colonial and anthropogenic domination. Although the beach has been thoroughly parsed within some traditions of spatial theorizing—notably in essays by French thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Didier Urbain, and Alain Corbin—it has largely eluded the attention of modernist scholars, due in part to the field’s longstanding affinities with the space of the city. And yet, as Hannah Freed-Thall writes compellingly, the modernist beachscape yields a rich cultural archive and a generative space through which to think questions of emplacement, improvisation, and relationality.

What might it mean to read the beachscape? From even the opening pages of Modernism at the Beach, it is already evident how expansive this project will be. Extending the work of the sociologist Urbain, Freed-Thall stresses how the beach affords us a privileged access to social and corporeal rituals. Paying close attention to the cadences of the intertidal zone, she suggests, also raises formal questions about meter and form to which the literary scholar can attend. And by centering queer artists’ visions with the beach—which often draw attention to its status as a mutable, mobile, protean topos—the book opens up aesthetic and political questions to which the burgeoning field of queer ecological theory feels eminently suited to respond.  Across its five core chapters, Modernism at the Beach explores the work of a range of twentieth-century artists and writers who turn to the beachscape as an experimental ground for thinking about identity, sociality, ecology and aesthetic form.

Chapter one, “Proust’s Leap,” considers the role of the seaside resort of Balbec in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Bearing uncanny resemblance to the Normandy beach town of Cabourg (which Proust would regularly frequent) Balbec plays a crucial role in Within a Budding Grove and Sodom and Gomorrah. In the first section of this chapter, the proximity of the beach and the casino in Belle Époque seaside resorts sets the stage for a compelling discussion of chance and contingency in the novel. Freed-Thall goes on to discuss the beachscape as an important site for the novel’s corporeal choreography, drawing particular attention to the improvisatory movements of Albertine and her petite bande of friends while by the sea. This novel focus on littoral spaces does much to breathe new life into secondary literature on Proust: not only does the space of the beach complicate the two poles (Paris and Combray) around which the Proustian psychogeography is organized, but the titular motif of the leap, and the bodying forth of the queer human form, productively dislodges the repertoire of gestures and affective states we come to associate with Proust, such as stillness, repose, and introspection.

The second chapter continues this investigation of the beach in the modernist novel by focusing on Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Freed-Thall draws particular attention to the role of the littoral zone as a “parenthesis in the plots of marriage and ambition,” a momentary suspension of the social scripts of “heteroreproductivity” that weigh heavy on the mind of the novel’s protagonist (97). Much like the Proustian beachscape, which comprises a complex admixture of real and fictive geographical referents, the beaches we find in Woolf are often composite spaces, encompassing elements from the Cornish coast and the Isle of Skye. Freed-Thall’s interest in To the Lighthouse’s processes of unplotting or unmooring attains a queer valence in this chapter. The beach is a resonant topos precisely because it allows Woolf to carve out a thin slice of space and time beyond the heteroproductive.

The sense of queerness that Freed-Thall derives from her reading of Woolf is irreducible to the subjects of same-sex desires or non-normative genders. Rather, through an attention to texture, rhythm, and meter, she is interested in how the intertidal zone generates “other styles of intimacy and patterns of attention and attraction” (72). The relationship between these two understandings of queerness goes on to pattern the subsequent discussion of Rachel Carson’s ecological writing in chapter three. Better known as a pioneering mid-century environmental activist than a prose stylist, Carson’s generically hybrid body of writing on marine life receives a timely reappraisal in this chapter. Freed-Thall’s analysis of The Edge of the Sea operates across multiple scales, from the intricate forms of the rock pool to the sublime depths of the ocean, while also drawing attention to Carson’s own passionate relationship with Dorothy Freeman. Through a subtle and engrossing analysis of this text, we get a deeper sense of how the contours of this queer relationship mutely inform and inflect Carson’s aquatic imaginary.

Chapter four centers on the work of Claude McKay, a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance, whose 1929 novel Banjo: A Story without a Plot literalizes a littoral expression that has long fallen out of fashion: to be “on the beach,” we learn, is a synonym for joblessness. One occupational hazard that comes with writing about the beachscape is that this site and subject is often associated with a bourgeois, liberal gaze upon the world. McKay’s writing throws this problem acutely into relief, modelling alternative—looser, more associative—ways of relating to the waterfront. The interest in queer spatial practices that we discern at many moments of the book goes on to find its strongest expression in the latter section of chapter five which explores the practice of waterfront cruising on the Chelsea Piers via the work of photographers including Gordon Matta-Clark and Alvin Baltrop.

The delamination of the picture postcard beachscape continues to take place in the final chapter which examines the theatre of Samuel Beckett and performance art of Sarah Cameron Sunde. Chapter five opens with a discussion of Happy Days, whose protagonist Winnie is famously encrusted into a beachside rock pool, before bringing Beckett into conversation with the more recent work of Sunde who similarly engages with the ideas of stasis and exhaustion in her multisite performance, 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea. We come to appreciate both pieces in contradistinction to the governing approaches to the beach in their respective contexts. Just as the subversive power and affective weight of Beckett’s dystopian comedy cannot be fully appreciated without reckoning with the idealized role that the beach came to play in the mid-century French imaginary, so too, Sunde’s work registers a trenchant critique of the forces of anthropogenic climate change wreaking havoc in our present moment.

Modernism at the Beach stretches the beach’s signification in many different directions, though several recurrent ideas that can be sensed throughout. These include (1) an interest in how the provisional nature of the beachscape make it ripe for queer ecological contemplation; and (2) an interest in the double valence of the term “plot”—understood as narrative structure and parcel of land—which will become contested and complicated through modernist experimentations with the beach throughout the twentieth century. Much like an intertidal water mark, each chapter brings into view a new contour of the beachscape—a new ways in which it can be read, sensed, and known. In an organizational logic that perhaps mirrors the book’s subject, each chapter contains both a main theme or current, and more speculative tributaries and rivulets leading us in a range of other tantalizing directions. Freed-Thall’s discussions of canonical literary figures often give way, intermittently, to lesser-known names and other art forms such as photography and performance. For instance, having laid out the coordinates of the Proustian beachscape in chapter one, readers are treated to various volleys back and forth between Proust’s work and a wider network of avant-garde artists, from Jean Cocteau to Charlie Chaplin, whose own gestural repertoires expand the balletic quality of movement we find so deftly outlined in his Recherche. This spirit of playful expansiveness also extends to the impressive interdisciplinary scope of Freed-Thall’s book. Modernism at the Beach is nourished (in the positive sense of the word) by insights from numerous disciplines, ranging from environmental planning and media theory to queer ecology, thereby yielding new possibilities for the spatial analysis of modernist art, literature, and culture.