“Nature’s Personhood”
Thesis:
Lawrence
Buell wanted to lead his readers through the death and revival of the
personification relationship between humanity and nonhuman kind. He uses a
linear progression, starting at the death of the genre then leads his readers
through its incremental rebirth. Buell goes into depth of the bipolar nature
that the Romanticism era had towards the personification of nonhuman kind.
Linear Progression:
Buell’s
linear progression can be seen as a step by step process of how the
personification of nonhuman objects was reborn in the Romanticism era. He first
starts with how some post-Romanticism writers felt that the personification of
nonhuman objects did not express facts that were highly regarded during that
time. The readers are then given examples of how writers would try to find
acceptable forms of personification toward nonhuman objects such as, “natural
creatures as transformed humans” (pg. 183). Buell’s midpoint of the article leads
to examples of how the genre made a great step into being recreated by Romanticism
writers going into, “the dignification of the overlooked” (pg. 184). The article then leads to Blake’s argument
which expresses that humanity and animals were interchangeable. Then the
article ends with the comparison between the ideals of Emersion and Darwin theories,
which lead to the Victorian era style of personified writing.
Issues:
There
are a couple of issues with Buell’s article, however. The first problem is his
assumption that the reader is familiar with Lynn White, Jr.’s “The Historical
Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”. The information in this essay is crucial to the
information Beull uses to make his argument on page 183 of this article. There
are several questions asked in this particular paragraph, none of which are
actually delved in to or answered. Instead, they are only passingly referenced.
A second problem with this article is located in the same paragraph as noted
above: Buell references religion,
specifically Christianity, in an attempt to bolster his point, but the
information doesn’t really seem to fit the theme of personification or
anthropomorphism. The third issue with this essay is on page 182. The author
brings up atheism, secularism, and cardinal sin when speaking of the anti-anthropomophism
movement but doesn’t really explain what those religious concepts had to do
with it.
Questions:
1. Is there religious significance
in the relationship between the man and the personified mouse?
2. Is he dignify the flower by
comparing it to the women?
Here's a bit more detailed of a summary:
ReplyDeleteBuell begins with a discussion of modernist writers (early 20th century) who reject personification (180-2); he then moves back into classical antiquity and the advent of Christianity to argue that monotheism created a relation of domination between humans and nature, while the continuing influence of classicism promoted nature and humanity as reciprocal forms of personhood (183). This reciprocity is his interest in the article. He then goes on to discuss how eighteenth-century writers like Thomson dignified the overlooked through personification (184), which as you note is taken up by the Romantics like Coleridge and Blake. Buell then indicates that there was another approach in the Romantic period, typified by Erasmus Darwin’s natural history (186). Like the sentimentalism of Coleridge and Blake, who represent human and nature as interchangeable, Darwin’s work reinforced the idea of kinship between humans and nature—the problem, as he goes on to suggest, is that this kinship is often just a fantasy (186-7). And the Romantics didn’t just wholeheartedly embrace personification, as Buell suggests: poets like Wordsworth criticized earlier authors for distorting objective reality with their personifications (187). These objections led to the Victorian tamp down on personification (188), and later the modernist rejection of it, which he noted at the beginning of the essay.