The word “ecocriticism” was likely first used in William Rueckert’s essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978) and was later accepted in critical vocabulary when Cheryll Glotfelty, at that time a graduate student at Cornell, revived the term at the meeting of the Western Literature Association in Coeur d’Alene in 1989.
She recommended the use of the term to refer to the scattered critical field that had been known as “the study of nature writing.” Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.
Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.
” She further states that “all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts language and literature.
As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman.” (Glotfelty xviii).
Simon Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to establishing change by analyzing the role–thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise–of the natural environment or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material humans” (Estok 16-17).
Thus, it may be stated that ecocriticism tends to analyze the analogies between ecosystems and creative texts and postulates that such texts potentially have an ecological (regenerative, regenerating) function in the cultural system (Zapf).
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) – Canada’s extraordinary woman of letters – has made her reputation as much by being versatile as by being controversial. Atwood’s poetry reflects a post-modern emphasis on language as constitutive of reality.
The forms are discontinuous, and her thematic focus is on almost all the central issues: revising and remythologizing the past, politics, peace, ecology, victimization, survival, and the complex web of human relationships. A writer of international prominence, Atwood is at the same time a poet, novelist, critic, and short-story writer.
The conventional readings of Atwood center around her projection of adult female characters in her novels, the societal structures, her concepts of victimization and endurance, and her longing to gain individuality for women and Canada as a nation.
With the growing concern over environmental issues and the role of literature, Atwood becomes more and more pertinent because of the profound ecological implications in her works, which clearly reflect Atwood’s ecological ideas concerning the human-nature relationship.
Margaret Atwood, the daughter of Carl and Margaret Killam Atwood, was born on 18 November 1939 in Ottawa. She is the second of three children in a family with strong cultural roots in Nova Scotia. Atwood also spent a large portion of her growing up in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where her father, a professional entomologist, pursued his research.
Even after settling in Toronto in 1946, Atwood continued to visit the northern forests in summer with her parents. This childhood experience in the Canadian wilderness provided the background for her nature poetry.
Atwood’s first book of poetry, Double Persephone, was published in 1961 and was awarded the E. J. Pratt Medal that year. This small collection of poetry focuses on the duality inherent in the classical myth of Persephone, as well as on the schematization of the world in terms of two parts. The title poem conveys a sense of a world where there is a contrast between art and life, the static and kinetic.
In 1966, Atwood’s second collection of poetry, The Circle Game, appeared and received a Governor General’s Award that year. The poems in this collection received international attention because of their subject matter and tone. With the publication of The Circle Game, Atwood became a major voice in the feminist debate over personal relationships.
The same contradictory dichotomy of process and product, performer and performed, creator and creation, is the central concern of Atwood’s next volume of poetry, The Animals in That Country (1968). One of Atwood’s most captivating books of poetry, The Journals of Susana Moodie (1970), is based on narratives of the life of the Canadian pioneer woman of letters Susana Moodie.
Moodie provides Atwood with a character for exploring the dualities of colonial Canada. In her next collection of poetry, Procedures for Underground (1970), there are a number of poems dealing with family history, and Atwood also extends her subject matter to include nature and the role of the artist. With the publication of Power Politics (1971) and You Are Happy (1974), Atwood’s public visibility increased.
In Power Politics, Atwood voices women’s concern for carving out a female space in the patriarchal structure of society; she portrays women as victims who are denied their own identity. Love between man and woman is a power game where men colonize and consume the flesh of women. In the “Circe/Mud Poems” of You Are Happy, there is a transformation of this relationship where the female protagonist rejects the traditional roles of women and prefers a love and relationship with men based on equality and compassion.
In “Two-Headed Poems” (1978), Atwood returns to a concern that first emerged in “Survival” (1972): the complexities of being Canadian. The verse forms in this collection also reflect many of the themes Atwood was exploring in her prose writings and novels. In “True Stories” (1981), art and life meet and struggle. “Interlunar” (1984) opens with a series of “Snake Poems” that reiterate Atwood’s central preoccupation: victimization.
Women, like serpents, suffer from the prejudices, superstitions, falsehoods, and violence of others. Themes of death and power, usually against women, remain the central motivation in this series of poems.
From “Double Persephone” (1961) to “Interlunar” (1984), during this period of her literary career, Margaret Atwood moved from a reliance on the conventions of traditional lyric poetry to an effortless use of the prosodic conventions of her contemporaries. Likewise, her thematic focus also changes with that ease from Canadian patriotism to Modernism; ecology to politics; victimization to survival. Margaret Atwood is both an ironist and a visionary.
She holds a mirror up to our times, whose multiple refractions challenge our definition of reality and, more importantly, demand that we change those worlds in which we live. Atwood sees clearly where humanity stands with all its clutter, its mess; and the ironist Atwood reflects it through her poems.
In Atwood’s first book of poetry, “Double Persephone”, the paradox established by the contrast between dynamic, natural, creative process and static, unnatural, created product generates many of her later poems: “Two-Headed Poems,” “Procedures for Underground,” “The Animals in That Country,” and most strongly in “Power Politics.” The same self-contradictory dichotomy of process and product, performer and performed, creator and creation, is the central concern of Atwood’s following volume of poetry, “The Animals in That Country” (1968).
In the poem “Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein,” “the poet becomes a performer with a scalpel, skilled and controlling, but the poet is also a creator who questions the validity and effects – on himself and on others – of his creation” (Hutcheon 21).
In “The Reincarnation of Captain Cook,” the adventurer, in his old age, realizes that his mistake or failure lies in acknowledging the names, maps, and history that preceded him on his ocean trips, thereby making his discoveries of “a known / land, a country” already ordered by man.
The “animals in that country” are dead or domesticated or hunted. “This” country, in contrast, is the living, unknown one where animals still die, but their deaths, like their births, are part of the natural process of life.
“Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” is viewed as a fable of the Canadian colony. It portrays an early settler’s failure to find a place for himself in the wilderness. The poem begins with the paradox of the pioneer imprisoned by infinity: “with no walls, no boundary line / anywhere”.
He shouted at the wilderness, “Let me out!” The colonist tries to impose order on the wilderness, but he fails and goes insane: “the green vision, the nameless giant invaded”. The poem is also viewed as an ineffectual attempt of a Canadian woman to find a place in the wilderness of a male-dominated society.
“A Fortification” is a poem of self-disclosure through the metaphor of privacy. The garrison-mentality theme of the poem, in which a man is held “safe” from nature, is ironic. The poem goes:
I have armed myself. Yes, I am safe: safe:
The grass can’t hurt me.
My senses swivel like guns in their fixed sockets:
I am barriered from leaves and blood.
One of Atwood’s most absorbing books of poetry, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), is based on narrations of the life of the Canadian pioneer lady of letters, Susanna Moodie. Moodie provides Atwood with a character to explore the dualities of colonial Canada.
The book is divided into three sections or “Journals” presented in Moodie’s voice. “Journal I” is concerned about the years 1832 to 1840 and recounts Moodie’s arrival in Canada and the inevitable disaffection of this cultivated young Englishwoman from the people and the new land. It seems that Moodie at first lost herself in the wilderness of Canadian shrub, and it also marks the loss of her self. She entered a big darkness. It was our own ignorance we entered. (“Further Arrivals”)
But her struggle for survival in the wilderness changes her. In the poem “Departure from the Bush”, she is almost ready to accept the wilderness of Canadian nature, but she still requires artificial lamps to see in the dark. Though she does know the fact that, “I need wolf’s eyes to see / the truth” (“Further Arrivals”). When she leaves the wilderness, she feels that she is losing something she did not yet have:
There was something they about taught me
I came off not having learned.
The second diary covers the period 1840-1871, Moodie’s years in Belleville, and concerns her reflections on society and her experience in the wilderness. She recounts her bush life, in which the force of nature, the identity of hunter and victim, and her recognition that man is both part of nature and also alienated from it, allow Moodie to accept the dichotomy of life in the Canadian wilderness. At last, Moodie accepts the land as the grave of the fruit of her uterus. The poem “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” ends with, “I planted him in this country/ like a flag”.
The 3rd diary covers the period 1871-1969, that is, to the poet’s present day. Atwood adds a further dimension of doubleness. The literary dead Moodie is transformed in the verse form into a creative energy and uncontrollable spirit of the land upon which the 20th century constructions of man rise.
In the last verse form of the diary, “A Bus Along St. Clair: December,” Moodie is presented as an old lady on a coach in Toronto, teaching the reader to see the wilderness both beneath and within the city.
In her following collection of poetry, Procedures for Underground (1970), there are a number of poems covering family history, and Atwood also extends her subject matter to include the nature and the role of the artist who is essentially a woman, and the poems deal with the response of the artist to the Canadian wilderness.
Atwood has said that the title poem, taken from Northwest Coast Indian mythology, is “one of the few poems I’ve written about the creative process, and I do see it as a descent to the underworld” (Sandler 10). The underground reverses our perception: the sun is green, rivers flow backwards, the traces and stones are shifted from their locations, and the dwellers are perpetually hungry. If the artist returns safely to this world, she will return with “wisdom and great power,” but not without pain.
The artist’s underground knowledge brings heightened, at times terrorizing, sensitivity to the force implicit beneath ordinary surfaces. Images of plunging, of figures rising from the water or appearing in it, also remind us of Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing (1972): not surprisingly, because when Procedures for Underground appeared, Atwood was in the process of writing Surfacing.
In “Three Desk Objects,” she reflects on the development of humankind, implying so many struggles (wars and deaths) before typewriters, and lamps could be invented. Regarding these objects, she says:
“I am afraid to touch you. I think you will shout out in pain. I think you will be warm, like skin.”
Again, Atwood’s earlier books are recalled in the images of the menacing game and of the free and caged animals in, for example, “Dreams of the Animals.” However, in Procedures for Underground, stasis and order are seen as both necessary and endangered by nature: houses are protective but can burn down, and the thawing snow is responsible for “undermining the road.”
The emphasis, though, is not only on the dangers of (and to) the inactive rational orders of man’s concepts but also on the possibility of expressing the moral force within the inactive: “seeing the ice as what it is, water” (Hutcheon 23).
In Two-Headed Poems (1978), Atwood returns to a concern that first emerged in Survival (1972): the complexities of being Canadian. The poems of this collection also reflect many of the themes Atwood was exploring in her prose writings and novels.
In Two-Headed Poems, Atwood continues to explore the doubleness within: of the heart that says, “I want. I don’t want”, and the doubleness of Canada as a nation. The epigraph of the section entitled “Two-Headed Poems” is: The heads speak some things separately, sometimes together, sometimes alternately within a poem. Like all Thai twins, they dream of separation.
Atwood’s central concern in Two-Headed Poems is the quandary of women in the patriarchal structure of Canadian society. In The Circle Game and Power Politics, women are projected as beings whose flesh is colonized, whose eyes are captured behind mirrors, and whose words are incapacitated.
In You Are Happy, the relationship between man and woman is intended to be on the ground of equality and compassion. In Two-Headed Poems, there is further movement of transformation where the woman moves beyond her function as mirroring object and assumes her historical identity as a woman: the woman becomes the agent of history rather than its victim.
“As for the woman, who did not want to be involved, they are involved. It is that blood on the snow which turns out to be not some bludgeoned or machine-gunned animal’s, but your own that does it.” In True Stories (1981), art and life meet and struggle and the poems of this collection also reflect Canadian women’s response to wilderness.
The art and life struggle in the realm of love, and it shows a kind of movement in Atwood’s response to the topic: “Screw poetry. It’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, talk on your skin.” (“Late Night”) Art and life also engage in struggle in the realm of politics: “How can I justify this soft poem so in the face of sheer horror?” (“Small Poems for the Winter Solstice”)
“Small Poems for the Winter Solstice” is a series of love poems included in True Stories that projects the ferocity, the ‘true stories’ of the world. The final poem in the series is a speculation on the power of the poet, quite unlike the traditional love poetry in which the ideal of the beloved is to be in a poem. The poet here opts for life with all its uncleanness and jumble, and incorporates herself with it.
The in-between subdivision of this aggregation, as well as a verse form series within it, is called “Notes Toward a Poem That Can Never Be Written.” The verse forms in this series express the horror and ferocity of the events described.
These verse forms are grounded, better, inexorable, and direct; it seems that these verse forms have calculated designs on the reader; they say, “I accuse.” The ferocity described in “A Women’s Issue” is calculated and arresting. The series concludes with the revelation of the speaker’s sense of engagement in the imposition of agony and her response to vast unanswered wilderness:
“This wood is foreign to me, closer than skin, unknown, something early as caves and buried, hard as a shredded rock knife, the long bone lying in darkness inside my right arm: not innocent but latent.”
Affiliated with the 1980s human rights organization Amnesty International, Atwood’s preoccupation with the ferocity and irrational atrocity of the universe as well as the atomization of the human mind in this helter-skelter situation is obvious in this aggregation of verse forms. George Woodcock has observed that the verse forms read “like verse abstracts of the more agonizing subdivisions of Amnesty International studies” (Woodcock 139).
Interlunar (1984) opens with a series of “Snake Poems” which reiterate the central preoccupation of Atwood: victimization. Women, like serpents, suffer from the prejudices, superstitions, falsehoods, and force of others. Subjects of death and power, force, normally against women, remain the central motive in this series of verse forms: “A peach in boiling water / This is a domestic image. / Try: soft Moon with the rind off.”
In verse forms such as “Reading a Political Thriller Beside a Remote Lake in the Canadian Shield” and “The Words Continue This Journey,” the poet’s central concern is evidently on Canadian women’s response to wilderness as well as issues concerning human rights and the writing of poetry. Interlunar suggests that the two manners of poetry and fiction may not be easily dissociable, and it reveals the perfect medium for Atwood, the poet-novelist.
The ecocritical reading of her verse forms reveals that Atwood makes a parallel study of Canadian wilderness along with the place of women in traditional Canadian patriarchal society. It is also to be noted that Atwood herself has many times raised her voice for the protection of Canadian wilderness.
“For an author who spent so much time plumbing the metaphoric qualities of the land, it is surprising to see how matter-of-fact Atwood is about wilderness preservation” (Hatch 197).
Again, in Wilderness Tips, Atwood portrays how nature takes revenge upon those who declare themselves eco-friendly but who really threaten the natural by rejecting its profusion. So Atwood, both in her poetry as well as in prose writings, depicts the contradictory human attitudes towards nature and has thus become a powerful voice for environmental preservation.
Plants cited:
- Estok, Simon C. “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: An Analysis of ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ in King Lear.” AUMLA 103 (May 2005).
- Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: University of Georgia, 1996.
- Hatch, Ronald B. “Margaret Atwood, the Land, and Ecology”. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Camden House, 2000.
- Hutcheon, Linda. “Margaret Atwood”. Canadian Writers Since 1960s: First Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume-53. Ed. W. H. New. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1968.
- Sandler, Linda, ed. “Interview with Margaret Atwood”. Margaret Atwood: A Symposium. Special issue of Malahat Review 41 (January 1977).
- Woodcock, George. “Metamorphosis and Survival: Notes on the Recent Poetry of Margaret Atwood”. Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System. Eds. Sherrill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983.
- Zapf, Hubert. “Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts.” New Literary History 39, no. 4 (2008).
