Energy, Ecology, and Victorian Fiction

Energy, Ecology, and Victorian Fiction

Barri J. Gold*Muhlenberg College

Abstract

This article discusses the state of ecocritical thinking in Victorian literary scholarship. It proposes adistinctive Victorian ecocriticism, informed by thermodynamics, wherein we may understand theliving and non-living, the biological and the physical to be both linguistically and energeticallyentangled.

Energy, Ecology, and Victorian Literature

When, in the 1990s, literary scholars began to call themselves ‘‘ecocritics,’’ it was notclear whether they were doing one thing or many, inventing something new, or revivingsomething very old. Though readers have been interested in the depiction of ‘‘nature’’ inliterature since time immemorial, ecocriticism is a stylishly interdisciplinary approach,involving the environmental sciences in thinking about literature and purposely maintain-ing a wide variety of methods and concerns.

Nonetheless, the broad scope of ecocriticism has seemed to some to exclude Victoria-nists. These have expressed dismay at ‘‘a strong general bias in the field toward Americanliterature,’’ and qualified that where ecocritics have focused on British literature, theyhave largely ‘‘gravitated toward the romantics’’ (Carroll 305). Similarly, with poetry inparticular, we find the lament that ‘‘Victorianists have traditionally left it to their Roman-ticist and Americanist colleagues … to extrapolate the environmental implications of verse… that takes landscape as its subject’’ (Frankel 630).

At the same time, ecocriticism has been subject to the critique that its practitioners takerather too naıve a view of nature for contemporary literary taste. Ecocritics have resistedwhat they see as the tendency of literary studies to read depictions of nature politically.In her introduction to The Ecocritical Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty worries that if one’s knowl-edge of the world came from literary studies, ‘‘you would quickly discern that race, classand gender were the hot topics of the late twentieth century, but … you might neverknow that there was an earth at all’’ (xvi). Similarly reacting (sometimes overreacting) toAlan Liu’s increasingly notorious, if frequently misunderstood, assertion that ‘‘There is nonature,’’ ecocritics insist that nature exists separate from us and our politicized, linguisticconstruction of it. And of course, Kate Soper has a point when she observes that ‘‘it isnot language that has a hole in its ozone layer’’ (151).

Neither of these concerns characterizes the whole of ecocriticism, however. Scholarshave long considered the wealth of Victorian engagement with nature, from the Victo-rian garden to the exploration of the arctic and the abundance of natural images in thearts, Turner’s landscapes and Morris’s leafy wallpaper. The Victorians also boasted a‘‘romance’’ with natural history as well as the establishment of increasingly professional-ized natural sciences.1 And since Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots and George Levine’s Darwinand the Novelists, we have found evolutionary narratives throughout Victorian fiction –

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‘‘green’’ as well as ‘‘brown.’’2 The ‘‘green’’ have sometimes seemed more elusive, how-ever, since the Victorian fascination with nature has long seemed tinged by anxiety, fromTennyson’s depiction of ‘‘nature red in tooth and claw’’ to the late-century’s scientificallyinformed worries about nature’s inevitable decay. But recently, scholars have begun toargue for the environmental or ecological concerns in what may seem unlikely places –within the socialist writings of William Morris, the religious poetry of Gerard ManleyHopkins, the art criticism of John Ruskin, and the detailed cityscapes to be foundthroughout Dickens. Thus, ‘‘greening’’ a few Victorian favorites, Victorian scholars,among others, have also resisted the temptation to beat a reactive retreat to an underthe-orized, naıve or nostalgic view of nature. In such manifestly social and political contexts,we cannot easily ignore the effects of language on nature even as we devote to the physi-cal world the attention it deserves.

It is not my goal here to canvas Victorian or Victorianist treatments of nature, thor-oughly explored before now. Instead, it is the purpose of this essay to consider how read-ers of Victorian literature have engaged with contemporary ecocriticism, and to suggesthow such scholarship has something distinctive to offer to its future directions. I believethat where ecocriticism seems least appropriate may in fact be where it is most needed. Ifwe wish to change ourselves along with our reading practices, we will need to wrestlewith the ‘‘greening’’ of much beloved, but dubiously ecological Victorian literature, thosefamiliar texts wherein ‘‘race, class and gender’’ have been such ‘‘hot topics,’’ whereindustrialism and urbanization are such overwhelming anxieties, where the individualcomes to such prominence, and where even the wildest spaces may evince deep traces ofhuman occupation. In turn, Victorian literature may help us find new ways to query ourown, troubled relation to the natural world.

I will begin by considering how studies of Victorian literature seek to trouble ‘‘nature’’– identifying among the Victorians problems of signification not unlike our own. I willthen turn to a slightly different set of organizing categories, to critics who have identifiedwhat may more properly be called an ‘‘environmentalist’’ strain in Victorian writing andwho identify among the Victorians the roots of modern ecology, albeit more ‘‘social’’than ‘‘deep.’’ Finally, I will make a suggestion: a possible synthesis of two largely disparatestrains of Victorian literary criticism. To the self-consciously ecological strain that dealswith ‘‘landscape’’ and other forms of what one might call ‘‘experiential’’ nature, I willsuggest we incorporate the scholarship that explores the Victorian discourses of energy,especially where these seem to me to have environmental implications. I admit thatmy entree into ecocriticism is through the latter, but to me, the connections betweenenergy and ecology seem obvious, compelling, imperative. Such a combined approach is,I believe, an essential part of our study of Victorian literary ecosystems – an approach that,I believe, can do much to help us avoid both an excessive literary anthropocentrism anda nostalgic vision of untrammeled nature, as we work to develop ecological readingpractices appropriate to the thoroughly trammeled spaces of our own world.

‘‘Nature’’

‘‘Nature,’’ as Raymond Williams puts it, ‘‘is perhaps the most complex word in the lan-guage,’’ adding that ‘‘any full history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large partof human thought’’ (219, 221). Certainly the Victorians have been part of this history –though not, perhaps, in the same ways as the Romantics or Thoreau or the literature of theAmerican West. Their ‘‘nature’’ is not, identically, Romantic ‘‘nature’’ or the Thoreavian‘‘wild’’ – and ‘‘nature’’ itself may be too ambiguous a term to tease out its specificity.

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Our own views of ‘‘nature’’ have been importantly shaped by the Victorians. Indeed,Jonathan Bate’s extremely important Romantic Ecology locates some of our problematicreadings of nature in Wordsworth in our practice of (mis)reading through the Victorians,notably Thomas De Quincey, who seems to have set the standard for ‘‘the most influen-tial recent readings of Wordsworth’’ that ‘‘seem to demand of poetry that it should solvepolitical and social problems’’ (15). Like Glotfelty above and Lawrence Buell, who identi-fies in ‘‘criticism on the subject of art’s representation of nature,’’ a tendency ‘‘to effacethe world’’ (5), Bate seeks to redress a certain myopia in literary criticism, the tendencyto interpret ‘‘nature’’ in literature as predominantly political, as metaphor or a kind ofspin that seeks to establish preferred political positions as right by arguing they are natural.But Bate does not simply blame the Victorians. If we are inclined to do so (less often byfollowing De Quincey than by oversimplifying Ruskin’s notion of ‘‘pathetic fallacy’’),Bate reminds us that: ‘‘The common reader’s view of Wordsworth’’ – i.e., that he was,in fact, a nature poet, ‘‘derives from the Victorian way of reading him, John Stuart Mill’sway, John Ruskin’s, Leslie Stephens’’ (4). Devoting much of his book to Morris as wellas Ruskin, Bate thus calls for a return to a reading of Wordsworth’s nature as nature.

But as Bate knows well, treating nature as nature is a tricky business. Like us, the Vic-torians struggled to define nature, and to delineate a variety of natures including humannature and women’s nature, which time and scholarship have so often identified as not par-ticularly natural at all. Weeding through the abundance of such usages could prove a bitdaunting, but as Barbara Gates, for one, has shown us, the persistent association ofwomen with nature enabled women to voice considerable ecological concern – often tospeak for nature, as it were. Gates’s Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embracethe Living World explores the ways these women participated in the 19th century’s recon-ceptualization of what ‘‘nature’’ means – as scientists, as advocates, and as artists. Fromthis project, grew her anthology of women’s nature writing In Nature’s Name, whichprovides a wealth of material, organized thematically according to such categories as‘‘Protecting,’’ ‘‘Domesticating,’’ ‘‘Adventuring,’’ and so on. Along with such work asNaomi Wood’s on Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Gates directs us to the ecological poten-tial we might find in lesser-known writers and forms, including ‘‘writing about naturestudy and science education’’ (Nature’s Name xxiii) and ‘‘children’s literature, [which]almost from its inception, has been deeply invested in drawing connections betweenhumans and the natural world’’ (Wood 233).

If we are partial to Victorian novels or perhaps constrained to teach the canon, wemight turn to an essay such as Ella Soper-Jones’s ‘‘Shivering Sands: Anxiety and theVictorian Ecological Imagination.’’ Reading Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, she finds a‘‘destabilizing ironic tension between themes of social estrangement … and themes ofbiological entanglement’’ (199), arguing that

the ‘broad brown face’ of the Shivering Sand is an ersatz for a ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw,’a presence that threatens to consume Blake [the amateur detective-hero] in his monistic questfor signification. (206)

This essay thus points to a Victorian ambivalence about nature (evident also, as Soper-Jones suggests, in Tennyson’s In Memoriam) manifest in the anxiety that nature may bemore violent and threatening and not nearly so motherly as could be wished.

Many Victorian interactions with ‘‘nature’’ have been identified as such a quest for sig-nification (sometimes domination) riddled by ambivalence. One Victorian notion of nat-ure seems to have been an idealized product of Victorian antiurbanism – a sort ofnegative reflection of Victorian dismay at the effects of industrialization, but no more real

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than the nature with which the Victorians are said to credit the Romantics. Among Vic-torians who studied nature, there were varying (sometimes mutually critical) opinions onwhat it meant and what our relationship to it should be. In The Romance of Victorian Nat-ural History, Lynn Merrill observes that natural history ‘‘served as a bridge’’ between twomodes of conceptualizing nature, ‘‘the classical worldview and the upstart scientific one’’(12). The debate, moreover, between closet and field naturalists

represent[ed] one expression of a major dialectic … between the Broad view—natural ecology,the landscape as a whole, objects within their setting—and the narrow view—anatomical details,microscopic focus, the object as isolated … [a] dialectic [that] figures importantly in … Victo-rian poetry, Victorian painting, sketching, and photography, and natural history writing. (81)

Thus, we see the Victorians experiencing not only the beginning of what has been called‘‘the two cultures’’ but also a set of discourses struggling, and sometimes competing, todefine nature and our relations to it.

Kate Soper’s What is Nature? powerfully suggests that we still haven’t come to any neatsettlement of this struggle. Soper usefully clarifies the tension that currently existsbetween what she calls ‘‘postmodernist’’ and ‘‘ecological’’ ways of thinking about nature,which boil down roughly to nature-as-linguistic-construction and what we’ve been call-ing nature-as-nature. But Soper proffers a different set of terms to characterize our modesof thinking about nature, and these seem to me rather helpful if we seek an ecocriticismfitted to Victorian literature. Her metaphysical nature is the non-human that demarcatesthe boundaries of the human. Lay or experiential nature refers to the ‘‘ordinarily observa-ble features of the world’’ (not unlike Bates’s ‘‘common reader’s view’’). But realist natureseems to point to something the Victorians developed in spades, a concept of nature that‘‘refers to the structures, processes and causal powers that are constantly operative withinthe physical world’’ (155–6) – the stuff of science. Thus, even if we were to concede laynature to the Romantics (though I am by no means saying we should), the Victoriansmay well have a good deal to say about realist conceptions of nature. This is the naturethat subjects us to the implications of Darwinian evolution and energy physics even as itimplicates us in the application of scientific ideas. We will return to this kind of naturewith the discussion of energy. Meanwhile, we turn to Victorian treatments of what maybe called – thought not without complications – the environment.

Environment and Ecology

Scholars have done considerable work to locate the roots of modern environmentalismamong the Victorians. There is, of course, an intuitive basis for this connection, as theVictorian perception of limited space and scarce resources may speak more directly toour most pressing problems than do ecological writings premised on the availability ofopen and unexplored ‘‘wild’’ spaces. A decidedly environmental conscience drove Vic-torians like William Morris and John Ruskin, who nonetheless have situated their con-cerns within spaces long inhabited. These have repeatedly (and rightly, it seems to me)been cited these as early environmentalists. Patricia Nixon names ‘‘John Ruskin andWilliam Morris: Prophets of the Modern Ecology Movement.’’ Brian Day investigates‘‘The Moral Intuition of Ruskin’s ‘Storm-Cloud,’’’ (a title that alludes to Ruskin’sfamous essay on the changes in atmosphere wrought by industrialization within thetime span of his Ruskin’s own memory), and Ruskin and Environment brings together acollection of essays exploring such concerns. In ‘‘Woods Beyond Worlds,’’ however,Sara Wills warns against taking such readings too far, and especially against understand-



ing William Morris as a ‘‘deep ecologist,’’ insisting that we recollect his investment inhuman society.

If Morris’s ecology isn’t necessarily ‘‘deep,’’ there is nonetheless an argument to bemade that it is decidedly modern. The essential modernity of Victorian ecological think-ing – including attention to negative environmental impact, informed by modern scien-tific paradigms such as evolution and thermodynamic theory – is at the crux of JohnParham’s argument for a Victorian ecology. Similarly, Harriet Ritvo’s wonderful historyThe Dawn of Green identifies as familiarly modern the discourse surrounding LakeThirlmere’s eventual conversion into a reservoir serving the industrial city of Manchester.Ritvo identifies the emergence of

a nebulous new sense of ownership—a sense that the citizens of a nation should have some sayin the disposition of significant landscapes even if they held no formal title to the property inquestion. (104)

Though historical in nature, this work is discursively sensitive enough to satisfy literarytastes, exploring both the irony of ‘‘The Unspoiled Lake’’ and the iconography of ‘‘TheDynamic City.’’ It cries out for literary counterparts, perhaps in readings of such indus-trial novels as Elizabeth Gaskell’s.

Such treatments suggest that aspiring Victorian ecocritics needn’t limit themselves tothe study of the most outwardly nature-loving Victorians. Buell usefully lays out the‘‘ingredients that might be said to comprise an environmentally oriented work’’ – notone of which insists that such texts be nature poetry or preservationist manifesto. Indeed,none of these categories necessarily precludes texts dealing with, say, urban environments.For example, ‘‘human accountability to the environment’’ may readily be said to be partof not only Gaskell’s, but also Dickens’s ‘‘ethical orientation’’ (Buell 7). And for all thatBuell takes Martin Chuzzlewit to task for treating the American West merely as ‘‘a fram-ing device,’’ there is a wealth of Victorian fiction in which ‘‘the nonhuman environment… begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history’’ (7). We maythus shift our ecocritical expectations a bit. Instead of pursuing a ‘‘deep’’ ecology amongthe Victorians, we may look for a kind of ‘‘social’’ ecology. Very simply, the former asksus to put nature first, relegating human concerns to the relative margins; the latter seesthe roots of environmental problems in social problems.

This incorporation of the social also suggests that a broadly construed notion of envi-ronment or place may well fit within the mandates of ecological criticism. Without rele-gating place to simple setting or background, nor understanding it as merely the outwardprojection of our inward states, we can nonetheless make use of place as somethingshaped by humans as well as by nature. Such a principle of place clearly drives JosephCarroll’s observations on Victorian fiction. From novels set in the African wilderness,through the ‘‘bewildering wilderness’’ and ‘‘primeval chaos’’ of Dickens’s London (307),he finally arrives at ‘‘Fielding, Austen, Thackeray, and Trollope, [for whom] the place isoften an estate.’’ Nor are considerations of place exclusive to novels. Moving indoors,Nicholas Frankel finds even in ‘‘the decorative poets,’’ Rossetti, Morris, and Wilde, aconviction that ‘‘literature … takes place in an environment, not in isolation from it’’(634). In ‘‘Victorian ecological verse,’’ with its emphasis on sensation and perception,Frankel sees ‘‘a discernible effort to dissolve the confines of self in the dynamics of envi-ronmental interaction’’ (631) – a dismantling of Cartesian categories key to conceptualiz-ing an ecology. Frankel also finds Morris and Ruskin ‘‘arguing for a closer integration ofcultural production and environmental awareness’’ (629) – a comment that speaks to



Morris’s exclusion from the ranks of ‘‘deep’’ ecologists but that might suggest somethinguseful and distinctive in Victorian ecological thinking.

As we struggle with whether such ‘‘integration’’ is a bane or a benefit, it helps to con-sider a useful distinction between ‘‘environment’’ and ‘‘ecology’’ made by Cheryll Glotf-elty in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader.3 She claims that

in its connotations, enviro- is anthropocentric and dualistic, implying that we humans are at thecenter, surrounded by everything that is not us, the environment. Eco-, in contrast, impliesinterdependent communities, integrated systems, and strong connections among constituentparts.4 (xx)

Whether everyone subscribes to Glotfelty’s linguistic distinction is unclear – indeed, unli-kely. But we may nonetheless find such concerns in other language. Regenia Gagnierand Martin Delveax identify such a tension of ‘‘independence versus interdependence’’among the literary Decadents of the late 19th century, an anxiety of ‘‘individual develop-ment threatening the survival of the whole’’ (573). And Glotfelty’s preference for theword ‘‘ecology’’ seems consistent with the term’s Victorian inception.

The word was invented by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866. He described it as:‘the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and organic environ-ment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants withwhich it comes directly or indirectly into contact’. (Parham, ‘‘Green Man’’ 258)

And the shift (return?) to ecological thinking at least allows us to evaluate whether a con-cern for the social is disastrously anthropocentric or rather approaches a sense of humansas part of a larger system of interdependent communities.

From Energy to Ecosystems

The breadth of Haeckel’s definition – total relations, inorganic and organic, friendly andinimical, direct or indirect – seems to make space for a productive indistinction betweenthe natural and the cultural as well. It invites a kind of interdisciplinarity that is at once atthe core of ecocriticism and decidely Victorian. Indeed, Regenia Gagnier finds ‘‘pre-dis-ciplinary Victorians … closer to this way of thinking than the rationalized disciplines ofthe past hundred years, which reduced causality to nature or culture exclusively’’ (19).Ecology itself is not only Victorian in origin but always-already what we call interdisci-plinary: ‘‘Ecology conjoins two different nineteenth-century scientific frameworks, naturalhistory – positing a ‘balance of nature’ – and evolutionary theory, change driven by spe-cies competition.’’ And as Victorian ecology comes into contact with Victorian energyscience, we find also the roots of what we now call ‘‘ecosystems theory.’’ Drawing onsuch energy concepts, Haeckel’s ‘‘total relations,’’ are rearticulated: ‘‘‘all relations amongorganisms … in terms of purely material exchange of energy and of such chemical sub-stances as water, phosphorus, nitrogen, and other nutrients’’’ (Parham 258).

The picture of a world in which both the cultural and the natural are bound together bycountless processes of energy exchange seems decidedly ecological. It also seems ‘‘realist,’’in the sense used by Kate Soper, as it implicates humans in and subjects us to the causal pro-cesses that are constantly operative within the physical world. Energy, moreover, does notdistinguish between the social and the natural, though the discourses of energy may be usedin decidedly anthropocentric (even racist, sexist, and imperialist) ways.

Close attention to the study of the discourses of energy suggests how such concernsmay enrich Victorian ecocriticism, help us to develop reading practices sensitive to



interrelations between ourselves and the natural world of which we are part, and alert usto the spin to which scientific discourse may be subject without discounting the scienceitself. Much of the expanding body of Victorian energy criticism verges on a new formof ecocriticism. Notable among these are Tina Choi’s ‘‘Forms of Closure’’ and AllenMacDuffie’s essay on ‘‘Joseph Conrad’s Geographies of Energy.’’ In connecting a first-law, conservationist aesthetic to the water cycle and to the sustainability implied by thephrase ‘‘making the system work conservatively’’ (which she uses in her analysis of HenryMayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor), Choi connects ecological thinking to nar-rative form. She finds a ‘‘thermodynamic aesthetic’’ in the circularity and closure of somany 18th and 19th-century novels, including Tom Jones, Emma, Oliver Twist, and OurMutual Friend, in which ‘‘the novel’s … resolution, like the rainfall, must be drawn fromthat bounded system itself, from the circulation of characters and other elements alreadypresent’’ (316). Choi’s phrase ‘‘making the system work conservatively,’’ moreover,implies the space for ecological action closely associated with the energetic meaning of‘‘conserve.’’ We may choose whether to treat a system as if it were closed, doing our bestto recycle limited resources as we strive for what we now call sustainability. Or we mayassume an open system, fueled by unlimited resources from without, and see where thatgets us.

Allen MacDuffie finds Conrad critiquing the latter attitude. According to MacDuffie,‘‘Conrad’s use of thermodynamics [reveals] the physical pressures of work and waste thatexpose the contradictions of imperialist hegemony and undermine the rhetoric of Euro-pean energy and efficiency.’’ As energy concepts and resources are misused in the inter-ests of expanding empire, ‘‘entropy itself [becomes] the secret denied by the rhetoric ofimperial civilization but working everywhere to undermine its claims to advancing pro-gress, prosperity, and control’’ (95).

Interestingly, both scholars point to guano as a good example of their different points– interesting not only because there isn’t nearly enough guano talk in Victorian literaryscholarship, but also because it highlights two contradictory ways Victorians deployedenergy concepts as they formulated our relation to nature, environment, and ecology.Choi points to Mayhew’s outrage that so much effort and expense went to the importa-tion of guano for fertilizer, a highly troubling ‘‘failure of conservation’’ when there wasso much ‘‘ready manure [available for] circulation and transformation’’ (310). MacDuffie,on the other hand, points to the absurdity in the conceit ‘‘that guano deposits, copperore, ivory tusks, or rubber trees are ‘running to waste’ because they aren’t being har-vested and hauled away by Europeans,’’ a conceit, he points out, that ‘‘draws upon therhetoric of thermodynamic energy-dissipation to describe unrealized profits, but it is, infact, at odds with the laws of thermodynamics themselves’’ (77).

In spite of such widely varied uses and misuses, much of Victorian energetic discoursefeels deeply ecological. If some uses of energy concepts drove the pursuit of industrialand imperial progress at the expense of some objectified and subjectable nature, othersprovide us with ways to think about our connections with nature, connections that are atonce subtle and completely encompassing. Such possibilities seem to be inherent in thehistory of Victorian energy physics, which, among other things, sought to satisfy a crav-ing for oneness with and within nature, embracing the ‘‘central tenet of Romantic phi-losophy that nature should be apprehended as a coherent and meaningful whole’’ (Morus58). The whole, moreover, includes us – though not necessarily at its center. And here,Jonathan Bate’s reading of ‘‘To Autumn’’ may serve as a nice model, taking the poem asan ‘‘ecosystem,’’ a ‘‘better word [than environment] because an ecosystem does not havea center; it is a network of relations’’ (qtd. in Green Studies Reader 259).



An attention to energy concepts also neatly acknowledges the effects of linguistic con-struction, without denying nature’s independence. On the one hand, no effects of lan-guage or culture, however pervasive, will enable us to create or destroy energy or tocircumvent the second law. On the other, energy connects us to nature, both linguisti-cally (as a means by which we construct our understanding and experience of nature)and, well, energetically, since we are perpetually bound up in those countless processes ofenergy exchange. And perhaps this energetic connectedness enables us to move awayfrom some of the anthropocentric inevitabilities of language-only or metaphysical con-nections, as well as of models that place humans at the command-center of an environ-ment. Like Soper’s realist nature, energy physics describes ‘‘a nature to whose laws weare always subject, even as we harness them to human purposes, and whose processes wecan neither escape nor destroy’’ (156). Or, as Ursula Le Guin might say, we are in thebag, but we are not the hero.5

Energy physics, moreover, evokes a productive indistinction between what is naturaland what, technological: ‘‘the machinery of nature’’ is not just a metaphor, but anacknowledgement that nature and technology are governed by the same principles.Moreover, when the Victorians talk about machinery, it does not (or at any rate, notalways) evoke the evacuated non-life that the metaphor so often implies to us, as TamaraKetabgian has shown in her recent book The Lives of Machines. Or, as Victorian brewerand physicist James Prescott Joule puts it, as he articulates the principle of the conserva-tion of energy,

Thus it is that order is maintained in the universe— … nothing is deranged, nothing ever lost,but the entire machinery, complicated as it is, works smoothly and harmoniously … everythingmay appear complicated … yet is the most perfect regularity preserved—the whole being gov-erned by the sovereign will of God. (273)

This kind of machinery, which expresses the complicated energetic entanglement of thewhole, might well be a useful shift from nature ⁄ culture or even species ⁄environmentmodels that still dog our steps as ecocritics.

It is largely for these reasons that I think there is so much potential for Victorianiststhinking about energy to come together with those thinking about ecology.6 As weattempt to bridge the divide that currently exists between these approaches, we can tracea conceptual convergence of the two in dual strains of Hopkins criticism. MariaconcettaCostantini locates Hopkins firmly as an ecological poet – contrasting what she calls the‘‘the anthropocentric attitude of his father [Manley Hopkins], who foresaw ecologicaldisaster only to lament a change in human values’’ to the ‘‘genuine preoccupation for thesurvival of natural life,’’ which Gerard demonstrates in ‘‘Binsey Poplars’’ (501). On theother hand, Jude Nixon shows how, in a poem like ‘‘God’s Grace,’’ Hopkins concernshimself with the realities of thermodynamics, as in ‘‘Binsey Poplars’’ he worries about thereal felling of real trees. As Nixon focuses increasingly on how ‘‘Hopkins rescues naturefrom entropic death’’ (146), he touches upon the distinctively Victorian ecocriticism I amseeking.

But it is John Parham who brings us nearest fruition. Where Costantini emphasizesHopkins’s resistance to pathetic fallacy, John Parham’s analysis of the same poem, ‘‘BinseyPoplars,’’ finds an account of how tree-felling ‘‘endangers the entire surrounding ecosys-tem.’’ His readings of Hopkins identify not so much a break from Romantic sentiment,as ‘‘a tension between preservationist sentiment and ecological science’’ (265), whereinHopkins develops a ‘‘dialectical model of individual species interrelated within an energystructure’’ (263). Parham thus moves us toward a strategy for reading at once ecologically



and energetically. And doing so may well release us from some of the baggage attachedto nature. Once we can speak of literary ecosystems – incorporating not only the livingand non-living, the biological and physical elements of a natural environment, but alsothe cultural with the natural, both parts of a larger system and entangled not only discur-sively but also energetically – well, then even the phrase urban ecosystem does not necessar-ily strike one as oxymoronic. And, as Parham points out, given the

trajectory of development from thermodynamics to ecosystems theory, it is no leap of faith toargue that Victorian critics intuitively understood concepts like ecosystems and sustainability andapplied these in social critique. (259)

Coda

Who’s to say where such intuition may extend? To such urbane social critics as Dickens,perhaps? Certainly Parham thinks so. Laying out four stages of Dickens’s environmentalanalysis (environmental description, scientifically informed elaboration, recognition ofhow environmental hazards pervade the human environment, and ultimately a concernabout how these impact human health [11]), he argues that Dickens’s novels may beunderstood as ‘‘social’’ rather than ‘‘deep’’ ecology, more interested in articulating a‘‘‘deep-seated continuity between nature and society’’’ than in ‘‘recuperat[ing] an idea-lised ‘nature’’’ (3).

If, like Dickens, most of us are without either the inclination or the means to go tothe woods (to live deliberately or otherwise), we would do well to consider domestic,urban, industrial, and even suburban ecologies. To do so, we will undoubtedly need toincorporate different modes of ecological thinking. While we may decide not to engagein the project of recuperating an ideal nature, we are likely to find realist nature andsocial ecology throughout Victorian fiction. Similarly, we may find the workings of realecosystems, incorporating both human and natural systems and binding these energeti-cally.

Such work will require developing the Victorian vocabulary of ecosystems; perhaps wewill find it in the language of wholeness or unity or closure, perhaps in the machinery thatmarries nature to culture. In the recent forum on ecosystems in the Victorian Review,scholars have found it in the brief rage for tide pools, in the spectacle of the world underthe microscope, and in the ‘‘Victorian pluralism’’ that resisted ‘‘the rigidities of socialDarwinism and competitive individualism’’ with its own ‘‘models of co-operation,exchange, and adaptation’’ (Gagnier 18). It has been found even in such unlikely placesas certain polygenist conceptions that, in spite of all the problems of racism attached tothis belief that separate races had separate origins, nonetheless saw ‘‘humans as still depen-dent on their environment, still subject, like the rest of the flora and fauna, to the ecosys-tem in which they find themselves’’ (Psomiades 36).7

As we continue to explore literary ecosystems, considering how they shape the form aswell as the content of Victorian fiction, familiar narratives may come to look rather dif-ferent. Certainly, Magwitch changes (in) our perceptions when we start to ask how hefunctions at once as waste and resource, as source and user of energy. More broadly, thecomplex network of Great Expectations that binds Magwitch to Pip, Pip to Estella, Estellato Magwitch, and so on, seem to frame a narrative that cannot be adequately understoodas humans operating within an environment. These evoke at once the machinery of lifeand an ecosystem – both of which require us to consider a proliferation of relationswithin spaces, between spaces and the beings that exist within and in relation to those



spaces and to each other. In such a picture of Great Expectations, Mr Wemmick may beseen to conduct experiments in self-sustainability: his capacity to raise a salad is poisedagainst his love of portable property; the careful delineation of Walworth from LittleBritain, an attempt to police the boundaries of a system that can sustainably be neitheropen nor completely closed. In this way, Wemmick’s is an attempt at ‘‘making the sys-tem work conservatively.’’ He negotiates a balance between ecological self-sustainabilityand the thermodynamic impossibility of sustainable closure.

Similarly, Jane Eyre’s (arguably anthropocentric) focus on individual progress, may giveway, via Bertha Rochester, to the problematics of sustainability in a closed, entropic sys-tem. That Bertha still works as a figure for the expression of female desire and the returnof the colonial repressed, suggests, moreover, the interconnections between domestic,political and global systems. In this way, even our familiar readings may be extended, toaddress questions of how ecological problems may be rooted in social ones – indeed,how these may be one and the same. I suspect that much of what we have read througha post-colonial (or gender studies or economic …) lens will bear fresh scrutiny as weaddress a different, albeit overlapping, set of questions – a set of questions whose contem-porary imperatives are all too clear: How does this text figure the distribution and use ofresources in an economy of scarcity? How does it delineate (some people, cultures,spaces, things as) ‘‘resources’’ from the users of such? How does it define and delineateenergetic systems? What does it sustain? How does it handle entropy? Produce work?Recycle waste? How does its machinery work? How does the text itself function as anecosystem? And how does this reconstitution of ‘‘the system’’ represent at once a per-sonal, a political, a linguistic and an energetic – that is to say, an ecological choice.

Short Biography

Barri J. Gold is an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at MuhlenbergCollege (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). She earned a BS in Physics from MIT and aPhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. Her book,ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (MIT Press 2010), considersthe work of such thinkers as Tennyson, Thomson, Joule, Maxwell, Dickens, Spencer,Bulwer-Lytton, and Stoker as it explores the conversation between literature and physicsthat develops the laws, concepts, and implications of thermodynamics.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of English, Muhlenberg College, 2400 Chew Street, Allentown, PA 18104, USA.Email: [email protected]

1 The collection of essays in Nature and the Victorian Imagination makes manifest the depth and extent of such Victo-rian engagements with nature. And Richard Bevis’s sweeping The Road to Egdon Heath traces the ‘‘aesthetics of thegreat in nature’’ from (roughly) the renaissance to its conscious articulation in Hardy’s 1878 The Return of theNative, devoting a long section to 19th-century ‘‘Science and Sensibility’’ that includes discussions of Darwin,Ruskin, Carlyle, Mill, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and of course Hardy.2 I am using this term is the sense used by Laura Dassow Walls in ‘‘Greening Darwin’s century,’’ wherein she takesDarwinism to have ‘‘in effect accomplished the ‘browning’ of literature’’ such that ‘‘we tend to regard everythinggreen with suspicion’’ (93).3 The table of contents of this Reader may well daunt a Victorianist looking for work on Victorian texts, but itproves very useful for framing questions that inform Victorian scholarship.4 Michael Wheeler makes a similar distinction between ‘‘conservationist’’ and ‘‘environmentalist’’ in his introduc-tion to Ruskin and the Environment.5 I am thinking of her essay ‘‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,’’ included within The Ecocriticism Reader.



6 For an introduction to the expanding body of Victorian energy criticism, see Allen MacDuffie’s ‘‘Victorian Ther-modynamics and the Novel.’’7 I am thinking in particular of the essays by Bernard Lightman, Amy M. King, Regenia Ganier, and Kathy AlexisPsomiades in the Victorian Review. This volume is a must read for aspiring Victorian ecocritics.

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Documents

Energy, Ecology, and Victorian Fiction