Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Tag: Anthropocene

  • A Case for Denise Levertov as an Ecofeminist

    A Case for Denise Levertov as an Ecofeminist

    Ecofeminism was not refined in its usage until the 1980’s when Levertov was losing popularity as a poet, so it is unlikely she ever would have used this term in her life (ignoring the fact that she did not want to be labelled as a feminist in the first place), however, her work and personal ideologies closely aligns with the general theories of ecofeminism established and refined throughout her lifetime. Most ecofeminist work written during the ’70s centres around “dualisms such as woman-nature that worked in opposition to that of men-culture” (Estévez-Saá and Lorenzo-Modia 126). These dualisms are the subject of many of Levertov’s early poems such as “Losing Track” and “Stepping Westward,” making her one of the trailblazers of this movement.

    Many of Levertov’s poems use the moon or tides as a metaphor for celebrating her innate femininity, which follows one of Gretchen Legler’s, an ecofeminist literary critic, “emancipatory strategies” of ecofeminist criticism. In Levertov’s “Stepping Westward,” she says, “If woman is inconstant, /good, I am faithful to/ ebb and flow” (lines 3–5). The “ebb and flow” suggests images of tides, oceans, and water. Tides are controlled by the moon, which is a common motif for femininity. This image, coupled with her statement that it is good if a woman is “inconstant,” ever-changing, and unfaithful, shows a devotion to nature and its reflection of her inner femininity. In this poem, Levertov expresses the joy she finds in being a woman, the sense of self-sufficiency she feels, and the stability of her innate femininity in her life.

    The forces of water are powerful and are always tied to femininity in Levertov’s work. Water is controlled by the moon in many of her poems, suggesting a devotion to this feminine power. Water often exposes dreams and acts as a source of creativity, while removing men and patriarchal forces in Levertov’s work. These images of water are important because they blur the “boundaries between inner (emotional, psychological, personal) and outer (geographic landscapes),” which is one of Legler’s emancipatory strategies, an ecofeminist way to think about the relationships between women and nature (Estévez-Saá and Lorenzo-Modia 140).

    Not many of Levertov’s poems take a direct, feminist approach. Many of her poems, like “Losing Track,” encode ecofeminist values through the description of personal experience. In “Losing Track,” the speaker describes the tide as a force that takes a lover (presumably a man) away from her and exposes her dreams. Levertov puts her readers in a surreal experience in “The Room,” relying on the senses to make a feminine experience. Levertov adheres to Leger’s strategy of blurring boundaries between woman and nature in “Losing Track” as well. The poem ends with the image of “mud sucking at gray and black/ timbers of me,/ a light growth of green dreams drying” (Levertov lines 16–18). In this poem, the speaker is a pier, and the “green dreams” are moss on her piles (line 18). This moss is only exposed when her feminine force, the tide, takes her presumably male lover away. From this imagery, we infer that she is only able to see her dreams clearly when the presence of a man is removed. She is only free to explore her “green dreams” when the influence of the patriarchy is gone from her life and the tide has taken her love away (line 18). Levertov uses Leger’s strategies by blurring the lines between women’s inner desire and nature in both “Losing Track” and “Stepping Westward.”

    In both “Stepping Westward” and “Losing Track” Levertov associates the colour green with feminine dreams. “Stepping Westward” opens with the lines “What is green in me/ darkens, muscadine” (Levertov lines 1–2). Muscadine is a plant, a grapevine that produces grapes used to make wine. These grapes are green when unripe and turn a dark purple as they ripen. The colour green is often associated with fertility and growing, while the colour purple is often associated with power and wealth. As the speaker in this poem is “Stepping Westward,” an idea long associated with the American dream, her dreams ripen or begin to come to fruition. The idea that the speaker is stepping into her power and passing through the stage of growth or fertility in her life into a place where she can “hold steady” is conveyed completely through images of the natural world (Levertov line 11). Levertov’s images work as a metaphor for a woman’s ambitions and dreams, blurring the boundaries between nature and human, because the woman is the plant in this metaphor.

    Most early ecofeminist writers operated with “dualisms” as mentioned earlier. These dualisms are consistent in Levertov’s work. In her “Stepping Westward,” Levertov contrasts the bliss of being a woman with the “burdens” being “gifts, goods, a basket/ of bread that hurts.” These images are items to be bought, sold, and consumed; products of a capitalist society that tie the speaker to a system that she is “inconstant” to (lines 3, 26, 28, and 29). Similarly, in “Losing Track,” the speaker aligns herself as a manmade structure, a pier, to symbolize that she is a product of the patriarchy. She, a pier, is “half-in half-out of the water,” suggesting that she is partly feminine, partly masculine. The speaker also compares her lover to a boat, a manmade symbol of technology, the opposite of nature. When this lover comes to her, she loses track of the moon, her femininity, and the tide takes her lover away, exposing her “green dreams.” The presence of masculine, capitalistic forces in the speaker’s life made her forget her femininity and dreams. These images and metaphors reiterate Levertov’s dislike for the patriarchy and distaste for its degradation of women.

    Levertov’s work demonstrates a deep awareness of the effects the patriarchy can have on women through dualism and exposes a dislike for those effects. While she disliked the label of feminist and preferred her work to be thought of holistically, the values expressed in her poetry are that of an ecofeminist. Her subtle connection of woman to nature and reverent tone when describing the natural world indicate her as a pioneer in ecofeminism.

    Works Cited

    Estévez-Saá, Margarita, and María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia. “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-Caring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(S).” Women’s Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, Mar. 2018, pp. 123–46. doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2018.1425509.

    Jarman, Mark. “Lives of a Poet: Denise Levertov.” The Hudson Review, www.hudsonreview.com/2014/02/lives-of-a-poet-denise-levertov/#.YuxJU3bMK3C. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    Levertov, Denise. “Hypocritical Women.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42524/hypocrite-women. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    —. “Losing Track.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=29543. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    —.  “The Room.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27828. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    —. “Stepping Westward.” All Poetry, www.allpoetry.com/poem/8503363-Stepping-Westward-by-Denise-Levertov. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    —.  “The Well.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=28573. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    Siwatch, Pooja. “Ecofeminism and Value Based Social Economy in Feminine Literature: Allied Resistance to the Age of Anthropocene.” Research Horizons, vol. 7, July 2017, pp. 57–63. Academic Search Complete, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=a9h&AN=138606072&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

    Abigail Zajac is the author of this post.

  • “Survival is insufficient”: The cautionary power of speculative fiction

    “Survival is insufficient”: The cautionary power of speculative fiction

    Image by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash

    Current headlines abound with apocalyptic references to the global climate emergency. The 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in August 2021 brought into the mainstream what climate scientists already knew – dramatic and life-altering changes to the climate are much closer than many of us expected. The ambiguous language is gone. Where before there were qualifiers about the likelihood of impacts and degrees of certainty regarding human responsibility, now we are told that the situation is unequivocal, unprecedented, indisputable and immediate. The proximity of potentially disastrous and irreversible climate impacts has come as a complete shock for many people. We thought we had more time. Given this accelerated schedule, we wonder how to respond, how to stay hopeful. What can we do when it feels like the precipice is closer than we imagined?

    Speculative fiction can provide insights into how people might respond to impending crises at different timescales, and what the consequences of those responses could potentially be. With the shortened timelines expressed in the IPCC report, it appears useful to consider three novels where the characters are confronted with crises that unfold over an extended period and which leave various amounts of time remaining before their version of the end of the world. The novels I have selected to do this are Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Seveneves by Neil Stephensen, and The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. None of these novels have happy endings. In many ways, the authors seem to be warning against certain attitudes and types of responses rather than suggesting solutions.

    The characters in Station Eleven, for instance, are the survivors of a highly contagious virus which wiped out ninety-five percent of people. The novel looks back on how individuals processed and responded to the immediate threat posed by the Georgian Flu. Many of them managed to escape infection and the rapid loss of life by barricading themselves in places cut off from the rest of society. Outside their safe havens there was widespread panic, looting and hoarding of supplies, and quarantine of entire cities and countries. One man survived the initial crisis inside an airport terminal, haunted for years by his last phone call. Instead of calling his wife and child, he chose to talk to his business partners. The shallow, empty, professional terminology (circle back, put a pin in that) plays and replays in his memory.

    There are clear parallels between these responses and those currently manifesting to climate change. Populist governments across Europe and the United States are already threatening to turn against climate migrants and isolate themselves rather than committing to painful cuts in emissions and consumption that could potentially improve future conditions for vulnerable people. Climate denial persists in some arenas, and even those who believe in climate change may continue their lives as usual. If we trust the lessons of Station Eleven, in hindsight we will be haunted by our failure to act now to cherish and preserve what is important to us.

    The novel Seveneves explores humanity’s response to the destruction of the moon and the knowledge that within two years all life on Earth will be extinct. Governments of the world come together to expand the International Space Station and try to preserve humanity in the form of 1,500 randomly selected representatives. Throughout the novel, there are widespread concerns that the governments of the world do not actually believe in their own desperate projects. They simply want to pacify their citizens by being seen doing something. In the meantime, many people continue commuting to work and school and paying their bills on time, although Stephensen does make a point of noting that the home improvement industry has collapsed.

    The performative actions of world governments in Seveneves are paralleled by some responses to climate change. Despite growing awareness of threats, the temptation to continue business as usual looms large. Many countries take steps that are just enough to be seen to be doing something, even if they are fully aware that it will not be enough. In addition, a phenomenon called greenwashing has emerged, where any kind of product or activity is claimed to be “green” or “climate friendly”, regardless of its real impacts.

    Finally, in The Three-Body Problem a human-instigated crisis likely to lead to the eradication of humanity looms four hundred years in the future. The crisis was caused by people who decided that human civilisation was beyond redemption and invited the destruction of all human life by broadcasting our location to a hostile alien world. The extended timeframe of this novel means that humanity moves through several stages of denial, preparation and hopelessness. At the beginning of the crisis so many resources are poured into defending the Earth that rationing and shortages of basic necessities lead to a period called the “great ravine” where the global population plummets. Later, people decide that technology has advanced enough to save them and become complacent. At the international level, rich governments refuse to share technology and try to manoeuvre so that if anyone survives beyond the crisis they will emerge with more power and control. Low-income countries feel excluded and increasingly desperate, with sometimes violent consequences.

    Again these responses are frighteningly similar to what we see unfolding today. The refusal of rich countries to share their technologies or prioritise global concerns over their own reflects responses to climate change (and COVID-19, another urgent problem but beyond the scope of this post). Debates between proponents of degrowth and technological optimists expose a fundamental divide over how much our lifestyles and economies need to shift. Even further, Cixin Liu describes in detail the dangers of pouring resources into saving the future at the expense of the present. The Three-Body Problem poses a stark warning about the loss of democracy and the risk of losing our humanity in a moment of desperation. He causes us to wonder, what if we manage to stop climate change but, in the meantime, a real “great ravine” happens and millions or billions of people lose their lives? Will it have been worth it? What is the alternative?

    Even though Station Eleven, Seveneves and The Three-Body Problem present fatalistic doomsday scenarios, these novels seem to suggest that we have some agency in deciding between multiple pathways through catastrophe, not just in technical terms but in terms of what kind of future we want on the other side. In the aftermath of the Georgian Flu in Station Eleven, the remaining people decide that “survival is insufficient”. Survivors prioritize keeping art, music, creativity and beauty alive. The question in Seveneves after the decimation of life on Earth similarly is not just how to stay alive, but what kind of life preserves our humanity and is worth living.

    These novels are not optimistic or uplifting stories of how we can prevent climate change or survive the emergency we are already in. Instead, they hold a mirror to our modern society which highlights certain potential flaws in our current tendencies. The authors have each taken an intensified hypothetical scenario and followed it through to its logical conclusion. Such stories provide a source of caution and critique by centring the undesirable consequences of acting in certain ways which parallel responses we are currently seeing to climate change. By making these possibilities visible they give us an opportunity to rethink our own behaviour and perhaps even try to change it.

    Author:

    Elizabeth MacAfee is a PhD candidate in Society, Development and Planning at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Elizabeth has a master’s degree in International Environmental Studies from NMBU and a bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science from the University of Puget Sound. The topic of Elizabeth’s dissertation is drinking water quality governance and planning in Kaolack, Senegal. She is interested in the ethical aspects of drinking water quality governance and frames her thesis using concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory. Elizabeth is also a member of a speculative fiction book club in her free time. She read all three books referenced in this post with the book club and the ideas presented here grew out of those discussions.

  • Summary of the 18th EASLCE Webinar: Realism(s) in the Anthropocene, Representational and Ethical Challenges

    Summary of the 18th EASLCE Webinar: Realism(s) in the Anthropocene, Representational and Ethical Challenges

    Host: Prof Adeline Johns-Putra, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China & University of Hong Kong

    Participants:
    Lena Pfeifer, University of Würzburg, Germany (co-ordinator)
    Julia Ditter, Northumbria University, UK (co-ordinator)
    Xianmin Shen, Shanghai University, China
    Lucy Oulton, University of Chichester, UK
    Klara Machata, University of Freiburg, Germany
    Hannah Klaubert, Stockholm University, Sweden & GCSC Gießen, Germany
    Kristy Henderson, Rachel Carson Center, Germany
    Isil Sahin Gülter, Firat University, Turkey

    On 16 April, a group of early career scholars interested in the Environmental Humanities joined Prof Adeline Johns-Putra for a discussion about the capacity of literary realism to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. The provided readings offered a multifaceted introduction to the debate of whether realism – as a mode of narrative that has dominated our storytelling, but which is also often anthropocentric – can retain its relevance in the Anthropocene.

    Adeline Johns-Putra offered a summary of the most central tenets of the critical readings. She invited us to think through the dialectic between roman and récit which, according to Fredric Jameson, characterises realist modes of writing, and asked us to consider how new perspectives on history that attend to nonhuman time scales might help us rethink realist conventions.

    Rather than discussing these topics in the abstract, Adeline Johns-Putra offered excerpts of contemporary examples of realist writing and invited us to identify literary strategies that might allow a simultaneously centring and decentring of the Anthropos. The discussion of whether such strategies are effective in highlighting both inter- and intra-species connections at once led us to reflect not only on the ethics of the literary text itself, but also on our own reading practices.

    There were a range of inspiring questions and ideas that we took with us after the webinar and that will help us rethink how we approach realist writing, and literature more broadly, in the future:

    • When the Anthropocene is challenging us in ever new ways, can the emancipatory potential of the novel be harnessed to address these challenges?
    • Do we need a “new” realist novel or has the realist novel always already allowed for multispecies perspectives to shine through, for example in accommodating pockets of descriptions of the environment?
    • Does the anthropocentrism lie on the side of realism, or are we the ones reading realism anthropocentrically?
    • How can literary texts invite multispecies readings while also remaining within the human perspective characterising realism?
    • Should we do away with the human perspective? Why (not)? Why can it be important to recentre the human (as much as we also need to decentre the human)?
    • How can we adopt multiscalar reading practices that change how we read novels and allow us to embrace the ambivalences and tensions that come with a simultaneous decentring and recentring of the human?