Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction

2. Ecofiction’s Roots and Historical Development

9 2 Ecofiction’s Roots and Historical Development Ecofiction’s roots are as ancient as pictograms, petroglyphs, and creation myths. Nature forms the very core of Native American, Australian Aboriginal , pagan, Celtic, Taoist, and many other cosmologies and their associated oral and written literature. These legends and the values they represent are echoed in contemporary ecofiction by indigenous and white authors alike. They can be found in classical literature such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Latin pastoralism. Animal legends, human-animal metamorphoses, and pastoralism are common to many oral traditions and much written folklore. Medieval European literature is rich in naturalistic content and tone, as evidenced by Arthurian lore, the Chanson de Roland, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the works of St. Francis of Assisi, and others. The “green Shakespeare” includes at least The Tempest, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Winter’s Tale, and As You Like It. Contemporary green adaptations of Shakespeare include Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), and Jonis Agee’s Strange Angels (1993). The focus on nature in Romanticism, traditional pastoralism, and transcendentalism influenced ecofiction, but critics tend to disagree about whether the fiction associated with these movements is truly ecological. One might argue that such books are precursors because they precede the development of 10 where the wild books are modern ecological science and the related consciousness that emerged in the late nineteenth century, but most lack the activist quality of much ecofiction. Despite the environmental ravages of the Industrial Revolution, an awareness of environmental crisis was only beginning to emerge. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, political and literary resistance to industrialism emerges. The animal heroes in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind and the Willows (1908), for instance, actually do something about their plight, making it a truly activist pastoral. Even though they themselves did not write fiction, the nature and philosophical writing of nineteenth-century essayists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson , Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, Margaret Fuller, and particularly John Muir has had a strong influence on modern ecological thought, environmentalism , and ecofiction. nineteenth century Although ecofiction is primarily a literary phenomenon of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, there are several works from the nineteenth that warrant inclusion in the canon. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) foreshadowed a spate of fiction incorporating both environmentalism and feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Herman Melville’s most famous work, Moby Dick (1851), engenders controversy among critics, some of whom consider it merely another example of human domination over nature, while others cite Ahab’s failure as an illustration of the futility and folly of such attempts. Lacking an ecological consciousness , Ahab not only fails to understand nature and his own nature, but even the need to understand them. Glen Love notes that Melville “virtually overwhelms the reader with natural science in the cetology chapters only to question science’s capacity to reveal—or the human mind to encompass—the limitless dynamism of nature. . . . Melville’s myriad explorations of cetology and the natural sciences serve to reprove Ahabian anthropocentrism.”1 Although not as famous, Melville’s Polynesian trilogy (1846–49) is equally fascinating and may be more inherently ecological. It consists of Typee: A ecofiction’s roots and historical development 11 Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), and Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849). Typee is a thinly veiled autobiographical adventure based on jumping ship, becoming lost in a cloud forest, and being taken in by supposedly barbaric cannibals who turn out to be gentle and earth-oriented, a stark contrast to the “civilization” that dispatched ships to slaughter whales for oil. Omoo is a more comical account of the mutiny and jailbreak on Tahiti that Melville participated in. The “Long Ghost” in the account is the ship’s doctor, a rational, scientific man who becomes increasingly feral as he moves from analyzing nature to experiencing it directly. Omoo is also an indictment of the deleterious effects of colonialism and particularly Christian missionaries on the Polynesian environment and culture. Mardi is a darker and more complex philosophical allegory and inquiry into the themes raised in the first two books. A quest for beauty and innocence ends in disaster. The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, is a novella about the Galapagos that appears in...