Wordsworth, Ecocriticism, and Natural Education

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Wordsworth reinvents the Enlightenment’s concept of natural education in ways that resonate with theories of ecology in a time of global warming. In book 5 of The Prelude, Wordsworth launches a scathing satire against the modern educator, whose scheme of natural education resembles rationalist interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wordsworth questions the naturalism of Enlightenment educational theory, arguing that modern education is rooted in a desire to control the course of both nature and human development. He reimagines natural education as a process that entails unpredictable and irreversible change. For Wordsworth, natural education is not a highway that leads directly towards a better future but is instead a broken and winding passage from one stage of life to another. Ecocritical scholars have embraced Wordsworth’s attack on rationalistic, anthropocentric conceptions of nature, but his ecological sensibility continues to be defined in relation to an outdated vision of pastoral renewal. This essay maintains that the sense of discontinuity that characterizes Wordsworth’s lyric narration of natural education approaches much more closely to twenty-first-century experiences of ecological chaos, estrangement, and loss.

Notes

1 For Jonathan Bate, Wordsworth’s retreat from revolutionary politics in the 1790s entails a discovery in nature of a more stable foundation upon which to realize the Enlightenment’s progressive goals of freedom and equality for all. Bate also emphasizes Wordsworth’s role in shaping Romantic conceptions of the state of nature, a category that comes with a promise of a restoration of an unmediated relationship to the landscape (Romantic Ecology).

2 Heidi Scott has argued that narratives in Romantic and Victorian literature respond to industrial shifts by representing ecology as inherently chaotic and unstable (1). Eric Gidal contends that James MacPherson’s Ossianic poetry records the processes of loss that accompanied the transformation of Scottish and Irish lands by industrial modernity and “urbanized communicative networks” (14).

3 For examples of ecocritical arguments urging a turn away from Wordsworth to more socially or historically minded Romantic authors, see Lynch; Smith and Hughes; and Washington. Outside of Romantic studies, Lynn Keller maintains that Wordsworth’s reverence for “beautiful and permanent forms of nature” (10) represents “an insufficient poetic response to the radical instabilities of the environmental mess in which we find ourselves” (19).

4 Anahid Nersessian, Anne-Lise François (“‘A Little While' More”), and Paul Fry have demonstrated Wordsworth’s relevancy to contemporary environmental and social crises. Though their concerns vary, these scholars agree that Wordsworth’s poetry complicates idealistic notions of nature as a permanent shelter and refuge. None of them takes up, however, the question of natural education.

5 Wordsworth showed a keen awareness of the future potential of man-made damage to ecosystems. James McKusick notes, for instance, that Wordsworth was outraged by an 1845 proposal to build a railway into the Lake District. He objected on the grounds that tourism and commerce would damage village life and degrade the character of the natural setting (74–76).

6 I will be using the 1805 version of The Prelude except where specified.

7 Theresa Kelley notes that contemporary thought about Carl Linnaeus’s botany has “emphasized its role in the desire for, and claim to, epistemological mastery as the work of modernity … [S]tudies have emphasized the role of taxonomic inquiry in discovering plants and creating empires” (4). Kelley complicates this argument, however, by studying the persistent difficulties that beset the Enlightenment’s commitment to taxonomic mastery.

8 For a more in-depth study of Lakanal’s addresses and their impact on Wordsworth, see Chandler 98–107.

9 François makes a similar observation, writing that “part of Wordsworth’s originality is that he experiences his ‘human nature’ not as an essential ‘nature’ in the sense familiar to the radical supporters of the French Revolution—an innate and fundamental goodness conceived, whether as a potential to be developed or an origin to be recovered, as both inalienable and infinitely improvable under the right social conditions—but as a property he can lose, can lose irrevocably, and without return” (“‘O Happy Living Things’” 60).

10 See Hartman and Caruth 630–52; Elam and Ferguson.

11 Also quoted in Nersessian 3.

12 David Collings argues that the sights the boy sees in the drowned man episode may refer back to the Arab dream that is included as book 5’s preface (191).