Wordsworth, in “Poems on the Naming of Places,” highlights an interesting “attachment to rural objects” where individuals demonstrate a tendency to name unnamed places or locales in nature. The speaker’s description of nature in stanza one is pure and unrestrained where the April morning is “fresh and clear” and streams run “soft into a vernal tone” (Wordsworth 1, 5). There is a connection between the speaker and the other creatures of the wild, but it is also apparent there is no sense of ownership or control. At first, the speaker seems content in acting as a tourist or passerby in an environment he can simply observe and admire. The speaker’s observations soon evolve into a desire or perhaps a need to name the natural space. The speaker eventually names this wild space “Emma’s Dell” and later mars a space by brutishly carving “Joanna’s Rock” onto a stone nearby (47, 85). The actions taken by the speaker seem to represent the tendency of human beings to both acquire and place nature in a system of, what I might call, environmental commodification. On its’ face, naming places in the wild might imply that humans can connect to nature and personify both its beauty and granger, but there is also an opportunity to commodity such natural spaces.
The commodification of nature or natural spaces is still a vibrant point of discussion today. Hutchings, in “Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies,” discusses the “field of inquiry for ecocriticism” as a medium that “reflects and helps to shape human responses to the natural environment” (1). Romantic literature introduces the idea that “nature is celebrated as a beneficent antidote to the cross world of getting and spending” (1). Yet the encroachment of human society is quickly diluting and polluting the antidote nature once provided with plentiful abundance. The growth of suburbs and industry, as Blake put it, caused “cities turrets & towers & domes / Whose smoke destroyed the pleasant gardens” (qtd in Hutchings).
Wordsworth’s speaker, in naming and appropriating natural spaces, acts as the clichéd “writing on the wall” for what would eventually be described as environmental crisis or plight in the following centuries. When the speaker of Wordsworth’s poem names a place and marks it for himself this immediately begins a process of decay and disruption in nature. Yes, naming a space might bring individuals closer to nature in some sense of identification or personification, but naming also leads to the possibility of exploitation of nature in its use and abuse by humans. Ecological criticism, as noted in Hutchings, “purports to speak on behalf of non-human organisms and the biological processes that sustain them,” but it seems that humans position their environment as more of a living space akin to a house or dwelling (3). It seems industry and innovations have made the environment a space that can be manipulated and edited. Forests and plains can be reorganized and reallocated as one might reposition furniture in a den or living room. Yet, sadly, the exploitation of nature goes far beyond the trivial act of moving furniture. In an effort to extend this argument, Hutchings notes “[the word] environment presupposes man at the centre, surrounded by things [and depicts] human mastery over, and possession of, nature” (qtd. in Hutchings). Overall, it seems Wordsworth is able to point to the eventual progress of man in acquiring and manipulating nature. The idea that humans can both appreciate and degrade nature begins in its personification. There is, indeed, a delicate balance that must be observed to preserve unity with natural spaces and also, paradoxically, a respectful distance.
Jeff, you raise some excellent points that we might get answers to or we might simply raise more questions about. Commodification is certainly a threat, and in fact late in his life the 75 year old Wordsworth wrote passionately against the extension of a railway through the Lake District in terms that closely resemble our modern rhetoric of despoliation (is that a word?). That he also suggested that factory workers wouldn't be able to appreciate nature's sublimity probably strikes modern readers as woefully elitist, but we haven't moved very far from the terms of that argument--just look at an REI catalog.
ReplyDeleteBut while naming places is tied to Adam naming the beasts and so forth, it is also tied in Wordsworth's imagination to the way the natural world is the lived in world--think of Michael with its ragged heap of stones that tells a story about a shepherd and his son, or the house they lived in named the Evening Star and symbol to the neighborhood of hard work. Wordsworth's nature is sometimes national park like but more often than not it is lived in space--marked everywhere by human transit. In a lengthy footnote (some 20 pages long!) to The Excursion, he argued that poetry was closest to the idea of the epitaph. So while Wordsworth occasionally equates nature with what we might anachronistically call the wild or wilderness, that opposition is really more American.