The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys

Eros and Environment

Colin Carman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429664663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment is the first full-length study to explore a radically queer ecology at work in writings by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as their discussions of nature and the natural consistently link ecology and erotic practice. Initiated by Timothy Morton in 2010 as a hybrid of two schools of thinking about nature, queer ecology combines the alertness of environmentalists to constructions of the "natural" with efforts of sexuality scholars to denaturalize identity and to expose sexuality as a culture-bound construct. Conceptions of place are central to this investigation not only because an attachment to place is traditionally thought to be the ontological basis of all environmental consciousness (e.g. think-globally-act-locally) but because these two Romantic writers underscore the dynamic interaction between a person's natural surroundings and his/her interpersonal attachments. The poetical and prose writings of the Shelleys claim our special attention because of their unusual conception of the oikos, the etymological root of "ecology, " to mean both local grounds and the social, often domestic, places in which people dwell and desire. The overarching thesis of this book asserts that proto-ecological theories in Romantic-era England cannot be understood separately from discourses related to married/family life, and the texts considered demonstrate the comingling of earthly and erotic enjoyment. The issues raised by Eros and Environment are fundamental not only to literary and queer history but to all humanistic studies. They render the study of nature from a queer perspective a matter of intense interest to scholars in numerous disciplines ranging from ecocriticism and the natural sciences, including climate studies, to feminist criticism and sexuality studies.

1 Queer Ecology and Its Romantic Roots

The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys seeks to diversify the theoretical basis of ecocriticism and to open up a whole new basis for understanding the merger of the natural and the social. What both of the Shelleys’ works offer ecological- and queer-minded people alike is a different conception of themselves, not simply as “culture-bound creature[s]” – to borrow a phrase from the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould – but as living things whose right to erotic pleasure is naturally theirs (133).¹ What I am investigating here is not simple-minded escapism, nor the facile fantasy of “oneness” and the hope that everything on the earth’s surface forms some harmonious whole. Proof of a certain religiosity, the ecological exponents of universal “oneness,” in the formulation of social ecologist Murray Bookchin (2005), only deny what he calls the “rich differentiations that biotic evolution has produced” and in an innately chaotic and anarchistic fashion (23). Nature, like human sexuality, is nothing if not diffuse, diverse, and difficult to master. Accordingly, the Shelleys understood the disruptive, even anarchic, essence of eros and the unique power of queer desire, like the natural world, to scramble the cultural boundaries put in place to organize our experience as a species not only distinct, even superior, to other species but to relegate human desire to the indoors. For the Shelleys, these matters automatically involve questions of sexual liberty and natural rights.

The Shelleys believed so strongly in the blurriness of the nature/culture divide that they never stopped investigating how a greater appreciation for nature, and for the diversity they saw rooted there, could liberate what the Greeks called “Eros,” and what psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche once called “the life drive or Eros,” from the shackles of social prejudice (107). Eros is what propels the nonhuman speaker of “The Cloud,” Percy Shelley’s 1819 lyric poem, forward, “over Earth and Ocean, with gentle motion” (21–2), and the cloud that speaks in that poem. According to his A Philosophical View of Reform (also penned in 1819 and inspired by the Peterloo Massacre that August, in which some 60,000 peaceful protestors were violently put down by the Manchester Yeomanry), “it is our nature to press forward” but also “our duty” (256). In this respect, man mirrors nature by pushing forward and generating new lines of growth. Yet, unlike the more famous poem by William Wordsworth in which the poet wanders like a cloud, Shelley’s cloud speaks and claims to love in a humanly way (“lured by the love of the genii that move / In the depths of the purple sea”) (23–4). Shelley’s virtuosity lied in his ability to careen seamlessly between fiery polemic and nature poetry. Even so, modern-day readers may find Shelley’s ventriloquizing of a cloud trite or even ridiculously “romantic,” but the motif is a meaningful one in light of the fact that the ideology that nature is separate from human culture only accelerates man’s destruction of life on earth. Whether a nature-poet is speaking as or for nature, the underlying purpose is to con/fuse nature and human culture and to reverse the anthropocentric mindset with which man objectifies the earth and sees nature from the damaging viewpoint that the earth exists only to be exploited, or “open for business.” Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology, was born in 1809, but his theory that the social environment within a species is always changing, due to the laws of natural selection, would not take hold until after the Shelleys had died. Yet their imaginative works enact a pre-Darwinian belief that everything in the physical world is subject to change and “cycling on” ad infinitum, as Darwin once wrote, “according to the fixed law of gravity” (131). What the Shelleys called “mutability,” Darwin called “variability” in his The Origin of Species (published in 1859) and thought to be the first major scientific effort to dismantle the nature/culture binary (119).²

The Shelleys were not naturalists per se, but they depicted the nature of sex and sexual identity in a way that made the two appear interdependent, and this book is about that under-examined interchange and the insights their works provide in terms of living in what geologists and atmospheric chemists call the Anthropocene, or the Epoch of Man.³ “We are now living in an age defined by an anthropogenic fossil record,” notes Bernhard Malkmus, with a “footprint on earth” so large as to trigger the sixth mass extinction (71–2). This potential cataclysm is one for the history books, however. While asteroids or comets were the culprits behind the last extinction, when, 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs were expunged, humans are the agents behind their own slow-motion self-destruction. As a bulwark against the Age of Man, and the hegemony of the straight man, and their double threats to social justice and futurity, the Shelleys espoused a queer ecology – an even richer and more progressive development of Bookchin’s conception of social ecology.⁴ There was a time when humans thought they made no impact on their external environs, as in Percy Shelley’s somewhat naïve assertion that it is “Nature” alone who “stamps upon those rare masterpieces of her creation, harmonizing them as it were from the harmony of the spirit within” (353). But the time for harmonizing may have already run out and, in the Anthropocene, we now inhabit an age in which man is not one but two with Nature. Call it hyperbole but more than a decade ago, the former Vice President and climate crisis crusader Al Gore cautioned that “what is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings” (qtd. in Szendy 13). Regardless of Gore’s status as the environmental movement’s Paul Revere – warming oceans and mass extinctions are coming! – ecological apocalypse is still something that many people regard as unimportant and, worse, partisan. Three words from another American politician embody that pernicious attitude toward an earth that supplies resources that are largely nonrenewable: Drill, baby, drill!

As a timely remedy to that shortsighted imperative, we should start the following study with two queries: what is queer ecology and why does it matter in the Age of Man? What makes this amalgamation of ecocritical thought and sexuality studies, currently exploding within the academy, especially well suited to analyzing the Shelleys’ sense of sex and nature? At the forefront of queer studies, today is the topic of “queer nature,” though queerness and nature have long made strange, even incompatible, bedfellows. The Shelleys offer an illuminating way out – a breath of fresh air, if you will – of the perceived impasse between queer theory and ecocriticism because their writings champion the diversity of erotic and ecological life and combine such matters with that of political justice. Since the term “queer ecology” would have been unfamiliar to early nineteenth-century writers, it is worth asking how and when this subset of social ecology came about. The Romanticist who successfully queered the field of ecocriticism by bridging these disciplines was Timothy Morton whose first book, it should be noted, was on Percy Shelley: 1994’s Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World. That work is an important point of origin, especially in its final chapter on Shelley’s commitment to a more sustainable future without waste, because it highlights the inseparability of social problems from environmental ones in works like Queen Mab and Ozymandias. In a penetrating reading of the latter poem, Shelley’s best-known short work including a forceful prediction that all tyrants must fall, Morton illustrates that nothing, not even an earthly topos (or place) like the “desart,” lies outside the realm of social politics. Any assertion that nature and culture are sharply distinguished, Morton claims, is “unproductive” and antithetical to a Romantic “ecography” that privileges sameness over difference (225). Simply put, nature-culture is a distinction without a difference.

By conceiving of a queer ecology, Morton was only deepening the degree to which nature is politicized in Percy Shelley’s thought. Sixteen years after Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, Morton coined “queer ecology” in the PMLA to mean an anti-essentialist discipline premised upon at least three distinct but related ideas: first, the interconnectedness of biodiversity and gender/sexual diversity, both of which are not only natural but essential to the health of any ecosystem; second, the rejection of all taxonomies that organize their members hierarchically; and third, the denaturalization of heterosexuality. Morton’s adumbration of what the queering of ecocritique would mean for these two fields, both of which have been marginalized within the academy because of what he called “ideological baggage,” hinges on the concept of fantasy, which is certainly no stranger to gender/queer criticism, given its roots in psychoanalytic thought (5). In fact, Morton’s interest in a queer ecology grew out of his earlier effort, mapped out in 2007’s Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, that art facilitates the fantasy work that drives the contemplation of the natural world, for “it is in art,” he writes, “that the fantasies we have about nature take shape – and dissolve” (1).

Yet Morton’s fusion of eco-studies and queer studies did not occur sui generis, and there is something chicken-and-egg-like about trying to pinpoint the precise founder of the field. Eco-feminism predates this latter-day iteration by decades, after all; the term “eco-féminisme” was coined in 1974 by the French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne. When Mary Daly published Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-ethics of Radical Feminism four years later, she categorized, in her words, “Lesbians / Spinsters / Amazons / Survivors” as the true champions of the earth and singled out Silent Spring author Rachel Carson as an “early prophet foretelling ecological disaster” (20). In the parlance of Percy Shelley, Carson was, according to Daly, an “unacknowledged legislator” of the natural “world” (A Defence of Poetry 297). Furthermore, Morton was not the only scholar to query “How Queer is Green?” (as Greg Garrard did in 2010) and to link queer theory with what Garrard called a “radical new level of skepticism toward ‘nature’ and its presumed taxonomies” (77). Some green shoots of queer eco-scholarship had already sprung up, first in the edited collection, Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture (1995), which interrogated what editors Paul R. Abramson and Steven D. Pinkerton, both professors of psychology, called the “intricate intertwining of the cultural and the biological in the experience of sexual pleasure,” though such intertwining did not involve ecology and queerness (12). As a corrective, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson) coincided with Morton’s guest column in the PMLA and expanded the field to include such disparate topics as penguin family values, the 2005 gay-cowboy film Brokeback Mountain, sex al fresco in the poetry of Adrienne Rich, and what David Bell called (building onto a coinage of Donna Haraway’s that collapses two supposed contraries: “naturecultures”) “queernaturecultures” (135). Queer Ecologies was the culmination of Sandilands’ earlier efforts to entangle matters of environmental ethics and queer eroticism and to forge what she excitedly called, in 2001, a “gloriously rich site of interaction between biology and culture” (171).⁵

The major reason why the Shelleys have never been analyzed in terms of a queer ecology is that most literary critics still have no idea what the field really entails. Why on earth would queer studies take an interest in nature when the fantasy of a pure and authoritative “nature” has been weaponized to abject queer sexuality as unnatural and uncultured? Put more glibly, what has nature ever done for us? A convergence of two critical fields that arose after the 1960s, queer ecology is still putting down roots. One of many cutting-edge ecologies, queer ecology not only interrogates the ways in which queer sexuality came to be regarded as “unnatural” but how heterosexuality claimed nature as its own. This recent development in queer theory not only brings nature to the center of queer studies, but it focuses on how the Shelleys attempted to pervert dominant notions of the “natural” in English Romantic age. This happened on and off the page since this was no conventional married couple. One need not be familiar with the Eve K. Sedgwick’s theory of homosocial triangulation (articulated in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire) to see something strongly queer in the Shelleys’ erotic involvement with other members of their close-knit friend circle. The fact that Mary was already pregnant, in 1815 (one year after the couple’s elopement) when Percy Shelley encouraged a ménage à trois that would include his Oxford classmate and collaborator, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, is less surprising than the perverse in-language Shelley used in his letters to his Hogg. “I shall be very happy to see you again, & to give you your share of our common treasure of which you have been cheated for several days,” he wrote in April 1815, prior to his assurance that “we will not again be deprived of this participated pleasure” (Letters I 426). Mary withdrew from the proposition, prompted by the birth of the couple’s first child and its death ten days later.

This is not to say Mary Shelley was a willing victim of her young husband’s homoerotic schemes, and the fact that she referred to herself in a flirtatious letter to “my poor Jefferson” in April 1815 as “a very naughty Dormouse” (using the men’s pet name for her) reveals the way in which she enjoyed playing the coquette, even in an epistolary form (Letters I: 13). Playing the part of a mischievous rodent, Shelley aligns herself with animal desire but asserts her literary know-how, given the echo of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Prince’s directive that his mother “let the bloat king tempt you again to bed [and] call you his mouse” (III.iv.182–3). This is a facet of queer ecocentrism: humans taking sexual cues from animals.⁶ Shelley’s self-description can be parsed further: the word-choice is closely related to her euphemism for lesbian desire – that impulse, in her youth, to feel “tousy-mousy for women,” as she wrote in 1835 – to which I will return in Chapter 4 in the context of animal studies, a recent offshoot of eco-studies (Letters II 256). Peter Heymans, author of Animality in British Romanticism: The Aesthetics of Species, claims that it was the combination of two historical events, the Industrial Revolution and a shift in England’s agricultural policy by way of parliamentary enclosure laws, that fundamentally altered the way people saw themselves in relation to their environment and to natural fauna.⁷ “With humans moving into the city and animals moving out,” he writes, “the latter were increasingly looked ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Primary Works Often Referenced, With Abbreviations
• Author Bio
• Introduction
• 1 Queer Ecology and Its Romantic Roots
• 2 “The Nature of Love and Friendship”: Ecotones and Other Fine Lines in Percy Shelley’s Writings on Romantic Friendship
• 3 Percy Shelley’s Hermaphroditus: Queer Nature and the Sex Lives of Plants in The Sensitive-Plant and The Witch of Atlas
• 4 Communal Ecology and the Queer Domesticities of Mary Shelley’s Maurice and Valperga
• 5 Osculate Wildly: Earth-Kissing and Tree-Kissing in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Lodore
• Conclusion: Tangled, or the Shelleyan Network
• Index