Review Landscape Nature And The Body Politic

Review: Landscape, Nature, And The Body Politic, The Politics Of Nature, Romanticism And The Materiality Of Nature And In Nature’s Name Essay, Research Paper

book reviewsWe revere it, we destroy it, we deconstruct it… PD Smith gets to grips with the natural world in books from Kenneth Olwig, Nicholas Roe, Onnon Oerlemans and Barbara T GatesBest wear a good thick skirtLandscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New Worldby Kenneth Olwig352pp, WisconsinThe Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporariesby Nicholas Roe228pp, MacmillanRomanticism and the Materiality of Natureby Onno Oerlemans253pp, TorontoIn Nature’s Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing and Illustration, 1780-1930ed Barbara T Gates699pp, Chicago Nature is a slippery word. What do we mean by it. The OED lists 15 different definitions. Perhaps scientists have the answer; after all, their journal is called Nature. Or is science part of the problem. How natural is a human ear growing on the back of a lab mouse. There are no simple answers, but there are clues in many different disciplines.Geographer Kenneth Olwig explores the social and political origins of “landscape”. One of the first uses of the word occurs in The Masque of Blackness (1605), written by Ben Jonson and designed by architect Inigo Jones. Performed for James I, the self-proclaimed King of Great Britain, this masque used landscape to legitimise the Stuart dynasty by forging the “image of the British nation-state as a body politic in a body geographic”. Jonson and Jones created a new political “mindscape” from a theatrical landscape.The rediscovery of Inigo Jones’s “scenic vision of Britain as landscape” at the beginning of the 18th century transformed the English countryside. After the revolution of 1688, the Whig gentry who dominated Parliament wanted to make their mark on the countryside. In the landscaped gardens of their country seats, nature became a theatrical space moulded by a surveyor and an architect.These landscapes did not grow out of “culture and custom”. Ancient villages were demolished to create an artificial Arcadia in England. Olwig argues that they were politically motivated landscapes (”Whigscapes”) designed to naturalise the power of the country’s new rulers.In an interesting twist, he shows how the idea of the English landscape garden was transplanted into America. Inspired by Thoreau’s idea that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World”, Frederik Law Olmsted, designer of New York’s Central Park, campaigned for a national park at Yosemite in the 1860s.It was a “scientific fact”, Olmsted wrote, that looking at nature was “favorable to the health and vigor of men”. Dire consequences resulted from too little nature: “softening of the brain, paralysis, palsy, monomania, or insanity”. Olmsted had been impressed by England’s landscape gardens and, according to Olwig, they provided the model for what he calls the “emparking” of America.As in Britain, the indigenous cultural landscape was uprooted – the native Yosemite Indians (”savages” to Olmsted) were evicted from their land to create this “natural” park that came to symbolise national unity.It is hard work cutting a path through the dense undergrowth of Olwig’s academic prose. But his meticulous uncovering of the origins of landscape has important implications: it exposes the phoney link between nature and nation and undermines naive blood-and-soil rhetoric. Even something as apparently “natural” as landscape can turn out to be rooted in the mind of man.Nicholas Roe’s subject, in The Politics of Nature, is the crucial role played by nature in the politics of poetry at the end of the 18th century. For Tom Paine, the revolutions in America and France were a new beginning, “a renovation of the natural order of things”. From nature, Paine and his fellow radicals took the ideas of freedom, equality and a sense that men were “kindred”.In this new, expanded edition, Roe makes a convincing case for the close relationship between revolutionary science and politics in Romanticism. Wordsworth’s “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused” has a scientific resonance for Roe: “The poetry of Romantic transcendence was dependent upon and articulated the materialist principles of contemporary scientific and medical debate.”Post-structuralism and new historicism have solved the problem of nature by deconstructing it: Wordsworth scholar Alan Liu says “there is no nature”. For Onno Oerlemans, in Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, this position represents an impoverishment of nature. Yes, nature comes to us laden with ideas, but its essential materiality remains.German Romantics, such as Novalis, claimed that “inward goes the mysterious path”. But for Oerlemans, the work of writers such as William Wordsworth and Gilbert White testify to Romanticism’s “sheer appetite for the infinite physical presence of the world”. His perceptive readings of the Romantics uncover a keen sense of nature’s materiality, but also reveals a nature that is “strange and unknowable”, irredeemably “other”. To describe this experience, Oerlemans borrows an apt phrase from Keats – the “material sublime”.Our fascination with nature is, as Thoreau wrote, “a need to witness our own limits transgressed”. It is an existential moment, an encounter with something larger than ourselves, humbling in its complexity and strangeness. For Oerlemans, the animal poetry of John C