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Book Review
| Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England. By Sylvia Lorraine Bowerbank. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xii+287 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $49.95.
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| Speaking for Nature began as a meditation on Jane Jacobs' observation that, in Sylvia Bowerbank's words, "the sentimentalization of nature is part and parcel of [our] ecological crisis" because it allows us to be "at once the greatest destroyers and lovers of wild nature" (pp. 135, 220). Speaking for Nature historicizes that sentimentalization, what Bowerbank calls at one point "the romancing imagination" (p. 54), by tracing its emergence in chapters addressing the writings of a number of early modern Englishwomen, including the well known, such as Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Wollstonecraft; the obscure, such as Catherine Talbot, Jane Lead, and Anna Seward; and even the nearly anonymous, such as eighteenth-century writers of educational texts for children. |
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The book thus offers different appeals to different readers: ecologists will discover a wealth of engaged writing about the environment by women from the sixteenth century through the early nineteenth century, and literary critics specializing in these writers will see the works from a perspective that is thoroughly engaged in today's ecological debates. Bowerbank situates these early modern women's voices as part of an emerging discourse that simultaneously contributes to and contests those offering new justifications for dominating nature, particularly masculinist science and capitalist political economy. Thus, in the chapters on Wroth, Cavendish, and Wollstonecraft, Bowerbank reads each woman's writings as permeated by a sense of loss for a relationship to the natural world guaranteed by a place of privilege within feudal political economy (rather more residually so for Wollstonecraft, of course). But by acknowledging the self- and class-interests of these texts and their authors, and by acknowledging that women's voices were by no means homogeneous in "negotiating their places within the shifting sands of early modern discourses of nature," Bowerbank is able to focus on aspects of their writings that variously do "resist" traditional religious or new masculinist understandings of nature or that even "reinvent 'nature'" itself (p. 4). In Wroth's case, this means wrapping a critique of the ecology of Aracadianism in a more thoroughgoing critique of women's oppression. In Cavendish's, this means creating a natural philosophy that subverts experimental science through satire and contradiction. In Wollstonecraft's, this means a rather complex struggle to "break with the fixed 'nature' of woman" in order to "search for a new kind of family, an alternative to the patriarchal family" (pp. 192, 198). |
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At this point, it is perhaps appropriate to cite an omission, Bowerbank's failure to address the contributions of lesbians or queer women in her narrative of women's contributions to ecological discourse. Such contributions are implied, but not recognized or theorized, in the book's treatment of Anna Seward, a woman who never married, had a "romantic friendship" with another woman (p. 173), and found "the optimal realization of her ecological principles" in the home of Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (p. 164), a famous lesbian couple of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Finally, the book as a whole suffers—perhaps unavoidably—from the problem that vexes the women writers it studies; It cannot answer the question of "how to conserve and distribute nature's gifts justly" (p. 79). As for Margaret Cavendish, so for us: Such questions remain open and particularly vexing at the level of social class. Speaking for Nature is, nevertheless, a commendable and informative attempt to grapple with the complex process of social change, the fact that persons and texts may "simultaneously embody antithetical values" and therefore contribute both conservatively and progressively to the construction of social reality (p. 30). |
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Sharon O'Dair is professor of English and Interim Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. Author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars Michigan, 2000), she is currently working on a manuscript entitled, "The Eco-Bard: The Greening of Shakespeare in Contemporary Film." |
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