Ecocriticism and Women Writers: Environmentalist Poetics of Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith

196 Pages·2013·5.1 MB·English

by  Justyna Kostkowska (auth.)

Ecocriticism and Women Writers
Also by Justyna Kostkowska
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S EXPERIMENT IN GENRE AND POLITICS 1926–1931:
Visioning and Versioning The Waves
Ecocriticism and Women
Writers
Environmentalist Poetics of Virginia
Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith
Justyna Kostkowska
© Justyna Kostkowska 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-30843-5
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
1 The Narrative Ecology of “Kew Gardens”: Virginia
Woolf’s Ecofeminist Imagination and the Narrative
Discovery of Jacob’s Room 12
2 “All Taken Together”: Ecological Form in Mrs. Dalloway 29
3 Singing the World in The Waves: The Ecopoetics of
Woolf’s Play-Poem 41
4 Living with the Other: Jeanette Winterson’s Written
on the Body 56
5 Multiplicity and Coexistence in The Powerbook 71
6 The Fiction of Abundance and Awareness: Jeanette
Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping 91
7 Hotel World: A Symbiotic Narrative Space 105
8 Getting Close: The Ecopoetics of Intimacy in
Ali Smith’s Like 124
9 Stories That Change the World: Ali Smith’s Ecological
“Realityfiction” 144
Conclusion: Re-visioning the World from the Inside Out 164
Notes 167
Bibliography 180
Index 187
v
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to the Middle Tennessee State University College of
Liberal Arts, the English Department, and the Faculty Research and
Creative Activity Grant Committee for providing the essential time off
teaching and the summer resources. Special thanks to MTSU English
Department Chair, Tom Strawman, for his support. Thank you Ann L.
Ardis , Bonnie Kime Scott, and Ellen R. Donovan for reading proposal
and chapter drafts and writing grant recommendation letters. Thanks to
my parents for their support and encouragement.
Chapter 2 was originally published in Critical Insights: Mrs. Dalloway,
ed. Dorothy Dodge Robbins (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, a division of
EBSCO Publishing, 2012). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
vi
Introduction
M. Jimmie Killingsworth writes in “Discourse Communities”: “In
addition to changing language and changing minds, the enterprise of
rhetoric suggests that speakers and writers have the power to trans-
form the site of discourse, the community itself” (1992: 110). Modern
humanities and sciences agree that language lies at the heart of the
transformation towards a more ecologically sound society, a transfor-
mation that we must undergo if we are to survive as a civilization. Val
Plumwood has pointed out that the rationalist, androcentric master
narrative that had served to support patriarchy must now give way
to multicentric pluralism. The way we use language must be carefully
scrutinized and reformed to eliminate old hegemonic patterns and to
promote modes of linguistic expression that foster connectivity instead
of separation, equality instead of hierarchy, diversity instead of homog-
eny. Such ecologically progressive modes of narrative, ones that model
healthier ecological relationships, already exist and are continuously
being written. These narratives are not always explicitly or primarily
environmental in theme, but carry out the ecological work at the
narrative level. Often their very form does the fundamental work of
destabilizing the binary thought patterns that lie at the core of Western
rationalism and its master narrative. This book is an addition to the
branch of ecocritical studies that looks beyond the so-called nature
writing to explore such transformative literary narratives and consider
their ecological value.
Lawrence Buell has argued that “ecocritism becomes most interesting
and useful … when it aims to recover the environmental character or
orientation of works whose conscious or foregrounded interests lie else-
where” (2005: 26). Nature writing “combin[es] the objective description
of natural history with the personal insight of autobiography, to give its
1
2 Ecocriticism and Women Writers
reader a model of how, individually and collectively, we should relate
to the nonhuman world” (Herndl & Brown 1996: 13). However, as has
been noted by several critics, even nature writing in the canonized tra-
dition of Thoreau is not impervious to (eco)ethical problems. Marilyn
M. Copper has pointed out that “narratives of retreat into unspoiled
nature … are … grounded in a mechanistic view in which nature is
seen as separate from human culture and as an object to be contem-
plated or saved by a controlling, dominated subject” (Dobrin & Weisser
2001: xvi). Nature writing belongs to the category of the well-meaning
ecological discourses that “strive for a position of totalizing narrative,”
which Dobrin and Weisser identify as one of the pitfalls of explicitly
environmental narratives (2001: 9). Texts that do not foreground nature
or purport to describe what we should be doing for the environment
avoid such a proselytizing, hegemonic position. Buell advocates a more
constructive ecocritical practice that approaches the world as “an intrin-
sically dynamic, interconnected web of relations” with “no absolute
dividing lines between the living and the nonliving, the animate and
the inanimate” (2005: 137). In the hope of moving beyond that perva-
sive dichotomy, I follow in the footsteps of Timothy Morton, M. Jimmie
Killingsworth, Jonathan Bate, and Robert Kern to explore how texts
with little or no obvious environmental themes can also be ecological
in their politics, and in effect do the same value- and consciousness-
raising work as strict nature writing performs. Diverging from some of
these critics’ interest in poetic texts, I focus on fictional prose, a genre
that, as Jonathan Levin observes, has received relatively little ecocriti-
cal attention since “it foregrounds human drama at the expense of the
inherent drama of organic nature, and … rarely allows for a close and
detailed account of the particulars of natural phenomena” (1998: 182).
Patrick Murphy also notes that “Fiction writing is probably the terrain
in which the least codification of a nature writing canon or mode of
representation has occurred” (Gaard and Murphy 1998: 32). My project
aims to diffuse the perception of fiction as a genre less suited to ecocriti-
cal analysis, and to encourage other studies to offer evidence that the
ecological, world-changing potential of fictional texts in fact equals and
in some ways exceeds that of nature writing.
In my experience of reading modernist and contemporary experi-
mental fiction by women, which is the focus of this book, I have been
struck by the extent to which these texts echo contemporary ecological
philosophy without purporting to be ecologically conscious. To address
Jonathan Levin’s first claim about fiction’s ecocritical “deficiencies,”
I have found that “human drama” in this fiction does not occur “at
Introduction 3
the expense” of the nonhuman; the two often exist side by side and are
mutually embedded. As has been noted, this configuration of feedback
and dialogue mirrors the reciprocal relationship that Maurice Merleau-
Ponty defined in his philosophy:
Our most immediate experience of things … is necessarily an expe-
rience of reciprocal encounter—of tension, communication, and
commingling. From within the depths of this encounter, we know
the thing or phenomenon only as our interlocutor—as a dynamic
presence that confronts us and draws us into relation. We concep-
tually immobilize or objectify the phenomenon only by mentally
absenting ourselves from this relation, by forgetting or repressing our
sensuous involvement. (Abram 1997: 56)
The human and nonhuman dramas in this fiction reflect the mutual
phenomenological interrelation because they are presented as interde-
pendent and analogous, as in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, where geranium
and human lives alike get “ruined by the war.” Moreover, these texts
often critique the concept of “environment” per se by blurring the line
where the human ends and the “environment” begins. In Ali Smith’s
novels, for example, humans often appear more remote from each other
than from the natural “others,” and flakes of human skin are literally
mixed with the remnants of other natural beings to form dust. (This last
detail is a case in point in respect to Levin’s second observation. The
texts I am exploring testify that experimental fiction, conceived of as a
flexible and ever-accommodating medium, is fully capable of allowing
room for even microscopic natural detail.) This fiction tends to show
nature as particular and active, intervening in striking bursts, disrupt-
ing the human infrastructure, underscoring the vibrant reality and
persistence of the nonhuman world. The nonhuman presence does not
need to predominate in a text to be effective for the ecological “cause”;
on the contrary, it is often more conspicuous when occurring briefly,
sharply asserting itself within the human context.
Contemporary philosophy and literary criticism increasingly sup-
port the position that “language and discourse shape our social and
(for some) physical environments” (Levin 2002: 176). In What’s Nature
Worth, Satterfield and Slovic have queried authors of the so-called
nature writing about the role of narrative in creating environmental
values. The emerging conclusion is that “cultural values are a necessary
basis for environmental action, even if they may not be sufficient by
themselves” (2004: 1). This book joins the investigation of what makes