Abstract
Even as Sylvia Bowerbank writes, “To speak for nature is to speak powerfully,” she cautions about the vulnerable and potentially compromising position in which such speaking puts women: “When women claim to ‘speak for nature’ that discursive privilege is, inevitably, entangled in, and legitimated by, the very structures of Western thought that yoke woman and nature together as objects of man’s use, possession, and pleasure.”1 To posit women’s relationship with nature in such a freighted way was new neither for Bowerbank nor for ecofeminism. However, Bowerbank’s work marked a new direction in the scholarly conversation within early modern studies that this collection develops further; we aim not only to challenge our notion of how early modern women may or may not have spoken for (or even with, as we discuss later) Nature but also to demonstrate how tracing the diverse ways of speaking vis-à-vis Nature in one historical period can help us rethink, retheorize, and revise our notion of such speaking in ecofeminist, feminist, and ecocritical studies in our own.
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Notes
Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 3.
John O’Neill, “Who Speaks for Nature?”, How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition, ed. Yrjo Haila and Chuck Dyke (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 263.
Susan Griffin, Made From This Earth: An Anthology of Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 83.
Catherine Roach, “Loving Your Mother: On the Woman-Nature Relation,”, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, ed. Karen Warren (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 54.
See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1980);
Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women and the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Victoria Davion, “Is Ecofeminism Feminist?”, Ecological Feminisms, ed. Karen Warren (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 9.
Donna Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms,”, Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Karen Hekman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 159.
W. B. Baker, J. A. Munroe, and A. H. Hessel, “The Effects of Elk on Aspen in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO,” Ecography 20 no. 2 (1997): 155–65.
Val Plumwood, “Nature, Self, and Gender”, Ecological Feminist Perspectives, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1996), 172.
Andree Collard and Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 137.
Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: from Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 34.
For example and summary, see Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Charis Thompson, “Back to Nature? Resurrecting Ecofeminism after Poststructuralist and Third-Wave Feminisms,” ISIS (2006) 97: 507. Likewise, ecocritics have often underplayed the significance of ecofeminism within both green studies in general and early modern studies in particular. Even as Estok ostensibly claims to value ecofeminist work, he writes, “Ecocriticism has, of course, developed so greatly in the last dozen or so years that it has supplanted ecofeminism” (“Afterword”). While Estok laments this supplanting, his “of course” suggests that it was inevitable, that ecocriticism would “of course” supplant ecofeminism, just as his own interest in the shared oppressions of speciesism, racism, and misogyny is subsumed in his own work to considerations of only the broadest of human-nonhuman relations. And yet, Estok’s “of course” is instructive: it reminds us that even though ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminism share a common purpose—to investigate and mitigate structures of oppression by way of deconstructing the binaries by which they are possible in the first place—all three of these fields need still to be brought into a wholly productive conversation so that none is (“of course” or not) supplanted by another.
Karen Warren, “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism,”, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, ed. Karen Warren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 19.
Stacy Alaimo and Karen Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 1, 6.
Susan Orlean, “The It Bird,” New Yorker September 28, 2009, 26–31.
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© 2011 Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche
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Munroe, J., Laroche, R. (2011). Introduction: In Dialogue with Nature: New Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity. In: Munroe, J., Laroche, R. (eds) Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001900_1
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