Abstract
This essay considers how affect theory might inform ecocriticism. While ecocriticism has historically rejected anthropocentrism, recent nature writing such as Helen Macdonald’s bestselling H Is for Hawk embraces human experience, including the subtleties of human emotion. Drawing on work by William Reddy and other theorists of affect, Ottum argues that affect is not only anthropocentric: in H Is for Hawk affect amplifies the text’s “ecocentric” elements. By describing her own process of feeling, reflecting, and learning to describe her emotions, Macdonald models for readers how to “do something” with the affective intensities provoked by nonhuman nature. Specifically, the text demonstrates how affect can be channeled toward a stance of humility and respect for nature’s agency.
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Notes
- 1.
These classifications—and many others—can be found in the promotional materials inserted into the front of the 2014 Grove Press edition.
- 2.
In a 2015 interview, Salon’s Nick Willoughby asks Macdonald whether she “[went] out with the intention of writing a nature book”; Macdonald responds: “Not consciously. I actually had a very strong sense that I didn’t want to write a book that was nature writing.” She continues: “Growing up I used to love those books about nature that were written in that wonderful expert tone. They would say: This is the natural world, and this is what’s in it, and this is what it means. I wanted to write a book with more than that one voice, and to play with genres” (“‘You can’t tame grief’”). While this exchange does not engage with conservation or environmentalism specifically, it suggests that Macdonald did not conceive of H Is for Hawk as an activistic text.
- 3.
Foundational ecocritical texts such as Lynn White Jr.’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967) identified anthropocentrism as the root cause of modern environmental degradation; in White’s view, our problems began with the rise of Western Christianity, “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (1204). Subsequent studies built on this premise, incorporating “ecocentrism,” “biocentrism,” and other alternatives into the field’s lexicon and core conceptual structures. Lawrence Buell, for example, famously defined an “environmental” text as one in which “human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest”; green texts, he argues, steer clear of the “self-absorption” found in John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” or Percy Shelley’s“To a Skylark” (1996, 7).
- 4.
In The Futureof Environmental Criticism (2005), Lawrence Buell cites a consensus among “contemporary theorists” that place “can become regressive and repressive when it is thought of in essentialized terms as an unchanging unitary entity” (145–146).
- 5.
This recent “wave” of ecocriticism has thus far emphasized the entanglement of sentient and non-sentiment matter across bodies, as in, for example, Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) influential notion of “trans-corporeality.” Similar to the work that preceded it, this emergent strand of ecocriticism aims to dismantle the nature/culture divide, only here the focus is on materiality: for Alaimo and others, the shared materiality of humans and nonhuman entities makes it impossible to distinguish people from “the environment.” In turn, new materialist ecocriticism acknowledges the agency of all matter, including non-sentient matter: as Jane Bennett (2010) and others have argued, toxins, viruses, and biological processes wield “thing power.” This reconceptualization of agency presents new ethical challenges, for, as Bennett explains, acknowledging the shared materiality, and interrelatedness of all matter does not imply the “smooth harmony of parts” often associated with deep ecology (ix).
- 6.
For a helpful overview of research on the intersection of affect, child development, and education—including an account of how Tomkins, Vygotsky, and other mid-twentieth century researchers approached this topic—see Watkins (2010).
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Ottum, L. (2019). Feeling Nature, Reconsidered: Ecocriticism, Affect, and the Case of H Is for Hawk. In: Ahern, S. (eds) Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_13
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