Abstract
This chapter was born of an e-mail conversation I had with Jennifer Munroe during the spring of 2009. Jen and I were struggling over the issue of terminology; our dialogue was one of those deepening, academic back-and-forths, in which neither of us threw up our hands but rather continued pecking away at our keyboards until we arrived at something we could hold on to: Jen’s point that ecofeminists might be “more concerned with the materialization of the N/nature-woman connection than the theorization of it.” Jen’s conclusion not only works for me intellectually but it also feels right. I might quibble with her on whether it has to be “N/nature-woman” (largely because— without theorizing too much—I think that both men and women need to focus on the physical, bodily connection with nature if we are to alter our ecological conduct), but her observation summoned something in me, and became a lens through which I have come to consider much of the ecocritical work I have read since that time. It has led me to this chapter—a call for an ecofeminist reclamation of the word “N/nature.”
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Notes
In “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon asserts, “If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both” (90). William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995, 1996), 20.
Robert Watson expresses the detrimental potential of the vision of nature as a repository of pure reality. Such a notion collides in immeasurable ways with an environmental position that respects the infinite diversity and hybridity of nature. Robert Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Turning to Plato, Val Plumwood challenges the view that the domination of nature and women can be located entirely “in the Enlightenment and the rise of atomistic science.” Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), 5. I reference the rise of science as the epistemic shift it initiated is crucial to early modern scholars.
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. “Demeter,” accessed May 23, 2010, http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_project_detail.html?project_id=149&menu_id=261. Demeter is a computer-controlled speedrowing machine, equipped with a pair of video cameras and a global positioning sensor for navigation. Demeter is capable of planning harvesting operations for an entire field, and then executing its plan by cutting crop rows, turning to cut successive rows, repositioning itself in the field, and detecting unexpected obstacles. See Pilarski, Thomas, Michael Happold, Henning Pangels, Mark Ollis, Kerien Fitzpatrick, and Anthony Stentz. “The Demeter System for Automated Harvesting,” Autonomous Robots 13 no. 1 (July 2002): http://www.springerlink.com/content/xgucuwjk39dy1aa8/.
For an ecocritical analysis of the variations on the Erysichthon myth see Jill DaSilva, “Ecocriticism and Myth: The Case of Erysichthon,” ISLE 15, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 103–116. The pre-Hellenic myth of Demeter speaks to women’s role in horticulture, the precursor to agriculture (which became the province of men).
See Autumn Stanley, “Daughters of Isis, Daughters of Demeter: When Women Sowed and Reaped.” Women’s Studies International Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1981): 289–304. My comment on biogregionalism references how horticulture reduced nomadic living and engendered an intimate connection to a specific geographical space.
Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction,”, The Ecocritical Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xviii, emphasis mine.
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 47.
Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2006), 41.
Thanks to David Abram, the term “more-than-human world” has come into increasing use, and I have begun to use it in place of “nonhuman,” yet I remain guilty of all the semantic sins that I describe in this paper. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1997).
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 68. Soper states, “Yet, as with many other complex terms, its complexity is concealed by the ease and regularity with which we put it to use in a variety of contexts” What is Nature?, (1). It seems that a good many ecocritics and scholars have stopped using it with ease or regularity.
Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 6.
Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber, eds. Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 1.
Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2.
Barbara Hanawalt and Lisa Kiser, eds., “Introduction,”, Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Lisa Kiser (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 2.
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5. For Latour, “political ecology has to let go of nature, [because] if ‘nature’ is what makes it possible to recapitulate the hierarchy of beings in a single ordered series, political ecology is always manifested, in practice, by the destruction of the idea of nature” (25, italics in original).
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.
Quoted in Laurence Coupe, “General Introduction,” Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000), 3.
Carolyn Merchant, “Glossary,”, Major Problems in American Environmental History, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heather and Company, 1993), Appendix x. Laurence Coupe’s glossary in The Green Studies Reader offers “the physical, nonhuman environment, including wildlife and wilderness, flora and fauna, and so on; but also the ‘essence’ of anything, including humanity, in which case it is often spelt with a capital N and should be used with caution,” 303.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1983), xv.
Ariel Salleh, “Merchant’s Earthcare,” Environmental Values 6 no. 3 (1992): 72–73.
Michael Hunter, “Boyle, Robert (1627–1691),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, online edition, 2004), accessed April 20, 2010, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3137.
Robert Boyle, A free enquiry into the vulgarly receiv’d notion of nature (London, 1744), 6.
Quoted in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: 1500–1800 (Oxford, MA: Oxford University Press, 1996), 27.
Steven Shapin persuasively argues for how Boyle uses the technology of language and theatrics to convince others of the value of his new technologies (experiments). Steven Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology,” Social Studies of Science 14 no. 4 (1984): 481–520.
Here Bowerbank paraphrases Merchant, Death of Nature, 11. Bowerbank qualifies this position, arguing that the trope of marriage is equally predominant. See her discussion of Bacon in Speaking for Nature (9–14). A number of the husbandry manuals from the era substantiate Bowerbank’s point. See, for example the prefatory letter to John Fitzherbert’s The Book of Husbandry (London, 1598).
Greta Gaard, “Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature”, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), 5.
A word might be said here about the Gaia hypothesis, put forward by atmospheric chemist, James Lovelock. While highly controversial among scientists, Lovelock’s view of the earth as a self-regulating organism identifies the earth as “more than the mere sum of its parts” (Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (London: Routledge, 1992), 98). As such, we might see this particular view of earth as a living organism as a way that polarized thinking (man: woman, reason: nature) gets complicated by science.
For a particularly early modern take on Gaia Theory, see Gabriel Egan’s “Gaia and the Great Chain of Being,”, Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Daniel Brayton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).
Carolyn Merchant, “Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory,”, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 104.
Interestingly, Rebecca Merrens posits the possibility that Boyle’s A free enquiry is a direct attack on Cavendish’s view of Nature. Rebecca Merrens, “A Nature of ‘Infinite Sense and Reason’: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy and the ‘Noise’ of a Feminized Nature,” Women’s Studies 25 no. 5 (1996): 421–438.
Jennifer Munroe, “‘Work, Lady Work’ (or Better Science in the Kitchen”): Women’s Work as Science in Margaret Cavendish’s Writing” (Book chapter from monograph in progress, April 2010), 3.
Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters Written by the thrice noble, illustrious and excellent princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle. (London, 1664), 266–67.
Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters or Modest Reflections upon Some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, Maintained by Several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age (London, 1664), 144.
Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (London, 1666), 25–26.
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© 2011 Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche
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Bruckner, L.D. (2011). N/nature and the Difference “She” Makes. In: Munroe, J., Laroche, R. (eds) Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001900_2
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