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F. Veenstra (3642542)
Dr. B. Bagchi
BA Thesis
June 2014
Anthropos in Oikos: On Nature in Transcendentalism and Modernism
1. Introduction
Ecology in the twenty-first century is defined by looming threats to both nature and the
human, the origins of which are hard to trace and that are impossible to view solely as an
effect of developments in either of these two domains. In order for us to lessen the potential
damage of ecological threats, we need to understand the relations and differences between the
natural and the human world. Nature (especially in relation to the self) has always been an
important subject in intellectual history, and this thesis will focus on its representation in texts
from two specific literary movements; nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism and
twentieth-century English Modernism. Assessing the different mindsets that these depictions
of nature indicate can, in turn, offer insights into what determines our view of nature today.
Specifically then, the question I am concerned with in these pages is: how is nature
represented in the primary texts from Transcendentalism and Modernism and what (ecological
or anthropocentric) mindset does this indicate?
The texts of focus are appropriate for the matter at hand, for they all consider fractures
in society life and turn to nature in order to deal with this.Transcendentalism came into being
when intellectual life was perceived not to live up to what America, land of possibilities and
ideals, the ‘New World’ stood for, whereas Modernism was a radical reassessment of
traditional Victorian ideas that lost their grounds even more in the Great War (WWI). The
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natural environment in which these movements were set, is also valuable to consider. As
Perry Miller put it, the U.S. as a nation in the nineteenth century was “still running the
Puritans’ errand into an apparently limitless wilderness” (1956, 205), whereas highly
urbanized twentieth century Britain has its people running in opposite direction, to the sea.
Even if we set aside the Puritans and the fact that the escape from the city to the sea was
mainly for relaxation reasons, the contrast remains: the U.S. as embedded in a seemingly
infinite nature, waiting to be tamed (or preserved) and the U.K. as an island, fully civilized
and overwhelmingly industrialized.
In the following pages I will discuss Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” (1836) as a
manifesto of Transcendentalism and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) as a continuation
of this movement, but also as a deviation from it, for the experiment at Walden Pond moves
away from a rigid idealist view of nature, to one that is perhaps more realistic. This then hints
towards the texts of Modernism, where Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) focuses on
moments of unity between the natural world and the human in it and, finally, the poetry of
W.H. Auden sheds light on the inevitable anthropocentrism that is inherent to our view of
nature and illuminates our connection to a nature that is also the ultimate other.
Before confronting these texts, Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993)
will function as a starting point from which to consider the relations between the human and
nature in literature. Latour’s concept of modernity and the “proliferation of hybrids” (of
which climate change is an example) under the “Modern Constitution” illuminates the
difficulties we have caused ourselves by rigidly separating the human from the natural realm
(difficulties that are hard to overcome, as the primary texts will illustrate). Latour proposes to
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amend the modern constitution to a nonmodern one, which would provide a viable middle
road between (while, at the same time, connecting) the domains of anthropos and oikos.1
By focusing on the relation between the human and nature in literature, this thesis can
be placed within the framework of ecocriticism, which, according to Kate Rigby, “remembers
the earth by rendering an account of the indebtedness of culture to nature” and is concerned
with the revaluation of “the more-than-human natural world” for there are “some texts and
cultural traditions” that “invite us to attend” to such a revaluation (2002, 164). My position in
this debate is defined by the bold statement that ecocentrism (in the sense of a nature-centered
system of values) is ultimately futile to attempt, for there is no way to get beyond a human
perspective. Thus, I would argue that all revaluation of the natural world beyond the human
world is inevitably characterized by anthropocentrism. However, this thesis (with its analysis
of primary texts that “invite us to attend” to a renewed appreciation of nature) will hopefully
illustrate how this insight, contrary to its cynical connotation, actually proves to be fruitful in
dealing with ecology today.
2. Anthropos versus oikos: Latour’s modernity
2.1 The modern constitution
Indicative for modernity is, Latour argues, the purification process between nature and the
natural sciences on the one hand, and the human, social and political, order on the other hand.
Latour traces this divide back to the seventeenth century when Robert Boyle and Thomas
Hobbes prompted, respectively, a modern experimental science that was considered
independent from human subjectivity (knowledge of things) and a theory of society and
politics that was unrelated to any material conditions (knowledge of people). The influence of
‘Anthropos’ is Greek for ‘human.’ ‘Oikos’ means ‘house,’ or ‘dwelling’ and I use it to refer to the earth as our
home.
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both constructed the dualist program of modernity, in which the two domains of the natural
and the human are purified from any traces of each other. However, this strict separation is a
myth, for obviously there has always been a reciprocal relation between nature and society
and the modern world is no exception to this, which is something the modern constitution
nevertheless plainly denies (Pickering 1994, 257).
Latour, then, does not see objects of knowledge (both human and nonhuman) as
strictly real, social (or discursive) and instead argues for allowing mixtures; quasi-objects and
quasi-subjects. The moderns are characterized by their work of purification that neatly defined
these quasi-objects and quasi-subjects into set categories. Yet, all the while, beneath this
severe separation, “hybrids” proliferated, circulating in networks of translation and mediation.
Contemporary matters of concern, such as global warming and biotechnologies, are examples
of hybrids of the natural and the social, and thus today the headstrong conception of a world
purified into confined domains loses its ground. It is no longer possible not to allow hybrids
their place as hybrids; their hybrid qualities cannot be nullified in order to partition them into
being either natural phenomena or social constructs (Crawford 1994, 579). Thus, Latour
argues, we need to find a way to consider both hybrids (and deal with mixtures of nature and
culture) and the work of purification (and its total separation of the domains) in a new
constitutional model.
2.2 The redistribution of the human
A crucial part in the constitutional amendment is, for Latour, the redefinition and relocation of
the human; it is taken from its isolation in society and placed in a central, mediating position
along with the nonhuman. The nonmodern constitution is then characterized by the
development of knowledge (both in and of the world) through “following both humans and
nonhumans across networks, cutting through seemingly impermeable boundaries and
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understanding how those boundaries are constituted in nature, society, and discourse”
(Crawford 1994, 578). In the nonmodern constitution the human is interrelated to everything
else and is thus defined by everything around it, instead of by an essence. Whereas the
modern constitution created “magnificent figures” out of the human (with its rationality, free
agency, consciousness, and so on), Latour claims that this “humanism does not render
sufficient justice” to the human. In modernity, human figures “remain asymmetrical, for they
are the counterpart of the object of the sciences” (Latour 1993, 136) – which is nature –
whereas in fact the human has the potential to be the key to understanding the relations
between the two purified domains and the hybrids in between. Hence, in the new constitution
Latour argues the human to be defined by all the “alliances and … exchanges” (137) between
the human, the nonhuman and the hybrids taken together, because the human gives shape to
everything outside itself. Thus, according to Latour, the place of the human in relation to this
network humanizes the nonhuman, whereas in the modern constitution the isolation of the
human only dehumanized the nonhuman, leading to a profound sense of alienation in our own
world.
This new type of humanism centralizing the human in the network of the entire world
(as mediator), instead of merely in its own human realm (strangely so: as dominator over
other realms), does not however indicate the world to ultimately revolve around the human for
Latour. The human might be a pivotal mediator, for it is of course a human constitution
(considering it to be more than that would be the modern fallacy all over again), but next to
that “there is indeed a nature that we have not made” (140), a natural world that is beyond the
human. Thus, Latour’s new draft does not consist merely of networks of quasi-objects and
quasi-subjects, for it also allows nature to be transcendent and society to be immanent. In so
doing, it defines where the human ends and the nonhuman begins without however implying
an absolute separation of the two domains.
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2.3 The nonmodern constitution in life and literature
Valuable for this thesis is the sense of unity Latour’s new draft implies and, with that, the
embeddedness of the human in the world. Nature is beyond us in the nonmodern constitution,
but at the same time not separated from us, or from technology and the like.2 Thus, I would
argue, perhaps boldly so, that Latour’s nonmodern constitution can guide us to a point
between the (historical and traditional) focus on the anthropos, that alienates all that is not
human (and everything becomes non-human in modernity), and the (more recent) attempt at a
nature-centered system of values focusing on the oikos, in light of the devastation we have
caused our environment. These two ‘options’ are roads that ultimately lead nowhere and thus
Latour’s midway might prove to be a more satisfactory route for us to take.
Now, how does this relate to literature? Clearly, I have not done justice to the breadth
and complexity of Latour’s thinking here, but these brief considerations of Latour’s work on
the concept and the amendment of the modern constitution can however provide a foundation
for the analysis of the aforementioned literature, for it allows us to better understand the
difficulties that are inherent to the representation of nature in these texts. A prime example
here is the fact that, in life and in literature, nature has always been something that is easily
romanticized, and we will inevitably run into this when we proceed to the analyses of the
primary texts. Considering this resonance of the romantic tradition in our dealings with the
natural world, Rigby’s words on Romanticism (in relation to ecocriticism) are useful here, for
For a short detour here, consider plastic: This is an ‘unnatural’ fabric in the sense that the natural cycles are
unable to break it down again, but its basic components are made from raw, natural material, obviously, for we
could never make anything out of something that is not already here. Even plastic then implies the unity of the
world, something which the modern constitution simply denied. If plastic could be considered a hybrid than we
can actually see how hybrids proliferated in the modern constitution by the reality of the ‘plastic soup’ in the
world’s oceans. According to the moderns, it is not natural and it is not human, so as a hybrid it does not exist.
Well, it does and that is alright, we can deal with it, if we acknowledge it. With the words of Rigby: “[T]o regain
a sense of the inextricability of nature and culture, physis and techne, earth and artifact - consumption and
destruction - would be to move beyond both the impasse of modernism and the arrogance of humanism” (Rigby
2002, 152).
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she asserts that “the romantic legacy … is a mixed one.” Even though the “Cartesian dualism
of mind and matter” can be considered to have been overcome in Romantic thought (by
“positing human consciousness and creativity as a manifestation of potentials inherent to
nature”), it might also be argued that “the romantic aestheticisation of nature has functioned
historically not so much as a potential locus of resistance to its industrial exploitation, but
rather as a compensation for it.” Rigby argues that, under the modern constitution, we have
been allowed to easily move between “the consumption of nature as raw material for
economic production during the working week, to the consumption of nature as sublime or
beautiful on Sundays.” Moreover, on those Sunday walks, when our romantic souls celebrate
nature’s beauty, “there is sometimes a transcendental strain, whereby the ultimate source of
meaning and value is projected out of this world into a heavenly beyond,” thus making nature
as it is less meaningful than the transgressing capabilities of the mind (Rigby 2002, 161).
In the following pages we will encounter these problematic elements in the literature of
focus. I would argue, in line with Rigby, that the fact that these elements are “still very much
with us” today emphasizes the importance of their reconsideration. We will find that to some
extent “romanticism is part of the problem of modernity” (Rigby, 161), but it might also prove
to be a useful starting point when venturing on to the middle road of Latour’s nonmodern
constitution.
3. Anthropos in oikos: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
3.1 Idealism in Emerson’s “Nature”
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While eventually turning into a fully worked out “ideal theory” (N 303) of “man and nature”
(N 31), Emerson begins his essay “Nature” (1836) on a somewhat different note, with the
demand for “poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation
to us, and not the history of [the foregoing generations].” A historical approach to present
experience thus leads Emerson’s generation to behold “God and nature” not “face to face” as
the foregoing generations did, but “through their eyes,” forgetting therefore that “[t]he sun
shines to-day also.” This dissatisfaction with the current intellectual mode inspired Emerson
(and others) into a new conception of life that focused on the experience of one being
“[e]mbosomed … in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us,
by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature” (all the above, N 1). Thus
Transcendentalism arose; theorizing the “extended process of gradual inner growth dependent
on discipline and careful self-cultivation” through which “one would discover the crucially
important confirmation of ‘experience,’ a feeling of a ‘Divine presence’ within” (Robinson
1999, 15). This project of the individual, central in “Nature,” reveals Emerson to be “an
idealist, a believer that process, purpose, or concept precedes and determines product”
(Richardson 1999, 101).
Idealism rings through in Emerson’s conception of nature, stating that there are “no
questions to ask which are unanswerable,” because “whatever curiosity the order of things has
awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.” This is because, just like “[e]very
man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put,” nature is
“already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design” (N 2). Thus “physical,
outward nature leads him to inquire into the inner laws of nature which determine the outer
appearances” (Richardson, 101) by asking “to what end is nature?” (N 2). According to
Emerson then, there is a purpose to nature that is beyond nature, which one can experience by
I will refer to Emerson’s essay “Nature” as ‘N’ followed by the page in the 1954 publication of AHM
Publishing.
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consciously and carefully treading the hieroglyphic path that is laid out for us in nature. Two
interrelated things are important to add to this and specify. The first is that even though the
answers to all questions are already there, according to Emerson this does not mean that
nature will ever become obsolete to us, and the second is Emerson’s focus on the beautiful in
nature (both come to the fore in the following): “Nature never wears a mean appearance.
Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her
perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit” (N 3). Emerson thus elucidates this
sense of nature as “a distinct but most poetical” one, which “mean[s] the integrity of
impression made by manifold natural objects” (N 3). Because this sense of nature is poetic, it
is mainly the beauty of the land that excites the observer. Thus, the conception of nature as
“uncontained and immortal beauty” is what leads to the aforementioned ‘experience’ which,
in turn, relates to the Romantic concepts of the sublime and the imagination:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without
having in my thought any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect
exhilaration, I am glad to the brink of fear … Standing on the bare ground,—my head
bathed in blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes, I
become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal being
circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. (N 4)
This experience of nature then suggests “an occult relation between man and the vegetable”
(N 4), which sounds somewhat strange but hints back at what Emerson mentions before,
namely that “philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature4 and the Soul”
To specify Emerson’s use of capitalized “Nature:” “Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all
which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body,
must be ranked under this name, NATURE” (N 2). Non-capitalized “nature” relates to the ‘real’ natural world.
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(N 2) and that these two are interrelated, making man “not alone and unacknowledged” but in
communion with nature on a spiritual level. Thus here we find, with the words of Richardson,
“[t]he central point, the pivot of Emerson’s understanding of nature,” defined as the
“conception of the all-encompassing relationship that exists at all times between the mind –
understood as a more or less constant, classifying power – and the infinite variety of external
nature” (102). Emerson argues that “it is certain that the power to produce this delight does
not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both,” and so we return to the two
interrelated things discussed above, nature as infinitely interesting and nature as beautiful; the
reason we are so fascinated and delighted by nature is because, according to Emerson, it
“always wears the colors of the spirit” (N 5).
In the chapter on “Idealism” Emerson argues this concept to be “the unspeakable but
intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man … in every object of sense.
To this one end … all parts conspire.” Emerson goes on to explain how “the Ideal theory”
does not, however, affect “the stability of nature” (N 24) for there is a difference between the
permanence of natural laws and the absolute existence of nature. Roughly said: the first is a
given, the second is not. For Emerson, then, a distinction can be made between the experience
of nature by “the senses and the unrenewed understanding” as opposed to one by “the eye of
Reason” and the imagination. To the first “belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute
existence of nature” which results in a view of man and nature as “indissolubly joined.” When
“the first effort of thought,” also known as Reason, comes in, it “tends to relax this despotism
of the senses which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof,
and, as it were afloat.” When Reason is “stimulated to more earnest vision,” then outlines and
surfaces (perceived as such by the animal eye of man) become transparent and “causes and
spirits are seen through them.” According to Emerson, “[t]he best moments of life are these
delicious awakenings of higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its
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God” (N 25). These remarkable comments elucidate how Emerson uses nature to move
beyond nature. And beyond nature, we find God and infinity: “Idealism sees the world in
God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things … as one vast picture which God
paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul” (N 31).
Thus in Emerson, we find that nature’s floods of life “stream around and through us,”
its power to delight can be found only “in man, or in a harmony of both,” and not in nature
alone. To the uncultivated mind, man is bound to nature “as if … a part of it,” whereas
Reason will elucidate the ideal, in which one can witness the “withdrawing of nature” before
infinity, the final cause, unity, God. In Emerson, then, the human is embedded in nature, but
the true purpose of the individual is to break free from this connection to nature and thus,
recalling Rigby’s words, “the ultimate source of meaning and value” of human life “is
projected out of this world into a heavenly beyond,” but it is important to remember that,
nevertheless, in this beyond “the whole circle of persons and things” is beheld in unity, “as
one vast picture” painted on the “instant eternity.”
3.2 Nature’s dualism in Thoreau’s Walden
There are several things one should keep in mind about Walden (1854). One is that there is a
widespread approach to the story is as a “popular cultural myth,” Richard J. Schneider notes,
with Thoreau leaving the unsatisfactory life of society to retreat to Walden Pond, making
Walden “a myth of a return to Eden, a myth of stasis.” However, searching for the truth
behind this tale will most likely prove unsatisfactory, for Thoreau takes his reader in many
different directions away from this quest, considering contradictory paths that he himself
encountered during the elaborate time span5 of the writing process. It is not surprising then,
5
Thoreau claims to have moved to Walden Pond on the 4 July, 1845. The experiment lasted 2 years, after which
he returned to society-life again, and in those two years Thoreau did write parts of his story, or documented his
experiences. This initial draft has gone through many redrafts and revisions, thus only in 1854, after 7 years
away from Walden Pond, Walden was published.
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that “[a] closer reading of Walden reveals a Thoreau who is often less interested in stasis than
in change, less interested in meditation than in a journey of exploration” (all the above,
Schneider 1995, 92).
This takes us to another account of Walden, the unavoidable Transcendentalist one,
where “inward exploration”6 takes central stage. As with Emerson’s “Nature,” the individual
project for Thoreau is triggered by the sense of a need for change. Thoreau takes in Emerson’s
remark that “[a] man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work” (N 6). This circular
way of living (lacking self-cultivation and progress) is considered by most who live it to be of
the utmost importance, thus, according to Thoreau, making “[t]he incessant anxiety and strain
of some … a well-nigh incurable form of disease.” On the lives of the generations that have
come before, Thoreau concludes: “They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me
anything, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it
does not avail me that they have tried it” (W 8). Both “Nature” and Walden then, are a noble
attempt at life with eyes wide open, in which one can actually admit to be living for the sake
of life (instead of living to work and eat), and both look to nature to assist them in their
individual projects of living.
Here we encounter a third and most problematic reading of Walden, when we consider
the friction between Emerson’s and Thoreau’s differing concepts of nature. Schneider points
out that the transcendental idealism of “Nature” is echoed in the chapter “Higher Laws” of
Walden, when Thoreau states that “[m]an flows at once to God when the channel of purity is
open,” claiming that “he is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by
day, and the divine being established,” leading to the somewhat disturbing remark that
“[n]ature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome” (W 196). However, this is only one
side of Thoreau’s view of dualism inherent in nature, making “Higher Laws” the exception to
6
A term I borrow from Schneider, which he in turn takes from Sherman Paul.
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an overall attitude in Walden that disagrees with Emerson in the necessity of moving beyond
physical nature to a spiritual goal, because “[f]or Thoreau spirit is found in nature, not
through it – a crucial distinction” (Schneider, 100). Nevertheless, there is a quest for spirit,
which is a fundamentally ideal concept and because of the suggestion of truth that is given to
it (by both Emerson and Thoreau), the physical world remains to be considered somewhat
illusory, or at least not good enough. Thoreau however comments on this in the final pages of
Walden, by stating that “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is
where they should be. Now put the foundations under them” (W 286). This is said in an
effortlessness that probably does not correspond to its application to life, but it illuminates the
fact that, in the end, Transcendentalism for Thoreau is not about trying to stretch an ideal
mode of life for an entire lifetime (and encountering endless disappointment because of the
sheer impossibility of it), but instead about taking the spiritual, transcendental experience and
have it be productive in ‘real’ life, which would inevitably take on different forms for
everyone.
Now, let us move to the pond. Earth in general might not offer any worthy foundation
for Transcendentalist idealism, but somehow Walden Pond does, which is probably why
Thoreau went there in the first place:
Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the
surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling
it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose
gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; – a
mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy
brush – this the light dust-cloth – which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but
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sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected on its bosom
still. (W 168-9)
What is striking about Thoreau’s descriptions of Walden Pond, is the focus on the beautiful (a
focus Emerson also had). Everything about the pond is good; it is the embodiment of purity,
virtue, and divinity, and these are exactly the characteristics that one could achieve by
transcendental self-cultivation (which perhaps accounts for Thoreau’s occasional
personifications of Walden Pond). In the face of the purity of the pond, all meanness
disappears from the world, which echoes Transcendentalist ideals of perfection and harmony
of the good, in which evil has no place. Next to this focus on beauty, there is another
significant aspect in these passages, for Thoreau does not move beyond the experience of his
surroundings to inward reflections or meditations of any kind, as one would perhaps expect.
He is paddling in a boat on the pond, looking at the birds, the fish and the “transparent and
seemingly bottomless” (W 169) pond, and when the rain forces him back to land, Thoreau
tells of “[a]n old man” who “came here afishing” some sixty years ago and “used an old log
canoe which he found on the shore” (W 170). After the perception of the beauty and spirit of
the pond, we are not lifted further into the ideal, but instead are brought back down to earth
where old men use the pond for fishing. Thus, here we find that spirit for Thoreau is found in
nature and not beyond.7 It is there when someone perceives it so, thus it will also disappear
when the first raindrops, causing “dimples on the surface,” remind one of having to row back
to land, “anticipat[ing] a thorough soaking” (W 170). Although one might expect this to be a
disappointing experience, there is no reflection of any kind that would betray this feeling.
Schneider illustrates the same point with the following example: “His most obvious counterpoint to the
Transcendentalism of “Higher Laws” occurs when he parodies idealism in his comic dialogue between the
Hermit (Thoreau) and the Poet (his friend Ellery Channing) at the beginning of “Brute Neighbors.” The Hermit
abandons his meditation to go fishing, thereby affirming that spirit is to be found by experiencing nature, not by
retreating into the mind” (100).
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What we encounter is a momentarily heightened awareness of the environment, and this
eventually gives way for discomfort of the flesh, nothing more, nothing less.
Thus, the purity and divinity that Walden Pond represents is simply a part of nature that
we need to see, just as, according to Thoreau, we need to see the absolute other end of nature,
the “tonic of wildness:”
We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of
inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features – the sea-coast with its wrecks, the
wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which
lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits
transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered
when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us,
and deriving health and strength from the repast. (W 281)
There is a world of difference between this image of nature and the descriptions Thoreau
gives of Walden Pond, yet both are equally important and the one does not exclude the other.
One can actually love death and cruelty in nature because “[t]he impression made on a wise
man is that of universal innocence.” Nature does not mourn its losses, is not compassionate,
and actually “[c]ompassion is a very untenable ground,” because in nature “[p]oison is not
poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal” (W 281). Life goes on indefinitely,
indifferently, and thus innocently. I agree with Schneider stating that “[t]he crux of Walden is
perhaps to be found in Thoreau’s recognition of [a] dual goal of humanity” (318), pointing to
Thoreau’s words: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we
require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be inifinitely wild,
unsurveyed, and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (W 281). We want to master
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nature just as much as we want nature to be untamable. Thus, whereas Emerson perceived the
unity of the world from beyond the actual world, Thoreau finds it in the perception of a
reciprocal relation of the divine and the wild in nature, as the spirit that runs through both.
4. Anthropos in oikos: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden
4.1 Moments of being in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
A much quoted fragment in the literature on Virginia Woolf is from the autobiographical “A
Sketch of the Past,” where Woolf posits the idea of a unity that is behind all things and thus
connects the particulars: “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all
human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are
parts of the work of art.”8 This characteristically high modernist focus on unity (and form)
suggests that the move away from traditional modes of structuring the world was
accompanied by the search for a new idea of what is beyond and what we are in relation to it.
Woolf views us, human beings, as parts in a bigger whole that we cannot perceive, that is
intuitive, but nonetheless gives meaning to an otherwise empty existence. There is a touch of
the transcendental in here: it might not be the patriarchal God of the Victorian age, but it
certainly is ‘other.’ Yet this other does not alienate but connects, and through that connection
it gives meaning to the particular, the self.
In the first part of To the Lighthouse (“The Window”), the figure that embodies unity in
the sense of stability is Mrs. Ramsay. She fabricates a sense of connectedness by “merging
and flowing and creating.” The connection is inherent (for everything is always in unity) but
one has to perceive it so. In the case of the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay uses what Lily
perceives of as “pity,” niceness and insincerity to undo that “[n]othing seemed to have
See, for instance, Andrew McNeilie’s “Bloomsbury” (2000, 17-18) and David Bradshaw’s “The socio-political
vision of the novels” (2000, 136-37).
8
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merged” for “[t]hey all sat separate” (TL 919). The fact that Lily wonders at these “lies,”
indicates their different perspectives; Mrs. Ramsay as a product of Victorian times and Lily
with her modern gaze. Yet, Lily values Mrs. Ramsay immensely, precisely for her capacity of
revealing unity (which is something Lily is doing also, less consciously and not deliberately
perhaps, with her painting):
Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent … – this was the nature of a
revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing …
was struck into stability. Life stands still here, Mrs Ramsay said. (TL 176)
The passage relates back to Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past,” for “the nature of a revelation” is
an increased awareness of a sense of “being” (as opposed to “non-being”).10 Being for Woolf
thus is an experience of the now as a stable moment, of seeing the work of art that is the
whole of the world in one instant, and having life stand still in that moment (instead of
experiencing life as a continual movement away from the now, this “eternal passing and
flowing,” which, I would argue, determines the non-being).
Beyond what Mrs. Ramsay does in the domestic sphere and what Lily does in the
artistic sphere, is the transcendent whole that seeps through the text as nature (“this vast mass
that we call the world”) and the embeddedness of the particulars in it. However, there is no
sense of difference between unity in the world of nature and in the domestic or artistic world,
for Woolf illuminates it as the same universal whole. We see how nature is constantly woven
in with what is not nature; the lighthouse, the waves, the house, the wind, the trees, the ships
and the people at times give the impression of being interrelated, of a sense of ‘naturalness,’
I will refer to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as ‘TL’ followed by the page in the 1992 publication of Penguin
Books.
10
These terms are used by Woolf in “A Sketch of the Past” (see McNeilie 2000, 17).
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of things just being right the way they are at that very moment. This does not mean however,
that nature’s function in To the Lighthouse is to complete the human. On the contrary, nature
is indifferent to the emotions of its characters and it does not provide them with any moral
background. Thus, the natural environment is often at odds with the characters thoughts, yet
sometimes, only after altering one’s perception, nature does allow the characters to glimpse
the unity beyond it all. A valuable trait of nature is that it would never ‘forget’ being and lose
itself in a sort of temporal flow the way humans do and thus (by just being nature without any
moral constructs superimposed on it) illuminates the structure, “the pattern” of the whole, to
us humans (less stable beings). This whole does not consist of the natural only; it is
everything that inhabits the world, the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the
nonnatural.
Moments of unity and being might be rare, but the overall sense of this first part of To
the Lighthouse is one of stability and quietude. With the interlude of “Time Passes” this peace
is harshly disturbed. It is the shortest part in the book, yet this “dark fantasia of the
unconscious” compresses “[t]en years that include the Great War itself … into the passage of
a single night” (Briggs 2000, 72). For, “what after all is one night?” (TL 139). There is
violence from the war, “ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt,
which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups”
(TL 145), but also from the raging sea and harsh weather, “gigantic chaos streaked with
lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported
themselves … and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight” (TL 147). Both thrusts
of violence end in silence, but a strangely uncomfortable silence:
In spring the garden urns, casually filled with wind-blown plants, were gay as ever.
Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as
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strange as the chaos and tumult of the night, with the trees standing there, and the
flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless,
and so terrible. (TL 147)
The word “eyeless” marks the meaning of this passage, for Woolf used it “as a kind of
shorthand to herself, holding together a number of related senses: it partly stood for the kind
of inexplicable and pitiless fatality that is manifested in … death” along with “[a] further
sense, derived from its homonym, ‘I-less’ … of the absence of or detachment from the self
(itself one possible consequence of deep shock or grief)” (Briggs 2000, 72). It indicates a
feeling of a world bereft of meaning, with its objects, its particulars, simply “standing there”
but “beholding nothing.” Thus, nature’s capability to always be, can also evoke a feeling of
alienation from it, because the chaos of the human world is set in stark contrast to the stability
of the natural world (for it comes to life again in spring, as always, even when the human
realm is in ruins). In the last section (“The Lighthouse”), after quite a few of the party,
including Mrs. Ramsay, have died, Lily reflects on how “[s]he had no attachment here, she
felt, no relations with it” for “the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and
they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow.” Everything seems “aimless,” “chaotic,”
“unreal,” and when Lily looks at her “empty coffee cup” it emphasizes the feeling of
disconnectedness from domestic life that goes on, which is accompanied by the perception of
the indifference of natural life to these emotions for “it was a beautiful still day” (all the
above, TL 160). Mrs. Ramsay, the “link that … bound things together,” is gone, and Lily is
left with an “extraordinary reality” that is downright “frightening.”
However, it also presents the possibility of a search for a new way of linking things
together, which is actually “also exciting” (TL 161). In a world that seems to have nothing
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left, one is able to start anew. Lily finds a way to do this, by, interestingly enough, returning
to something she had already been doing:
Such were some of the parts, but how to bring them together? … Suddenly she
remembered. When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig or
leaf pattern on the table-cloth, which she had looked at in a moment of revelation. There
had been a problem about a foreground of a picture. Move the tree to the middle, she
had said. … She would paint that picture now. (TL 161)
Even after horrible events of death and violence, there is still always “a pattern” to be
discovered. The parts may seem hopelessly detached, and you, one of these parts, may feel
dreadfully alienated from your environment, but this might be exactly what you need to see
that the unfamiliar particulars are only “some of the parts,” and that there is a whole to be
discovered in them. This then is what one should strive for, what will be fulfilling beyond the
saddening particular. For Lily, it leads to the reflection: “But what does it matter?” when
considering that her painting “would be hung in the attics … would be destroyed” (TL 225)
Thus she takes up her brush again, that “one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin,
chaos” (TL 164), and “with a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a
line there, in the centre;” Lily has “her vision” (TL 226) of the whole world as a work of art.
4.2 Nature’s indifference in Auden’s “1929,” “The Maze,” “Ode to Gaea” and “Objects”
Rainer Emig noted that W.H. Auden’s poetry creates an insight into how our “representations
of nature [are] inevitably anthropocentric,” yet without making “human rationality
omnipotent” for it turns the human construct of nature “into an imaginary other by which to
define the self” and makes of nature the “defining limit to human autonomy and power”
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(2005, 215). I have mentioned nature is something that is easily romanticized (and, as we
have seen in Transcendentalism, idealized), but the following pages will illustrate how
Auden’s poetry remains conscious of this fact and reflects on it. Auden illuminates our
tendency to either want to try to separate the human from nature or otherwise to become one
with it, and how this leads to estrangement. In the first case because it supposes a
disconnection to something we are fundamentally connected to, and in the latter because we
either surpass ‘real’ nature for a transcendental experience, or try to ignore that there are
indeed differences between the human and nature. Auden’s work modifies these dead-end
streets into something more productive by laying bare our construct of nature and
acknowledging it as the absolute other, to which we are nevertheless intimately connected,
thus allowing us to see what it means to be human in the light of that ‘other’ world.
Auden’s “1929,” for instance, opens with “It was Easter as I walked in the public
garden,” and the narrator perceiving “magnificent” clouds that move like “traffic,” “without
anxiety on open sky,” indicating the dread of modern life, for depicting clouds as traffic is
somewhat unconventional, and an overall image of fear due to the war, where soldiers move
in open fields, with an anxiety that the clouds do not know. A possible pleasant reverie in the
park in springtime is harshly disturbed by reality and, instead of life (the usual connotation),
spring reminds the narrator of “all those whose death / Is a necessary condition of the season’s
putting forth” and thus even “fallen bicycles” appear “like huddled corpses.” Auden’s style is
alienating, turning seemingly familiar, pleasant themes into something disturbing, where the
magnificence of clouds is not associated with the natural but with the industrialized, where the
potential beauty of spring in poetry (in which one finds “An altering speech for altering
things”) is disrupted by the appearance of what is mournful; a “solitary man” sitting “weeping
on a bench” looking “Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken.” It is a harshly realistic part,
scorning poetry for sweet reveries that make no sense in a world of misery, denoting the
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indifference of nature for having spring occur even with death all around and at the same time
saying that people would die anyway, spring or not. What they look back on then is the life of
past winter in “Christmas intimacy” and a “winter dialogue / fading in silence” and thus,
seasons do not accord to the human; seasons come and go, but people only live and die once
and “the season’s putting forth” is not a sign of life, not a sign of anything, but perhaps of
getting closer to death. In the second part, this awareness of the movement of human life
towards death is set opposite to “a colony of duck” that “Sit, preen, and doze on buttresses,”
natural creatures that “find sun’s luxury enough” and know nothing of war, “restlessness,” or
“anxiety at night.” From a hilltop the narrator perceives another potentially beautiful scene, of
the unity of this “enormous world” in the evening. Along with the “vanishing music of
isolated larks” however, the smoke that “rises from the factory in field” dissolves into
“Memory of fire,” thus again beauty makes way for darkness. This effect of reality on the
human is contemplated on in the last paragraph of this part when the narrator speaks of
wanting to see the “absolute unity of evening / And field and distance,” and feel that “peace”
that comes with it, without however “forgetting / Those duck’s indifference” or the “hysteria”
of a friend “Talking excitedly over … war.” In other words, there is a desire to take in all of
the world, the human and the natural, and find it soothing (even when reality is cold and
nature is not there to soothe us) to feel it all, to see it all with eyes wide open. Thus: “To love
my life, not as other, / Not as bird’s life, not as child’s, / ‘Cannot’, I said, ‘being no child now
nor a bird.’” Wishing for nature’s indifference would be escapism, and Auden seems to assert
the true test of life is, instead, to figure out how to live and be content despite the harshness of
human reality.
However, this is more easily said than done, for our questions concerning reality and the
knowledge that is supposed to help us through it often constructs difficulties that actually
alienate us from life, which is illustrated in many of Auden’s poems, for instance in “The
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Maze” (1940). Here, “Anthropos apteros”11 is lost in a maze, and human rationality and
cultural constructs come to ‘help.’ The wingless human is trying to decipher the labyrinth,
(which is in itself already a human construct) to understand it and to get to the center, to the
truth of the maze, by using mathematics, reasoning, materialism, aestheticism, religion and so
on. And if all that does not work than there is still probably “no reason to despair” because
“The centre that I cannot find / Is known to my unconscious mind,” yet in the end Antropos
Apteros’ “knowledge ends where it began” for “A hedge is taller than a man” and he cannot
see what is beyond it. The wingless human then finds himself “perplexed” and “Looked up
and wished he where a bird,” which is obviously not wingless and “To whom such doubts”
about “which turning to take next” must seem “absurd.” Absurd because the bird would be
able to see from above where the center is, but also because the bird would not even care for
the center the way Anthropos Apteros does, thus again stressing nature’s indifference.
The last line of “The Maze” is interesting also in its contradiction, for it attributes
human characteristics to the bird, by saying he would find it ‘absurd.’ Nature’s indifference,
in Auden, is often illustrated by a somewhat haughty attitude towards the human. Perhaps one
could never present nature’s indifference, without giving it an attitude (the latter being
essentially human, of course). Auden plays with this idea of the impossibility of getting
beyond anthropocentrism in “Ode to Gaea” (1954) where from the perspective of “this new
culture of air,” we encounter what “our Mother, the nicest daughter of Chaos” would see in a
mirror. The descriptions of the earth “From overhead” mixes the new found human perception
of the earth from the airplane with what the earth thinks of it. In so doing, Auden disrupts
oppositional thinking in terms of nature versus the human, for technology here aligns the
vision of the human with that of nature. However, the second paragraph comments on an
‘Apteros’ is Greek for ‘the wingless.’ In mythology it refers to a surname for Nike, the goddess of Victory,
who had a sanctuary in Athens. Nike was usually portrayed with wings, and their absence here thus indicated
that Victory would never leave Athens.
11
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inherent difficulty: what is “far-shining in excellence” to us, “in her eyes, is natural,”
elucidating that nature would never perceive nature the way we do, and if we would imagine
her to do so, she could not be impressed for what she ‘sees’ is “natural.” Thus, having her
make “a value judgment” in the sixth paragraph, saying “of pure things Water is the best,” is
as contradictory as the bird and his judgment in “The Maze.” This is not to say that there is
something wrong with the poem, on the contrary, I would argue it creates an insight into the
construct we make of a nature that is inherently not-constructible, because it surpasses us. In
this light we can also view what follows; landscape, depictions of how we have shaped the
earth, that “till the end, will be Herself,” into a construct of moral and symbolic significance
and how the view from up above gives new insights into these developments. Yet however
much we have changed and shaped the land and given ‘meaning’ to it, “She [the earth] has
never been moved” and thus “to Her, the real one, can our good landscapes be but lies.” Yes,
nature is humanized, but in Auden’s work this only emphasizes nature’s transcendence, its
being other.
This transcendence, however, also accounts for a different, more intimate connection
between human and nature, by having the natural world deepen the meaning of our existence.
“Objects” (1956) speaks of “All that which lies outside our sort of why / Those wordless
creatures who are there as well … / Make time more golden than we meant to tell.” The
objects do not feel, have no emotion, yet “their surfaces appear as deep / As any longing we
believe we had.” Nature gives meaning to our lives, yet not through a moral construct that we
put on nature, but meaning in the sense that even in its transcendence, we are connected to
nature, for we are a part of it also. Auden’s work illuminates that what we make of nature is a
construct of “our sort of why,” thus acknowledging nature as “outside,” which actually allows
us to deepen the meaning of our existence for we can see ourselves in light of, and in relation
to, that other world.
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5. Conclusion
How, then, is nature represented in literature and what mindset does this indicate? In Latour’s
amendment of the modern constitution, we have found the nature-culture dualism inherent to
modern thinking to give way to a perspective that places the human in the middle of the
networks that are the world, functioning as a mediator and thus humanizing the nonhuman.
By allowing nature’s transcendence (and society’s immanence), the uncontrollable character
of these networks was limited, thus defining where the human ends and the nonhuman begins
without separating the two domains. In Transcendentalism, we have moved from Emerson’s
idealist view of nature that supposed harmony beyond, but ultimately diminished the value of
‘real’ nature, to Thoreau’s view that considered the importance of both the divine and the wild
spirit of and in nature. In Woolf we found a transcendental unity beyond the particulars that
however bound the latter together and Auden illustrated nature’s indifference to the human,
and the inevitability of an anthropocentric focus. All texts dealt with ‘being,’ with living to
the fullest, and in all the key to life was found by considering the human in relation to nature.
For Emerson, the ideal state of being lies beyond nature and can be reached through it; for
Thoreau, the answer lies in a reciprocal relation between the divine and the wild in nature; for
Woolf, being is defined by revelations of the pattern that connects the particulars; and for
Auden, nature should be our example for living now, yet without forgetting the indifference
of nature to the human, and without forgetting that human reality will have to be faced as
well. All texts, in different ways, suggest a sense of unity, defined by nature as an ultimate
other that does not alienate but connects, and through that connection gives meaning to human
life.
Thus, we find connections between the texts that, when tracing them, bring us towards a
mindset that concurs with Latour’s proposal for a nonmodern perspective. Modernity might
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be defined by a nature-culture antithesis, but the difficulties inherent to this view, which I
have attempted to lay bare, would prove that oppositional thinking is not necessarily a viable
way of considering nature and the human. Moreover, this line I have drawn through
(intellectual) literary history could indicate something like a continuous flow in which
thoughts and ideas are never drastically left behind, but instead taken up and amended (as did
Latour), thus also suggesting the fruitlessness of an oppositional perspective, for even in our
human domain ‘breaks’ do not really exist.
Unfortunately omitted, due to a lack of space, from this thesis is the subject of the
pastoral, which has been of great importance for, especially, Thoreau and Auden. The pastoral
mode is definitive for our appreciation of nature and it can be said to both enhance and
deconstruct the nature-culture opposition. The role of technology also, which has been only
too briefly touched upon in the analysis of Auden, would be worth looking into, for, as I have
said in the introduction, the natural environments of the U.S. and the U.K. differ significantly,
which could account for diverging views on industrialization and the destruction of the land
due to technological developments. I have given the example of plastic as a non-natural
natural product, thus a hybrid, and more examples of twenty-first century environmental
problems could be analyzed with Latour’s theory. This can perhaps lead to an understanding
of certain relations between nature and the human, which is, as I have said before, of vital
importance when it comes to dealing with ecology in the twenty-first century.
I am aware of the fact that (cultural) theory and literature have their limits when it
comes to assessing the real natural world, and that this requires ‘hard’ science to come in at
some point, but hopefully this thesis exemplifies that, first of all, literature is able to
contribute to the matters at hand today, and secondly, that (as Latour suggests also) there is no
strict dividing line between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ sciences for their objects of research,
nature and the human (oikos and anthropos), are not neatly separated. Thus, the development
Veenstra 27
of knowledge in and of the world, when considering hybrids for example, will require the two
sciences to go hand in hand.
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Works cited
Primary literature
Auden, W.H. “1929.” Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber,
1976. 50-53. Print.
____ “The Maze.” Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, 1976.
236-37. Print.
____ “Ode to Gaea.” Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber,
1976. 423-25. Print.
____ “Objects.” Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, 1976.
473. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Five Essays on Man and Nature. Ed. Robert E. Spiller.
Arlington Heights: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1954. Print.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. London: Harvester
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Thoreau, Henry David. Walden or, Life in the Woods. London: Everyman’s Library, 1992.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Londen: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.
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