The Hive and the Pod: Ecocritical Subversions in Laline Paull’s Two Interspecies Narratives

Abstract

This ecocritical analysis of Laline Paull’s The Bees (2014) and Pod (2022) employs Greg Garrard’s framework of environmental dualisms and Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence (Nixon, 2011) to interrogate how nonhuman narrators expose the entangled ecological, social, and spiritual crises of the Anthropocene. Through close reading and interdisciplinary synthesis, the study demonstrates how Paull’s fiction reframes industrial agriculture and marine exploitation as systemic failures rooted in anthropocentric hierarchies. In The Bees, the queen monopolizes the reproductive rights of the bees in the hive; the queen’s act, critiques patriarchal control over labor and ecology, paralleling ecofeminist critiques of nature’s commodification. In Pod, the spinner dolphin Ea navigates oceans ravaged by seismic blasting (termed the Thunder) and plastic waste, her echolocation disrupted by anthropogenic acoustic smog (Duarte et al., 2021). The Tursiops dolphins’ exploitation of remoras and reliance on pufferfish toxins mirror capitalism’s extractive logic, their eventual collapse underscoring the fragility of such systems. Paull’s narrative strategies reject anthropomorphic simplification. By employing biomimicry, such as scent-driven communication in The Bees and echolocation syntax in Pod, she centers nonhuman cognition, fostering empathy without erasing alterity. Rituals like the Waggle Dance and humpback whale songs reclaim spiritual ecology, positioning nonhumans as custodians of planetary memory. Ultimately, the novels advocate interspecies solidarity, urging readers to heed Flora’s realization of hive-world symbiosis (Paull, 2014) and Ea’s declaration of collective tidal agency (Paull, 2022). Paull’s work transcends climate fatalism, offering a radical reimagining of environmental justice through collective, multispecies survival.