Christina Rossetti's Environmental Consciousness

Todd Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429655678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Christina Rossetti's Environmental Consciousness takes a cognitive ecocritical approach to Rossetti's writing as it developed throughout her career. This study provides a unique understanding of Rossetti's identity as an artist through a cognitive model while also engaging significantly with her spiritual relationship to the nonhuman world. Rossetti was a deliberate and conscious creator who used her writing for therapeutic purposes to create, contemplate, maintain, verify, and, revise her identity. Her understanding of her autobiographical self and her place in the world often comes through observations and poetic treatments of the nonhuman. Rossetti, her speakers, and her characters seek spiritual knowledge in the natural world and share this knowledge with an audience. In nature, Rossetti finds evidence for and guidance from a loving God who offers salvation. Her work places a high value on nature from a Christian perspective that puts conservation over renunciation. She frequently uses strategies that have now been identified by Christian environmentalist such as retrieval, ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality. With new readings of popular works like "Goblin Market" and "A Birthday, " along with treatments of largely neglected works like Verses (1847) and Rossetti's devotional writings, Christina Rossetti's Environmental Consciousness offers an understanding of Rossetti's processes and purposes as a writer and displays new potential for her work in the face of twenty-first-century environmental issues.

1 Self-Creation and Environment

Wayfinding Cognition

A cognitivist approach to Rossetti allows us to better understand her practice of comprehending and valuing the natural world. Easterlin has made the case for applying cognitive approaches to ecocriticism writing that

if ecocritics wish to get closer to the apparent realities that mental and linguistic constructions such as nature and environment represent and to understand the reasons why these terms have been constructed in these specific ways, they need to learn about the human brain-mind, the negotiating and orienting tool that creates and utilizes those constructions.¹

Easterlin draws from the work of environmental psychologist Stephen Kaplan to apply the concept of ‘wayfinding’ cognition to literature.² Rossetti’s poetic speakers and literary characters often act as wayfinders, as does Rossetti herself in her first-person prose commentaries that make up the majority of her later work.

Humans are a knowledge-seeking and meaning-making species. Easterlin explains this general wayfinding tendency in humans by reminding us of our evolutionary roots.

Over the course of about six million years, humans evolved from arboreal ancestors protected and shaded by trees into a far-ranging, wayfinding, knowledge-seeking species whose cognitive, emotional, and physiological makeup slowly altered as the species sought to meet its needs for food, protection and mates.³

Our species developed in a way that motivated and enabled us to explore new habitats and learn about new surroundings so that we could survive in different ecological regions. At the same time, we maintained deep emotional attachments to places and social attachments to those in our tribes.⁴ Humans developed culture (language, art, stories, etc.) in part to enable us to share knowledge, information, and values.

This is essentially how our brains still work, and our biological evolution is evident in our cultural evolution. Our human ways of thinking were adaptive to help our ancestors survive and thrive in various natural environments. Therefore, it is not surprising that so many literary works deal with the natural world in order to locate greater meaning and knowledge in it. Easterlin explains,

the implication that our epistemology is embedded in our functional response to environmental pressures has direct bearing on literary artifacts. Art is, in effect, a way of knowing and coping with the world, one that initially, perhaps, served to strengthen human groups. While its function has mutated somewhat in modern culture, art still serves as a way of coping and knowing.⁵

Rossetti’s literary works, like those of other artists, not only examine the world in order to understand and interpret it, but they also serve as a way of coping with the fear and loss that comes with existence. Beyond the personal, Rossetti’s writings provide a way to share knowledge and experience with others through lyrics, narratives, and interpretations of scripture. This cultural activity is similar to when early human wayfinders went out to explore new land and would return to tell others in their tribe about what they saw and learned. Rossetti is one who seeks and finds, and who uses her literary talents to share what she has found. For Rossetti, creating literature was a way not only to solidify her own Christian identity, but also to share the spiritual wisdom she gained throughout her life with a broader Christian community.

The Autobiographical Self and Sociocultural Homeostasis

The term “environmental consciousness” from this book’s title may be taken in several ways. Certainly, in the sense of awareness, Rossetti is highly conscious of and attuned to environmental surroundings in her writing. Her work also implies a moral consciousness about environment in terms of environmental ethics. Environmental awareness and ethics are frequently evoked in ecocriticism, which I will discuss in the following chapter. What I have in mind foremost, however, in terms of psychological principles is the consciousness of self that is developed and practiced in Rossetti’s work through environment. Here, I turn to affective neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on understanding consciousness and the concept of the self that is unique to human beings.⁶ Consciousness is not simply an awareness of the contents of the mind, but a felt sense of an embodied self in relation to the world—the physical, social, and cultural environment. Consciousness and this sense of self involve a number of elements that should be taken into account when considering the perspective of a writer, including the writer’s physical body in the world, feelings and emotions, memory and mentally mapped images, and the process of life regulation that occurs both physically and culturally.

Damasio defines consciousness as “a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings.”⁷ Consciousness allows for human beings to have a sense of self. To explain the complexity of human consciousness, Damasio looks to our evolutionary past where he locates three neurobiological developmental stages of self: protoself, core self, and, finally, autobiographical self.

The protoself provides the oldest evolutionary conception of self, which is rooted in the human brain stem. This oldest part of the mind/brain remains essential to the development and ongoing function of human consciousness. At the most basic level, our bodies seek to maintain homeostasis, a balance of optimal life functioning. Damasio follows a bottom-up model of human consciousness calling the protoself the “stepping-stone required for the construction of the core self.” He continues, “It is an integrated collection of separate neural patterns that map, moment by moment, the most stable aspects of the organism’s physical structure. The protoself maps are distinctive in that they generate not merely body images but also felt body images”—the “primordial feelings” of the body.⁸ These primordial feelings of the mapped living body act as a kind of gauge for maintaining homeostasis in the organism.

The brain’s ability to create maps and images is its “distinctive feature.” These maps are “constructed when we interact with objects.”⁹ Such mapping and image creation allow us to store memory and knowledge in order to improve our interactions with the world. While Damasio’s protoself links a mind to a body in order to provide a primal sense of self, the next stage of consciousness, the core self, “is created by linking the modified protoself to the object that caused the modification, an object that has now been hallmarked by feeling and enhanced by attention.”¹⁰ We also come to place different values on different images depending on their importance for our life functioning and survival.¹¹ At this point, the mind is aware of interactions with outside objects and their causal effect on the organism. Now the images of the outside object can be modified and linked in a pattern, but only in the moment at this stage.¹²

As the self develops, the image creating and mapping functions become more complex. These images of self, external self-modifying objects, and the felt experiences of such objects are essential to the production of a conscious mind. The advancement to the extended consciousness of the autobiographical self is one of scope in that “it manifests itself most powerfully when a substantial part of one’s life comes in to play and both the lived past and the anticipated future dominate the proceedings.”¹³ Here, the experiences, or pulses, of the core self, a self that interacts with objects and changes due to these interactions, are “linked in a large-scale coherent pattern based on a self that has learned from past experience and is able to look forward, and one that has a sense of identity.”¹⁴ While the core self function remains always active, the autobiographical self only actively and consciously functions at certain moments of reflection. The rest of the time it functions more subtly and unconsciously, but in both functional modes it is capable of revising and rewriting itself. The self, like the mental maps and images that constitute it, is plastic. “As lived experiences are reconstructed and replayed, whether in conscious reflection or in nonconscious processing, their substance is reassessed and inevitably rearranged, modified minimally or very much in terms of their factual composition and emotional accompaniment.”¹⁵

We see in Rossetti how interactions with the external world become emotionally mapped and give rise to patterned and also novel responses. In considering creative activities like art or poetry, it is essential to remember that the multitude of collected felt images and patterns in our brain are plastic and available for modification through external experience and/or internal cognitive activity.

Rossetti’s work, I argue, reflects a constant, active reflection on the world and on her embodied self in the world—especially regarding “the most refined among our emotional experiences, namely, those that might qualify as spiritual.”¹⁶ With Rossetti, literature is largely an active creation of an autobiographical self and a decidedly spiritual identity.¹⁷ The wayfinding Rossetti, and her characters and speakers constantly interact with real and imagined objects in the world from which she gains perspective and knowledge, but that are also put into a context of a coherent and mostly consistent set of beliefs that she holds about the world. Her work reflects a self with a strong sense of identity, but one that is also capable of renewal—“an open sense of self that is both strong and flexible.”¹⁸ Most significantly for her readers, Rossetti has the poetic awareness and ability to express phenomena of a human organism engaged with a world of objects that give rise to new experiences in the self. As a lyric poet, she is always attuned to the sensory feelings, emotions, memories, images, and thoughts her environment evokes. She is able to use intense moments of experience, especially with the natural world, not only to practice her identity and regulate her life by creating art, but also to alter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cognitive Ecocriticism and Rossetti
• 1 Self-Creation and Environment
• 2 Embodied Christian Aesthetics and Environmental Ethics
• 3 Gleaning Ruth: Early Poetry
• 4 Victorious Jael: First Major Poetry Volumes
• 5 Pious Hannah: Early Devotional Writings
• 6 Fruitful Sarah: A Pageant and Other Poems
• 7 Prophetess Anna: Later Devotional Writings
• Bibliography
• Index