Abstract:
This paper attempts to view the Environment in selected literary text. In recent years the human and environment connection has provided a vast area for research. Environment is an inseparable part of human’s world but personal greed has increased the depletion of nature. Dickens in Hard Times have done great service unknowingly by projecting imagery of industrial town and imparted serious teaching of Environment. William Wordsworth is nature poet and so in this paper also makes efforts to read his poems as envirocentric literature. Every literary work constitutes an environment in the background, reading it allows us to understand its problem in contemporary time. This paper attempts to read the environment in selected literary works.
Keywords: Envirocentrism, Hard Times, Charles Dickens, The Tables Turned, The
World is Too Much With Us, William Wordsworth, Eco criticism, Nature.
Discussion:
Literature has capabilities to influence readers and their minds. It ignites the capability to see the world with an entirely different perspective. In literary works, history plays an important role in shaping it; It brings the political and cultural reality of that period, and comes up with critical eyesight towards various social norms. Literature aims for social, political and cultural refinement along with expanding our field of vision towards the environment.
If one analyses several literary texts one finds numerous environmental concerns in it, it might not be the chief affair of the text but definitely the subordinate one. The text which deals with the environment is Envirocentric Literature and This multidisciplinary study of literature and environment is identified as Envirocentricism / Ecocriticism.
The concept of envirocentric literature/ ecocriticism was specified by Joseph Meeker as an idea called ‘Literary ecology’ in his ‘The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology’ (1972) and later the term ‘Ecocriticism’ was coined by William Rueckert in his essay ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’ in 1978.
There was no specific organised movement to study ecocriticism/ envirocentric literature like we do have Romantic period in English Literature, was at its peak in 19th century in the span of 1800- 1850, began with publication of Lyrical Ballad (1798). It was disintegrated with various titles like Pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism etc.
Later in the 1980s, collective work began under this genre by the efforts of Western Literature Association. It set up ASLE at a Conference in Reno with a motive of "sharing of facts, ideas, and texts concerning the study of literature and the environment," in 1992 . Ecocriticism is associated with ‘Association for the study of Literature and Environment’ (ASLE- United States), founded in 1992 which organises a conference for the scholars of Environmental studies in literature and Environmental Humanities in general and later in publishes a journal, a quarterly published by Oxford University Press, ‘Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment’ (ISLE).
Cheryll Glotfelty defined Envirocentricism/ ecocriticism in ‘The Ecocriticism Reader’
(1996) "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment".
The second wave of ecocriticism/ envirocentric literature turned up in the 2000s. Its
representative work is Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy (2002) by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (Eds.). According to Lawrence Buell, promoter of ecocriticism expresses that the second wave envirocentric literature deals with public health environmentalism, considering
sociocentric point of view rather than ecocentric. It doesn't only think about rural landscapes but also started including Urban and industrial transformation which one can define as human wildness.
According to Simon Estok -
"ecocriticism has distinguished itself, debates notwithstanding, firstly by the ethical stand it takes, its commitment to the natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic study, and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections".
Camilo Gomides offered a comprehensive definition in reply to the questions about What ecocriticism is or should be with his article "Putting a New Definition of Ecocriticism to the Test: The Case of The Burning Season, a Film (Mal)Adaptation" in 2006.
"The field of enquiry that analyses and promotes works of art which raise moral questions about human interactions with nature, while also motivating audiences to live within a limit that will be binding over generations".
The second wave envirocentric literature was inspired by the writers like Charles Dickens who wrote about society in the Victorian era and its concern with increasing industrialisation.
Let us see ‘Hard Times: For These Times’ (1854) by Charles Dickens as an Envirocentric Literature. What one generally sees is when we read any text from an environmental view one finds presence of environment in every text. The only muddle is one reads the environment as a background but for enviro- criticism the environment plays an active role.
Thematically ‘Hard Times’ portrays the reality of Victorian society. The harsh reality of its education system, money- minded society and futility in concern for humans, Dickens criticises the modernisation. All these social and economical areas play an active role in the novel ‘Hard Times’. Besides all this Dickens very prominently presents wilderness of humans towards nature.
In the Novel, the narrative of the Imaginary town Coketowm shows the immense disturbance in Dickens seeing the neglecting nature of humans towards the environment. The narrative of Mr. Gradgrind in the novel easily suggests that hard times have already begun.
Presenting the picture of Coketown which didn't look natural. “It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it...”
The images like ‘savage’, ‘elephant’, and ‘serpents’ show the human attitude towards nature.
“ ...it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves...”
An imaginary town of Dickens is painted red and black which seems like ‘savage’ something which is violent or uncontrollable which aptly indicates that the town is developing hastily, it has lost its naturalness and now it cannot be controlled. ‘Serpents’ are poisonous and the smokes coming out of tall chimneys are visualized poisonous for humans. Through this one can suggest the atmosphere of Coketown is toxic.
“... the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.”
The imagery of ‘elephant’ is significant. As the mad elephant destroys its own living similarly here man who is acting like a machine ‘piston of steam- engine’ like a mad is destroying his own livelihood.
“...had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye....”
Water is life and the above indicates the containment of water. Industrialisation implanted its dirt in nature.
Along with all these features of Coketown putting forward envirocentrism in the ‘Hard Times’. The structure of the Novel is very significant, it is divided into three sections with agricultural titles “ Sowing,” “Reaping,” and “Garnering”. It is ironic as the novel’s overall focus is on industrialisation
Judging Hard Times with Envirocentric idea pushes us in wonders, How magnificently Dickens portrays Novel with its reading of Envirocentric Literature. William Wordsworth (1770- 1850) , a pioneer of romanticism, celebrated as a ‘poet of nature’, ‘worshiper of nature’. He supported the idea that nature and man are interconnected and both need to maintain their harmony. He always held up upon the idea of man’s dependence on nature. Bate, an eco- critic in his book ‘Romantic Ecology:
Wordsworth and the Environmental Imagination’ writes, romantics to be the ‘first ecologists’ as in a way they turned to be the prominent in challenging the idea of ‘capitalism’. He used simple language and described the nature/ landscape, he had his own nature, his world in his mind. He belonged to the middle class and studied in Cambridge and brought out new versions of nature poems. He was a pastoral person and so believed in the strong relation of nature and humans.
Bate is supporting the idea of Wordsworth but he doesn't mean to separate material and natural world, but both human and non- human world needs to walk hand-in-hand. Bate in his ‘Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Imagination’ explains psychology of romantic poets, “a respect for the earth and scepticism as to the orthodoxy that economic growth and material production are the be-all and end-all of human society”
Above explanation of Bate can be aptly justifies by the Wordsworth's poem “The World is Too Much With Us”, written in 1802 and published in 1807
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Wordsworth poem “The Tables Turned” (1798), is the best example of nature’s power. The poem has a prominent voice that the knowledge acquired from nature is more powerful than the knowledge acquired by books, human knowledge.
Up! up! my friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:...
Books! ’tis a dull an endless strife:
Come, and hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it
Not only for the knowledge, mental power but depicts nature to be the ultimate source of health, cheerfulness and wealth also i.e. physical power.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Wordsworth always paid great attention to the physical world around him, ‘Nature is a teacher'. Somewhere we do find him subjective in his works but he also describes nature objectively. Reading Wordsworth’s poem as an envirocentric one can easily find Wordsworth's disappointment with the effect of industrialisation and one can easily find ecological and environmental concerns in his poems. Going through the poem we realise that it was an attempt done by the poet to awaken the society for the welfare of nature and the environment. we can interpret that the world was moving so fast towards the materialism and industrialisation that they were losing the physical world around them, they were not enjoying the nature on the other hand they were destroying the nature for their own benefits.
Every literary work portrays environment and every text seems to be envirocentric it depends on the reader how he reads it. The theory of ecocriticism is a recent theory of the 20th century but we find that the literary writers used to write about the environment in the past also. We have a habit of reading the work based on the current situation. For example, today we are reading various poems like Wasteland by T.S. Eliot with the pandemic lens. Similarly today when we are facing environmental problems like climate change, snow melting etc , we read various texts and poems from the environmental point of view. Sometimes we find that literary writers are also playing the role of historians. Whenever we read a literary text we get an idea of an historical event through it. so it is a duty of literary writers to portrait contemporary Society of their time in their work today we're facing use issue of Climate Change and the popular writer of today, Amitav Ghosh is writing his various text like The Hungry tide (2004), the Great Derangement (2016), Gun Island (2019) depict the environmental issue of contemporary time. In this paper I have dealt with one novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens and two poems of William Wordsworth through which we can identify the environment of their period and also understand how the society of that period was looking towards the environment.
Today, the ratio of envirocentric literature is greatly focused, as our current problem is climate change. Many novels very briefly illustrate the environment but those are the fresh images. After analysing the above envirocentric works we can trace human society’s role is depleting environment and environment’s superiority. It is necessary to portray the environment in works as it provides eyesight to the importance of human and nature relationship. And ecocriticism/ Envirocentric literature helps us to criticise the mannerism of society in treatment of nature.
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