Literature and Ecofeminism

Intersectional and International Voices

Douglas A. Vakoch, Sam Mickey, Douglas A. Vakoch, Sam Mickey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351209731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together ecofeminism and ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism), this book presents diverse ways of understanding and responding to the tangled relationships between the personal, social, and environmental dimensions of human experience and expression.

Literature and Ecofeminism explores the intersections of sexuality, gender, embodiment, and the natural world articulated in literary works from Shakespeare through to contemporary literature. Bringing together essays from a global group of contributors, this volume draws on American literature, as well as Spanish, South African, Taiwanese, and Indian literature, in order to further the dialogue between ecofeminism and ecocriticism and demonstrate the ongoing relevance of ecofeminism for facilitating critical readings of literature. In doing so, the book opens up multiple directions for ecofeminist ideas and practices, as well as new possibilities for interpreting literature.

This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, literature, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

1 “Like a creature native”

Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism

Lesley Kordecki

There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds

Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,

When down the weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her cloths spread wide,

And mermaid-like a while they bore her up;

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and endued

Unto that element. But long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

(Gertrude on Ophelia’s death,
Hamlet 4.7.170–181)

William Shakespeare’s famous lines about Ophelia’s death, recited by Gertrude, the only other woman in the play, have generated many centuries of critical inquiry, but none seems to answer satisfactorily the plaguing questions about Ophelia’s role in this most definitive tragedy of Western culture. Harold Jenkins, editor of the play, tells us that “Shakespeare’s conception of Ophelia is profounder than that of his critics; and [this speech] … is its supremely imaginative culmination” (1994, 547). What makes this death announcement the “culmination” of the great poet’s “imagination”? In her groundbreaking 1985 essay, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” Elaine Showalter traces artistic, stage, popular, and critical interpretations to demonstrate the cultural manipulation of this legendary character’s appearance in feminist thought. She follows the “meaning” of Ophelia into the twentieth century, showing how her “erotomania” or sexualized madness helped form the representation of women over the centuries. Showalter calls Ophelia’s story the “history of her representation,” linking female insanity with female frailty and sexuality, and then by the end of the last century, linking her with “protest and rebellion” (1985, 79, 91–92). This argument is well founded, but Ophelia has more to teach us.

We in the twenty-first century can see how Ophelia’s indelible cultural mark is delineated in yet another way by her abundant and exquisite association with the flora and fauna of Shakespeare’s potent language, but now with the political edge that ecocriticism has taught us, we can revise her problematic function as docile victim. Gertrude’s account of her death excerpted above challengingly positions her vital significance. Lovely, ephemeral, fading, here Ophelia becomes the symbolic flowers she poignantly and distractedly distributes to the other characters in her prior scene. But she is not just flowers; the brook that ultimately envelops her “mermaid-like,” or “Like a creature native and endued [i.e., fit]/Unto that element,” literally absorbs this outcast woman into the natural world. Gertrude’s elegant pastoral eulogy on Ophelia’s drowning in essence grafts the dead or dying woman onto the natural tableau, the fluid water itself, as she becomes its “creature.” These telling signifiers explain the deceptive power of this seemingly passive woman.

The other chapters in this volume will show how literature, positioned historically and geographically, is deeply infused with social issues entwining women and nature in the last few centuries. The international scope of the essays alerts us to the global repercussions of patriarchal mindsets in other times and in other cultures. I believe that the sub-textual resonances of Hamlet explored below will demonstrate the fully formed ecofeminist ideology in the Early Modern stage of Western society. My chapter will argue that Ophelia continues to point the way in the history of feminism, but now emerges as the definition of ecofeminist influences on our perceptions, and reveals the dire effects of ignoring them.

Ophelia’s natural associations are not really news, and do not help us much with this overdetermined text unless we study how Hamlet, our beloved protagonist, interacts with her; then the play’s prophetic ecofeminism emerges. Jeanne Addison Roberts reminds us that

The equation of women and Nature is so ancient and so ubiquitous as hardly to need documentation. From Aristotle on, philosophers have seen women as formless matter upon which men must imprint shape, even as Nature was the raw material from which human Culture was to be constructed.

(Roberts 1991, 25)

Ophelia assumes the role of eschewed nature for Hamlet, which in turn helps us resolve many of the tragedy’s essential questions.

As symbol, Ophelia is not a static romanticized version of the natural world, but a persistent reminder of human abuse, censorship, victimization, and even destruction of nature. Still, she also depicts nature’s healing power. Ecofeminists have noted the impact and the oppression of the environment on the literary texts we love. Ophelia is subject to “the instrumental treatment of nature and its exclusion from ethical significance in western (now global) culture,” as Val Plumwood would put it (1993, 6), by the men around her. She is manifestly used and objectified, as I will show. She and the nature she represents are denied or “backgrounded” to “a dominant, foreground sphere of recognized achievement or causation. This backgrounding of women and nature” (1993, 21) is accomplished almost indiscernibly and automatically by the human males who define themselves by exclusion from female and from nature. Both Ophelia and the natural world can be seen as an “independent centre of resistance and opacity” (1993, 157), Plumwood’s careful phrase to include the nonhuman with the female human in our speciesist and masculinist language.

Similarly, Shakespearean critics are studying the effect of the environment on the plays. In the 1930s, Caroline Spurgeon recorded the proliferation of natural imagery in Shakespeare and especially in Hamlet (1966, 13, 16, 367–368). Roberts more recently examines how the gendered “wild” interacts with the male self. She tells us that “Seen as passive and receptive, women were repeatedly linked by tradition and specifically by Shakespeare with the earth, the affinity of wombs and tombs became a cliché.” As such, Ophelia, like other women (Lady Macbeth, Hero, Hermione, Thaisa) can be seen as the “tamed Wild,” rebelling through death, even if the death is not actual (Roberts 1991, 25–26). Gertrude’s womb and Ophelia’s tomb both threaten Hamlet’s and thus the play’s sense of the world. I will return to how the grave dominates the action below.

The following reading argues how Ophelia represents a more thought-provoking notion of nature than hitherto supposed. She incarnates all four of the elements of fire, air, water, and earth, and she attempts to intercede in the fatal outcome of the other characters. Deirdre Byrne (in the present collection) tells us of “elemental energies” still associated with women in contemporary poetry. Like nature itself in Western culture, however, Ophelia is othered and abandoned, the only true innocent in this brilliant study of human struggle. Through her, nature is aligned with many stereotypes of women, and she ultimately emerges as visionary and ruthlessly expendable as the narrative moves in its masculinist directions. Ophelia, so well known for her mad scenes, appears sparsely in Hamlet’s story, but as a representative of nature, she occupies a primary place in his ideological battles. She interacts with Hamlet on stage only in Act 3, and yet her death brings about everyone’s end.

Before Ophelia’s appearance in the play, Hamlet, distraught by his father’s death, begins to move away from his stable grip on the environment around him and becomes isolated within his own identity concerns. His first soliloquy compares the world to “an unweeded garden/That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature/Possess it merely [completely]” (1.2.135–137), and in a few lines he is accusing his mother of rushing into “incestuous sheets” (1.2.157). He is then haunted by the ghost of his father, much like the mad Ophelia is later by her own father. When he becomes animated by the unnaturalism of the ghost, he vows to transform himself and embrace his mission of revenge:

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

…

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain

Unmixed with baser matter.

(1.5. 98–99, 102–104)

His agitation has been well noted, but it seems that his love for Ophelia and his foundation in the natural world is relegated to “trivial” and “baser matter,” especially since his mother’s actions prove to him the corruption of all female sexuality, as he tells us later.

Ophelia’s first scene, with her brother Laertes and father Polonius, establishes her as the element of fiery passion for Hamlet. Her part in the drama of unremitting human catastrophe amid metaphysical contemplation begins with this identification. She is not just Hamlet’s beloved, but is wholly defined by the destructiveness of sexuality, reduced inexorably to her value as virgin by Laertes’, Polonius’, and later even Hamlet’s patriarchal eyes. Laertes warns her not to open her “chaste treasure” to Hamlet’s “unmastered importunity” (1.3.30, 31). Polonius refers to Hamlet’s desire as “blazes” but not true “fire,” and that she must protect herself from his “unholy suits” (1.3.116, 119, 128). Polonius talks to Claudius and Gertrude of Hamlet’s “hot love” (2.2.132). Ophelia brings out the fire in Hamlet. She is nature’s dangerous temptations for him, which he seems to convert later to threatening hatred when he accosts her in Act 3.

After this rather conventional plot line exhorting caution with young love, we move to Ophelia’s next scene in which she tells her father how Hamlet appears to her “Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,/And with a look so piteous in purport/As if he had been loosed out of hell/To speak of horrors” (2.1.79–81). But what is happening here? A reading of the love between Ophelia and Hamlet rings untrue if we take a realistic look at their interactions. One could argue that the intelligent, philosophically self-deprecating Hamlet would trust a woman he truly loves more, would not use her to display his “antic disposition” (1.5.170) in order to achieve his revenge. He expressly tells Horatio and the guards that no matter “How strange or odd some’er I bear myself” (1.5.168), they should not reveal his conversation with the ghost, but does not afford his beloved the same courtesy. When he first appears to Ophelia offstage, she describes him in this state, but he is deemed to be in the throes of love-madness, a long tradition of love-longynge from medieval texts wherein the sufferer transforms into a melancholic. This constitutes a valid conjecture on the part of Polonius and even Ophelia herself unless, like the audience, they were privy to Hamlet’s plan to simulate madness.

Significantly, Ophelia is never part of Hamlet’s contemplations about retributive action toward Claudius or even any concerns he harbors about remaining in Elsinore. She is not featured in his decisions or his passions as represented in those extraordinary soliloquies. His declaration of the depth of this love at the end of the play comes as a surprise: “I loved Ophelia—forty thousand brothers/Could not with all their quantity of love/Make up my sum” (5.1.258–260). His love affair rings hollow if she is the mere mortal we take her to be; instead, the text uses her to stand for the natural, the part of the world abandoned by the obsessed Hamlet. This is not to give Hamlet an excuse for his abuse of Ophelia; his ranting is not just a simple betrayal of young love. It tells us more about his inability to embrace the virtues of ideologies outside a masculinist, speciesist paradigm. He rejects all that Ophelia represents while he delays in enacting his vengeance.

We have no scenes of love between Hamlet and Ophelia to compare with what happens when they first appear on the stage together. We see that Ophelia, at first hesitant, is now obedient to her father’s order to have nothing to do with him: “I would not in plain terms from this time forth/Have you so slander any moment leisure/As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet” (1.3.131–133). She returns Hamlet’s letters, which he denies giving to her, and then he turns on her by asking “Are you honest [chaste]?” and suggests that the power of her beauty will “transform Honesty from what it is to a bawd” (3.1.102, 111). With little preface, Ophelia’s sexual honor is being attacked, and Hamlet tells her he lied when he told her he loved her. His love is mentioned after her chastity has been examined, again showing that for Hamlet she is or must be the embodiment of virginity (forestalling sexuality and fertility). Hamlet then utters the famed angry words “Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (3.1.120–121). If these lines are sincere and not contrived to feign madness, he then reveals his consummate wrath toward her, as well as toward himself. His misogynistic accost, “You jig and amble and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness ignorance” (3.1.143–145), expands his condemnation to all women, insulting all as well as the submissive and forgiving Ophelia, who clearly believes in his madness. All women are hypocrites who lack genuineness as long as they can entrap men with their sexuality. Hamlet continues to separate himself from any true natural or feminine contact that can keep him grounded.

A long critical tradition asserts that Hamlet knows that Polonius has set Ophelia upon him in this encounter, and therefore Hamlet contemptuously deals with her betrayal when he tells her to “Go thy ways to a nunnery” (3.1.128–129). But this does not explain Hamlet’s first appearance to Ophelia offstage. Hamlet’s treatment of his beloved becomes almost iconic, a rejection that is somehow cosmically antithetical to Hamlet’s mission of revenge. She is more than a mortal lover; she is natural life itself, all its promise and desirable sexuality and fertility, and he cannot entertain thoughts of such during this time. His attack on Ophelia seems to merge with his disgust of his mother’s remarriage. All love toward women and nature becomes subsumed to his duty to avenge his father’s death. As Harold Jenkins notes, Hamlet “denies his own nature” (1994, 153). He tries to make himself into the masculinist ideal that could easily kill Claudius.

Ophelia’s lament over Hamlet’s loss of reason illustrates her loving spirit. When he leaves her devastated with his verbal attack, she exclaims that his “noble mind is here o’erthrown.” This man whom she characterized as the “rose of the fair state” (3.1.145) no longer is figured as a blossom. She has lost hope along with the fire of his love: “O woe is me/T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see” (3.1.159–160).

The fire of his love takes another turn in Hamlet’s second and last encounter with Ophelia on stage; Hamlet resorts to a mean-spirited banter with her in the “play-within-the play” scene. Ophelia, attempting to conciliate him, utters a pathetic “I think nothing, my lord” in response to which Hamlet constructs a crude pun: “That’s a fair thought to lie between mai...