SOURCE: Snyder, William C. “Mother Nature's Other Natures: Landscape in Women's Writing, 1770-1830.” Women's Studies 21, no. 2 (1992): 143-62.

[In the following essay, Snyder contends that the picturesque movement provided particular intellectual opportunity for women artists, Wordsworth among them.]

In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the merging of two concurrent phenomena—the solidification of picturesque values and the proliferation of women artists—yields an imagery that resists seeing Nature as Mother. Progressive women artists at the end of the century and even through Romanticism tend to limit mothering impulses to human expression, while rendering external Nature as multifaceted and integrative, patterned but not personified. Individualized re-creation of a Nature mystically charged with fertility may have been brilliance of a kind, but as this new sensibility replaced the insistent patriarchism of the neo-classical style, the female was no less marginalized, fit to the role of praiseworthy Mother. Thus, enterprising women artists at the end of the eighteenth century were forced to explore an aesthetic space free from male metaphors of hierarchy—Nature as the great chain of being—or of maternality—Nature as the milk of paradise.¹ They drew the self not as individualized against natural and social barriers, but as communalized with other and Nature. Their implicating of gender in natural process stressed inclusion and integration aside from fructification; and as they traced the immediate connections carried out in family, community and partner, the aesthetic space women artists tended to refer to was that of the picturesque.

NATURE AND GENDER: QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY

For seminal commentary on sensation and intellection in the encountering of landscape, the chief theorists of the picturesque looked to Edmund Burke's 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In positing curiosity as our primal imaginative drive (Enquiry 31), Burke tends to questions that correlate feelings, such as love or astonishment, to sensuous apprehension. Burke calls elements of the Beautiful—softness, smoothness, grace—feminine, while he considers strength, power and rationality masculine. His argument, in disclosing the features of the Beautiful and Sublime, considers masculinity and femininity as carrying aesthetic weight while concomitantly dealing with effects of verbal and visual representation.

From the 1770's on, picturesque thinkers such as Uvedale Price and William Gilpin derive from and take issue with Burke. At this time, the rise of the importance of landscape and the emergence of the picturesque widened artistic range by reviving themes or imagery not categorized under beautiful or sublime, as well as by urging the coalescence of a variety of arts. Theoretically, the picturesque seeks new fields of associations—to combine the humble with the grand, the mellow with the bold, the smooth with the rugged, the aged with the youthful. This central feature of the picturesque, the blending of opposing qualities in landscape, thus prompts a new reading of the relation between nature and gender. A general, simplified view would hold picturesque texts as tempering masculine boldness, dynamism and reason with feminine delicacy, passivity and reflection. But a more specific, more complex view discloses these texts as explorations of a key paradox: how powerful natural forms and effects suggest, co-create or foster domesticity, community and sympathy—the province of both genders. In its mature stages, picturesque art goes beyond its definition of “that which looks well in a picture.” It reaches a point where imagination reconciles the vastness of natural forms such as mountains and sprawling valleys with shepherds, cottages and ruined abbeys. The process of integrating a variety of features in natural objects and atmospheres is an inclusive one which tests aesthetic depth without relinquishing control.

This process has implications for the role of gender in aesthetics. Price's essay On the Picturesque re-evaluates Burke's Beautiful Feminine—revealing “smoothness,” “uniformity of surface” and “gradual variation.”² Price devotes a chapter to separating the Beautiful from the picturesque, asserting that “sudden protuberances, and lines that cross each other in a sudden and broken manner, are among the most fruitful causes of intricacy” (82). Nature, then, is only partly Beautiful, and not centrally feminine. The picturesque delves into the complementariness of scenic phenomena, and accepts parts of Nature as broken, ambiguous, ruined or barren—not simply Beautiful, not simply powerful, and certainly not maternal.³

The proclivity to associate Nature with fecundity is often seen as axiomatic for Romanticism, as well as for the male: the egotistical sublime needs to value profusion, intensity, power, transcendence. Thus Romantic imagery is frequently characterized by ascents and abysses, fountains, clouds, “winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, / The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky” (Prelude VI). However, women writers seem to resist such signification of Nature and natural process, unless intending to associate these with abuse of power. Rather, women writers gravitate toward the picturesque because one of its aesthetic ideals is “grace,” which Michael Cooke considers “the term most effectively combining power and ease, strength and delicacy” (Acts of Inclusion, 182).⁴ Perhaps because their message tends to privilege intimacy over spectacle, domesticity over transcendence, women artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries find more compatible the understatement, subtlety and integrative qualities of the picturesque. A marginalized, subordinated program itself, this theory of art may have been inviting to women because of its ability to merge pursuits in which they had some hand—the picturesque encompassed not only painting, poetry and aesthetic theory, but correspondence, touring, architecture, journal-keeping and gardening.⁵ From one point of view, then, the picturesque helped to demythologize Arcadian landscape and to offer a way of apprehending Nature before one part of Romanticism remythologized it as Mother.

As the rise of landscape coincides with the rise of the picturesque, the rise of female artists is concurrent with the rise of both. While the first-generation Romantics take one direction in providing an elaborate imagery of Nature as provider, care-taker and nurturer, contemporaries Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Ann Radcliffe turn to the picturesque to elevate alternate ideals or patterns they saw implied in natural processes: community, generosity, sympathy, delight, connection, and intimacy. These female artists appropriate the picturesque to re-gender Nature by focusing on themes that we might call “pre-transcendent,” themes directed toward reciprocity, inclusiveness, and sustained rather than transitory fulfillment.

NATURE AS PATTERN: DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

The woman most fully involved with landscape is Dorothy Wordsworth, who kept a variety of journals during tours with her famous brother.⁶ Her relationship with nature is more phenomenological than ontological; as Margaret Homans says, “… though her personality enters into her description, it never imposes on what she describes” (Homans, 94). Nevertheless, her journals are rich, especially in the way that her descriptions reveal a nimbleness of perception and expression: she draws together a variety of influences and imaginative powers, ranging from Virgilian mimesis to Turnerian optical fusion. But her steadiest style is picturesque, as in particular she explores paradoxes of delight and care in rusticity and domesticity.⁷

In her Alfoxden journal Dorothy expresses a deep sense of care for a Nature which she perceives clearly in picturesque terms:

Set forward after breakfast to Crookham, and returned to dinner at three o'clock. A fine cloudy morning. Walked about the squire's grounds. Quaint waterfalls about, about which Nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed—ruins, hermitages, etc. etc. In spite of all these things, the dell romantic and beautiful, though everywhere planted with unnaturalised trees. Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy.

(17)

Despite her use of the term “romantic,” the objects of her attention and her vocabulary are patently picturesque: “quaint,” “beautiful,” “ruins,” “hermitages.” And her association of art with deformity betokens an anti-academic sensibility which is often allied with the picturesque. Importantly, Dorothy presents Nature in need of care: the mothering impulse actually comes from the artist. We might even infer that Nature may be considered a hurt child. For Dorothy, maternal care flows out from the human heart, not to it from above or beyond, a sensibility echoed in many other places in her journals.

Whereas Dorothy contextualizes care only as a human sensibility, she does, like her brother, allow that Nature can provide pleasure. However, pleasure for Dorothy has little to do with rapture. Mostly, she presents Nature as a source of sensuous enjoyment, a kind of open-air gallery, usually creating brief depictions that draw out the uniqueness of object or of perception. In Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, Dorothy describes a bridge as providing the kind of amusement apropos of the picturesque:

It is a bridge of heavy construction, almost bending inwards in the middle, but it is grey, and there is a look of ancientry in the architecture of it that pleased me.

(107)

And she notes that perceiving ambiguities in Nature causes a delight of recognition, a perceptual process which receives such attention in Price and Gilpin. Like a painter, Dorothy experiments with perspective and exercises an eye that is creative, yet controlled:

The solitary hut on the flat green island seemed unsheltered and desolate, and yet not wholly so, for it was but a broad river's breadth from the covert of the wood of the other island. Near to these is a miniature, an islet covered with trees, on which stands a small ruin that looks like the remains of a religious house; it is overgrown with ivy, and were it not that the arch of a window or gateway may be distinctly seen, it would be difficult to believe that it was not a tuft of trees growing in the shape of a ruin, rather than a ruin overshadowed by trees. When we had walked a little further we saw below us, on the nearest large island, where some of the wood had been cut down, a hut, which we conjectured to be a bark hut. It appeared to be on the shore of a little forest lake, enclosed by Inch-ta-vannach, where we were, and the woody island on which the hut stands.

(227)

The ruin-tuft ambiguity is clearly a source of picturesque pleasure caused by playful engaging of mind and scene. For Dorothy, Nature is more visual experience than anything else; she constantly attends to lighting and texture and, deliberately, I think, overlooks possibilities for maternal symbolism or personification, usually referring to Nature with the impersonal pronoun “it,” and not with “she” or “her,” as did her brother.

Dorothy seems to have been fond of visual ambiguities, some of which were transformed into poetry by William. Her optical notation, “The hawthorn hedges, black and pointed, glittering with millions of diamond drops; the hollies shining with broader patches of light. The road to the village of Holford glittered like another stream” appears in William's Prelude IV:

My homeward course led up a long ascent,
Where the road's watery surface, to the top
Of that sharp rising, glittered to the moon
And bore the semblance of another stream
Stealing with silent lapse to join the brook
That murmured in the vale.

And the famous flowers of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” are first encountered at Ullswater by Dorothy's curious, playful eye:

… at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and about them … the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing … a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.”

(106)

When Dorothy does associate Nature with Female, the reference is a metaphor in which Dorothy writes the female as a craftsperson, not as a mother, as in this impression gained in Scotland:

Every cottage seems to have its little plot of ground, fenced by a ridge of earth; this plot contained two or three different divisions, kail, potatoes, oats, hay; the houses all standing in lines, or never far apart; the cultivated ground was all together also, and made a very strange appearance with its many greens among the dark brown hills, neither tree nor shrub growing; yet the grass and the potatoes looked greener than elsewhere, owing to the bareness of the neighboring hills; it was indeed a wild and singular spot—to use a woman's illustration, like a collection of patchwork, made from pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to kit each other, the different sorts of produce being in such a multitude of plots, and those so small and of such irregular shapes.

(176)

Here the attention is on the arrangement of Nature much more than on its profusion. Dorothy sketches how cultivation and accident, lushness and bareness, regularity and irregularity intermesh to create a particular kind of scene. Her perception of contrast and division is modified by an appreciation for order within irregularity. She likens the work of Nature to that of the maker of gowns; the image is female as pattern-maker, as integrator, emphasizing a certain visual and tactile intricacy—what the hands, not the breasts, do. The implied oxymoron—that this scene offers a “wild collection” of shapes, textures and shadows, is entirely compatible with Price's penultimate statement in his essay On the Picturesque: “that the two opposite qualities of roughness, and of sudden variation, joined to that of irregularity, are the most efficient causes of the picturesque” (82).

Reading the art of brother and sister provides a unique view of a relationship between gender and Nature. While the writing of both William and Dorothy is incubated in the picturesque in the early 1790's, William leaves it behind to seek the divine in Nature and, on his way, to characterize it as nurture: “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her” (Tintern Abbey, l. 122). In keeping William emotionally, artistically and domestically nurtured, Dorothy knew that her role was as integrator of a moveable household that could include other male artists. Her vision so close to home, she had little inclination to see or believe in Nature as Mother when so much human mothering was needed.⁸ As Homans points out, “when [Dorothy] might have been writing she was instead spending her creative energies on plans for the future” (67). Busied away from exercising imaginative power—axiomatic for a fully Romantic perception of the world—“Dorothy sees herself excluded from a hermetic system” (Homans, 67) a system which provided time for William to cultivate his view of Nature as Mother. A nurturer without actually being a mother, a giver far more than receiver, Dorothy could neither perceive nor trope Nature in the same way as William. For him, maternality was equated with productivity, abundance and fertility; for Dorothy, maternality meant care, protection and intimacy.

.....

CONCLUSION

Critically and historically, then, the picturesque opens women artists to participation in a specific artistic program embracing values with which they could identify and feel free to express. Partly because, as Ronald Paulson points out, “picturesque landscape was … cut off from a historical and social context and given a personal one” (154), women artists working in the picturesque were not as tightly bound to the codes of a patriarchal history and society. Participating in the philosophical and aesthetic challenges to Burke's categorization of Nature as Beautiful or Sublime, they seem to hold the Beautiful as often illusionary and easily appropriated, its association with the female too heavily dependent on male desire. On the other hand, the Sublime is unsatisfactory for female expression because it privileges Nature, valuing it on its own terms, dramatizing only its most obvious features or processes. Between these, the Picturesque is based on mutuality of human and natural, masculine and feminine, both of which can share power and delicacy. There is a strain in the movement which leans toward care and preservation (the feministic), without an imagery of procreation and fertility (the maternalistic). Thus, this complex aesthetic phase directly preceding Romanticism shows that Nature may be prolific, ornamented, admirable and powerful, but for human happiness, it must be connected with, arranged, lived into—processes implying a more holistic investment than seeing it as Mother allows.⁹

Notes

1. The place of land and landscape under the view of Nature as Mother is neatly synopsized by Carolyn Merchant: “… While the pastoral tradition symbolized nature as a benevolent female, it contained the implication that nature when plowed and cultivated could be used as a commodity and manipulated as a resource. Nature, tamed and subdued, could be transformed into a garden to provide both material and spiritual food to enhance the comfort and soothe the anxieties of men distraught by the demands of an urban world and the stresses of the marketplace. It depends on a masculine perception of nature as a mother and bride whose primary function was to comfort, nurture, and provide for the well-being of the male. In pastoral imagery, both nature and women are subordinate and essentially passive. They nurture but do not control or exhibit disruptive passion” (The Death of Nature. 8-9).

2. Price undertakes his argument because he finds “picturesque” to be an equivocated aesthetic term: “In general, I believe, it is applied to every object, and every kind of scenery, which has been or might be represented with good effect in painting—just as the word beautiful, when we speak of visible nature, is applied to every object and every kind of scenery that in any way give pleasure to the eye—and these seem to be significations of both words, taken in their most extended and popular sense” (77). Price's thesis in Chapter III is “that the picturesque has a character not less separate and distinct than either the sublime or the beautiful, nor less independent of the art of painting” (78).

3. Valuing of barren, decayed, broken or “encrusted” objects counters imagery presenting Nature as beautiful and fecund. See Price, p. 82, where Time is discussed as a key agent, because it “converts a beautiful object into picturesque one. …”

4. Cooke actually considers “grace” to be an effect of the romantic pursuit of the feminine, but I believe the term is also apt for this strain of the picturesque.

5. See Malcolm Andrews, Chapter III, “The Evolution of Picturesque Taste, 1750-1800,” and IV, “Travelling ‘knick-knacks.’”

6. In “The Cult of Domesticity,” Kurt Heinzelman shows that the Wordsworth's moving to the Lake District in 1799 was the beginning of a domestic consciousness from which Dorothy “articulates and sustains the idea that the equating of creativity and work is necessary to the success of the household unit” (Romanticism and Feminism, 56).

7. Brief sketches like these are frequent in her journals: “The morning warm and sunny. The young lasses seen on the hill-tops, in the villages and roads, in their summer holiday clothes—pink petticoats and blue. Mothers with their children in arms, and the little ones that could just walk, tottering by their side” (7). “We went up the hill, to gather sods and plants; and went down to the lake side, and took up orchises, etc. I watered the garden and weeded” (37).

8. While her journals mention mothering only in human contexts, Dorothy's most significant narrative, “Concerning George and Sarah Green of the Parish of Grasmere,” details the tragic orphaning of the Green children whose parents met with a fatal winter accident. See Susan J. Wolfson, “Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William” in Romanticism and Feminism, 139-166.

9. I am indebted to Anne Mellor, James Heffernan, Ann Bermingham, David Rollison, Catherine Burroughs, Katherine Haley Arneson and Richard Wissolik for fruitful ongoing conversation and advice that have certainly contributed to the refining of ideas in this essay.

Works Cited

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Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. New York: New American Library, 1979.

———. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Scholastic Library, 1962.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. James Boulton, ed. Notre Dame University Press, 1958, 1986.

Cooke, Michael G. Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.

Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. Princeton: University Press, 1980.

Manwaring, Elizabeth Wheeler. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700-1800. Riverside, Ca.: Marcellus Bookery, 1925.

Mellor, Anne, ed. Romanticism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980.

Price, Uvedale. An Essay on the Picturesque. 1794.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents, a Romance. Frederick Garber, ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, 1987.

Wolfson, Susan. “Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William” in Romanticism and Feminism, Anne K. Mellor, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journal. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1987.

———. Journals. William Knight, ed. London: Macmillan and Co., 1938.

Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works. Ed. Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940-49.