Schneider Richard - DARK NATURE: anti-pastoral essays in american literature and culture

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Richard J. Schneider

The serious consideration of nature as more than just background in a literary text began in the 1980s. This first wave of what would soon be called ecocriticism emphasized the genre of literary nonfiction and the importance of wilderness, focusing on British and American literature. A second wave beginning in the mid-1990s expanded ecocriticism to include multiple genres of literature and popular culture, world literatures, urban environments, and special issues such as environmental justice.

More recently a third wave has expanded ecocriticism even further, including, Scott Slovic explains, such concerns as global comparisons of nature in different national cultures on one hand and local bioregionalism on the other, multi-gender issues such as green Queer Theory, and justice for and subjectivity in nonhuman species. To these new concerns we might add the interest in the agency of both nonhuman and non-organic nature expressed in the new materialism.

All of these interdisciplinary permutations of ecocriticism have done much to demonstrate the fields true range and its power to illuminate an almost endless variety of texts (Armbruster and Wallace 3). However, throughout these various waves of change, ecocriticism has continued to be dominated by an essentially pastoral, conservationist, and preservationist sensibility.

According to ecocritic Terry Gifford, the pastoral perspective is essentially idealistic, emphasizing fertility, resilience, beauty, and unthreatened stability in nature (47). It tends to privilege a past when humans were closer to nature, everything was better than today, and there were no problems of everyday living so that one had time to contemplate the meaning of life. It was Arcadia, a Golden Age of imagined perfection, the world of Wordsworth and Thoreau. This pastoral world of nature is a place to visit, but we cant live there; the writer must return from either a literal or an imagined retreat into nature (Gifford 4753). As Thoreau admitted, he lived a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only (Walking 217).

As Leo Marx pointed out in 1964 in his The Machine in the Garden, the pastoral experience can be a mere sentimental escape or it can be a complex experience that allows the writer to bring back the wisdom found in nature for renewed life both individually and socially (25). In either case the idealization of nature in the pastoral perspective persists in ecocriticism.

Recent anthologies of environmental literature provide a case in point. Michael Branchs excellent anthology Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden, includes Captain John Smiths glowing description of New Englands bounty in A Description of New England (1616). The rivers, the ocean and rivers provide, he says, an abundance of fish easily caught: He is a very bad fisher [who] cannot kill in one day with his hook and line, one, two, or three hundred cods (Branch 55). Game too is plentiful: For hunting also: the woods, lakes, and rivers, afford not only chase sufficient, for any that delights in that kind of toil, or pleasure; but such beasts to hunt, that besides the delicacy of their bodies for food, their skins are so rich, as may well recompence thy daily labor, with a captains pay (Branch 55).

Branchs anthology does include a brief excerpt from Smiths description of natures supposed bounty in A General History of Virginia