MAN AND NATURE
"But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself"
Rachel Carson
The man–nature relationship has always been ambiguous, nature being seen as both a provider and an enemy. On this page we will offer you a careful analysis of the relationship between man and nature from the 16th century until the end of the 18th century. Enjoy the reading!
The Renaissance
During the 16th and 17th century, several changes occurred, such as the division of the Christian Church into Protestants and Catholics, which changed the view of the world. Trade expanded and, with the colonization of North America, slave trading began. Under Elizabeth I, culture flourished and England became the center of sea trade, with the resultant rise of a new middle class. At the time, the universe and its creatures were thought to be organized in a chain of being and everything that was outside of it was considered chaos. Despite these ideas, the concept of microcosm and macrocosm has also developed. The universe, nature and the sky were part of the microcosm and man returned to the microcosm, like a map of the universe. Alongside this way of thinking, "Humanism" had developed. According to this ideology, man occupied the central position of the chain of being and all the other categories (the spiritual world and nature) were linked to him.
The chain of being
Nature in the Renaissance
With Humanism, man became aware of the capabilities of human reason and understood that nature could be governed and exploited, being it an instrument at his disposal. Man also understood that nature was something that humanity governed, and, being it a creation of God, it was under man. This influenced the fact that artists and intellectuals didn’t necessarily consider nature as a potential subject of their works during this period.
a typical coffee house
The Age of Reason
Eighteenth-century England was considered a golden age and it was also referred to as the 'Augustan' Age after the prosperous period of Roman history. At the time Britain was experiencing a period of political stability and power, as well as an incredible flourishing of the arts. Monarchy and Anglicanism had been restored, parliamentary sovereignty was established and the political parties, liberal 'Whigs' and conservative 'Tories' came to life. Scotland and England became a one big country and the British colonial expansion reached North America. Economical prosperity and political stability led English society towards individualism and materialism. Newspapers, coffee houses, circulating libraries and book clubs produced cultural and political debate and great circulation of ideas. This new stimulating environment pushed men and women to read and writing became a profession. The Age of Reason was further characterized by liberal thought, free will and optimism. A big role was played by the Enlightenment which emphasized the faith in reason to achieve happiness. It aimed at freeing men from ignorance through knowledge and science. No wonder, education had become the key to social and political change.
Nature in the Age of Reason
Sissinghurst Castle English Garden
17th century scientific revolution brought to perceive nature as the complex system of divinely arranged principles which manifested in the creation. Enlightened thinkers did not just have the desire to comprehend the natural sphere but they wanted to enhance it. On top of that, they strongly believed that reason was the key to improve society and nature and to discover new horizons, encouraging exploration and the interest in exotic and savage civilizations. Indeed, they were fascinated by the man's primary state, where nature was intact and man epitomized the 'noble savage'. The view of nature changed into a new optimistic attitude: the natural world was thought to be beautiful and friendly rather than something crooked by sin, as the Calvinist belief stated. In this cultural environment the 'English garden' came to life shaping the British landscape into a series of thoroughly planned spaces, which embodied values such as freedom, balance and harmony between man and nature.
Enlightenment philosophers
Amongst the innovative theories of the Seventeenth-century scientific revolution was the natural philosophy, a new current of thought which, through the use of the experimental method (previously created by Galilei and Kepler), attempted to explain the mysteries of the universe. This method, used up to this day, consists in the formulation of theories only after the thorough observation and verification through experiments of natural phenomena. Such a rationalistic and scientific view of world was not seen as a challenge to religion neither in England nor in Europe, but rather as a tool to a complete and better understanding of the order and harmony of a God-created universe. Isaac Newton contributed to the natural philosophy with the demonstration of the laws of gravitation and motion by which the Planets move in their systematic courses.
Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
The Romantic Age
Revolution was the main feature of the Romantic Age: the Industrial, the American and the French Revolution shaped this incredible century. The United States of America won their independence under the manifesto of 'No taxation without representation'. English Industrial Revolution changed the face of Europe, the production system, based on the use of coal, iron and steam engine developed the new industrial world. Masses of workers moved from the countryside to the urban centres: fields were abandoned to rush after the new labour opportunities, which turned out to be a system of exploitation and misery. Cities expanded to unprecedented sizes, and grew into into centres of pollution, poverty and deprivation. They began to symbolise the failure of laissez faire liberalism’s philosophy that, permitting people to follow their self-interest, would have led to a perfect society. To contrast this greedy self-centered society, a new sensibility towards nature, beauty, feelings, power of imagination and individualism broke through with all its might.
London during the Industrial Revolution (illustration by Gustave Doré)
What does laissez faire mean?
Laisser faire is a French expression, which summarizes the principle according to which the state must not impose any constraint on economic activity. The individual fits into the natural order and derives what is beneficial for him and for the community.
In the second half of the 18th century the concept of nature completely changed due to due the historical and social contest: there was a reactionary response against the scientific rationalisation during the Enlightenment, commonly expressed in literature, music, painting and drama. But it was not simply a response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, it was also a reaction against the material changes in society, which accompanied the emerging and expanding industrial capitalism.
In the Early Romantic poetry the poets tended to use subjective, autobiographical material moving towards the expression of a lyrical and personal experience of life. There was a growing interest in humble and everyday life, associated with meditation on the suffering of the poor and on death, which explains a new taste for the desolate, the love of ruins, graveyards, ancient castles and abbeys. The classical view of nature as an abstract concept, as a set of divine laws and principles established by God, which man could order and control thanks to the faculty of reason, was slowly replaced by the view of nature as a real and living being. Nature was considered a vehicle for self-consciousness, a source of sensations and an expressive language that provided the poet with a way of thinking about human feelings and the self. The higher value placed on sensibility led to the need to elaborate a new aesthetic theory, the sublime, which was defined by Edmund Burke as "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger...or operates in a manner analogous to terror".
Nature in Early Romantic Poetry
Old Cemetery by Marie Egner
Graveyard poetry
The genre's name is given to its melancholy tone and to the choice of graveyards, ruins and stormy landscapes as the setting of its works. Nature in Graveyard poetry is thus gloomy and bleak.
The most important work of this school was Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751).
Ossian by François Gérard
Ossianic poetry
Nature in Ossianic poetry was described as wild and gloomy. Ossian was a legendary Gaelic warrior who lived in the 3rd century, hence the controversial nature of the authenticity of the cycle of Ossianic poems. A number of these were published in James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760).
James Thompson's portrait
Nature poetry
In the works of the genre's main representative, James Thompson, nature, which was considered in its physicality, and its wild sceneries led to reflections on the character of the primitive man in comparison to the civilised man.
Romantic landscape by John Trumbull
Pastoral poetry
This genre's main features were idyllic pleasure and happiness of rural life.
William Cowper's, the main representative of the genre, celebrated country life for its domesticity and simplicity in his work The Task (1785). To the author, nature was a sorce of innocence and joy.
Nature in Romantic Poetry
Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", became the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry. William Blake was the third principal poet of the movement’s early phase in England.
Wordsworth's Preface key points
William Wordsworth
To Wordsworth, man and nature were inseparable: he had a pantheistic view of nature, which was the seat of the spirit of the universe. Nature comforted man in sorrow, it was a source of joy and pleasure, it taught man to love and to act in a moral way.
In his I wandered lonely as a cloud (1807) the poet enjoys the «jocund company» of daffodils beneath the trees near a lake and states that a poet could not be happier in such a location.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To Coleridge, nature represented awareness of the existence of the ideal in the world. However, due to his strong Christian faith, he did not consider nature as something divine. Therefore, to Coleridge nature was not limited to being a moral guide or an aid for consolation. Nature has always played an essential role in his poetry because it helped him in his creativity and within nature the poet would find symbols that could be associated with emotions or feelings, experienced by himself but also by humanity in a more complete sense. In fact, nature in its entirety represented man's emotions.
In his The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), the Mariner kills an Albatross going against nature breaking one of life's sacred laws. Only when the man unknowingly blesses the water snakes, his sensibility towards the natural world changes and so begins to re-establish a relationship with it. In this ballad, the natural elements are turned into supernatural pictures and help create a nightmarish atmosphere.
I wandered lonely as a cloud by Wordsworth
Nature in the Gothic Novel
The general features of Romantic poetry continued to evolve during the following years until the end of the 18th century, when a new genre was created, the Gothic novel, which was the extreme form of Romantic literature and put a spin on the Romantic idea of nature worship and nature imagery. Along with nature having the power of healing, Gothic writers gave nature the power of destruction.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)
In the writer's masterpiece nature plays a major role. Not only does it seem to restore and affect the characters' moods, but it can also act with vengeance when it is mistreated. Mary Shelley paints nature and its divine grandeur with the rare strokes of a masterful hand. She deliberately juxtaposes the exalted vision of Mother Nature with the horrendous spectacle of a man-made monster and his ghastly deeds.
This steep contrast brings the reader to think about the wisdom of departing away from the set norms of nature. Mary's message to mankind is loud and clear: do not mess with nature for your own good. Humans should best live like humans. Any attempt to change the status quo can be very expensive and dangerous. If you will preserve nature, nature will preserve you.
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)
At the end of the 19th century, drastic events like the spread of Darwin's theory of evolution and the continuous growth of the Industrial Revolution, which economically and socially changed the previously agrarian England, forced the country's society to question the system of beliefs that had governed it for the past centuries. In Stoker's Dracula this further step into modernity is represented by the change of settings: starting in a ruined castle and then "evolving" into the Victorian London.