Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

VIRGINIA WOOLF, ECOFEMINISM, AND
BREAKING BOUNDARIES IN NATURE
by Bonnie Kime Scott
As an author and feminist social critic, Virginia Woolf was extraordinarily aware of
boundaries of all sorts and of ways that their traversal had psychological, cultural,
and political signifi cance. Even in her early diaries, saved in A Passionate Apprentice,
she made imaginative juxtapositions of scenes and showed interest in the boundaries
between indoor and outdoor spaces. Early and late, we fi nd her or her characters positioned
near a window, with their thoughts diverted from the cultural tasks of reading
or writing by a landscape or a perceived communication from another creature. In this
paper and Virginia Woolf’s Uses of Nature, a book manuscript in progress, I am particularly
concerned with boundaries on nature—where the cultivated garden meets the moors or
the woods, or is invaded by wild “pests,” where exotic plants and animals import echoes
of the Empire, where science divides the species, or an artist like Woolf traverses such barriers
to think like a moth, take in the perceptions of a snail, or the motion of a fl ock of
birds. I shall be concentrating on Woolf’s traversals of such boundaries today, testing her
ecofeminist potential in the process.
I was encouraged to discover that, for this conference, two full panels were dedicated to
Woolf from the environmental perspective. My original concern that there would be unpredictable
overlapping of the six papers proved unnecessary; indeed there was a variety in level of
abstraction that ranged from Ian Blyth’s appreciation of Woolf’s accuracy in describing rooks
to the slippery metaphors for the dog captured by Jane Goldman. Both Diana Swanson and
I see Woolf as a proto-ecofeminist, based on the relation of the human to the non-human she
describes, though we focus on diff erent texts. Relatively little has been written about Woolf’s
ecofeminist potential, or indeed about her attitude toward the environment. Exceptions to this
include Charlotte Zoe Walker, who reads Woolf’s nature writing as a conversation with nature,
Elizabeth Waller, who develops a Woolfi an ecology that goes beyond human language, Reginald
Abbott, who has thoroughly researched the background of Woolf’s essay on the “Plumage
Bill,” and Elisa Sparks, who off ers detailed research into Woolfi an gardens. Th ere is an older
tradition of those who fi nd Woolf or her father Wordsworthian or otherwise related to the
romantics. 1 I’m eager to fi nd what else may be percolating.
Let me begin with a small dose of the still evolving critical resources aff orded by
ecofeminism. Environmentalist Aldo Leopold’s description of the “biotic community,”
of which “man is…only a member” (204-05) in his landmark 1949 essay, “Th e Land
Ethic,” brought the concepts of holism and an ethical resistance to anthropocentrism to
the movement now known as deep ecology. By pointing out the historical connection of
anthropocentrism to androcentrism, Val Plumwood makes the turn toward ecofeminism,
which critiques the notion that humans (read primarily as men) are the ones to set the
boundaries on nature, to exert their power over it and control it (22). In Th e Death of
Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientifi c Revolution, Caroline Merchant suggests that,
for its world view, modern science reconceptualized “reality as a machine rather than a