Deep Ecology and Seld-Realization In

DEEP ECOLOGY AND SELF-REALIZATION IN SHAKESPEARE’S A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Humanities by Swetlana Nasrawi Schmidt Spring 2019 Dedicated to my Bella. Now let’s go places. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Daniel Greenspan who continued to challenge my thinking by asking the tough questions and encouraging deeper reflection. His feedback and wisdom have broadened my own thinking, and for that I am indebted. I would also like to thank Dr. Matthew Luckett for cleaning up my little messes along the way, as well as his tireless dedication to the program; and also to Dr. Debra Best, who has demonstrated generosity of her time and expertise. Finally, I would like to give special thanks to my personal Jack Bottom, a true ecological artisan: a warm thank you for our three years in the dream, and your willingness to talk this out with me. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………… ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………………iv ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………... 1 2. TOWARD AN ECOLOGICAL IDENTITY…………………………………………..11 3. 1595: CONTEXT, TRANSITION, AND ALLEGORY IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM..................................…...……………………..20 4. JACK BOTTOM: PEASANT, ARTISAN, AND THE DILEMA OF ECOLGICAL IDENTITY……………..………………..……………………… 32 5. PUCK AS MASTER OF REVELS………………….…………………….………….. 45 6. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………….…………… 61 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………....... 64 iv ABSTRACT If it is the role of the humanities is to interpret the expressions of human experience over time, what exactly can Shakespeare offer in response to critical environmental concerns? How can an ecological reading of Shakespeare serve to inform humanity’s role in the health of ecological systems? This paper presents an ecological reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, bridging allegorical interpretation with the principles of deep ecology, a philosophy founded by mountaineer Arne Naess. Specific to the philosophy are concepts which promote wider identification with nature. Deep ecology is predicated on the idea that non-human living beings have an equal right to live as humans. My discussion elucidates the connection between deep ecology and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, beginning with its fundamental precepts, moving into the ecological history of Elizabethan England, and finally into an allegorical interpretation of Jack Bottom and Puck, the intermediaries between nature and social order. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Many of the world’s great literary luminaries have mourned the loss of our “organic” world, where our species lived in close relation with nature and upon which our sustenance so heavily relied. From transcendentalist to existentialist, dystopias to post-colonialists, humankind’s estrangement from nature is trope that, through the lens of ethics, can contextualize one’s responsibility to the environment. It is possible that William Shakespeare had the prescience to create fantastic characters whose relationships and antics reflect the modern, anthropocentric tendency to dominate nature. However most critics traditionally do not read Shakespeare from the standpoint of ecological ethics. We might look to contemporary writers like Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Kim Stanley Robinson, E.O. Wilson, or Octavia Butler to address the environmental crisis facing the modern world, but not so much Shakespeare. Instead, we remember Shakespeare plays for the more magical portrayals of the natural world--the witches of Macbeth upon the heath, the echoes of animal imagery juxtaposed with life and death, the mysterious creatures of forsaken islands in The Tempest and King Lear, and of course, woodland sprites of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet no writer has been more widely read than Shakespeare. In these fantastical settings, Shakespeare invites audiences into the natural world that has become so distant, our species can only fully comprehend its power with a belief of magic and earthly transcendence. 1 2 Our current anthropocentric and even shallow ecological attitudes toward the environment necessitates alternative readings of traditional and classic works. We can stand to learn much about ecological ethics if we reexamine works produced during times of revolution--age of rule, machine, industry--the moments in which civilization departed from the natural world of trees, rivers, and animals, departed from a time when the human species may have “co-existed with nature,” when the human species began to move into to city-states and commodify natural resources. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is such a text. This paper will demonstrate the connections between Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and deep ecology, both a philosophy and a movement pioneered by environmental ethicist and mountaineer, Arne Naess, and why our current environmental crisis necessitates such a reading in the humanities. To be true to form, this paper will not only identify aspects of deep ecology in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but present an ecosophic reading of Shakespeare, one which justifies our identification in nature for the benefit of the world. The character relationships in A Midsummer Night’s Dream express the western world’s movement away from nature-aligned identity toward one aligned with technological and social advancement, and the subsequent dreamlike confusion that results correlates to a culture alienated from the natural world. However it is Nick Bottom and Robin Goodfellow, known as “Puck,” who most closely embody the “realization of the ecological self,” as discussed by Arne Naess. There are inherent problems in language when discussing ecosophy, deep ecology, and ecological ethics. Terms like “nature,” for example, assume social 2 3 constructions that can have any number of connotations. It will be necessary to deconstruct both contemporary and Elizabethan interpretation of nature1 while also providing a tentative framework for the tenants of long-range, deep ecology prior to discussing the specifics of the “ecological self.” We can begin with the definition of ecology. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary proved three definitions: 1. A branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments. 2. The totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. 3. Human ecology, that is, a branch of sociology that studies the relationship between a human community and its environment; specifically, the study of the spatial and temporal interrelationships humans and their economic, social, and political organization. In the introduction to Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited, authors William Ophuls and A. Stephen Boyan, Jr. interpret these definitions: the first describes the work of professional ecologists; the second they deem as more general, as in, the “ecology of peasant life” or the “ecology of a mountain pine”; but it is the third definition that most concerns this discussion, as well as the authors’: “one would indeed expect human ecology to concern itself with the totality of the relationship between a human 1 Both Pierre Hadot in the chapter “The Promethean Attitude” of The Veil of Isis and Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature both discuss the domination of nature during the transition time between Queen Elizabeth and King James, which is specifically the period A Midsummer Night’s Dream addresses thematically. Based on the history outlined in these texts, I will use “nature” to mean “ecology”--the interaction of living organisms, or, the “rich variety of the spectacle presented to us by the living world and universe” (Hadot 34); but there remains, even in the philosophy of the Middle Ages, the Platonic understanding of nature as an “intelligent force, called the soul” (Hadot 25). This becomes relevant as we investigate how this period of transition restructures the human’s relationship with ecology. 3 4 community and its environment,” they write. “Unfortunately, as the second part of the third definition reveals, the purview of human ecology has in practice been rather limited, so that at present there exists no genuine science of human ecology in the full sense. It is such a science that environmentalist wish to create. Meanwhile, they are trying to broaden the meaning of the term human ecology to embrace the totality of people’s relationship with their physical and living environment, and it is this sense that we shall use the word ecology” (Ophuls and Boyan 6). What we can do as humanists in this interdisciplinary field is create a true, human ecological lens through our interpretations of poetry, art, and literature, and to see our “ecological selves” in such readings. The human-turned-animal Jack Bottom, for example, will be the quintessential model of an ecological self--a being which represents how we can view the depth our own interrelatedness to the natural world, while Robin Goodfellow, as an embodiment of nature, ushers the ecological initiate into spontaneous experience, a gateway to nature identification. Naess posits ontology to proceed ethics and encourages a personal ecosophy through spontaneous experience and what he calls “total view.” By this

Load more