Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory

Jennifer Munroe, Rebecca Laroche

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472590459
• eBook ISBN: 9781472590473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Ecofeminism has been an important field of theory in philosophy and environmental studies for decades. It takes as its primary concern the way the relationship between the human and nonhuman is both material and cultural, but it also investigates how this relationship is inherently entangled with questions of gender equity and social justice. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory engagingly establishes a history of ecofeminist scholarship relevant to early modern studies, and provides a clear overview of this rich field of philosophical enquiry. Through fresh, detailed readings of Shakespeare's poetry and drama, this volume is a wholly original study articulating the ways in which we can better understand the world of Shakespeare's plays, and the relationships between men, women, animals, and plants that we see in them.

1

Ecofeminism matters

[T]he human is always the very stuff of the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world.1

In the chapters that follow in this book, we demonstrate how an application of some of the principles of ecofeminist theory we have discussed in the Introduction allows us to reorient and defamiliarize categories of enquiry that have thus far been of import to Shakespeare studies – in particular, ‘the Domestic’, ‘Knowledge-Making’ and ‘Subject–Object Relations’. Each of these has been the topic in recent decades of ecocritical/feminist scholarship, but ecofeminist theory gives us the opportunity to consider them anew and to think about how the concerns of ecological and feminist theorists might be brought into dialogue to help us understand the interconnected relations between them. What is more, within an ecofeminist discussion, the boundaries of these discursive topics begin to dissolve, finding space in which the domestic concerns merge with knowledge-making, and both disrupt the relationship between subject and object. In this dissolution, we can start to see the continuity and disjuncture between early modern ways of being and thinking and our own.

Domesticated beings

Using ecofeminist theory, we look to interrupt the ‘natural’ woman–nature alliance associated with the domestic sphere by combining readings of Shakespeare with household texts associated with and owned by women, as these books usefully reveal a relationship not always in alignment with but rather sometimes antagonistic to the natural world.2 They disclose women’s roles in maintaining the illusion of control over nature, as moth holes in clothing and mice droppings in the flour would defy that control. Thus the ‘domestic’ as a category, as discussed by so many feminists in a variety of insightful ways, is a subject that also has profound ecological implications.

At its root, the domestic implies a set of binaries – inside/outside, culture/nature, human/nonhuman, clean/dirty, cooked/raw – detrimental to ecological thinking around what belongs within the house and what belongs without its walls. ‘The domestic’ is also a heavily gendered domain, as a space that is associated with the female, particularly from its Victorian ‘angel in the house’ constructions. As a result, it has been widely considered by feminist theorists and critics, but it has not been a category regarded at any length by ecocritics, perhaps because in its very construction it assumes an exclusion of ‘the natural’. While feminist critics of early modernity such as Wendy Wall have explored the anxiety around demonic potentials in women’s actual domestic work of medicine making and meal preparing, ecofeminism interrogates the very real boundaries maintained in deference to the domestic delusion of exclusion and the othering of the nonhuman.3 In confronting the presence of pest control in particular in domestic discourse, we proceed to deconstruct one of its primal oppositions (cat and mouse) with Shakespearean examples and ecofeminist tools. From there, we move to the spider, moth, fly and the like to show how the movement of these ‘lesser creatures’ across household boundaries exposes not only literal holes that might be exploited, but also the fundamental delusion of containment. And finally, we move to fire, that which is necessary in the home but also destructive if it leaps its bounds, as a way of reconceptualizing domestic tasks within a larger ecological framework.

While plays like Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew have served as material to explore anxieties related to women’s place in marriage, the household and domestic economies, as Natasha Korda and others have pointed out, women’s work itself remains, still today, largely ‘invisible’;4 ecofeminism’s project, like theirs, is fundamentally recuperative, and brings to the fore women’s work, their material and practical lives. Ecofeminism, with its particular emphasis on the ‘socio-ecological’, troubles the category of the domestic to consider how an interrogation of women’s household labour in the context of a combined feminist and ecological approach traverses multiple boundaries, how the household itself is a marker for the illusion (and delusion) of containment – of space, of bodies, of gendered identity, of nonhuman creatures and non-living things. That is, ecofeminist theory offers a rethink premised on the notion of ‘transcorporeality’; if, as Stacy Alaimo posits, the human self and the environment that self occupies are both jointly the products (and co-producers) of one another, then the notion of discrete boundaries, that a ‘thing’ (or person-as-thing) might be contained, is in fact an impossibility.5 Early modern scholars have considered such ‘ecological’ premises of ontological co-creation, but their interest has tended to consider the household more as generic, not gendered space.6 In the interest of recuperating a richer and more multi-dimensional sense of human–nonhuman relations, though, we need to think of containment fantasies related to the household in terms of the multiple forms of subjection that we discussed in the Introduction. Without suggesting that Shakespeare was somehow aware of this idea, we propose here that some of Shakespeare’s works anticipate what this application of ecofeminism has more recently been able to articulate; the works we discuss demonstrate how anxieties about women’s containment were inextricably linked to those about the subjection of nonhuman things, the potentially invasive forces and materials – mice, fire, moths, wind and others – that threatened the seeming boundaries established to protect the men and women that inhabited the house and its environs.

Ecofeminist theory, in its joint interest in both the social and the ecological, forces us to reassess how material is inextricably linked to material practices and how co-agentic material processes are intertwined with the material power relations that asserted, but could never truly establish, women’s containment within the house. Instead of boundedness, women’s work reveals a fundamental ‘embeddedness’ in which humans and nonhumans are fundamentally entangled.7 In so asserting, we draw on how Korda proposes the household to be a site of ‘multiple exchanges’, economic and human, that reveal the permeable boundaries between inside and outside rather than their discreet and manageable borders.8 And to her materialist feminist reconceptualization, we add the ecological: these ‘exchanges’ simultaneously serve as co-productive happenings that alter the qualities of the human and nonhuman things in question such that the lines between human and nonhuman, cook and fire, patient and cordial, are not simply transgressed but prove to be a fundamental human delusion. As such, we revisit the way early modern scholars have discussed the chaotic nature of households, as Wall does in Staging Domesticity, when she writes, ‘Representations of domestic disorder on the stage might thus simply be said to anatomize the wayward passions to be mastered or pathologies to be cured so as to ensure the proper ordering of home and polity’,9 and begin to think of the impulses to manipulate diet, to manage flesh, to defy mortality (through preservation of food or people) as fruitless efforts not because they were simply unachieved by all housewives, but rather because these efforts reflected that such management was an impossibility all along.10

Attempted acts of enclosure, whether of the garden, the (especially female) body, the pantry or the house, betray how the impulse to subject one force or body to another is futile. It is an illusion not simply because the household was a chaotic more than an ordered space, but instead, as ecofeminist theory helps us articulate, what we call ‘chaos’ in this context is not antithetical to order but is the very quality of co-agentic human and nonhuman materials that defy control, which is the aim of enclosure. For example, the rosemary, angelica and rosewater in a fortifying plague water serve to do more than just order the human body (humoral or otherwise) through the absorption of plant material into human stomach, blood and cell tissue. To say as much would be to reassert the boundary between human and plant, even if one is incorporated into another, and it reinscribes the notion of human agency over plant (as human ingests, human body absorbs the passive plant object). Rather, ecofeminist theory helps orient us to the exchange between plant and human body that defies order or easy categorization, causing us to reassess the process of ingestion and absorption as simultaneous instances of plant/human ‘intraconnection’ and ‘entanglement’.11 These materials, human and nonhuman alike, collaborate such that what we want to call the human itself is a composite, not a distinct thing, and so too the nonhuman as well.

Ecofeminist theory, moreover, also asks us to revisit the social and historical implications of such a reassessment. It is, for instance, not an unimportant detail that anxieties about household order went hand in hand with anxieties about managing the housewife – her body, her behaviour, her passions – and we see this in particular with the discourse around kitchen fires in the period. Domestic cookery and medicine were areas of early modern life that used ingredients and processes that are co-creative with their would-be human agents, but they also served to reinforce ideas about women’s containment within the house, that household work was women’s domain, burgeoning conceptions that served as the contested context for second-wave feminism. Ecofeminism helps us redefine the binaries wild/domestic, inside/outside household, women/men, housework/professional work, nonhuman/human – and so, ‘domesticated’ comes to refer to a bevvy of human and nonhuman things in the context of containment. Ecofeminism emphasizes how both the containment of seemingly subjected humans and of nonhuman beings, and their linked qualities, are imagined more than realized states of being.

On the other side of the question of containment, however, is the intimacy that arises from the material practices historically linked with the household. In growing, preserving and, yes, even domesticating animals and plants, humans come to know them in their diurnal and seasonal cycles. In this revaluation of these ways of knowing and in this other definition of ‘domestic’ as the familiar, therefore, ecofeminist enquiry returns us again to a sense of embeddedness, of shared susceptibilities and co-creative exchanges.

Knowing things

Even as ideas about the household, which might be contained within and defined as domestic, were in flux in this period, so too were ways of valuing knowledge; and new ways of knowing nonhuman things went hand-in-hand with human subjection of ‘Nature’. But what does it mean to know something, to know a thing? Whose knowledge counts? We have inherited a Cartesian value system that recognizes rationality (with its related term, cognition) as the foundation of knowledge, but what if efforts ‘to know’ something simply betrays the limits of cognition? And what if things themselves might know, might have an existence beyond our human knowing? Vital materialist and posthumanist scholarship have ventured into this territory, aiming to reorient our understanding of things, of knowledge. Jane Bennett’s now-familiar rat, glove, bottle cap, stick, pollen tableau observes ‘stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects’ and points to the ‘vibrant agency’ of things.12 Even Francis Bacon, who insisted on the primacy of human reason and rationality over the senses, which ‘deceive’, also acknowledges that as ‘interpreter of Nature’, Man has limits; Man may be the ‘interpreter of Nature’, but he is also Nature’s ‘servant’.13 How, though, might such ‘existents in excess’ that Bennett proposes be recognized but through a human lens? After all, such things may have agency beyond human signification, but we are asked to think about them anew as assemblages apprehended, comprehended, by humans and within a context that is as much cultural as ‘natural’. Bennett rightly asks us to consider the ‘dangerous’ agency of things, that which ‘will always exceed our knowledge and control’, as in her example of electricity and ours of fire, but it is ultimately we humans who articulate that excess, that danger, not nonhuman things themselves.14

While posthumanist work like Bennett’s challenges our conception of how ‘things’ themselves might be agents, we need still to deconstruct the ‘us’, the ‘human’ to which she refers, as it potentially reifies the ‘Man’ Bacon understood as the legitimized knower, the primary apprehender and interlocutor of things. That is, until we dismantle the seemingly universal ‘human’ of ‘human meanings’, then the ‘we’, that ‘us’, the ‘human’, becomes yet another substitute for dominant ideas and perspectives. What if, that is, instead of the question of whether or not nonhuman ‘things’ also have agency, we concentrate on the interstitial territory between what appears to be within the realm of human apprehension and that which exceeds it, the elusive qualities rather than universalizing potential of meaning? What if we ask not what else we might know about nonhuman things but rather what it is that exceeds the limits of what we might know and how it has been tied culturally and historically to anxieties about the excess of Others? What if we look to different ways of knowing altogether, those that simultaneously redress the limits of the category ‘human’ and the ‘denial of ecological embeddedness’, to use Val Plumwood’s language, by making central that which defies human control and not the attempts to control themselves, at the same time we elucidate the fallacy of the collective human ‘we’?15

Ecofeminist theory provides a framework to interrogate the ontological co-evolution of things, human and nonhuman alike, such that we can embrace the ‘ecological embeddedness’ Plumwood describes; yet it simultaneously explicates how the multiplicity of the ‘we’, of the ‘human’ is experienced in diverse ways – raced, classed and gendered. To revalue embedded experience is also to revalue this (bio)diversity and chaotic multiplicity, the limits of the ‘human’ in ways that relate to environmental justice concerns and to reconstitute frameworks of knowledge whereby we also value wonder, the unknown or not-yet-known.16 In so doing, ecofeminists may simultaneously intervene in networks that privilege reason and objectivity over embodiment and experiential knowledge and those that subjugate racial Others, the poor, women and nonhuman beings – in particular, networks of scientific knowledge that became formally established in early modern England and that ...

Table of contents

• Arden Shakespeare and Theory
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Communities, collaborations and chaos
• Introduction: Ecofeminism and the seeds of time
• 1 Ecofeminism matters
• 2 Of mouseholes and housefires: Transcorporeal domesticity
• 3 How we know any thing
• 4 The dynamic object
• Conclusion: Nature, stir: Ecofeminists in the archive
• Appendix: Excavating nature
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright