Reconceiving Nature: Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry by Patricia Murphy (review)

Patricia Murphy's Reconceiving Nature: Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry is a compelling and urgent study of six late Victorian poets, Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and Louisa Sarah Bevington, all New Women who each, in their ecofeminist verse, contributed to the late-nineteenth-century turn to ecological awareness. It is a privilege to read a critical book that so carefully attends to the lyrically captivating verse of these women even as it situates them in the historical and political formation of one of the most important movements of our time. Murphy's own fervent commitment to their significance as poets and commentators drives the argument forward and provides plenty of material to inspire further research into their writing, and to secure its place on Victorian syllabi. Also welcome is her willingness to locate her poets in relation to, rather than solely interrogating or critiquing, the Romantic tradition from which they emerge. While Murphy shows how Field rewrites Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde's imagination-infused natural world by valuing its autonomy, and how Meynell rethinks William Wordsworth by privileging fancy as a means for attending to nature objectively, for example, she is always careful not to reduce or caricature the earlier nature poetry that founds Victorian ecopoetics.

Murphy begins her study by providing a detailed context for her critique of the shared social construction of nature and gender. In a series of clear discussions of Victorian and modern links between nature and women, she outlines how we have come to presume "commensurate characteristics" between the two, including their "immutable susceptibility to domination," "apparent passivity rather than agency," "marked distance from culture," and "deserved denigration in Christian thought" (4). She allows her six poets to respond to these connections in a framework that is at once theoretical and historical. Murphy summarizes her methodology with reference to the fields of ecofeminism (celebrated here in the work of Andrea Campbell, Rosemarie Tong, and Val Plumwood) and new materialism (associated with critics like Donna Haraway and Stacy Alaimo), but attunes both to ecofeminist spirituality, a term she uses to "reimagine" conventional religious thought with Rosemary Radford Ruether and Carol J. Adams (4). This allows Murphy to move the term ecofeminist beyond its political origins in the 1970s to encompass new ontologies and philosophies that seek to resist "the logic of domination" as it functions to work against both women and nature (17). In particular, Murphy nuances her historical discussion of nineteenth-century industrialization, pollution, deforestation, and the ecological consciousness that emerged as a response to it with reference to Luce Irigaray's commitment to reading women and nature as active agents in the formation of culture and spirituality. This theoretical-historical approach means that each chapter both introduces poets who might be lesser known to some readers and establishes them within a forceful and energizing discussion of their radical interrogation of the Anthropocenic oppression of nature, culture, religion, and gender.

The chapters on Webster and Blind expound their ecofeminism through their shared commitment to improving education and employment conditions for women, which both do by unsettling essentialist connections between nature and women. Where Webster's A Book of Rhyme (1881) becomes a critique of the "damaging assumptions" of the "nature-woman bond" in Murphy's hands, Blind's The Ascent of Man (1889) is read convincingly as a Wollstonecraftian revision not only of Charles Darwin but also of the masculinizing of the relationship between the human and the land (63). Blind's 1867 poem "Entangled," for example, elevates nature as an agent by giving the speaker's voice to sighing ferns that sing and nod to their reader. Blind's deft managing of religious and classical language to explore the floral, oceanic, agricultural, and nocturnal is eroticized by the Field poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, Murphy argues, as she works with Gretchen Legler's definition of nature as a "desiring subject" to...