Ecological intelligence: British women writers and the environmental tradition

The new field of Romantic ecology has so far focused very little attention on women writers. Mary Shelley and Dorothy Wordsworth appear in some ecocritical readings of Romantic literature but usually in the context of the male writers. This dissertation examines how Romantic women writers cultivate ecocritical ways of thinking by challenging the totalizing character of Enlightenment hierarchies and by endorsing ideas of interconnectivity and mutual interdependence among all living things, human and nonhuman. Anticipating many current ecofeminist claims, Romantic women writers critiqued the Enlightenment rationale of subordinating nature to systematic patriarchal domination and the consequences of objectifying the natural world in the name of social, scientific, and imperial progress. Within a burgeoning new field of reading Romantic-era texts through interdisciplinary ecocritical lenses, I show how writers such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Ann Radcliffe, and others perceive the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world through their use of eighteenth-century discourses on sensibility, natural history, and aesthetics. In doing so, they privilege fellowship and individual alterity within a pluralistic holism---a notion that also has profound implications today for the understanding and treatment of the environmental crisis of the twenty-first century.;Chapter one positions Anna Letitia Barbauld as one of the first ecological thinkers of the Romantic era in order to show how her critique of spirit/matter, science/aesthetics, reason/feeling, and mind/body hierarchies advocates sympathy and fine feeling as instrumental to the development of an egalitarian community that is predicated on the fellowship of all living individual things.;Chapter two continues the conversation of sympathetic identification by illustrating how Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, and Jane and Ann Taylor imagine animal subjectivities in order to validate their mental states and the many possibilities concerning their inner realities of which humans are virtually unaware. These writers position animals not as objects but as subjects in their own right. In doing so, they also critically examine what ecofeminists deem the "logic of domination," a rationale predicated on gender inequity that subordinates nonhuman and human others to patriarchal systems of power.;Chapter three examines how totalizing ways of abstracting plants, animals, and non-European others not only objectify but also neglect the individual subject. A close reading of the work of sisters Catherine Dorset and Charlotte Smith reveals the exploitation of individual subjects through scientific and imperial collecting. Their anti-imperialist critique exhibits what I call "green realism," a form of literary writing that poetically values nature's concretism, while positioning nature, and not nation, as a sovereign power.;Chapter four illustrates the reciprocal relationship between human agency and nature's agency in Ann Radcliffe's fiction. While investigating current ecophilosophical debates concerning the problem of nature, I show how Radcliffe's aesthetics intrinsically value the material reality of the natural environment even as they instrumentally render it as an art object. Consequently, Radcliffe's relational ethic not only challenges traditional Romantic notions of landscape as a projection of mind, but it also reveals a latent environmentalism in her work that addresses the preservation of ecological well being---for humans and nature in the eighteenth century as well as today.;By concentrating on the individual integrity and alterity of the natural world from frameworks that expose what totalizing systems tended to overlook or neglect, these writers demonstrate an ecological intelligence in British Romantic-era texts that not only anticipates today's developing claims about literature and the environment, but also invites fresh readings that can have profound ramifications for understanding ecological Romanticism both inside and outside the classroom.