Peter Remien, The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019. 234 pp. ISBN 9781108496810. £75.00 hardback.
Literature and ecology. This is the sort of combination that readers of The Spenser Review might expect in a special issue on the subject of ecocriticism. Ecology, after all, is both the word and the notion that gives us the concept of the ecocritical. It accounts for the prevalence of the eco- suffix: we are ecoconcious, ecotravelling ecofeminists because we are ecominded – sensitive to the fundamental and imperative importance of ecology. Such has been the development and expansion of ecocriticism that this might all seem, appropriately enough, natural. But Peter Remien has identified a problem. Ecology is a comparatively new word. As a branch of biology, it can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, postdating the Romantic poets beloved by first wave ecocritics. As a term denoting a sociological study – as in ‘cultural ecology’ or ‘social ecology’ – it is barely a hundred years old. But if we factor in political or advocatory implications to the word, then it seems we can go no further back than the early 1960s, when Aldous Huxley titled a pamphlet ‘The Politics of Ecology’. This shift has taken hold, and colours the ways in which we think about texts and their language. We might think, for example, of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as a profoundly ecological text, but Carson did not use the word in that way.
Clearly, we might say, Carson practised ecological work despite not conceptualising it as such. But it is, Remien argues, a matter of distortion to assume the same of thinkers writing in centuries past. Accordingly, The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature is Remien’s offer of an alternative direction to take. Here is how he puts it:
By starting with modern ecology – at once a science, a philosophy, and an ethical program – early modern ecocriticism has tended to project a prefabricated set of ethical and epistemological concerns onto the past, distorting the constellation of ideas involved in ecology’s early development. Rather than assume that ecology is ahistorical and universally available, I contend that the concept has a history, which can be traced back to early modern ideas of oeconomy. (2)
Throughout the book, Remien uses the archaic spelling – ‘economy’ being, of course, weighed down by its own multifarious history – to denote the protoecological ideas and practices discussed and represented in his primary material. It is a slight shame that the book’s title does not employ the term (although perhaps the marketing department of the press would disagree), as Remien’s arguments for reviving it are cogent and compelling. This is not to suggest, however, that oeconomy – or rather the phrase ‘oeconomy of nature’, a distinct concept in its own right as Remien shows – is a single, immutable subject. Remien’s metaphor of the constellation of ideas quoted above is a fine one, suggesting as it does a kind of order glimpsed only from a particular point of view. The phrase is found in the writing of Kenelm Digby, first in his Two Treatises of 1644, but is taken up by several other natural philosophers. Remien takes time over the introduction and first chapter to delineate the ways in which the ‘oeconomy of nature’ is tackled by Robert Boyle, Walter Charleton, Samuel Collins and Samuel Gott (the special case of Thomas Burnet is saved for later, to be read alongside Milton). As Remien puts it,
The phrase ‘oeconomy of nature,’ which came into wide use in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, designated an array of physical phenomena, from the collective processes of human and animal bodies […] to the systemic principle animating the world. (3)
It is no surprise that, with this range in mind, Remien has to carve out a lot of deep foundations on which to build the rest of his study. For those coming to the opening chapters of his book from earlier, ecocritical, arguments, these opening chapters may be particularly rewarding, for they expose the philosophical contexts of the literature in far greater detail than is normally managed. If the various uses to which ‘oeconomy’ and ‘oeconomy of nature’ start to become a little disorientating in their multiplicity, it might readily be said that this is a function of our having tended to obscure those valences with our own familiar term ‘ecology’. And if the success of Remien’s approach lies not so much in his creation of new ideas but in his recontextualisation of existing approaches, then surely that recontextualisation is vital.
For readers of this journal, it is worth clarifying that Remien does not mention Spenser very much (indeed, one time that he does so is to gesture to the necessary absences that the scope of his title demands). It is a pity, as his take on the shorter works, not to mention The Faery Queene, would no doubt be illuminating. The poets that are dealt with in detail, though, are familiar. In the course of explicating the concepts under discussion, Remien reads Margaret Cavendish – in particular The Blazing World, but also Poems and Fancies. Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ is the subject of Chapter 2 whilst Chapter 3 explores Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’. Chapter 4 concerns what Remien calls the ‘Divine Husbandry of George Herbert’, and Chapter 5, almost inevitably, discusses Paradise Lost. There is a great deal of other material under discussion here too, but as can be seen from this list, the country house poem takes up quite a proportion of the book. We might expect as much, given the notions of ‘household management’ connoted by oeconomy. Any account of the English natural philosophy of the mid-seventeenth century must surely acknowledge its aristocratic context. Digby’s concept of the oeconomy of nature is no different; for Digby, after all, the question of ‘household management’ could easily be ‘which of my households shall I manage today?’ That interpretation would, at least, hold before the Civil War, but, as Remien notes, the royalist Digby was imprisoned for his support of Charles, and fled to France following the seizure of his estates. Remien elucidates the several connections between political attitudes and the natural philosophy that is his subject with a great deal of care and insight. ‘The oeconomy of nature’, he writes, ‘as it develops during the Interregnum and the Restoration, tends to encode religious, social, and political conservatism […]. Rooted in unity and hierarchical integrity, the oeconomy of nature reifies monarchy, aristocracy, and religious uniformity’ (37). We need not be experts in Stuart history to realise that those categories are rarely, if ever, uniform in the period. The reification enacted in the ‘oeconomy of nature’ is thereby a kind of wishful thinking, or escapism. Indeed, if, for Digby, ‘the aristocratic estate forms the implicit metaphor for understanding the collective functioning of the natural world’ (37), then we might wonder if Digby’s whole symbolic model is founded on his experience of loss. This would have profound resonances with much ecocritical thinking, but Remien does not venture far in that direction. His focus is rather on the period’s own conceptualisations of the non-human than the way they chime with our own.
Again, then, the focus is on recovering the early contexts of ideas. This is most evident in Chapter 3, when Remien writes on Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’. In part, the chapter forms a diptych with Chapter 2, which – instructively – reads ‘To Penshurst’ in relation to Jonson’s representations of parasites during the rest of his career. Along with that of Marvell, the anthropocentrism of Jonson’s poem is thrown into relief. Here, and through the chapter, Remien is clearly influenced by the work of Diane McColley in particular, along with that of other critics who have followed her trail. Certain points that Remien makes readily recall his ecocritical forebears: ‘Despite the idealization of natural architecture, human attempts to dwell within nature produce not harmony but clumsy destruction, which can be seen in the poem’s contradictions and ironic tensions’ (97). But, it is the contextual accuracy of that ‘destruction’ that is Remien’s own, instituted as it is in his explication of oeconomy. Following Remien, we can see how ‘the oeconomy of the estate reveals what we now recognize as forest ecology’ (99). To explain, Remien highlights the way in which Marvell’s poem observes, records and examines the woodpecker’s behaviour. Via his organising principle of oeconomy, then, Remien here likens Marvell’s speaker to ‘a field ecologist’ (99). It would be uncharitable to quibble over this distinction between ecology and oeconomy as a small difference, for anyone interested in the history of ecology will find value in Remien’s thorough work. Moreover, ecology, not to mention literary criticism, is intimately concerned with the effects that small differences can make.
For his chapter on Herbert, Remien draws on the thinking of Giorgio Agamben who, in turn, develops the concepts of biopolitcs found in Michel Foucault. There is, then, a certain density to the arguments of the chapter. And yet, Remien’s most persuasive conclusions rely on his own groundwork rather than the framework of continental philosophy that he brings in here: ‘As in Digby’s account of the oeconomy of nature’, he writes of Herbert’s poem ‘Providence’, ‘observation supplants ideology, as the creation assumes more autonomy’ (119). Herbert, of course, is a very different poet from both Jonson and Marvell, but Remien’s position anticipates variety. In part, this is because he has demonstrated the various ways in which his core concepts were developed in the period, and in part because the variety is much of the point: ‘early modern oeconomy clearly contains tensions that led writers to divergent conclusions about humankind’s position in nature’ (129). It is with this introductory statement that Remien introduces John Milton. Milton’s position in, and reaction to, the sociopolitical upheavals of the period were clearly very different from those of Digby and several of his theoretical descendants. ‘Milton understands human liberty as essential to proper household management’ writes Remien, and this ‘version of liberty is not aristocratic freedom from work but rather freedom to work: free access to the resources responsible for human life’ (139–40). It is, perhaps, a stretch too far to identify the points on which Milton’s socioeconomic opinions align with those of Gerard Winstanley. Remien, however, argues finely that the oeconomic positions of these writers can be usefully thought of as parallel. Remien shows here that the concepts with which he is working can be productive outside of the field of literature and ecology. Human labour is the topic for the rest of the chapter, with both Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes considered before Remien turns to Thomas Burnet, whom he constructs as Milton’s philosophical counterpart. We might contend that it is unfair that Milton’s opus is given the same length of discussion as one of Jonson’s poems, but these, as we know, are the demands and pressures of publishing and academic work in which we all, like Samson ‘dutifully [toil] away’ (149). To be clear, however, whilst I would have liked more on Milton, I would not have wanted any of the earlier chapters curtailed.
This is an earnest and detailed book, that makes its case for a reconsideration of our critical terms very persuasively. The field of literature and ecology is distinct from that of literature and oeconomy, and there are many points at which Remien illumines the way that future research on all sorts of topics might go. But a book called The Concept of Nature will no doubt be grouped with more explicitly anxious, more activist works of ecocriticism. Authors of such work will learn a great deal from Remien’s book. It deserves its place alongside the core ecocritical texts that Remien cites, and, I hope, will prove influential for those that follow.
Gwilym Jones
University of Westminster
Comments
It accounts for the prevalence of the eco- suffix: we are ecoconcious, ecotravelling ecofeminists because we are ecominded – sensitive to the fundamental and imperative importance of ecology.
Link / ReplyThis shift has taken hold, and colours the ways in which we think about texts and their language.
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