Reconceiving Nature

Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry

PATRICIA MURPHY

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780826274298
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Surprisingly, glimmerings of ecofeminist theory that would emerge a century later can be detected in women's poetry of the late Victorian period. In Reconceiving Nature, Patricia Murphy examines the work of six ecofeminist poets—Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and L. S. Bevington—who contested the exploitation of the natural world. Challenging prevalent assumptions that nature is inferior, rightly subordinated, and deservedly manipulated, these poets instead "reconstructed" nature.

CHAPTER ONE

Augusta Webster:

Interrogating the Nature–Woman Link

IN A RESPONSE TO ARISTOTLE’S perception of a connection between nature and women, Luce Irigaray alludes to the vexing issue of essentialism that has plagued them both: “The substance of the plant, like that of any (female) being, cannot move, or move beyond, the ontological status assigned to it. Once and for all. It is not capable of any less or any more.”¹ The ramifications of this traditional assimilation become especially troubling when considering the faulty logic that confers upon both the unprivileged traits of passivity, materiality, and other markers of inferiority to justify domination of the ostensible analogues. Intervening in this societal verity, however, Augusta Webster provides an iconoclastic perspective in her 1881 A Book of Rhyme whereby essentialist presumptions become unsettled through complex strategies that break the supposed ontological linkage between nature and women, instead illuminating difference and undermining commonality. Additionally, A Book of Rhyme illustrates the harsh situation of a conventional Victorian woman whose prospects of self-fulfillment are dashed by a constrictive society. Webster adopts an unusual approach for pursuing her sweeping agenda in that the poem deploys nature imagery itself, in multifaceted and mutable permutations, to accentuate difference as well as to foreground the repression of Victorian women experiencing stifled potentiality and thwarted development.

Webster’s challenges to deleterious gender presumptions extended beyond her poetry to a dedicated advocacy of women’s rights. Webster took public stances through her essays and participated in activities to promote educational improvements, suffrage, and other pressing claims for women. As modernist novelist Vita Sackville-West remarked, Webster was “a woman who was deeply concerned with the lot of women throughout her life.” Webster’s feminism, as characterized by Angela Leighton, was an “essentially practical” approach. A writer for both the Examiner and the Athenaeum, Webster lent her voice to a host of topical subjects, with many of her articles subsequently gathered in the curiously titled A Housewife’s Opinions, an eclectic blend that Theodore Watts characterized in an Athenaeum obituary of Webster as “a miscellaneous collection . . . in which criticisms upon Greek drama are oddly mixed up with discussions upon domestic matters.” As Leighton remarks, A Housewife’s Opinions, “under the guise of homely wisdom, . . . ironically mocks many of the cherished opinions of the day.” In the collection, Webster took issue with the wrongheaded repression of women, especially regarding education and suffrage.²

Webster’s work to improve female education addressed inequities on both the university and girlhood levels. Her critiques of university education, presented in A Housewife’s Opinions, targeted examinations and degrees. In the first case, Webster assailed the practice, as at Cambridge, of holding separate examinations for women and preventing them from competing with men in the evaluation process. Webster argued that examinations exclusively for women treated them “as a class apart” and were suitable only for prospective governesses. This approach, Webster maintained in the essay “University Examinations for Women,” was without value since the learning that a woman attained was compared only “to that of other weak vessels.” Instead, Webster sought a meaningful standard that would apply to both women and men so that examinations would “represent for Mary what they represent[ed] for John.” Webster additionally defended young women “who [had] felt the restlessness of intellectual faculties unnaturally cramped, the weariness of unsatisfied hunger of mind.” Rather than encouragement, they faced “on all sides hindrance.” In the related second case, Webster attacked the system preventing women from attaining degrees at Cambridge except through the women’s colleges. Unlike the man with a degree, who “goes forth to the world stamped and warranted,” Webster asserted in “University Degrees for Women,” a woman was merely “politely assured that she would have had the degree if she might.” She therefore gained no status in the public eye, with repercussions for earning an income since she lacked “the degree’s plain voucher for her competence among the incompetent host of untrained women struggling for wages.” In the essay “Keys,” Webster criticized another educational issue, the focus on teaching women various foreign languages, saying this should not be “a chief and ultimate object, ignoring altogether the art of having anything worth saying in them.” The capacity “to think soundly in one language” matters more than being able “to talk sillily in a dozen.”³

Without adequate education and other training in a society where women outnumbered men, single females were seriously disadvantaged in endeavoring to support themselves, Webster stated in “The Dearth of Husbands,” a piece in A Housewife’s Opinions. Webster did note, though, that improvements had been made. She wryly noted a recognition that “the Unprotected Female,” like “the Habitual Criminal,” needed education. Yet many women still lacked decent education, she asserted, especially “gentlewomen” without an inheritance.⁴

Webster’s efforts to improve the educational situation for girls came through her consequential position on the London school board, “where her influence was considerable,” her contemporary Mackenzie Bell reported after her death. As Patricia Rigg relates, Webster fought efforts to expand coverage of domestic matters in the girls’ curriculum, wanted the girls to receive physical education, and believed that girls should learn mechanical drawing. Webster also sought an expanded female membership on the board to improve education and to oversee female instructors, Rigg details, and Webster argued against a measure to prevent married women from being hired to teach.⁵

In addition to her educational endeavors, Webster fervently championed the suffrage cause, both as a participant and as a writer. She was a dedicated member of a suffrage organization, but her goal to expand the vote remained elusive in her lifetime. As Rigg reports, Webster’s actions included supporting a petition to Parliament, advocated by John Stuart Mill, calling for women’s voting rights. Indeed, Webster even attempted to persuade Christina Rossetti to support voting rights, although the poet “preferred not to do [so],” her brother William revealed. Webster’s essays in A Housewife’s Opinions backed the vote for independent women ratepayers and envisioned success for the suffrage movement. In “Parliamentary Franchise for Women Ratepayers,” Webster argued that “commonplace justice” demands that these individuals should have the same right as men. She contended that “no earthly reason” existed to prevent the “special class of women whom our laws and customs recognise as qualified citizens in all other respects” from attaining the vote. Although these ratepayers were taxed as were their male counterparts, the women had no political recourse, Webster argued. Writing more generally about the suffrage effort, Webster labeled its advocates “an irrepressible army” in an essay with that phrase as its title and predicted that the movement would triumph. Although legislative measures had proven unsuccessful, she declared that “[t]he phalanx stands united.” Webster ridiculed others’ expectations that success would cause women to “become coarse-featured un-mannerly hybrids, men-hating, and hateful to men,” who would “wear coats and trousers, . . . be Bishops and Judges, and . . . break all the commandments.”⁶

A Housewife’s Opinions also examined other contentious social issues affecting women, such as employment and marriage, and denounced oppressive conditions. For example, in “Protection for the Working Woman,” Webster attacked overprotectiveness aimed at preventing women from gaining adequate employment, arguing that “such formidable power” would actually enslave them. Webster cautioned that foreclosing labor opportunities would cause grave harm. Without the benefit of reasonable opportunities, Webster warned, women would need to battle poverty through vice. Moreover, such factors as tradition prevented women from engaging in various types of work, she argued in “The Dearth of Husbands,” but those occupations were “perfectly suitable for them” and even better undertaken by women than by men. In “Matrimony as a Means of Livelihood,” Webster decried the sentiment that “any marriage [is] better than none.” She castigated “women who marry to be married . . . and be taken care of” rather than suffer the indignity of being an “old maid” or facing poverty.⁷

Webster’s unstinting assaults on female repression are compellingly evident in A Book of Rhyme through her contestation of the nature-woman bond that so intensively limited a woman’s potentiality. As Bell stressed, Webster’s “mature poetry” displays “her intense and passionate study of Woman’s position and destiny,” and such attentiveness is certainly evident in A Book of Rhyme. Although Webster wrote numerous nature poems that follow a more conventional trajectory, several verses in A Book of Rhyme illustrate difference by pointing to the unique aspects of the natural world and allowing the oppression of conventional Victorian women to stand apart from the workings of nature. During a period when the propriety of topics chosen by women writers raised debate, Webster elided criticism by situating her forceful stance within the customarily noncontroversial contours of the nature poem. Isobel Armstrong remarks generally on a “doubleness of women’s poetry,” a point that could apply to Webster’s work. Armstrong explains that “conventions are subjected to investigation, questioned, or used for unexpected purposes”; additionally, “[t]he simpler the surface of the poem, the more likely it is that a second and more difficult poem will exist beneath it.” Similarly, Marysa Demoor sees a modernist component threading through Webster’s verse, “that of her elaborating the worn, cliché images of Victorian poets and novelists only so as to subvert them” and “especially target[ing] those stilted images that have been used in connection with women.”⁸

The first group of poems from A Book of Rhyme that will be examined in this chapter reveals diverse and complex strategies to undermine essentialism. In the first poem, “The Swallows,” nature breaks away from essentialist cultural truths to become reimagined in liberatory ways, contrasting startlingly with Victorian women, whom those cultural verities constrain. The next two verses, both centered on springtime—“The First Spring Day” and “A Song of a Spring-Time”—negate supposed reproductive similarities to illustrate difference instead. The second section of this chapter addresses poems deploying floral imagery, particularly the rose, as the crucial focus and controlling mechanism to convey the disturbing societal appraisal of Victorian women. The third group of poems addresses the conflation of women and nature, delineating undesirable results. Finally, “The Old Dream” depicts the damaging effects wrought by essentialist perspectives transmitted across generations.⁹

Substantive Dissimilarities

In “The Swallows,” Webster advances multiple techniques to challenge the fusion of nature and women by depicting them as dramatically distinct entities, primarily by conferring agency and purpose on nature, in sharp contrast to the passivity associated with a traditional Victorian female ensnared within intellectual and behavioral strictures. The poem depicts nature not in customary terms as a homogenous, readily definable other through an identifiable essence, but as a heterogeneous mixture of discrete and distinguishable elements, exemplified by the fitting choice of the anomalous swallow. In the poem, nature further provides a lesson that biological sex need not determine destiny, for the male and female of the eponymous creatures significantly participate in identical activities, as figuratively opposed to the gender-specific pursuits underlying nineteenth-century culture. At first consideration, the poem may seem to present nature in conventional feminine images, but such portrayals instead demarcate the deathlike condition that essentialized Victorian women’s, and not the energetic swallows’, experience. Narrated by a speaker with a marginalized presence, “The Swallows” serves as a lament of sorts; the stanzas trace the free movements of the avian travelers embarking on their migratory journey to emphasize the antithetical condition of a moribund Victorian woman.

Opening with a plaintive question posed to the swallows, the poem reveals the speaker’s naïveté about her dismal condition and her underlying but unattainable hope that a desired change in Victorian society’s version of natural law could occur and thereby enable the speaker’s own version of a dying summer to revive.

Ah! swallows, is it so?

Did loving lingering summer, whose slow pace

Tarried among late blossoms, loth to go,

Gather the darkening cloud-wraps round her face

And weep herself away in last week’s rain?

Can no new sunlight waken her again?

“Yes,” one pale rose-a-blow

Has answered from the trellised lane;

The flickering swallows answer “No.”

Feminine pronouns designate the summer, which assumes essentialist traits through extended sobbing and vitiated movement in her reluctance to depart under another entity’s volition, effacing herself in the shadowy celestial mantle. Indeed, the ponderous phrasing and necessarily protracted enunciation of the second and third lines mimic the diffident motion. The other feminine entity, the pallid rose, conveys in this brief poetic appearance the attenuated condition of an unfortunate Victorian female through its wan demeanor and irreversible deterioration, for a blown rose has flowered and decayed; moreover, this rose rests in a “trellised lane,” suggesti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Nascent Ecofeminism
• Chapter One. Augusta Webster: Interrogating the Nature–Woman Link
• Chapter Two. Mathilde Blind: Contesting Domination
• Chapter Three. Michael Field: Eroticizing Agency
• Chapter Four. Alice Meynell: Unsettling the Nature/Culture Dichotomy
• Chapter Five. Constance Naden: Embodying Spirituality, Making Matter Matter
• Chapter Six. L. S. Bevington: Seeking a Harmonious Relationship
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index