ECO CRITICISM
Eco Criticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the
physical environment. Actually it takes
its literary bearings from three major 19th C American writers,
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) and Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862). They were the essayists and
philosophers known collectively as the transcendentalists. Emerson’s ‘Nature’ talks about the impact of
nature upon him. Fullers ‘Summer on the
lakes, during 1843’, deals with her encounter with the American landscape at
large. Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ is an account
of his two-year stay from 1845, in a hut he had built on the shore of Walden Pond. These three books can be considered as the
foundational works of American ‘eco centered’ writing.
However, the
terms ‘eco criticism’ and ‘Green Studies’ were used to denote a critical
approach in the USA in the late 1980’s and in the UK in the early 1990’s. In the USA the acknowledged founder is Cheryl
Glotfelty with her essay ‘The Eco criticism reader: Landmarks in literary
Ecology’. It was she who revived the
term ‘eco criticism’ to refer the critical field that had previously been known
as ‘The Study of Nature Writing’.
Similarly the UK version of eco criticism takes its bearings from the
British Romanticism of 1790’s. The
founding figure on the British side is the critic Jonathan Bate who wrote
‘Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition’ in 1991. However, both these American and British variants
warn us of environmental threats emanating from governmental, industrial,
commercial and neo-colonial forces.
Eco
criticism deals with how environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the
environment and attitudes are presented and analyzed. This has gained a lot of attention during
recent years due to higher social emphasis on environmental destruction and
increased technology. Thus it has become
a broad one that includes green studies, eco feminism; eco poetics, deep
ecology and bio-politics. As there was
earlier a utilitarian attitude towards nature, nature was for human needs. However, after the 18th C, there
emerged a demand to revaluate the relationship between man and the environment.
Arne Naess
(1912-2009) a Norwegian philosopher developed the notion of ‘Deep ecology’ that
emphasizes the basic interconnectedness of all life forms and natural features
and presented a symbiotic and holistic worldview rather than an anthropocentric
(human-centered) one. Similarly, Eco
poetics extended the art of poetry with the intention of foregrounding an
investigation into ecology. It is
actually a new form of phenomenology as it tries to locate the human in the
world. Its approach is totally different
from the Romantic and aestheticizing approaches of nature.
Apart from
these ‘Ecofeminism’ was coined by Françoise d' Eaubonne (1920-2005). The Ecofeminists argue that a relationship
always exists between the oppression of women and the degradation of
nature. Moreover, in post-colonial studies of native and indigenous communities, ecocriticism took up a lead
role. The critics of imperialist
expansion involve an ecocritical understanding of land rights and issues of
ownership. Thus Biopolitics, the intersectionality between racism and land occupation, that takes the administration of life and a
locality’s population too has become a thing to be considered in ecocriticism.
While
ecocritics began to study literature written throughout history and analyze its
relationship to the environment, the British and American literature of the 19th
and 20th centuries had a lot in it to be focused. It happened because, American and British
Romantic writers took great interest in nature as a subject. The Victorian realists wrote about
industrialization that was changing the natural landscape. Moreover, 19th century American
naturalists and explorers are actually credited here by ecocritics for their
initiation of the conservation movement through their scientific descriptions and
speculations about nature.
William
Wordsworth celebrates the beauty and mystery of nature in his ‘Michael’, ‘The
Excursion’ and ‘The Prelude’. The poetry
of S.T. Coleridge John Keats, Byron and Shelley too has their contributions to
it. The Victorian essayists John Ruskin
and Thomas Carlyle too were there to lament the destruction of the environment
due to industrialization. The two great
American naturalists, according to the ecocritics are John Burrough and John
Muir. John Burrough’s ‘Wake-Robin’ and ‘Birds
and poets’ actually influenced Whitman a lot.
Muir, apart from writing, worked to prevent the destruction of the
environment. It was he, who is
responsible for preserving the Yosemite Valley in California, the very second
national park in the United States.
An
ecocritical reading of a literary text is, actually an approach with a new
alertness to a dimension that has perhaps always hovered about the text, but
without ever receiving our full attention earlier. Let’s take Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809-1849) well
known tale ‘The Fall of the House of usher.
In the tale, Rod-crick Usher and his sister Madeline, undergo a kind of
voluntary imprisonment in the ancient, crumbling isolated house of Usher that
stands next to an evil-looking lake.
When the sister suffers from a strange wasting disease, Usher is
afflicted by ‘A Morbid Acuteness of the senses’, which makes him unable to bear
any contact with the natural world. It
is said, ‘The odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by
even faint light’. His only contacts
with the world beyond himself were books and musical instruments. The tale is usually read and analyzed with
the focus on the morbid psychology of Usher.
The
ecocentered reading of this tale focuses outside, on the house and its environs,
rather than inside, on the owner and his psychology. It uses ideas of energy, negative energy that
causes breakdown and symbiosis the ‘living together’ that denotes mutual
sustaining and co-existing systems. The house
has no symbiotic connections with the broader biosphere. The house breathes in the atmosphere of its
own decay. The stagnant lake reflects
the house’s own unmoving image. These all
led them to a gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own
about the waters and the walls. So, Usher
is ‘Photophobic’ (hyper sensitive to light) and prefers the represented light
in paintings. As he cannot bear natural
sounds he hears only the ‘processed sound’ of music. So, what is imagined here is on eco-system
damaged beyond repair and cut off from any possible sources of renewal. On this reading, the centre of the story is
not a dark night of the soul, but the permanent night of willfully-courted
ecological disorder or solar exhaustion.
The aloofness turns the house into a kind of black hole into which its
energies are sucked and destroyed as it is said the black lake into which the
house collapses and disappears at the end.
Thus, the ecocentered reading makes this tale a more frightening one.
When other
literary theories examine the relationships between the writer texts and the
world with the social sphere, Ecocriticism expands the notion of the world to
include the entire ecosphere. Thus this
ecologically oriented criticism is an inevitable response to the urgent issues
of the day. As critics have pointed out,
one of the reasons that ecocriticism continues to grow as an important one is
the continued global environmental crisis.
Its aim is also to show how the work of the writers considering
environment can play important roles in solving ecological problems and
environmental issues.
----Thulasidharan V
No comments:
Post a Comment