Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century

Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century

Christopher Hitt

College Literature, 31.3, Summer 2004, pp. 123-147 (Article)

Published by West Chester UniversityDOI: 10.1353/lit.2004.0035

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I .

Few subjects garnered more attention fromeighteenth-century pundits than the roleof nature in literary works. Participants in

the discourse of criticism and aesthetics dur-ing Britain’s Hanover regime not only had toknow an iamb from a trochee, but also thegeorgic from the pastoral, the sublime fromthe picturesque, natura naturans from naturanaturata, and the general idea of the tulip fromthe streak of the tulip. Of course, debatesabout art’s relationship to nature date back toantiquity, but in the long eighteenth centu-ry—an age that ushered in empiricism, natu-ral theology, and natural history—the subjectassumed an increased urgency. Current aca-demic scholarship on the period likewisereflects this attention to the idea of nature: forevery Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Johnsonthere is a Basil Willey, a Marjorie HopeNicolson, a Blanford Parker, and an AnnBermingham.As critics and teachers, we tend

Ecocriticism and the LongEighteenth Century

Christopher Hitt

Christopher Hitt is a visiting

assistant professor at the

University of Oklahoma. He has

published articles on P.B. Shelley

and on the concept of the sub -

lime.

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to focus on the same things as the wri t e rs we study.Thus it seems only natu-ral that the critical approach most obviously identified by its interest in nature,e c o c ri t i c i s m , should turn to the literature of the long eighteenth century.

The “ecocritical insurgency,” as Lawrence Buell has recently described it(1999, 699), has gained much momentum over the last decade and shows fewsigns of slowing down. In recent years, several major scholarly journals,including New Literary History (30.3 [1999]) and Studies in Romanticism (35.3[1996]), have devoted special issues to the field. In 2001 it was the focus of aPMLA Forum. And although American literature has remained the majorfocus of published work in ecocriticism, the amount of scholarship on Britishprose and poetry has increased greatly in the past few years. Jonathan Bate’sRomantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) hasemerged as virtually canonical in the ranks of ecocritical scholarship; subse-quent books, including Karl Kroeber’s Ecological Literary Criticism: RomanticImagining and the Biology of Mind (1994),Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (1999), andJames McKusick’s Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (2000), have con-tinued to explore how British writers have imagined and represented thephysical environment.Yet literature from the Restoration to the end of theeighteenth century has occupied a generally marginal position in this dis-course.Ecocritical work on the period tends to be limited to articles on indi-vidual authors or texts, such as Nick Pici’s piece on “Milton’s ‘Eco-Eden,’”published last year in this journal.The potential for ecocritical approaches toBritish literature between 1660 and 1800, so vast, is largely untapped.

This essay will make a case for ecocriticism as a promising new approachto teaching and studying the period. I must begin, however, with a definitionof the term, which has tended to mean many things to many people, evenamong its own practitioners. In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader,Cheryl Glotfelty succinctly defines ecocriticism as “the study of the rela-tionship between literature and the physical environment” (1996, xviii).There is a certain appeal in the simplicity and inclusiveness of this definition.Yet it begs the question: How exactly is this a new perspective? Or does eco-criticism merely put old wine in a new (recyclable) bottle? Indeed, BasilWilley, whose book The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea ofNature in the Thought of the Period was first published in 1939, would seem toqualify as an ecocritic according to Glotfelty’s terms. So would Parker, inas-much as his recent book The Triumph of Augustan Poetics devotes a few chap-ters to the representation of nature in eighteenth-century poetry. NowParker may well hold environmentalist beliefs—but quite clearly, he does notwrite as an ecocritic. For whatever his views about our present-day practicesand policies toward nature, he does not make a point of bringing them tobear on his scholarship. In my view, this is the litmus test for ecocriticism:

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rather than being the generic label for a cluster of related interests (as manyecocritics still seem to define the field), it is in fact a perspective defined byits politics.To write ecocritically means to make value judgments about theliterature we study, value judgments based on a common concern about theexploitation and overconsumption of nature by certain human cultures. Inother words, ecocriticism shares with a number of other critical approach-es—feminism, Marxism, and postcolonialism, to name a few—the convictionthat literary criticism should assume an overtly ethical stance.

Most self-proclaimed ecocritics would probably characterize their ownwork as having a political or ethical dimension. I suspect, however, that somewould be resistant to defining the field primarily in these terms. After all, toacknowledge explicitly that we write with a political agenda is to open thedoor to a lot of thorny philosophical questions about the role of academicresearch and its relationship to “real life.” But it seems to me these are pre-cisely the questions we should be considering, even inviting—not only with-in the critical discourse, but also in our classrooms. For even if ideals such as“objectivity” and “critical distance” were genuinely attainable in our schol-arship, it is worth asking whether such a detached mode of criticism wouldbe of much value pedagogically. My belief is that it wouldn’t: after all, stu-dents want to see how the literature we ask them to read is relevant to theirlives and to ours. If we are to inspire interest in the classroom, we must avoidbeing perceived as museum guides leading them through exhibits of dustyfossils and desiccated relics. By showing our students that we have a person-al investment in our subject, by showing them that reading and analyzing areintertwined with ethics, we build a bridge between the past and the present,bringing to life the literature we teach. Ecocriticism is an approach well-suit-ed to establishing this link to the past, especially in light of the growing inter-est in environmental issues on college campuses today. And, as I have sug-gested, it is well-suited to the literature of the long eighteenth century, aperiod in which we find, arguably, the major roots of our own attitudestoward the natural world.

Within the parameters of this definition, there is ample room for debateand dissent. Environmentalist thinking itself is extremely heterogeneous—and even when critics do happen to share an identical perspective on envi-ronmental matters, their scholarship can reflect this perspective in myriadways. Such diversity is surely salutary. Nevertheless, as I will argue in thisessay, at least one element is essential to the ethical and intellectual integrityof ecocriticism.That essential element, crudely stated for now, is the recog-nition of complexity. If ecocritics sometimes seem to apply the Thoreauvianmantra—“Simplify, simplify!”—to their academic work, that tendency maybe rooted in the very virtue I have just noted, their attention to the conti-

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nuity between past and present.The problem, it seems to me, is that too oftenthis mirror turns into a blind spot. When environmentally-minded critics,teachers, and students hunt too diligently for the ways in which old textsseem to anticipate new attitudes and values—when they play a sort of liter-ary critical version of “Where’s Waldo?”—they run several risks. Theseinclude projecting present-day ideas onto the text; reading the text too selec-tively; and reading it too literally, accepting at face value its self-representa-tions or ostensible themes. In each case, the result is a distortion of the textor a neglect of what is often most revealing about it: its internal tensions andcontradictions, both thematic and rhetorical.

This is not at all to suggest that the similarities between eighteenth- andtwenty-first century concepts of nature are liable to be overstated, but ratherthat they are liable to be misidentified. For the great legacy of that age withrespect to attitudes about nature is best described not as incipient ecologismbut rather as a profound ambivalence, the paradoxical recognition that weboth master and are mastered by the nonhuman world. Critics’ failure to reg-ister that complexity in their work on the period may signify a similar neg-lect of our own age’s complicated and conflicted relationship to nature. Inthis essay I hope to avoid this trap precisely by searching for it at every turn.In so doing, I hope to demonstrate how an ecocritical approach to the longeighteenth century can both enhance our understanding of that period andstimulate the intellectual curiosity of our students. And if the past indeedholds up a mirror to the present, then such an approach will also enhanceour understanding of ourselves and our own critical enterprise.

I I .

Let us begin with one of the most important and influential “naturep o e m s ” of the eighteenth century, T h o m s o n ’s The Seasons ( 1 9 8 1 ) .Undoubtedly, teaching this long poem—even in an abbreviated form—posesa challenge. (Few teachers I know would dare ask their undergraduates toread even as much as one full “season.”) However, inviting students to thinkabout The Seasons from an ecological perspective offers them a way of con-necting with the poem. We might begin by directing their attention toThomson’s artful description of fly-fishing (Spring ll. 379-442). Students whoenjoy the sport, or even just literature about it (Norman Maclean’s A RiverRuns Through It, David James Duncan’s The River Why), would likely find thispassage perfectly accessible and engaging. They might also be interested tofind what looks like proto-environmentalist sentiment elsewhere in thepoem, including Thomson’s denunciation of the killing of animals for food(Spring ll. 336-73), his critique of hunting in general (Autumn ll. 360-457),and his objection to the caging of birds (Spring ll. 1172-1207). Focusing on


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such passages would seem to be a good starting point for class discussion ofThe Seasons, particularly if students are inclined to debate among each otherthe controversial issues raised here.

We might employ a similar strategy in introducing them to other texts,for similar expressions of apparently environmentalist views are scatteredthroughout the literature of the period. Silva, John Evelyn’s 1669 tract onBritain’s forests, sounds at times like an Earth First! manual, as in his elegiacdescription of trees blown over in a storm,“lying . . . in ghastly postures likewhole regiments fallen in battle.” “I still feel,” Evelyn intones, “the dismalgroan of our forests” (qtd. in Schama 1995, 163). In the same vein, AnneFinch’s panegyric to “The Tree” includes the wish that the tree “Prevent theAxe” (26), that it be allowed to grow old:“To future Ages may’st thou stand/ Untouch’d by the rash Workman’s hand” (19-20).William Gilpin makes asimilar comment in Remarks on Forest Scenery, an installment in his prolificseries on picturesque touring:

Whenever trees can be turned to profit, they are commonly cut down longbefore they attain picturesque perfection. The beauty of almost everyspecies of tree increases after its prime; and unless it have the good fortuneto stand in some place of difficult access, or under the protection of somepatron whose mansion it adorns, we rarely see it in that grandeur and dig-nity which it would acquire by age. (Gilpin 1791, I. 204-05)

And in a much better-known text such as Robert Burns’s “To the Mouse,”what looks like a “green” sensibility toward nonhuman creatures is impossi-ble to overlook.The same could be said about Anna Barbauld’s comparable(and earlier) poem “The Mouse’s Pe t i t i o n ,” in which the poet assumes thep e rsona of a mouse caught in a trap, pleading to be fre e d .These are only a fewof the many such examples in the literature of the long eighteenth century.

All of which seems well and good as a pedagogical tool, as a way of mak-ing the period seem less remote. However, it is important to emphasize thatgetting students to make a personal connection with the text is nothing morethan a starting point. For it would surely be misleading to imply thatThomson, had he lived today, would have been a card-carrying member ofPETA, or that Gilpin would have chained himself to a bulldozer on the mar-gin of an old-growth forest. While the excerpts above do seem to reflectproto-ecological sentiment, certainly none of the texts is reducible to thissentiment.Thomson’s poem, after all, is really about the relationship betweennature and the imagination; Gilpin values trees primarily as aesthetic objects;the Burns and Barbauld poems operate as extended metaphors for the curseof human self-consciousness.To overlook these points would be to miss whatis most important, not to mention most interesting, about the texts.

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Genuine learning, that is to say, happens when the recognition of simi-larity gives way to an awareness of the discrepancy between the real and theapparent, between the texts and our “strong misreadings” of them. Havingfirst noted, for instance, Thomson’s eco-rhetoric, we might direct our stu-dents to those passages in The Seasons which problematize our sense of thepoem. How, we may ask, can Thomson the nature poet and incipient envi-ronmentalist be reconciled with Thomson the visionary, who celebrates atrancelike enthusiasm “that abstract[s] the Soul / From outward Sense, farinto Worlds remote”?1 Or with the Thomson who praises Industry, thedivine gift which inspired humankind to “dig the Mineral from the vaultedEarth,” to give “the tall antient forest to his Ax,” and which generally “bad[e]him be the Lord of All below” (1981, Autumn ll. 43-95)? Such apparent con-tradictions are everywhere in eighteenth-century writing about nature. Butthey are everywhere, too, in our own age.Anyone who watches TV has seensome version of the commercial in which a particular manufacturer’s sportutility vehicle is offered as a mode of escape into the wilderness. Consistentlyin this series of ads, nature is presented both as an attractive, sublime sanctu-ary and as an object of conquest: our SUV, bigger than life, takes us to the topof a mountain where, Godlike, we tower over the landscape below.Numerous critics have commented on how the “prospect view” in eigh-teenth-century literature functions as an expression of imperial and patriar-chal power; the SUV commercial, I contend, is an updated version of thistrope. Such comparative strategies illustrate that a genuine understanding ofthe past, and of ourselves, means moving beyond comfortable platitudes andconfronting complexity.

As we focus more closely on the contradictory attitudes eighteenth-cen-tury writers held toward nature, we will notice they come in a variety offorms. Perhaps the most important of these was the natural sublime, an aes-thetic of wildness which, as Raymond Williams reminds us, originated anddeveloped alongside industrialization and agricultural capitalism (1973, 128).The sublime as applied to landscape (rather than the literary or visual arts) isthe subject of Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s fascinating study Mountain Gloom,Mountain Glory. Nicolson notes that before the late seventeenth century,mountains were denigrated as grotesque, unsightly obstacles, of no valuewhatsoever. Some time after the Restoration, however, there emerged a newaesthetic attitude toward rugged, wild nature. She quotes John Dennis’sdescription of his tour of the Alps, from 1688:

[T]he impending Rock that hung over us, the dreadful Depth of thePrecipice, and the Torrent that roar’d at the bottom, gave us such a view aswas altogether new and amazing. On the other side of the Torrent, was aMountain that equall’d ours, about the distance of thirty Yards from us. Its


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craggy Clifts, which we half discern’d thro’ the misty gloom of the Cloudsthat surrounded them, sometimes gave us a horrid prospect.And sometimesits face appear’d Smooth and Beautiful as the most even and fruitful Vallies.. . .The sense of all this produc’d different emotions in me, viz., a delight-ful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, I was infinitely pleas’d, Itrembled. . . . [T]ransporting pleasures follow’d the sight of the Alpes, andwhat unusual Transports think you were those, that were mingled with hor-rours, and sometimes almost with despair? (qtd. in Nicolson 1959, 277-78)

Noteworthy here is Dennis’s apparent ambivalence, as captured by phrasessuch as “delightful Horrour” and “terrible Joy.” A century later these oxy-morons would have become virtually synonymous with sublimity, whetheras a term theorized in aesthetic discourse or as a concept represented in poet-ry and prose. To experience the sublime, these writers insisted, was to feelboth anxiety and euphoria simultaneously—to be at once humbled beforenature and exalted over it.Thus in his widely read formulation of the sub-lime, Edmund Burke echoes Dennis in calling the sublime a “delightful hor-ror” (1986, 73). On the one hand, Burke writes, we are humbled by thepower of nature or nature’s God and so “shrink into the minuteness of ourown nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated” (68). On the other hand, evenas Burke’s primary focus is to ground the sublime in terror, privation, and theapprehension of pain, he also notes its capacity to make us “rejoice” (68), tofeel “delight” (134). As if these contradictions weren’t enough, at least oneother important paradox attended most versions of the sublime: thoughostensibly occasioned by external nature, it nevertheless tended to transportthe percipient into a realm or state of mind best characterized by its differ-ence from nature. That is to say, in the tradition of the sublime one’s mostvivid and intense encounter with the physical world was experienced pre-cisely as a negation or transcendence of that world.2 We often associate suchmental flights with the Romantics, but they were a commonplace wellbefore Blake and Wordsworth, evident in such works as Finch’s “A NocturnalReverie,” Thomson’s The Seasons, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, AnnRadcliffe’s novels, and Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation.” I willreturn to this point in the final section of my essay, with special attention tothe Barbauld poem.

It would be beyond the scope of this essay to formulate an ecocriticalreading of the natural sublime, an exercise I have, in any case, attempted else-where (Hitt 1999). What I do want to emphasize here is the consistentinconsistency eighteenth-century writers tend to demonstrate in their atti-tudes toward wild nature. Certainly this tendency is evident in the othermajor aesthetic category of the eighteenth century, the picturesque.3 On theone hand, this immensely popular way of seeing fostered widespread appre-

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ciation for out-of-the-way landscapes. On the other hand, it did so only aspart of a prepackaged experience (hence Wordsworth’s condemnation of thepicturesque in The Prelude and Austen’s satire in Northanger Abbey4).As JohnBarrell observes of the picturesque scene,

What is uncultivated is uncivilised—that is its attraction—and thus alsomysterious; but . . . the picturesque traveller can appropriate and thusdestroy in the places he visits precisely what attracts him to them, the sensethat they are mysterious and unknowable: and he does this not only by put-ting the places he visits on the map, whether literally or in some othersense, but also because the only way he can know a landscape as picturesqueis by applying to it a set of “picturesque rules,” as it were categories of per-ception without which any knowledge of the landscape would be impos-sible for him. (Barrell 1972, 62)

Thus the act of picturesque seeing domesticates the wild landscape, and itdoes so in at least two ways. First, because remote regions are made accessi-ble, they are physically altered. Present-day comparisons are easy to think of:the “ecotourism” industry in Costa Rica, tour buses in Yosemite, vendingmachines at the summit of Mount Fuji. Second, on a deeper level, the pic-turesque is underwritten by an asymmetrical relationship between the per-ceiving I/eye and the perceived landscape.Taking this observation to its log-ical extreme, many critics see it as an aesthetic of control and mastery: thesovereign subject commodifies nature by framing, manipulating, and con-suming it. Elizabeth Bohls, for example, w rites that the “ p rocess of framingand composing constitutes an exe rcise of powe r, a non-re c i p rocal mode ofvision whose effect is to display and re i n f o rce mastery ” ( 1 9 9 5 , 8 7 ) .E c o c ritics could build on critiques like these, perhaps exploring how this“ n o n - re c i p rocal mode of vision” p e rsists in pre s e n t - d ay concepts and re p re-sentations of wildern e s s .

Whether or not eighteenth-century writers explicitly invoke the rheto-ric of the sublime or the picturesque, we find similarly conflicted views ofnature in their texts.Three good examples come to us from, as it happens,three consecutive years, 1711-1713.The first is the Earl of Shaftesbury’s TheMoralists. Shaftesbury’s “enthusiastic” interlocutor Theocles, in a rhapsodicapostrophe to nature, proclaims:

THY Being is boundless, unsearchable, impenetrable. In thy Immensity allThought is lost; Fancy gives o’er its Flight: and weary’d Imagination spendsit-self in vain. . . .Thus having oft essay’d, thus sally’d forth into the wideExpanse, when I return again within My-self, struck with the Sense of thisso narrow Being, and of the Fulness of that Immense-one; I dare no morebehold the amazing Depths, nor sound the A byss of the DEITY.(Shaftesbury 1999, 79)


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The passage appears to acknowledge the superi o rity of nonhuman nature ove rthe human speake r,who assumes a posture of awe s t ruck humility.Gazing at thes t a rry sky above,Theocles seems to re c ognize how insignificant he is by com-p a ri s o n . But The Mora l i s t s, it turns out, is hardly an early bl u e p rint for gre e nt h i n k i n g . For T h e o c l e s ’ h u m ble tone gives way to a va l o rization of humanreason and our ability to know the unive rse in spite of its immensity. T h et u rn a round anticipates, by almost a full century, K a n t ’s formulation of the sub-lime experience in The Critique of Judgment (Zammito 1992).5

The following year Joseph Addison authored his series on “The Pleasuresof the Imagination” for The Spectator (1965, 3.535-81), which included anessay on nature’s superiority over art where the entertainment of the imagi-nation was concerned.6 The series stands as a significant early record of theincipient taste for the “rough careless strokes of nature” over the “nice touch-es and embellishments of art” (1965, 3.549).Addison praises the “vast uncul-tivated desert,” the “huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices,[and] wide expanse of waters,” which strike us with a “rude kind of magnif-icence” (3.540). And he criticizes the well-ordered and meticulously mani-cured gardens then fashionable:

Our British gardeners, . . . instead of humouring nature, love to deviate fromit as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes and pyramids.We seethe marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whetherI am singular in my opinion:but for my own part, I would rather look upona tree in all its luxuriance and diffusion of boughs and branches, than whenit is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure[.] (Addison 1965,3.552)

Having clearly privileged nature over art, however, Addison throws us acurveball. “We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant,” he writes,“themore they resemble those of Art” (3. 549). If this qualification is not an out-right reversal, it is only because Addison is now using the terms “Nature” and“Art” in a much more complicated (we might even say philosophical) sensethan in the gardening example. Sufficiently conversant in neoclassical aes-thetic theory, Addison would have understood both “Nature” and “Art” asexpressions of divine creativity, the former mediated by the material worldof forms, the latter by human ingenuity. In this sense the best art was natu-ral, and the best nature was artful. However well this explanation resolves theapparent logical contradiction, the fact remains that Addison vacillatesbetween two incommensurate models of Art/Nature. I attribute this vacilla-tion to a tension between the neoclassical aesthetic (which unites God, man,and material nature) and the more radical aesthetic of wildness (whichexcludes humans from the equation). Indeed, one might speculate that the

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neoclassical doctrine is summoned here as a kind of counterbalance to thethreat posed by wildness.7

It was also in 1712 that a young Alexander Pope was in the process ofcomposing his locodescriptive poem Windsor-Forest, which would be pub-lished the following year. Like “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” the poemreflects a taste for wild nature but also the influence of neoclassical aesthet-ics—most visibly the doctrine of concordia discors, order in disorder.8 The for-est, writes Pope, lacks symmetry but not harmony:

Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised,But, as the world, harmoniously confused:Where order in variety we see,And where, though all things differ, all agree. (Pope 1993, 13-16)

Pope thus embraces an aesthetic of wilderness that, perhaps paradoxically,becomes a reassertion of order.The nature of Windsor Forest is harmoniousbecause it is part of the Nature of the universe, whose ultimate concordia isguaranteed by God. Pope would eventually develop this latter concept inEssay on Man, describing how all of Nature is linked in a “Great Chain ofBeing” (Lovejoy 1950).9 Now this undoubtedly sounds like an ecologicalidea, given that the science of ecology operates on the principle of inter-connectedness. In Windsor-Forest, however, Pope has a very different set ofconnections in mind:“Thy Trees, fair Windsor! now shall leave their Woods,/ And half thy Forests rush into my Floods, / Bear Britain’s Thunder, and herCross display, /To the bright Regions of the rising Day” (1993, 385-88).Thetrees are to be cut down and made into warships, which will extend Britain’sinfluence to all corners of the world.The harmony that Pope has in mind isless ecological than imperialistic.

What I hope I have at least roughly sketched here is how these textsdemonstrate a double gesture of both deference and mastery before nature.This double gesture, in its various iterations, is the characteristic feature ofeighteenth-century nature writing. And if, as I believe, our contemporaryviews toward wilderness reflect a comparable structure, then we have yet onemore reason to study the period. Ecocriticism, as both scholarship and ped-agogy, would profit from a more rigorous engagement with these character-istic equivocations and disjunctions.When we fail to do so, as I have alreadyimplied,we leave ourselves vulnerable to romanticizing certain authors, texts,and motifs. Such is the pitfall of Pici’s eco-reading of Paradise Lost: while hisessay is richly suggestive and offers a fresh new way of thinking about thepoem, it overstates its case in its eagerness to make Milton a proleptic envi-ronmentalist. Pici finds in Milton’s Paradise “[s]ubtle undercurrents of greenphilosophy and ways of living, even certain inchoate ideas that presage anecological science” (2001, 35). In support of this reading, he leans heavily on


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Milton’s invocation of the pastoral, a “literary form with a distinctly greencomplexion.” “[P]astoral works,” he writes, “intensify our perceptions ofnature and place” (36).To his credit, Pici does concede that the pastoral hastraditionally been more complicated than these claims would suggest; heconcedes, for instance, that “there are going to be fantastic attributes ascribedto any pastoral Arcadia” (38). But in acknowledging what seems to me adecisive point—that the pastoral idealizes and thus fictionalizes nature—hedoes not, at least to my satisfaction, confront that point.What are the conse-quences, we want to ask, of Milton’s invocation of a patently artificial andconventional idyll to describe the main natural setting of his poem? To pur-sue that line of questioning is to complicate and ultimately enrich ourunderstanding of the attitudes toward nature exemplified in Paradise Lost.Pici’s discussion of the pastoral, and indeed his essay as a whole, willfullymisses the forest for the trees: it focuses on highly selective details to paint itspicture, conveniently ignoring or downplaying those which do not fit. Inprecisely this sense (and with no little irony) Pici’s argument is itself an exer-cise in the pastoral.This is not to say I necessarily dismiss his conclusions. Ionly mean to suggest that his essay would have revealed much more aboutMilton’s text had he grappled with its fascinating contradictions. To speakmore generally, when ecocritics let the “eco-” outweigh the “criticism,” ourwork tends to be less persuasive.

I I I .

Before leaving the subject of the pastoral, I want to pause over Pope’s oft-cited remarks on the form in his “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry”:

If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this idea along with us,that pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we arenot to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as theymay be conceived then to have been . . .We must therefore use some illu-sion to render a pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing the bestside only of a shepherd’s life, and in concealing its miseries. (Pope 1967, I.259-60)

Once again Pope’s neoclassical training is evident. “Nature” here is not thephysical world but an ideal, accessible only by human reason and imagina-tion.To “copy Nature,” then, is to copy an internal rather than an externallandscape. Many other writers echoed Pope on this point, including Johnsonand Sir Joshua Rey n o l d s , who maintained that the best art (literary or visual)c o nveyed a “general idea” of its object rather than distracting part i c u l a rs .Gilpin saw the ideal picturesque landscape in a like manner.“ S c o rn thou then/ On p a rts minute to dwe l l ,” he writes in one of his few poems on the pictur-e s q u e,“The ch a racter / Of objects aim at, not the nice detail” ( 5 3 7 - 5 4 4 ) .1 0

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Numerous critics have taken these writers to task for their apparent eva-sion of the material. Bohls, for instance, writes that “[t]heorists of the pictur-esque like Gilpin [exhibit] . . . a strategy of willed distance from particularobjects in the world and the needs and desires that connect or cathect indi-viduals to them” (1995, 67). In The Country and the City,Williams argues thatthe eighteenth-century pastoral reinforced the status quo of agricultural cap-italism by neatly erasing the laborers who made production possible. Newhistoricist critics such as Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson have leviedsimilar critiques against the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth. Each ofthese critical responses focuses on representation, the relationship betweenliterature and empirical reality, privileging or censuring literary texts accord-ing to how fully and accurately they represent the real world. Much recentecocriticism takes a similar approach, judging a work’s greenness accordingto the accuracy of its descriptions of nature. For example, in his essay“Romantic Ecology,”Tony Pinkney praises the poetry of John Clare for its“mode of attention to local flora and fauna,” which “has much in commonwith natural history writing in its devoted precision to the creature and habi-tat before it” (1998, 414). By contrast, he finds Shelley’s “To a Skylark” to be“arrogant” and “exploitative” because it regards the bird as a mere symbol,“representative of the poet’s own inner aspirations,” instead of “respect[ing it]in its objectivity” (414).

I happen to think Pinkney misreads Shelley’s poem, but I want to makea more general point about the critical premise exemplified here. It seems tome the ecocritical preference for accuracy in literary representations is, atleast potentially, a version of the uncritical literal-mindedness I have alreadycautioned against. Pinkney avers that poetry “should seek to attain the den-sity and physicality of the natural objects and processes it describes” (1998,414). But this ideal, this wish for a kind of transparency between word andthing, seems based on a too-simple view of referentiality. In fact, just as care-ful scrutiny of eighteenth-century attitudes toward nature reveals equivoca-tions and complexities not apparent on first glance, so too does careful con-sideration of linguistic representation reveal a fundamental instability. Afterall, no matter how scientifically accurate our descriptions are, literature cannever recover or replicate real nature; it can only construct “nature” in quo-tation marks.The valorization of accuracy amounts to a wish that “nature”(a linguistic representation) resemble nature (the real deal) as closely as pos-sible. Such an approach seems at best drastically narrow, at worst misguidedin its assumptions about literary representation. Dana Phillips illustrates thepoint in his warning that “[i]f ecocriticism limits itself to reading realistictexts realistically, its practitioners may be reduced to an umpire’s role, squint-


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ing to see if a given description of a painted trillium or a live oak tree is itselfwell-painted and lively” (1999, 586).

Even putting aside that objection, one might question whether “preci-sion” or referentiality is necessarily more responsible from an ecological pointof view than symbolization or figuration. As Lawrence Buell cautions,“mimesis . . . threatens nature by tempting us to accept cozening copies forthe real thing” (1999, 103).11 It could be argued that if “nature” really wereexactly like nature, we would have no incentive for saving the latter. I do notmean to suggest that mimetic representations of nature are somehow anti-ecological, or that because language is imperfect it can convey nothing at allabout reality. Nor do I mean to imply that I find shades of green in the neo-classical notion of Nature: on the contrary, I would speculate that part ofwhat made this theory attractive was a need to tame the unnerving other-ness of nature, to humanize it. (Certainly in his Journey to the Western Isles ofScotland we sense Johnson’s palpable anxiety about landscape, and see himstruggling to keep this threat in check.) Rather, my point is that the rela-tionship between literature and its referent, between “nature” and nature, isfar more complicated than much current ecocritical scholarship reflects. Inmy view, ecocritics would do well to move beyond the constraints of the lit-eral and the empirical by confronting directly the instability of linguistic rep-resentation. This applies whether their subject is realistic, mimetic literature(which seeks to narrow the gap between language and empirical reality) orimpressionistic, highly figurative literature (which draws attention to thatgap—often in illuminating ways).12

Important enough on its own merits, the debate over representation is,furthermore, another instance of how current thinking about literature andthe environment finds precedent in the long eighteenth century. The eco-critical preference for fidelity to empirical detail and scientific fact is a directlegacy of thinkers such as Newton and Locke; hence it should come as nosurprise that we find writers of that age, too, commending naturalisticdescription. A 1777 tract by John Aikin, brother of Anna Barbauld, is a casein point. In his Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry,Aikin com-plains that among “those poets who have occasionally introduced thedescription of natural objects,” it is not uncommon

to find their descriptions faint, obscure, and ill characterized; the propertiesof things mistaken, and incongruous parts employed in the composition ofthe same picture. This is owing to a too cursory and general survey ofobjects, without exploring their minuter distinctions and mutual relations;and is only to be rectified by accurate and attentive observation, conduct-ed upon somewhat of a scientific plan.As the artist who has not studied thebody with anatomical precision, and examined the proportions of every

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limb, . . . cannot produce a just and harmonious representation of thehuman frame; so the descriptive poet, who does not habituate himself toview the several objects of nature minutely, and in comparison with eachother, must ever fail in giving his pictures the congruity and animation ofreal life. (Aikin 1970, 9-11)

The aversion to abstraction exemplified here is not restricted to literary crit-icism. Indeed, it could be argued that the greatest expression of that senti-ment was the period’s newest literary genre, the novel.As Ian Watt and oth-ers have contended, the novel inaugurates an “age of realism” in literary his-t o ry, a decisive turn away from the mists of poetry and romance towa rd thec l a rity of precise empirical descri p t i o n . A c c o rding to this conve n t i o n a lv i ew, the novel reflects the most profound influence of Lockean empiri c i s mon literature.

Since I am especially interested in phenomenological representations ofthe physical landscape—that is, as it is mediated or transformed by humanconsciousness—and since such descriptions tend to be found in lyric poetry,the majority of my examples in this essay come from that genre. But I canimagine an ecocritical study, of the sort I have been advocating here, thatfocuses on the novel. Such a study might look exclusively at realistic proseand the limits of that mode of representation; or it might problematize theeasy generic distinctions we make between the novel and poetry. After all,even if the novel tends toward realism, plenty of eighteenth-century novel-ists represent the landscape subjectively, or phenomenologically, rather thanobjectively, or mimetically; Ann Radcliffe is a fine example.13 Moreover,plenty of eighteenth-century poets describe nature in detailed, scientificallyprecise language. Blanford Parker goes so far as to call naturalism one of thedefinitive characteristics of Augustan poetry:“The whole notion of descrip-tive poetry is the invention of that period. . . . The natural world and theworld of incidental appearances . . . burst forth and flooded the scene of eigh-teenth-century writing” (1998, 18). For his part, Aikin praises a number ofpoets for their scientific description, especially Thomson, with his “unrivalledexcellence in delineations from nature” (1970, 41). For “it is in that trulyexcellent and original poem,Thomson’s Seasons, that we are to look for thegreatest variety of genuine observations in natural history” (57). Of course,Thomson’s debt to natural science has since been well-documented byrecent critics.14

My point is that while dichotomies such as realism versus anti-realism,the novel versus poetry, and so on provide a helpful framework for approach-ing the issue of representation, we must understand them as heuristic andprovisional.The fact is that eighteenth-century writers, whichever directionthey might lean, often found themselves caught between the impulse to rep-


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resent nature faithfully and the realization that language is inadequate to thetask.Thomson explicitly acknowledges this dilemma in The Seasons:

who can PaintLike nature? Can Imagination boast,Amid its gay creation, Hues like hers?

[And] if Fancy thenUnequal fails beneath the pleasing Task;Ah what shall Language do? (Thomson 1981, Spring 468-75)

So it is that the same period that ushered in the novel and the rise of anobjective, scientific world view also produced the sublime, with its emphasison the elliptical, the figurative, and the obscure. But the relationship betweenthese two opposing impulses is not so much dualistic as dialectical.Understanding eighteenth-century literary history in this way puts us in aposition to appreciate more fully the legacy of philosophical empiricism: forwe might speculate that the very insistence on literary realism betrays anacute awareness of the lack of fit between text and world, image and thing—the very discontinuity that underlies the sublime. Indeed, it was empiricismitself, specifically Lockean empiricism, that in the late seventeenth centuryeffectively shattered the felt continuity of experience by theorizing the frag-ile and incomplete relation between thing and mental image, as well as thearbitrary relation between mental image and verbal sign. Locke’s desire forepistemological certitude evolved, paradoxically, into the anxiety about thepossibility of any knowledge that would trouble Hume and other philoso-phers. As Thomas Reid writes in his Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764),“There is no phenomenon in nature more unaccountable, than the inter-course that is carried on between the mind and the external world” (1997,91). Concomitantly, Enlightenment science’s quest to know the worldempirically had certain undesirable side-effects, including the unsettling ofreligious faith and the underscoring of human limitations. The more welearned, the more we realized how little we knew.

Thomas Weiskel hypothesizes that the eighteenth-century sublime isboth a reaction to and a product of these broader intellectual developments.“In one sense,” he writes, the sublime

was a response to the darker implications of Locke’s psychology and whatthat psychology represented of changes in perception. If the only route tothe intellect lies through the senses, belief in a supernatural Being finds itselfinsecure. God had to be saved, even if He had to marry the world ofappearances.And so, in the natural sublime, He did.The first development,in the seventeenth century, was the identification of the Deity’s traditionalattributes—infinity, immensity, coexistence—with the vastness of spacenewly discovered by an emergent astronomy. (Weiskel 1976, 14)

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In other words, the sublime served in part to compensate for the “darkerimplications” of empiricism (both philosophical and scientific) by promisingto restore the order and harmony to the universe that had been called intoquestion.Therefore,Weiskel concludes, “Scientific thinking and the aesthet-ic of the sublime are correlative expressions of an episteme in which order isarbitrary” (1976, 16). Both are responses to the opacity of nature. Referentialdescription, with its promise of ordering the world, of “regulat[ing] confu-sion” in Johnson’s memorable phrase from the Dictionary, may also be under-stood as such a response.

I V.

I have tended to stress here how writers of the long eighteenth centurysought to transform nature—sometimes physically, but more often imagina-tively. Yet nature is as often the agent or vehicle for transformation as itsobject: after all, human beings also are changed by their encounters with thephysical environment. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver,Matt Bramble from Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, Wordsworth’s poet of theThe Prelude, and Byron’s Childe Harold are all characters who undergo achange upon leaving the comfort and familiarity of the place that had beenhome. Or, in another version of this motif, a character alone in nature maybecome “transported” to a higher, visionary realm, professing to gain insightas a result. Such is the experience of Radcliffe’s heroine Emily St. Aubert inthis passage from The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794):

From the consideration of His works, her mind arose to the adoration ofthe Deity, in His goodness and power; wherever she turned her view,whether on the sleeping earth, or to the vast regions of space, glowing withworlds beyond the reach of human thought, the sublimity of God, and themajesty of His presence appeared. Her eyes were filled with tears of awfullove and admiration; and she felt that pure devotion, superior to all the dis-tinctions of human system, which lifts the soul above this world, and seemsto expand it into a nobler nature; such devotion as can, perhaps, only beexperienced, when the mind, rescued, for a moment, from the humblenessof earthly considerations, aspires to contemplate His power in the sublimi-ty of His works[.] (Radcliffe 1980, 47-48)

Barbauld describes something similar in “A Summer Evening’s Meditation.”Her speaker watches intently as the sun gradually sets, the sky turns to azure,and the stars appear in the heavens. As she meditates on the starry sky, her“soul / Turns inward, and beholds a stranger there / Of high descent, andmore than mortal rank; / An embryo GOD; a spark of fire divine, / Whichmust burn on for ages . . .” (1994, 53-57). In both the Radcliffe and Barbauld


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passages, nature is described as a vehicle through which the characters pur-port to achieve a spiritual experience.

H oweve r, as we have come to expect from eighteenth-century re p re-sentations of nature, t h e re is more to the picture than first meets the eye. Iconclude this essay with a brief ecocritical reading of these texts, with par-ticular attention to the Barbauld poem.This re a d i n g , I hope, will illustratethe critical and pedagogical benefits of the brand of ecocriticism I haves ketched here.

When I have taught “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” in undergradu-ate classes, my students have tended to fixate on the lines quoted above. Mostof them are very attracted to the idea that we have in us a spark of God(however defined), and that nature plays a role in helping us reach this stateof enlightenment. Certainly the notion that through nature we can accessour spiritual selves continues to be a deeply held conviction in our culture.Examples from popular entertainment can be brought into the classroom toemphasize the point; I have hauled in a CD player and had my students lis-ten to Johnny Cash’s “Bury Me Not,” from his 1994 album AmericanRecordings. The song includes these lines: “Lord, I’ve never lived wherechurches grow / I loved creation better as it stood / . . . I know that othersfind you in the light / That sifted down through tinted window panes / Andyet I seem to feel you near tonight / In this dim, quiet starlight on theplains.” Even students cynical or judgmental about such sentiment (or forwhom Johnny Cash is as much a dinosaur as Anna Barbauld) will at leastacknowledge its currency and wide appeal.

Once students have made this connection with the poem, we turn backto the text with redoubled attention. For a closer look at either the Radcliffepassage or the Barbauld poem reveals that neither is reducible to a straightfor-ward expression of “natural religion.” Both texts are complicated in interest-ing ways by the provisions and hesitations attached to them. Radcliffe’s toneis surely sanguine, but the force of the vision is diminished by a series of qual-ifying words in the final sentence:“seems,”“perhaps,”“for a moment.” Eventhe word “aspires” implies a distance between the subject and God: the mindmerely “aspires to contemplate His power” but, as far as we know, does notin fact realize its aspirations.15 Consistently in Radcliffe’s novels, the vision-ary is apprehended only in fleeting glimpses, obliquely and indefinitely—notunlike the specters which appear to haunt her novels but then fade with thelight of day.

A similar rhetorical countercurrent is discernible in the lines from “ASummer Evening’s Meditation.” The speaker’s recognition of her inchoatedivinity is couched in language that undermines the ostensible joy of thatdiscovery, specifically with the words “stranger” and the oddly biological

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“embryo.” The undeniable suggestion of unfamiliarity, of alterity, barelymasks a latent anxiety that is amplified by the pun on “stranger”: thisencounter yields not only estrangement but also strangeness. And if“embryo” evokes any kind of visual image at all, then that word would seemto contribute to this disconcerting sense of the strange. (Another pop culturereference fits uncannily well with this passage: the closing shot of StanleyKubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which, from the depths ofspace, an embryo mysteriously appears.) One might object that “embryo”could have only positive associations for the writer who assumed the personaof a pregnant woman in her poem “To a little Being who is expected soonto become visible.” That the word “embryo” does not appear in that poem,and that Barbauld herself never experienced a pregnancy, may or may not berelevant to that objection.What does seem relevant is the word’s appearancea few dozen lines later in “A Summer Evening’s Meditation.” The speakerimagines her soul soaring through space, past planets, stars, and finally “To thedread confines of eternal night, / To solitudes of vast unpeopled space, / Thedeserts of creation, wide and wild; / Where embryo systems and unkindledsuns / Sleep in the womb of chaos” (1994, 93-97). Here, “embryo” and“womb” reside in a bleak realm of darkness and abject solitude. Indeed, it isprecisely in Chaos where Barbauld, in richly allusive Miltonic blank verse,places her poetic speaker: this is the forbidding region through which Satanflew on his way to corrupt the human race, depicted in Books II and III ofParadise Lost. In his poem Milton explains that Chaos is where sinners willeventually end up, finding there “Fit retribution” (1977, III.454); amongthese unlucky souls will be “Embryos, and Idiots, Eremites and Friars” (474;my emphasis).

These observations would seem to alter our perspective on the originalpassage, Barbauld’s apparent presentation of spiritual illumination inspired bythe natural world. Nature has led her to a fleeting glimpse of the deity, orsomething like the deity in herself, but her dubious attitude toward thisexperience is betrayed by the language she uses to describe it. And the sec-ond half of the poem confirms that this experience will adduce no exulta-tion or insight. Instead, the speaker demonstrates a yearning desire to soar stillhigher:“Ye citadels of light, and seats of GODS! . . . O be it lawful now / Totread the hallow’d circles of your courts, / And with mute wonder anddelighted awe / Approach your burning confines” (1994, 61-71).The passagestrongly recalls Young’s Night Thoughts, not only because it invokes sublimerhetoric to describe sublime aspirations, but also because those aspirationsexplicitly involve a flight from the natural world:“On fancy’s wild and rov-ing wing I sail,” she writes, “From the green borders of the peopled earth”(73-74). More subtly but perhaps equally significantly, Barbauld’s presenta-


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tion of a character who vainly desires to be Godlike is reminiscent ofMilton’s Satan. Thus, the passage may be seen to foreshadow the speaker’sfrightening journey into Chaos and old night.

E m e r ging here is an understanding of “A Summer Eve n i n g ’sMeditation” very different from our initial impression of the poem.Barbauld’s starting point is the idea expressed succinctly by Radcliffe, that“from the humbleness of earthly considerations, [the mind] aspires to con-template His power in the sublimity of His works.” But Barbauld does notgo in the direction we might expect: she proceeds to call into question theethics of that desire, which in any case is never clearly or fully realized in thepoem.The speaker’s Pindaric flight begins to sputter (“fancy droops, / Andthought astonish’d stops her bold career” [1994, 97-98]) as she continues herfutile search for the deity:“Where shall I seek thy presence? how unblam’d /Invoke thy dread perfection?” (101-02).The line is another allusion to BookIII of Paradise Lost: “May I express thee unblam’d?,” Milton’s narrator won-ders aloud, referring to his poetic representation of God. However, the toneof Barbauld’s question is more searching, more desperate than Milton’s.Wecan detect a trace of guilt here, as if the speaker is beginning to blame her-self for seeking to locate and identify with divine power.This tone of self-reproach leads into the poem’s conclusion:

But now my soul unus’d to stretch her powersIn flight so daring, drops her weary wing,And seeks again the known accustom’d spot,Drest up with sun, and shade, and lawns, and streams,A mansion fair and spacious for its guest,And full replete with wonders. Let me hereContent and grateful, wait th’appointed timeAnd ripen for the skies: the hour will comeWhen all these splendours bursting on my sightShall stand unveil’d, and to my ravish’d senseUnlock the glories of the world unknown. (Barbauld 1994, 112-22)

Suggesting that “the glories of the world unknown” are to be found only indeath—not in the heavens but in Heaven—the closing lines further under-mine her earlier, supposedly epiphanic encounter. For if correct, if trueepiphany is attainable only in the afterlife, then what indeed did the speakerexperience earlier? Was this episode merely wishful thinking, the result of anoverzealous (and not blameless) imagination?

The poem may not offer any definitive answers. It does, however, inviteus to reevaluate the concept it had earlier presented at face value, the notionthat nature offers a conduit to spiritual enlightenment and, indeed, to self-apotheosis. As in the Radcliffe passage, Barbauld’s speaker seems to want

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nature to lead to God, but that idealistic goal is subsequently revealed to beelusive, dangerous, perhaps even unethical. In this opposition between sub-lime aspiration and sobering humility, the poem instantiates the tension char-acteristic of eighteenth-century attitudes toward nature.Yet if the speaker’sultimate realization is represented as a loss, there is compensation: the“known accustom’d spot” to which she returns, a domestic space of “sun, andshade, and lawns, and streams,” is recognized to be “full replete” with its own“wonders.” She has reached an insight after all.Through a kind of via natu -raliter negativa, she has discovered that the illumination she sought was withher all along, right in her own back yard.The domestic “wonders” she hasdiscovered may not rival the dizzying heights to which she had aspired—surely they are much simpler, much humbler—but what they lack in inten-sity they make up for in proximity and stability, in the assurance that they arereal and accessible.

An ecocritical reading of the poem must account for the complexity ofits presentation of nature, or more precisely, of the relationship betweennature and the human mind. If we, or our students, are tempted to read thepoem reductively, it may be because we seek confirmation of our ownromantic ideas about starry skies (or majestic canyons, or ancient forests, orvast oceans) and their capacity to inspire. I am not arguing that such ideasshould be rejected—on the contrary, I embrace them, at least in principle—nor am I saying Barbauld rejects them. What the poem offers instead is awarning about the potential risks involved in seeing nature as a source ofspiritual enlightenment. Implying that in order to be ethical our relationshipto nature must be characterized by restraint and humility, it formulates a cri-tique of the excesses of the “egotistical sublime.” And ecocriticism, byemphasizing the possibility that we share the speaker’s aspirations, helps us seethat we too should be aware of these dangers, with their real-life conse-quences. “We always have to be wary,” Kate Soper writes, “of the ways inwhich romantic ideology may serve as the cover for the continued exploita-tion of nature” (2000, 123). This is the obligation of the ecocritic. LikeBarbauld, we must ask hard questions. By doing so, and by recognizing thatthe line between literary criticism and self-criticism can often be blurry, welay the foundation for an ethical approach to reading, teaching, and analyz-ing literature.

N o t e s1 These lines come from an earlier edition of The Seasons. See Sambrook’s foot-

note to Autumn ll.1033-36 (Thomson 1981, 187).2 The idea of transcendence may seem to play a relatively minor role in eigh-

teenth-century British aesthetic theory, especially if we grant Burke’s Philosophical


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Enquiry central status in that discourse. However, while it may be true that no writeron the sublime offers an explicit theoretical discussion of transcendence until 1790,when Kant’s Critique of Judgment was first published in Germany, the subject was nev-ertheless raised, if obliquely or implicitly, by many British theorists (includingDennis, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Baillie). In any case, the association of sublimitywith transcendence seems clear in eighteenth-century prose and poetry.

3 I exclude the beautiful here because it is less directly relevant to wildness, thecharacteristic of nature embraced (if ambivalently) by eighteenth-century writers. InKant’s formulation, the beautiful is a feeling of pleasure aroused by a sense of the har-mony between mind and nature, or, to be more precise, between the formal quali-ties of an object and the imagination’s representation of it.Thus, in direct contrast tothe sublime, it is predicated on the continuity of the human and natural realms.

4 Wordsworth (1979, 11. ll 149-84); Austen (1971, 86-87). Although first pub-lished in 1818, Northanger Abbey was written during 1798-1799, when the pictur-esque was still very much in vogue; its popularity had begun to fade by the time thenovel came out.

5 See this work for a discussion of the influence, both direct and indirect, ofBritish literature and aesthetic theory on Kant’s theory of the sublime.

6 Addison opens this essay by writing,“If we consider the works of nature andart as they are qualified to entertain the imagination,we shall find the last very defec-tive in comparison of the former” (1965, 3.548).

7 For a more detailed discussion of this apparent contradiction in Addison, seeSaccamano (1991, 83-106).

8 On the concept of concordia discors in Pope, see Wasserman (1959); and Andrews(1989, 17-18).

9 Arthur Lovejoy traces the Aristotelian and Platonic roots of that concept; seeLecture II, 24-66. Pope’s treatment of the “Great Chain of Being” is most direct insection viii of the first Epistle of Essay on Man (1733):

See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth,All matter quick, and bursting into birth.Above, how wide! how deep extend below!Vast chain of being, which from God began,Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see,No glass can reach! from Infinite to thee,From thee to Nothing!—On superior powersWere we to press, inferior might on ours:Or in the full creation leave a void,Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed:From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. (Pope 1993, ll. 233-46) 10 The poem is appended to Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque

Travel, and on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting(London: Blamire, 1792).This book is divided into two separately paginated sections,

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the first consisting of the “Three Essays,” and the second the poem, along withexplanatory notes to the main text.

11 Phillips criticizes Buell for what he calls “the central claim of Buell’s book”:that “ecocriticism should focus on recovering a sense of the ‘experiential or referen-tial aspects’ of literature” (1999, 585). Although I strongly agree with Phillips’s gen-eral argument, I find unfair his choice of Buell as the exemplar of ecocritical resist-ance to theory. I give Buell credit for at least confronting theoretical questionsinvolving reference, though I do see him ultimately hedging his bets (as, for exam-ple, in his statement that “it seems to me more urgent, being more scandalous to cur-rent critical orthodoxy, to stress writerly interest in fidelity to the world of objects”[1999, 463]).

12 As is probably apparent, my thinking on representation is influenced by post-s t ructuralist theory and cri t i c i s m , and more specifically by deconstru c t i o n i s tapproaches to reading.Although I have a degree of sympathy for the view that cer-tain deconstructionists, Derrida for example, appear to exhibit an indifferencetoward nature with their strict focus on textuality, I do not regard this as a reason tojettison their insights altogether.After all, ecocritics are literary critics: our subject isfinally texts, not trees.What poststructuralist theory offers is a vocabulary for articu-lating the sophisticated and elusive forms of referentiality we find in literary works(such as Shelley’s “To a Skylark”). Addressing this point, Cathy Caruth writes that“this rethinking of our notions of reference does not . . . close down our access toreality, but rather opens up an inquiry in which our experience can be rethought andorganized anew” (1995, 3).Thus deconstructive criticism offers a tool to account forthose aspects of the world not transparently or mimetically represented in the text.

For an extensive critique of poststructuralism from an ecocritical point of view,see Scigaj (1999, especially Chpts. 1 and 2).Although I think Scigaj ultimately mis-represents poststructuralism, he at least gives it close attention and concedes that itcan have value (see especially 273-74). For an ecocritical study that is somewhatmore receptive to poststructuralist thinking, see Mazel (2000).

13 See the beginning of Section IV of this essay for an example of such adescription from Radcliffe.

14 See Nicolson (1946), Davie (1963), and Jones (1966). In his editor’s intro-duction to the Oxford edition of the poem, James Sambrook writes, “the languageof natural description . . . in The Seasons is drawn freely from the regular, exact vocab-ulary of early eighteenth-century writing” (1981, xxi).

15 Robert Miles makes a similar claim about the following passage, whichdescribes Radcliffe’s heroine Ellena from The Italian:

Here, gazing upon the stupendous imagery around her, looking, as it were,beyond the awful veil which obscures the features of the Deity, and con-ceals Him from the eyes of his creatures, dwelling as with a present God inthe midst of his sublime works; with a mind thus elevated, how insignifi-cant would appear to her the transactions, and the sufferings of this world!(Qtd. Miles 1995, 125)


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Miles comments: “Radcliffe’s subjunctive ‘as it were’ registers the tenuous nature ofthe sublime glimpse: it is only as if one beheld God’s face behind the veil” (1995,125).

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: ClarendonPress.

Aikin, John. 1970. An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. New York:Garland.

Andrews,Malcolm. 1989. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourismin Britain, 1760-1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Austen, Jane. 1971. Northanger Abbey. Ed. John Davie. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1994. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Ed. WilliamMcCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft.Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Barrell, John. 1972. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: AnApproach to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bate, Jonathan. 1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition.London: Routledge.

Bohls, Elizabeth. 1995. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Buell, Lawrence. 1999. “The Ecocritical Insurgency.” New Literary History 30.3(Summer): 699-712.

Burke, Edmund. 1986. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of theSublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton. Notre Dame: University of NotreDame Press.

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Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century