A Question of Nature: Byron and Wordsworth

Abstract

Two terms inform contemporary Romantic eco-criticism: and Critics such as Jonathan Bate and James McKusick depend on these terms to standardize Wordsworthian eco-poesis against which other 18th and 19th century writers are judged. However, the normative work of these two terms excludes consideration of other writers and obscures the richness and variety in early 19th century environmental thinking. Case in point: Byron. With the exception of Karl Kroeber, Jonathan Bate, and Timothy Morton, who treat him peripherally, most critics ignore Byron because he does not measure up to the Wordsworthian standards of nature and dwelling. But in many of his writings, Byron represents human culture and the environment as dynamically interconnected, similar to the ecology of Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold. I will make the case that Byron is an important Romantic nature writer, though not by the Wordsworthian standards of eco-criticism. Dwelling, concept adopted from Heidegger, means to embed oneself within the texture of one's place, thereby opening oneself to an empirical understanding of the interworkings of the environment as system. Dwelling is practice and theory, way of being- and wav of knowing. Lines of belonging are established between one s identity and the physical place, ultimately creating sense of home. Identification, belonging, and place-meaning are dialogically related to the quality of empirical observation and depth of knowledge that is attained. The greater the length of time spent in one place, the more extensive the dialogic action. For this reason, dwelling has become synonymous with rootedness, and an equation has developed between dwelling, environmental sensitivity, and ethical care for one's place. This definition sets dwelling in opposition to wandering, the touristic mentality that is aloof to the environment and its inhabitants. The wandering tourist has something in common with Wendell Berry's exploiter-colonist who views the land as means to an end: resources to be exploited or landscape to be enjoyed aesthetically. Without studying the delicate evolutionary dynamic that unites place and its inhabitants, the tourist cannot know the place, value its meaning, or extend ethical care to it. Because the tourist cannot engage in the fundamental mechanics of environmental observation, thinking, and belonging, he or she cannot be said to be environmentally conscious. The dwelling-wandering binary reinforces two other binaries: nature-culture and ecocentric-anthropocentric. These binaries inform the deep ecology that ecocriticism has used to study literature. In this theory, culture, epitomized by the city, stands for the ills of modernism, anthropocentrism, and techno-rational domination over nature. As Wordsworth characterizes it in the Prelude, the city is where humans are most alienated from nature, most mobile, and most anthropocentric, and thus least capable of achieving ecological insight, sense of home, and an ethics of care for one's environment. With similar logic, Jonathan Bate has claimed that Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen are environmentally conscious writers because both critiqued a lack of rootedness and metropolitan brashness [that] are associated with modernity and corruption (Bate [1999], 2). Ralph Pite argues that. Romantic ecocritics have privileged the writers who prefer what nature can teach to what man has taught, [and find] true and unalienated life in rural, pre-industrial communities (357). Nature refers to wild, unspoiled backcountry, the antithesis of the modern, anthropocentric city. Out in the rural backcountry, the writer can strip off corrupting layers of culture, and then dwell, achieving environmental consciousness. Pite argues that these normative terms, Nature-Culture and Dwelling-Wandering, were created because the first ecocritics needed standards to define what was specific to ecocriticism and green writing. …