Ecochaucer: Green Ethics and Medieval Nature

Abstract

Ecochaucer:Green Ethics and Medieval Nature Sarah Stanbury At the end of her best-selling novel Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver adjusts the relation that would see things as an "I" and a "thou," or even as Man and Nature. Imagining a hunter silently watching a coyote loping through the forest, Kingsolver pictures for a moment the hunter's sense that he and the animal comprise, however briefly, all there is. But, she says, "He would have been wrong. Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end."1 The important, ethical, or even right relation, Kingsolver suggests, is the web; all actions have consequences, however invisible, on the web of life, and it is only through our human presumption that we can imagine ourselves separate from it. Kingsolver's novel, which appeared in 2000, stakes out an important place in American fiction as a bestseller whose ethics and erotics reside in environmental relations. In this love story, the relationships that characters develop with each other are shaped by the relationships they hold with the natural world: the wilderness and its troubling predators (coyote), or farms and gardens with their competing insect life. Her central metaphor for this set of responsibilities and interactions, the "web pulling mate to mate," is a term with a rich set of resonances. Bespeaking the fragility and interconnectedness of the natural world, the image of the web is one of the most central—and by now prosaic—images to define both the modern and postmodern conditions.2 The web articulates globalism on many levels. A synonym, of course, for the internet, it also gives concrete form to chaos theory, whose classic example of invisible subatomic quivering and response is the so-called butterfly effect, whereby the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas. A key term in ecocriticism, the web also implies human accountability; since all things are physically interrelated, humans are at least partially responsible for environmental change—even if they cannot see the etiology that links cause and effect. [End Page 1] As a fictional work that voices the increasingly urgent concerns of the environmental movement, Prodigal Summer can also serve as a contemporary lens through which to explore ethical relations binding human interests and desires to the nonhuman living world in earlier writings, and specifically in Chaucer. How does Chaucer position nature in relation to human agency? Does nature in Chaucer's poetry engage characters in relationships of custodial responsibility or stewardship? Nature in Middle English often describes a force for generation or desire: "so priketh hem Nature in hir corages." An agent with effects on the will, the emotions, or the body, nature acts on people. Does nature in this form, I will ask, make demands for reciprocal attention or care? In exploring Chaucer's representation of ethical custodianship of the natural world, this essay also examines the rhetorical terms with which Chaucer links the nonhuman living world, or what we today would call the natural world, to the human. How does Chaucer use metaphor, the central poetic trope by which writers explore relationships among things, to represent nature? More particularly, how does Chaucer, through metaphor, relate terms from the nonhuman living world (such as flowers or animals) to people? By examining Nature as personified force and nature as a class of things linked rhetorically to human qualities, this essay seeks to engage in dialogue with ethical concerns of ecocriticism and to situate Chaucer within an important critical dialogue that has paid, to date, little attention to premodern texts.3 Before exploring Chaucerian nature, I would like to sketch some of the mandates of ecocriticism, whose primary interests lie in ways that texts represent relationships of domination and subjection between humans and nonhuman life; how do writers represent the design and control of the web that links living and nonliving things? As Kingsolver invokes the metaphor of the web in Prodigal Summer, she seems uncertain about the importance and agency of humans in its design. Indeed, even though she...