Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden by Kelly Sultzbach (review)

In Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination, Kelly Sultzbach examines representations of the human and nonhuman world in the works of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden. Weaving together a range of ecocritical concerns and frameworks—from the pastoral to postcolonial ecocriticism to ecophenomenology to ecomaterialsim to queer ecocriticism—Sultzbach traces how Forster, Woolf, and Auden’s “representations of environmental forces and nonhuman characters inflect a wide array of recognized modernist themes, including interiority instability, and concerns of empire” (10). Sultzbach surveys several literary works to better understand Modernism’s complicated relationships to the nonhuman world and to awaken an environmental consciousness in readers:

Literature records the voices that are often lost in mainstream stories. It witnesses our ongoing struggle to let Nature speak for itself in its cacophony of voices and ruminates on ethical values that might yet compete with industry, economy, and greed. As a result, the kinds of reevaluations that literature can provoke are fundamental to persuading readers to feel themselves as embedded within a thriving net of interacting, pulsating, worldly flesh. Ultimately, the measure of our literary words may be the first impetus for putting the natural world first.

(192)

Literature, Sultzbach shows, not only serves as a witness of past ecological attitudes but should also prompt ongoing conversations about our attitudes toward the environment.

In unpacking these environmental concerns, Sultzbach is careful to neither present Forster, Woolf, and Auden as “nature writers,” nor to present them as writers offering ideal “green” practices; instead, she calls attention to the “literary contradictions and the philosophical sinkholes” (7). Sultzbach’s interest in these green gaps recalls Joshua Schuster’s claim, in The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (2015), that “Modernism was never very green” and that American modernism is “keenly attentive to environs but ambivalent about environmentalism” (3). Rejecting projects that aim to “green” Modernism in redemptive ways, Sultzbach and Schuster share a common goal of presenting modernist ecology as full of “the very conflicted reactions to environmental relationships and human responsibility that make them so productively messy,” like “solipsism, racism, and desire for escapism” (Sultzbach 6). While Sultzbach does not mention Schuster (likely because of their projects’ continental differences and contemporaneity), she does engage a host of modernist scholars and their ecocritical studies of Modernism: Phillip Armstrong’s What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (2008), Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (2009), Christina Alt’s Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (2010), Bonnie Kime Scott’s In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Uses of Nature (2012).

Sultzbach’s first chapter, “Passage from Pastoral,” rescues Forster from a mischaracterization as a “liberal humanist,” which suggests that his thought only centers on human communities. To nuance these previous readings, Sultzbach suggests that Forster should be better understood as what Timothy Clark calls a “romantic humanist,” defining humanity by “confronting what it means to be a creature in a larger environmental habitat that informs so-called human qualities” (25). To better understand Forster’s environmental context, then, Sultzbach examines the place of the pastoral (and eventually the anti- and post-pastoral) in Forster’s work. Reading the pastoral influence of Theocritus and Virgil on Forster’s “The Story of Panic” and “The Other Kingdom,” Sultzbach argues that these early stories advocate forms of stewardship and “clearly critique the perspective of white, upper-class narrators” (37). Still, the “tendency of these narratives to change lower-class characters of nonEnglish race into objects—even if those objects are idealized organic trees—replicates troubling treatments of nonwhite ‘peasant folk’ as somehow less than civilized” (37).

Next, Sultzbach considers how Forster’s use of the anti-pastoral in “The Machine Stops,” Howards End, “Arthur Snatchfold,” and Maurice seems to depict the working poor as “blithely happy figures,” even as Forster calls attention to the “politics...