In this video we're going to talk some more about William Wordsworth's poem "I
wandered lonely as a cloud," and this time we're going to take the angle of eco-
criticism ... so another kind of literary theory that I'd like to introduce you to.
This is a very broad introduction, but it'll just give you a few of the basics
and it'll give you a sense of how each new critical theory sheds a
different light on the same topic or the same text. And I think
that's really worthwhile -- to see how each theory brings out details that we might
not have noticed otherwise. So what is eco-criticism? Well, it's a kind of
literary theory that really came into being or became popular in the 1990s, and
is still so today. So we'll say the 1990s till today. There was some eco-criticism
before that already but as people started to think more and more about
climate change and so on, eco-criticism became a more urgent discipline or more
urgent field within literary studies. Now we're focusing especially on the
relationship between literature and nature, but eco-criticism has moved
beyond this as well and there's lots of eco-criticism in other disciplines in
other fields. What does eco-criticism focus on in terms of this relationship?
Well, it's really wide open. As long as you can find a text that has some
bearing on nature, you can practice eco-criticism, and you can ask very
fundamental questions about how does this text approach nature? how does it
view it? what can we learn from it? But there's definitely a side of eco-
criticism that's driven towards action and politics. So there's a side
that's concerned with turning all of this literary theory into some kind of
action so that we can think about how to have sustainability, how to
have ethical behavior, political change and all of these kinds of things.
So this side we might refer to as action as well as ethics. It's a lot of concern
about proper ethics. Another side of eco-criticism concerns
the very question of what is nature, so the concept of nature is being discussed.
What is it? And you can take this in many different directions. You
might say, for instance, this society will have a hierarchy or a structure and
that hierarchy will seem natural -- at least to the people in that society. But
from a distance it may seem rather artificial, and so the whole concept of
nature is being called into question. Another place where you might see this
is with something like gender. What does natural gender actually mean?
And so eco-criticism, even though it focuses on nature, it often also
moves into these other fields such as society and human behavior. Less
controversial is simply the appreciation of nature. So if we are busy with eco-
criticism, then we can also come to appreciate nature through literature
let's say, and that again might move us to action ... might, you know, make us plant
some trees, grow a garden, be involved, recycle -- all of these kinds of things.
That's roughly what eco-criticism does -- at least some significant
portions of it -- but if you practice this kind of criticism you should really feel
free to take it in interesting directions that you're fascinated by. So
what I thought we would do, having explained very broadly what eco-
criticism is, is to actually have a look at a sample eco-critical reading of
Wordsworth's poem "I wandered lonely as a cloud." For this I have selected this
little article by Scott Hess, and it's called "John Clare, William Wordsworth,
and the (Un)Framing of Nature." So here's a quotation from the article and Hess is
talking here about "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and he says, "the narrator," which
would be Wordsworth I suppose, "composes the landscape into aesthetic
form from a single point, located outside landscape, exactly the manner of a
picturesque viewer, and in the process constructs a purely visual and seemingly
disembodied subjectivity. Even as he claims to connect to nature, he views
that nature through a kind of invisible frame and turns it into a resource for
the construction of his own seemingly autonomous self." So what does that mean?
Well, imagine that Wordsworth is like a tourist and he goes and he looks
at these daffodils, and it's almost as if he sees the daffodils just
as a photo -- so a bit like a postcard you might say. And we know these kinds of
tourists: they drive through, they stop, they take a picture, and they move
on. What Wordsworth does then is he
composes this kind of scene as if it's one picture, as if it doesn't have
movement beyond that. And you can imagine all the details in the scene. We have the
lake, we have all these little flowers, and then we have the larger trees,
and the flowers are underneath, and then we have some clouds. There we go. And he
is looking at the scene as if from a cloud, so quite far away. And this notion
of distance is important, according to Scott Hess. So the point
then, what Scott Hess is saying, is that what Wordsworth does is he does not
stick around. He doesn't immerse himself in nature, he doesn't do
anything in terms of sustainability. He doesn't get a shovel out, he doesn't
pick up garbage -- none of this. I mean he just looks from a distance almost as if
he takes a picture, then he leaves, and he's happy just to have that photo in
his scrapbook you might say. And the worst part of it is that he turns it
into a resource for the construction of his own autonomous self, and what that
means is that Wordsworth seems most interested in this picture in order to
think about his own subjectivity, his own consciousness, because in the last stanza
of the poem of course, Wordsworth kind of says ... I remember this scene,
it comes back, it flashes upon my inner eye, and so on.
And I have this wonderful sense of memory and imagination. So according to Hess,
then, Wordsworth does two things. First he treats the scene just as a picture and
you can take it with you and you can frame it -- this notion of framing is
important -- and then the second thing is [that] he uses it for purely selfish reasons so
that he can feel good about who he is and he can construct a sense of self. Now,
as it turns out though, Hess isn't quite done with those two criticisms, as if
that's not enough. Hess also argues that we can apply this to today. We can
actually think about this in relation to our own ethical or unethical practices
in relation to the landscape. And the example that has gives is of the way in
which North Americans often treat their national parks. So the North American
landscape has lots of national parks, but according to Hess what happens with
these national parks is that we spend a tremendous amount of energy making those
national parks as pristine as possible, as beautiful as possible, keeping them
clean, allowing tours to kind of see nature in its most beautiful form, but
then we don't always do the same thing with the rest of the landscape. And
according to Hess what we do with the National Parks is a little bit like what
Wordsworth does with framing the scene. He doesn't look at
anything else, he ... ignores all the human parts of the
landscape -- he even gets rid of his sister actually in the picture. It's just
himself all lonely there. And he creates this little pristine version of nature
which he doesn't get involved with, and maybe that's a little bit like the way
we treat the national parks. So an example here is if you if you go to
Yellowstone let's say. This is not his example but I'll I'll provide this one.
Most people go to Yellowstone and they want to see Old Faithful. They want
to see it's going up in all the steam and so on, and it's a remarkable sight.
And then they take their picture and they go home -- a little bit like what
Wordsworth does. If you were to zoom out from this scene ... I mean this is sort of
what you would see. You would see all
these throngs of tourists wanting to go see the geyser. Which version of
nature is correct? What should a poet describe? Should a
poet kind of zoom out and show the whole picture? Should we talk about the way in
which nature is being ... maybe preserved in one place but destroyed in
another? Those are all kinds of ethical questions, and according to Hess
Wordsworth is not being quite ethical enough. He's just kind of using nature
for his own ends. So that's one eco- critical perspective, and I think as you,
as you look at that, you really have to decide for yourself is that fair? Do you
agree with that? Because there are other perspectives, and I'll mention one other
one which clashes a little bit with what Scott Hess is saying. So here is one more
critical perspective, and this is by Ralph Pite. He doesn't actually say
that he's directly doing an eco-critical reading necessarily but he is talking
about Wordsworth's concept of nature and I think that does put it into the
same kind of field. This is some of the same interest as what other eco-critical
critics have. So here's just a little quote from his his article, and he writes
"In Wordsworth's ... sorry, in Wordsworth's work (that's a tongue twister), the
natural world is always social, both in itself and in its relation to man.
Consequently nature does not offer an escape from other people so much as
express an alternative mode of relating to them." And I want to bring this up
because notice that it talks about nature's being social. That's interesting
because that suggests that Wordsworth does not see nature as alien and distant
quite so much, but he sees a kind of companionship in nature, he sees a
kinship, and that allows him then to immerse himself much more in nature than
perhaps Scott Hess actually suggests. And if you were to read these two
critics side-by-side (and this is what I suggest you do as as an English student --
that you read the critics as having a discussion even when they don't mention
each other), then maybe you can take a stance on this and try to figure out
which one is closer to the truth. If we look at the poem then ("I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"), is it distant or is it not quite so distant? He does
talk about nature as a "jocund company" -- this sense of nature being happy
and he finds happiness in nature. Even at the end, he says, "my heart dances with the
daffodils." So at the very least we can say that this poem allows us to
appreciate nature and that might make us go out into nature and conserve
it. So I think you could argue that Scott Hess is being a bit too
dramatic in suggesting that Wordsworth is being selfish. It's quite possible
that Wordsworth would go out on a Saturday and you know clean up garbage
and look after things with other people. I I don't think we have to make
Wordsworth out to be a bad guy just for writing a poem that seems a little bit
selfish. There's more to the picture and I think we have to really look across
Wordsworth's work to see what his general attitude towards nature is. But I hope at
least that you've been able to see how different perspectives can bring out
details of the poem that we might not have noticed otherwise, and I think for
that eco-criticism is very worthwhile. And of course also it
probably creates in us a desire to do something ourselves, to take care of the
world in which we live, and that is definitely a noble goal.