Beyond the Bower

Romantic male poets typically describe bowers as lush, ecological spaces for quiet introspection and poetic creation within a distinctly masculinize landscape. In contrast to these idyllic spaces in Nature, the word bower meant something quite different for many nineteenth-century British women writers. For Romantic female poets, these garden bowers were isolated and fragmented spaces where artistic production was inhibited rather than nurtured. Their poems imagine a very different kind of bower, one that is aligned most directly with a second definition of the term: namely, a lady’s apartment in which “embowered” characters are trapped in interior spaces. These barren, claustrophobic bowers offered the antithesis of the freedom and inspiration male poets of the Romantic-era associated with outdoor garden bowers. Poet, essayist, and activist Caroline Norton demonstrates how these artificial domestic prisons produced paralysis and self-division rather than comfort and poetic inspiration. Cut off from the ecological spaces available to their male contemporaries, Norton’s female characters are silenced, distracted, and confined unable to leave their stifling bowers to create space for themselves in the natural world. Many nineteenth-century women writers reconfigured the Romantic garden bower as an unnatural lady’s bower from which female artists must flee in order to create.

Toward A Political Ecology in Lydia Maria Child’s “Chocorua’s Curse”

“Chocorua's Curse,” Lydia Maria Child's retelling of a White Mountain legend, found its way into middle class Boston homes through its publication in the 1830 gift book, The Token, accompanied by an engraving based on a Thomas Cole painting. Child's short sketch contrasts with typical iterations of the tale—and with the several paintings of the dramatic pyramidal peak by Cole—by its inclusion of homes spaces, a female figure, and a sense of the landscape as a watershed and not merely the iconic mountain peak. In addition, using ideas about household economy, educational transmission, and sympathy, Child prefigures ways of writing about the ecological flow of energy and materials through systems that include human and nonhuman entities. With this reading, the poison intended for a “troublesome” fox is an essential part of the subsequent chain of revenge killings and doubles with the final curse on the waters. Using the trope of sympathetic transmission, I argue that Child anticipates ecological thinking through a gendered lens. Material and emotional energy move through human and nonhuman entities, and mindful consideration can perhaps thwart the disaster caused by the men who, as critics have noted, seem disengaged from larger social systems.

Ecocultural Contact and the Panarchy of Place

Margaret Fuller travelled to the Great Lakes region in 1843 on the trail of the Anglo-Ojibway poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. She had seen enough to recognize Schoolcraft’s immense promise—a “mine of poesy” that might serve as the raw material of a new American identity based on very different coordinates of gender, race, and culture than the ones settling into place in the antebellum United States. Fuller was too late to meet Schoolcraft, who had died the year before, but with her help, she learned to see the natural world, and the society taking shape in this colonial frontier, in an entirely new way. This essay uses a new materialist focus on the environment to examine how these writers allowed the natural world to complicate and counter the gendered ideologies of settler colonialism spreading over the land. The interplay of these elements in these writers works—American culture, Ojibwe culture, and the environment—is an example of ecocultural contact, one alive to the panarchic energies that often flourish beneath a dominant ideology. Fuller and Johnston, in particular, feature the voices of trees in their radically unsettling work. Reading these two women writers together offers a new approach to ecofeminism.

A Space of “unwonted liberty and pleasure”

Gardening and botany emerged as independent and stimulating pursuits permitted, and even encouraged, for women, in the nineteenth century. Drawing on the cultural history of these pursuits, this paper examines how Charlotte Brontë uses gardens as critical sites in the Bildungsromans of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. I argue that corresponding to this culture, and given the restricted locations in which the traditional female Bildungsroman may play out, Brontë’s gardens function as sites of liberation and self-discovery and are a fundamental part of the heroines’ journey into adulthood. They become crucial places for communication, courtship, and power relations, and of escape, sanctuary and introspection; public yet private spaces in which young women might negotiate and discover an empowered self. Critics have tended to treat gardens in the Brontë novels as Edenic, or as having pedagogical or moral associations. But taking an ecofeminist approach, particularly drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s work on trans-corporeality, I argue that Charlotte Brontë actively interrogates the relationship between Victorian ideologies of nature and the construction of female selfhood. Brontë valorizes the natural environment that was being eroded and exploited, appropriating gardens as a feminine territory that sustains and enriches the individual, albeit within the safe bounds of the domestic sphere.

Afterword

It is worth repeating the roll call: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child. The essays in Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century...

The Place of Objects

As British female writers, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot perceived their environs with keen awareness of the intra-action of the female body with matter. The environs, often linked to the materiality of natural phenomena, is open space, which is inhabited by animate and inanimate entities as objects intra-relating with each other. Through an interpretive reading of Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), my objective is to reconsider the female body in the novels as part of an assemblage of distinct objects (i.e., subject treated as object) in the context of a neo-materialist approach to ecofeminism. My attempt is to read the female body in relation to entities, yielding a perception of the body, which examines the body-as-matter within narrative discourse. The female body, however, is not meant to be constituted as a subject-less object without agency that, in effect, results in disempowerment. Instead, my discussion examines selected instances by which the female body has been entangled with more-than-human nature, revealing the vibrancy of the female body and its agential link to matter.

Animating Athens

In the early nineteenth century, a revival of all things ancient Greek opened opportunities for women on either side of the Atlantic to study Greek history, literature, and myth as the products of a powerful world apart from their own, and to re-envision that world through fictional dialogues, sketches, and romances. While the resulting body of literature has been studied for its contributions to modern discourses on aesthetics, sexuality, and politics, little work has been done to understand how this popular, Romantic Hellenism served to expand upon an enlightenment-oriented environmental perspective that sought to counter the first effects of industrialization. This essay takes such a tack. It situates Wright's and Child's comments on the gender of suns, rivers, landscapes, and polities in "A Few Days in Athens" and “Philothea: A Grecian Romance,” two short, philosophical fictions that emphasize the pristine and luminous, yet fundamentally endangered natural worlds of ancient Greece. I argue that their visions of the Greek environments of the deep past as subject to cycles of declension and regeneration offer model for future theories of ecology.

The Manifold Ecologies of Lady Audley’s Secret

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was a spectacular transatlantic success. The novel was also surprisingly transgressive, not least because it reacted against the way in which the transhistorical association of women and nature was itself becoming the basis of a gendered ecology of the household. In the novel’s opening chapter, for example, Lady Audley and the gardens of Audley Court together appear domesticated and docile: oikos has been subjugated by logos. Yet, Braddon creates this world simply in order to subvert it. Lady Audley is, it transpires, an adulteress who is perfectly willing to attempt murder to protect her secret. By relating the novel to material feminism, it also becomes apparent that Audley Court is itself agential, and its transcorporeal intra-actions with human others suggest that its identity is, like Lady Audley's, not fixed, but on the contrary, constantly changing. In turn, the novel’s many, mutable ecologies point to the possibility of new forms of ecological understanding.

Ants Become Giants

In her pioneering work on the shapes and meanings of fictional and actual space, Judith Fryer coined the phrase “felicitous space” (1986) to refer to space that “frees the imagination” (293). In particular, Fryer explores how the landscape in works by Edith Wharton and Willa Cather functions as a spiritual ground upon which girls and women can build their lives. In the essay, I build upon Fryer’s concept of the liberating nature of land and apply it to the ever-popular Little House series of books written by Cather and Wharton contemporary, Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957). While Wilder did not publish her books until the 1930s, her series takes place in the late nineteenth century, from roughly 1870 to 1890, and so she can effectively be studied as a nineteenth century author. I argue that Wilder’s Laura offers unique possibilities for nineteenth-century female identity, as she is grounded in the natural world rather than in a fabricated aesthetic realm. Rather than conform to traditional feminine ideals of the time, Laura expresses the freedom and courage embodied by the masculine Western “hero” and, thus, presents a much-needed Western “heroine.”

Beyond the Binary

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of binary opposition considers oppositional categories as a fundamental effect of human cognition. Humans, Lévi-Strauss argues, structure the world and their existence in it by way of symbolic oppositions that are represented and negotiated analogically. Nineteenth-century writing about nonhuman nature has been commonly regarded as a male-dominated field focusing on encounters with nature as a feminized other that resides in contraposition to man and manmade settings. This essay seeks to theorize the inconsistencies represented in feminized nature, to lay bare the ways in which scholarly interpretations of nature writing are traditionally structured around binary boundaries, and to reassess the conceptual framework of feminist geography, which has historically employed a dichotomous structure to expose traditional representations of gender. Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals each illustrate an awareness of the transcorporeality of human bodies and ecological spaces as enmeshed in a complex, shifting ontology. Both writers attempt to reconstruct an inclusive “non-gendered” ecology that transforms the binary landscapes of “village-woods” and “island-garden” into non-hierarchical vistas that de-enforce the subservience of nature, making these spaces compatible, harmonious, and synergistic.