English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Environment of Ecocriticism

Sylvia Bowerbank. Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2004. 312pp. Cloth, $49.95.

By David Coleman, Queen's University—Belfast

            Sylvia Bowerbank’s book is an addition to the burgeoning field of critical literature which clusters under the term "ecocriticism." As the name suggests, this critical approach mines the literary culture of earlier periods to examine how texts engage with what contemporary culture rather loosely terms "the environment": landscape, plants, animals, natural resources. To a skeptical eye, this may appear to be no more than a revival of a centuries-old interest in "nature"; or, more particularly, of a recurrent anxiety about the relationship between human endeavour (literature, science, culture) and the world as it exists beyond human society (nature). Stated like this, ecocriticism would seem to offer little that has not been said before; the ecocritical difference, however, is that the new movement is unapologetically concerned with the current political imperative to rethink and reconfigure human interaction with "the environment."  Ecocriticism, then, constructs itself as a radical movement, using the culture of the past to intervene in contemporary affairs; yet if the criticism does not achieve a sufficiently acute level of insight, there remains a risk of falling into a conservative sentimentalization of "nature."  Speaking for Nature is aware of this potential problem, and just about manages to avoid the trap: but it treads a perilous journey throughout.

As a whole, Speaking for Nature is excellently researched, written in attractive, lucid prose, and full of engaging and stimulating arguments. There are just a few concerns that strike this reader, mainly with regard to the, sometimes contradictory, nature of the text’s radical philosophy. One of the initial problems, for an academic readership at least, comes in the book’s claim that it deals with "Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England" (emphasis added). Early modern England, as Bowerbank understands it, is substantially different to the entity imagined by most practicing literary critics: early modernity, the academy would have us believe, comprises the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (in England, at any rate). Yet Bowerbank shifts the focus slightly later: her first case study is on Mary Wroth (ca.1587-ca.1651; within the conventional boundaries), her last is on Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97). The chapter on Wollstonecraft clearly indicates that Bowerbank is unafraid of turning her critical eye on the period conventionally occupied by critics of "romanticism." Of course, the age of the sublime forms a fascinating subject for the type of criticism for which Bowerbank argues; but there remains a, not insignificant, concern about the difference between the "modern" and the "early modern," a concern that Bowerbank refuses explicitly to address. The academic reader, naturally, senses the political move behind this challenge to conventional periodisation. One feels, however, that Bowerbank has overlooked an opportunity to significantly engage with the politics of periodisation, an engagement which may have added urgency to her critical concerns.

The theoretical centre of the book may be said to revolve around the author’s initial attempts to define and promote an "ecological feminism." Bowerbank assumes that ‘"feminism" is a critical prerequisite for a female academic, and it follows that this ecofeminism should be expected to offer a significant alternative to the more general ecocriticism which I have discussed above. As one delves deeper into the book, however, it is not always clear where the distinctions between ecocriticism and ecofeminism lie. Certainly, the Introductory chapter ("Toward a Genealogy of Ecological Feminism") is convincing in its suggestion that "nature" is gendered female/feminine in Bowerbank’s early modern period, but the case studies which follow offer disappointingly little engagement with the significance of all this for current literary theory. The case studies are admirably historicized, but glance only obliquely at current concerns. Perhaps more straightforward signposting, although a concession to the reader, may have been beneficial in this instance. There are a number of sections in particular where this is most relevant. The section on "Blood Sport: Open-Air Exercises of the Aristocracy [in Wroth’s Urania]" (39-44) could have been pushed to suggest something about the ongoing debate in British culture about the ethical and social status of hunting;[1] similarly, Chapter Five, “If Animals Could Talk: Ecological Dialogues for Children” (135-60) has the potential to suggest much about the intellectual community’s continuing uncertainty as to the ethical stance appropriate to non-human species. The potential is not, however, explicitly addressed. In addition, the final pair of chapters, one on "defending local places" and the other on "the bones of the world," clearly chime with current concerns over the politics of the local in an increasingly globalised culture. I do not doubt that the author intends this resonance, and perhaps one should appreciate the complex dialogue between past and present which the author establishes; but an undergraduate reader, for example, may, without considerable guidance, miss some of the significance.

If there are problems with the relationship between the past and the present in this book, there are also some issues regarding the construction of the past. The focus on gender means that it is clearly important that Bowerbank focuses on women writers; but women writers do not exist in a vacuum. Their work is variously influenced by, reacting against, or in dialogue with the work of other writers, both male and female. At times, Bowerbank writes well on the ways on which early modern women writers engage with the work of their male counterparts; there is, for example, much careful explication of Francis Bacon’s views on nature, and on the rhetoric of gender which structures his writing. This, in turn, forms a useful context for the book’s analysis of seventeenth-century women’s writing. But when Bowerbank examines the construction of nature at the end of the eighteenth century, there is no mention made of the English Romantic poets, and only a brief mention of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757); the masculine strategies of inscription on the landscape found in these authors would have provided a context along the lines of that provided by Bacon for the earlier authors. This is not to claim that women’s writing can only be read alongside men’s writing; merely that, in these circumstances, an analysis of male writing may have allowed a further demonstration both of the distinctiveness of women’s writing at this point, and of the way in which gender continues as a structure for thinking, and writing, about nature. That said, perhaps the true value of the book comes in the way in which it can ignite such arguments; ecocriticism, as Bowerbank practises it, has the capacity to combine with other current concerns, and reveal much about the cultures of the past and the present.