Victorian Environmental Nightmares

Laurence W. Mazzeno, Ronald D. Morrison, Laurence W. Mazzeno, Ronald D. Morrison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030140410
• eBook ISBN: 9783030140427
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Literature

The twelve essays in Victorian Environmental Nightmares explore various "environmental nightmares" through applied analyses of Victorian texts. Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers of imaginative literature often expressed fears and concerns over environmental degradation (in its wide variety of meanings, including social and moral). In some instances, natural or environmental disasters influenced these responses; in other instances a growing awareness of problems caused by industrial pollution and the growth of cities prompted responses. Seven essays in this volume cover works about Britain and its current and former colonies that examine these nightmare environments at home and abroad. But as the remaining five essays in this collection demonstrate, "environmental nightmares" are not restricted to essays on actual disasters or realistic fiction, since in many cases Victorian writers projected onto imperial landscapes or wholly imagined landscapes in fantastic fiction their anxieties about how humans might change their environments—and how these environments might also change humans.

© The Author(s) 2019

Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison (eds.)Victorian Environmental Nightmareshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14042-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Representing Victorian Environmental Nightmares

Laurence W. Mazzeno¹ and Ronald D. Morrison²

(1)

Alvernia University, Reading, PA, USA

(2)

Department of English, Morehead State University, Morehead, KY, USA

Laurence W. Mazzeno (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Ronald D. Morrison

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Through the title of a 2015 review essay in Victorian Literature and Culture, Jesse Oak Taylor posed what was—at least for a brief time—an intriguing question: “Where is Victorian Ecocriticism?” ¹ Taylor’s first sentence concisely sums up the state of ecocritical work on Victorian texts at that curious moment: “The most striking thing about reviewing the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it” (877). Things, of course, changed very quickly. Even so, Taylor’s comments on the general state of Victorian ecocriticism are worth lingering over. By way of introduction to his review of three new books by Scott Hess (writing about Wordsworth), Allen MacDuffie (a contributor to this volume), and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Taylor argues that it has generally proven advantageous that Victorian scholars have seemingly lagged behind an initial wave of ecocriticism focused on British Romantic and American writers and texts. Taylor also encourages scholars to avoid the oversimplifications and exclusions of much early environmental criticism, including “the celebration of a de-historicized ‘Nature,’ idealizing wilderness rather than engaging with urban environments, uncritical and often largely metaphorical absorption of scientific terminology, inadequate attention to race and empire, and … a fixation on essences and abstractions rather than the dimensions of scale” (877). Looking back just a few years later, this list seems extraordinarily prescient, with Taylor’s suggestions describing key features of the most significant work that has followed in a relatively brief period. Toward the end of this Introduction, we return to this insightful listing to explain how the essays in this collection attempt to meet these criteria.

By the time Daniel Williams published a similarly focused review essay on Victorian ecocriticism in the same journal in 2017 entitled “Victorian Ecocriticism for the Anthropocene,” he was able to review Taylor’s well-regarded book, The Sky of Our Manufacture, as well as impressive new contributions by Heidi C. M. Scott and Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson. Only two years after Taylor puzzled over the disconcerting lack of ecocriticism on Victorian writers, Williams was able to state: “The Victorian field has seen a proliferation of ecocritical scholarship” (679). He mentions the appearance of our edited collection Victorian Writers and the Environment, as well as several key articles, special issues of journals, and themes of academic conferences—all focused on some dimension of Victorian ecocriticism. For Williams, one of the most important shifts in recent years has been the reconsideration of the value of “period thinking” and the implications of this shift, both in considering what constitutes the historical boundaries of the Anthropocene and whether employing traditional literary periods remains a useful strategy for dealing with geological and environmental changes that have occurred on far different timescales. Williams concludes by claiming that “Victorian ecocriticism seems to be thriving at a moment where its imaginative resources are most certainly needed” (680), surely an allusion to shifting political contexts in the USA and Western Europe as well as recently emerging (and often deeply troubling) climate data that gives additional relevance and perhaps a certain poignancy to the entire ecocritical project.

Since Williams’s review essay appeared, even more work has been published. In addition to full-length ecocritical readings of Victorian authors and texts, no fewer than three edited collections of ecocritical essays have appeared as we complete this Introduction to Victorian Environmental Nightmares in the early fall of 2018. Counting our own first collection, our new volume represents a fifth volume of essays (and this number will likely increase, perhaps even before Victorian Environmental Nightmares is published). ² Obviously, Victorian ecocriticism has not only emerged from obscurity; it has clearly thriven and is becoming a major growth industry in Victorian Studies in general. The result is that sustained justifications such as the one we crafted for our proposal to Routledge for Victorian Writers and the Environment, elements of which remain in the published Introduction to the volume, are no longer necessary. It has now become widely accepted that, in Taylor’s words, “the Victorians were the first people to dwell within [the Anthropocene] as a condition of their existence, witnessing the radical transformation of the world and the conditions of possibility within it” (“Where” 878). Thus it seems inevitable that Victorians would respond to changing environments at home as well as those encountered (or perhaps imagined) in the far-flung parts of the Empire. And, since the term “environment” emerged from both the biological and social sciences, it also seems inevitable that they would study and respond to human-created environments and the problems resulting from the industrial age. Perhaps, instead, we need to offer an explanation for why we have collected so much work on this subject in a relatively brief period of time and how this new collection differs from other recent work focused on Victorian ecocriticism. Heidi Scott makes the simple but profound point that a broad-based, multidisciplinary conception of ecology “is the most humanistic of the sciences because it is an interwoven fabric of landscape stories” (86). Certainly, in one fashion or another, every essay in our first collection, Victorian Writers and the Environment, focuses on one or more “landscape stories” from the Victorian Age. Yet we realized that this broad survey did not yet do justice to the nuanced approach to the Victorians’ critique of the encroaching footprint (and perhaps more importantly, handprint) of humans on the environment—an intrusion some saw as nightmare. Hence, we begin with our own story of how and why we collected so many of these critical analyses of Victorian landscape stories in the form of ecocritical analyses and why a more focused examination of one aspect of the Victorians’ perception of environment is called for at this time.

Even as Taylor lamented the dearth of ecocritical work on Victorian texts, we, along with a number of other scholars, were busy at work on our own ecocritical project. Morrison had contributed a broadly focused ecocritical analysis of Hardy’s later novels for the Mazzeno-edited volume Twenty-first Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, published in 2014. Quickly forming an editorial partnership, we determined that there was considerable need for an edited collection that provided an overview of various Victorian ecocritical approaches, a conclusion affirmed by enthusiastic responses from key scholars in America and Great Britain who accepted our invitation to contribute to such a project. Adopting a model that emphasized “coverage” over other principles, we also attempted to include a broad range of genres and approaches under what we have sometimes described to each other privately as “big tent” ecocriticism, including essays focused on canonical writers such as Tennyson, Dickens, Christina Rossetti, Emily Brontë, and Hardy, as well as several lesser-known authors. Moreover, our contributors approached Victorian texts from a diverse range of ecocritical approaches that incorporated elements of New Historicism, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial criticism, as well as traditional scholarship dependent upon biography and formalist analysis. In addition, we were determined that our anthology should be practically oriented and relatively accessible to advanced undergraduate students and above, even though contributors were also encouraged to draw upon sophisticated theoretical models.

As we were completing this first collection, we were both constantly aware that there was always “something more” that needed to be written about Victorian ecocriticism. One issue that frequently claimed our attention is the Victorian interest in nonhuman animals (and in fact this point of emphasis reemerges with some frequency in this new volume). Before Victorian Writers and the Environment was in press, we began to commission essays that were published in Palgrave’s Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism as part of its Studies in Animals and Literature Series. Our volume appeared a full ten years after Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay’s groundbreaking and influential Victorian Animals Dreams (2007). We offered Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture as a complement to Morse and Danahay’s influential volume, allowing our contributors to employ more recent theoretical models in examining a range of texts and cultural contexts that brought Victorians into frequent—for a great many, daily—contact with animals and with various forms of discourse about animals. While animal studies has evolved in the last couple of decades into its own interdisciplinary field that often makes use of literary studies, it also extends well beyond literary studies. This is not to ignore that this relationship has at times proven complex. In describing the realm of political activism, Ursula Heise maintains that “Animal welfare advocates and environmentalists have had a mixed history of convergences and conflicts that have come and gone” (129), and in certain respects there is a similar set of convergences and conflicts that exist between animal studies and ecocriticism. ³

A delay in the publishing process caused our two books to appear within a few months of each other, causing one reviewer to claim (understandably) that the Routledge volume was intended as a supplement to the Palgrave volume, when in reality it was the other way around. Ultimately, we take a very practical approach to this issue and view the two as closely related interdisciplinary fields with (usually) complementary goals and methodology. One important connection that we attempted to call attention to in our subtitle to the volume focused on animals was the historical and cultural contexts of these critical analyses as we attempted to avoid a simplistic version of presentism in critiques of some very specific Victorian contexts that included skin-collecting, livestock markets, the acclimatization debate, and the euthanasia of stray dogs. While some of these subjects are addressed through realistic fiction and journalism, there also remained a thread of animal-related literature that was frequently connected to the Gothic or to fantastic literature. That subject put us on the track of a very different range of possibilities for imaginative treatments of the environment in general.

Over the course of the Victorian period, a diverse selection of writers, making use of multiple literary and rhetorical forms, expressed growing fears and concerns over environmental degradation (in a wide variety of meanings, including social and moral). In some instances, environmental disasters (such as the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883) influenced these responses, while in other instances a growing awareness of the problems caused by industrial pollution and the unprecedented growth of cities prompted responses in imaginative literature, as we see in a range of novels and some poetry that focused on nightmarish urban scenes. But what we designate “environmental nightmares” are not restricted to essays on actual disasters or to realistic fiction or to the polemically inclined poetry that shares many features with it. In some instances, Victorian writers projected onto colonial landscapes or wholly imagined ones in fantastic fiction their anxieties about how humans might change their environments—and how these environments might change humans. From such a perspective, works as diverse as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Richard Jefferies’s After London , and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau all might be said to offer visions of enviro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Representing Victorian Environmental Nightmares
• Part I. At Home
• Part II. Abroad
• Part III. Imagined Landscapes
• Back Matter