Redefining the Self: Depicting Nature and the Construction of Identity in the Poetry of Anne Michaels and John Steffler
by
Breanna Keeler
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (English)
Acadia University Fall Graduation 2013
© by Breanna Keeler, 2013 ii
This thesis by Breanna Keeler was defended successfully in an oral examination on ______
The examining committee for the thesis was:
______Susan Boddie, Chair
______Dr. Carrie Dawson, External Reader
______Dr. Herb Wylie, Internal Reader
______Dr. Lance LaRocque, Supervisor
______Dr. John Eustace, Department Head
This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (English).
______iii
I, Breanna Keeler, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.
______Author
______Supervisor
______Date iv
Table of Contents
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter One Relationships 20
Chapter Two Discourses on Nature 44
Chapter Three History and Memory 81
Conclusion 104
Works Cited 106 v
Abstract
This thesis utilizes ecocritical and ecofeminist theory to compare the depictions of landscape presented in the poetry of John Steffler and Anne Michaels and examine the consequences of these depictions in terms of the formation of personal identity. Chapter
One employs ecofeminist views on the connection between the treatment of women and treatment of nature to provide a framework in which to examine the interpersonal relationships depicted in the poems. Chapter Two explores the discourses on nature that
Steffler and Michaels employ in their works. Steffler operates out of a discourse based on dominance and hierarchy in which the self is defined in opposition to nonhuman nature.
Michaels, alternatively, works with a discourse based on connection and therefore the self is defined in concert with nonhuman nature in her works. Chapter Three examines the ways that Steffler and Michaels’ narrators interact with history as contained in both human constructions and the nonhuman landscape. In both Steffler and Michaels’ philosophies, history and memory play an important role in creating personal identity. For
Steffler, history primarily consists of facts and figures, while for Michaels it primarily consists of narrative. Steffler’s narrators distance themselves from the history they find in nonhuman nature, preferring to engage with and define themselves by way of the history they find in human-made structures. Michaels’ narrators acknowledge history found in human-made structures, but engage far more frequently with history found in nonhuman nature. Ultimately, Michaels creates an alternative to the traditional approach to the human-nonhuman relationship which is demonstrated in Steffler’s works. 1
INTRODUCTION
Poetic works about nonhuman nature do not simply reveal the poet’s view of the physical world, for when poets write about nature they are often writing about humans.
Both John Steffler and Anne Michaels write poetry which in its depictions of nonhuman nature is also about human nature. Whether directly addressing and depicting particular landscapes — such as Groais Island in Steffler’s The Grey Islands — or writing poetry about other topics, both Steffler and Michaels produce works saturated in natural imagery, and, through this imagery, reveal information about how personal identity is formed in their works. Their poetic works take two opposite approaches to depicting landscape and defining the self through the human relationship with nonhuman nature, and these approaches arise from attitudes toward interpersonal relationships. Steffler attempts to redefine the human relationship with nature, but ultimately remains loyal to what I will call, following Marilyn McKay, “the nomadic concept of territory” which
“focuses on wilderness land and the active processes of conquest and penetration” (5) and defines the self in opposition to nature1. The term “nomadic” is freighted with many problematic connotations, particularly when it is considered in postcolonial terms where it is typically used to pejoratively refer to the indigenous people of a colonized country who do not occupy a fixed space that aligns with the European conception of “home.”
However, in this thesis, the term is instead being used to speak about the European attitude toward nature, one which is based on conquest and the subduing of nonhuman
1 The understanding of the term “nomadic” that will be used in this thesis is not related to Gilles Deleuze’s well-known sense of the word. Instead, I am adopting this term from art history, and using it to describe a particular way of viewing the nonhuman natural world which focuses on conquest and the subduing of nonhuman nature. 2 nature. Michaels successfully redefines this paradigm, basing the human-nonhuman relationship on connection and interdependence. This thesis will explore the ways in which these two attitudes are established and revealed by way of the depiction of relationships, discourses on nature, and the treatment of history and memory.
John Steffler has published six collections of poetry: An Explanation of Yellow
(1981), The Grey Islands (1985, 2000), The Wreckage of Play (1988), That Night We
Were Ravenous (1998), Helix: new and selected poems (2002), and Lookout (2010). He also published a novel, The Afterlife of George Cartwright, in 1992. Critical attention to
Steffler’s work mostly focuses on The Afterlife of George Cartwright, while critics largely ignore his poetry collections. The Grey Islands, his best-known poetic work, has only been addressed in a single article, Adam Beardsworth’s “The Natural’s Not in It:
Postcolonial Wilderness in Steffler’s The Grey Islands,” and Alexandra Gilbert’s 2010
Master’s Thesis from Acadia University. In this thesis I will be focusing on The Grey
Islands. This book-length poem tells the story of an unnamed speaker who leaves an unfulfilling job as a town planner, sends his wife and children to Toronto for the summer, and travels to the Grey Islands off the coast of Newfoundland, intending to spend his summer in solitude on a now-deserted island in order to search for his personal identity in the context of the wilderness. I will also comment on a selection of poems from Steffler’s other collections that address nature in a similar way and demonstrate the same attitude toward nature and its relationship to personal identity.
Steffler’s poetry attempts to move away from the depictions of landscape that, as we will see, traditionally characterize nature writing in order to participate in an 3 ecocritical conversation which avoids both an idealization of nature and an anthropocentric viewpoint that requires the domination of nonhuman nature by humans.
Although Steffler achieves a modicum of success in this regard, his work ultimately falls short of a complex ecocritical position. In order to move away from a pastoral ideal,
Steffler adopts a position which sees the landscape as something that must be confronted and conquered. However, the self is still defined through place and one’s relationship with it. Steffler says in an interview with Ian Ferrier at the 2007 Words Aloud Spoken
Word Festival in Durham, Ontario, that he is particularly interested in the connection between place and the self and intrigued by “the way we have an impact on our environment and the way a particular kind of environment in which people live — both the natural and the human-created environment, cultural environment as well as natural environment — the way that influences our lives” (Steffler, “Steffler Interview”). He reiterates this fascination with place in an interview with Maria Jesús Hernáez Lerena in the Winter 2012 issue of Arc. He tells Lerena that “[p]lace is one of the most fundamental givens that shapes who we are” (83). Consequently his poetry is often an
“investigation of place and the history of place” (Steffler, “Steffler Interview”) and the way in which the self is created through these elements. Recognizing a connection between the environment and the self forms an important step toward an ecocritical stance such as the one articulated by Glen Love or Carolyn Merchant2, and Steffler even
2 The understanding of ecocriticism outlined by Glen Love in “Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism” is well-articulated and thus helps inform the ecocritical theory I will be using. Similarly, Carolyn Merchant’s ecofeminist writings, especially The Death of Nature, Radical Ecology, and Earthcare, are central to the understanding of ecofeminism I employ in this study. 4 makes gestures toward the possibility of defining the self in connection with nature, but his poetry remains firmly attached to the nomadic mindset.
Attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature stem from attitudes toward the relationship between men and women. Ecofeminism, particularly what Carolyn Merchant calls cultural ecofeminism, argues that “women and nature have been mutually associated and devalued in Western culture” (Merchant,
Earthcare 10). The violation, domination and mistreatment of nature, ecofeminism argues, has been made appropriate by way of associations between nature and women (7).
Throughout Steffler’s work, relationships between people are based on a patriarchal model, and this attitude of dominance is echoed in the relationship between humans and nature. The attitude that Steffler’s speakers adopt toward the women in their lives — typically relegating them to a background position in the narratives of their encounters with the wilderness or presenting them as possessions — lies at the root of their attitudes toward nonhuman nature.
Steffler’s poetry, especially The Grey Islands, explores “how human beings fit into the natural world” (Gilbert 2). His poems often begin by presenting a pastoral version of nonhuman nature and the relationship that exists between it and humanity: nature is presented as a retreat, a place to attain solitude and space in order to come to an understanding of one’s identity. His poetry deconstructs this way of viewing nonhuman nature, but in order to do so he presents nature as a dangerous entity that needs to be dominated by humans, a position that counteracts any ecocritical gestures he makes.
Steffler presents nonhuman nature as an Other: it is threatening, dangerous, and 5 confrontational, it refuses to conform to expectations of silence and solitude, and it threatens those who attempt to interact with insanity and death. While this depiction successfully deconstructs an idealistic view of nature, it does not provide the basis for a sophisticated ecocritical stance. Steffler attempts to overcome this viewpoint by establishing a connection between humanity and the landscape, but is only partly successful because he establishes this connection within the context of language that presents nature as dangerous, monstrous, and deadly.
In addition to the self being defined through a connection with the physical landscape, Steffler connects land with history when it comes to the exploration of identity. The self in Steffler’s poetry is shaped by both “place and history of place” (Steffler, “Interview”). In what can be construed as an ecocritical move, the land in Steffler’s poems contains history. The ideas of “home, community, and the natural and historical landscape” are all “inextricably interrelated in Steffler’s work” (Gilbert 2).
However, history is contained in human-made structures as often as in the natural world; the graveyard in “From Halki,” the abandoned houses in The Grey Islands, and other human-made structures in Steffler’s works provide a connection to history that is different from that provided by nonhuman nature. When nonhuman nature does contain history, it is always someone else’s history and it does not intersect with, or seemingly affect, the person encountering it. The speaker in The Grey Islands remains separate from the history he finds in the landscape of Groais Island, particularly when it is found in nature. Consequently, Steffler never completely inhabits an ecocritical stance.
Throughout his poetry, Steffler attempts to move toward an ecocritical stance which 6 defines the self in connection with nature, but ultimately he can only ever gesture toward such a position because he continues to present nature as something that must be controlled and consequently defines the self in opposition to nature.
Like Steffler, Anne Michaels has also produced both poetry and prose over the course of her writing career. She has written three collections of poetry, The Weight of
Oranges (1986), Miners Pond (1991), and Skin Divers (1999), and two novels, Fugitive
Pieces (1996) and The Winter Vault (2009). The subject matter in Michaels’ poetry is wide-ranging, but she often deals with the lives of those affected by the Holocaust.
Almost all of these poems, while not directly about nature, address the nonhuman natural world in some way since it is this world which provides the context for the lives that
Michaels depicts. As is the case with Steffler, far more critical attention has been paid to
Michaels’ novels than her poetry. While The Winter Vault is still too new to have received much attention, numerous critics examine Fugitive Pieces and look at where Michaels’ work falls in relation to that of other authors writing about the legacy of the holocaust.
Some of these critics, such as Donna Coffey, also examine her use of geography and geology in Fugitive Pieces, and these arguments have proved useful in this thesis. More critical attention has been paid to Michaels’ poetry than Steffler’s, with Robert
Eaglestone, Connie Braun, and Kimberly Verwaayen all working with various selections from Michaels’ poetry and looking at memory, time, trauma, suffering, and the formation of identity. This thesis will work with a wide selection of Michaels’ poetry from all three of her collections. 7
As in Steffler’s works, the attitude toward interpersonal relationships in Michaels’ texts connects to the attitude toward nonhuman nature; however, unlike in Steffler’s work, the speakers in Michaels’ poems approach these relationships in a non-patriarchal manner. The relationships dealt with in Michaels’ work are not based on a hierarchical structure which has one gender dominated by the other. Her sense of interpersonal relationships is not based on dominance, and this attitude translates into human- nonhuman relationships as well, which allows for the development of an alternative approach to the formation of personal identity in the context of nonhuman nature.
While John Steffler’s poetry makes unsuccessful gestures toward an ecocritical stance, Anne Michaels’ poetry develops a complex ecocritical position. In part, this success is due to the fact that Michaels avoids defining identity by way of the “wilderness and the need to take control of it” (Spergel 45) like early Canadian canon-makers.
Steffler’s attempts to move toward an ecocritical stance are never successful because he remains firmly entrenched in this traditional way of thinking, continuing to see nonhuman nature as something that must be controlled; consequently the self must be defined in opposition to nature. Michaels diverges from this traditional mindset and creates a model in which the self is defined by way of an intimate connection between nature, memory, language, and personal identity. Language that evokes nonhuman nature abounds in her poems, woven into descriptions of events, locations, and emotions. Thus, landscape continues to play a crucial role in defining and shaping identity. This combination of natural imagery and nature-focused language marks an important shift in approach from the traditional, nomadic mindset found in Steffler’s works. By refusing to 8 keep nature distinct from humanity, Michaels creates an intimate connection between the two, particularly by way of memory, and thus makes space for an ecocritical stance in which nonhuman nature and humans need not destroy each other.
In Michaels’ work, “geography and identity intermingle” (Malone 91), allowing her to “excavate her chosen themes of love, language and memory” (Crown). Sarah
Crown’s use of the word “excavate” is particularly apt here; Michaels uses an abundance of archeological imagery in order to convey an interconnection between memory and the earth. For Michaels, the earth itself remembers humanity. Identity is created by way of memory in Michaels’ poetry, and both language and nature embody memory. In
Michaels’ poetry, the language used to convey identity-shaping memories is laced with natural imagery. Moreover, the earth itself becomes a repository for human memory, both personal and collective, and therefore becomes that which defines personal identity.
Consequently, identity becomes intimately caught up in nature. This connection between the self and nature allows Michaels to adopt an ecocritical stance.
Before providing a brief theoretical context for this study, I am going to pause here in order to define a few terms. There are several different names floating around for writing about nature, including, but certainly not limited to, “nature writing,”
“environmental literature,” “wilderness writing,” and “ecopoetry.” These terms, it seems, do not have well-formed definitions. Harry Thurston admits that “to define nature writing is, in the first place, a challenge” because it “is something of a chimera” (1), and concludes that it may be that “the defining character of nature writing is its stubborn and unpredictable diversity” (6). J. Scott Bryson, editor of Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction, 9 explains in the book’s introduction that “[a] precise definition of ecopoetry has not yet been established” (3). Other terms suffer from the same ambiguity, since they are often synonyms for “nature writing” and therefore adopt the same unclear definition, or are thrown into discourse with little attempt at definition made.
There are those who have attempted to create some kind of distinction between the various terms. Patrick Murphy offers a distinction between “nature literature” and
“environmental literature” in his book Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented
Literature, by explaining that “[n]ature writing is a genre within a mode, while environmental literature is a mode with several genres” (49). He then argues that “[t]he modes rather than the genres ought to be defining our field of study” (49). This same sense of openness has been adopted by other critics. Thurston claims that while nature writing may be an amorphous category, there are some similarities between the works that fall under its broad reach. These works are all “grounded in the natural world and, to varying degrees, dedicated to its preservation” (Thurston 1). More importantly for my purposes, “nature writing is not only (or even primarily) about the wilderness and what you find in it” (6), but is instead about how that wilderness is viewed. Similarly, Bryson argues that ecopoetry provides “a perspective on the human-nonhuman relationship” in a way that is distinct from those of previous generations of poets (5). I am partial to this sense of openness and will be implementing it in my understanding of what constitutes nature writing. For the purposes of this thesis, works need not directly address nonhuman nature, but must demonstrate particular ways of seeing, understanding and interacting with nonhuman nature in order to be considered “nature writing.” 10
Steffler and Michaels are both heirs to a discourse on nonhuman nature based on domination and control which characterizes nonhuman nature as both female and Other.
Don McKay suggests that it is helpful to begin an analysis of the theoretical roots of these works by “bring[ing] in a totally different tradition ... not as a stick with which to beat our own tradition, but as evidence that, within the experience of our species, other attitudes to primordial energies are possible, that the Canadian experience is controlled by historical circumstances, not fate or the human condition” (7). These traditions bring context to the works being examined. The ideological frameworks played out in contemporary writing did not emerge ex nihilo. Rather, they find their roots in much earlier literary practices.
The seventeenth century marked the emergence of the Baconian scientific method, which provided humans with developments that allowed for easier and much more thorough means of dominating and domesticating nature. Changes in agriculture meant that “[m] an’s relation to the soil was profoundly changed” (L. White 8). Consequently where “man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature” (8). Of course, this mastering and exploitation of nature was not new. In fact, it can be traced back to works of art from the Middle Ages which indicate that “[m]an and nature are two things, and man is master” (8), but this attitude became codified in the seventeenth century 3. The works of the Romantics at the end of the nineteenth century brought about a broader and more complicated understanding of “wilderness.” Wilderness was strategically used by poets in
3 The establishment of the scientific method in the seventeenth century is important to the ecofeminist approach. Carolyn Merchant notes in The Death of Nature that the ideas formed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mark “a transformation that shaped and pervades today’s mainstream values and perceptions” (xx) and suggests that feminism and ecocriticism prove useful in examining these ideas in both their historical and contemporary contexts. 11 order to create controlled experiences of the sublime, small doses of terror which emulated the “sudden experience of wilderness-as-other” after its having “been experienced as an adjunct to human values or ... as a commodity” (D. McKay 10-11) without the imminent threat of becoming bushed. Wilderness was no longer simply one thing — usually a “tract of solitude and savageness” (Scheese 20) but was now “complex and multivalent” (20). The attitudes that emerged out of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remain evident in contemporary literature. Belief in the necessity of the dominance of nature and obsession with order and harmony form the basis for the nomadic understanding of nonhuman nature that grounds Steffler’s writing, and
Michaels’ depictions of nature are indebted to the sublime paradox. The complexity that emerged in the nineteenth century continues to characterize contemporary poetry; even within the work of a single author one viewpoint does not always prevail, as is evidenced by Steffler’s works.
A search for terror and antagonism in literature became academically fashionable in Canada during the second half of the twentieth century. Survival, Margaret Atwood’s theoretical text, suggests Canadians position themselves in their literature as victims of nature and argues that Canadian literature depicts nature as a monster. She suggests that
“Canadian writers as a whole do not trust Nature, they are always suspecting some dirty trick” (Atwood 49). Nature is “dead, or alive but indifferent, or alive and actively hostile towards man” (54). This same struggle is identified by Northrop Frye, who argues that in
Canadian literature “life struggles and suffers in a nature which is blankly indifferent to it” (The Bush Garden 139). Of course, not all critics have jumped on board with these 12 analyses. George Bowering, for instance, argues in Imaginary Hand that the patterns detected in and ascribed to all Canadian literature are in fact an eastern phenomenon, and that the western relationship with nature in literature is markedly different than the eastern one. Despite emerging disagreement with both Atwood and Frye, recently by critics such as Susan Glickman, the views they present continue to colour the way critics understand and analyze Canadian literature and identity (P. White 11). Of course, the antagonistic relationship this viewpoint is predicated on is not limited to Canadian literature.
As Peter White has shown, this framework for understanding Canadian literature remains prominent, but it is beginning to lose popularity as academics and the general public start to realize that the relationship with landscape is far more complex than this framework would have them believe. The vision is “acknowledged to be a dated and limited vehicle for the representation of national identity and feeling,” but “emotionally this perception nonetheless continues to retain a powerful hold on the national imagination” (P. White 11). In part this results from a proliferation of viewpoints, as “a growing number of landscape writers offer essays, poems, and fictions that represent the human relationship to the natural landscape in ways that are often antithetical to our culture’s usual emphases” (McDowell 371). However, increasing sensitivity to other ways of understanding the human relationship to nature, which have existed in Canadian literature far longer than typically acknowledged, also factors into this shift4. A second major trend that has been identified in nature writing is the tendency to see nature as an
4 Susan Glickman makes a compelling argument for this rereading of Canadian literature in The Picturesque and the Sublime: a poetics of Canadian landscape. 13 escape from everyday life (Murphy 13), a pattern that Steffler simultaneously emulates and deconstructs. Additionally, the traditional nature-culture dichotomy has been complicated. Murray explains this more complicated relationship between nature and culture as a continuum between the city, pseudo-wilderness and wilderness in which there is no simple correspondence between one location and ‘goodness’ (75). This complexity, which finds its roots in the Romantic period, is gestured toward in Steffler’s work and is essential to Michaels’.
Just as Steffler and Michaels have inherited a historical context for discussions of nonhuman nature, those reading their work always operate out of some theoretical context; in the case of this thesis, ecocriticism and ecofeminism form the context.
Ecocritical discussions centre around words such as “nature,” “wilderness,” “landscape,” and “environment,” deceptively simple terms. Problematically, these terms often embody contradictory ideas or associations: dangerous and protective, innocent and wise, vindictive and kind, and countless other binary pairs. Intrinsic in all definitions of nature, or related terms, is the notion of otherness; nature is always separate from humans.
Frederick Turner notes that when asked what nature is, “[m]ost of us ... would probably make a vague gesture toward the nearest patch of green vegetation and say, to begin with, something like ‘Well, it’s what’s out there, not what’s in here’” (42). This distinction is maintained regardless of the physical relationship between “nature” and “humans.”
Traditionally, writers consider the realm into which they escape “wilderness,” meaning
“land unaffected by humans” (Scheese 6). This definition, however, has become insufficient. There is now so little space unaffected by humans, writers are not simply 14 dealing with untouched land, and, to make matters worse, as soon as a writer has infiltrated a landscape through writing, it has been affected by humans. Several critics suggest a continuum of land which ranges from the city through a kind of pseudo- wilderness to a ‘true’ wilderness (Murray 75 and J.B. Jackson qtd. in Scheese 7).
Frequently, in ecocritical discussions, the term “landscape” is favoured by authors because it incorporates more than the simple geography suggested by terms such as
“land,” “environment,” “terrain,” and “space” (Glickman ix). “Landscape” incorporates these geographical concepts, but also includes the cultural by way of the relationship between people and place (Janice Monk qtd. in Glickman ix-x). Throughout this study, I will favour the term “nonhuman nature,” but will also refer to “wilderness,” “land,”
“landscape,” and “nature.” I will, however, try to remain conscious of the connotative weight of each of these terms.
The ecocritical concern with breaking down traditional dichotomies in order to solve problems of domination and exploitation dovetails nicely with the concerns of feminism, and ecofeminism has emerged out of this crossing over of ideologies. Arguing that “[w]omen and nature have an age-old association — an affiliation that has persisted throughout culture, language, and history” (Merchant, The Death of Nature xix), ecofeminists examine history and literature to find the roots of this connection and seek ways to rectify the imbalance between nature and culture by dismantling the hierarchy between men and women. Ynestra King suggests that “there is no way to unravel the matrix of oppressions within human society without at the same time liberating nature and reconciling that part of nature that is human with that part that is not” (109). 15
Ecofeminists argue that the dichotomy between male and female in Western discourses connects with the dichotomy between humans and nonhuman nature. Women have traditionally been more closely aligned with nonhuman nature than men, viewed as a part of nonhuman nature because of their reproductive function. This relationship places them in a position of subordination and creating a hierarchy not only between humans and nature but between men and women so that men are superior to both women and nature5.
Instead of accepting the feminization of nature as a justification for the domination and exploitation of the nonhuman world ecofeminists attempt to “reweave” the relationship between nature and culture (Mack-Canty 173). However, Michaels’ work introduces a new take on this interaction with the integration of human history and nonhuman nature.
The problematic connection between the oppression of women and the oppression of nature is apparent in Steffler’s work; the patriarchal attitude toward relationships, particularly with women, exhibited by his speakers, both reflects and feeds the attitudes they exhibit toward nonhuman nature. Similarly, a reweaving of the relationship between nature and culture which arises out of a redefining of the relationship between men and women is evident in Michaels’ work, where a non-patriarchal attitude prevails and thus transforms the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature.
Using elements of ecocritical and ecofeminist theory, this thesis will look at the poetic works of Steffler and Michaels. I will attempt to demonstrate how the ways in which these two authors depict nonhuman nature in their works differ, how this
5 Carolyn Merchant explores the development of these dichotomies — especially the characterization of nature as female and therefore Other and exploitable — in both The Death of Nature and Earthcare. 16 difference leads their speakers to different ways of defining personal identity, and how these viewpoints arise from attitudes toward human relationships, specifically, those between the genders. Steffler’s works are closely aligned with the nomadic way of depicting landscape. Although he does take steps away from this type of depiction and toward a more ecocritical depiction, he ultimately does not escape its confines. His speakers approach relationships with other people in a patriarchal manner, and this attitude is reflected in their relationship with nature. In these works, personal identity is defined in opposition to nonhuman nature. Michaels’ works present a more ecocritical version of landscape in which the binary between humans and nonhuman nature breaks down to some extent. Again, this attitude reflects the way her speakers approach interpersonal relationships. Personal identity is shaped through interaction with nonhuman nature in Michaels’ works. Steffler and Michaels’ works demonstrate two different ways of understanding the human relationship with landscape and consequently two different ways of defining personal identity.
In Chapter One, ecofeminist views on the connection between the treatment of women and the treatment of nature provide the framework for an examination of the attitudes toward interpersonal relationships in Steffler and Michaels’ poems. The ecofeminist argument begins with the premise that there is a connection “between the forms of exploitation of nature and the forms of the oppression of women” (Murphy
160). Therefore, discussions about the human-nonhuman relationship must begin with an examination of the treatment of women. According to King, the presence of hierarchical structures in patriarchy makes it easier to adopt an attitude toward nonhuman nature 17 which sees man as superior to nature (King 107). Additionally, since men have historically been associated with culture while women have been linked with nature
(Mack-Canty 155), the male-female dynamic also translates into the male-nature dynamic; if one is subsumed, then the other will also be subsumed. Both Steffler’s and
Michaels’ writings demonstrate this connection between these attitudes. Steffler’s speakers function out of a deeply patriarchal attitude when it comes to the relationships in their lives. This attitude is perhaps most notable in The Grey Islands. In contrast to
Gilbert, however, I will argue that although it does occasionally seem like the speaker comes to realize the negative aspects of his approach to his relationships with his wife and children, his entire quest is patriarchal in nature, and, moreover, he never acts on any of these realizations, instead remaining firmly entrenched in the patriarchal mindset.
Steffler’s speakers largely approach relationships as if other people are either property or obstacles to personal development. This attitude plays out in their interactions with nonhuman nature as well. In contrast, Michaels’ speakers approach interpersonal relationships with an emphasis on interdependence rather than hierarchy. In these works, human relationships are essential to the formation of personal identity, with family history echoing up through the generations until it comes to bear on the poems’ speakers.
This sense of interdependence also translates into their approach to nonhuman nature, leading to the creation of a non-antagonistic relationship between humans and nonhuman nature.
In Chapter Two, Steffler and Michaels’ respective discourses on nature are examined in order to demonstrate the opposing kinds of nonhuman nature they depict and 18 consequently the opposing ways they construct the human-nonhuman relationship.
Discussion of Steffler’s work begins with an examination of his speakers’ pastoral expectations. His speakers believe that nature will be “a perfect world of leisure, in which a temperate and completely beneficent nature provides for human wants without the necessity or curse of labor” (Hess 73). They expect a retreat into the wilderness to provide silence and solitude in which to reflect and explore one’s creative abilities.
However, Steffler attempts to dismantle this idealistic viewpoint by subverting these expectations; silence proves to be a myth, and solitude is only threatening to both mind and body. The gestures Steffler makes toward an alternative to a patriarchal worldview are echoed in gestures toward the possibility of a complex ecocritical stance; however, just as his speakers ultimately remain firmly entrenched in the patriarchal mindset in regard to their interpersonal relationships, so, too, do they remain within the nomadic mindset when it comes to their treatment of nonhuman nature. In attempting to deconstruct the pastoral ideal, Steffler finds himself creating a monstrous version of nonhuman nature which precludes the possibility of a complex ecocritical position and leaves his speakers entrenched in a battle for survival with nonhuman nature.
Alternatively, Michaels creates a nature humans must engage with in order to shape their personal identities. She does this by consistently linking discussions of landscape and discussions of memory. Memory and history, in Michaels’ ethos, are crucial elements in the formation of personal identity, and whenever she discusses memory she does so within the context of nonhuman nature. Since such a crucial element to the creation of identity is caught up with nonhuman nature, Michaels’ speakers cannot distance 19 themselves from nonhuman nature the same way Steffler’s speakers must; instead they base their relationship with nonhuman nature on the idea of interdependence.
In Chapter Three, an examination of the way that Steffler and Michaels’ speakers interact with history demonstrates the opposing ways they approach the human- nonhuman relationship. These two approaches depend, in part, on two different kinds of history, with Steffler focusing on quantitative data, and Michaels looking at emotionally engaging stories. Just as memory and history are essential elements in the formation of personal identity for Michaels’ speakers, they are also important in Steffler’s works, although perhaps less obviously so. History can be contained in nonhuman nature in these works, but in these cases it is always a history which belongs to someone else, with little bearing on the individual encountering it. This allows the division between humans and nonhuman nature to be maintained. Furthermore, human constructions, as is more commonly expected, contain history, and Steffler’s speakers connect instead with this version of memory. This allows his speakers to avoid any need to interact with nonhuman nature in order to access memory, thus allowing for the continued distinction between themselves and nonhuman nature which will maintain their physical and mental well- being. Chapter Two begins the discussion of the role memory and history play in
Michaels’ works, and establishes that both the literal and figurative containment of human memory in nonhuman nature are essential in her portrayal of the human- nonhuman relationship. Here, too, memory is found in human-made structures, and a few of Michaels’ poems focus on this classification of memory exclusively; however, the majority of her work focuses on the variety of memory found in nonhuman nature, and 20 even when her work turns to urban spaces, the history found there is still embedded in the natural world. Unlike the history that Steffler’s speakers encounter in the landscape, the history that Michaels’ speakers encounter there is personally affecting. While Steffler’s speakers turn almost exclusively to the history found in human-made structures to define themselves, Michaels’ speakers rely on the memories they discover in the landscape. Her speakers create an intimate connection with nonhuman nature in order to define their personal identities. All of these elements — the attitude toward interpersonal relationships, the discourses surrounding nonhuman nature, and the relationship with history contained in nonhuman nature — contribute to the fundamental distinction between Steffler and Michaels’ approaches to the human-nonhuman relationship. 21
CHAPTER ONE: RELATIONSHIPS
The attitudes Steffler and Michaels’ speakers adopt in regard to interpersonal relationships both inform and are informed by their attitudes toward nonhuman nature.
Ecofeminists argue that there is a “link between nature and culture, between the forms of exploitation of nature and the forms of the oppression of women” (Murphy 160), and this link exists in both Steffler and Michaels’ poetry. According to ecofeminists such as
Carolyn Merchant, Ynestra King, Colleen Mack-Canty, and Sherry Ortner, the hierarchical relationship that exists between men and women in a patriarchal paradigm translates into the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature6. Similarly, if women must be controlled and dominated, then this attitude transfers to the treatment of nonhuman nature. In order to solve ecological crises, ecofeminists argue, we must first examine the way we treat women and other marginal groups because only by shifting our social attitudes and reconsidering hierarchical structures can we hope to address the problems with our approach to nonhuman nature. We need to seek “a partnership ethic that treats humans (including male partners and female partners) as equals in personal, household, and political relations and humans as equal partners with (rather than controlled-by or dominant-over) nonhuman nature” (Merchant, Radical Ecology 188).
This correlation is evident in Steffler and Michaels’ texts, and the attitudes with which human relationships are approached are mirrored in and arguably the origin of the approaches to the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in these texts.
6 This connection is discussed in Merchant’s The Death of Nature and Earthcare, King’s “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature/Culture Dualism,” Ortner’s “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” and Mack-Canty’s “Third-Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality.” 22
Steffler’s poetic speakers, especially the speaker of The Grey Islands, take a patriarchal approach to human relationships: women are never anything more than background figures, and family and romantic relationships interfere with the male’s discovery of himself and are therefore something to be left behind in the pursuit of personal identity.
Michaels’ texts reject this patriarchal attitude, instead approaching relationships as partnerships, an attitude that informs the approach the speakers in her poems take to their relationship with nonhuman nature as well. Attitudes toward women and attitudes toward nonhuman nature are inseparable in these texts.
STEFFLER: PATRIARCHAL ATTITUDES
An anthropocentric bias that depends on the assumption that “society is complex while nature is simple” (Love 230) still often characterizes Western thinking, and this assumption leads to one of the central tenets of Western thinking: the distinction between nature and culture (Mack-Canty 155; Ortner 72-3). According to ecofeminist theory there are two ways the nature-culture division correlates with patriarchal attitudes, another fundamental element of Western thought (Murphy 160). First, an association between women and nature means that attitudes toward one carry over into attitudes toward the other. Historically, “[i]n the nature/culture dualism, man was seen as representing culture, and needing to be unconstrained by and to have domination over natural processes, both of a nonhuman nature and of human embodiment” (Mack-Canty 155). Because women are associated with nature they must be controlled by men, who are associated with culture. In the nature-versus-culture dichotomy “it is always culture’s project to subsume 23 and transcend nature”; therefore “if women were considered part of nature, then culture would find it ‘natural’ to subordinate, not to say oppress, them” (Ortner 73)7. Second, because the framework for subordination preexists within patriarchal structures, this kind of thinking easily translates to nature as well. As King explains, “the mind-set of hierarchy originates within human society. It has its material roots in the domination of human by human, particularly of women by men” (King 107). The consequences of approaching the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature from a patriarchal standpoint are apparent in Steffler’s poetry.
Steffler’s speakers primarily present a patriarchal attitude toward the relationships in their lives, but they also wonder, occasionally, about the suitability of their attitudes.
The Grey Islands is an unnamed speaker’s account of a summer he spends on Groais
Island, a no-longer-inhabited island off the coast of Newfoundland. Prior to his journey to the island, the speaker lives with his wife and children in Milliken Harbour, where he works as a town planner. Milliken Harbour is, in the eyes of the speaker, a stereotypical small town, set in its backward ways and opposed to, or at least uninterested in, progress.
Although the fault lies partly with his own attitude, the speaker feels that even if he were to care about the place, he still would not be able to do anything of import because the townspeople would be against any change. In order to escape his unfulfilling job and unsatisfactory life, and, as he claims, find “[s]ome blunt place [he] can’t go beyond,” a
7 Ortner’s “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” points out that “although this argument can be shown to have considerable force, it seems to oversimplify the case” (73) and proceeds to examine why women have come to be associated with nature and complicate this association. This line of inquiry is interesting, but not particularly relevant to to the examination I am presenting here. For more details, see Ortner’s article. 24 place “[w]here excuses stop” (13), he sends his family to Toronto for the summer and ventures out to Groais Island. While there he hopes to learn about himself in the isolation provided by the island. He believes that in order to be successful in this quest for self- discovery, he must separate himself from his family and engage with a harsh and unforgiving landscape. Despite this desire for solitude, as the speaker in The Grey Islands admits, for Steffler’s speakers there is “always the background pull / an aching magnet inside you: / home” (134). The draw of “home,” however, is not simply linked to the draw of familial connections. In fact, it seems that more often than not a fear of or discomfort with being alone produces this longing for home. The expectations Steffler’s speakers hold in regard to the idea of restorative solitude are debunked by their actual experiences, but even though solitude is dangerous rather than restorative, an idea that will be examined in depth in Chapter Two, this experience does not specifically evoke a longing for family. In these works, wives and children are background figures who stand in the way of self-discovery for the male speakers. This patriarchal attitude is paralleled in and informs the attitude that the speakers adopt toward nonhuman nature.
Although the romantic relationships in Steffler’s poems are patriarchal, this does not mean all depictions of relationships are negative; however, details in passages often reveal the presence of a patriarchal attitude on the speaker’s part even when his actions are not overtly patriarchal. For instance, “Eclipse” describes a rather touching moment.
The speaker of the poem hopes to meet his significant other before the eclipse comes, fearing that if he does not manage to meet her, the darkness will come while he is “in a parking lot, / mistaken, / unconnected to this place or that” (That Night We Were 25
Ravenous 42). It seems she grounds him and gives him a sense of purpose. When they finally find each other the scene is mythic in scale:
the clap of gladness we make coming together, lined up
with the sun and moon at our heads,
the earth at our feet,
the blurred shadows of branches trembling around us,
about to come undone, about to break
into script or tears or racing
flame. (42-43)
The entire universe aligns itself for and with this couple’s relationship and their happiness depends on each other’s presence. However, the details of this passage reveal a patriarchal attitude. As the couple approach each other, the woman is “carrying milk” (42), an image that evokes her feminine function as a mother who nourishes her children. As she nears the speaker her face is “sad and tilted toward the ground” (42), but as soon as she approaches him, she raises her head to look up at him. This body language suggests that he is in a dominant position in their relationship; she must physically look up at him as if greeting a superior. Despite the apparent positivity of this scene, a patriarchal attitude still characterizes the details.
Not all of the positive relationship moments in Steffler’s poetry are as sweeping as the one in “Eclipse”. Some moments are simple, intimate, and tender, like the early morning thoughts of the speaker in “Morning, Late October”:
grey window. frost. 26
sun not yet over the mountain. I stay
formless in dark, bedded up to the ears, breathing
your hair, your neck’s sweet warmth, still
partly a god,
legs still stretching to rivers and plains. (The Wreckage of Play 16)
Again, the details betray the patriarchy here. Although the scene begins with the speaker focusing on the serenity of this moment, enjoying being near his partner, he quickly shifts his thoughts away from her and her physicality in order to consider his own god-like status. The speaker is “partly a god” (16), while his partner is merely a body, “hair” and
“neck” (16). Poems like this indicate gestures toward a different framework for approaching relationships in Steffler’s work, and this gesturing plays itself out in attitudes toward nonhuman nature as well. However, these gestures are never fully realized in regard to either interpersonal or human-nonhuman relationships.
Even the speaker of The Grey Islands, arguably Steffler’s most patriarchal text, as well as the one in which relationships are most prominent 8, is not wholly derisive toward his relationships. In fact, at times he becomes wistful and nostalgic, longing for days gone by. His wife’s scent sneaks up on him while he cuts wood, and he goes on a search for its source: “I sniffed like a bloodhound, smelling the cabin wall, the steps, the ground, my clothes, without being able to find where it was coming from” (97). Not only does his
8 The fact that The Grey Islands is the text in which relationships are most prominent is itself indicative of the patriarchal ignoring of relationships that characterizes Steffler’s poetry, since relationships are simply obstacles to be overcome or background figures for the narrator of The Grey Islands. 27 wife’s presence seem to haunt him on his journey, but he also gets jealous at the thought of her recently acquired freedom, picturing her out in Toronto:
I can see it so well, the cafés and bars, Queen Street West, the
sun blasting down, the cars and racket, the awnings and
railings and chairs, and Karen gay and talking, her sunglasses
bouncing the light, her slim tanned arms on the table, her loose
top and all the alert men and you can’t blame them, a beautiful
woman without a man, I can see it so well, friends of her sister,
cool professional guys laughing and chatting and asking her
out and she goes of course, eager to make friends, she goes
with them. But how far does she go? That’s what I’d like to
know. And how far is she really away? (149)
The speaker’s patriarchal attitude appears here as well. The men he imagines completely control the situation, and Karen has little or no agency. This passage also reveals another patriarchal binary which helps to frame our discussion of Steffler and Michaels’ works.
Traditionally, men are equated with the mind, while women are aligned with the body.
Ortner argues that women’s historical association with nature arises in part out of women’s “body and its functions” (73), specifically those involved with reproduction, whereas men’s association with culture arises out of their “lack [of] a ‘natural’ basis
(nursing, generalized to child care) for a familial orientation” (79) which leaves them to be identified with “the finer and higher aspects of human thought” (79). Women’s roles are defined by their bodies; men’s roles are defined by their minds. Steffler’s speakers, 28 particularly the one in The Grey Islands, are far more comfortable in their minds than in their bodies. They over think and obsess, suffering from the anxiety that arises from this; note the anxiety that arises from the imaginary situation in this passage. Living in the mind like this occurs throughout The Grey Islands and serves to reinforce the patriarchal mind/male-body/female dichotomy.
Despite the fact that he aims to separate himself from everything and everyone in his life in order to explore his personal identity, he never manages to fully leave his wife and family behind him. He even contemplates abandoning his trip before it starts when the reality of leaving occurs to him:
Karen gone. Peter and Anna gone. House closed up. The fact
hitting me more and more real. I won’t be seeing them all
summer long. And I feel stupid all by myself, want to turn
back, recall, revise everything. But the road’s too narrow to
turn around and the few side trails go by so fast I miss every
one of them. (24)
His relationship with his family continually crops up in his thoughts throughout his time on the island. He misses his children, lamenting the fact that he will “find them older and grown when [he] touch[es] them again” (36). He admits to experiencing an unexpected difficulty when it comes to leaving his family behind, even though he sees them as something that must be abandoned in order to further his search for himself. He talks about “[his] children. [his] family. / their talk, the way their bodies / pull [his] blood across the emptiness” (105) and admits that “[m]aybe [his] family ties are stronger than it 29 looks, only twisted and stretched in strange ways” (132). His family is the one thing that gives him pause when he considers going to the the Grey Islands, but they are also, he thinks, the thing that he must leave behind in order to find himself, regardless of how that decision impacts them.
The speaker’s moments of nostalgia and longing even lead to apparent revelations about his relationship. His jealous musings about Karen’s activities in Toronto lead him to conclude that “[t]iming now is the thing. To not let it drag on too long. Everyone changes in time” (149), seemingly indicating that he has come to understand that his solo quest for personal identity presents some danger to the survival of his relationship with his wife. Distance brings clarity to his view of their relationship, particularly his role in it:
From this distance, Karen, so many clear facts: that I’ve been
dead and giving you nothing now for years, and it runs in my
mind, the break, the break, how close it was, and it strikes me
all at once that this is it! That it’s here. What am I doing off on
an island anyway? You’re gone and I won’t get you back and I
want to run into the ocean and swim to the nearest airport as
fast as I can. (133)
As Gilbert points out, “[t]he speaker’s decision to leave has personal consequences, and he begins to self-consciously examine the masculine gender role he is playing in his familial drama, critiquing his own typically male behavior in the context of gender balance” (50). The speaker at least temporarily recognizes the problems with his viewpoint. Moments like these lead Gilbert to declare that the speaker “does not embark 30 on his journey lightly, and he is acutely aware of the impact of his retreat on his marriage and family” (Gilbert 57), and argue that “[h]is awareness of his masculine idleness and selfishness represents Steffler’s critique of masculinity and the clichéd gender role the speaker is acting out” (57). Gilbert argues that the speaker experiences internal growth and that this growth creates a critique of the patriarchal attitudes present in the narrative9.
However, patriarchal attitudes again assert themselves here; all of this occurs in his
“mind” (The Grey Islands 133), but does not result in physical action.
Critical work done on Steffler’s poetry often ignores the problematic depiction of relationships in his works and those that address these depictions justify patriarchal attitudes as essential in the quest to understand one’s own identity. Gilbert’s thesis takes particular pains to explain away the patriarchal attitudes exhibited by the speaker of The
Grey Islands, justifying his attitudes as a necessary part of the process of self-discovery.
She suggests that “although the speaker’s decision to leave his job and family is problematic ... in doing so he becomes more aware of himself” (11) and that “[i]n order to psychologically break out of his masculinist mode of thinking and recenter himself, he actually leaves his home situation so to gain a necessary kind of perspective on it” (58).
Yet, in order to make this argument, Gilbert must ignore portions of the text which demonstrate that the speaker’s attitude does not evolve in the way she argues it does. At no point in The Grey Islands, or in Steffler’s other works, does any apparent growth the speakers undergo actually transform their relationship dynamics. Ultimately, Steffler’s poetry remains entrenched in a patriarchal attitude, despite gestures toward the contrary.
9 I will reference Alexandra Gilbert’s thesis frequently in this study because engaging with her work helps to demonstrate the problematic contours of Steffler’s texts. 31
Overall, Steffler’s poetry is populated with just as many, if not more, obviously patriarchal depictions of romantic relationships as it is with seemingly tender moments.
The marriage in “On this Day of Sun and Showers” provides a protracted example of the difficulties that arise in Steffler’s depictions of relationships. The jealousy exhibited by the speaker at the flirting occurring between his neighbour and his wife is understandable, even justified. However, difficulty arises in the imagery used to show this conflict; as the speaker himself says, “the symbolism / is so goddamned transparent” (The Wreckage of
Play 77). The running image of spraying Lorraine with a garden hose has animalistic overtones, made obvious by the speaker as he wonders what the appropriate response is:
what do I do?
prance at him sideways like a cat
hissing: “I’m the only one who sprays my wife!”?
turn off the main valve?
go and spray his wife
with his hose?
God only knows into what suburban adventure
that might lead. (77)
The speaker exhibits instinctual, animalistic behaviour. Although Lorraine participates in the situation, squealing and pleading with the neighbour not to spray her, the whole exchange ultimately boils down to a pissing contest between the two men. The woman is 32 property or territory to be marked. The man, however, is a god-like figure requiring worship. Lorraine “says, ‘I already got sprayed once today,’ / meaning she was caught in the morning rain” (77-78), and the speaker likes this, not because it indicates his wife’s fidelity, but because he does not “mind being likened to Zeus” (78). A clear imbalance exists in this marriage, and this imbalance arises from a patriarchal attitude on the part of the speaker.
In order to argue that the speaker in The Grey Islands is not actually patriarchal in his attitude, Gilbert contends that the speaker’s decision to leave his wife and family is not a patriarchal move because Karen benefits from his decision to leave and is not a victim. Because of this, the “dualism of males over females ... is not complex enough for this situation” (Gilbert 57). The speaker does not act on a “selfish whim” (The Grey
Islands 30) because while “Karen is solely responsible for the family while he is away ... she is also happy that she does not have to put up with him for the summer ... and she gets to spend the summer as she wants to: in Toronto” (Gilbert 57). The speaker certainly thinks this is the case, claiming that Karen approves of his plan (The Grey Islands 30).
But he also recognizes that while Karen might understand his decision, and even benefit from it in some ways, she also takes the brunt of the fallout from his choice:
she’s annoyed because it’s my initiative, and she’s left to react,
do what she has to because of me. Stuck with the kids. While
I’m off indulging in masculine idleness, chasing a selfish
whim ... Tough going back to her family alone though. All of
them so alert to the smell of divorce. Quick with contingency 33
plans, personal strategies. They’ll take her into their arms,
drooling condolences, and she’ll have to say over and over,
‘It’s not like that!’ Hating my guts. (30)
Karen is powerless in this situation. She is left on her own to suffer the consequences of a decision she did not make. A power imbalance clearly exists in this decision, and Karen’s tangential benefits do not negate it as Gilbert argues.
Furthermore, Gilbert suggests that Karen’s reaction to the news of her husband’s plan indicates marital discord and that the speaker’s trip is therefore not a “selfish whim” (30) but an attempt to save the marriage. As soon as the speaker told Karen his plan, “she started guarding herself, taking charge of her fatherless brood like [he] was just visiting” (30), a response which Gilbert reads as “manipulative because she deliberately acts in a certain way in an attempt to get him to feel guilty, and as though they are already no longer together, instead of using her words to express how she feels about his idea” (56). This reading leads Gilbert to conclude that “Karen’s immediate, instinctively protective reaction to his departure signals conflict, even marital instability, on a level the speaker does not tell us about” (56). There are, however, problems with this reading.
First, while Gilbert is probably correct in recognizing the presence of marital discord that the speaker does not reveal, she fails to recognize that there are other things the speaker may be leaving out as well. This guardedness may not have been the entirety of Karen’s reaction to her husband’s declaration of intent; she may indeed have “us[ed] her words to express how she [felt] about his idea” (56). Second, I would suggest that reading this reaction as manipulative is simplistic. Instead, I read it as a perfectly logical and motherly 34 reaction to her situation. Having been blindsided by her husband’s announcement that he would be leaving her and their children for the summer, it makes sense that she would become defensive and protective. Finally, the presence of marital issues indicated both by
Karen’s instinctive, protective reaction and the “undercurrent of relief” (55) that runs through this passage, neither negates the patriarchal tone of the speaker’s decision and subsequent actions, nor definitively means that the speaker’s journey is the only, or even the best, solution to these issues. In fact, his failure to alter his patriarchal attitudes over the course of his time away suggests that this was an ill-advised course of action.
In part, Gilbert identifies the source of the marital discord that drives the speaker to embark on his journey as a sense of placelessness in the marriage. She suggests that because they are not rooted in any one place, because they do not feel at home anywhere, their relationship suffers. Even though they live in Milliken Harbour, it has never become a home. The speaker admits he is not attached to Milliken Harbour in any way and declares that even after four years he is “still like a tourist” who “[hasn’t] even left the motel” (26). Karen, according to the speaker, shares this discomfort with Milliken
Harbour, so they “head for the mainland every chance [they] get, Karen dying for Yonge and Bloor, Kensington Market, Spadina Avenue. And I’m dying for it too” (27-28). But once they get there the place they have been longing for is not satisfactory:
We get there and drag ourselves over the sidewalks and I hate
the place. Two weeks every year. We’re like ghosts looking for
something we’ve lost. The city changes in four years, people 35
move, we don’t have a home. And we change too. We fade
slowly. Into ghosts. (28)
They have no place; they have become ghosts wandering from one location to another, untethered and drifting. Without a place to call home, a connection to place, they lose their identities, both as individuals and as a couple, and this, according to Gilbert, causes marital tension to develop.
Gilbert employs John Elder in order to argue that this kind of placelessness is a problem because “marriage borrows its wholeness from a chosen landscape” (Elder 68).
Marriage, according to Gilbert and Elder, must literally be grounded, attached to the earth of a specific location, so without such grounding, the marriage between the speaker and
Karen suffers. There is no doubt that the relationships in Steffler’s texts are largely divorced from place or marked by anxiety about the possibility of placelessness. As I said earlier, I am following Marilyn McKay in defining the “nomadic concept of territory” as one which “focuses on wilderness land and the active processes of conquest and penetration” (M. McKay 5), but additionally, the sense of homelessness evoked by this term emerges in his speakers’ sense of placelessness. His speakers not only possess a nomadic attitude in the sense that they strive to dominate the landscape, but in the sense that they are nomadic, moving from place to place without setting down roots. Recall the passage from “Eclipse” which was discussed earlier in this chapter; the anxiety in that poem arises from the potential to be left “unconnected to this place or that” (That Night
We Were Ravenous 42). The problem with Gilbert’s argument does not arise from pointing out placelessness and its potential problems, but from how she uses 36 placelessness as an argument to justify the speaker’s decision to leave his family. She suggests that “[h]e is not leaving as a means of escape, but rather as an attempt to solve a marital issue of placelessness” (Gilbert 57). While a quest to get in touch with the wilderness in order to get in touch with one’s self is a possible response to this problem, it seems ill-advised to strike out on this kind of journey alone when its purpose is to repair and ground a marriage. Gilbert recognizes this problem, but argues that the speaker needs to find himself in order to repair his marriage, despite the fact that this seems paradoxical
(57). Whether or not the speaker’s departure is necessary, he accomplishes it in a troublesomely patriarchal manner.
The very premise of the speaker’s journey in The Grey Islands is patriarchal in nature: the speaker separates himself from his family in order to benefit himself, leaving them behind because he sees them as impediments to his personal mission. Gilbert acknowledges the possibility of this interpretation of the speaker’s actions, admitting that the speaker’s “decision to go to the Grey Islands could be read as masculinist: an act of dominance in which the male makes a decision in an imbalanced family power structure in which males are dominant over females and children” (55); however, she quickly argues that “utilizing this argument to protest against the speaker’s idea of going to the
Grey Islands, and condemn it as blatantly sexist, is unsatisfactory for several reasons” (55). According to Gilbert, “[a]lthough the speaker may appear masculinist, he is in fact undergoing a process in which he becomes aware of his blind spot in regards to gender roles” (57), but in order to make this argument, she must ignore portions of the text which indicate the ultimate ineffectiveness of the speaker’s “process.” She focuses 37 her discussion on the moments in the text when the speaker makes apparent breakthroughs in his attitude toward gender roles, but fails to acknowledge these moments in their entirety. For instance, when the speaker first embarks on his journey and considers turning around and returning to his family, he continues on because “the road’s too narrow to turn around and the few side trails go by so fast [he] miss[es] every one of them” (The Grey Islands 24). There is a sense of inevitability and necessity in this phrasing which suggests this is the way it has to be, the man must go off on his own, leave his family and home behind, and test himself in the wilderness in order to come to understand himself.
But this moment occurs early in the narrative, and Gilbert suggests that the speaker’s attitude evolves over the course of the story. Partway through his time on the island, the speaker recognizes his role in whatever issues existed in his marriage prior to his departure and the absurdity and potential consequences of his quest (133). This moment certainly seems to be the realization Gilbert insists occurs over the course of the narrative. However, a retraction immediately follows it: “But I know that’s wrong. (It goes around like this.) I know I’m digging life out of this place. I hope for all of us” (The
Grey Islands 133). In negating his own statement this way, the speaker effectively leaves himself entrenched in a patriarchal mindset. He may have become “more aware of himself” (Gilbert 11) and briefly recognized the consequences of his patriarchal thinking, but he refuses to change his actions to align with this new paradigm.
Furthermore, the conclusion of The Grey Islands gives no indication that the speaker’s attitude toward his wife and children has changed. In fact, just prior to leaving 38
Newfoundland he indulges in a kind of mythic fantasy about sleeping with Jewelleen, the daughter of the proprietor of the guesthouse he stays at on the mainland:
I go back to Jewelleen. I tell her we’re getting married. She’s
drunk. A prim wobbly smile wandering over her face. Cigarette
ash down her pink v-neck. She doesn’t say no ... Arm in arm
we fall, once in a tavern, once in the road, many times at the
boarding house. We swim over the floor, up and down the
stairs, tangled in curtains and blankets ... With two of us in it
her bed sags more and more. We lie in a clump. A slowly
squirming knot like jigged squid. The bed, her body, my whole
past, the whole dark world: a dream I contend with: hills,
various faces milling, rising falling. Her skin has the taste of
onions and powdered rock. Her tongue tastes of bacon.
Woodsmoke. Sour milk. (169)
The language used to describe this fantasy lends a mythic quality to the imagined encounter. For instance, they “swim over the floor,” taking what is portrayed as an almost epic journey to reach the bed (169). Jewelleen herself becomes a kind of landscape consisting of “hills” and “powdered rock” (169). She tastes like “[s]our milk,” the sourness indicating that something about her womanhood has gone awry. She is something other than a mere woman; she is a landscape in which the speaker can find himself because she is not actually a part of nonhuman nature. Moreover, the speaker can find himself in her landscape because it exists only in the safe realm of the mind, the 39 patriarchal male comfort zone. Once again, the speaker is living wholly in his mind.
Here, at the end of the story, the speaker has not shifted his patriarchal attitude at all. He does not even consider Karen, and he sees Jewelleen as a mythic woman-nature creature only useful in his personal quest. He continues to live out of a patriarchal stance by living in his mind.
By the time he leaves for home at the end of the summer, the speaker of The Grey
Islands has not changed his attitude. He still sees his wife and family as restrictive, as standing in the way of him being the man he truly is. As he leaves Newfoundland, he is
“trembling at how [he]’ll change being with Karen again” (176), concerned that once he is back with her, he will be transformed “back into flesh and blood, time thickening, slowing [him] down, letting [him] out of the spear point narrowing line this place is paring [him] down to” (176). Karen’s presence somehow makes him a lesser man. For the speaker, a return to “flesh and blood” (176) poses a problem for two reasons. First, this journey was intended to allow him to find himself, and he has successfully done so, he thinks, so a return to who he was before is problematic. Second, the patriarchal framework assumes a connection between men and the mind. The speaker’s time on the island has successfully whittled him down to a “spear point narrowing line” lacking
“flesh and blood” (176); he has, in a sense, become the ultimate man, wholly existing in his mind, and returning to Karen will undo this, making him, in his patriarchal estimation, less of a man by forcing the “feminine” body on him. How, with a concluding declaration such as that, can a reader assume that the speaker will approach his relationship with his wife, or anyone else, any differently than he did before he left? In fact, it seems that his 40 time on the island has intensified his resentment toward his relationship and that this will lead not to a living out of his realization that his attitude has caused problems but instead to an increased distancing of himself from his wife in an attempt to maintain whatever god-like transcendence he feels he has attained during his time on the island. Ultimately,
Steffler’s speakers fail in their roles as husbands in both senses of the word; their neglect of their families mirrors their neglect of the land, and vice versa.
MICHAELS: CONNECTION AND INTERDEPENDENCE
A correlation between attitudes toward women and attitudes toward nature exists regardless of the attitude being adopted. Ecofeminists focus on both “explain[ing] how the nature/culture duality occurred” and determining “how to approach weaving it back together” (Mack-Canty 173). In an effort to accomplish this weaving back together, ecofeminism argues for “the abolishment of the male-female dyad and its relations of dominance and subjugation in our Western ontological model” (Swanepoel 247). Of course, simply identifying the problems inherent in the patriarchal model is only a first step, so the challenge issued and adopted by ecofeminism is to find viable alternatives that can shift perspectives on both male-female and human-nonhuman relations. Lola
Lemire Tostevin argues in “Breaking the hold on the story” that “merely pointing the finger of scorn is insufficient. Methods are needed that will force not only an examination but a reinterpretation of traditional and theoretical models” (386). In order to achieve these new models she encourages women to “bring to their reading and writing a more comprehensive vision than those presented to us through so-called facts of human 41 sciences or fiction — a vision which not only seeks the destruction of that which it opposes but hopefully can convert it into a dialectical adversary for the sake of meaningful and constructive dialogue” (386). Michaels’ works follow this model. While
Steffler’s speakers stay entrenched in a patriarchal stance, moments of clarity regarding the problems this stance creates notwithstanding, the relationships depicted in Michaels’ work are based on equality and mutuality, and these attitudes provide the framework for the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in these works just like the patriarchal framework provides an approach to interacting with nonhuman nature in
Steffler’s texts.
The patriarchal attitude in Steffler’s works, particularly as manifested in The Grey
Islands, depends on a perceived separation between individuals which allows for the existence of a hierarchy between men and women. Relationships in Michaels’ poems, however, are predicated on an ecofeminist recognition of an intimate connection between individuals. Ecofeminism borrows from feminism “the insights of a social analysis of women’s oppression that intersects with other oppressions such as racism, colonialism, classism, and heterosexism” and learns from ecology “to value the interdepenence [sic] and diversity of all life forms” (Mack-Canty 169). This sense of interdependence characterizes the relationships in Michaels’ poems. In her works, family histories weave their way through the generations. In “Lake of Two Rivers,” the speaker recalls moments from childhood, simultaneously telling her story and her family’s story, unable to differentiate between the two because “[f]aces press the transparent membrane / between conscious and genetic knowledge” (Michaels 10). The members of families “live each 42 other’s life / without the details” (12). For the speaker of “Lake of Two Rivers,” the story of a single person cannot be told in isolation:
My mother’s story is tangled,
overgrown with lives of parents and grandparents
because they lived in one house and among them
remembered hundreds of years of history. (10)
Family members are connected, their histories entwined so that one story cannot be told without the other. Without division and distinction between individuals, hierarchical models of thinking become hard to maintain. Ynestra King argues that “the mind-set of hierarchy” regarding the human-nature relationship arises out of “the domination of human by human, particularly of women by men” (107), so it follows that as hierarchies between humans are broken down, hierarchies between humans and nature will also be broken down as their basis for existence is removed. As these hierarchies begin to break down, a recognition of interconnectivity begins to characterize not only relationships between people but also relationships between people and nonhuman nature.
Of course, the relationships Michaels depicts are not without pain or difficulty. A paradigm shift away from patriarchy does not ensure the end of inequality or suffering, but despite difficulties, family members are inseparable. There exists an imperfect, but still functional and essential love between siblings in Michaels’ works: “[b]rother love, like the old family boat / we call the tin can: dented, awkward, but still able to slice the lake’s pink skin” (“Miner’s Pond,” Poems 61). Imperfection still exists, but it no longer results in the splintering of relationships; instead, relationships morph and change as time 43 goes on because “[a] family is a study in plate-tectonics, flow-folding. / Something inside shifts; suddenly we’re closer or apart” (61). Instead of denying the importance of connections between individuals, Michaels’ speakers recognize them. In fact, these connections are so strong that the line between individuals, and consequently the line between the genders, becomes blurred. Many times it is difficult or impossible to determine the gender of either the speaker or the subject: consider “Lake of Two Rivers,”
“Another Year,” “What the Light Teaches,” or “Skin Divers.” By emphasizing interconnectivity, Michaels creates a new, although potentially idealistic, framework out of which the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature can be approached.
This new framework is also established through the creation of a connection between place and relationships; while relationships in Steffler’s poems suffer from placelessness, relationships in Michaels’ poems are deeply rooted in place. The relationships in Michaels’ poems do not suffer from placelessness; whether it is the pair who meet “and talk — 50, 15, 25 years old” while “crossing ... glinting fields” (“Another
Year,” Poems 25) or the childhood friends of “Words for the Body,” for whom “[i]t’s always been this way…[they] reach lakes and then just stand there” (41), each relationship in Michaels’ poems occurs within the context of nonhuman nature. Romantic moments occur “[u]nder dark lanes of the night sky” (“Lake of Two Rivers,” Poems 10), and on rainy days which create “[t]his ... order, this clutter that fills clearings between us” (“Rain Makes Its Own Night,” Poems 32). Every moment is contained within the context of the landscape that surrounds it. 44
Relationships are connected to place so deeply that “[l]ove longs for land” (“The
Passionate World,” Poems 154) in a very physical, literal sense. This longing leaves the couple in “The Passionate World” tangled in the night world as profoundly as they are connected to each other:
All night
we dream the jungle’s sleepy electricity;
gnashing chords of insects swim in our ears
and we go under, into green. All night
love draws its heavy drape of scent against the sea
and we wake with the allure of earth in our lungs,
hungry for bread and oranges. (“The Passionate World,” Poems
154)
This relationship, as with other relationships in Michaels’ work, becomes a part of nonhuman nature, leaving those who are in it breathing the scent of earth, dependent on nature for sustenance and life. Even friendships occur within this nature-infused context with memories formed while “[p]iano flickered the leaves, / evening in perfect summer, / temperature the same inside and outside of my body, / night a pigment in my skin” (“Words for the Body,” Poems 42). Memories and moments are contextualized by nonhuman nature. Place is essential in these poems because it is what grounds relationships.
Not only do relationships exist within the context of nonhuman nature, but also the people in these relationships become a part of the natural world that their relationship 45 is rooted in. In part this is because love is itself a natural element. It “is soil — stronger than peat or sea” (“Last Night’s Moon,” Poems 147), the very thing that gives life to relationships. It “wails from womb, caldera, home” (“Lake of Two Rivers,” Poems 10), requiring both physical place, “caldera,” and a sense of place, “home.” A natural phenomenon, love, arises from the soil like a plant; it “doesn’t fall to earth / but bursts up from the ground, fully formed” (12). Consequently, those in relationships also become part of the natural world. Like the couple in “The Passionate World” who “go under, into green” (154), sinking fully into the world of nonhuman nature, the couple in “The Weight of Oranges” become metaphorical elements of nonhuman nature, “planets, holding to each other / from a great distance” (35). Perhaps a little idealistically or Romantically, love transforms people into a part of the natural world it belongs to:
Like the light of anything that grows
from this newly turned earth,
every tip of me gathers under your touch,
wind wrapping my dress around our legs,
your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists. (“Flowers,” Poems
89)
Love transforms people into a part of nonhuman nature; it turns shirts into flowers and people into growing things emerging from the earth. This transformation is involuntary:
If love wants you; if you’ve been melted
down to stars, you will love
with lungs and gills, with warm blood 46
and cold. With feathers and scales.
Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy
you’ll want to breathe with the spiral
calls of birds, while your lashing tail
still gropes for the waves. You’ll try
to haul your weight from simple sea
to gravity of land. Caught by the tide,
in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments
suffocating in both water and air. (“Last Night’s Moon,” Poems
149-50)
In addition to demonstrating the transformation love causes, this passage shows the way
Michaels deals with the traditional male-mind/female-body dichotomy. Michaels’ speakers are certainly not trapped in their minds like Steffler’s, but neither are they reduced to the body. Instead they are embodied: they are physical and aware of their bodies in a way Steffler’s are not, but this is not the entirety of their existence. The language in the passage — “feathers,” “scales,” “gropes,” “gravity,” “suffocating” — is highly tactile and physical. Michaels employs the language of the body, not just the mind, here. This kind of embodiment makes the natural world essential, for the body, unlike the mind alone, depends on the physical world, for “how could we be if not for this planet that provided our very shape?” (Snyder 29). Embodied individuals such as Michaels creates depend on the earth in a way that Steffler’s speakers, caught up in their minds, do not. 47
Relationships occur within the context of the nonhuman world, and then transform members of these relationships into a physical part of nonhuman nature. People are “melted / down to stars” (149), transformed into “planets holding to each other” (“The Weight of Oranges,” Poems 35), transformed so there is no longer a distinction between them and nonhuman nature, between “warm blood/ and cold ... feathers and scales” (“Last Night’s Moon,” Poems 149). One cannot divorce one’s self from nonhuman nature because humans are a part of it. Relationships in Michaels’ works are not only based on connection rather than separation between people, but also on a connection with nonhuman nature. Just as both interpersonal and human-nonhuman relationships in Steffler’s work are based on patriarchal frameworks grounded in conflict, relationships in Michaels’ works are based on interconnection, and this attitude informs the approach that is taken toward the relationship that exists between humans and nonhuman nature. 48
CHAPTER TWO: DISCOURSES ON NATURE
Steffler and Michaels present two opposing discourses on nature in their poetry.
Steffler works out of a discourse based on domination, creating an antagonistic relationship between humans and nonhuman nature; on the other hand, Michaels operates out of a discourse based on cohabitation, forming an intimate connection between humans and nonhuman nature. Steffler’s depictions of nonhuman nature begin, particularly in The Grey Islands, with nature as a sanctuary or retreat from everyday life, providing silence and solitude in which to reflect and understand one’s self. While
Steffler attempts to move away from this idealized conception and toward a more ecocritical stance in which humans and nonhuman nature are interconnected, his language never allows him to move beyond an antagonistic relationship with the natural world. He presents nonhuman nature as dangerous, monstrous, and deadly. Humans must protect themselves from the wilderness, and consequently, the self is ultimately defined in opposition to nature in these works. In Michaels’ works, on the other hand, the self is defined in connection with nonhuman nature. This is accomplished in part by the fact that whenever Michaels writes about memory, which is fundamental to the formation of personal identity in her paradigm, she uses language which evokes nature. Additionally, she explores memory by way of metaphor, purposely comparing it to natural phenomena, thus underscoring the importance of nature in the formation of personal identity.
Nonhuman nature contains human history and memory — formative elements for personal identity — and consequently in order to gain an understanding of one’s self there must be a close relationship established with nature. 49
STEFFLER: DOMINATION
Steffler’s poetry can be seen as perpetuating a pastoral version of nonhuman nature which associates it with “the pre-established discourses of nature writing that envision nature as the locus of human redemption” (Beardsworth 96). This paradigm presents nature as “a source of inspiration, redemption, and transcendence” (92). The pastoral version of the human-nonhuman relationship exists in Steffler’s work10. The
“pastoral has always been a product of sophisticated, centralized urban societies, projecting a dream of simplicity onto a stylized literary countryside” (Hess 72-73) dependent on a retreat from the urban world to the country or wilderness in order to
“attain a critical vision of the good, simple life” (Love 231). Through this journey one attains “a vision which will presumably sustain [the traveler] as they return at the end to the great world on the horizon” (231). The return to “civilization” is essential in the pastoral approach to the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. The distinction between the world of humans and the world of nature must be maintained; although nonhuman nature can provide a location for contemplation and exploration of
10 The structure of Steffler’s work is far less traditional than his approaches to subject matter. In particular, The Grey Islands, with its mix of verse and prose, and its inclusion of other texts such as censuses and pamphlets (amongst others), is a very postmodern text. These structural choices are perhaps indicative of Steffler’s attempts to move past traditional constructions of the human-nonhuman relationship. This lends some credence to Beardsworth’s assertion that “Steffler’s text subverts conventional Romantic approaches to writing the environment” (113); however, it still stands that Steffler only attempts this subversion and is not as completely successful as Beardsworth seems to suggest. 50 the self, humans must ultimately withdraw back into their own sphere, ostensibly with some greater knowledge. As Scott Hess notes, “[t]o offer this definition too straightforwardly, however, denies the complexities of which pastoral is capable” (75)11.
However, this modernist version of the pastoral is most applicable to an examination of
Steffler’s works since it provides the structure for the journey undertaken by the speaker in The Grey Islands. This particular poem is told by the unnamed speaker, a town-planner living in Milliken Harbour, who is dissatisfied with his life and decides to send his wife and children to Toronto for the summer while he himself travels to an abandoned island off the coast of Newfoundland. The poem traces his experiences as he journeys into the wilderness in order to “find himself,” and then returns to his “normal” life. Although it seems that over the course of his journey he at least begins to look at himself differently and perhaps even consider his relationship to nonhuman nature in different terms, any knowledge he has gained from this experience will be obliterated by his return to normalcy. The pastoral approach to the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature depends on a return to “civilization” which demands that the distinction between humans and nonhuman nature be maintained. Consequently, Steffler perpetuates an antagonistic relationship between humans and nonhuman nature.
Steffler’s poetry initially presents a version of nature in line with the pastoral tradition. Pastoralism depends on “a preference for the apparently ‘simple’ world of
‘nature’ (traditionally understood as the nonhuman realm) over the complicated life of
11 For a fuller exploration of the development of the pastoral, particularly as it has evolved in the postmodern age, see Hess’s article, “Postmodern Pastoral, Advertising, and the Masque of Technology.” 51
‘civilization’” (Scheese 4). It “traditionally posits a natural world, a green world, to which sophisticated urbanites withdraw in search of the lessons of simplicity which only nature can teach” (Love 231). Nature becomes a kind of spiritual retreat, which is peaceful and calming. Don Scheese explains that “[a]t heart pastoral writers are antimodernists who employ the pastoral to tell of their ‘escape to’ — a less pejorative way to put it might be ‘quest for’ — a particular place in order to celebrate a return to a simpler, more harmonious way of life ‘closer to nature’” (6). In the pastoral, “healing is found through escape from an artificial lifestyle into one more allied to the natural order” (Thurston 10). Withdrawing from urban society into a natural environment is essential in the pastoral tradition.
This impulse to retreat into a natural environment in order to escape from real life provides the premise for The Grey Islands. The speaker of the poem decides to spend his summer in an abandoned outport off the coast of Newfoundland in order to escape from his marriage, his family, and his unfulfilling job. Initially, his journey is characterized by moments which meet his pastoral expectations that “a temperate and completely beneficent nature provides for human wants without the necessity or curse of labor” (Hess 73), such as his surroundings when he goes squidding:
grey silk we sway on
salt-grey smells
sky and hills shedding a powder-grey glow 52
even the boat’s thick paint glows china white
and our faces, peach, copper, cream-yellow
round, our faces
glow in the cotton air like lamps. (46)
At this early stage in the narrative, the world is soft, beautiful, and welcoming. Notice the language that Steffler uses here: words full of ‘s’ and ‘h’ sounds, images of beautiful, soft, and luxurious colours and fabrics — “grey silk,” “powder-grey,” “peach, copper, cream-yellow” (46) — and glowing, soft light. This kind of language recurs throughout the early stages of the speaker’s interaction with the island. The air on the island is “not just clear, but washed, polished, an active medium able to intensify each object, speed and refine the movement” (67) and the birds “glid[e] past in perfectly smooth steady lines as though drawn across the sky by some precision instrument” (67). Moments of serenity and happiness fill his early days on the island. As he explores the new landscape, he discovers “[t]he new light. The chest-deep grass you wade through along the path.
Low intricate shrubs — birds flitting ahead every step — each feature so strong. So sharp in the new air” (67). He finds himself bombarded by “flashes of happiness” (67). He expects the island to be the ideal retreat, and at first he finds what he expects.
Description of this variety can be found throughout Steffler’s poetic works.
Nature is routinely portrayed as “a good place to escape / to” (“A10-150 Holloway:
John’s Beach,” Helix 119). Nature brings peace and rest, as in “Swoop” when it carries the speaker away from the stress of his everyday life, “away from the streets / ticking with weekend errands, away / from the bottomless silence of [his] house” (Lookout 27) 53 as he sits on the edge of a cliff at Cape Blomidon watching the ocean. It is a source of inspiration, as in “At the Foot of a Wall” when the speaker hopes that the “sun and the island’s beauties [will] dive / into [his] eyes, out of [his] mouth in poems” (That Night We
Were Ravenous 62), believing that an island retreat will help his creativity. This idealized state of nature even ironically functions as a marketing tool, with “[s]eclusion, remoteness, smallness, bareness and rarity” used to attract the “life-giving substance” of tourism to national parks (“Park Office,” Lookout 9). In “Park Office” Steffler demonstrates that he does not completely buy into the pastoral ideal. The speaker demonstrates self-reflexivity in this poem, making it clear that this is simply another way humans exploit nature. This attitude toward the pastoral indicates Steffler’s desire to attempt to move away from the pastoral mode, but this desire is never completely fulfilled. Inspiration, rest, solitude, and peace are the qualities of nature actively pursued by the speakers of Steffler’s poems.
Of all the idealized qualities Steffler’s poetry imbues nature with, solitude and silence are two of the most frequently cited. The speaker of The Grey Islands chooses to retreat to the island in order to pursue solitude. The poem’s earliest description of the island ends, “Now there’s nothing out there at all, just a herd of caribou” (The Grey
Islands 15). The island’s appeal for the speaker comes from this emptiness. He explains to his landlady in Englee that he wants to be alone (69). When he imagines himself on the island he has “visions of [himself] trying to meditate on the tide” (31). He pursues the pastoral ideal of retreating into nature to find solitude and solace. The poems in the first sections of the book are “filled with images of a journey into isolation” (Beardsworth 54
100). The harshness of the landscape is equally as important in this task as the solitude, another sign that Steffler is moving away from the pastoral ideal. According to Steffler’s mythology, the landscape being entered needs to be harsh in part so one can find complete isolation, but also because it contributes to the search for self through the act of a quest or pilgrimage. Confronting wilderness allows one to prove one’s self, a connection that can be traced back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature where
“the solution was not to escape to pastoral simplicity, but to engage in an individualistic, competitive encounter with others for the sake of advancement and survival” (Merchant,
The Death of Nature 131). This need for confrontation with nonhuman nature is especially common in a patriarchal context. Males are typically, in Western philosophy, considered the active sex, while females are considered the passive sex, a construction that troubles critics such as Susan Bordo. Bordo traces this duality through the work of
Plato to Leeuwenhoek in 1677 and up to Alan Guttermacher’s relatively recent
Pregnancy, Birth, and Family Planning (Bordo 11-13). If men are the active sex, then they cannot define themselves by staying at home. Instead they need to go out and actively engage with something, in this case nature, something that offers resistance and danger, so that they can establish themselves in this role. A strongly patriarchal impulse drives Steffler’s speakers out into the wilderness in order to prove themselves against harsh conditions.
The speaker focuses on the idea of solitude. Even before he reaches the island, he enters into nearly deserted landscapes and relishes the space he finds there. As he drives away from Milliken Harbour, the speaker passes through an area with “hardly a 55 soul” (21). He celebrates the “isolation within a harsh, soulless landscape” (Beardsworth
100) because this very isolation facilitates his mission of self-discovery. He goes to the island for “the space and solitude” (Steffler, The Grey Islands 32), the “absolute solitude” (67), and that is exactly what he finds. When he first arrives, he worries that because he is living right on the harbour, he will never be left alone, but instead he does not see a soul, “as though everyone cleared out or pulled back the minute [he] arrived” (71). His only company is “absent people, gaps / where they would have walked, worked, / stood in their doors” (98). He finds himself in exactly the kind of isolation he hoped to find. Steffler’s speakers, not only in The Grey Islands but throughout his poetic collections, begin their journeys from this idealized understanding of nature.
The entire point of retreating into this landscape is a search for personal identity.
Gilbert problematically suggests that “The Grey Islands is about an individual searching for a meaningful identity in the context of home, community, and the natural and historical landscape” (2). The idea of finding one’s self in nature is not exclusive to The
Grey Islands; rather, it recurs throughout Steffler’s poetry. His speakers repeatedly turn to nature as a source of inspiration and a way to understand themselves. They search for
“ferns uncurling words” (“Since Early May,” That Night We Were Ravenous 22), hoping that an interaction with nature will bring them to an understanding of themselves.
Steffler attempts to deal with the problems with the pastoral model by debunking myths about solitude and silence, but instead finds himself in arguably an even more simplistic understanding of nonhuman nature: the nomadic mode. I am following 56
Marilyn McKay in defining the “nomadic concept of territory” as one which “focuses on wilderness land and the active processes of conquest and penetration” (M. McKay 5)12.
Steffler’s descriptions of landscape are nomadic in tone and therefore perpetuate what
Margaret Atwood argues is a particularly Canadian trope: the idea that “nature is a monster” (66) which is “harsh, ‘violent,’ sharp and jagged, bitter cold in winter and burning hot in summer” (53) and “actively hostile towards man” (54) and must therefore be met with violence so that it can be forced into submission. Steffler’s nonhuman nature is an iteration of this monster, and humans must subdue it in order to survive. The three- stanza poem “Battle at Halfway Point” employs the language of war to describe the relationship between nature and man:
Even after the water was wounded and lying
without a ripple, it would wait until it got
a chance, then shoot a soldier in the back.
One cove, concealed by a scrap of fog,
killed four men before the scouts found it
and burnt the covering fog. Then the troops
12 Marilyn McKay traces the development of Canadian art in Picturing the Land: Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500-1950. She attributes this “nomadic concept of territory” primarily to paintings done between 1500 and 1760, but also argues that this method of representation was practiced well into the twentieth century. I see this same attitude in Canadian literature, both past and present. Additionally, although McKay does not make this connection, the term “nomadic” also implies a level of homelessness which is reflected in the placelessness exhibited by Steffler’s speakers. 57
shot all the coastline that could do
any damage. I don’t think more than five
small bays got away from Humber Arm. (Lookout 79)
The landscape acts as an organized and deadly army. For humans to survive in the context of a warlike landscape then they must also be warlike. Confrontation seems to be the only option for Steffler’s speakers. Adam Beardsworth suggests this confrontational relationship emerges in The Grey Islands when the speaker observes the process of fishing for squid (The Grey Islands 47). In that moment the speaker begins to realize that the relationship that exists between man and nature is not based on ideals of solitude and redemption, but instead “based on violence, exploitation, and the cruel realities of harvesting” (Beardsworth 107). The speaker himself participates in this way of interacting with nature while working as the town planner in Milliken Harbour. He decides he will plant maple trees along the town’s streets in order to improve the appearance of the town, even though he is advised that those trees will not grow there
(94). “[P]ower” motivates this decision (94), and he exerts this power over both the other members of the council and over nature itself. He tries to force nature to conform to his understanding of what it should look like and how it should behave because he believes
“nature is to be controlled and its purpose is to serve as an object of beauty for the town” (Gilbert 88). In order to serve as the ideal retreat, nature must be controlled and dominated because on its own it can only offer danger. A confrontation with and successful domestication of nature is necessary for a retreat into the wilderness to be worthwhile, and only after domestication has occurred can any glimmer of the pastoral 58 ideal come to fruition. However, this passage also contains a degree of self-criticism which indicates Steffler’s attempts at moving away from a patriarchal mindset. Recalling the outrageous amount of money he spent on his tree-planting project makes the speaker
“blush” (The Grey Islands 94), and he acknowledges, looking back on the choices he made, that he “had no notion of the waste and the stupidity, striding up and down seeing how the work was getting on” (94), implying that he now recognizes the foolishness of his actions. Despite this self-awareness, the speaker never truly discards the attitude toward nonhuman nature he displays here.
Exploitation of the landscape is a recurring theme in Steffler’s poetry; over and over again, his speakers talk about the exploitation of landscape, not in order to critique it, but in order to present it as a viable and often necessary option. In “Saint Laurence’s
Tears,” a poem recounting a summer evening spent outside, the landscape literally supports a pair of siblings, but it also becomes a beast of burden, carrying the weight of human societies on its obliging back, “its slow cooperative swell thick with all it had borne, / gathered back: flints, coins, kitchen knives” (“Saint Laurence’s Tears,” The
Wreckage of Play 13). The exploitation of nonhuman nature also becomes a way to make money. Not only through subsistence fishing, such as the squidding that the speaker of
The Grey Islands observes, but also through tourism. In “Park Office,” the speaker observes that “[n]one of these men has any doubt about what their job is here. They’re guarding a portion of nature, not from the predations of the human world but as a lure for human attention” (Lookout 9). The park rangers become pimps, whoring out a natural environment being marketed as pristine and empty in order to attract “a nutrient their 59 area needs”: the “life-giving substance” (9) of tourism. Similarly, the people of L’Anse aux Meadows “want / more boulders like L’Anse aux Meadows, more / nooks where money drifts in” (“Wind Shadow, L’Anse aux Meadows,” Lookout 11). Nature becomes a way of making money. Human activity continually “seeks to dominate the natural” (Beardsworth 94) in Steffler’s poetry, and this domination is captured by an ongoing description of the relationship between the land and the people in The Grey
Islands.
In part, nature can be turned into a resource for profits because it is created and shaped by people. Repeatedly in The Grey Islands, the landscape is talked about as a creation of the minds of the people who live there. Carm Denny, the island’s last inhabitant, who purportedly went mad while out there alone, is said to be “[h]olding the whole island in his head. Thinking it into reality” (Steffler, The Grey Islands 22).
Stepping into Carm’s cabin is “like standing inside the head of someone who knows the place” (146). The landscape becomes a mere “backdrop” (108) because the “people don’t measure by what you can see. They carry the world around in their heads” (108). The powerful landscape has not created the people; rather, the people have created the landscape.
Steffler’s works do not simply present these views of nature in an uncomplicated manner; they are not merely “the inheritor of this longing for the regenerative powers of the natural world” (Beardsworth 95). Rather, the texts attempt to deconstruct these idealistic views. Gilbert agrees with Beardsworth on this, and even extends the argument further in order to claim that, at least in The Grey Islands, Steffler actually presents an 60 ecocritical viewpoint in which the speaker “gradually let[s] go of his need to dominate the landscape, and becomes aware of its power as a place unto itself” (Gilbert 26).
Steffler deconstructs the idealistic view of nature and thus “demonstrates that unsustainable worldviews, such as the one initially held by the speaker, will eventually undo themselves because they are flawed to begin with” (3). Gilbert argues that by presenting a different side of nature Steffler is able to inhabit an ecocritical position.
Gilbert and Beardsworth are certainly accurate in pointing out an attempt at the deconstruction of an idealized nature in Steffler’s work, but it is important to note that he stops short of actually adopting an ecocritical view of nature. He may adopt a “realistic” view, but he never actually becomes ecocritical because of the language he uses to deconstruct the ideal.
The ideal in Steffler’s work presents nature as a peaceful retreat, and a site of rejuvenation and self-exploration, but Steffler’s portrayal of nature as a threatening, dangerous, deadly, and confrontational entity unravels this ideal. Even early on in The
Grey Islands, when nature is still portrayed as soft, kind, and beautiful, there are gestures that indicate its potential hostility. As the speaker drives toward Englee, basking in the near-solitude that he has already found, nature begins to mock him: “Horses up ahead, foals and mothers, a whole shaggy herd scattering off the road to watch me pass. Eyes full of casual mockery. A trail of turds right down the centre line” (23). It is as if the horses are taunting him; nature has become confrontational, if not yet threatening, even at this early stage of the narrative. As the long poem progresses, the danger and threat associated with nature become more and more obvious to the speaker, and consequently, 61
Steffler’s language shifts to reflect this change in perspective. He moves from descriptions coloured with soft pastels, littered with gentle ‘s’ and ‘h’ and ‘sh’ sounds, and exuding glowing light to characterizations of nature filled with sharp consonants, violent imagery, and darkness. The “sky ... shedding a powder-grey glow” (46) becomes a “scoured sky. wind / and open miles” (55). The “water. sky. / bottomless depths / on all sides. nothing to hold to. / nothing warm” (72) replace the gently rolling “grey silk” and
“salt-grey smells” (46). Even the plants undergo a transformation; they become “crabbed things / dry. snaking. // claws. crisp bristling spines” (77). The light is extinguished by
“the night. Black end-of-the-world ocean. Miles and miles. Not a light” (90). The landscape becomes hard, cold, unforgiving rock:
the ground is solid rock. the clouds are solid rock.
the trees are solid rock. the snow is solid rock.
the sea is solid rock. the sun is solid rock.
the air is solid rock. the rain is solid rock.
the night is solid rock. the wind is solid rock. (92)
By the end of the poem, the whole island has become a “jagged island. / island of noise” with the “wind tearing itself to pieces” (144). The natural world that started out harmless and edifying becomes “inherently chaotic, unforgiving, and unconcerned” (Beardsworth
92). Nature is no longer benign and lovely, but harsh.
Along with being brutal, nature is also threateningly powerful. The longer the speaker of The Grey Islands remains on the island, the more aware he becomes of the power of nonhuman nature: 62
I stand on the first letter of the earth’s alphabet.
tower of stone and air.
nothing behind this bull’s eye of power.
nothing higher.
eagle god. wind’s first eyes. (168)
The island itself becomes a kind of primordial and patriarchal god-figure imbued with all the powers of creation and destruction that such a position suggests. The life and death of humans lie in the hands of this nature-god. This power becomes particularly evident at night, for “[n]ight on the island is full of power. In the dark the land and sea are released from the spell of logic and industry the sun’s light places upon them” (85). Nighttime on the island seems to free nature to exist in its most basic and primordial state, a state that does not make sense to those of us confined to human logic. Nature refuses to behave in an ideal way, providing those who venture into it with silence and solitude or a safe space in which to discover themselves. Instead it threatens and intimidates; it holds a god-like power not just to give life, but to take it away in only moments.
Nature in Steffler’s works does not present an idle threat. For instance, what begins as a vague sense of danger rapidly transforms into an awareness of the life- threatening circumstances on Groais Island. The changing of the tides produces a constant shifting of the perceived landscape, and this creates actual danger for those who are caught in this changing landscape:
when you lift your eyes 63
the landscape has changed.
the sea, once far away
is all around.
busy. impersonal.
paths have vanished.
the shore has wandered inland like a herd of caribou. (80)
Because of this constant shifting of the landscape, it is “often impossible to know before stepping forward into the tall grass whether [one’s] foot will find solid earth or water below the leaves — and if there is water, how deep it will be” (79). This “beautiful lush sight” (79) is also potentially deadly, offering only the perpetual threat of drowning.
Storms befall the island on a regular basis and the speaker is convinced that “the door is about to burst in with some monster // some mountain thunderball screaming / ripping splinters splattering teeth / bone-chips bloody clots of hair” (111). This must be an attack, for “what else could such cold crags / such heaving water intend?” (111). From the speaker’s point of view, nature only has one possible intention in this poem: to attack and destroy those foolish enough to attempt to coexist with it.
The dominant attitude toward nature in Steffler’s works is fear. In his sense of landscape, humans, their accomplishments and lives, become inconsequential.
Everything that defines an individual, even his or her very life, is minuscule compared to nature. Here “man [is] a little thing. death a little thing” (129). Just as the paths disappear 64 with the tides, so too do all human achievements. The buildings of the village have largely disappeared, consumed by nature while the inhabitants were away. And yet, Cyril and Ambrose, the fishermen the speaker interacts with while he is on Groais Island, continually reference buildings that are no longer standing as if they were useful landmarks. The speaker looks where they are pointing and only ever sees “grass and rock looking secretive” (108). With time, nature swallows all human constructions. The speaker observes that “[e]verything you do is swallowed so fast here. Everything taken away” (108). When discussing the Newfoundland landscape, Steffler explains that
“[p]lacing too much store in physical property was futile” because “[t]he ocean very quickly breaks down everything it encounters” (Lerena 88). Humans and their grand accomplishments count for absolutely nothing.
The same harsh language that characterizes the later descriptions of the landscape in The Grey Islands appears throughout Steffler’s work. In “Cedar Cove,” “shrunk trees writhe” in a place “whose gravel is soft compared / to its air” (That Night We Were
Ravenous 8). The tree described in “Barrens Willow,” an “[u]nnatural snake twisting up from a cold cleft into sun, / opening a mouthful of leaves” (Lookout 10), is not any more picturesque than the writhing trees at Cedar Cove. In “The Cobs Fatten, but Every So
Often,” the darkness is seized in “crags / and chasms,” the “[e]arth trembles again, black / cracks split the air,” and nature has “the old power to ravage and burn” (That
Night We Were Ravenous 30). Even the light is not safe in Steffler’s poetry; he presents
“light / that hurts” (“February First,” That Night We Were Ravenous 38) which emanates from “the sun with its blinding / teeth (breath / smelling of blood)” (“Noon,” That Night 65
We Were Ravenous 65). In “Location” it is the sea that is dangerous and unforgiving. The repetition of a single word emphasizes the brutality of nonhuman nature:
The sea
slams and slams
and slams and slams and slams
and slams and slams
and slams its iron
door. (Lookout 14)
The sea is relentless and bent on destruction. Every aspect of nonhuman nature is violent and dangerous in these works.
Steffler tells Lerena in their interview that in Newfoundland “[p]eople were never able to extend their holdings very far. The sea and rock and harsh weather would smash everything — all your wishes and constructions — except for what you and your family and friends could hold together close by” (Lerena 83). This philosophy informs all of
Steffler’s writing and characterizes his speakers’ attitude toward nonhuman nature. Of course, Steffler’s observations about the harshness of life in Newfoundland and its outports are accurate; the speaker of The Grey Islands confronts a genuinely dangerous and threatening landscape. It could, of course, be argued that because Steffler is largely dealing with dangerous landscapes, the attitude his speakers adopt toward their surroundings is a fair one, and that because Michaels writes about landscapes that are 66 more pastoral in nature, it logically follows that her speakers would be able to create a sense of intimacy with nonhuman nature that eludes Steffler’s. While I do not wish to dismiss this argument as facetious, there are some mitigating factors that should be considered. Michaels also addresses landscapes capable of killing — recall the drowning being mourned in “Anna” — and yet does not present a monstrous nonhuman nature.
Additionally, other ecopoets who write about harsh landscapes do not present nature as monstrous the way that Steffler does (for example, see Harry Thurston’s “Northing”).
Furthermore, Steffler’s narrators have so internalized this way of understanding nonhuman nature, that, I would argue, it does not matter what kind of landscape they encounter; it seems that even in a seemingly benign landscape they would focus on any potential dangers.13
In Steffler’s speakers’ worlds, the best way to cope with the danger nonhuman nature presents is to stay out of the way of its wrathful path. In “Location,” when the sea relentlessly “slams and slams and slams” (Lookout 14), it is “[b]est to be very small, / no clothes to get caught on things” (14). In fact, throughout Steffler’s work, the proposed way to avoid being completely destroyed by nature is to hide, emphasizing a human- nature schism:
Anything wanting to live here
finds it enjoys crouching in a still pocket
behind a rock (eight months of the year
13 The same argument can also be applied to Michaels’ narrators. They have also internalized their attitude toward nonhuman nature so completely that it no longer depends on their external circumstances. 67
a white drift) where once in a while a companion
will tumble in: an ant’s leg or cinquefoil leaf. (“Wind Shadow, L’Anse aux
Meadows,” Lookout 11)
In order to survive in the harsh natural world that Steffler presents one must become tiny, hide away in the cracks and crevices, and hope that nature will not notice you and therefore pass you by, unharmed. Retreat into one’s own self, one’s own mind, in order to deny nature is the only recourse left for Steffler’s speakers, but this, of course, poses its own dangers, which we will come to shortly.
Not only is nature clearly dangerous and threatening throughout Steffler’s work, but the same sense of immediate danger evident in The Grey Islands is found throughout the natural imagery in his work. Nonhuman nature is both destructive and deadly. In
“Cedar Cove,” the cove itself becomes a locus for the consequences of this danger, collecting all of the debris that results from nature’s destructive tendencies. If a storm tears through your property and “your wharf is washed away / it will come to Cedar
Cove” (That Night We Were Ravenous 7). It is not just destroyed property that washes up in Cedar Cove, but also lost lives:
And your uncle, should he not come back
from his walk on Cape St. George,
will be found grinning among
the glitter of barkless roots
lats struts stays 68
stringers and frayed rope
in Cedar Cove (7)
Nature is deadly; it will kill a person and then collect their body with the detritus of everything else it has destroyed. Splinters of destroyed wharfs, fragments of wrecked ships, and bodies of lost wanderers all accumulate in Cedar Cove, which becomes a kind of trophy room for nature. Here it displays its kills like a hunter displays the stuffed heads of animals.
Nature’s power makes it dangerous in both The Grey Islands and Steffler’s other works. Nature is “animalistic and defends itself” (Gilbert 86), a large and threatening creature that cannot be tamed by humans no matter how hard they try. Nature takes on bestial qualities in Steffler’s “A10-150 Holloway: John’s Beach.” It cannot be forced into submission, and any boundaries that have been set up between it and humans seem insubstantial and insignificant:
The owner has barred
the way with a gate and run
a stick fence straight up the hill’s
side, balanced it there like a twig
on the back of a moose who will
twitch its hide in a minute or take
a step, and you can pick up your twig 69
and try again or try something
else. (Steffler, Helix 119)
Steffler believes that “[y]ou can’t own or fence the sea. It smashes everything it touches.
The best you can do is balance on it, dodge it and snatch a precarious living from it” (Lerena 89). Efforts at construction and division will always be overturned by the powerful creature that is nature.
Just as Steffler sets nature up as a place of retreat only to deconstruct this ideal, he also sets it up as a realm of solitude and silence in order to demonstrate the falsity of this conception; nature ultimately is not silent, and the solitude it offers is neither comforting nor edifying. The speaker of The Grey Islands begins his travels “thinking he would be enjoying space and solitude on the island” but quickly begins to see “nature as unpredictable” (Gilbert 84). After arriving on the island, the speaker repeatedly admits that his actual experience does not align with his expectations. While he thought his journey would take him somewhere characterized by silence, he finds that the “island blares and bustles / as hard as any town” (Steffler, The Grey Islands 68). And although he sets out wanting solitude, he eventually realizes that he has subscribed to “some brainless myth. the value of / loneliness. the place to be is where / nobody goes. trendy inversion” (92). The reality of the island “de-romanticizes solitude” (Gilbert 81). He does not anticipate “the extent to which solitude in space [will] be a threat ... rather than a comfort” (103). In fact, the unfamiliar soundscapes and unsettling solitude combine to create discomfort and fear: “The unfamiliarity of the sounds of the sea combined with the 70 fact that I’m alone here and always half expecting someone to come to the cabin makes me uneasy at night and keeps me from sleeping” (Steffler, The Grey Islands 75).
Ultimately, he must admit that the world he meets with is “filled with an excess of elements that refuse to be accommodated within his symbolic paradigm” (Beardsworth
113). In Steffler’s works, the pastoral ideal does not hold true in the face of an actual encounter with the nonhuman natural world.
Steffler’s language depicts a monstrous natural world and as a result his speakers become deeply fearful of the nonhuman world. Throughout The Grey Islands the speaker remains “vaguely anxious, uneasy in the middle of [his] actions” (Steffler, The Grey
Islands 79). It turns out that “in solitude, nature becomes a source of anxiety” (Gilbert
84) rather than a nurturing environment. Although he intends to write while on his adventure, the speaker finds that the only thing he manages to produce is “one / message in a bottle. / HELP! GET ME OFF THIS ROCK!” (Steffler, The Grey Islands 92). This fear and anxiety drives speakers throughout Steffler’s works to the perceived safety of their human-made dwellings. The speaker of The Grey Islands finds the island “too massive and too cold to confront alone” so “[i]n a rush [he] turn[s] back to the cabin and open[s] the door: the relief! the lantern throwing its cone of warm light over the table, my book, the woodstove crackling contentedly” (85). The speaker of “Walls of Sound” agrees with this course of action, offering this advice: “Build your walls thick there and / stay indoors, filling the lighted air / with the music of men” (That Night We Were
Ravenous 32). Humans must protect themselves from monstrous nonhuman nature by separating themselves from it. Safety depends on the maintenance of a dichotomy 71 between nature and culture, so Steffler’s speakers make the landscape into an Other in order to distinguish themselves from nonhuman nature. Once they establish that distinction, it provides safety through both physical distance and the justification for the domination of the nonhuman world.
Throughout Steffler’s work, fear of nonhuman nature leads to a need to control it in order to protect one’s self, and the self consequently becomes defined by way of this opposition between humans and nonhuman nature. While Steffler makes motions toward an ecocritical stance, his language leaves him firmly entrenched in the nomadic model which focuses on the conquest of nonhuman nature by humans. Beardsworth argues that
“Steffler’s text embraces the notion that before an enlightened approach to the ecological can be fully broached, the implicit logic of domination that upholds the authority of
Western liberal subjectivity must first be interrogated and decentred, even if it is done in a qualified and provisional manner” (97), and Gilbert argues that “the speaker undergoes a transformation in which he realizes that his previous way of thinking, in which he placed himself in a position of dominance over the community and the natural landscape, serves neither him nor the community” (4). Both Beardsworth and Gilbert pick up on
Steffler’s provisional movement toward an ecocritical position by way of a deconstruction of the pastoral ideal; however, the language throughout Steffler’s poetry ultimately leaves his speakers as examples of the nomadic viewpoint. The self remains defined through an antagonistic relationship with nature — exactly the dominance that
Gilbert argues is eliminated in the course of The Grey Islands. An undeniable connection exists between humans and nonhuman nature, but it is based in violence. While out 72 fishing, the speaker of The Grey Islands articulates this violent connection between himself and the landscape he has been inhabiting:
the world suddenly seems to be all
alive, blood running inside
of us and outside of us, inside
our hands and over them, with little
between the two, a cover of skin
keeping me in or out I’m not
sure which, but some sharp
bones have gone into my hands
and some of the running blood is mine. (Steffler 167)
The violent, exploitative nature of this encounter becomes a metaphor for the entire human interaction with nonhuman nature. Humans attack nonhuman nature, and nonhuman nature attacks back; both sides draw blood, and both sides are injured.
MICHAELS: COHABITATION
Michaels establishes a close connection between humans and nonhuman nature rather than a distinction between them. This breaking down of dichotomies is integral to ecocritical work (Swanepol 247 14; Merchant Earthcare 5), which calls for us to “rethink
14 Swanepoel’s article, “Engaging with Nature,” aims to empirically examine what motivates people’s attitudes toward nonhuman nature in order to contribute to a base of knowledge which will allow for the creation of effective ways to change attitudes toward the environment and thus solve current and avert future environmental disasters. As part of this exploration, he looks at the arguments of ecofeminism. 73 and refeel our nature and destiny” (L. White 14) because “the current ideology which separates human beings from their environment is demonstrably and dangerously reductionist” (Love 237). While the Western tradition struggles with this abolishment of the nature/culture dichotomy, there are non-Western traditions which provide an
“ecological” model:
In ancient Chinese poetry and culture, the wilderness, or
rivers-and-mountains (shan-shui) tradition lies at the root of
the cosmology, the very expression of the Tao. As such, it
includes, like a giant respiratory system, non-being and being
in constant alteration. Not having to cope with Western
subject-object dichotomies, it simply gathers human being into
the process by which all being emerges out of nothingness ...
the kind of thinking we now call ‘ecological,’ based on the
idea of the complex interdependence of life forms, comes to
river-and-mountains poets such as T’ao Ch’ien or Wang Wei as
an inherited belief rather than a late, difficult set of ideas
growing out of advanced biological science and
phenomenology. (D. McKay 7)
Of course, Western poets such as Michaels “do not have T’ao Ch’ien or Wang Wei luggage and must somehow cope with a set of forces challenging to their Judeo-Christian dualities” (7). Michaels deals with this by creating a connection between history, the land and the self, in part by way of the language which she uses to discuss memory. Memory 74 and history are essential to the formation of personal identity in Michaels’ work and discussions of them are always couched in language that evokes nature so that language and nonhuman nature both come to contain human history. By ensconcing memory in nature, Michaels creates a vital and intimate connection between humans and nonhuman nature.
Memory is a recurring theme throughout Michaels’ poetry. She writes of it “again and again in her poems” (Eaglestone 24), exploring its shape, trying to determine how it endures, how humans experience both personal and collective memory, and how memory impacts identity. In her collections, the body becomes “a memory palace” (Michaels,
“Fontanelles” Poems 181), not only in the sense of housing memory, but also in the sense of being constructed by and for memory. Historically, “the imaginal shape of the body has been ... variable” (Bordo 3). Within Western philosophy images of “[t]he body as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul and confounder of its projects” have been the most common images (3), but not all views have been as negative. Michaels’ understanding of the body differs from these traditional views and breaks down another
Western understanding of the body: the mind-body split. Traditionally, a rhetorical split has existed between mind and body “across the natural and human sciences” (Blackman
4). This dualism is weakened by the idea of the body as a memory palace because it means memory is no longer solely the territory of the mind; the body becomes a necessary participant in something that would normally be a task for the mind alone. This refusal to buy into the “notion of separation” (8) required in order to keep the mind and body distinct betrays the ecocritical thinking essential to Michaels’ work. Ecocriticism, as 75 presented by scholars such as Glen Love, Michael J. McDowell, and Piet Swanepoel, relies on a dialectical model that recognizes the “integration of human with natural cycles of life” (Love 235), and ecofeminism, particularly as it is presented by Colleen Mack-
Canty, Ynestra King, Carolyn Merchant, and Lola Lemire Tostevin, works to break down dichotomies between men and women and, as a result, between men and nature, so it makes sense that Michaels would extend this to break down the dichotomy between mind and body and create an integrated unit, a “memory palace” (Michaels, “Fontanelles”
181). In Michaels’ works, individuals understand themselves in the context of their histories, and these histories are stored in the body as memory.
The way that Michaels couches these memories focuses on the natural world, and by doing so establishes a link between humans and nonhuman nature by connecting what
Michaels presents as the fundamental element to personal identity with nonhuman nature.
In poem after poem, Michaels’ speakers recall memories that are almost always placed within the context of a natural setting. In “Anna” family members process the death of a loved one in a kitchen where “[n]othing moved except a green fern pushing its way out of a jar” (18). Nature filters into every moment in order to provide context for events. In
Michaels’ works, “memory is inextricable from ... place” (Braun); place provides context for memory, and this place is almost always defined, at least to some degree, by nonhuman nature. Even in urban settings, nonhuman nature creeps in and is the item that is noted and remembered.
The title poem from Miner’s Pond, a poem which serves as an examination of familial bonds, especially between siblings, uses the language of nonhuman nature to 76 frame childhood memories. The speaker recalls days in “[h]ot August” with “trees above the quarry like green flames, / dry grass sharpened by the heat, and / dusty yellow soil
“dry as mummy skin” ” (“Miner’s Pond” 57-58). In addition to this physical landscape, the language of geography also helps provide a context for her childhood memories. Her brothers would tell her stories at night, and “[t]heir language took apart landscapes” as they told “stories of sastrugi and sandstreams, / shelves and rain shadow” (58). Her childhood days ended with “[w]ords like solfatara, solfatara, / slipping [her] down like terraced water, into sleep” (58). Many of the speaker’s memories of childhood with her brothers are framed in landscape, either those landscapes that they inhabited or those that they spoke of. In fact, childhood itself becomes a landscape: a field of “long grass” through which fears slide and “pleasures like toucans” fly, “their brightness weighing down the boughs” (61). In Michaels’ poetry, memories exist in the context of nonhuman nature.
Memories of all kinds of relationships are placed in the context of nature the way that the relationships between siblings are in “Miner’s Pond.” Nature’s influence on memory is particularly evident when providing context for relationships. The long poems in each of Michaels’ collections demonstrate this contextualization particularly well. The third section of “Lake of Two Rivers” encapsulates the ways in which nature and humans interact, including nature providing the context for a relationship:
Purple mist, indefinite hills.
At Two Rivers, close as branches. 77
Fish scatter, silver pulses with their own electric logic.
Milky spill of moon over the restless lake,
seen through a sieve of foliage.
In fields to the south
vegetables radiate underground
displace the earth.
While we sit, linked by firelight. (9)
Firelight yokes the family together, and they are surrounded by nature. This context frames their memories. In this poem, the speaker does not recall what they said or did; only the context, the space in which these things would have occurred, remains important while the events themselves seem to fade away. The landscape provides the space for these interactions to occur and subsequently provides the space for the memories of these nights to continue to exist.
Again in “Words for the Body,” a poem in which the speaker addresses a childhood friend, the natural context figures most prominently in the memories of a relationship. A “photo of redwoods in winter, / the half-frozen pond” (45) triggers memories of walking home and skating in the ravine in “late winter afternoon, / so cold the air seemed to magnify the world, / sky the colour of plums” (45). In fact, this entire relationship exists in the context of nature:
We grew up waiting together by water, 78
frozen or free,
in summer under the cool shaggy umbra of firs,
or in the aquarium light of birches.
It’s always been this way between us.
We reach lakes and then just stand there. (41)
The entire course of this relationship has occurred in the context of lakes and trees.
Landscape contains the memories these friends have of their history together so that natural scenes trigger nostalgia and remembrance. Similarly, “What the Light Teaches” depicts nature as a place that will hold memories. Here, trees will carry memories of the past. Even “[w]hen there are no places left for [them], / this is where [they]’ll still meet” (117); the memory of their relationship will persist “[p]ast the white fountain of birches, / green helmets of willows. / Past the boulder that fastens the field / like a button on a pocket” (117). They will continue to exist “where trees [she] planted are now twice
[their] height” (117). Just like the forest which compresses personal past into the rings of trees in “Another Year,” the trees which have been planted contain the memories of those who planted them. The relationship and its attendant memories continue to exist in the time capsule of the forest.
An intimate relationship between humans and nature comes out of this connection between the landscape and memory. This connection arises in part from desire for “what we’ve lost as well as what we’ve never known” (Michaels, “Cleopatra’s Love” 15), a longing which drives individuals to “look and look with [their] bodies, dissolve into places and loves, into earth and light ... look into present moments to enter what has 79 passed there before us, to take apart a moment like a landscape — geologically, anthropologically, atomically” (15). The intimacy of this relationship is conveyed in several ways. First, Michaels makes frequent use of personification, imbuing nonhuman nature with human qualities. Second, a kind of reverse personification occurs in her works: humans take on the qualities of nonhuman nature. Finally, descriptions of the relationship between people and the landscape betray this intimacy.
By using personification, Michaels establishes a connection between the natural world and the human world. In her poems, “landmarks assume the qualities of living beings” (Malone 92). Of course, personification is not unique to Michaels. However,
Michaels’ personification of nonhuman nature differs from Steffler’s. Steffler’s personification focuses on nonhuman nature adopting threatening traits, whereas
Michaels’ personification allows for the adoption of traits such as vulnerability and fragility, ultimately creating a much kinder depiction of nonhuman nature than that in
Steffler’s work. Nonhuman nature is, in the context of Michaels’ works, the same as humans, which means that maintaining a distinction between the two becomes nearly impossible. In “Fontanelles” this personification emerges in the passage which provides the poem with its name:
islands so rigid the rain
bruises into peat, parietal
thumbprints in the gneiss
like the soft lakes
in an infant’s skull. (Michaels, “Fontanelles” Poems 178) 80
A definite connection exists between the human body and the landscape here. The ground becomes human, a delicate and easily injured infant’s skull. Personification establishes similarity. Humans and nonhuman nature cannot be separated; their identities become intertwined to the point that they are indistinguishable from one another.
Just as the landscape can assume human qualities, “people can merge with the landscape” (Malone 92). This bi-directional process is seen in “What the Light Teaches.”
The “river has been bruised by our bodies,” but human bodies have become “liquid fossils of light” (117). Nonhuman nature has taken on human characteristics — the ability to be injured — and the human element in this scene has become a part of nonhuman nature. The short poem “Women on a Beach” encapsulates this transformation into a part of the landscape. When the speaker first looks at the scene, the women’s
“three bodies form a curving shoreline” (29). As night falls and the women remain on the beach, they become “a small soft heap, a kind of moss. / In the moonlight, a boulder of women” (29). They are a physical part of the scenery surrounding them; they are shoreline, moss, and boulder. They are identified as part of nonhuman nature rather than something distinct from it.
The progression of the opening section of “Lake of Two Rivers” demonstrates the process of humans becoming a part of the landscape. The first line, “Pull water, unhook its seam” (7), is an instance of humans acting on nonhuman nature. This acting on transforms into acting with nonhuman nature in the second and third lines: “Lie down in the lake room, / in the smell of leaves still sticky from their birth” (7). Finally, the fourth and fifth lines progress from acting with nonhuman nature to acting as nonhuman nature: 81
“Fall to sleep the way the moon falls / from earth: perfect lethargy of orbit” (7). The transformation from people distinct from the natural world to people intimately caught up with it ends as “[w]e take off what we are, / and step into the moon” (“What the Light
Teaches,” Poems 117). Michaels’ poetry ultimately brings humans to this kind of connection with nonhuman nature. The connection between humans and landscape becomes so intimate that they are one entity; nonhuman nature acts like a human and humans act like nonhuman nature.
Michaels also evokes the connection between humans and nonhumans through specific word choice. There is a “seam between starlight and skin” (“What the Light
Teaches,” Poems 11) which connects the two, tying them together into the same entity.
The speaker of “Night Garden” touches on this same connection, declaring that “[n]aked in the middle of the city / the stars grow firm in our mouths” (141). The speaker’s companion in “Another Year” is “[t]raversed by the treeline, // Nothing breaks the restraint of this grid, / [his] face held in place by pines” (25). Michaels’ word choice here
— “seam,” “grow,” “traversed” — establishes physical connections. Landscape and humanity are entwined in such a way that it would be painful to remove one from the other; each has become entirely necessary for the other’s existence. The connection between them is permanent and inescapable:
We’ll never achieve escape
velocity, might as well sink into wet
firmament, learn to stay under,
breathing through our skin. 82
In silver lamella, in rivers
the colour of rain. Under water, under sky;
with transparent ancient wings. (“Skin Divers,” Poems 138)
Humans will never escape from nature. As humans sink into the “wet / firmament” (138),
“[g]ently, so bones may embrace a little longer, / mud replaces marrow” (“What the Light
Teaches,” Poems 120). Nature has seeped into our very bones so that “[c]arefully, part by part, it replaces us” (120). Michaels establishes a permanent and total connection between humans and nonhuman nature.
Personal identity becomes based on this connection with nature. Nonhuman nature provides the language for Michaels’ speakers to express and contain memory, and these nature-centric memories come to define the self. Robert Eaglestone sees “Lake of
Two Rivers,” the first poem in The Weight of Oranges as “a statement of identity” (23), and this evaluation holds true for almost all of Michaels’ poems. In Michaels’ work,
“geography becomes a reflection of identity” (Malone 97), by containing the memory which forms identity and allowing a framework by which to understand it. An exploration of this memory allows for the investigation of identity, an idea that Spergel identifies in
Fugitive Pieces when she asserts that “[i]t is their spatial explorations of the many places’ layered narratives, stories and memories that allow Jakob and Athos to investigate their own identities” (49). The speakers of Michaels’ poems engage in this same excavation of memory in order to figure out their identities, and this search finally leaves them in an intimate relationship with nature. Parts of nonhuman nature permanently become parts of humans: 83
There is earth
that never leaves your hands,
rain that never leaves
your bones. (Michaels, “Into Arrival” Poems 143-4)
The connection between identity and landscape is finally so intimate in Michaels’ works that nature’s influence is indelible. While in Steffler’s works, the self must be kept distinct from nonhuman nature, in Michaels’ poems, the self cannot be defined apart from nature because landscape infiltrates memory and the language used to express it so deeply that identity must be defined in connection with landscape. 84
CHAPTER THREE: HISTORY AND MEMORY
In both Steffler and Michaels’ work the connection between history and nonhuman nature directly affects the impact the human-nonhuman relationship has on the formation of personal identity. I have already touched on this connection in Michaels’ works, but the storage of memory both literally and figuratively in nonhuman nature is essential to the way she portrays the human-nonhuman relationship. Steffler’s works also create a connection between history and nonhuman nature but use this connection to create a very different human-nonhuman relationship than Michaels does. The landscape undeniably contains history in Steffler’s works, contradicting the claim of some critics that wilderness writers who “colonize empty space in search of solitude” (Beardsworth
99) risk “burying the very histories that [postcolonial critics] have sought to unearth” (Nixon qtd. in Beardsworth 99). History is not obliterated by the human occupation of “empty” wilderness; in fact, this occupation is vital to the development of history which can be stored in the land. However, in Steffler’s works history is just as likely to be contained in human-made structures as it is in natural elements. This containment of history in human-made structures emphasizes the distinction between nature and culture that is fundamental to the nomadic mode of Steffler’s works.
Additionally, Steffler’s speakers recognize the history in the landscape but never see it as affecting them personally. This act of distancing arises out of and contributes to the oppositional basis for the formation of personal identity in Steffler’s works; the history contained in landscape cannot be personally affecting, for then nonhuman nature would need to be approached with something other than antagonism. Since Steffler’s works 85 function within the nomadic mode, the speakers keep themselves distinct from the landscape by keeping themselves separated from the history it contains. For Michaels’ speakers, though, the land contains both collective and personal history. Although history can be contained in human constructions, it is more frequently found in natural elements.
Landscape in Michaels’ works has the ability to evoke and store memory. The formation of personal identity in Michaels’ works depends on interaction with memory and history, and therefore the fact that nonhuman nature serves as the locus for these memories — both figuratively and literally — forms a connection between humans and nonhuman nature.
The difference between Steffler’s and Michaels’ approaches to history arises in part from a difference in their definitions of history. In Steffler’s works, history primarily consists of a collection of facts and figures. The structure of The Grey Islands provides an insight into the elements that make up history: maps, censuses, and informative pamphlets are peppered throughout the text as a way to convey information and provide context for the events of the speaker’s summer on Groais Island. Anecdotes, of course, also play a role in Steffler’s version of history (think, for instance, of the stories the speaker hears about Carm’s life on the island), but anecdotes serve only to fill out the numbers to an extent, and they provide only a limited emotional engagement with the events they describe. History in Michaels’ works, on the other hand, is less about quantitative data and more about narrative and story. She, like many Canadian authors, adopts the voices of historical figures — Pieter Brueghel in “January,” Alfred Doeblin in
“Sublimation,” Marie Curie in “The Second Search,” and Kathleen Scott, wife of 86
Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, in “Ice House” are some examples — and explores the personal and emotional stories of these individuals rather than the facts and figures one might find in an encyclopedia. While Steffler primarily focuses on information, Michaels mainly focuses on emotion and story. This difference enables them to write personas who approach history in two markedly different ways. Even given the focus on facts, Steffler’s speakers remain relatively unaffected by the factual history they encounter, while Michaels’ speakers engage with the emotional history they find.
STEFFLER: HISTORY IN HUMAN-MADE STRUCTURES
The connection between personal identity and history is less explicit in Steffler’s work than in Michaels’, but the way landscape contains this history and the way Steffler’s speakers interact with it is important in understanding the nomadic stance they take.
Steffler emphasizes the importance of history in formulating personal identity, claiming that “place expresses who we are and how our lives really extend beyond the narrow limits of when we were born and when we die ... we’ve inherited to a large extent from countless generations before us, and we will go on having an influence on the land and the people and the culture after us” (Steffler, “Interview”). This connection between self and place and history means “our lives ... exten[d] much farther into the past and into the future than we often are aware of” (Steffler, “Interview”). Steffler’s works explore this
“connection between history and the individual life, place and the individual life” (Steffler, “Interview”). This relationship is important, but ultimately characterized by distance: distance between history and the individual and distance between the 87 landscape that contains the history and the individual who encounters it. Just as Steffler’s model of nonhuman nature depends on a monstrous nature that necessitates an oppositional relationship between nature and culture, so too does the distance that he creates between his speakers and the history they recognize in the landscape contribute to an oppositional, antagonistic relationship between humans and nonhuman nature.
According to Steffler, “[t]he longer people have lived in a place ... the more the accumulated traces of human culture and human history become part of the place’s influential character” (Lerena 83). The speaker in The Grey Islands recognizes that the physical space he inhabits contains the history of the island’s previous inhabitants. From his first arrival on the island, “[h]e has the sense that he is intruding on something that should be private, as though the outporters are still there and he is impinging on their community” (Gilbert 89). He finds that the presence of Carm Denny, the island’s last inhabitant, rumored to have gone crazy, is particularly strong, permeating the island with
“[a] kind of organic shadow of the man. A lingering aura of his heat and movements stirring in the sod” (The Grey Islands 139). Carm has sunk into the soil of the place, and as the speaker interacts with the physical place, he feels as if he is “touching some extended parts of him, veins that had spread from his body taking root in the land from which he had never divided himself” (140). The entire topography of the island is
“peopled by the remnants of those who lived there” before the speaker (Gilbert 87). He may be alone, but he is haunted by ghosts that have worked their way into the land. The island’s previous inhabitants have become a part of the landscape they inhabited, and the speaker can access this history; he can interact with it and, if he chooses, use it to come to 88 an understanding of himself. Steffler is aware of the possibility of this kind of engagement, another gesture toward a more ecocritical position, but the fact that his speakers avoid this engagement in favour of distance and separation reveals the persistence of a patriarchal viewpoint in his works.
Groais Island is not the only place where the landscape contains history; throughout Steffler’s poetry, speakers encounter landscapes that are saturated in history and haunted by spirits. In “Moni,” a poem about the speaker’s experience of a small
Greek town, “the chronically roaming and / chilly spirit is clothed and at home ... bound / in the long-lived hills more than in human flesh” (Steffler, The Wreckage of Play 91). The spirits that haunt places speak through “unknotting green leaves in the dirt / like grandmothers’ voices still going on / with their tales” (“Rains,” The Wreckage of Play
89). Spirits can communicate through nonhuman nature; the wind and leaves carry their voices. History surrounds Steffler’s speakers in this way.
Landscapes contain the whole of human history; there are “terraced valleys holding all the eroded / history of man, grieving and lovely, / the work of proverbs / more than the work of rain” (“A Chain of Islands,” The Wreckage of Play 100) and a “mist- blown cliff… / once bone — / prehuman Egypt, / gods’ jaws, twenty-ton lintels, upended stairs” (“Cape Norman,” Lookout 5). The “geology” of every place is “still humming hit tunes / from a billion years ago, the same / hard rhythms” (“Over Northern Ontario,” That
Night We Were Ravenous 102). Nonhuman nature becomes a “lost familiar text” on which humans “crawl” (“Cape Norman,” Lookout 6), attempting to decipher themselves by way of the history they find there. The landscape becomes a historical landscape, “the history 89 of the human and natural worlds as they intersect” (Gilbert 88), and thus the potential for an ecocritical relationship between humans and nonhuman nature presents itself.
Gilbert argues that Steffler capitalizes on this potential for an ecocritical viewpoint in The Grey Islands. She problematically claims that the speaker comes to understand “that nature exists as part of the historical landscape” and in doing so
“becomes less alienated from nature and community as he grows to understand the community as existing within nature” (81). The historical landscape that Steffler establishes does allow for a possible way to “conceptualize nature in a way that does not alienate humanity from it” (88). Don McKay’s evaluation of The Grey Islands sees this potential playing out through the speaker’s encounters with the history of the place.
McKay claims that the speaker “learns something of the spirit of people who have lived, and are living, in close contact with the elements” (27), the implication, of course, being that the speaker learns a way to reconcile humanity and nonhuman nature. I would argue, however, that Steffler’s linguistic framework prevents this potential from ever being reached. The nature created in Steffler’s poetry is monstrous, necessitating distance between humans and nonhuman nature, for to be sucked into the landscape is dangerous.
In particular, the threat of becoming bushed — going crazy because of isolation in a wilderness setting — demands one adopt binaries dividing nature and culture in order to protect one’s self not only physically, but also mentally. Mainlanders like Nels and his family think the speaker’s plans are mad because they understand the threat that the intense solitude of the island presents, which the speaker has overlooked in his idealization of solitude in nature: 90
to Nels and his family,
going to live alone on an island is madness,
terrifying to contemplate.
I can see a shrinking point in their eyes
when they ask me; ‘Won’t ya get lonely out there?’
they know these islands, stories of people
lost, stranded, gone mad.
I answer, ‘No.’
and then, ‘At least I don’t think I will.’
since it’s a tricky question with me too
and as much as I’d like to put them at ease,
show that I’m no harebrained mainlander
off to blithely feed himself to the sea,
I don’t want to boast. because
I don’t know what the night and the island spirits
will do to me. (The Grey Islands 48)
With the suggestions of Nels and his family, the speaker begins to realize that the solitude he seeks may not be edifying. After his arrival on the island, he begins to discover that he is “potentially vulnerable” (Gilbert 84) and does not know what he is capable of when left on his own:
how well do you know yourself?
the various people 91
waiting inside.
heroes, hysterics, killers
who push to the front of the crowd
when things go wrong (The Grey Islands 53)
The prolonged solitude the island promises creates the potential for unknown facets of the speaker’s personality to emerge, and the potential for these emerging “people” to be crazy or violent frightens him. Nonhuman nature, for Steffler, can make people into things they are not in their everyday lives by driving them insane.
The wilderness produces a kind of siren song which, the speaker discovers, begins to wear away at mental stability, leaving the listener teetering on the edge of madness, ripe with the potential for these “heroes, hysterics, killers” (53) to burst forth.
Heading out to the island in the boat with Nels, the speaker watches the water and the whales and has a strange and overwhelming urge to throw himself overboard, allowing the sea to take him as its own:
and I feel it,
knowing it is a laughing
fact: the harder your hungry eyes bite
into the world
......
the more
you spread your arms to hug it in, 92
the less you mind the thought of diving under,
eyes flooded. gulping dark. (55)
Nature lures him in, urging him to behave irrationally. After time spent alone on the island, he finds himself once again tempted to give in to the landscape, to “Go with it.
Join it” (90). This same impulse to suddenly behave irrationally and fling one’s self out into nonhuman nature appears in Steffler’s other poems as well, such as “February First,” a poetic description of a day in the deep of winter, where the speaker declares:
I want to respond
somehow, drink tea straight
from the pot, jump through the glass
and hang like Nureyev
all day,
the burst glass chiming around me
pure outer space (That Night We Were Ravenous 38)
Although the speaker of The Grey Islands reassures himself that the landscape will “get tired by and by” (90), the reader cannot help but wonder if nature really will tire.
One of the few characters to deeply engage with the landscape is the island’s last inhabitant before the speaker’s arrival, a madman named Carm Denny, whose “veins ... spread from his body taking root in the land from which he had never divided himself” (140). The speaker is warned that “[a] madman is living out there alone” (22).
These tales make the speaker and others anxious about his decision. Beardsworth argues that the speaker “identifies with Carm rather than regarding him as a ‘mad’ Other” (111) 93
— and that the speaker moving into Carm’s old house solidifies and demonstrates this identification (112) — but also calls Carm the speaker’s “‘mad’ doppelganger” (113). The notion of Carm as doppelganger is understandable, and the speaker undoubtedly identifies with Carm to some extent, but the fact that he does not construct Carm as an
Other does not mean that he does not see Carm as mad. I would argue that the speaker identifies with Carm including Carm’s alleged madness. He recognizes the wearing away of his sanity by the wilderness he has encountered and understands how Carm may have gone mad.
For Steffler, distance must be established between humans and nonhuman nature in order to guarantee human safety, so this same distance must be maintained between humans and any history contained in the landscape. Lerena comments that in Lookout
“[r]ock is itself conceived of as text, time compressed in stories decipherable through stone and vegetation” (93). However, although nonhuman nature can contain human history, it does not always do so. In fact, sometimes nonhuman nature refuses to contain human history. For instance, “in spite of cold or heart / or cloud or helicopters or prospectors’ stakes or /funeral processions along Route 406” Blomidon Head never changes (“Blomidon Head,” Lookout 85), refusing to absorb human history.
In Steffler’s works, when history is found in the landscape, it is not a personal history that will affect the individual encountering it in a profound way. The speaker of
The Grey Islands hears and senses the ghosts of the island because “the grass still rustles with their parents’ voices, / people who tried to balance their homes / between water and air” (101), but he hears someone else’s history, not his own, and consequently this history 94 does not affect his understanding of himself. The rustling grass tells an interesting story, but not one that is personally relevant for the speaker. He identifies to an extent with the struggles of these people because he is living where they lived and confronting the same landscape they confronted, but he does not engage with the stories he finds in nonhuman nature.
Steffler’s speakers distance themselves from the history contained in the landscape in order to protect themselves from the threat presented by intimacy with nonhuman nature, but they acknowledge the history found in human-made structures.
Throughout Steffler’s poetry, graveyards literally contain history:
This chamber deep in the local mind, out here open to all,
makes the rest of the land seem like the rest of the mind.
Outside the graveyard wall I pick up a broken cross
carved with names and dates, and the littered earth
focusses, strikes like a snake, the yellow sticks cracking
under my shoes are thigh bones, ribs
still tangled in black rags. (“From Halki,” The Wreckage of Play 90)
While the land physically contains the bodies buried in a graveyard, the graveyard itself is a human construction15. The land has not simply adopted or absorbed human history as it has occurred, but has had history forced upon it. Notice that interaction with the land
15 This differs from the types of burial grounds found in Michaels’ writing, which are not spaces intentionally designated as graveyards, like the bog in “Last Night’s Moon,” which will be discussed later in this chapter. 95 here is dangerous, with the earth “strik[ing] like a snake” (90). While the history contained here is safer because a human construction contains it, it is still close enough to the land to offer a threat.
Despite The Grey Islands ostensibly being a poem about the speaker’s interaction with nature, he engages with history as it is contained in human constructions far more than he engages with nature. Beardsworth notes that “[f]or a text that has been recognized as a work of wilderness literature, a large portion of its content actually takes place within a Newfoundland outport” (97). Even once the speaker has made his way to the island, ostensibly the site of wilderness, it is the physical structures left behind by the previous inhabitants that present the island’s history to the speaker most strongly. Once again, graveyards become important. The previous inhabitants have “so little left to speak for them. / white stones in the boggy burying ground, a few / small houses fallen in. rich plots of weeds. / a path leading nowhere under the gulls” (The Grey Islands 104). These remnants of human monuments and buildings lead the observer into history:
the graves too are paths,
the fallen church is a path,
the tangled gardens, wind-hollow
houses are paths you can’t help
following (103)
Spaces and structures created by humans create the easiest access to history; graveyards, churches, gardens, and houses are all human constructions, whether akin to the nonhuman natural world or separated from it, and one can access history through these 96 structures. While the history contained in the landscape is dangerous to access because it requires engaging with nonhuman nature, the history found in these human-made spaces does not provide the same kind of threat because they allow a distinction between nature and culture to be maintained.
The speaker’s sense of closeness to history is strongest when he wanders among the abandoned houses. Exploring the houses that overlook French Cove, he finds himself confronted with ghosts:
Approaching the first house I sensed what the ghosts of the
place were thinking, and I felt foreign, ashamed, standing
there with my knapsack and fishing rod and camera. I left
my things in the grass and stepped through the doorway into
a colourless space. Among fallen ceilings and shelves. Lost
life. Labour nothing can call back. The torture of being
deserted given form. An abandoned child built these walls
with its cries. (145)
The physical detritus of human lives continues to hold the history of the island. In these ruined spaces, which are slowly being destroyed by nonhuman nature “[t]he way stones wear out shoes and water eats through steel” (145), the speaker can commune with the former inhabitants of the island and safely access history to some extent. In Steffler’s works, nonhuman nature slowly destroys human history by destroying the structures that contain it, and this is a cause for anxiety on the part of the speaker of The Grey Islands because it threatens to destroy humans right along with their creations. Without access to 97 the history contained in these structures, Steffler’s speakers cannot use history to come to an understanding of themselves without engaging with nonhuman nature, a dangerous task likely to lead to either physical or mental death. Even the speaker’s connection with
Carm — who the speaker considers intimately connected with the land — is largely formed by the exploration and inhabitance of Carm’s house. His “bond of brotherhood” (139) with Carm is solidified when he moves into Carm’s former cabin
(146). Although he came to the island in search of a retreat into wilderness that would allow him to escape culture and discover himself in a new way, “he cannot escape culture; urban images intrude constantly” (Gilbert 85). Nonhuman nature may hold history, but it is the history contained in human-made structures that Steffler’s speakers turn to in order to understand themselves without the threat of both physical and mental destruction.
MICHAELS: HISTORY IN LANDSCAPE
While Steffler’s speakers keep themselves separate from the history contained in nonhuman nature in order to protect themselves from the threats of death and insanity,
Michaels’ speakers embrace the history contained in nonhuman nature and allow it to contribute to their understanding of themselves without fear of injury, death, or insanity.
In the previous chapter, I noted that in Michaels’ poems nonhuman nature becomes a figurative container for human memory and history by acting as a reminder of various events. Human memories are triggered by elements of nonhuman nature. Nonhuman nature also becomes a literal container for human history and memory. When Steffler 98 presents a literal containment of history in a physical plot of land, it is always in a constructed and curated space such as a graveyard, but when Michaels presents a literal containment of history in the landscape, it is in an uncontrolled environment. Michaels’ work does not require a separation from nature because, as the previous chapter demonstrated, she does not present nonhuman nature as a monster like Steffler does, so it is not necessary to protect the self in the same way it is in Steffler’s work. Human-made structures do contain history in Michaels’ poems, but more often nonhuman nature contains it. Moreover, more emphasis is placed on nature-contained history than history found in human-made structures. Additionally, in Michaels’ works, history is continually drawn into the present; the formation of personal identity relies on history because the past is never separate from the present moment. Individuals cannot remain separate from the past, because it colours the present. Consequently, the self is defined in connection with nature, since the formation of personal identity requires a connection to the history contained there and this connection does not threaten the physical or mental well-being of individuals.
The previous chapter already established the importance of memory in the formation of personal identity, and this theme serves as a touchstone for all of Michaels’ work. At the Prague Writers’ Festival in 2009, Michaels discussed her most recent novel,
The Winter Vault, in connection with the idea of personal relationships to history. She believes that “we all have a relationship to history, whether we are overtly conscious of it or not ... and it is a personal relationship” (“Anne Michaels Reading”). This connection to history relies on an “examination of questions that have no answers, of inexpressible 99 things about which one must be as precise as possible, because it is those inexpressible things that require the most precision” (“Anne Michaels Reading”). This longing to examine a personal connection to history, both individual history and world history, can be seen in all of Michaels’ work through an engagement with memory.
In Michaels’ work, history and memory are not the same entity, but the two are closely related, and while distinct, they are dependent on one another: memory needs history in order to exist. Memory arises out of history, particularly in the case of collective memory. The difference between the two lies in personal significance:
“history’s source is event, but memory’s source is meaning” (“Cleopatra’s Love” 15). For
Michaels, poetry specifically contains memory. The meaning that is the source of memory manifests itself as a personal connection to history in Michaels’ works. History forms the basis for memory, but it only makes the transition from one to the other by becoming personally affecting for the individual encountering it. This distinction between two varieties of history will become crucial in the next chapter, but for now it is important to know that in Michaels’ poetry, history is always a variety of memory because it personally affects the people who encounter it.
History, for her, is simply a series of events comprised of facts and figures, but memory has emotional consequences for individuals. This kind of significant memory exists throughout Michaels’ corpus, and it distinguishes her work from Steffler’s work in such a way that Michaels can inhabit the complex ecocritical stance that eludes Steffler.
Steffler’s landscapes contain history; they contain a record of events that have happened, and yet these events have minimal meaning for his speakers. Instead, his speakers are 100 able to separate themselves from the history found in the landscape because it is someone else’s history; events are laid out as objects rather than experiences. On the other hand, the history contained in Michaels’ landscapes is not merely a list of events, but a sequence of occurrences made significant by their deeply personal meaning. There are childhood memories, the lingering ghosts of past relationships, the shapes of younger versions of the self, and the echoes of ancestors. These are personal stories that arise out of the past in order to affect, not just inform. The speakers of “Words for the Body,”
“What the Light Teaches,” “Last Night’s Moon,” and “Another Year” all recall sequences of events that shaped relationships. “Lake of Two Rivers” and “Miner’s Pond” tell stories of childhood memories. “Anna” recounts the intimate family moments following a death.
“Near Ashdod” and “Letters from Martha” centre around correspondence between loved ones, and “Into Arrival” talks of the reunion of lovers. Michaels’ poems are marked by personal, intimate moments, memories that bring meaning to the lives of her speakers, and which occur in the context of nature.
In order to unearth these stories, one must physically engage with nonhuman nature. Discovery cannot occur through passivity, but only through active engagement with nature. Skin Divers as a whole is filled with “archeological imagery” that is used “to call up lost lives through memory” (Braun). In particular, the long poem “Last Night’s
Moon” employs this archeological imagery in its examination of time and its effect on love. History becomes “a long bone” (148) uncovered through an excavation intended to find “[a]ll the history in the bone-embedded hills / of your body” (148). The landscape and the body are conflated here, with the body becoming hills so that digging in the earth 101 uncovers memory. The body and nonhuman nature have become one and the same, just like they do in “Women on a Beach.” One cannot keep one’s self separate from nonhuman nature because active, physical engagement with the landscape is required in order to discover the memories which allow for an understanding and construction of personal identity.
Memory is also contained outside of the self. In “Last Night’s Moon,” a meditation on the way in which memory functions in the context of landscape, the speaker declares “[t]he past / is not our own” (“Last Night’s Moon,” Poems 148). Instead of belonging to the body, memory belongs to nature:
Mole’s ribbon of earth,
termite house,
soaked sponge. It rises,
keloids of rain on wood; spreads,
milkweed galaxy, broken pod
scattering the debris of attention. (148)
The past is a natural element, a part of the land, something separate from the body; it is wood and rain, milkweed pods and earth. In containing these memories nonhuman nature contains the source of identity, a “you” that can exist while the body is elsewhere,
“remembering” (148). The landscape literally and metaphorically contains a record of the past in this poem:
In the bog where the dead never disappear,
where river birch drown, the surface 102
strewn with reflection.
This is the acid-soaked
moss that eats bones, keeps flesh;
the fermented ground where time stops and
doesn’t; dissolves the skull, preserves
the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud. (147)
The bog literally contains the past in the form of bodies, becoming yet another graveyard.
However, unlike Steffler’s graveyards, this one is not of human construction. There is also a metaphorical preservation of memory by the bog. Bodies may be dissolved, but the dead will never disappear completely because the brain is preserved, an image which suggests the retention of memory by this ground. Here in this particular landscape, “time stops and / doesn’t” (147). The past continually remains even though time marches forward. In Michaels’ works, memories of death and loss and war are particularly likely to be contained in landscape, either figuratively or literally, buried there as if in graves.
Of course burial in ground will cause memories to change. They take on new shapes as some aspects are lost, eaten away by “acid-soaked / moss” and “fermented ground” (147) and others are revealed as the memories become a physical part of the landscape, growing “orchids and weeds” (“What the Light Teaches,” Poems 126). The search for memory takes one to the archeological sites where human history can literally and figuratively be unearthed.
The short poem “Fresh Mint” conveys nature’s ability to contain human memory.
Something as simple as the scent of fresh mint is “[p]ersuasive as an extra electron, it 103 changes / conversation, reminds us of / something” (91). Even the simplest natural objects influence memory, recalling particular events or moods to the observer. Nature has this same power to evoke memory in “Lake of Two Rivers,” where “leaves / bleed their gritty boundaries, / corrosive with nostalgia” (8). Leaves are more than simple objects; they are talismans that store and conjure memories. Trees function to store memory in “Another Year” as well. The speaker stands in the forest with someone and declares, “[e]ach year the forest pressed our dialogue / into another ring” (25). For
Michaels, memory is metaphorically contained in the trees themselves, a part of each ring that marks the tree’s growth. Personal history is embedded in the forest, hidden in the trees, revealed only if a tree is cut open. In order to find memory in the land, one must dig, and in order to find it in the forest, one must cut down the trees. Similarly, the river participates in the metaphorical storage of personal memory in “What the Light Teaches.”
Rather than speaking their testimony into the trees, the speaker and her companion
“spend hours by the river, telling everything. / So that when we are gone, even our spirits / weighed down with stones, / the river will remember” (124). The river will whisper the stories that were told to it just as the trees in “Another Year” create a physical record of history that incorporates the moments they witnessed. Humans and nonhuman nature become homologues in Michaels’ works, and the connection this creates between the two aids in breaking down the hierarchy that traditionally exists between them. If humans and nonhuman nature are recognized as the same thing, then a division between them no longer exists, making it difficult to adopt a nomadic stance similar to Steffler’s, and thus allowing for Michaels’ integrated approach. 104
Sometimes memory must literally be buried in order to survive: “A writer buried his testimony / in the garden, black type in black soil, / trusting that someday earth would speak” (126). Michaels’ note on the text of “What the Light Teaches” explains that the
Russian poets Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Anna Akhmatova, to whom the poem pays tribute, had family members memorize their poetry in order to prevent their words from being lost to censorship during the Stalinist regime; in this way, their words survived even if they did not. In Michaels’ poem, however, survival is dependent on the earth. The earth contains the record of the writer’s words; it literally contains history, and consequently it can speak. Nonhuman nature, throughout all of Michaels’ poetry, physically contains memory, and discovery of these memories and the formation of personal identity depend on engagement with nonhuman nature.
Just as in Steffler’s work, memory can also be contained in human-made structures in Michaels’ work, but whereas this is the primary source of history for the speakers in Steffler’s works, Michaels’ speakers address this particular variety of containment far less frequently, instead favouring natural elements even when within a human-made structure. Thus nature, rather than the more general place, is most important in Michaels’ poetry. However, this does not indicate a complete lack of poems dealing with urban spaces. “Phantom Limbs” is a poetic exception to this tendency, instead addressing how a city can hold memory:
So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to. 105
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs. (Michaels, “Phantom Limbs” Poems 92)
Memory is certainly contained in human constructions, and these memories can haunt individuals in the same way that the memories contained in nonhuman nature can. “Every house is a storehouse” (“A Height of Years,” Poems 21) holding the history of those who used to live there in a specific space so that they can come back years later and access this personal history if they so desire. However, the manner in which these buildings contain history differs from the way the human-made structures in Steffler’s works contain history. The structures in Michaels’ poems are portrayed as almost living entities with their own memories. The city in “Phantom Limbs” “carries ruins in its heart. / Longs to be touched in places / only it remembers” (92). Every city is alive; “There is no city that does not dream / from its foundations” (“There Is No City That Does Not Dream,”
Poems 146). The cities, the buildings, that contain memories are as alive as nonhuman nature, and they contain memory in the same way.
Even the history contained in these human-made structures is intimately caught up with nonhuman nature. The dreams of the city arise out of the history of the land on which the city has been built:
The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of brick makers,
the floor of the ravine where light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stored in that geologic 106
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones
under the rumbling track. (146)
Michaels’ work depends on the continual presence of the past. Note, however, that the past that remains is a “geologic” past (146) filled not with the developments of humans but with “dinosaurs,” “winters,” “rivers,” and a “lost lake.” The memory contained by human constructions is shaped, structured, and understood by way of the city or building’s interaction with nonhuman nature. Even though buildings store memories, natural elements, such as storms and rain, allow these memories to be accessed: “Rain unearths the dusty smell of lilacs. / Old dandelions collapse into fine ash over the lawn” (“A Height of Years,” Poems 21). Nature is inescapable when it comes to an exploration of history and memory, so to separate one’s self from nature would be to separate one’s self from memory and therefore from an essential element in the formation of identity. While the separation Steffler establishes between his speakers and history contributes to a traditional philosophy in which the self is defined by way of a distinction between humans and nonhuman nature, Michaels ultimately creates a philosophy that requires an intimate relationship between humans and nonhuman nature which provides an alternative to the traditional construction of the human-nonhuman nature that Steffler’s works exemplify. 107
CONCLUSION
In the poetry of Michaels and Steffler, the attitudes taken toward the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature influence the process of establishing personal identity in their works. These attitudes are in opposition with one another, and arise from two opposing attitudes toward interpersonal relationships. Steffler’s works arise out of a patriarchal attitude which characterizes his speakers’ treatment of relationships with both other people and nonhuman nature. His linguistic choices create a nonhuman nature that is a dangerous monster which must either be fought against and subdued or completely avoided in order to ensure safety and survival. The human-nonhuman relationship in
Steffler’s works is based on antagonism, and personal identity arises out of this conflict- ridden framework. The treatment of the human relationship with history embodied in nonhuman nature is an important element in this. In Steffler’s works, nonhuman nature does contain history, but this history always belongs to someone other than the person encountering it and thus is not important in the creation of personal identity, a distinction which allows Steffler’s speakers to avoid any need to engage with nonhuman nature and thus to maintain the distinction between themselves and nonhuman nature. Instead, memory and history are found in human-made structures, and Steffler’s speakers connect with the memory found in these locations, thus maintaining the nature-culture schism, and their own physical and mental well-being. In contrast, Michaels’ works emerge out of a non-patriarchal framework based on a recognition of interdependence, and thus connection, rather than conflict, characterizes her treatment of the human-nonhuman relationship. Interpersonal relationships in her works are shaped by interdependence 108 rather than hierarchy, and this lack of a hierarchical structure translates into her treatment of nonhuman nature as well. Memory and history play key roles for Michaels in the development of personal identity. Memory is both literally and figuratively stored in the landscape, making an intimate relationship with nonhuman nature essential for the formation of personal identity. Although history may also be stored in human-made structures in Michaels’ work, it is the history found in landscape that informs Michaels’ speakers’ search for identity.
The nomadic mindset that colours Steffler’s work still characterizes much nature writing even though critics have begun to point out the problems with such a stance. This kind of discourse — or traces of it — can be found across a wide spectrum of poetry. For example, it can be found in the works of poets such as Robinson Jeffers, Wendell Berry, and Harry Thurston, and is certainly present in Steffler’s work. Jeffers is known for his rigidly binary thinking and his unyielding opposition between nature and civilization. But even sophisticated ecopoets like Thurston and Berry, who attempt to break down the nature-culture divide, still tend to construct personae distanced from nature. Much of
Berry's poetry is committed to overcoming human alienation from the land, but, perhaps because of his acceptance of the Christian agrarian tradition, his personae's consciousnesses often hover above the earth (see, in particular, Farming: A Handbook).
Thurston's poetry, while capable of dealing with complex human-nonhuman relationships, still ends up creating distant, detached observers. Even in remarkable poems like “Postcard from the Pleistocene,” “Record of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton,” and “Greenself” ( all found in If Men Lived on Earth), where he tries to overcome 109 conventional boundaries between humans and nonhuman nature, the personae appear as haunted, isolated voices. Steffler is not simply emulating an antiquated view of the human-nonhuman relationships, but is taking up a discourse that runs throughout contemporary ecopoetry.
Of course, just as Steffler is not the only contemporary ecopoet who operates out of a nomadic discourse, Michaels is not the only contemporary ecopoet who writes out of an alternative viewpoint. For instance, Don McKay’s poetry, in collections such as Strike/
Slip (2006), Birding, or Desire (1983), and Another Gravity (2000), works to weaken binaries, including the one between humans and nonhuman nature. Poems such as
“Identification” (Birding, or Desire) gesture toward unity between humans and nonhuman nature, indicating, if not fully buying into, the possibility of the kind of relationship Michaels ultimately develops in her works. Another approach that resembles the interconnection found in Michaels’ works exists in Mary Oliver's poetry, which emphasizes reverence and a discovery of the exotic in ordinary aspects of nature. Without introducing history like Michaels does, Oliver captures a sense of intimacy with non- human nature in collections such as House of Light (1992), Owls and Other Fantasies
(2006), and White Pine (1994). Her poems about small creatures (see for a few typical examples “Snail,” “May,” or “Toad” from White Pine) close the distance between the human and non-human world, and reject the mood of alienation. Of course, a study such as this one, which focuses on only two authors runs the risk of unintentionally establishing a dichotomy of male-bad/female-good, when this is not the case. For instance, in addition to similarities to McKay’s approach, Michaels’ poetry is akin to 110
Gary Snyder's, which not only strives to break down old subject-object and nature-culture dualisms, but also insists upon making historical, spiritual, and cultural contexts present in the poetry. See for example, “Mother Earth: Her Whales,” “Traveling to the
Capital,” and “Building” (collected in No Nature) or the hybrid writings of Earth House
Hold (1981). Ultimately, Michaels’ sense of interconnection between human and non- human nature aligns with North American poets such as Oliver, McKay, and Snyder. The distinctions between ecopoets are often subtle, since they are all concerned with establishing connections between humans and nonhuman nature. However, what I think is crucial and needs to be nourished is the writing that most profoundly undoes the human-nonhuman binary, and Michaels’ poetry falls into this category.
While Michaels’ approach and portrayal of nature may be idealistic at times, it seems to offer a more sustainable option than either extreme currently found in ecopoetry.
The apparent newness of this approach may not be because no one else is writing from a similar standpoint, but because writers who do not address nature directly in their work are typically left out of the ecocritical discussion. It is important, however, to bring these voices, voices like Michaels’, into the ecocritical discussion in order to attempt to find a livable middle ground in which both humans, and their culture, and nonhuman nature can survive. 111
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