Ground-Work by Hillary Eklund;

Author:Hillary Eklund;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism, Nature in literature, Soil and civilization, Ecocriticism, Literature and science—England—History—16th century, Literature and science—England—History—17th century
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

HOMOGENIZING THE WORLD

Drainage projects in England were not isolated public works initiatives but instead part of a more widespread tendency among European powers to make the natural unknowns of the world both known and controlled. In France, for instance, inland lakes were drained as projectors sought to manufacture land for arable and animal husbandry and for housing.18 European involvement in New World reclamation projects dates back to the settlement of Mexico City, where Dutch engineers undertook drainage projects as early as 1614.19 In these and other locales, drainage was a crucial thread in knitting the fabric of human prepotency over cyclical changes in the natural world. As such, it formed part of what Shakespeare scholar Garrett Sullivan terms “the landscape of sovereignty,” which “reflects and shapes the ambitions and imperatives of those who control or would control the kingdom; and, more broadly but distinctly . . . represents the conceptual annexation of distinct cultural spaces in the name of monarch or (a culturally homogenized) nation.”20 By imposing a homogenized, official landscape onto what literary critic and environmental theorist Rob Nixon has called a “vernacular landscape,” colonizers, chorographers, and drainage promoters threatened the lives of local inhabitants as well as patterns of living that integrated cultural and environmental knowledge and practices — a soil science of the swamp.21

As an economic response to new ecological information, the “official landscape” or “landscape of sovereignty” traffics in a mixture of desire (for profitable land) and disgust inflected by ecophobia, a term the Shakespearean eco-critic Simon Estok uses to describe “an irrational and groundless fear or hatred of the natural world” that often appears in an early modern tendency to “imagin[e] badness in nature and [market] that imagination.”22 (Here we need only think of the sinful Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress [1678], the swamp into which Christian sinks under the weight of his sin.23) In Shakespeare’s Tempest, for instance, the shipwrecked nobles disagree about the climate of the island: where Antonio and Sebastian complain that the air is rotten, “as ’twere perfumed by a fen” (2.1.48–49), Gonzalo and Adrian praise the qualities of the isle.24 Similarly, both before and after the establishment of Jamestown on the fertile floodplains of the Tidewater, explorers in Virginia construed the land as an empty waste even as they praised the fecundity of the soil. In his Generali Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Somer Isles (1624), Captain John Smith derides unfavorable reports of the swamps of coastal Virginia as “vulgar rumour,” which attributes the colony’s troubles “to the vnwholesomnesse of the ayre, and barrennesse of the Country, as though all England were naught, because the Fens and Marshes are vnhealthy.”25 In drawing a direct comparison between colonial and domestic attitudes toward wetlands, Smith opens the channel through which modern plantation strategies that had been developed in the New World may have driven higher-stakes improvement projects in England. Indeed, as new landscapes were domesticated, they might even look better than those closer to home: “some small

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