“O'er Pathless Rocks”: Wordsworth, Landscape Aesthetics, and Queer Ecology

Abstract

. . . [the] queer project and the environmental project are always already connected . . . the questions and politics of human sexuality are always entwined with the questions and politics of the other-than-human-world. (4) . . . fully and properly, ecology is queer theory and queer theory is ecology: queer ecology. (281) Our understanding of Romanticist landscape aesthetics has been—or at least should have been—reshaped over the past 10 years by advents in second-wave ecocriticism, and more recently by the emerging discourse of queer ecology. Queer ecology, broadly defined, is a subdiscipline of cultural theory devoted to framing ideas of queer sexuality with ideas of science and nature, and, conversely, a way of reading ecologically concerned texts through the framework of queer theory. To simplify, queer ecology reads the queerness of nature and the nature of queerness mutually. While the hermeneutics, foci, and methods of queer ecology are still in flux, it is clear that queer ecology provides a substantial intervention in readings of Romantic poetry, greatly freeing our ability to address the thematic complexities of landscape poetry despite our heteronormative and humanist aesthetic tendencies. Speaking to form, the methods of such an epistemological mode allow for readers to see the mimetic turn between certain brands of environmentalist criticism that aim toward the emancipation of the environment from human exploitation and the imaginative and performative readings of queer theory. The broader aim of this essay is to start putting these theories into practice, to see how they act as methods, and to explore how Romantic poetry can speak back to queer ecology and shape it in return. The landscape aesthetics of the two poems I address in this essay, William Wordsworth's “Nutting” and “The Thorn,” come more fully to life when queer ecology, with a language that can navigate between our ideas of sexuality and nature, is employed, while also raising questions about what queer ecology is and how it operates.