Reconceiving Nature: Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry by Patricia Murphy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reconceiving Nature: Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry by Patricia Murphy Marion Shaw RECONCEIVING NATURE: ECOFEMINISM IN LATE VICTORIAN WOMEN'S POETRY, by Patricia Murphy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019. 262 pp. $50.00 cloth, $50.00 ebook. Patricia Murphy's objectives in Reconceiving Nature: Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry are threefold: to direct attention to poets who have been relatively neglected; to increase interest in ecological concerns in Victorian literature; and to stimulate interest in women's nature poetry, particularly from the later part of the nineteenth century (pp. 33-34). The author covers her ground in a highly referenced monograph with detailed analysis of selected poems. Murphy's general introduction, "Nascent Ecofeminism," some thirty pages long, rehearses the dominant ideas of the Victorian period toward nature, in particular the "implicit equation of nature and women" (p. 5). From Copernicus onward, the earth has been viewed as female, fecund, and nourishing, seeded by the male agent of the sun. Victorians like Carlyle and even Darwin continued this thinking, and it lead inexorably to domination, with the earth lacking agency, as did women. Murphy's argument is that her chosen poets—Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and L. S. Bevington—challenged this orthodoxy. Throughout her study, Murphy follows the pattern of providing an introduction to the poet, then a highly selective choice of poems as evidence. She begins in Chapter One, "Augusta Webster: Interrogating the Nature Woman Link," with Webster, whose campaign for higher education for girls and women was underpinned by a denial of essentialism. Webster held that nature was a construct as much as womanhood, and there was no inextricable link between them. A close, vigorous if somewhat overwritten reading of Webster's compelling poem "The Swallows" (1881) illustrates Webster's challenge to the fusion of nature and women. The following chapter, "Matilde Blind: Contesting Domination," gives an analysis of Blind's The Ascent of Man (1889), a long narrative poem charting the failure of Western civilization under male domination, which affirms the need for a rebirth (surely a touch of essentialism here?) to redeem the natural world. An admirer of Percy Shelley, Blind is perhaps the most extreme and revolutionary thinker of this group of women poets. Chapter Three, "Michael Field: Eroticizing Agency," focuses on the two women, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote together under the male pseudonym, Michael Field. Their contribution to the debate is to eroticize nature, seeing it not merely as narrowly sexual but as sensual, passionate, spontaneous, and delightful. Finding models in the writings of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, Michael Field in "The Sleeping Venus" (1892) sees the female body and the contours of the earth joined by "no impermeable boundary": [End Page 167] There is sympathy between Her and Earth of largest reach, For the sex that forms them each Is a bond, a holiness, That unconsciously must bless And unite them, as they lie. (p. 101) The poem celebrates autoeroticism and also, it seems to me, lesbian eroticism. In its insistence on mutual female presence and desire, it too is surely essentialist. In Chapter Four, "Alice Meynell: Unsettling the Nature/Culture Dichotomy," Murphy argues that Meynell refuses to assign gender to the link between nature and humanity. An admirer of Tennyson, Meynell designates him "our wild poet . . . Wild flowers are his—great poet—wild winds, wild lights, wild heart, wild eyes!" (p. 143). Meynell belongs to a tradition of writers like Richard Jefferies and Gilbert White, who had an artist's "sympathy [for and] an eye for landscape" (p. 142). Murphy notes that in Meynell's poems, for example her powerful "The Visiting Sea," (1913) there is no gender assignment to the speaker who tells of an invasion that is not a male-female rape but a visitation from the seaward spaces, None knows, not even you, the places Brimmed at your coming, out of sight, —The little solitudes of delightThis tide constrains in dim embraces. (pp. 133-34) In Meynell's poems nature is not passive but is an active and equal partner with humans, different from William Wordsworth's works, in which nature is used...