Human-Plant Entanglement and Vegetal Agency in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath 1666955213, 9781666955217

Citation preview

Human-Plant Entanglement and Vegetal Agency in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

Critical plant studies Series Editor Douglas Vakoch   This series calls us to re-examine in fundamental ways our understanding of and engagement with plants, drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives. The series encourages work grounded in the humanities and social sciences that provides innovative reformulations of the scope and practice of critical plant studies. Books in this series include both monographs and edited volumes that target academic audiences. To introduce critical plant studies to readers not familiar with this field, the series publishes work that is relevant to those engaged in critical plant studies, while also being of interest to scholars from the author’s primary discipline. Among the books of special interest for the series are those that examine plants with reference to particular countries or regions of the world, or with respect to specific cultural, philosophical, religious, or literary traditions. Contemporary and historical works are equally appropriate. We especially welcome books that bridge academia and activism. Recent Titles in the Series Human-Plant Entanglement and Vegetal Agency in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath, by Dilek Bulut Sarıkaya

Human-Plant Entanglement and Vegetal Agency in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath Dilek Bulut Sarıkaya

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Quotations appear from “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” “Winter Trees,” “I’m Vertical,” “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Dark Wood, Dark Water,” “Tulips,” “Mushrooms,” “Elm,” and “Fable of Rhododendron Stealers” from The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, and 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Used with permission from HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sarıkaya, Dilek Bulut, author.   Title: Human-plant entanglement and vegetal agency in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath / Dilek Bulut Sarıkaya.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2024. | Series: Critical plant studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023057956 (print) | LCCN 2023057957 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666955217 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666955224 (ebook)   Subjects: LCSH: Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928--Knowledge and learning. | Plath, Sylvia-Knowledge and learning. | Plants. | Plants (Philosophy) | Plants in literature.  Classification: LCC PR4757.P53 S46 2024  (print) | LCC PR4757.P53  (ebook) | DDC 823/.8--dc23/eng/20231221  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057956 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057957 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my children Berra and Yusuf for making my life worthwhile and to all vegetal beings whose vigorous thriving assures the existence of all other life forms possible on this planet.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States

31

Chapter 2: Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

55

Chapter 3: Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

87

Conclusion

117

Bibliography Index

123

131

About the Author



135

vii

Acknowledgments

The conceptual seeds of this book began to spread in my mind two years ago while I was working on my previous book, The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II which triggered me explore the amazing dynamism, incessant intra-activity, extraordinary intricacy, and interdependency between nonhuman beings in the material universe. To my astonishment, I discovered that not only animals but also plants manifest acutely complicated behavioral patterns and are extremely conscious of their own selves and their environment. Since then, I never attempt to pick a flower, weed, or grass grown naturally in the fields out of a sheer respect for its life span. Acquiring a consciousness of plant thinking and agency has spurred my interest in writing on human-plant entanglements in literature, especially in poetic representations. The theoretical paradigms of critical animal studies have really become a great source of inspiration for the composition of this book which intersects critical plant studies with two outstanding poetic figures, Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath. I specifically want to acknowledge and thank Douglas Vakoch for his support for the publication of this book. I could not achieve to complete this project without his encouragement. Especially, I'm grateful to my colleague Zümre Gizem Yılmaz Karahan for her perspicacious ideas to enhance the scope of this book. I’m also indebted to the anonymous reviewers, who spent their precious time in reading my book and contributing to the improvement of this book with their insightful ideas. Also, I should never forget to express my gratitude to the editorial team of Lexington books for their constructive guidance of this project and patience in answering my questions. I want to thank my husband Usame Cem Sarıkaya and my children, Berra Sarıkaya and Yusuf Sarıkaya for their physical and psychological support and tolerance to the academic studies of their mother. Berra and Yusuf have been especially very curious about the book and have kept asking me questions about the subject of this book. Their bewilderment and interest in learning ix

x

Acknowledgments

more about plants has kept alive my enthusiasm and infatuation to finish this book. Finally, I should never forget to thank trees, flowers, weeds, and all plants who inspire me to write a book dedicated to the necessity of a more domineering and active vegetal presence in human life.

Introduction

Humans are indebted to plants for every single breath they take. The vanishing of plants from earth means the end of life not only for humans but also for all creatures in the universe. This book has come into being as a response to the exhilarating project of critical plant studies which is committed to reinstating the hitherto neglected dignity, prestige, and profundity of plants in humans’ social, cultural, and literary engagements. Plants are the prevailing concentration of this book which attempts to underscore that plant lives, feelings, and experiences are highly esteemed in the actual as well as in the fictional world. Therefore, it attempts to demonstrate how the emergence of critical plant studies invalidates the old, traditional, and untenable conceptualization of plants as passive, totally inert and trivial objects of nature and replaces it with a biological notion of plants who are absolutely alive, complicated, and have higher purposes of life than simply serving to human needs. To do this, the book forges a strong case that no matter how humans dissociate themselves from plant beings, place them on the fringes of their social relations, and find no visible alikeness to plants, they are, in fact, deeply entrenched in plant life and both physically and emotionally constituted by plants who cherish humans with air, breath, and shelter as well as harnessing their everyday practices, artistries, thoughts, and imaginations. The book, most of all, is dedicated to show that plants are the species that matter first in the universe, and thus, the blossoming of human life is completely conditioned on the unrestricted and unobstructed thriving of plant life on earth. It is time for humans to show more respect and veneration for the rights of plants to exist and prosper on earth instead of treating them as commodity materials that can be bought and sold. Remarkably, plants are the most significant consolidating units of this book, bringing together two different poets who belong to different nationalities and different periods. Providing an insightful peek into human-plant interaction in the poetic works of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) and Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), the book ushers humans to relinquish their customary practice of the self-obsessive instrumentalization of plants and explore new ways of weaving more symbiotic and less overbearing relationship with plants. Both Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath aptly observe human 1

2

Introduction

insentience to plant vitality in their poetry through which they grant us a powerful access to re-discover our lost ties with the plant kingdom and come to a keen awareness of our biological and emotional kinship with plants. To this end, this chapter will be setting the groundwork for the theoretical premises of critical plant studies by addressing the problems of human exploitation of plants and its disastrous ecological consequences. CRITICAL PLANT STUDIES In response to the disconcerting environmental deterioration which has far-reaching devastative repercussions on the planet as well as human and nonhuman beings living on it, humans’ derogatory relationship to nonhumans has come to be more closely and pejoratively interrogated by the cross-disciplinary studies like ecology, sociology, culture, politics, literature, and philosophy. Out of animal activist movements, critical animal studies has vigorously emanated in defiance of the exponential environmental crisis and has contributed a great deal to the acceleration of disgruntled arguments, questioning humans’ abusive treatment of nonhuman animals as unvoiced and unintentional objects of a human-governed universe. The aggregation of scientific debates, revolving around the intentional agency, personality, and rationality of animals inexorably has ignited a great scholarly curiosity about the prospect of a plant intelligence. Therefore, the posthumanist shift in moral consideration away from the human-centeredness towards nonhuman beings, on the one hand, inflames the proliferation of critical animal studies, and on the other hand, gives rise to critical plant studies which conducts a tenacious war against the disparaging human attitude to the dull presence of plants in human life. By the same token, it is ultimately necessary to supersede the “Anthropocene thinking” by “Planthroposcene,” that is introduced by Natasha Myers as a way of life “in which people come to recognize their profound interimplication with plants” (2017, 299, emphasis in the original). Over the course of the past century, the global scale of the apocalyptic impact of humans’ annexation of the natural world has been observed to gain a more terminal momentum, emanating as a byproduct of the abyssal distancing of humans away from the green world. For that reason, in her call for the exigency of “find[ing] ways to vegetalize our all-too-human sensorium,” Myers, like most other scholars do, looks for a more intimate, caring, moral, and responsible human relationship with plants and new alternatives for converting the catastrophic consequences of the Anthropocenic age (2017, 300). In attunement with critical animal studies which is anchored in the sustenance of an interdependent human-animal relationship that is not necessarily sustained by the iniquitous utilization of animals by humans, critical plant

Introduction

3

studies is construed upon “understanding of plant life, and of human/plant relations in a diverse set of arenas including plant science, agriculture, food practices and politics, forestry, gardening, and environmental ethics” (Stark 2015, 180). Regarding humans’ traditional inter-species relationship to nonhuman beings, plants are allotted to a much more inferiorized position than animals since they do not presumably share with humans and animals the familiar and easily perceptible systems of interaction, mobility, and communication. Pointing up to the widespread human illiteracy of recognizing plant vibrancy, Michael Marder probes into the roots of human negligence of plant vitality to reveal the underlying reasons of humans’ pushing vegetal life into a subsidiary position. Plants, saliently, have a unique sense of agency, different from humans and animals. Michael Marder expounds this peculiarity by giving specific examples like that plants “do not cut themselves loose from their source, do not die in an instant of transcendence, do not displace themselves in order to face the world, nor do they reach a destination” (Marder 2016, 4). On these grounds, bearing testimony to consciousness, intelligence, and intentionality of plants requires more interdisciplinary engagement and the convergence of scientific, philosophical, ecological, sociological, and cultural interactions. Therefore, the neoteric emanation of critical plant studies is facilitated by the burgeoning of cross-disciplinary attempts to corrode the immutability of the anthropocentric ideology of plants’ being motionless, insentient, and inanimate objects. Scientific proclamation of plant intelligence and agency with the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Power of Movement in Plants in 1880 has, to a great extent, stirred the emergence of pivotal studies pursued by modern biologists like Anthony Trewavas, Daniel Chamovitz, Richard Karban, and Monica Gagliano, writing on the awe-inspiring cultural complexity of plant life. Appropriately, the affluence of botanical studies on the subject of intentional plant behavior ultimately spurs the inception of the anthropological, cultural, philosophical, and literary studies about the plant cognizance that are unswervingly motivated to unsettle the erroneous convictions about the passivity and insentience of plants. Among these groundbreaking works are Matthew Hall’s Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany in 2011, Michael Marder’s Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life in 2013, Randy Laist’s Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies in 2013, Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate in 2015, Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan’s The Green Thread Dialogues with the Vegetal World in 2016, Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory: Biopower & Vegetable Life in 2016, Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture in 2017, Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira’s The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature in 2017 and many others. All of these works are zealously consecrated to abrade the fixity of anthropocentric

4

Introduction

assumptions about the inertness of plants by unveiling the intelligence and agency of plants, and empathically try to knit humans together with the responsive plant persons in an alliance of emotional and physical concord. The way humans situate plants within their imaginations, perceptions, and meanings are the substantial elements which determine the cultural and ethical conceptualizations of humans, misleading them predominantly to overlook the ethical standing of plants as living organisms. Keeping plants out of the hierarchical borders of humans’ moral standards prepares an ostensibly justifiable ground for treating plants as motionless substances, oblivious and abject objects. Since the commencement of life on this planet, plants have always subsisted in human life; nevertheless, the only reason of plant presence in human life, misfortunately, has been to satisfy human needs, usually as consumption materials or aesthetic objects at the background, serving to human tastes, artistic concerns, desires, and sensations. The unassailable reverberation of this perfidious human pragmatism is assessing plants according to a thoroughly materialistic valuation system which forefronts the commercial usefulness of plants while usurping their rights to exist and flourish on earth. Rectifying the fallaciousness of commodifying plants is a grave undertaking which demands comprehensive changes in biased human attitudes towards plants to bring an end to the malignant use of plants by humans. Humans’ inauspicious failure in appreciating the inherent value of plants is central to the objectified conceptualizations of plants that are incongruous with the idea of animated universe, replete with self-conscious and intelligent beings. Even a single act of photosynthesis is sufficient to prove amazingly exceptional agential capacity of plants which absorb sunlight to produce nutrition and energy. Michael Pollan comments on plants’ extraordinary, but at the same time, underemphasized skill of photosynthesis and writes that: I have enormous respect for the sophistication of these plants. We shouldn’t sell them short. While we were nailing down consciousness and locomotion, they were perfecting organic chemistry, and they’ve achieved, you know, the arts of molecular seduction and defense; they are nature’s alchemists, indeed. (Pollan 2002, 5)

Attributing instrumental value to plants resuscitates the operation of the anthropocentric mindset that helps humans perceive plants as financial products through which maximum profit can be achieved. Humans, whose senses are paralyzed to envision any physical and emotional relatedness to plants, are selfishly concerned with their own prosperity on earth at the cost of all other natural entities without internalizing the notion that the wellbeing of humans, in fact, is intricately related to the well-being and preservation of the species diversity, plant and animal populations, and the ecosystem as a whole.

Introduction

5

What is prompted by critical plant studies, thus, is to replace the egocentric penchant of humans for prioritizing their ontological existence over plants with altruistic traits that will enable them to take a serious notice of plants and begin to perceive plants from an entirely different vantage point instead of simply viewing them as underdeveloped, inferior life forms. Taking a serious concern of plants will undoubtedly stimulate groundbreaking solutions to the crucial problems that the world is trying to cope with today like genetically modified foods which threaten the health of the whole universe by destroying the balance of the ecosystem, reducing biodiversity as well as destroying the genetic structure of human body and causing the aggravation of congenital anomalies in newborn babies. Pertaining to these overwhelmingly complicated and synchronically related problems of genetic deterioration of humans and plants, it may even be argued that the false conviction of perceiving plants as simple consumption materials results in humans’ murderous attempts in trying to attain highest production rates from plants by altering their genetic codes and thereby, increasing plant stress, causing morphological changes, and menacing the future of the whole planet. Under these circumstances, what is the rationale of a distinct field of a critical plant studies while there are many diverse categories of environmental literary criticisms in abundance like ecocriticism, material ecocriticism, elemental ecocriticism, critical animal studies, and more? I believe that the emergence of a new critical theory that pays a particular attention to plant intelligence and calls for the urgency of taking plant life seriously should be merited immensely rather than being queried especially when it is taken into consideration that we, as human beings, owe our each single breath to the survival of plant beings who enclose the entirety of the world ecosystems. What is more, Michael Marder adroitly observes that the antecedent critical theories have “failed in difficult task of plant liberation,” and further asserts that “plants will not be free unless the political and economic conditions responsible both for their oppression and for our appreciation of them change as well” (Marder 2013, 149). Henceforth, the plant turn in literary studies emerges as the recent, and yet, not the final spot of the posthumanist debates in ecocritical studies. Matthew Hall’s Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany, published in 2011, appears as a hallmark of plant studies in which the author traces back the origins of the human-plant polarization to the classical Western philosophical texts in which human perception of plants is a template of physical and ethical discontinuities, rather than relatedness, between humans and plants. Hall argues that plants provide humans and animals with their natural habitat and comprise the weighing scales of the ecosystems; all the same, the destruction of those ecosystems is, for the most part, spawned by humans’ “lack of care and respect toward plants” (Hall 2011, 159). The anthropocentric

6

Introduction

configuration of plants as worthless, numbed beings sets forth the pretext for human impertinence towards plants. Plants’ anthropocentric representations have always been too far from the real life, oscillating between two peripheries; they are either exalted into romantic images, standing as human emblems of beauty, love, and other emotional expressions or casted into monsterized images, terrifying, killing, or eating humans. These plant-phobic representations further strengthen the position of plants as the other and alien forces that need to be controlled, dominated, and, if necessary, exterminated. Plant studies propels a posthumanist concern about the ethical standing of nonhuman beings to be more specifically concerned with the moral status of plants and insistently argues that it is not sufficient to enhance humans’ moral considerations to embrace animals merely, but plants should also be recognized as persons who have sheer interests and aims. Acknowledgment of plant personhood is strongly advocated by the scholars of plant studies to retain a more amenable and less detrimental relationship between humans and plants. On the same ground, it is a revolutionary attempt, on behalf of critical plant studies, to claim for the existence of vegetal agency in plants, which are, heretofore, assumed to be lifeless, impassive, and selfless objects, lesser than animals and humans. As Nealon compendiously remarks, the latest scientific arguments in plant studies demonstrate that “plants are not, as was thought for centuries following Plato and Aristotle, sessile and insentient . . . plants evidence active, purposeful, future-oriented movement and exhibit both competitive and defensive behavior” (Nealon 2016, 12). A regrettably late discovery of plants’ natural aptitude for instigating a meaningful communication with their environment, including their own species as well as humans and animals, also induces a wide-ranging distrust of the alleged existence of sharp-edged classificatory distinctions between humans and plants in terms of their agential capacities. Treating plants as active actors in nature’s social network systems emerges as a tremendously important premise of critical plant studies which is committed to recuperating humans’ short-sightedness, eclipsing their perception of the material universe. This unhealed short-sightedness appears as a serious impediment to seeing plants as uniquely creative and tactful organisms. As a result, humans continue, doggedly, to downgrade plant life as nothing more than a flaccid consumption material. Plant agency, as Karban suggests, is manifested in plants’ communicative rationality by reacting to “visual, chemical, tactile, and electrical sensory stimuli” (Karban 2015, 46). Fulfilling an indispensable precept of a meaningful communication, plants are quite successful in exchanging dialogue by way of their roots, cells, and other organs, sending and receiving messages from other plants, animals, and humans. Aside from their communicative talents, plants have amazingly advanced and complex social lives even at the level of competing with

Introduction

7

humans and animals. As Mancuso and Viola meticulously examine, “in the plant world, some are opportunists, some are generous, some are honest, and some are manipulators, rewarding those that help them and punishing those that would do them harm” (Mancuso and Viola 2013, 4). Likewise, plants are skilled enough to develop exceedingly inventive strategies that require active agency through multifarious “biochemical pathways,” and properly, “acquire information-rich cues from other organisms and the abiotic environment that contain reliable information about current or future conditions” (Karban 2015, 46). These scientific evidences of plant agency must be taken as the most incontrovertible substantiation of the awkwardness of human supremacy over plant life that is equally complicated, developed, and accomplished. While humans and animals depend on the other species for their survival, plants are self-autonomous, “autotrophic” species who “can synthesize all the life-essential organic materials they need from readily available supplies of carbon-dioxide, light, water and mineral nutrients” (Neumann 2006, 67). Such competency of plant behavior, irrefutably, deserves utmost respect and reverence, eliciting precipitous ethical responsiveness from humans instead of being relegated into a subjacent position. Additionally, the obscuring of the ontological differences ineluctably fosters the defeat of humans’ hegemonic domination of the vegetal planet and supplants the hierarchical substructure of human-plant relationship by that of affinity and kinship. The awareness of plant personhood is the first radical challenge to human domination of plants, initiating a more spiritually poignant and symbiotic intimacy with plants. Selfhood is imperative to partake in a meaningful and concerted relationship with other selves. Yet, selfhood cannot be restricted into living beings who have brains, on the contrary, “selfhood can be distributed over bodies (a seminar, a crowd, or an ant colony can act as self), or it can be one of many other selves within a body (individual cells have a kind of minimal selfhood)” (Kohn 2013, 75). The idea of plant personhood is further expanded by Matthew Hall who complies with continuities, rather than discontinuities between humans and plants by bringing forth the notion of plant personhood and human kinship with plants: This acknowledgement of plants as persons is based on and in turn strengthens the recognition of plants as kin. Indeed, personhood is expressed and galvanised within specific kinship relationships between individual plants and humans. These specific, local kinship relationships are accompanied by obligations of responsibility, solidarity, and care. Therefore, they are one of the most important aspects of inclusive human-plant relationships. (Hall 2011, 100)

8

Introduction

All-encompassing notion of kinship requires a fundamental shift of paradigm in the perception of universe away from the pervasive exploitation and domination of nature towards building connections, sharing the world, developing emphatic identification, and recognizing bonds of affinity with plants. Withholding from the homogenous conceptualization of the universe in which humans are the only privileged species over nonhumans, critical plant studies entails diversified existences, multiplicity of beings-otherthan-humans and reinforces the notion of dissimilarity not as a motive for marginalization but inclusion. Each diversified subject of being is capable of producing its own alternative meanings, developing its differing perspective of the world and thereby, partaking in the “causal intra-actions of the world in its differential becoming” (Barad 2007, 352). Plants, in this regard, have their own life interests, goals, and values in themselves that solicit respect from human beings. The ongoing scientific, botanical, and philosophical debates about the agency, intelligence, and communicative skills of plants inexorably invigorate not only a great public attention towards the central role of plants in the sustenance of the ecosystem but also inflames relentless scholarly debates by giving rise to positively challenging and stimulating questions: How are plants represented in literature?, What kind of roles are plants given in literary texts?, Do humans marginalize plants in literary texts as they do in their everyday social practices?, Do plants have an active or ghostly presence in literature?, Is it possible to adopt a botanical perspective in the burgeoning of distinctive plant poetics in literature? Are humans’ anthropocentric configurations of plants different from plants’ physical realities? All these questions, verily, bespeak of the necessity of fundamental changes in human perception of plants at the aftermath of the outstanding developments in modern botanical studies which establish scientific evidences of plant intelligence at the end of the nineteenth century. The intersection of botany and literature, signifying a rotation of approach away from the metaphorical representation of plants towards a biological and physical existence of plants in literary texts becomes a touchstone of a distinctive plant turn in environmental humanities, ensuing a vital animal turn. Although plants have always been important constituent elements of literature since the beginning of literary history, the notion of plants as actually living beings who can feel and think, rather than being abstract concepts, is a drastically challenging, brand-new idea, inflamed by the biological and other interdisciplinary fields that expand the horizons of human perspective and open endlessly “unique possibilities for literature in critical plant studies, a field gaining legitimacy through questioning how plants came to be seen as inert, insensate, and unintelligent” (McHugh 2021, 2). Drawing on Michael Marder’s philosophical theories about plant thinking and “vegetal

Introduction

9

existentiality” (Marder 2013, 90), the critical plant studies advocates the recognition of the ontological plant existence, embodying a soul, identity, and intelligence, and therefore, deserving human attention, respect, and ethical concern. As Marder proclaims, plants, not only scientifically, but also philosophically, have progressed from a denigrated, unwelcomed position of thingness towards an “existential domain (usually reserved for human beings alone) and their partaking of freedom, the temporal order, and wisdom (or intelligence)” (Marder 2013, 90). The aim of critical plant studies, correspondingly, is to transfer the biological and philosophical understanding of plants as intelligent living organisms into the literary platform where the vegetal existentiality could herald an unsubordinated, non-objectified ontological presence of plants in literature. Recently discovered biological complexity of the lives of plants, their capacity of storing, using, and sharing information with other species offers an astonishingly illuminative insight into the literary representation of vegetal beings that has formerly been depended solely on humdrum existence of plants as metaphorical constructions. With its diligent interweaving of botanical knowledge with literary imagination, critical plant studies pays an unfaltering attention to “the percipience of vegetal life—beyond its instrumentalization as food, fiber, and medicine” (Ryan 2020, 98). This stoutly accentuated idea of plant agency and vibrancy that invalidates the fallacious, and at the same time, dogmatic human assumption of plant dormancy is particularly highlighted by the scholars from across-disciplines who approvingly hold the anthropocentric notion of plant stagnancy accountable for being the prevailing cause of the far-reaching human exploitation of plant populations. Hence, the repositioning of plants as active participants of literary activity, heralding the percipience and consciousness of plants comes to forth as one of the most significant tenets of critical plant studies. Grounding its basic axiom on “recognizing plants as subjects deserving respect as other-than-human persons,” critical plant studies calls for a more ethically responsible human appreciation for the flourishing of vegetal life (Hall 2011, 13, emphasis in the original). The anthropocentric propensity to decrease every nonhuman being into a simple functional object is the greatest human handicap in comprehending the agentic capacities of plants like subjectivity, personhood, and intelligence. Plant involvement in literature, similarly, does not exceed the symbolic or metaphoric representations as passive ornamental devices of human imagination. Dismally, within the dualistic contours of this inadequate human imagination, plants are aligned with deformity and deficiency in contrast to the completeness and perfectness of the human self. Underscoring the significance of the subjective experiences of plants rather than their symbolic significance, Randy Laist notes that: “More interesting than the question of what plants mean is the question of what they

10

Introduction

are” (Laist 2013, 14, emphasis in the original). Laist’s statement brings up a crucial problem of human ignorance of plant beings who are entirely different and away from humans’ myopic assumptions and bigoted world views. With a specific focus on the crisscrossing experiences of human and plant communities, critical plant studies invites humans to perceive the outside universe from the standpoint of plants instead of fanatically being preoccupied with the anthropocentric dispositions of plants. The confluence of the interdisciplinary studies is revealed to be the constitutive facet of critical plant studies that is invested on dissolving any form of stratified borders between humans and plants by endowing plants with equal agency and vitality. Though they do not manifest a spatial mobility like humans and animals, plants can still exert agency and flexibility of moving and rotating around in synchronic movement with other natural entities. The intentional agency of plants is most apparently observed in their pursuing the sun rays to accomplish the process of photosynthesis that is known as “phototropism” in which “plants move and orient their leaves and stems toward the light through a complex interaction of photoreceptors, hormones, and signaling pathways” (Gagliano 2016, 20). The power of movement in plants, as a harbinger of their agency and vitality is, indeed, not a newly discovered phenomenon that can be attributed to recent scientific researches as Charles Darwin, in the nineteenth century, plainly revealed the capacity of movement in plants who can change their location and follow solar rays. He argues for the purposeful agency of plants which he names as “circumnutation” (Darwin 1880, 1) and about the sleep habits of plants, he writes that “the leaves of many plants place themselves at night in a widely different positions from what they hold during the day” (Darwin 1880, 284). What Darwin and other biologists and botanists, coming after him, endeavor to achieve is that the intentionality and intelligence can never be fixed solely upon human beings. While the human intelligence is revealed through language, plants and animals prove themselves to be capable of showing cognizant behavior by using different mediums. Each species has its own discrete way of displaying intelligence. Similarly, Trewavas insists on the “potential intelligent behavior in plants” (2014, 10) and points out that: No wild plant could survive without a memory of its current perceived signals or without a cumulative memory that collates its past information experience, integrates it with present conditions so that the probabilities of potential futures could be assessed. The problems that wild plants face in their attempt to optimize fitness are numerous. The uneven distribution of light, minerals, soil structure and water, competition by other plants, variation in rainfall and wind, and variable degrees of damage by disease pests and herbivores, all have to be assessed. (Trewavas 2014, 90)

Introduction

11

Trewavas ardently displays that plants are not just passive and simple organisms as assumed wrongfully, but are capable of showing highly complex, goal-oriented behaviors. They have memories to store information and keep track of climatic and environmental changes in order to be able to adapt into unprecedented conditions. Plants are playful and social entities that can engage in meaningful communication with each other as well as with animals and humans. As Trewavas asserts, “[c]ompetition requires communication in some way between the individual plants (self-recognition) and other organisms that are part of the game” (2014, 170), and the “[g]ames that plants play require both self-recognition and the capacity to make decisions. It also requires learning, memory, and assessment capabilities” (Trewavas 2014, 168). Bringing into light the inanity of imposing human meanings on plant beings, and in that fashion, diminishing the magnitude and complexity of the whole vegetal existence to a persisting servitude of human ends, Michael Marder introduces his philosophy of “vegetal phenomenology” which reinforces the prerequisite of plant perception rather than human perception to corroborate plant subjectivity (2013, 9). A philosophical perception of plant vitality, according to Marder, “accommodates plants’ constitutive subjectivity, drastically different from that of human beings, and describes their world from the hermeneutical perspective of vegetal ontology” (Marder 2013, 9). Humans’ problematic relationship with plants emanates from humans’ inability to look into the universe from the distinguishing point of view of plants and unable to capture what it is like to be a plant in a human controlled universe. In this regard, the necessity of adopting a distinctive “plant thinking” is propounded as a practical solution to human estrangement from plants and as the precondition of a “dehumanized” way of thinking about plants (Marder 2013, 10). As Marder strikingly puts it, “thinking without heads” is indispensible to maintain “an ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants” (Marder 2013, 10). To be thinking individuals, Marder suggests, plants do not need to have brains like humans and animals; instead, they manifest their intelligence through their exceptional ways of being in the world. The ubiquity of plant existence in the material universe as vitally active beings is delineated by Marder as the performativity of plant thinking and as a sufficient proof to convince humans to change their mindsets towards that of plants’ being more than insentient, consumable and replaceable commodities, and thus, worthy of being perennially connected with in an interpersonal relationship. Marder further elaborates on the plant thinking which: attests to the existence of a non-conscious, involuntary memory in plants. To say that vegetal beings possess memory is to claim that they have a past, which they

12

Introduction

bear in their extended being and which they may access at any given moment, or more simply, it is to assert that they are temporal beings through and through . . . Vegetal memory arises at the site of material inscription on the body of the plant and contributes to the register of physical stimuli (touch, exposure to light or darkness, etc.) that, having already affected the plant, may be retrieved after a delay, when the actual stimulus is no longer present. (2013, 155)

Vegetal memory confers intelligence and learned behavior into plants who are competent enough to preserve knowledge about their past that help them develop new strategies of adapting into changing physical conditions. As Witzany also argues, alleging plant memory is not an expansion of “anthropomorphic motifs and central nervous system features into nonanimal domains” but an affirmation of “epigenetic markings” and “sensing, monitoring, interpretation (comparison and evaluation against stored background information) which can be found in all organisms also communication can be found in all domains of life” (Witzany 2018, 1–2). To set the seal on plant intelligence by overthrowing the old, dogmatic notion of plants as inert and insentient beings, Darwin calls attention to the similarities of plants and animals in displaying intelligent behavior. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle,” Darwin accentuates, “acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from sense-organs, directing the several movements” (Darwin 1882, 573). What is more arresting, however, is that humans still insist on perceiving plants as inanimate objects at any rate, without lending any sensitive ear to the scientific evidences of plant rationality. The cultural constructions of plants as insentient and non-intelligent beings are incongruent with the scientific discourses which insistently talk about the complexity of plant behavior and their cognitive capacities. This may clearly be seen as the verification of the anthropocentric predispositions of humans who are still reluctant to comprehend the material universe as an intelligent and eloquent living organism. However, hegemonic ideologies and taxonomic groupings that are unflaggingly held on to by the contemporary Western societies for the sustenance of their anthropocentric practices are gradually becoming incompatible with the incessantly prospering counter discourses put forward by the interdisciplinary studies, exposing scientific proofs about the stupendous intelligibility of the material universe. “Knowing,” as Barad writes, is not a special human attribute but “a material practice, a specific engagement of the world where part of the world becomes differentially intelligible to another part of the world in its differential accountability to or for that of which it is a part” (Barad 2007, 342). This intelligibility of the universe, as Barad argues, is made possible by the profound intimacy and intercommunication between its individual units. Within the context of critical plant studies, the experience

Introduction

13

of human-plant interpenetration grows into being a knowing and intelligible materialization of the universe along those same lines that the meaning, produced by the philanthropic reciprocity between plants and humans is the essential element that submerges the material world with a purposeful action, rationality, and meaning. Appropriately, humans’ lack of interest in plant life and their tendency to overlook the profoundly significant role of plants in the preservation of biodiversity become pivotal concern of critical plant studies which delves deep into the historical roots of Western dualistic thinking that lies at the bottom of human incapacity of envisioning any kind of continuity between human and plant life. In his fervent engagement with drawing a theoretical framework for this nascent alertness and activism of plant life, Ryan pronounces the aim of critical plant studies as an endeavor “to reverse the tendency denoted as plant blindness” (Ryan 2018, 6, emphasis in the original). Plant blindness refers to the self-centered obstinacy of human species in looking at plants as instrumental devices by withholding from contemplating the body of plant as an extension of human body and the constitutive unit of the engulfed meaningfulness, vitality, rigorousness of the world. Excavating the social, cultural, and psychological undercurrents of humans’ taking plants frivolously without taking any grave concern for their biological and scientific mattering, Wandersee and Schussler are the first dedicated biologists who coin the term of “plant blindness” to identify humans’ spiritual and emotional blindness obstructing their potential capacity to recognize the visceral significance of plants in human life (Wandersee and Schussler 1999, 82). By way of contesting humans’ anthropocentric failures of realizing that plant life matters in itself without needing human appraisal or assessment of its value, Wandersee and Schussler make a coercive case for soliciting colossal public attention towards plants. In their manifesto-like research, Wandersee and Schussler auspiciously enumerate divergent bifurcations of plant blindness and itemize them as follows: (a) the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s environment; (b) the inability to recognize the importance of plants in the biosphere and in human affairs; (c) the inability to appreciate the aesthetic and unique biological features of the life forms that belong to the Plant Kingdom; and (d) the misguided anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals and thus, as unworthy of consideration. (1999, 82)

Plant blindness, as attested by Wandersee and Schussler, stands as a primary impetus in plants’ marginalization from the social, cultural, and moral concerns of humans whose senses are seriously mutilated, leading up to the interception of the physical and emotional relationship between humans

14

Introduction

and plants. Technologically sophisticated cultural advancement of human life asynchronously diminishes humans’ physical contact with plants who are allotted minimized spaces as decorative accessories in human domains. Essentially, stereotypically constructed ideologies about plant life are responsible for the systematic disparagement and regularized withdrawal of plants from humans’ physical territories as well as their ethical contemplations. Plants, throughout the ages, are transformed into fixed configurations by humans who are severely inflicted with plant blindness, unable to see the immanent plant complexity and agency of plant life. Those who are stricken by plant blindness are unsuccessful in feeling any sense of relatedness to plants, and therefore, show no respect for the ethical presence of plants, and most particularly, they are characterized by an absolute ignorance of the fundamental role of plants in human life. In their struggle to prescribe humans’ plant blindness and look for long-term solutions to the question of human inclination for neglecting plants, Wandersee and Schussler, also ruminate deliberately on the symptoms of plant blindness and identify an easily recognizable human trait which is “zoocentrism or zoochauvinism” which can lead humans falsely to come up with oversimplified conceptualizations about plants (1999, 82, emphasis in the original). Because of their easily observable agency, animals, as Wandersee and Schussler claim, are allocated more value than plants who stay in the shadow of animals whose agency can more evidently be discerned, compared to plants. Zoochauvinistic categorization of plants into an inferior status of dullness and inertness reveals an alarming human hindrance to perceive plant agency. That being the case, scientists, biologists and botanists undertake a grave responsibly to heal the anthropocentric plant neglect of humans and stimulate plant attentiveness in human mind by enforcing them to give more sincere effort to comprehend what is like to be a plant, attain a perceptual awareness of the interdependency between human and plant bodies, and look into the world from the perspective of plants. It is beyond a shadow of doubt that people who are not encumbered by plant blindness are specifically the ones who know best how to interlace their own identities with more-than human selves and embrace every nonhuman existence without any showcase of discriminatory attitude. Needless of any purpose or meaning, attributed by humans to them, plants have the capacity of producing and narrating their own realities, meanings, and stories, independent of humans. The new materialist philosopher Karen Barad argues for the self-consciousness of the whole universe and stresses that the material universe does not need the polarizing configurations of humans and their selfish bestowal of intelligibility solely on human species because the “intelligibility is an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation” (Barad 2007, 149). There is a consistently altering and enhancing process of “agential intra-action” between different bodies of

Introduction

15

nonhuman beings in the material universe (Barad 2007, 153). The concept of “intra-action” is defined by Barad as “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad 2007, 33, emphasis in the original). Different from an ordinary act of interaction, individuals do not exist on their own before their entanglement, “but rather, they emerge through, their intra-action” (Barad 2007, 33, emphasis in the original). Pursuant to Barad’s theoretical conceptualization of the universe which comes into being through an intentional intimacy between its “knowing” entities (Barad 2007, 185), it is palpably accurate that plants are highly complicated knowing subjects and material agents whose intra-activities with other bodies contribute to the materialization of the universe. Limiting the whole universe into a single voice of human species whose interests, needs, and desires are centralized as the sole purpose of life is a greatly suspicious anthropocentric mechanism which ignores “the infinitely complex dimensions of the creaturely world,” saturated with myriads of ingenious life forms whose rationality outstrips human intelligence (Houle 2017, 168). Thereby, it is not implausible to argue for a plant soul similar to human or animal souls, accrediting plants to have their own ethical systems, meanings, and directions of life. Turning a deaf ear to the stories of the material universe, and disregarding the multifarious diversity and complexity of the whole nonhuman world would mean for humans to be obdurately conducted, ruled, and dominated by their anthropocentric boundaries. Consequently, humans neither understand the eminent determinedness behind plant action nor do they acquire the ability to interpret the stories that plants tell through their bodily movements like blooming, growing, entangling, enhancing, closing, and opening their petals. Repudiating to give the right of speech to nonhuman beings is a way of “becoming savage for real” and acting in a biased manner like “someone who is ignorant of representative assemblies or who acts, out of prejudice, to limit their importance and scope; someone who claims indisputable power through which he short-circuits the slow work of representation” (Latour 2004, 71). Plants have determined goals, desires, and aspirations and behave intentionally to achieve these goals. Plants are inherently endowed with souls and as Marder emphasizes, “the vegetal soul, its capacity for growth but also for decay and the assimilation of nutrients, sets itself to work in a seemingly limitless extension in every conceivable direction, not just in a heliocentric tending toward the light” (Marder 2013, 27). Going against the reductionist Western dualism that fixes plants within the preordained role of passivity, Marder strives hard to help his readers discover the truth about the complexity and animism of plant life, replenished with soul, body, intelligence, and personality. As living, performing, and thinking selves who are capable of changing their environments as well as adopting themselves into perpetually changing circumstances, plants

16

Introduction

are embodied with vitality and agency despite humans’ pernicious agenda of silencing and suppressing nonhuman existence on earth. Expediently, the monotonous and mechanical view of plants standing as stock-still objects is encountered with drastic confrontations, spearheaded by critical plant studies working zealously to put on a program of strengthening the biological and cultural connectedness of humans and plants by exterminating their differences and distances. The primary amendment that is codified with certainty by critical plant studies is that attributing subjectivity to humans at the expense of pushing plants into objective status escalates the foreignness between humans and plants “so that they can never bring themselves together in the same space and proceed together to take the same solemn oath” (Latour 2004, 72). Transcending ontological discrepancies between humans and nonhumans, critical plant studies entails repositioning humans and plants not as subjects and objects, but as tightly knitted material properties of an interfused universal system. Correspondingly, critical plant studies compels humans to reassess their abusive, exploitative, and instrumental relationship with plants who are imprudently scheduled to be dumb, insignificant, and dispensable objects of humans’ social, cultural, and literary practices. Venturing humans’ coexistence with plants, in other words, becoming with plants, as a substitute for humans’ mastery over plants, critical plant studies summons humans to weave their stories together with the stories and narratives of plants, take a heed of plants’ soul and bodily existence, and be solicitous of their feelings, needs, and desires. The idea of plants as storied beings is, in fact, redolent of a highly relevant material ecocritical paradigm according to which the universe is filled with stories and every natural entity is physically endowed with the ability to tell its own distinctive story. Iovino and Oppermann introduces the term, the “storied-matter” to show “the narrative dimension of these agential emergences” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 451). As Oppermann argues, “all constituents of nature from the subatomic to the higher levels of existence possess agency, creativity, expression, and enduring connections that can be interpreted as a mélange of stories” (Oppermann 2013, 57). Within this frame of thought, it should not seem to be obscure to argue for plants’ being the writers and narrators of their uniquely different stories especially when we take into account the scientific and botanical studies which have already proved the existence of plant intelligence. So, literature can no longer tolerate the marginalization and stigmatization of plants under the pretext of their being insensate and inert substances. On the contrary, literature must be converted into a platform of an active plant-human engagement, unleashing plants’ potency for constructing a meaningful exchange of communication with their environment. Plants exhibit a fervent capacity of interaction with other species which is quite prosperously multi-dimensional and transformative

Introduction

17

process through which literary activity is rendered to be a communal performance of humans and plants rather than giving a one-sided account of humans’ individual experience of the world. Critical plant studies, subsequently, gives the authorial power of narration back to plants and postulates plants not as silenced objects of literature but as the tellers of their own stories by dethroning humans’ anthropocentrically privileged position of being the only source of meaning, knowledge, and the producer of the world’s stories. In tune with the posthumanist understanding of the outside physical universe, Ryan conceptualizes “phytography” as a distinct literary genre of literature in which plants are qualified to “write their own lives—sensorially and materially—irrespective of human mediation” (Ryan 2020, 99). As previously suppressed objects of literature, plants, in phytographical writing, are not muted but given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf as they are impregnated with multitudinous stories and meanings in a constant state of reciprocity with their environment. Hence, plants are not only physically active performers of actions but also active literary agents, producing their own stories, gestures, and meanings without necessarily requiring human intervention. Endowed with the power of articulateness in expressing themselves and leaving their marks on earth, plants are suffused with stories, composed through intimate physical interactivities with other material bodies in nature. Barad recurrently puts forward the idea that the world comes into being through a dynamic process of an “ongoing becomings” of the material bodies like the “rings of trees mark the sedimented history of their intra-actions within and as part of the world” (Barad 2007, 180). Plants vigorously exist as meaningful narrative agencies, discerned by the marks of their rings, their movements and change of positions towards sun, or their amazingly exceptional accomplishment of the photosynthesis that stands as the most indispensible occurrence for the prolongation of life in the whole universe. In their relentlessly evolving engagement with the world, plants perpetually find themselves in new entanglements and come into existence through new stories and new becomings. In Jane Bennett’s words, “vegetal agency in a natural system [is] understood not as a mechanical order of fixed laws but as the scene of not-fully-predictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants” (Bennett 2010, 97). To exemplify her intrepid statement, Bennett points out that: “Savanna vegetation, forest trees, soil, soil microorganisms, and humans native and exotic to the rainforest are all responding, in real time and without predetermined outcome, to each other and to the collective force of the shifting configurations that form” (Bennett 2010, 97). Thereupon, it is imperative to relinquish the disruptive human behavior of eradicating distinctive plant subjectivity, personhood, and vitality by reiterating the view that “individual plants should be regarded as meaningful narrative subjects in their own right” (Ryan 2020, 100). Phytography, in this sense, is a way of

18

Introduction

unfolding plants’ narrative agencies and characterized by Ryan as a “critical posthumanist life writing about more than-humans that pivots on the potential of collaborating and coauthoring narratives with plants” (2020, 101). In close adherence to Ryan’s definition of phytography as a discrete genre of plant narrative which is propelled as a solution both to the textual and actual estrangement of plants, “phythographia” is suggested by Patrícia Vieira as a designation of “plant inscription” in human writings (Vieira 2017, 215). With a struggle to retain a direct intersection between human and plant language, phytographia enables plants to imprint themselves on literary texts which are turned into polyphonic texts where humans are not distinctively and necessarily the only audible voices. Vieira subverts human supremacy of language by alluding to Derrida’s concept of “arche-writing” which can neither be associated with logocentricism nor reducible into the presence of human language since it exists in the material world in multiple forms of inscriptions, laid down by natural entities even before the existence of human species and the invention of human speech and writing (Vieira 2017, 214). Arche-writing is performed by nonhuman entities who leave “generalized inscriptions” in the physical universe and is distinguished by Vieira as the primordial form of language, speech, and, writing, different from humans’ definitive language which classifies humans and plants as two polarized groups that should be kept apart (Vieira 2017, 214). Further, Vieira underpins the “inscribableness” of plants and designates phytographia as a form of arche-writing carried out by plants during the photosynthesis and the unremitting process of expansion and self-production (Vieira 2017, 214). What complements plants’ skills of speech is their capacity of writing during which they “endlessly repeat parts of themselves by producing multiple leaves, flowers and fruits, all sharing similar traits but also displaying minuscule differences” (Vieira 2017, 215). The plant vitality and the physical traces of plants in the material universe are transcribed by Vieira as a model of arche-writing which deposes the ultimate power of humans in defining the experiences of plants from a human point of view. What is more, Vieira compares phytographia to the art of photography and argues that plants, through their disposition towards sunlight during photosynthesis, display an extremely developed artistic talent of “proto-photographia” which can appropriately be transferred into the literary creativity on account of the fact that plants can leave their marks in literary texts as they can leave their inscription on the physical world (Vieira 2017, 215). This bilateral interplay between plant and the text performed through phytographia synthesizes new conditions of human-plant relationship that is not based upon the marginalization of plants but finding new ways of being physically and emotionally involved with plants. The driving force for phytographia, hence, is to breed sweeping alteration in humans’ old habits of encroaching

Introduction

19

and displacing plants from the nucleus of literature. The reconciliation of the material reality of plant life with the textual reality of literature reveal brilliant prospects of contriving connectivity between humans and plants not only in the material universe but also in the narrative space of literature where meanings are produced and circulated mutually and persistently. In this way, phytographia furnishes the narrative sphere with highly esteemed stories of plants while the differences between humans and plants are eroded and performativity of plants have come into foreground. Meanings are disseminated on a common ground of human-plant companionship in a democratic textual atmosphere where human words are not prioritized over plant discourse. By juxtaposing the “photographic language of plants” with the “logographic language of literature,” phytographia propounds an exceedingly beneficial theoretical tool for the critical plant studies in order to eradicate impudently forged dualities between texts and worlds, and the matter and metaphor (Vieira 2017, 216). From this standpoint, Vieira’s conceptualization of phytographia is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomatic assemblage which “establishes connections between certain multiplicities” in order to ensure that “[t]here is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 23). Phytographia, viewed in this context, substantiates unprejudiced rhizomatic intercommunication between the outside physical world and the textual world, marking the “point of departure for the delusional passion of the book as origin and finality of the world” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 127). The physical world, in every respect, is capable of narrating and writing its multidimensional and polyphonic stories which are all connected to one another not through human language but through the bodily involvement of the actors in the composition of stories and worlds. Phytographia, in the same manner, allows plants to be themselves without simply decreasing them into a homogenizing and discriminatory human signification. In addition, keeping human language responsible for the creation of insurmountable divisions between humans and nonhumans by positioning humanity as the most privileged state of existence, Luce Irigaray underscores the value of becomings and “transformation” over the notion of “having” which is an indication of holding control and dominion over others and used to define human “subjectivity” (Irigaray 2017, 133): The vegetal world unveils something about the destiny of our culture by questioning the reduction of our language to a certain logic, due to which our relation to being as living got lost. If our Western history has gradually neglected the importance of the vegetal world, it likewise forgot what “to be” means. It assimilated this word to an idea extrapolated from any existence—as “Being” could be heard—instead of interpreting it as the specific origin and the determined

20

Introduction

development of each living being. This way of understanding “to be” has rendered possible the dissociation between being and existing, with all the human wanderings and drifts in appearances, artificial behaviors, and constructed realities that have removed us from our life, its achievement, and its possible sharing. (Irigaray 2017, 134)

Irigaray comments on the obfuscating power of human language to condense the materiality of the outside universe into intangible metaphoric constructions which divorce plants from human culture. She argues that human language is embedded with Western dualistic mindset that sets apart humans and plants into two distinct hierarchical territories in which human subject is entitled to attribute his own human meanings into plant objects. The inducement of human language to classify plants within linguistic construction is to bereave them of their existential meanings and transform them into abstractions. Irigaray, further, reflects on how human language, consisting of “separate and discontinuous utterances,” affects human life in a devastating manner, leaving humans in a complete sense of isolation as an outcome of the disruption of human-plant communication and emotional attachment (Irigaray 2017, 132). Trying to find an answer for humans’ inability to hear the language of plants, Irigaray affirms that we as human beings are persistently “losing our life in a way of existing cut off from our living resources, not to say from our being” because humans impose unrealistic, passive, and stagnant meanings into plants, triggering a chain reaction of the loss of vitality and materiality, erasing even the reality of being in the world both for humans and plants (Irigaray 2017, 132). More plainly, the permanent state of passivity that is ascribed to plants by human language not only damages plant life but also affects human life, ushering humans’ uprootedness from their naturally enmeshed spaces in the material universe, and suffocating them within the artificially constructed virtual reality of language, and its designating sign-system which distorts the relatedness of the matter and meaning rather than connecting them. In its steadfast determination to restore the broken connection between the reality of the physical world and humans’ linguistic constructions of it, critical plant studies urges “respect for the potentialities of plant language” which does not necessitate human mediation or interpretation as plants are perfectly equipped with essential faculties of intelligence and power of self-expression (Marder 2017, 114). A distinguished style of plant writing bolsters a distinctive plant language which will disentangle plants from the imprisonment of symbolic representations and metaphoric descriptions, and will let plants have their own sayings, perspectives, and understandings of the world which, oftentimes, are not compliant with human perspectives. Drawing on the emergent necessity of plant language, Michael Marder discloses the problematic

Introduction

21

structure of human language which treats plants as instrumental devices and states that: Across the spectrum of symbolic transcriptions and translations it motivates, the literal plant, the plant itself, remains untranslatable. There are no plants growing on the fields of metaphor, in the gardens of allegory, or in the forests of symbols—except of the metaphorical, allegorical, and symbolic kinds. When I say or write “the plant itself,” I do not mean a vegetal version of the Kantian thing-in-itself, foreclosed to human knowledge. I have in mind the language of the plants themselves, irreducible to our superimposition of meanings upon them. (Marder 2017, 109)

As steadily manifested by Marder, plants reject humans’ diminutive configurations which deny them the power of self-exertion by leaving little space for the co-evolution of human and plant beings as intimate partners and companions whose stories are converged together without necessarily requiring to be translated or interpreted. Marder is absolutely right in his claim that no plant can grow in the soils of metaphoric and symbolic representations of literature. Yet, above all, human language does not have a vital power of composing the physicality of plants who renounce the human role of mediator. Conversely, it is human language that imitates the cosmic language of plants and the material universe. Moreover, distinctive plant writing can efficiently function as a looking glass reflecting how plants sense and experience the world or what is like to be a plant in a human-oriented world in which nonhuman beings are seen as the means to human ends. Literature should not be a human dominated platform where humans describe their own experiences but must operate as a place of opportunities for new encounters and new engagements between humans and plants, enabling them to find innumerable connections and affinities. In this respect, literature should proffer new becomings both for humans and nonhumans who are permeable entities of nature in an enduring state of interaction and communication, cooperating in producing their stories. Plant writing, hence, gives birth to these stories of humans and plants who are smoothly intermingled and interfused with each other. As Karen Barad states, there is no fixity and passivity in the material universe, every single entity comes into being through “its intra-active becoming-not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency” (2007, 151, emphasis in the original). Likewise, the textually that is composed in imaginary platform of literature should also hold a mirror to intra-active becomings and coming into beings of humans and plants who are materially interwoven together in nature. What physically exists in nature is reconciled with the textuality of literature, constituting “not a dichotomous, pivotal, or fascicular book” but a “rhizome-book” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 23), in which the symbiotic entanglement of

22

Introduction

humans and plants are knitted naturally similar to the stem strings of a tree’s underground root, composing a network of interconnections and interdependencies and sharing equal agentic competencies with each other. In the course of this persistently evolving and modifying interplay of human, plant, and text, immutable boundaries and rigid configurations are dissolved, giving way to “an action of mutual compenetration between subject and environment, body and space, life and medium” (Coccia 2019, 37, emphasis in the original). Coccia delineates this material phenomenon as a “space of immersion” where “to act and to be acted upon are formally indistinguishable” (Coccia 2019, 37). Similarly, word and world, language and matter, humans and plants are tightly intermingled with each other and come to forth as an important theoretical paradigm of critical plant studies which aims to bring plants into the center of literary attention as well as cultural, social, and political concerns of humans. Ryan also underpins an analogous mission of poetry which “becomes the material exploration of potential in human and botanical subjects” through which plants and humans can define their own distinctive identities in their relatedness to each other (Ryan 2018, 9). Adopting a biological view of plants as dynamic agents, plant writing has an important undertaking of bringing the material and textual world together in order that plants no longer inhabit literature as symbolic representations, other than themselves but they exist there with their own factual physicality, without being forced into something else. The transfusion of the textual realm into the physical universe reveals the possibility of overthrowing the impermeable ideological binaries which position humans in opposition to plants as two purportedly different and antithetical forces. The prevalent speakers of plant writing are not monoglossic human agents who strive to configure homogenized meanings and subjugated individuals. As Bruno Latour succinctly asserts, “[s]peech is not a self-evident phenomenon that properly belongs to humans and that could be offered only metaphorically to nonhumans,” on the contrary, plants are dexterous to speak through humans unless their material presence and actual reality are expunged by the anthropocentric literary discourse (Latour 2004, 70). At first glance, it is humans who are seemingly observed producers and speakers of literature but, in fact, “a human speaks in such a way that he is no longer speaking at all; instead, the facts are speaking for themselves through him” (Latour 2004, 70). Regardless of their self-absorbed attempts to draw extensive separation lines against nature, humans are deeply entrenched within the world’s evolution, occurrences, and becomings. Latour’s presumption that the facts are speaking through humans puts humans’ authorial power over speech and literature into question considering the fact that humans are not disclosed to be the original speakers and producers of literary texts as they are always in need of nonhuman involvers to practice literary activity. Since “human culture is inextricably enmeshed in

Introduction

23

with vibrant, nonhuman agencies,” the burgeoning of a sophisticated human culture and a wholesome composition of literature seem to be improbable for humans to achieve on their own (Bennet 2010, 108). Every element of the material universe, including humans can only come into being through its physical performance with other entities. From this perspective, humans owe their existence and their social and cultural identities to nonhuman entities of nature with whom they are in a continual exchange of interaction and “interpenetration” (Coccia 2019, 49). The permanence of the human intentionally, intelligibility and self-consciousness are undeniably conditioned on the sustainability of humans’ connectedness to nonhuman beings. Bennett also stresses that “human intentionality can be agentic only if accompanied by a vast entourage of nonhumans” (Bennett 2010, 108). In this case, widening the space of literary activity to include plants cannot be deemed as a human munificence, vouchsafed upon plants, contrarily, plants occupy literary sphere as indispensible co-producers and meaning-making processes of literature. Hence, in its commitment to the healthy and feasible prospects of interspecies entanglement between humans and plants, critical plant studies, with a plant turn in literature, seeks to open an egalitarian domain where plants will also tell their own stories, avoiding any imposition of human meanings upon them. In Richard Mabey’s words, plants are filled with stories “as authors of their own lives and argument that ignoring their vitality impoverishes our imaginations and our well-being” (Mabey 2015, 4). Far from being discarded as nonliving aliens, plants manifest certain features that demonstrate their kinship with humans. Intentional agency appears as the most essential trait that is proved not only to be an exclusively human characteristic but shared by all the nonhuman beings. Literary activity, in this regard, is steadfastly rested upon the confluence of differing standpoints of miscellaneous selves whose diverse interpretations of the world do not impede the interaction between human and nonhuman beings. It is, therefore, convalescent for the physical and psychological well-being of humans to enlarge the frame of agency to comprise nonhuman beings by surpassing the confines of their anthropocentric mindsets. Instead of impoverishing human imagination and draining creativity away from literary activity, it is preferable to enrich literature by endorsing a free interchange of emotions and feelings between human and plant beings who act together in interweaving their own distinct bodies, identities, and stories. Critical plant studies places humans and plants as alliances not as adversaries and embraces a scientific apprehension of the biological connectedness of humans and plants while showing the myriads of possibilities for human-plant interaction. Being able to hear the voices of the real plants carries an enormous significance in critical plant studies in terms of internalizing a peculiar plant perspective that would help us understand what is like

24

Introduction

to be plant in a human governed universe in which no respect is shown for the natural evolution and flourishing of plant life. Critical plant studies strives to forge wonder and admiration for the biological complexity of plant life, dwelling in literature with its real material existence, without casting it into the secondary role of complementing human identity and emotions. In tandem with their crucial performance in the durability of life on earth, plants concurrently occupy the literary world as highly vibrant political and cultural actors in shaping and composing human culture and expanding its anthropocentric borders to encompass plants along with other nonhuman beings. It is not only humans who are capable of boosting sophisticated forms of culture but all living beings, as Coccia argues, unceasingly produce effect and alteration on their physical environment and subsequently give rise to the emergence of new cultures. He points out that: [B]y producing permanent and transmissible modifications from one generation to the next, living beings produce culture, which is not a human prerogative but rather a sort of inheritance that is not anatomical but ecological, an exosomatic inheritance . . . As we have seen, the world is by definition the life of others: the ensemble of other living beings. The mystery that needs explaining is therefore the inclusion of all in the same world, and not the exclusion of other beings— which is always unstable, illusory, and ephemeral. (Coccia 2019, 42–43)

Coccia’s underpinning idea of a material world that is constructed upon an all-encompassing system of network operates through the perennial entanglement of its individual units who come into being through their agential inter-relatedness. Living in a world of ongoing mutual interactions between individuals, it is impossible for humans to put barriers or draw frontiers between themselves and other natural beings. Every natural entity has confounding transformative power over other natural bodies by modifying and carving them. The process of this metamorphosis is designated by Coccia as culture, undulating across species and spaces. Appropriating a holistic view of the universe in which every single entity is deeply intersected with other entities, Coccia suggests that plants are the most powerful forces of nature who instruct human beings about what it means to evolve and grow with nature. Coccia, further, clarifies the concept of immersion which is not a simple notion of being embraced or surrounded by others. On the contrary, immersion means “an action of mutual compenetration between subject and environment, body and space, life and medium” to such an extent that it is almost impossible to differentiate between actors who are consistently undergoing different processes of becomings that happen more than once (Coccia 2019, 37, emphasis in the original). During the procedure of these multiple becomings, each entity is an active agent in performing its task of penetration

Introduction

25

and reciprocal intervention. Thus, nothing is passive to the action of others who altogether contribute to the becoming of the world. As Karen Barad concisely puts it, the world comes into existence “in its intra-active becoming” through the agential performance of human and nonhuman actors who turn the world into a meaningful and intelligible cultural intra-activity between its parts (Barad 2007, 207). In the same way, Coccia’s re-theorization of culture, which is not a recent human invention that can exclusively be aligned with the privileged status of humanity, finds a solid ground on account of the fact that culture is produced ecologically in the material universe by every organism who is acknowledged to be the “invention of a way of producing the world,” more distinctly, a “cosmogonic act,” happening universally in nature’s social network of interdependencies (Coccia 2019, 38, emphasis in the original). Plants, from this perspective, have drastic agential power to produce their own culture and build the world around them “through the simple act of being, the most intense influence with the richest consequences, and this on a global, not a local scale” (Coccia 2019, 39). Coccia’s gripping reasoning about the dynamism of plants who are capable of constructing their own cultural and ethical systems casts a shadow over humans’ own claims for the supremacy of having a self-autonomous system of culture which is quite exclusionary and exceptionally anthropocentric, leaving the majority of human and nonhuman communities outside of its locked system of social relations. Notwithstanding the human struggle to silence plants through textual and cultural constructions, plants exert their agency and vitality by injecting their own qualities into the material universe permeating and redesigning every living and nonliving beings. Investigating solidarity, friendship, love, and assorted adventures of tree communities in forests, Wohlleben coerces his readers look into the enchanting culture of trees and succeeds in manifesting the fact that there is more to the complex life of plants than simply being raw materials. He gives an insight to the interconnected social network of the forest and affirms that beyond the chimerical silence of forests, “daily dramas and moving love stories are played out. Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered” (Wohlleben 2016, 245). What is more to the cultural complexity of plant life is the difficulty of imposing human meanings upon them. As a substitute to the stereotypical cultural representation of plants, Jones and Cloke foreground “arbori-culture” that is explicated as “the complex coming together of tree materiality and the cultural constructions of trees” (Jones and Cloke 2002, 30). Consolidating the matter with meaning and the material with the cultural, arbori-culture emulates the reciprocal nature of human-plant interpenetration so that plants compose humans insofar as humans compose plants. In their exploration of the complex and

26

Introduction

energetic substrata of arbori-culture, Jones and Cloke reinforce the view that “[t]his mixture of the cultural, the material and the living presents interconnected agency and performance wherever trees are to be found” (Jones and Cloke 2002, 74). Significantly enough, within this interconnected agency and durable performance of the world, it is not possible to have a linear, onedirectional flow of energy between actors since myriad players operate concomitantly upon each other, producing arbori-cultural meanings, triggering complexities, and composing stories at the same time. Arbori-culture necessitates dynamic presence of plants in human culture, giving birth to “stories of becoming-with, of reciprocal induction, of companion species, whose job in living and dying is not to end storying, the worlding” (Haraway 2016, 40). Humans and plants are conjoint partners of their communities, or in Haraway’s words, companion species who work together symphonically for the construction of arbori-cultures. The opportunity of their dwelling together enables them to know and become with each other, prompting the composition of miscellaneous stories which are told by heterogonous natural entities who are woven together in the purposeful materialization of the universe. Given that plants are competent enough to build their own cultural systems as well as influencing, modifying, and shaping humans’ cultural lives, it is inconceivable to attribute the fictional territory of literature barely into humans who are wrongfully assumed to be the distinguished species who can express and exchange their thoughts by using language. Depending on this pretext, humans authorize themselves to speak on behalf of plants. This representation, however, is far from being a real manifestation of plant experience and serves nothing except humans’ self-revelation and self-expression. It is a human discourse of plant life but still about humans and for humans, loaded and encoded with humans’ symbolic messages. On the contrary, as the scientific and philosophical arguments of eminent scholars of critical plant studies lucidly point at, plants are accomplished to form meaningful communication with their own species, animals, and humans in their own exceptional way, and thereby, it can be argued that nature and culture, plant and human, text and nature are all knotted together in the ongoing constitution of the material world in which everything is intermixed with each other. It is hardly worthwhile to separate plants from texts or texts from plants and move them into the peripheries of the literary creation since plants along with other nonhuman beings are the very centers and origins of creativity, playing active roles in the materialization of texts. Therefore, moving plants into the hub of literary activity along with raising social, cultural, and political awareness of plant life upholds a momentous place in the agenda of critical plant studies. Unsettling the prejudicial assumptions of humans about their being the ethically refined centers of universe, critical plant studies envisages a more universal, all-embracing, and multi-vocal order of a world which incites

Introduction

27

approbation for the vegetal world not for its pecuniary value but for its innate worth. Even if it is an imaginary world of figurative language, literature is, still, a useful tool for directing human attention towards plant perception and confronting humans with how their exploitative behaviors are sensed, felt, and responded by plants. In this sense, literature has a key function of reshaping human mindsets and composing new value systems which are pursuant to the interests of plants. Only by adopting a distinct plant perspective and disentangling plants from metaphoric meanings attached to them, can plants be free individuals and leave more visible inscriptions in textual spaces. The worthwhile attempt of attaining a specific plant perspective is to halt the prolongation of the unaccommodating alienation of humans from plants by refining human consciousness to be able to see human affinities with plant life. Literature, likewise, no longer becomes an anthropocentric intermediary of representing plants or utterly monoglossiac human discourse about humans who speak on behalf of plants but it allows plants to speak for themselves even if it contradicts human interests. Hence, in their daunting endeavor to upswing attentiveness to plant sensitivity, intelligence, and agency, critical plant studies aims to reconfigure a more intimate, concerted, and communal relationship between humans and plants by revealing the agential potentiality of plants in the making of narration and poetry. This non-human dominated and democratic terrain of plant poetry is expounded by Ryan as follows: This is a dynamic sphere in which the lively plant activates and contributes to the process of poetization and, thereafter, remains as a corporeal trace within the poetic substratum. Rather than a reproduction or reconstitution of the vegetal form in the human mind, the poem conceived of as such embodies a dialectical back-and-forth between the lyrical exertions of the versifier and the autonomy of the vegetal presence inhabiting the poetic work . . . In receiving diverse sensory impressions from the plant, the poeticizing mind enters a field of concourse—a plenum, a poetisphere—between vegetal nature, personal imagination, and collective cognizance of, and between, life-forms (2018, 8–9).

The imaginary poetic sphere, as explained clearly by Ryan, is animated by the material presence of plants whose active participation during the composition of poetry is crucial for invigorating human imagination, and thus, forming assemblages between the outside world and the internal world of human mind, both the physical and the imaginary. The penetration of plants into human mind renders its unbendable hierarchical boundaries flexible enough to be modified and remolded which, in the end, results in humans’ gaining consciousness of their physical enmeshment within the material universe and their being-with-plants. As intricate patterns of the universe, humans, plants, words, and texts are all interlaced together, producing intermingled meanings

28

Introduction

out of their stories. The material universe, thereby, is the summation of these intersecting stories, breeding restlessly and enhancing in complexity. Once overcoming the obstacles of their anthropocentric prejudgments that are predicated on segregation rather than interfusion, humans can foresee the folly of representing plants as voiceless objects of literature. “By recognizing agency beyond the human, albeit usually interrelated with human agency,” as Jones and Cloke write, “it is possible to contest, fragment, and dissolve the nature-culture divide” to enable the distribution of agency among plants and humans uniformly, without giving in to the textual vulnerability of plants (Jones and Cloke 2002, 47). To sum up, critical plant studies encourages humans to appreciate the overriding influence of plants in revitalizing the textual domains and initiates convergences, based on the principle of equilibrium rather than stratification between humans, plants, and texts. Anticipating a decisive conversion of attitude in literary representation, critical plant studies abrogates the constraining cultural contexts which reduce plant life into symbolic representations through human discourse and replaces it with an agentic perception of plants, giving life to the material universe as well as the imaginary poetic sphere of literature. The silenced, unvoiced, and subordinated status of plants in literature succumbs to the active vegetative presence, capable of constructing inimitable plant poiesis which specifically emphasizes the cultural network of relationships rather than the hegemonic commandment of humans. The agential attendance of plants in the poetic creativity is the fundamental underpinning argument of critical plant studies to safeguard the transformation of humans’ anthropocentric cultural practices and literatures, into a posthumanist platform of human-nonhuman entanglements where humans are no longer the ultimate source of meaning and the purpose of the world. Humans and plants compose their own signifying assemblages through a distinctive plant poiesis which is not necessarily enclosed by human reasoning, discourse, and language, creating a radical fracture in the anthropocentric literary tradition that privileges humans over nonhumans. Hence, literature goes beyond a fictitious space of a self-reflective human ideology and turns into being a powerful stimulant of human-plant interactivity and performativity which is experienced quite practically and democratically in the material world. Advocating an unobstructed system of interrelatedness between heterogeneous individuals, critical plant studies is committed to giving birth to a plant-centered literary criticism that aims to liberate plants from textual objectification and peripheralization and unveils the agential capacity of the more-than-human individuals who act as persons separately for their own interests while manifesting their individuality through their shared inter-communal practices.

Introduction

29

Within the theoretical frame of critical plant studies, chapter 1, titled as “Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States” pins down historical roots of plant sensitivity within the context of intellectual debates and environmental movements in Britain and the United States. Chapter 1 plays a pivotal role in building a connection between Hardy and Plath’s poetic sensitivities to plants and the eventually arising global environmental activism against the unbridled utilization of natural resources, implemented by the belligerent capitalist policies and industrial activities. Among those which are specifically highlighted in chapter 1 are the protection of wildlife, plant diversity, and the emergency of taking serious judiciary precautions to safeguard the remaining forests in Britain and the United States during and after industrialization. Political strategies and law-making processes to fight against the rapid deforestation come to fore as the most fundamental discernments of plant sensibility, increasing slowly through the end of the nineteenth century and continuing progressively throughout the twentieth century. Chapter 2, titled as “Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath” is immersed in displaying how humans and plants are internally connected to each other in Hardy and Plath’s poems in which plants seem to be enthusiastic to sprout around, expand their environment and yearn for new companionships and entanglements with humans and other species around them. Both poets are depicted to be faithfully engaged in re-building an unassailable kinship between humans and plants, based on mutual love, empathy, and friendship by putting a final end to the hierarchical segregation of humans and plants according to their presumed differences. Hardy and Plath’s poems revolve around a common goal of creating consciousness about the indispensible requirement of human-plant interaction to heal aching splits between them which appear to be the underlying cause of the retreat of plants both from human life and the surface of the planet. In collaboration with chapter 2, chapter 3, titled as “Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath” shows the unwieldiness of a harmonious, perennial human-plant interaction without changing humans’ anthropocentric assumptions about plants’ being passive, nonliving objects rather than living entities. Therefore, chapter 3 hinges on plant agency which, once again, congregates Hardy and Plath’s poetry on the common ground of an utmost plant vitality that enables plants to make a meaningful understanding of the world and meaningful communication with their environment. Plants are no longer voiceless background devices in Hardy and Plath’s poetry, on the contrary, they appear to be speaking subjects, having their freewill to voice their resentment about human frivolousness in expending and exploiting the plant life. In this perspective, both Hardy and Plath open an egalitarian space in their poetry, allowing their readers to recognize the true

30

Introduction

nature of plants who are peeled off their symbolic meanings so that they are no longer inhibited to exert their actual biological agency rather than being used as a poetic medium of transcribing human thoughts and imaginations.

Chapter 1

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States

On par with the introductory chapter’s engagement with the outlining theoretical premises of critical plant studies, this chapter lays the foundational basis for the next two chapters’ scrutiny of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath’s poetry through the theoretical lens of critical plant studies. The essentiality of this chapter, additionally, resides in the impossibility of a comprehensive survey of critical plant studies without contemplating diverse stimulants of social, cultural, and political activism in British and American environmental movements, encompassing an increasingly greater sensitivity to plants, more specifically to the protection of native forests and natural flora. Although critical plant studies is a recently emerging theory, primarily concerned with the mattering of plant lives, both Hardy and Plath are two path-breaking poets who write long before the appearance of a distinct plant poetics and a critical theory. However, what should be particularly underlined is that the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries during which Hardy and Plath produce their poetry are marked by the apex of modernization and industrial development, bringing unquenchable escalation of environmental destruction. Therefore, these two poets’ attraction to plants derives from an unfalteringly growing scholarly attention and social upheaval against the rapid devastation of forests for capitalist expansions, the problem of pollution, deforestation and, the extinction of plant and animal species. While providing a seamless transition towards Hardy and Plath’s plant poetics, this chapter also intends to draw an overall structure of the historical background which gives birth to the British and the American environmental movements and plant sensitivity, coming out as a reaction to humans’ diminishing nature into an expendable material and the over-exploitation of the natural world. Hence, closely interlinked with the previous chapter, chapter 1 will locate Hardy and Plath’s plant poetry 31

32

Chapter 1

upon a solid conceptual and historical setting which will provide a broader insight into the identical plant perspective of Hardy and Plath, two poets from different nationalities but experiencing similar difficulties of fitting themselves into the modern societies where the capitalist enterprises passionately indulge in turning each natural entity into a property to be used and disposed without the exclusion of humans. Holding a leadership position among the world economies, British and American industrial activities were profligate in depleting natural resources and commercializing them as commodity materials. In this regard, the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were the periods during which the accelerated Anthropocenic threats to earth’s natural systems reached into an unprecedented pace and became lethally dangerous by putting the future of the planet at stake. Among the serious ecological consequences of the Anthropocene’s ideological vindications of “economic rationalization and growth, globalization and integration,” as Pattberg and Davies-Venn put forward, are “abrupt changes in the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds, environmental changes generated by these perturbations (e.g., sea-level rise and ocean acidification), rapid biodiversity loss both on land and in the sea” (Pattberg and Davies-Venn 2020, 144–145). The disruption of the global ecosystem leads to an accelerated loss of plant diversity. The problem of deforestation is articulated statistically by Hannah Ritchie who writes that “[t]he turn of the 20th century is when global forest loss reached the halfway point: half of total forest loss occurred from 8,000BC to 1900; the other half occurred in the last century alone” (Ritchie 2021, 1). Such a large-scale environmental devastation has certainly deep ideological roots boosting the industrial development of the capitalist countries while smothering the vegetal populations. It is, as well, not difficult to imagine how hard it is to destabilize the meta-narratives fashioned by the British and the American capitalist systems on popular beliefs of human progress, civilization, and technology for the future of humanity at the cost of green planet. The many-sided ideological mechanisms of capitalist economies determine the axiomatic principles of human-plant relationship by reshaping the societal norms, cultural, moral, spiritual values so convincingly that no sense of shame, responsibility, guilt, or remorsefulness is felt by humans. Humans arrogate to themselves the ultimate supremacy to rule over plant kingdom, use and manufacture them in food, cloth, chemical, and construction industries as well as exterminating them for opening up broader human terrains and urban areas. Industrial societies’ set of anthropocentric belief systems which put humanity at the center of world as the only honorable, praiseworthy, and the most-exalted paragon of perfection, prepare a legitimate ground for the destruction of wilderness in the name of human advancement, and thus, guarantee the perpetuation of

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 33

this system of oppression by using every possible means of controlling the thoughts and ideas of its individuals. Scherer alludes to the fact that: “The control of societies by technocracies and commercial enterprises is being made possible by the increasing naturalization of social processes and their availability in the form of data” (Scherer 2020, 154). So, humans’ everyday practices including their relationship with their environment are defined and organized by this anthropocentric mindset, co-evolving with the industrial development and modernist outlook which beholds the view that the dissipation of natural entities is a morally justifiable act if it contributes to a higher cause of the development of human civilization, technological innovations, and the modernization of life. The moral justification of human debauchery of annihilating the natural world is one of the most effective ideological tools, employed by the capitalist world order which discards everything nonhuman outside the borders of humans’ moral codes on account of the conviction that nonhumans, especially plants, are not sentient or even vital beings, and therefore, cannot feel pain, understand the world around them, or show any sign of self-consciousness. Since they do not feel any pain or affected by any injury, it is justifiable to cut trees, scar their bodies, burn them, transplant them into foreign soils, force them to produce the highest amount of crops through fertilizers, destroy them by using herbicides and pesticides, modify their genetic codes, and put them into all sorts of stress, pain, and torture. The notion of plant dormancy is so strongly established in the public consciousness of modern societies that the expression of vegetative state of being has come to mark out “a condition in which a person appears awake but lacks any self-awareness, environmental awareness, or basic or higher level cognitive functions (e.g., information processing, language comprehension and production, perception)” (“vegetative state” def. 2023, 1). Even this single definition presents crystal clear evidence which shows how humans construct their own state of being in the world in a dichotomous antagonism to vegetal beings who are assumed to lack awareness and cognitive skills. It is indubitably challenging to agitate these foundational ideologies and system of thoughts that occupy a highly sturdy and legitimate place in the collective consciousness of modern societies where it is perceived to be the most natural and divinely bestowed human right to pollute, poison, and persecute vegetal existence. The insufficiency of current social organizations and political systems in tackling with these virulent anthropocentric ideologies as well as in taking necessary precautions to avert the cataclysmic consequences of the environmental destruction precipitates a growing social distress and restlessness towards the greedy economic model of capitalism, turning everything—without the exception of humans—into an object and a commodity to make profit. Eventually, out of these tensions, clamors, and exacerbated environmental problems, a counter force of environmental

34

Chapter 1

justice activism and environmental consciousness strongly and tenaciously have come out to be with the intention of hampering the industrial societies’ pervasive plunder of natural resources. The principal concentration of these environmental movements is, first of all, the protection of forests and the governments’ policy of forestry. As Barton underscores, during the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, “climate theories that explained how forest lands affected rainfall, along with soil preservation, water flow, animal life, and the preservation of a variety of forest flora and fauna made forestry the most pressing environmental issue” (Barton 2004, 9). However, in organizing societies to increase awareness about vegetal beings, the British and the American environmental movements and their ongoing campaigns, were, at first, motivated anthropocentrically to improve the well-being of universe for the maintenance of the future of human species on earth, but soon, evolved towards a more non-human oriented way of thinking. Such eco-centric view of the world, conceivably, enabled these two countries to take more revolutionary steps in shifting human perceptions of nonhuman beings away from nonliving, passive instruments of human prosperity towards active, intelligent, and self-conscious individuals, possessing their own inherent value. EMERGENCE OF THE BRITISH ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE RISE OF BOTANICAL STUDIES Although industrialization seems to have created the most extensive human-imposed devastating alteration in the world’s ecosystems, the Anthropocene-driven destruction of nature goes back to the Early Mesolithic Age, starting from “10,000 BP and lasts for about 1500 years” an era of hunter-gatherer societies before the emergence of capitalist economies (Simmons 2001, 32). The transformation of the native flora, in this age, was facilitated by the “human control of fire” causing the burning of “the abundant reed-beds” in the area of North Yorkshire (Simmons 2001, 37), as well as the opening of “clearings” within forests to create grazing areas for animals (Simmons 2001, 49). While the hunter-gatherer period gradually gave way to the agricultural system during the Middle Ages, the exploitation of forests and native plants gained a drastically dangerous turn with the expansion of human settlement on rural areas and the appearance of the small but constantly growing towns. With the advent of feudalism after Norman conquest, cutting of trees in royal forests to meet timber needs of the medieval societies was strictly prohibited by the forest law, the violation of which was resulted in terrible punishments including “blinding, emasculation, and death for violators” (Young 1979, 11). Quite interestingly, in the Middle Ages, the forest

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 35

and woodland came to be used as distinctively separate terms. Forest was not understood in the same sense of modern times, and could also refer to open pastures without trees, while woodlands would be thick with trees. Forests were secured by law as the private property of kings, “a hunting reserve for royalty” of Anglo-Norman kings while the woodlands were used as cultivated areas, “farming settlement” and rendered available to the use of villagers (Aberth 2013, 88). These woodlands were at the high risk of human misuse since their management was in the hands of monasteries and “small peasant farmers” who could “make way for arable and cultivated land” (Aberth 2013, 94). Accordingly, the rise of human populations and their settlement on land, the birth and the growing of towns, and the agricultural activities of humans all triggered an accumulated impact on human colonization and domestication of plants and finally caused deforestation by way of “clearing trees,” in other words, “making assarts” which were, most of the time, unreported and illegal (Williams 2006, 92). Charles Young specifically states that there was a dramatic decrease in the fields of woodlands between the years “1066 and 1086 in the four counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire. The areas where trees had been cut were left as waste, which would seem to indicate the cutting was for timber” (Yoıng 1979, 8). Likewise, Williams notes that: “Peasants nibbled away at the edges of the woodlands around the villages, and then the assart, or new clearing, would be added to the existing field system” (Williams 2006, 98). All in all, the medieval period stands at the critical juncture of the amendment of human relationship to plants, evolving quickly towards an anthropocentric conceptualization of trees as economic assets. Until the end of the sixteenth century, Simmons states that “monarchs were no longer fanatical about hunting and the greater value of their area [of forests] as timber reserves took precedence, for in 1608 it was calculated that there were 580,000 valuable timber specimens in Royal Forests” (Simmons 2001, 111). Humans’ exploitation of forests, trees, and plants for farming activities gains an increasingly dangerous momentum in the following periods, fostering the human-led conversion of the natural ecosystems and the destruction of forests. In his analysis of the global environmental changes during the early modern ages, Robert Marks notes that the “very act of removing forests through girdling, felling, and burning released carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, while the subsequent farming (especially of wet-rice paddy) and animal husbandry released large amounts of methane (CH4) into the atmosphere” (Marks 2015, 41). These are among the greenhouse gases which cause global warming when released into air, bearing testimony to how humans, since their existence on earth, have a disparaging influence on nature. When the British agricultural economy is converted into industrial economy from the eighteenth century onwards, the human impact, empowered by technological devices, is begun to be felt more stoutly as the

36

Chapter 1

damage humans made on nature concomitantly becomes more thoroughgoing and deeply rooted. At the pinnacle of industrial growth, the nineteenth-century Victorian Britain bears a strong witness to wide-ranging pernicious impacts of the environmental deterioration. While the increasing amount of factories, the development of manufacturing industry, and the use of coal energy are conceived as opportunities that provide economic prosperity and technological facilities for the Victorians, it is soon dismally discovered that the industrial expansion of Britain generates crucial environmental problems among which are over-population, pollution, and deforestation that drag the country rapidly into an untrammeled ecological devastation. Intolerably high proportion of carbon emissions, induced by chemical factories and acid rains, caused by “the combustion of coal”—one of the most important energy sources of the nineteenth-century industrial development—are held culpable for the toxic poisoning of plants, air, waters, as well as human beings (Clapp 1994, 23). Gradually, it became a more discernible perturbation for the Victorian society that the infusion of the burned coal into the air was brimming over Britain with “blackened skies, soot-covered buildings, filthy waterways and streets, and respiratory ailments directly attributable to the toxic atmosphere” (MacDuffie 2014, 26). As a consequence, Britain’s outstanding heritage of green landscape was undeviatingly dragged into an overall annihilation, leaving the whole country in smoke and supplanting the oxygen with carbon dioxide which was terribly toxic and an overwhelmingly suffocating for all the living organisms, human and nonhuman beings in the universe. Such a drastic transformation of Britain’s green countryside into grey urbanized centers, as anticipated, gives way to the increasing social and public disturbance which can be identified as preliminary awakenings of ecological consciousness about the depletion of resources, the problem of sustainability, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and other incalculable natural disasters, stemming from toxicity that threatens the health of the entire ecosystem. In defiance of these problems, the necessity of developing an ecologically sustainable world became the subject of heated debates in the nineteenth-century Victorian Britain. According to Wendy Parkins, “[i]t was the Victorians who first contemplated the widespread environmental despoliation brought by industrialization” (Parkins 2018, 1). In fact, Victorian society’s disquietude about environmental deterioration goes beyond a mere speculation and moves towards taking more tangible and deterrent actions in synchronization with the newly evolving political and scientific dialogues and negotiations about the cataclysmic effects of the industrialization upon the natural world. On behalf of grabbling with the problem of environmental crisis, Britain possesses the “earliest jurisdiction to encounter systematic industrial environmental threats with growth in chemical and other industries,

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 37

and urbanization” (Pontin 2007, 176). Apart from legislative concerns, more straightforward voices of scientists who outspokenly predict the results of unfettered acceleration of industrialization are also heard in the nineteenth century. Thomas Herbert Barker, for instance, is a medical scientist and surgeon who, in his famous book, Malaria and Miasmata (1863), warns against the effluence of soil with coal, which would culminate in the death of complete vegetative beings as “plants would be as little able to grow in such ground as they would if hydrated protoxide of iron were mixed with the soil” (Barker 1863, 20). It should, further, be noted that the widespread societal acknowledgment of the question of environmental pollution also reverberates with the political attentiveness, leading environmental issues to be treated as important political concern, demanding urgent solutions. Peter Thornsheim records that “[d]uring the closing decades of the nineteenth century people across the political spectrum asserted that efforts to increase the amount of ‘nature’ in urban areas were being hampered by the smoky air that enveloped and damaged the trees and plants they were trying to protect” (Thornsheim 2017, 34). These legislative and political discourses about the seriousness of environmental pollution, most assuredly, are expected to create a substantial transformation on the strongly established anthropocentric ideology of Victorian people by challenging the absolute authority of human beings to have the ultimate control of the natural world. It is gradually being understood that the Antropocenic intervention inscribes irremediable damages on the natural environment and the material universe, unfortunately, can longer provide an endless source of energy for human beings. The nineteenth- and the twentieth-century scientist and writer Arthur Ransome (1884–1967), for instance, unfolds the extensiveness of atmospheric pollution, threatening not only human life but also the whole non-human entities on earth and underpins the fact that the toxic smoke, produced by humans through industrial activities has reached into such an alarming level that all natural entities have been fatally effected and nature can no longer sustain itself. Ransome, further, draws attention to the endangered life of plants who are unable to purify the polluted air and claims that “destruction of plant-life, and the injury to human beings that occur where the air is loaded with these substances, show that something more is needed than Nature unaided is able to perform” (Ransome 1877, 60). As the only means of deterring the manufacturing factories from continuing to pollute the air, Ransome strongly advises to put “[l]egislation and vigilant inspection” into work (1877, 60). Intersecting human and plant life as essential units of an interdependent ecological system, the scientists of the Victorian period strive assiduously to illuminate all the segments of their reading public to help them attain an ecological awareness of plants as the one and only suppliers of clean air,

38

Chapter 1

indispensable for every living organism, including humans. Clapp, similarly, points to the period of 1838–54 that witnessed a “heavy loss of human life, some of it almost certainly attributable to atmospheric pollution” (Clapp 1994, 65). It is also considerably important that the scientific monitoring of the physical universe postulates humans and their economic activities as the most dangerous galvanizing factors of the environmental pollution while displaying the preservation of vegetal life as mandatory for the continuation of life on earth since plants are vitally significant elements of nature, capable of producing clean, healthy, and breathable air, which is not laden with poisonous acids and other pernicious substances. From this perspective, we can assume that the nineteenth-century Victorian society, thanks to the incessant endeavors of scientists, slowly but steadily incorporates a more plant-centered perception of universe which is expeditiously being destroyed by humans’ economic exploitation. Humans, for the first time, have come to realize that plants that have so far been largely ignored and overlooked are actually the most important components of the material universe. Likewise, the nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), defiantly highlights humans’ industrial activities and never-ending appetites for financial profit as deleterious undercurrents of the loss of green planet: Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; -every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it. (Mill 1966, 327–328)

Mill reprimands Victorian anthropocentric mentality which shows a vanquishing prone to surmount nature, destroy every naturally growing plant “as a weed” or uproot any tree that is perceived as “hedgerow or superfluous” with an ultimate purpose of utilizing, subduing, and transforming nature into a merchandise for human use either for agricultural or industrial development (Mill 1966, 327–328). Mill’s ecological and more specifically, plant consciousness allows him to see that no plant is useless but quintessential part of the natural ecosystem which is in an urgent need of preservation. Mill’s righteous denunciation of human beings is predominantly hinged upon

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 39

industrialization and its capitalist economic concerns about “the inordinate importance attached to the mere increase of production, and fixing attention upon improved distribution, and a large remuneration of labour” (Mill 1966, 329). Mill’s special focus on plant life is an overt manifestation of his acute awareness of the inextricable connectedness of humans and plants. Thus, he reacts against the diminishing of plant life into a simple raw material for human consumption and tries to restore inherent value of plants that play an irreplaceably key role in the perpetuation of nature’s ecosystem. Tantamount to Mill’s denunciation of a demeaning human attitude to plants and how readily plants are discarded if they are not utilized for human ends, John Ruskin (1819–1900), a social theorist and a philosopher, works strenuously to uncover the disastrous influence of industrialization on the disappearance of gardens, flowers, and diverse plant species in general. In a lecture delivered in 1859, John Ruskin addresses the problem of swift demolition of trees and gardens in Liverpool parallel to the rise of the city as one of the most important industrial centers of Britain. Behind Ruskin’s sarcastic overtone towards British political strategy of an accelerated industrialization, there lies a crucial admonition about the total annihilation of nature, as he underlines, [Y]our success absolute: that from shore to shore the whole of the island is to be set as thick with chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool: and there shall be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens; only a little corn grown upon the housetops, reaped and threshed by steam: that you do not leave even room for roads. (Ruskin 2007, 52)

The quotation above is infused with Ruskin’s environmental anxiety about the changing landscape of Liverpool with the construction of factories. The spotlighting of meadows, trees, and gardens, further, can be considered as the ratification of Ruskin’s critical concern with plants who are granted almost no space to exist and flourish on earth and easily forsaken for the modernized lifestyles and the economic improvement of human condition. It is apparent that Ruskin broods over the extensively ruinous impacts of exploitative human activities, heralding the Victorian period as the zenith of the Anthropocenic age where human-rooted changes on earth result in irredeemable defilements on the ecosystem by reducing plant diversity, accelerating deforestation and polluting the air and waters. Taylor expresses that, in England, at the end of the nineteenth century, there “was a novel ecosystem, a manufactured environment in which every scrap of ground and breath of air bore traces of human action” (Taylor 2016a, 1–2). Similarly, what is unfolded in Ruskin’s salient inspection of the natural environment is the evanescence of the pre-industrial affluence of plant vitality and multifariousness that are made impossible to be enlivened in a fully industrialized

40

Chapter 1

Anthropocenic age of Victorian Britain. Furthermore, recounting his visit to an old English cottage, Ruskin voices his disillusionment of discovering an old “garden, blighted utterly into a field of ashes, not even a weed taking root there” while at the distant hills, he beholds “the furnaces of the city foaming forth perpetual plague of sulphurous darkness; the volumes of their storm clouds coiling low over a waste of grassless fields, fenced from each other, not by hedges, but by slabs of square stone, like gravestones” (Ruskin 2007, 53). The grassless field to which Ruskin attracts attention in his speech points to the destruction of pastures, uprooting of all trees, removing native plants, and cultivating land for the agricultural activities. Ruskin’s inspection, in fact, lays bare how the Victorian society constructed an extremely instrumental and a highly economic relationship to the vegetal world that depends on treating plants as simple manufacturing products for the agricultural industry instead of striving to build a more sustainable, ethical, and spiritual relationship with plants as living organisms. Apart from Ruskin’s struggle for subsidizing a new public awareness about the protection of pastures against the industrial farming practices which jeopardize the floral heterogeneity of lands, William Morris (1834–1896) exhorts against the “utilitarian agriculture” which makes “the landscape hideous” and eclipses the “beauty of trees and fields” (2012, 259). Similar to Ruskin, Morris ardently endeavors to enliven environmental consciousness about the necessity of sustaining green spaces and insists that “[t]here must be abundant garden space in our towns, and our towns must not eat up the fields and natural features of the country; nay, I demand even that there be left waste places and wilds in it” (Morris 2012, 209). Morris calls for the conservation of the wildlife in defiance of “the Barbarism of civilization” and “monstrous system of competitive Commerce” (Morris 2012, 204), and further reiterates that “no one for instance to be allowed to cut down, for mere profit, trees whose loss would spoil a landscape” (Morris, 2012, 210). Warning against the catastrophic outcomes of attributing commercial value to natural entities, Morris underpins the capitalist economy’s commodifying trees for profit-making industries as an inordinate threat to the survival of the ecosystem. The mitigation of “the sordidness of civilized town life,” Morris suggests, can only be possible with “the public acquirement of parks and other open spaces, planting of trees, establishment of free libraries” (2012, 264). By conjoining libraries and trees as necessary requirements of a civilized life, Morris exposes the groundlessness of a nature-culture duality and displays the possibility of burgeoning modern civilizations in harmony with the healthful proliferation of plants instead of eradicating them. In his search for an alternatively new human relationship with plants, Morris expresses his deep confidence in the prolongation of a human culture in collaboration—not in collision—with plants, burgeoned upon more democratic principles which

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 41

are devoted to pursue the interests of all participants rather than focusing on the one-sided interests of humans. The focal point of all these, scientific, political, and philosophical debates of the nineteenth-century Britain is to draw attention to the precarious correlation between the hasty growth of the urban spaces and the equally hurried shrinking of green spaces and the elimination of plant populations. What is persistently accentuated by Ransome, Ruskin, Mill, and Morris is that pastures, trees, plants, and vegetal life in its entirety should not be perceived functionally as raw materials that can be manufactured in factories. Such instrumental view of vegetation, as Ransome, Ruskin, Mill, and Morris opine, imperils the prospect of plant diversity at an unprecedented scale while, correspondingly, making it impossible for humans to survive in a universe, surrounded by concrete buildings instead of green plants. To this end, these writers along with many other prominent scientists and scholars of the nineteenth century indefatigably stress the essential role of plants in cleansing air and providing a habitable world for human and nonhuman beings. Notwithstanding the fact that the main intention of these scholars is altogether an anthropocentric motivation to ensure the healthy flourishing of human life, their contribution in prompting a broad-spectrum shift of human perception towards a deeper understanding of the significance of plants in human life is noteworthy and should be considered as a fundamentally rudimentary steps en route to contriving a pervasive plant consciousness in their societies. Accordingly, a widely accepted anthropocentric assumption that human beings stand all alone as the unique and all powerful investor of the nature market is eventually observed, in the nineteenth century, to be giving way to an interconnected system of thinking with a proclivity to perceive the whole universe not as a linear system of hierarchical power relations, vested on the atrocious violation of nature by an absolute human authority but as a complex network of mutual interactions and interdependencies between the myriad entities of nature. In this regard, a radical distortion of the qualified inhalable air directs human attention towards an evaluation of human-plant relationship and the possibility of recovering intercommunication between them. The Victorian society has, finally, come to notice that the neglected plant life is, in fact, intimately dovetailed with human life. In addition, an unavoidably growing interest in plants generates an exceptional curiosity about the complexity and sophisticated agency of plant life as well as invigorating the popularization of botanical writings. In particular, George Bentham’s Handbook of The British Flora in 1858 grows out of its author’s undertaking to instruct the British public about the flora of Britain by offering “the means of determining (i.e. ascertaining the name of) any plant growing, whether for the purpose of ulterior study or of intellectual exercise” (Bentham 1887, xi, emphasis in the original). Flora is defined by Bentham as

42

Chapter 1

“all the wild or native plants contained in the country in question, so drawn up and arranged that the student may identify with the corresponding description any individual specimen which he may gather” (Bentham 1887, xi). With a faithful dedication to provide an extremely detailed scientific information about each plant growing in the soils of Britain, Bentham assures his readers that “[f]or descriptions to be clear and readily intelligible, they should be expressed as much as possible in ordinary well-established language” (Bentham 1887, xi). Through his book, Handbook of The British Flora, Bentham aims at transmitting his fascination with the vegetal kingdom to his readers by providing them with a detailed information about Britain’s native plants, flowers, trees, grasses, mosses, and fungi. Bentham’s book is concrete evidence showing that plants are no longer seen as something passive, insignificant, and unwanted weeds needed to be dominated and controlled but they are perceived as biological organisms whose unknown complexity requires dedicated scientific research and a distinctive field of botany. Apart from Bentham, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) are, undeniably, two groundbreaking biologists who look for the ways of seeing the world from a distinctive plant perspective to discover what are plants’ interests and purposes of life. Darwin, in his book, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), concentrates on proving the existence of intentional agency in plants who are dynamically active in moving and altering their positions and aptly developing new tactics in concert with their changing physical conditions. Elaborating on the agency of flower-head, Darwin underlines that an “efficient agency comes into play” enabling the “aborted flowers” to “curve up towards the penduncle” (Darwin 1880, 517). Darwin has such a powerful belief in the agential capacity of plants that he never differentiates plants from animals in terms of mobility and agency and unhesitatingly compares a plant’s agency to an animal agency and says that: “The aborted flowers thus act something like the hands of the mole, which force the earth backwards and the body forwards” (Darwin 1880, 517). In the same vein, Haeckel in 1899, dauntlessly confronts the mechanical view of plants and firmly entrenches the view that there must be something in plant agency “which cannot be at all explained mechanically, but which must owe its origin necessarily to a higher, supernatural creative power, acting for a definite purpose” (Haeckel 2018, 21). Replacing the mechanical perception of nature with that of the organic and dynamic universe where human, animal, and plant lives are all interrelated to each other, these scholars profoundly activate the establishment of a new plant-centered view of the world which necessitates relinquishing of old exclusionary behaviors and adopting an integrative and all-embracing approach to animate and inanimate entities of nature. Significantly enough, the exponential rate of the belligerent human expansion on the planet has a co-concurrently blistering influence on the eradication

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 43

of nonhuman existence. The irretrievable extirpation of the green earth, comprising diverse plant species, native forests, and tree populations are expeditiously and ominously bringing an ecological Armageddon on a global scale since it has been, so far, understood that environmental devastation does not recognize any political, geographical, cultural, or national boundaries. As the functioning of nature’s intricate design is contingent upon the protraction of the interconnectivity between its diversely heterogeneous and interdependent natural bodies, the distortion of this ecosystemic balance inexorably puts the future of planet at risk not merely in Britain but in all over the world. At the upsurge of industrialization and urbanization during the nineteenth century, the Anthropocenic threats and the adversity of pruning away human impact on the environment have largely given rise to overwhelming troubles for other transatlantic countries. AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AND PLANT CONSCIOUSNESS Pioneered by Great Britain during the mid eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, industrialization turns out to be a sweeping power of economic expansion and growing market economies throughout the world during the twentieth century. The United States, most definitely, holds a fundamental position in implementing the industrial technologies extensively and developing its economy. Without showing any sign of deceleration, the nineteenth-century industrialization is bequeathed by the twentieth-century modernism during which cracking down the calcified dividing lines between humans and natural entities become more alarmingly difficult while the human negligence of the escalating environmental devastation persists. In an effort to recover from the turbulence brought about by the First World War, the global countries are confronted with the problem of finding new energy resources for their growing industries. Particularly, the 1920s, Martinez observes, “witnessed enormous increases in demand for automobiles, electricity, and agricultural commodities” (Martinez 2014, 172). To meet these never-ending demands, industrial companies plunge in a high-speed process of production to “churn out record numbers of cars as well as build additional electric-generating power plants and cut down forests” (Martinez 2014, 172). Cities were overcrowded and became industrial centers, leaving little space for vegetal beings to sprout while making it difficult for humans to inhale breathable clean air. Parallel to London in the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh, in the nineteenth century was considered to be the “epicenter of the iron and steel industry” and was called “‘the Smoky City’” (Taylor 2016b, 42). The coal industry was the major cause of pollution, threatening the environment

44

Chapter 1

along with the public health. As Taylor argues, “coal dust coated and corroded building and statues, irritated the eyes and lungs, and resulted in increased incidence of pulmonary diseases” (Taylor 2016b, 42). This rapid industrialization unfortunately has required contemporary societies to be structured around the urbanized living areas and imposed on them a consumerist lifestyle, providing them with little or no opportunity at all to get in genial contact with the green world. Apart from minimizing humans’ physical contiguity with plant beings, industrialization has also endorsed the expansion of commodity markets to ensure the production and the distribution of the mass amount of products and satisfy the artificially created needs and desires of consumer cultures. However, satiating these immeasurable needs and desires, generated by the capitalism and the consumer culture seem to be possible only at the expense of green world that is used and depleted as a resource for the sustenance of heavily industrialized economies. Plant populations, especially old-growth forests, turn out to be the most disastrously affected, vulnerable victims of the industrial development that is configured as “vast, ravenous, never-satiated machine that devours an ever-increasing quantity of natural resources” (Martinez 2014, 14). As Paul Wapner underlines, during the nineteenth century colonialism, “rainforests were converted to tea, cotton, and sugarcane plantations to feed the growing appetites of those in metropole” while in the United States and Europe, “railroads opened up whole new tracts of land and intensified ongoing deforestation” (Wapner 2010, 44). Such an extensive loss of forested areas, as a consequence, has led the government authorities to take urgent legislative precautions. For instance, in 1891 the first “federal Forest Reserve Act was passed” by President Benjamin Harrison with the aim of protecting woods and forests and prohibit the cutting of trees for timber industry (Brulle 2000, 150). With his taking serious governmental measures to prevent the total extermination of forests, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) is considered to be “the first American president to protect U.S. forests from timber interests using his bully pulpit” (Martinez 2014, 58). His contributions to the conservation of wilderness areas and the construction of “national parks” are acknowledged to be an environmentally responsible action in spite of the fact that his motives are purely instrumental, featuring him as a figure of “nature-loving anthropocentrist” (Martinez 2014, 58). The conservation policy of Theodore Roosevelt encompasses the “wise use of natural resources in rural areas by creating bureaus like the Reclamation Service in 1902, and the U.S. Forest Service in 1905” (Maher 2008, 187). Likewise, his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt had developed similar attentiveness to the environmental deterioration, believed in the necessity of forging more intimate human-nature relationship and “established a popular program that also put unemployed urban men to work in rural areas” (Maher

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 45

2008, 12). To prevent deforestation, Roosevelt “supervised the planting of a few thousand trees in 1912 and continued an annual planting regimen until his death in 1945” (Maher 2008, 21). Besides, cherished for being the first American environmentalist, who implores the American public to pay more serious attention to the forceful replacement of the natural environment with the Anthropocenic age, George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) specifies humans as the most hazardous factor in accentuating the loss of native forests. Being a “senator and statesman from Vermont,” Marsh promotes a co-evolution of human and plant life by conditioning humans’ prosperity and happiness on a degree of their intimacy with plants (Taylor 2016b, 265). In Man and Nature, published in 1864, Marsh complains about the scarcity of scientific research that analyzes how nature is affected by humans’ destructively transformative activities and asserts that “man has reacted upon organized and inorganic nature, and thereby modified, if not determined, the material structure of his earthly home” (Marsh 1864, 8). An undeniably significant feature of Marsh’s environmentalism lies in his developing a keen eye for seeing the natural universe from a botanical perspective that enables him to comprehend the necessity of preservation of “unbroken forests” in which old trees die and fall naturally one by one while the new saplings grow naturally, a perfect ecological system which ensures that forests could live for centuries without human interruption (Marsh 1864, 28). He, further, argues that it is almost impossible for insects or other natural causes to destroy native forests since they have their own ecosystems, protecting the health of trees and “those which perforate the stems and braches, to deposit and hatch their eggs, more commonly select dead trees for that purpose” (Marsh 1864, 32). Marsh, moreover, highlights the calamitous role of human beings on deforestation and says that: I do not know that we have any evidence of the destruction or serious injury of American forests by insects, before or even soon after the period of colonization; but since the white man has laid bare a vast proportion of the earth’s surface, and thereby produced changes favorable, perhaps, to the multiplication of these pests, they have greatly increased in numbers, apparently, in voracity also . . . In such cases as this and others of the like sort, there is good reason to believe that man is the indirect cause of an evil for which he pays so heavy a penalty. (Marsh 1864, 32–33)

Finger-pointing humans as the ultimate cause of deforestation, Marsh reminds that the essential responsibility of humans is to “become a co-worker with nature” in “reclothing the mountain slopes with forests and vegetable mould” (Marsh 1864, 35). The ethical standards of humans’ aesthetic values, according to Marsh, are determined by incorporating plants into almost every stage

46

Chapter 1

of human life. In this respect, he persuades the farmers in Vermont to “plant shade trees around their buildings” in order to improve the architectural structure of their buildings, make them aesthetically more appealing, and leave a more beautiful world for the next generations (Taylor 2016b, 266). In addition to Marsh, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1853–1882) is one of the most outstanding transcendental philosophers who emphasize the spiritual significance of the natural world in human life. American environmental movement is, essentially, associated with the transcendental movement which is a philosophy of life appearing as a reaction to America’s violently invasive strategy of industrial development. Overthrowing humans’ materialist relationship to the natural world, transcendentalism tries to construct a more reciprocal human-nature engagement in such a way that nature “was not subordinate to them [humans], but instead nature was the other part of a symbiotic relationship” (Baratta 2012, 1). Gravely concerned with how industrial activities inflict irrecoverable damages on natural environment, transcendental writers have a strong belief in the spiritually curing power of nature over individuals living in the modern industrial societies, who are kept apart from the opportunity of forming a deep emotional interaction with nature. Aside from striving for the mass transformation of the society by the implementation of social reforms, transcendental writers also focus on creating a consciousness on the individual level by changing the perception of humans towards nature which should be seen not as an object to be abused but as a sacred living entity, deserving an utmost respect. The pioneer of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson has a strong passion for the natural world and promotes living in nature amidst wilderness instead of living a life of entrapment in urbanized city centers. He sturdily argues for the ethical standing of nature and advocates a harmonious co-evolution of human and plants in opposition to the capitalist industry’s objectification and brutal exploitation of nature. Every natural entity, for Emerson, has a sacred value on its own and a moral standing. “The moral law lies at the center of nature” purports Emerson, and in this respect, the “chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants” are all “sacred emblem[s]” of the universe (Emerson 1950, 23, “Nature”). Emerson’s insights are derived from a biological understanding of a universe which is an organic whole. According to this view, humans are not distinct from but integral parts of nature, and hence, positioning humans in opposition to nature is an insubstantial ideology that needs to be shifted. Humans are inseparably embedded in nonhuman world where there is an inter-related system of universe in which everything is connected to everything else. Emerson adopts a holistic view of nature and believes that the human self cannot divorce itself from “the unity of Nature-the unity in variety-which meets us everywhere” (Emerson 1950, 24, “Nature”). Humans’ distancing themselves from the rest of nature, according to Emerson, originates from their ethical degeneration

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 47

which he expresses in the following words: “As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house [nature] is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God” (Emerson 1950, 36, “Nature”). Humans’ detachment from the natural world impedes them to grasp the complexity of the material universe and recognize its inner dynamics as well as the inherent worth of plants and animals. As a result, humans are prone to develop a diminishing attitude to plants and animals instead of embracing their complexity as a sign of incessant animism and dynamism of the world. Emerson exemplifies human blindness of the natural world and writes that: “We do not understand the notes of birds . . . We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine” (Emerson 1950, 36, “Nature”). It should specifically be underlined that Emerson perceives the natural universe as “intelligible,” vibrant whole embedded with meanings while human is an inexperienced “pupil” of nature as the embodiment of wisdom (Emerson 1950, 26, “Nature”). Plants and animals, in this regard, are intelligible beings who have quite developed self-consciousness and awareness of their physical environment. Moreover, in outlining the determining features of a poet, Emerson states that a poet should be sufficiently capable of “unlocking, at all risks, his human doors” and letting himself “caught up into the life of the Universe,” then “his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals” (Emerson 1950, 332 “The Poet”). While nonhuman rationality is envisaged by Emerson to be unquestionably the most apparent manifestation of the material universe, human rationality is presented as a relatively dubious provision. Emerson, here, conditions the intelligibility of humans on their willingness to open themselves into the rest of the universe and nonhuman beings living in it, who long for closer intimacy with their surrounding and thus, render themselves comprehensible to humans. Humans can achieve their own sense of completeness and intelligence only after they can understand their own existence in their relatedness to the outside universe. Therefore, in Emerson’s outlook, animal and plant intelligibility are not questionable issues while human intelligence depends on the level of humans’ capacity to conceive the meaningfulness of the universe. A similar induction about the interconnectedness of man and nature is made by another landmark figure of American transcendentalism, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) who articulates his ecological concern about the protection of wilderness by stating that: “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him” (Thoreau 2002, 76, “Walking”). Unsettling the dualistic and anthropocentric impositions on nature / culture, wild / civilized, and human / nature distinctions, Thoreau advocates human-nature enmeshment by confronting industrialization and its perilous propensity to destroy nature and substitute it with highly advanced machines of human technology and a mechanical

48

Chapter 1

lifestyle. Thoreau puts forward the probability of generating a human culture which is not in opposition to nature but evolves out of and co-extensively with nature. “Give me a culture,” Thoreau writes, “which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements” (2002, 84, “Walking”). In shattering the discriminatory lines of nature / culture distinction, Thoreau, in fact, emphasizes humans’ inextricable relatedness to wilderness and the necessity of building a civilization that is internally connected to nature and wilderness. Interweaving wilderness with human progress, culture, and civilization, Thoreau reveals his recognition of humans’ innate bond of kinship with nature as well as envisioning humans not as masters but as equal partners among the multiplicity of the nonhuman members of the universe. Feeling a deep sense of physical and spiritual immersion in forests and woods which he describes as his “‘best’ room” and his “withdrawing room,” Thoreau, in his famous work Walden, reinforces the moral significance of every plant species and dives deep into the potentialities of an annealing communion with plants (Thoreau 2004, 141). In speculating about “the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds,” Thoreau exhibits a commemorative ethical subtlety of striving not to destroy “their [weeds] delicate organization so ruthlessly” (Thoreau 2004, 161). What is so gratifying about Thoreau is his attempt to extend the ethical focus beyond humans to embrace plants and other natural entities so that every single element of nature is considered to be morally significant and deserve a maximum adoration. Giving the first priority to forests, woods, and plants, Thoreau is unwaveringly dedicated to removing humans’ plant blindness that hinders them from recognizing the vital, yet, neglected presence of plants in human life. Thoreau’s thoughtful observation of human ignorance of plants provides an evocative insight to the significant role that plants play in human life. Uttering his utmost astonishment that a person “shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head, and cannot be said to know that they exist,” Thoreau prescribes for his society a more responsible action and a caring behavior for plants who should be perceived as living agents and the most intimate friends of humans (Thoreau 2002, 115, “Autumnal Tints”). Thoreau’s plant awareness is revealed in an anecdote of his personal experience in which he regrets that he has not noticed the beautiful flowers growing in the street that he has passed before so many times. He confesses that: “[I] never yet distinctly recognized these purple companions that I had there. I had brushed against them and trodden on them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and blessed me” (2002, 115 “Autumnal Tints”). In his urgent call for the preservation of vegetal diversity, Thoreau, on the one hand, wages a fervent war against the aggressive industrial policies and economic activities while, on the other hand, he underscores the prerequisite of educating the

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 49

society to resolve people’s plant negligence which he specifies with a striking statement that “the rising generation in this town do not know what an oak or pine is” (Thoreau 2002, 200 “Huckleberries”). Thoreau, additionally, points out his disturbance about the contemporary society’s inconsistent attitude to the preservation of forests and asks a thought-provoking question: “Shall we hire a man to lecture on botany, on oaks for instance, our noblest plants, while we permit others to cut down the few best specimens of these trees that are left?” (Thoreau 2002, 200 “Huckleberries”). Thoreau answers his own question by summoning up more effectual activism and the awakening of public consciousness about the significance of trees by ensuring that “each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons” but should be allowed to grow and decay naturally and be the authentic, natural showcase for the next generations (Thoreau 2002, 201 “Huckleberries”). Thoreau and Emerson’s supervisions on how to attain the integrity of a human’s self-identity in relation to, not apart from nature, project a guiding light for the next generations of American society and contemporary environmental movements. However, the wholesale impact of the environmental pollution and annihilation reach into more disastrous levels with the development of the nuclear and the biological war technologies during the Second World War and the Cold War that have brought mass destruction to humans, plants, and animals by igniting prevalent environmental problems like the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere and toxic poisoning. The outrageous statistical information about the huge degree of radioactivity release during nuclear testing programs is provided by Leaning who remarks that the “testing phase of nuclear weapons included 423 atmospheric tests (conducted from 1945 to 1957) and about 1400 underground tests (from 1957 to 1989)” (Leaning 2000, 1157). Among the irreversibly injurious effects of the use of these nuclear weapons, as Leaning writes, are the “bombardment of cities and the destruction of forests, farms, transport systems and irrigation networks during World War II” (Leaning 2000, 1158). In conjunction with this perilous competition of world countries, testing and developing their technologies of nuclear weapons, other chemicals like DDT have come to be extensively used in agricultural industries to increase soil productivity. These chemicals, promoted as “miracle chemicals,” incinerate the diversity of life in soil by killing all the microorganisms in it (Egan 2007, 2). The revolutionary agricultural methods, aiming voraciously to reach maximum harvesting levels by exploiting the earth, as Eagan argues, “led to an outpouring of polluting technologies, which contributed to what may be regarded as tragic tableau of the Progressive Era that humans could infinitely shape and dominate environment” (Egan 2007, 2).

50

Chapter 1

Concurrently, American society’s environmental awareness considerably rises as a reaction to the post-war nuclear era’s constantly prospering industry, capitalist market economy, and technology which altogether promote the incorporation of plastics, synthetics, and innumerable chemicals into human life. Unadulterated efforts of the nineteenth-century environmental activists promisingly find an ardent expression in the twentieth-century social movements and the campaigns of environmental protection. The eco-centric premises of these campaigns entail more ethical focus on the scientific perception of the material universe, pursuing not just the preservation of the natural world for instrumental human interests, but a more sustainable and harmonious human-nature relationship by shifting the hierarchical borderlines between them. Remarkably, Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) emerges as the most influential ecologist, conservationist, and environmental philosopher of the twentieth century during which the capitalist exploitation of nature and the industrial conquest of the wildlife gain a larger momentum. In his trailblazing book, A Sand County Almanac published posthumously in 1949, Leopold commences to explain his scientific theorem, pertaining to environmental problems not from a preservationist but an ethical standpoint and recurrently emphasizes the urgency of changing humans’ anthropocentric perception of the natural world by helping them see the internal connectedness of humans to nonhuman world. By fostering the moral dimensions of human-nature entanglement, Leopold aims at showing the disastrous consequences of the instrumental relationship that humans have set up between themselves and nature. “Conversation is getting nowhere,” Leopold claims, as long as humans persist in deeming nature as “commodity belonging to us” rather than “a community to which we belong” (Leopold 1949, viii). Leopold, in his famous book, offers invaluable instructions for safeguarding the biological diversity in nature by inducing ethically accountable action from humans. In Leopold’s own words, the universe is in an urgent need of an overarching “land ethic” which “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (Leopold 1949, 204). Among the miscellaneous ecological problems that the author enunciates in his book, plants hold an essential place, reflecting Leopold’s exquisite care for plant kingdom. In his book, Leopold appeals directly to the commonsense and consciousness of his readers by forcing them to face with the irreversible damages done by the human species to plant populations. Leopold questions humans’ authorial power over plants and blames them for assuming that human species are invested with the “divine functions of creating and destroying plants” (Leopold 1949, 67). He argues that the drastic changes inflicted on the physical nature in the name of human progress and civilization carves the inevitable way for larger-scale plant destruction. Elaborating on the plant blindness of American farmers who have absolutely

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 51

no knowledge of the flora growing on their land, Leopold propounds two alternative options that are “either insure the continued blindness of the populace, or examine the question whether we cannot have both progress and plants” (Leopold, 1949, 47). The species interaction and the interconnected evolution of each species in the biotic network system are arresting topics that are tightly entwined with Leopold’s vast botanical knowledge about vegetal history that may evidently be substantiated all throughout his book. In particular, his scientific skill of reading the history of a fallen oak tree by a close scrutiny of the rings on the tree trunk is worthy of mention. After identifying a tree trump which “has a diameter of 30 inches,” displaying “80 growth rings,” Leopold anticipates the exact age of the tree by saying that “the seedling from which it originated must have laid its first ring of wood in 1865, at the end of the Civil War” (Leopold 1949, 6). On this account, The Sand County Almanac is a groundbreaking work which reveals Leopold’s ecological perspective of the universe that is directed towards appreciating the diversity of plant and animal species through the prolongation of the inter-species entanglement. He confirms this interactive co-flourishing of species by noting that the “old prairie lived by the diversity of its plants and animals, all of which were useful because the sum total of their co-operations and competitions achieved continuity” (Leopold 1949, 107). While Leopold’s seminal book, Sand County Almanac, during the 1950s, is ubiquitously credited with the burgeoning of ethical environmental movement in the face of aggressive growth of industrialization, the more substantial challenge to the overexploitation of nature comes after the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson’s (1907–1964) trailblazing book, Silent Spring in 1962 which has stimulated a great social upheaval and environmental activism in the society. Silent Spring, in fact, is a science book, evading scientific discourse, addressing to a general audience, and thereby, written in a plain language in order to be understood by everyone. Carson, in her book, wages an avid war against the use of chemicals, DDT, pesticides, and herbicides which are poisoning soil, plants, animals, and other living organisms as well as dismantling the functioning of the whole ecosystem. As Michael Egan underpins, “Rachel Carson had been effective in articulating grounds for a passionate oppositions to pesticides in addition to her scientific argument, which had made that issue pivotal to the growth of 1960 environmentalism” (Egan 2007, 89). The reverberating influence of Carson’s book with its immediate call for social and political action against chemical use has soon extended beyond the United States, invigorating a sweeping public activism across the world. The revolutionary book of Carson has challenged the strongly established idea of technology as a means to progress, and thus, ignited a widespread disturbance in the public. Silent Spring has become a milestone in the development of the modern environmental movement by

52

Chapter 1

warning people against the widespread perils of the use of chemicals, and proving, for the first time, that these chemicals promoted by capitalist companies with the aim of harvesting maximum profit from agricultural activities, are actually as dangerous as nuclear wars which have the potential to annihilate a great number of human and nonhuman species at one time. In Carson’s words these chemicals “accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter and alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends” (Carson 1962, 8). Carson proclaims that from the outset of “mid-1940s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern world as ‘pests’” (Carson 1962, 7). Unrestrained use of these chemicals become so widespread that it is almost impossible not to come across with a single living being, human or nonhuman who is not exposed to the toxic influence of these chemicals. What is more hazardous is the fact that since the ecosystemic balance is distorted by the use of these pesticides; it has become more difficult to cope with the disproportional increase of unwanted insects that destroy vegetation. Lamenting the loss of native vegetation in some part of the United States during the past few decades, Carson writes that: A generation or more ago, the towns of large areas of the United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with complete destruction as disease sweeps through the elms, carried by a beetle that would have only limited chance to build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the elms were only occasional trees in a richly diversified planting. (Carson 1962, 10)

Carson’s deep anxiety in this quotation proceeds from immeasurable human impact on the natural environment triggering the spread of fatal diseases among plants and her concern about the native plant populations that are destroyed and replaced by new plantations, consisting mostly of imported exotic plants. Carson captures a great public enthrallment by presenting her ideas with statistical and scientific evidences. For instance, she asserts that: “The United States Office of Plant Introduction has alone introduced almost 200,000 species and varieties of plants from all over the world” (Carson 1962, 11). So, almost “half of the 180” harmful insects that the farmers are fighting against are mostly “accidental imports from abroad” travelling on plant bodies (Carson 1962, 11). Carson’s environmental struggle is hinged on the rubric of an interconnected system of universe where the “earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals” (Carson 1962, 64). Hence, no matter

Plant Sensitivity and Environmental Movement in Britain and the United States 53

how hard humans try to keep themselves outside of this interconnected system, Carson argues, they are part of this system so much so that “chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests, or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one another in a chain of poisoning and death” (Carson 1962, 6). The inevitable outcome of these intensive pesticide and herbicide usage is that these chemicals now “occur in mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child” with a capacity of changing humans’ genetic codes and causing a dangerous growth in genetic disorders and diseases (Carson 1962, 16). The common assumption that can be deduced from the writings of all these philosophers, biologists, and botanists is that plants, comprising the majority of the world’s ecosystems and yet, receiving the least attention, are the most severely and expansively affected by industrial enterprises and commercial policies both in the Great Britain and the United States, two pioneering countries, playing decisive roles in the world’s industrial development and economic activities. Transcending the national, political, and geographical borders, these industrial threats to plant populations inexorably became a global problem. As Corlett argues, “major threats to plant diversity include habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation, overexploitation, invasive species, pollution, and anthropogenic climate change. Conservation of plant diversity is a massive task if viewed globally” (Corlett 2016, 10). Hence, it seems clear that both British and American environmental movements embody a great social responsibility to plant populations of the world, carrying within themselves an ecological consciousness of plants’ being lively organisms and indispensible members of the planet unlike the traditional anthropocentric assumptions of their being passive objects. The operation of these campaigning mechanisms is anchored upon producing comprehensive changes in individual, societal, as well as political planes by appointing divergent social dynamics for the maintenance of a multifaceted transformation and collective behavioral patterns towards plants and other natural entities. Defeating anthropocentric mindsets is admittedly not an effortless task but these environmental justice movements, no matter how their anthropocentric rationales serve to the ultimate good of human life, still have played undeniably important roles in harnessing exploitative human attitude to the natural world by delineating humans as part of nature, not apart from it, and forcing them to face with the consequences of their abuse of natural resources which would eventually affect their own life. It is quite natural that the biological concept of plant vitality and agency reverberates in the works of artists on account of the fact that every writer or a poet is a product of his or her own age. Hence, a plant-oriented poetic vision seems to be relatively—although not frequently—appropriated in the works of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, venturing to encourage thinking

54

Chapter 1

in terms of companionship and symbiosis with plants and attempting to dethrone the grounds of human exceptionality. Within this frame of reference, Thomas Hardy, a British poet writing his poems during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries and Sylvia Plath, a mid-twentieth-century American poet, centralize plants in their poetry and are faithfully dedicated to redefining human-plant relationship, based on reciprocity, not on domination. In this regard, Hardy and Plath play significantly leading roles in their own epochs and societies in the advancement of the new ecological knowledge systems, trying to replace the anthropocentric ideologies with eco-centric and plant-friendly thoughts. Above and beyond all, these two poets contribute, to a great extent, to the shift of the public opinion about the concept of plant passivity, and objectivity by replacing it with that of plant dynamism, subjectivity, and intelligence. Human-plant engagement in Hardy and Plath’s poetry, which will be the prevailing subject of the next chapter, conjoins humans and plants on common grounds of biological and spiritual kinship, friendship, showing the possibility of constructing meaningful interactivity and communication with each other. Creation of a wonderful harmony between human and plant individuals without erasing their distinctive individuality seem to the common goal of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath who are both infatuated by the sophisticated patterns of plant behavior, the wisdom, and the cognitive capacities of plants.

Chapter 2

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

Within the theoretical frame of critical plant studies, this chapter is concerned with Hardy and Plath’s diligent attempts to build social and literary awareness of the biological and emotional affinity between humans and plants. The importance of this chapter lies in its venture to bring a new perspective of a recently arising critical plant theory to the poetry of Hardy and Plath who wrote during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where the industrial activities and capitalist development were advancing at a breakneck speed. Preliminary to the emergence of a particular literary movement which is specifically directed towards contriving attentiveness and evoking more self-accountability to plants, the poetry of Hardy and Plath is originally committed to recovering the lost connection between humans and plants by depicting pernicious results of humans’ exploitative attitude towards plants and eliciting respect for plants. Hardy and Plath’s hankering to bring human and plant beings together by spotlighting the unnoticed continuities between them can be interpreted as quite an innovative and dis-anthropocentric objective which seems to be left in the shadow of the mainstream that is characterized by a modern and mechanical lifestyle, brought about by the consumerist economies and cultures. Both Hardy and Plath’s treatment of plants work on a grander scale than their predecessors by drawing a crucial attention to the fact that humans’ infliction of damage on plant populations on earth arises from a dichotomous and anthropocentric conceptualization of plants as absolutely different, inferior, and separate from human beings. A dramatic rupture between the ferroconcrete world of humans imposed by modernism and the rest of shrunken plant world has culminated in the oblivion of human’s internal compatibility with the green world in their daily practices, customs, social and cultural activities, as well in the public 55

56

Chapter 2

consciousness. Scholars from diverse interdisciplinary fields of science and humanities put forward compelling arguments, cautioning against the eradicating power of humans over plant kingdom that carves the way for “large changes in biodiversity and loss of species as a result of human modification of natural landscapes, particularly conversion of forests and savannahs into agropastoral uses” (Moran 2005, 3). This upsurge of the creation of ecological awareness on the significance of plants seems to reverberate across nations and disciplines and becomes an effective catalyst for literary studies and critical theories, focusing on the nature of human-plant relationship which is dogmatically defined by the marginalization of plants from the nexus of literary concern. The coalescence of poetic imagination with botanical understanding of plants gives credit to a more intensified concentration on the representation of plants in literature, designating a distinguished type of plant poetics which aims to raise consciousness about the inter-connectedness of humans and plants rather than their separateness. Moreover, the growth of a multidisciplinary field of critical plants studies has contributed a lot to the burgeoning of studies, focusing on “scientific, philosophical, and artistic human creations to the materiality of the vegetal, a reality reflecting our symbiosis with oxygen-producing beings” (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira 2017, x). For capturing and preserving this symbiotic connectivity between the cultural domain of humans and the vegetative world, it is essential to remove plants “from their current status as marginalized oppressed beings in need of liberation, to a central, redemptive role within the framework of a social and civilizational transformation” (Winter 2019, 16). The cultural neglect of plants issued by the inadequacy of humans’ plant knowledge comes out to be the rudimentary mainspring in the splinter of human-plant interaction and communication. Notwithstanding the human struggle to postulate humanism and its highly esteemed principles over everything, the structural dynamics of the material universe operate through, in Haraway’s words, a system of “material–semiotic relating” of human and nonhuman beings who come to exist in the world through their “intra-action” with diverse species other than their own (Haraway 2008, 71). Within this complicated network of intra-activity, each individual species can come into being only through a mutual entanglement with the other species, and as human beings “we are in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down” (Haraway 2008, 42). As Barad emphasizes, “‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement” (Barad 2007, 33). All living and nonliving organisms, natural and cultural structures, animals, humans, plants, bacteria, and even “technologies” attain a meaningful existence in the world through their entangled performances with each other (Haraway 2008, 41). Within this co-constitutive

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

57

mattering of the universe, humans and plants are co-shapers of each other who can never escape from being mutually involved in the ongoing intra-activity of the universe. Therefore, it is a completely a vain attempt for humans to keep themselves separate from this somatic entanglement of the heterogeneously diversified, pulsating organisms, undergoing an incessant process of change and transformation as an inevitable outcome of this physical intermingling and permeability. If humans can overcome their anthropocentric obstacles and plant blindness, they can quite clearly see that the human body itself is not except from this interpenetration. It requires an awareness of plant beings to comprehend that at every instance of our life, even with a simple act of breathing, we allow the infusion of the outside world into our bodies and are exposed to its transformative influence. Anthropologist Tim Ingold presents this notion of interpenetration as a necessary requirement for the continuation of life on earth and argues that “[w]herever there is life and habitation, the interfacial separation of substance and medium is disrupted to give way to mutual permeability and binding” as a consequence of which “they bind the medium with substances in forging their own growth and movement through the world” (Ingold 2011, 120). Likewise, Coccia deferentially observes that “everything is in everything, and thus that, immersion is the eternal form and the condition of possibility of the world, means first of all to assert that every physical event is produced as immersion” (Coccia 2019, 67). In concert with this system of thought, humans’ corporeal coming into being is made possible by the imbuement of plants into the permeable human bodies. As it is impossible for anybody to remain immune to the interpenetration of other bodies, it is high time for humans to come to terms with the reality of their oneness with plants by giving up the false assumption of their unique existence as the masters of the whole universe. Double-crossed by their human-oriented mindset which prepares the legitimate ground for the establishment of a hierarchical order of universe, humans do not refrain from employing every form of control mechanisms over non-human bodies to oppress, exploit, and, finally annihilate them. Reinforcing humans’ material ensnarement with plant bodies, critical plant studies undertakes a highly challenging responsibility of altering human-plant relationship so that the primordial enslavement of plant world would eventually come to an end with humans’ awakening to their connectedness to vegetal beings. What appears to be the ultimate goal of critical plant studies, similar to critical animal studies or other ecocritical theories, is to transform the dictatorial human hegemony over nonhuman world, depending on the overexploitation of vegetative existence, and replace it with a mutually interdependent relationship which prompts respect for the moral and ethical standing of plants. Therefore, recently sprouting field of critical plant studies opens

58

Chapter 2

a propitious prospect for a more symbiotic, moralistic, less materialistic, and more emotional human interaction with the green universe. HUMAN-PLANT INTERACTION IN THE POETRY OF HARDY AND PLATH The physical and spiritual kinship of humans and plants transpires to be the intrinsic feature of the poetry of Hardy and Plath who indulge in reconfiguring a dis-anthropocentric human-plant relationship. Both Hardy and Plath’s poetic imaginations are shaped by plants’ interactive engagement with their poetic personas, revealing the actively dominant role that plants play in their poetry rather than being used as background materials. As an alternative to fortifying the already established dualistic ideology of culture/nature and human/plant divisions, Hardy and Plath, in their poetry, show a faithful commitment to de-centering of human subject and restructuring alternative forms of human-plant encounters which are not circumscribed neither by textual nor actual objectification of plants but by forging affinities between different partners. Leaving aside their old convictions of plants as the hostile and menacing elements, humans are summoned to re-evaluate their instrumental relationship with plants in the poems of Hardy and Plath, which are ardently engrossed in restoring the powerful alliance and companionship between humans and plants. A prosperous evolution of human culture is shown to be possible only if it emerges out of the plant world, not in opposition to it. Plants are significant for human cultures not metaphorically but in the real sense of the word. Hence, plant-centered poetry of these two transnational poets commonly enact a pivotal paradigm of critical plants studies that is the interconnectedness of humans and plants so much so that humans’ imaginations, bodies, ideas, and thoughts are all formed, defined, and saturated by plants. The historical and emotional continuance between human and plant beings holds a central place both in the prose and poetic works of Thomas Hardy who is the spearheading poet of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. As it is expounded painstakingly in chapter 1, the nineteenth-century Victorian Britain is marked by an evolution of plant consciousness and abundance of botanical writings of Darwin, Haeckel, and other prominent scientists whose vibrational effects are strongly felt in the literature of the period. Hardy’s unfathomable fascination with plants cannot simply be explicated in terms of plants’ being an inspirational source of poetic imagination since his poems, most of the time, reflect a scientific curiosity of a botanist who is a keen observer of the plant kingdom. Rather than being dull, unresponsive objects of human life, plants are exposed to be intensely

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

59

co-operative, communicative, and highly animate living individuals who are capable of indulging in a complex communal relationship with humans and other species. It is also interesting to note that in Hardy’s poetry, plants are not artificially transplanted in a human-dominated world of literature, contrarily, “Hardy repositioned humans in nature, at a time when biology was being looked to explain forms of social and sexual behaviour. Biology seemed to offer him a way of getting closer to the truth and of defying literary and social convention” (Richardson 2002, 158). Hardy’s ruminations on the astonishingly complex life of plants are also expressed by himself in 1884 as follows: When trees and underwood are cut down, and the ground bared, three crops of flowers follow. First a sheet of yellow; they are primroses. Then a sheet of blue; they are wild hyacinths, or as we call them, graegles. Then a sheet of red; they are ragged robins, or as they are called here, robin-hoods. What have these plants been doing through the scores of years before the trees were felled, and how did they come there? (Hardy 1962, 164).

This quotation is only one example that shows Hardy’s innate inquisitiveness of plants. His unique competency of developing an uppermost scale of altruism with plants allows Hardy to expand his moral standards to embrace all nonhuman individuals of nature non-discriminatively. Darwin has a profound impact in the formation of Hardy’s poetic conceptualization of an interconnected system of universe in which every organism is defined, shaped, and even modified through a process of its ongoing interaction with other organisms. Hardy develops his own understanding of the evolution theory which is basically hinged upon the idea of a biological continuation and the physical engagement between human and non-human individuals. According to Hardy’s biological conceptualization of the universe, it is necessary for humans to attain all-inclusive ethical principles which do not exclude non-humans who are equally self-conscious beings like humans. Hardy overtly underscores his attentiveness to nonhuman world by saying that: “The discovery of the law of evolution, which revealed that all organic creatures are of one family, shifted the centre of altruism from humanity to the whole conscious world collectively” (Hardy 1962, 346, emphasis added). This conscious world, for Hardy, deserves respect and dignity of humans and should not be abused and treated as a mechanical device of industrialization. Hardy’s “powers of observation—astronomically, cosmologically and culturally—were keen enough for him to detect how his fellow human beings’ sense of connectedness to the natural world was weakening under modernity” (Gossin 2010, 239). On the same line with his biological perception of the material world, Hardy’s “The Tree: An Old Man’s Story” is an outstanding poem which

60

Chapter 2

reinforces the imperishable biological and spiritual connectedness of human and plant species. The poem’s title points to a striking analogy between the story of an old man and the story of an old, uprooted tree which can no longer stand upright against the strong southwestern wind. The persona’s consciousness is enlivened with the reminiscence of his tragic love story in the past while, in the present, he is watching the removal of the fallen tree: “Cart off the tree / Beneath whose trunk sat we!” (Hardy 2017, 135). The persona’s imagination consolidates human and plant lives at the intersection of their common histories and tragedies, bringing death for both humans and plants. The persona recollects an incident of his finding a mysterious love note in the pocket-hole of the tree trunk on which it is written that: “Beloved, I agree” (Hardy 2017, 136, emphasis in the original). As the poem goes on, an illicit love affair is unraveled to be lived in the past between a woman and a married man who kills his own wife in order to marry his lover. “’O shrink not, Love! – Had these eyes seen / But once thine own, such had not been!” (Hardy 2017, 137). As these lines indicate, it is quite a passionate love that ends in a tragedy. The lovers are separated and become strangers to each other: “But we were strangers. . . . Thus the plot / Cleared passion’s path. – Why came he not” (Hardy 2017, 137). The evil scheme of the two lovers not only causes the death of an innocent wife but also brings the end of their passion and disaster into their lives. The man cannot bear the burden of being the murderer of his own wife and instead of marrying his lover, he abandons her, leaving the girl in a great misery: “To wed with me? . . . He wived the gibbet-tree.” (Hardy 2017, 137). After giving her consent to her lover’s murdering his wife, the woman is left alone by the man who commits suicide after killing his own wife. The gibbet-tree, mentioned in the poem, is usually an oak tree, used by humans as a tool for hanging criminals. The poem’s assertion that the woman’s lover “wived the gibbet-tree” instead of marrying her shows that the man, unable to cope with the burden of his guilty consciousness ends his own life after killing his wife (Hardy 2017, 137). The gibbet tree, in this regard, stands there as physical evidence which shows how the lives of humans and plants are fused in the world’s material evolution, with their stories interlaced together. From a general perspective of critical plant studies, the poem lays out the major premise of liberating “the vegetal from a background position in literary discourse” and undergirds the critical role of plants in human life (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira 2017, xvi). Respectively, Hardy shows, in his poem, not the possibility of human-plant interaction but the inevitability of it. The poem, thus, dwells upon the idea that the persona’s whole life revolves around the old tree which, in fact, is the most important historical witness to human tragedies, cultures, experiences, and stories. Hardy’s respect and care for this old tree is reflected in his resembling the tree into a “mad Earth-god” whose existence on earth precedes human existence (Hardy 2017, 135). That

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

61

is to say, the tree is older and wiser than the human persona, and thus, the most vital and accurate recorder of human history which is physically interlinked with the stories of plants. In his analysis of Hardy’s novels, Bowden states that “‘characters are usually framed by old trees’ and the ‘novels’ human plots are unfolding in landscapes cultivated to preserve numerous old trees” (Bowden 2022, 94). In the same way, in Hardy’s poem, the life of the old man resonates closely with the life of the old tree which evokes past memories in the consciousness of the speaker, concealing the pain and suffering of love to be recollected again through his thoughtful surveillance of the fallen tree. In the last stanza of the poem, this affinity between humans and trees is reaffirmed by the persona who states that: “– Under that oak of heretofore / Sat Sweetheart mine with me no more” (Hardy 2017, 137). It can be propounded that the speaker of the poem has an arboreal imagination which is animated by the active involvement of trees whose lives recurrently traverse with humans. The speaker’s life is recapitulated as an undisclosed bygone story that is interlaced into the story of the oak. The fact that the persona’s imagination is animated by the physical presence of the old tree underpins the essential role of plants in giving meaningful existence to human life, shaping and composing their thoughts, imaginations, physical and spiritual lives. Thus, plants do not occupy Hardy’s poem as passively unconscious objects in the active world of human subjects but they are posited at the center of human life as active participants and dominant actors, holding a drastic power to change the course of human life. William Cohen suggests that Hardy “solicits our interest by upending a lot of conventional ideas about nature” and he has a special talent to “recognize the non-human in the human” (Cohen 2014, 7). Indeed, Hardy’s poem illustrates that the whole human history and culture are rooted upon and sustained by trees whose lives galvanize the stories of humans. The title of the poem, “The Tree: An Old Man’s Story,” accordingly, refers to this pattern of relatedness of the stories of humans and plants whose converging lives subsidize the material constitution of the universe. The incident of falling down of an old tree is juxtaposed with the memories of an old man—the persona of the poem—whose entire life has been tightly attached to the fallen tree. The poem, in this manner, unveils the reason of Hardy’s attraction to plant life which lies not just in plants’ complicated relationship with other plant species but also in the interconnectedness of human-plant lives whose shared memories mutually compose each others’ stories. What matters to Hardy most is to find cross-species affinities, genetic patterns and emotional resemblances that unite humans and plants with bonds of affinity, compassion, and empathy. The poem, as a result, reveals Hardy’s urge for rebuilding the human-plant kinship which would keep the past, present and future stories of humans in an enduring contact with the vegetal world.

62

Chapter 2

Similar to Hardy’s enticement in humans’ physical and spiritual connectivity with plants, Plath is an extremely sensitive poet who is preoccupied with exploring the vibrancy of plant world in which there is an amazingly organized system of inter-species entanglement. Unfortunately, inundated too deeply with androcentric or feminist approaches to Plath’s poetry, the majority of critical studies does not take a notice of Plath’s ecological engagement with natural entities and inadequately shows an aptness to interpret natural elements in her poetry as revelations of Plath’s destabilized psychology. Probably no other poet or writer has been so excessively exposed to pre-judgmental configurations of misogynist readings which whirl around Plath’s allegedly hysterical personality and poetry. Soliciting the help of psychoanalysis, David Holbrook, at the beginning of his book, before stating anything else, acknowledges his dense psycho-clinical standpoint by affirming that he is going to “use interpretations from psychoanalysis and kindred disciplines to improve our understanding of the poetry of Sylvia Plath” (Holbrook 1988, 1). Her controversial marriage to the English Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes and her tragically short life story become the center of heated debates more than her literary career. Likewise, the opening remarks of Harold Bloom’s book highlight Sylvia Plath as a poet who committed suicide at the age of thirty and carries a predisposition of its author who expresses that: “It is unwise to quarrel with Plath’s partisans, because one can never be sure precisely what the disagreement concerns” (Bloom 2001, 9). The repercussion of these academic predilections that insistently commingle Plath’s poetic creativity with biographical details is the classification of Sylvia Plath within “‘confessional’ mode of poetry” which blunders or causes the misreading of Plath’s exceptional poetic imagination in breaking the anthropocentrically constructed precincts between humans and the physical universe in which trees, flowers and the whole plant kingdom are akin to humans (Gill 2008, 19). Her nature poems, most of the time, are metaphorically read to hold a mirror to the mysterious paths of Plath’s interior mental status or to scrutinize her “split identity” (Bayley 2011, 93). Trees, in this respect, are interpreted symbolically as a reflection of Plath’s “self-discovery and growth” or as a “visual conceit for the nervous system” (Bayley 2011, 93). Nevertheless, the growing ecological problems alongside with the appearance of environmental consciousness also find an undeniably powerful expression in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. The mid-twentieth century in the United States is marked by the social and cultural turbulence as an outcome of intensifying environmental activism vigorously flamed up by the writings of Rachel Carson and other environmental scientists during the 1950s and the 60s. Therefore, it is not unlikely that Sylvia Plath, as a newly emerging young and talented poet during the 1950s, naturally responds to the current debates about the depletion of natural energy

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

63

resources, toxic poisoning, and environmental pollution in her poetry. As Zhang stresses, Rachel Carson becomes a “significant source of inspiration for Plath” who recurrently reflects a similar environmental sensitivity in her poems (Zhang 2018, 803). In one of her letters to her mother, she talks about her concern about the toxic poisoning caused by the chemicals and writes that: “I hope Strontium 90 level doesn’t go up too high in milk. I’ve been very gloomy about bomb news; of course the Americans have contributed to the poisonous level. The fallout-shelter craze in America sounds mad” (Plath 2010, 434). As it is explicitly displayed in this quotation, Plath’s conceptualization of the outside world extends beyond the symbolic use of nature and comprises socially responsible and ecologically conscious spiritual engagement with natural entities. Her poems, in that sense, carry strong ecological overtones, warning humans against the catastrophic results of environmental pollution and the inevitable “permeation and poisoning of the human body by toxic chemicals and pollutants” (Brain 2014, 84–85). Sylvia Plath’s poetry is deeply saturated with images drawn from the vegetal universe, ranging from varying tree species, fruits, and flowers to weed and grass. Plath’s interest in plants has nothing to do with an instrumental use of plants as background materials but conveys scientific intonations about the inextricable biological connectedness of humans and plants. On both physical and spiritual levels, plants inhabit Plath’s poems as dynamic actors and reliable intermediaries, transmitting the vibrational energy and meaningfulness of the material phenomena to the poet whose internal poetic imagination is inspired, governed, and shaped by the external world. “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” in this regard, is a poem which draws its inspiration from the material universe in which there is an unremitting activism and a process of energy flow between plants and other natural organisms. The poem reflects Plath’s extraordinary skill of vegetal imagination in creating an unconventional modernist image comparing a modern surgery room into an outside garden. The speaker of the poem is a male surgeon imagining himself as a gardener who is taking care of the plants in his garden and concerned with maintaining their healthy growth by cutting out the sickened parts, nurturing and recovering them. Just like a gardener who is dealing with “mat of roots” and flowers, the surgeon in the poem perceives his hospitalized patients as plants in his garden (Plath 1981, 170). The speaker gives utterance to his amazement of the astonishing resemblance between humans’ bodily organs and different plant species. He calls a human lung as a “lung-tree” (1981, 170), and the heart as “a red-bell bloom, in distress” (1981, 171) while showing outwardly his admiration of orchids. The persona’s knowledge of human anatomy fosters him to ponder upon the corporeal connectedness of human and plant bodies which are both equally complicated and awe-striking organisms, reminding the persona about his own tininess. He accepts his own insignificance by

64

Chapter 2

saying that: “I am so small / In comparison to these organs” (Plath 1981, 171). The organs that the persona refers to are human and plant organs that are intricately related to each other, the discovery of which leads the persona to surrender into the broader material universe by accepting his vegetal existence. He turns into one of these wonderful flowers growing in wilderness, “I worm and hack in a purple wilderness” (Plath 1981, 171). Losing his human identity, the persona gains a more natural, and enriched form of being in the embodiment of vegetal life. He gets out of the entrapments of his human body and is reborn to a new vegetal body which is enlivening rather than pacificizing experience for the persona. Plath, in her poem, invites her readers to discover their imperceptible alikeness to plant beings. Similar to the startling web of the roots of the tree, each vein, artery, and the organ of a human body is organized like a mosaic in a network of relationships with each other just like the structure of plant cells and stems. The poem hints at the biological realities that show humans’ entrenchment in nature as well as their interrelatedness to plants and other natural entities. The poet urges her readers to step away from their exceptional human positions, and then, discover the amazing similarity between human and plant bodies. In plants, humans can find their complete sense of identity and the wholeness of their selves not in isolation but in connection to nonhuman selves. Ooijen states that the poetic thought “by suspending the distance between human and world, allows us to think modes of non-human cognition. Thereby, it also makes visible the non-human aspects of ourselves” (Ooijin 2019, 2). Similarly, Plath, in each line of her poem, evokes plant-like existence of human beings in such a way that humans, not only on an emotional and spiritual plane but also viscerally, deep down in their corporeal existence, feel that they share similar anatomical structure with plants. The poem ends with the same idea of humans as plant beings: “Gray faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers” (Plath 1981, 171). Envisaging him as a sun, the persona depicts the faces of his patients like the phototropic activity of flowers moving towards the sun. Contrary to the poem’s scientific overtones, underpinning the biological resemblance between human and plant bodies, Edit Galla reads the poem within the context of “medical dehumanization” the sole objective of which is “to induce complete passivity and sometimes also immobility in patients” (Galla 2019, 85). Approaching the poem from the perspective of a modernist anxiety to suppress and pacify the natural, wild, and instinctual urges of humans, Galla, in fact, foregrounds the significance of humanity and stresses that “the body on the operating table becomes an inert mass, deprived of all human dignity or volition” (Galla 2019, 93). Galla tries to explicate the poem as revelation of Plath’s own sense of helplessness, paralyzing her consciousness as well as her bodily dysfunctionality. To renounce Galla’s argument, it can clearly be observed that the persona repeatedly expresses his admiration for

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

65

the astonishing resemblance of human body to plants not in the manner of passivity or inertness but in terms of an unabated activism and dynamism of forest ecosystems and plants particularly. The persona willingly dives into the “wilderness” of this “magical” forest which is full of restlessness, activism, and coordination (Plath 1981, 171). In contrast to the inimitably magical atmosphere of the natural world, humans have a high-handed penchant for creating artificial environments by keeping themselves distinctively aloof from the wilderness of nature. The practice of gardening appears in the poem as an important human motive to put what is wild and untamed under human control and domination. Once destroying the wilderness and refusing nature’s own system of designing, humans construct gardens where they can exert their agency more strongly only by suppressing the agency of plants and having the ultimate control over the growth and selection of plants. Hence, gardening stands as a human-constituted arena, and anthropocentric aesthetic design presented as an alternative to what is natural and wild. It can even be argued that gardening represents the modern world’s discontent with wilderness, and stands as an emblem of humans’ subordination of nature. This anthropocentric human tendency to control everything that is greater and beyond human command, is put under a close scrutiny in Simon Estok’s The Ecophobia Hypothesis in which the author probes into the roots of a primordial human desire to control and rule over the nonhuman world only to discover that it, in fact, originates from an undisclosed human fear of and scuffle against nature. After defining ecophobia as “modernity’s irrational fear of nature,” Simon Estok adroitly detects that ecophobia generates “antagonism between humans and their environments” which, accordingly, culminates in humans’ brutal abuse, oppression, and annihilation of the wilderness (Estok 2018, 1). Echoing Estok’s ecophobia hypothesis, gardening can be perceived as a reflection of modern societies’ ecophobic convictions which propel them to domesticate everything that is wild and uncontrollable in the universe. The poem powerfully expresses Plath’s poignancy of this feigned atmosphere of human designs, steered by human precepts. Her depiction of the operation room as a place of order and control where “microbes cannot survive in it” signifies this difference between what is natural and human-construct (1981, 170). The surgery room is an artificially constructed area in order to objectify, passivize, and desensitize patients similar to gardens where plants are also objectified, dominated, and are not allowed to flourish in their own free way and exert their true agency. The poem emphasizes the extremely hygienic condition and human-controlled atmosphere of the surgery room while in the outside world the ecosystem is composed naturally by an enormous amount of living organisms in close enmeshment with each other without being exposed to domination and intervention from outside.

66

Chapter 2

However, even in this artificial environment, humans are confronted with an undeniable fact that, no matter how hard they try to separate themselves from nature, they are still non-significant elements of this material universe. Each organ inside the human body is closely knitted together, operating within a system of interrelationships, instead of antagonism. Each bodily organ, in that sense, constitutes a vital evidence showing humans’ biological connectedness to the natural universe where there is a parallel system of interaction or in Coccia’s term an “immersion” where “subject and environment have to actively penetrate each other; otherwise one would speak simply of juxtaposition or contiguity between two bodies touching at their extremities” (Coccia 2019, 37, emphasis in the original). Significantly enough, Plath’s poem reveals this system of co-penetration, a mutual immersion between humans and plants in such a manner that a vast world of plants is seen to be deeply immersed within a single human body while an identical sophistication and complexity of human life is found within the plant kingdom. The poem reveals Plath’s profound awareness of plant vitality and agency, giving birth to the composition of the poem’s “vegetal textuality” which “always comes into existence in dynamic relation to actual, living flora” along with a denunciation of a false ideology that plants are inferior objects and less significant than humans (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira 2017, xvi, emphasis in the original). This connectivity between human and plant life is transmitted into a further level in Hardy’s “Transformations” which is a poem focusing on the stupendous transformative potentiality of the material universe where all life forms, living and nonliving organisms, are biologically affiliated to each other and their reciprocal entanglements give rise to fluctuating compositions of new life structures: “Portion of this yew / Is a man my grandsire knew,” (Hardy 2017, 364). In these lines, the persona refers to a person whom his grandfather knew personally and is transformed into a yew tree after his death. The poem also assures that the man is not separated from his family even after his death because near this yew tree, the wife of the man is reborn as a sprouting branch: “Bosomed here at its foot: / This branch may be his wife” (Hardy 2017, 364). The poem invites humans to embrace the material world as the coextensions of their own bodily existence and abstain from seeing the green world as something different and separate from their ontological anthropocentric stances: “A ruddy human life / Now turned to a green shoot” (Hardy 2017, 364). The poem introduces the yew tree whose history genealogically extends back to the ancestors of a human persona who feels a deep sense of kinship with each branch of the yew tree. So, the central stimulus of the poem is to develop humans’ compassionate identification with the outside world in which the grasses, roses, branches, and roots, are all the constitutive bodily units of human beings through which they continue to remain alive

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

67

eternally without being totally erased from the earth. “These grasses must be made / Of her who often prayed” (Hardy 2017, 364). While the grasses are seen as generated from the remnants of the woman, the persona imagines that “the fair girl” whom he remembers in the past “[m]ay be entering this rose” (Hardy 2017, 364). Anna West appropriately examines that “Hardy is able to move easily from the human to the animal to the arboreal and vegetal worlds, uninhibited by the traditional boundaries that separate one form of life from another” (West 2016, 56). The plants, in this respect, possess a prominent reproductive capacity of maintaining the spiritual and physical prolongation of human life on earth in different forms and shapes, evoking inter-species love, care, and respect. The poem entails an understanding of a universe which ceaselessly unpacks transmutable identities within different personalities and enforces “embodied perceptual experiences” with an inclination to look upon “the environment or landscape as an emergent concept formed by ongoing human (and nonhuman) activity,” inciting new emergences and intentional compositions (Miller 2019, 22). The biological kinship between humans and plants comes to fore as an inevitable outcome of this prodigious feature of the mutability of the universe in which transfusion of identities is a commonplace occurrence among multi-species entanglement. As Miller skillfully formulates, “people and plants are co-constituting one another through embodied encounters of growth and commensality that create and maintain kinship ties” (Miller 2019, 145). This process of co-constituting involves a prospect of posthumous life for humans, underlining the notion that ceasing to breathe does not mean an existential annihilation but it means being in the world in different forms and identities. At the end of his poem, Hardy asserts the same idea of human-plant enmeshment: “So, they are not underground, / But as nerves and veins abound” (Hardy 2017, 364). The poem emphasizes that not only spiritually but also physically humans continue to live and benefit from the universe. “In the growths of upper air, / And they feel the sun and rain,” (Hardy 2017, 364). Except the form, as Hardy notes, nothing changes in the life of humans who, in fact, are never totally wiped out from the earth but continue to live, grow and take advantage of the sun and rain by using their energy: “And the energy again / That made them what they were!” (Hardy 2017, 364). In their vegetative bodies, these dead human beings do not feel restrained in any sense and follow exactly the same biological pattern of life as they were living in their human bodies. As the new materialist philosopher De Landa states, humans are not discarded from the world’s biological process of “mineralization” which provides a “substratum for the emergence of biological creatures” (De Landa 2000, 26, emphasis in the original). Likewise, Hardy, in his poem, equates and relates plant life into human life and tries to attract attention to a crucial fact that humans, no matter

68

Chapter 2

how hard they struggle to keep themselves detached from the green universe, are the co-extensive substructures of plants. Plant subjectivity is another important point that is emphasized in the poem which is not related to creating metaphoric meanings out of the vegetative life that can be considered as inert objects of human imagination. On the contrary, vegetal beings are depicted to be dynamic living agents who have highly developed sensitivities to their environment and carry distinctive human souls and personalities. Thus, both plant and human souls are so strongly infused into each other’s bodily forms that it is almost impossible to differentiate between them. Elaine Miller defines the vegetative soul in terms of the intentional agency of plants and points out that it, emphasizes rootedness, vulnerability, interdependence, and transformative possibility rather than a separation of soul from body, actualization, and a stance of aggressiveness and self-preservation. The vegetative soul encompasses a thinking rooted incontrovertably in the body, but a bodily thinking that is itself indefinitely individuated and subject to metamorphosis. (Miller 2002, 18)

By placing emphasis on the competency of a vegetative soul in reforming, transforming, and metamorphosing the universe in multifarious structures without reducing the uniqueness of each entity, Miller advocates the exigency of vegetal thinking that requires thinking with diverse bodies not necessarily through human reasoning which tends to construct hegemonic authority over nonhuman bodies. Respectively, Hardy’s poem adopts a vegetative thinking, crystallized in the certainty of its non-prioritizing attitude to the status of being human. The vegetative thinking internalized by Hardy offers a possibility of the posthumanist viewpoint by putting both human and plant bodies side by side as permeable biological organisms, possessing discreet souls and identities congruously without negating one another’s individual existence and power of self-exertion. On that account, Hardy, unhesitating declares, in his poem, that these people, who are thought to be dead, are, in fact, completely alive in flesh and body but underwent a mutation by replacing their human bodies with new plant bodies, going on to flourish over the ground and taking the same source of energy out of the sun and rain. In writing such a poem about the metamorphosis of human bodies into diverse plant forms, Hardy achieves to change human perception of plants, inspiring them to see the soul, identity, uniqueness, and profundity of plants who are not inanimate and disconnected substances of nature but at the very core of human life, sharing the same spiritual and bodily experiences with humans. A universal human predicament of the finality of life is warded off by the poem’s ensuring the continuous renewal of human life in the form of plant bodies. Human life, therefore, is completely integrated into plant existence to such a great

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

69

extent that within each plant body there is an actively vibrating soul, trying to narrate its story just like humans. An unavoidable shift of human concern away from the egocentric privileging of humanity towards a posthumanist appreciation of vegetal life and the impartibility of human and plant lives are the prevalent dis-anthropocentric conceptions that are fostered by the poem. In addition to the inseparability of humans and plants in Hardy’s “Transformations,” Plath’s “Winter Trees” is a poem in which anthropocentric frontiers between humans and plants are blown out. The vegetal textuality of Plath’s poetry is emphatically monitored in this allusive poem in which the culturally constructed boundaries between the textual world of words and the actual world of the outside matter are rendered indiscernible. While the ink is split on page, creating blurry images, the poet visualizes an image of winter trees, obscurely observed out of “the blotter of fog,” and look like a “botanical drawing” (Plath 1981, 257). Once this system of dissociation between text and the world is evaded, it becomes possible for plants not only to communicate their own meanings through texts but also govern and construct meanings by shaping human imagination. In defense of the meaning making skills of plants that is coined as phytosemiosis, Martin Krampen puts forward a similar notion: Generally human aesthetic experience is heightened in symbiosis with plants, since the plant’s foremost “receiver of meaning” is its form, linked with physical “meaning factors” that generally follow physical laws. Thus, plants not only adapt indexically to their environment but also iconically portray the forces of their environment through their meaningful form. (Krampen 2010, 276)

Within the context of Plath’s poem, the dripping of the ink and water on blotting paper make the circles and naturally produce the image of winter trees that look like botanical drawings and spontaneously take the shape of tree rings which are quite significant in keeping the record of their own history. Viewed in this way, tree rings function as the physical narrative instruments of trees in constituting their phytosemiotic meanings and providing humans with an accurate knowledge about their own life story. The persona’s thoughts are condensed into these rings which give a vital account of “[m]emories growing, ring upon ring,” (Plath 1981, 257). The arboreal imagery that Plath employs in the poem does not simply offer a figurative language, evoking distant symbols and meanings from the poet’s own life; on the contrary, it gives her, and the readers, an opportunity to think about the similarities and continuities between human and plant life. Likewise, the memories that the persona recalls do not just evoke the memories of her marital life but also alludes to the memories of trees that are garnered by the composition of the rings on tree trunk. Tree rings, in this respect, are the material evidences of

70

Chapter 2

how trees store their information about their changing life conditions and personal experiences. As a plant biologist Richard Karban asserts, “[p]ast ‘memories’ in this context are accumulated experiences that have altered the morphology and physiology of the plant” (Karban 2015, 34). In Plath’s poem, the visual image of these botanical winter trees induces the female persona to draw a comparison between human and plant lives. The image of the ring, therefore, functions bilaterally representing both humans’ and plants’ past experiences. Just like the rings on tree trunk provide a glimpse into the past life of the tree, the ring on the persona’s finger shows her past memories that continue to give her pain. After comparing human life to the life of winter trees, the persona reveals her admiration for the trees who have not endured “neither abortions nor bitchery” (Plath 1981, 258). This line forces its readers to think beyond their own humanistic moral concerns in order to see trees as ethical beings. The use of the words abortion and bitchery, hinting at the moral imperfection of human world, instigates the persona’s respect for the innocence and purity of the world of trees which remains uncorrupted by humans’ loose moral values. The persona’s ruminations on plant and human life also bring into foreground an important dichotomous positioning of culture as against and superior to nature. While culture is conventionally categorized as an idealized status of being for humans, nature is usually aligned with under-developed, primitive, and therefore, inferior state of being. Plath, however, overturns this hierarchical positioning of human/culture duality to the advantage of plants. Modern life as an epitome of advanced human civilization which would be expected to bring happiness, comport, and ease into human life, brings pain, suffering, and diminution, preventing humans to enjoy life deeply and freely. The words abortion and bitchery are implications of humans’ entrapment within the ethical challenges and psychological problems brought on by modernism and its blemished moral and cultural values. So, the female persona, who goes through the psychological trauma of an abortion, aspires to live freely like trees who reproduce themselves easily and can be in touch with the outside universe freely. The poem makes an allusion to another important misconception about the inertness of plants who seem to be “footless,” and thus, lack mobility (Plath 1981, 258). In fact, the poem shows that having feet to move around does not make humans freer than trees who are adhered to earth but still free to move towards new horizons. The persona recognizes the fact that plants exert their agency in their own unique ways by spreading their seeds through winds. In his article “‘Wild Memory’ as an Anthropocene Heuristic,” Tom Bristow comments on the significance of seeds that encapsulate “plants’ experiences of the world” and peruses seeds as manifestation of plants’ agency and self-exposition (Bristow 2016, 83). “Life, in its various forms,” Bristow suggests, “exercises different ways of becoming

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

71

meaningful, and it harnesses various phenomenological experiences of a sensed world” (Bristow 2016, 83). Within this framework, spreading seeds around can be effectually considered as plants’ unique way of communicating with the outside world through which they find the opportunity to exert their agency, maintain their re-productivity, and make a meaningful sense of the world. In comparing her infertility to the potency of plants to reproduce and transmit their own meanings into the universe, the female persona falls into a deep sense of meaninglessness and despair. The poem, further, entails an emotional identification with the independence and the sacredness of plants who are “[f]ull of wings and otherworldliness” according to the persona’s vegetal imagination (Plath 1981, 258). In these lines, the poet turns upside down an anthropocentric mindset according to which humans are associated with the agential capacity while nature and nonhuman beings are aligned with passivity. The human persona’s passivity and inertia are contrasted with the agency and dynamism of plants whose freedom is never subdued by their lack of feet that would enable them to move from place to place. The emphasis on trees’ otherworldliness is particularly significant in the way that the poet deconstructs another anthropocentric ideology of plants’ being insensitive, soulless, and unfeeling objects in opposition to the spirituality of human beings. The poet stresses the sacredness and the otherworldliness of trees by identifying them with the mythological figure of Leda who is a famous personality of Greek mythology and known to be “seduced by Zeus when he took the form of a swan” (Cartwright 2017, 1). Identification of trees with the tragic mythological story of Leda who is exploited by a dominant male figure is noteworthy in the way that the persona finds a striking correlation between the victimization of female body and the victimization of trees. The female persona emotionally finds a striking resemblance between her own painful experiences and those of trees. It can be argued that feeling a spiritual connection to trees, the persona achieves to cast aside her anthropocentric misconceptions that stabilize the upholding of rigid dividing lines between humans and plants and then, adopts a true and unbiased perspective of plants whose spirituality, intentionality, and agency are sincerely acknowledged by humans. Therefore, Plath’s poem can be read as a phytosemiotic text which gives a reassurance that “plants have served as meaningful signs, indexical, iconic, and symbolic, in many cultures because they are living beings possessing features that evoke the attribution of meaning to a very considerable degree” (Krampen 2010, 276). In a similar manner, plants in Plath’s poem stand as active agents who create their own meanings without needing human meanings inscribed upon them. The poem, in this respect, gives a remarkable ecological insight into the life of trees, depicted as free individuals who are physically and spiritually awake into their environment while humans, who seem to have lost their otherworldliness, are condemned into a lifelong

72

Chapter 2

suffering. The poem ends with the persona’s feeling of despondency and helplessness which cannot be eased even by the singing of birds. Similar to Plath’s “Winter Trees” which invites its readers to think about the internal emotional bonds between humans and plants, Hardy’s “The Pine Planters” is another monumental poem which intersects humans and trees on shared emotional experiences. The persona finds herself in the same psychological situation with a pine sapling, feeling alone, isolated, and unloved in a foreign vicinity. Hardy’s vegetal thinking comes into the surface with a more crystal clear intonation in “The Pine Planters” in which the poet constructs an impregnable interpersonal companionship between humans and plants who are posited physically and emotionally akin to each other. The poem gives voice to the reverie and the inner feelings of Marty South who is a female character, suffering from an unrequited love in Hardy’s novel, The Woodlanders which is published in 1887 and constitutes the inter-textual sub-story of the poem. The poem consists of two parts and depicts a scene of two people, planting pine trees. There is a hardly any communication between these two people except that they are doing the same job of planting trees. “He busy with his thoughts / And I with mine” says the female persona of the poem to express the emotional distance between her and the man (Hardy 2017, 215). While the first part is based upon Marty South’s undisclosed feelings of love for her partner, the second part is concentrated on the analogous suffering of the pine tree who is transported into a foreign land and unable to form any connection to its new physical milieu. In the first part, the persona takes from the bundle a tree to be planted in the soil: “From the bundle at hand here / I take each tree,” (Hardy 2017, 216). While working in the field mechanically without exchanging any conversation with her partner, Marty, to her surprise, hears the voice of the pine sapling: “It starts a sighing / Through day and night,” (Hardy 2017, 216). Marty feels an emotional bond with the pine sapling who remains suppressed and unvoiced: “As if from fear . . . / ’Twas voiceless quite” (Hardy 2017, 216). Sighing is emphasized in the poem as the common emotional behavior that connects human and plant experiences which are based upon loss and grief and felt strongly by Marty and the young pine tree. The female persona, in this quotation, feels a strong sense of compassion for the flimsy sapling that she thinks is too weak to adapt into an entirely different environment. Her senses are vigilant to the feelings of plants, enabling her to understand and sympathize with the silent sighs of the pine sapling who is inflicted with fear, pain, and suffering by human beings whose economic concerns exceed their sensitivities for other life forms. The poem’s stress on plants being “voiceless” alludes to the human oppression of plants, silenced and turned instrumentally into profit-making resources by erasing their vitality, individuality, and ignoring their needs and desires. The poem develops a skeptical attitude to the plantation regulation

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

73

that is put into force to meet the infinite demands of Britain’s industrial development like “[h]ouse-building, pitprops, furniture-making, the domestic fire and the industrial furnace” (Clapp 1994, 106). “The Forestry Commission,” as Miller records, implemented a large-scale procedure of a rapid forestation and “encouraged the wholesale conversion of heathlands into pine plantations, institutionalizing a policy of aggressive afforestation” (Miller 2020, 168). The quick-paced plantation policy of the British government is pursued not only with the aim of boosting timber supply, but also reducing the risk of soil erosion because of the accelerated deforestation during the nineteenthcentury industrial activities. In Novel Cultivations, Elizabeth Hope Chang brings the overriding motive of this strategy of plantation into question and points out that: In addition to desiring the economic benefits of timber and pulp necessary to fuel the industries of imperial expansion, nineteenth-century forestry officials sought to transform an arid landscape according to the now-outdated desiccationist theories that believed forested terrain less vulnerable to drought and erosion. The introduction of foreign plants and trees would also seem to make sense for colonial landscape whose earlier missionaries had sought to alter its environment to better match the pastoral. (Chang 2019, 137).

Though the undergirding ideology of plantation seems to be carrying an environmental anxiety about the loss of soil and drought, it, in fact, gives birth to bigger ecological problems for the native ecosystem. Plantation requires destroying the native flora and fauna of the country and replacing it with an anthropocenic environment in which forests are produced artificially by human hand, producing more damaging and precarious contingencies for the future sustainability of these newly created territorial ecosystems. Miller describes Britain’s plantation policy of the nineteenth century as “human devastation of a once-untouched environment,” and notes that, the “disappearance of this habitat [heathlands] caused a concomitant drop in populations of species,” including plants and animals (Miller 2020, 168). Correspondingly, the pine sapling in Hardy’s poetry is portrayed as the vulnerable victim of this ambitious financial project of pine plantation which is based upon domination and the control of the forests that are viewed as commodity materials, not as living beings. The colonialist mentality, combined with the plant blindness precludes humans from caring for and respecting the needs of plants who are, actually, not passive and insensitive objects that can be used and abused by humans. Wandersee and Schussler configure plant blindness as “being insensitive to the aesthetic qualities of plants and their structuresespecially with respect to their adaptation, coevolution, color, dispersal, diversity” (Wandersee and Schussler 1999, 83). Likewise, Hardy illustrates

74

Chapter 2

the injudiciousness of this project of pine planting by eloquently reflecting the fragility of the pine sapling who is petrified in a completely foreign environment. The female persona of the poem, who is not inflicted with plant blindness, builds an emotional connection with the pine sapling, and thus, can hear the sighing of the plant whom she thinks “will sigh in the morning,” “at noon” and at “the winter’s warning” (Hardy 2017, 216). A foreboding estimation about the pine sapling’s being doomed to death can be emphatically noticed in these lines: “It should for ever / Remain a seed” (Hardy 2017 216). The female persona’s surmise on the notion of how it is like to be a lonesome pine sapling in the world is accredited by her botanical awareness of plant consciousness, allowing her to overcome pseudo boundaries that are erected between human and non-human individuals. Subsequently, she takes notice of a small seedling’s feeling of isolation and exile in its new, superficially constructed and non-communicative environment. Analogous to Marty’s sense of isolation that she experiences in the presence of her non-communicative partner, the pine sapling feels desolation and insecurity in a human-fabricated forest where the disrupted system of signaling makes the interchange of communication between trees and other organisms impossible. Wohlleben provides a scientific explanation of the uselessness of plantations and points out that “friendships that extend to looking after stumps can only be established in undisturbed forests” (Wohlleben 2016, 5). The friendship between trees refers to the strong system of social networking in ancient forests where it is possible to establish a strong bond of solidarity between individual trees in such a way that the weaker trees can get sustenance from older trees through their interconnected roots. Wohlleben comments on this symbiotic system of relationship between trees as follows: Planted forests, which is what most of the coniferous forests in Central Europe are, behave more like the street kids I describe in chapter 27. Because their roots are irreparably damaged when they are planted, they seem almost incapable of networking with one another. As a rule, trees in planted forests like these behave like loners and suffer from their isolation. Most of them never have the opportunity to grow old anyway. (Wohlleben 2016, 5)

The striking concurrency between Hardy’s poetic observations about the inability of the pine sapling to adapt into its new physical environment and Wohlleben’s scientific, ecological reflections on suffering and isolation of planted trees is outstandingly striking and can hardly be overlooked. In the last part of the poem, the persona questions the rationale of plantation and points out that she does not know “For whom or what / We set it growing” and what is assuredly known is the fact that “It still will grieve here / Throughout its time” (Hardy 2017, 217). The poem concludes with a tragic

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

75

foreboding that the longevity of this pine sapling’s life will even be shorter than a human life and it will not live long to “tell the story / Of us to-day” (Hardy 2017, 217). The poet’s sentience of the nonhuman world goes beyond a mere anthropomorphic projection of human emotions onto plants and astonishingly incorporates a botanical veracity about the lethal injuries on plant species, caused by modern forestry techniques that depend on disregarding smartness, vitality, and distinctiveness of plants with a selfish proclivity to treat them as commercial products. In this regard, the sighing of the pine tree in “The Pine Planters” is an actual revelation of plant sensation and intelligence rather than being a metaphoric representation of human feelings. Hardy’s aim is to cure the plant blindness of his readers by showing that the universe is not designated merely to serve human comfort which has a growing prevalence in modern societies as the major defining characteristics of humans’ existential meaning in the world. Hardy’s poem is, indeed, a critique of the Anthropocene where humans have granted themselves an ultimate authority to interfere and change the course of nonhuman life and treat plants as consumption materials. Tracing back the roots of the Anthropocene to the industrial activities, colonialism and plantations, Myers offers a replacement of the Anthropocene with the “Planthroposcene” which is featured as a “call to change the terms of encounter, to make allies with these green beings” (2017, 300, emphasis in the original). Similarly, Hardy’s poem can be interpreted as a Planthroposcenic poem, warning humans against disrupting the interconnected system of universe and holding them accountable for being the foremost reason of the pain of another living being, that is pine sapling. The poem, therefore, powerfully gives voice to the needs, desires, and fears of plant persons and establishes a sentimental attachment between human and plant individuals in terms of their shared feelings of estrangement, isolation, loneliness, and trembling of their hearts. Hardy’s attentiveness to plant life is specifically underlined by Michael Millgate who writes that during his marriage with Emma, Hardy had a special care for the garden, “supervised its maintenance, paid the gardener, and refused to allow the trees to be cut back for fear of ‘wounding’ them (Millgate 2004, 244). In pursuant to Hardy’s dealing with the human violation of plants and his special care and responsiveness to what plants feel during plantation, Plath expresses an unflinching desire to be physically and spiritually transmogrified into a plant body in “I’m Vertical” which uncovers the persona’s deepest aspiration to be dissolved into nature and to become an inextricable part of animated vegetal world. The poem conjures up a poignant emotional response in readers towards plants and opens with the speaker’s affirmation that she is vertical but would rather prefer to be “horizontal” in emulation of a dead body, lying underground (Plath 1981, 162). The whole poem is funneled towards unveiling the vibrancy, intentionality, and spirituality of

76

Chapter 2

plant life which evokes a sublime botanical curiosity in the persona who has a conspicuous yearning to participate in the symphonic interaction of plants and be permeable by their animated spiritual lives. The speaker contrasts her emotional loneliness, and deprivation of love to trees who are deeply entrenched in the earth, nourished and salved by the “minerals and motherly love” of the soil (Plath 1981, 162). With the permanent energy sustenance, provided by the nutrients of the earth and drawn through their roots, trees can heal and revitalize their bodies and retain their incessant growth and evolution for which the speaker has a great admiration. She feels a vast sense of desolation for not being able to live the life of trees who can grow vertically within their community and still preserve beauty, attraction, and connectivity with their companion species unlike her own verticality which brings nothing except pain and isolation in her human society. The poet’s vegetal thinking is so deeply infused into the poem’s diction that the persona imagines her own death within the context of a plant life, and remarks that “I must soon unpetal” (Plath 1981, 162). After stressing the significance of language that “serves us in our attempt to grasp the essence of what it is like to experience being human,” Monica Gagliano states that “the making of meaning is our gateway to experience our deep history of connection to all others, humans and nonhumans” (Gagliano 2017, 88). Plath, in her poem, uses language in the same manner to give meaning into the human existence in its indivisible relatedness to plants. She, therefore, adopts a botanical discourse to describe death in terms of a flower’s tapering off its petals. In a further analogy between plant and human life, the persona envies the self-awakened and self-magnifying life of trees compared to cataleptics of human life: “Compared with me a tree is immortal” (Plath 1981, 162). In developing a counter statement to the traditional conceptualization of plants as “passive automatons, aesthetic backdrops, or the mute foils of animality,” the poet discloses a worthier dimension of plant life that is unremitting vitality and agency, far surpassing human agency (Ryan 2018, 36). In foregrounding the immortality of plants in contrast to the shortness of human life, the poet dismantles the rigidly constructed social convictions about the superiority of humans and the inferiority of plants in such a way that human life is associated with notions of vulnerability and ephemerality while trees are aligned with their perpetuity and everlasting life. Furthermore, instead of drawing symbolic human meanings out of flowers and trees, Plath allows plants to create their own meanings simply by means of their existence. Echoing Randy Laist’s assertion that “flowers and fruits are semantic in their being—they have evolved with the explicit purpose of sending messages to mammals, birds, insects and other animals that pollinate them and disperse their seeds,” we can argue that Plath in her poetry dwells upon the existential

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

77

purposefulness of plants which is more crucially important than their symbolic connotations for humans (Laist 2013, 14). In the second part of the poem, the poet continues to elaborate on the verticality of humans and plants with a stronger emphasis on her wish to die and be horizontal. The persona believes that horizontal position would be more appropriate for her in order to be permeated by nature, transformed into one of these natural entities so that it would be possible for her to get in contact with the sky. “Then the sky and I are in open conversation” (Plath 1981, 162). The poem creates a quite striking irony with its assertion that the persona’s incapacity of reaching into and conversing with skies will be attained only through her death when she lies horizontally under the ground with her body decomposed and transformed into soil in an intersection with plants, a process of biological mineralization which would make an encounter with skies plausible for her. In opposition to widely accepted and literally registered worldviews, pushing plants instrumentally into the background as inactive objects and narrative devices, Plath appears as a poet whose senses are not blinded by anthropocentric preconceptions, hindering her to recognize the wisdom of plants and their intricate interplay of communal relationship, that is laid bare with an absolute precision in her poems. Richard Kerrige argues that Plath’s “interest in wild nature, then, was primarily in using animals, plants and landscapes to flush out elusive and elemental human meaning, rather than in scientific understanding” (Kerridge 2019, 224). However, Kerridge’s postulation of Plath’s poetry, being directed towards creating elusive human meanings rather than constructing an ecological understanding of natural elements proves itself indefensible considering Plath’s biological interest in plants, riveted explicitly in her poems. In this regard, the poem presents an unambiguous evidence of Plath’s congenial attentiveness and wakefulness to the natural phenomena of plant individuality, self-autonomous performativity, activism, subjectivity, and meaningfulness of flowers and trees. The poet, thereby, looks for alternative ways of reconstituting the forgotten kinship ties between humans and plants whose relatedness can be traced back to earth as their common origins. Death, as the persona believes, will restore her kinship ties with plants by bringing her closer into the presence of a delicate, dignified, mutually emotional and perennial relationship with trees where she will no longer feel alone or inadequate. The persona imagines that her humanly existence in this world will attain a more magnified purpose when her dead body is dissolved into soil’s nurturing minerals, necessary for the growth of trees. With this purpose achieved, the persona will get the opportunity to form a physical connection with trees and will add a meaning and moral significance into her life which will be deeply and immensely suffused with plants. In its delineation of a desperately alienating human life, contradicted with

78

Chapter 2

the dynamically active, performative, and communal life of plants, the poem, in fact, subverts the anthropocentric ideology which positions humans at the center of universe as the sole purpose and meaning of life while categorizing all nonhuman beings as the other and opposite of humans, whose main function of life is to serve human concerns and interests. Plath, in her poem, shows the triviality of human life compared to the exceptional complexity, connectivity, interdependency, boundlessness, and profoundness of the vegetal life. From this vantage point, it would not be a mistaken assumption to claim that Plath has developed a scientifically validated botanical perception of plants according to which plants “have cognitive capacity for perceiving, processing, and communicating with other plants, organisms, and the environment and to remember and use this information to learn, adjust their behaviors, and adapt accordingly” (Simard 2018, 193). The persona’s aspiration to use every possible means of having a mutually interactive and meaningful communication with nature is conveyed powerfully throughout the poem in which plants are portrayed as self-conscious, intentional, and communicative subjects who are constantly indulged in an ongoing process of self-exertion and evolution without taking any account of human beings: “I walk among them, but none of them are noticing” (Plath 1981, 162). Within this breathtaking animism and vivacity of plant kingdom, the persona’s human agency goes unnoticed and is reckoned insignificant. That is the underlying reason of the persona’s adulation of plants and endeavoring so hard to attract the attention of flowers and even desiring to physically look like them. In an ecologically commendable strive to move beyond her society’s anthropocentric confines, shoving humans and plants into opposite poles, Plath courageously defies solidified codifications and societal misconceptions about plants’ pursuing inactively dormant lives. In advocating the existence of a “vegetal mind,” Gagliano claims that “plants are able to encode both temporal and spatial information and modify their behavior flexibly” (Gagliano 2018, 217). Embracing a similar botanical view of plant intelligence, the poet proves the pointlessness of humans’ over-reliance on their supposedly privileged position in the universe and succinctly demonstrates the permeability of human and plant bodies while conjoining human and plant individuals under the parasol of her plant poetics which gives an accurate account of an ultimate human craving for a complete amalgamation with trees, flowers, and the whole universe. Reminiscent of Plath’s lucrative attempt to converge human and plant persons in the material corporeality of the physical universe, Hardy’s abrogation of an exclusionary view of plants that should be held outside the perimeters of humans’ moral and ethical contemplation is emphatically detected in “The Felled Elm and She” which analyzes the indissoluble connectedness of

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

79

humans and plants against the backdrop of a synchronized timescale of their lives. The poem installs an equally prevalent value upon the life of humans and plants who are not depicted in an overridingly hostile or competitive relationship, but in a symphonic and interactive entanglement with each other. “When you put on that inmost ring / She, like you, was a little thing:” (Hardy 2017, 508). The innermost ring of the tree refers to the first year of its life. The persona draws a comparison between the tree and the age of his lover. Quite interestingly, the persona addresses directly to the tree, communicates with it and expresses that: “When your circles reached their fourth, / Scarce she knew life’s south from north:” (Hardy 2017, 508). As years pass, the number of tree rings also increases in parallel amounts to the age and life experience of the girl. “When your year-zones counted twenty / She had fond admirers plenty:” (Hardy 2017, 508). The persona, further, emphasizes the simultaneous growth of the tree and the girl he loves while intersecting their stories and histories: “When you’d grown your twenty-second / She and I were lovers reckoned” (Hardy 2017, 508). Trees keep track of the changes in their lives, experiences, feelings, and emotions through their rings which offer a useful evidence showing trees’ alertness and responsiveness to their environment and their capacity to store information. Apart from giving the scientists a verified data about the age of the tree, these rings, as Jessica Stoller Conrad affirms, also reflect the susceptibility of trees to the changing climatic conditions, telling “what the weather was like during each year of the tree’s life. The light-colored rings represent wood that grew in the spring and early summer, while the dark rings represent wood that grew in the late summer and fall” (Conrad 2017, 1). Likewise, the persona, in Hardy’s poem, tries to read the rings of a fallen elm tree to have an account of its own past life and talks about his old unnamed lover whose life story shows a striking resonance with the life story of the tree. The astounding symbiosis between human and plant life is drawn effectively by the persona whose insightful exhibition of each stage of his lover’s life unravels formerly unexplored entanglement of human and plant lives. The smallest inner circle of the tree represents its first year in life which the persona identifies with the infancy of his lover and the following circles are matched with the blooming of the girl and how the speaker and the girl become lovers at the age of 22. Accordingly, each circle on the elm tree’s trunk points to the analogous maturing of the girl who concomitantly grows old while the tree goes “quite hollow within” as an indication of its old age (Hardy 2017, 508). As “[f]urther trunk-rings, were laid down,” the poem shows, human stories are more intricately knotted together with plant stories (Hardy 2017, 508). Hardy concludes the poem with a remarkable surveillance of the natural world and achieves to bring fundamental changes to human-centered ways of seeing trees: “Matching her; both unaware / That

80

Chapter 2

your lives formed such pair” (Hardy 2017, 508). The last two lines not only draw a crucial attention to the enmeshment of human and plant life but also confer legitimacy to the purposeful and knowledgeable lives of plants whose subtle contrivances in keeping a record of changing times and events and compel humans to recognize the authenticity of “plant personhood” and register it non-anthropomorphically in developing “human moral behavior toward the plant kingdom and nature as a whole” (Hall 2011, 14). Significantly enough, residing in a plant-ordained world where the sense of time, space, and history can be perpetuated uninterruptedly across species frontiers, the human persona in Hardy’s poem, is intimately aware of the agentic power of plants in leaving their traceable inscriptions on the conjectural histories of human beings. The rings of the dead elm tree in the poem, in this regard, are not only the epiphanies of plants’ perception of time but also the recordings of posthumous narration of human stories interlocking with plant stories. Marder reads trunk-rings as trees’ material conceptualization of the idea of time that is engraved manifestly on their bodies and claims that: Time in all its finitude is stamped on the collective and dispersed body of the plant . . . [T]he vegetal body . . . marks time in a peculiarly geometrical style, by the accretion of “rings,” those symbols of eternity and indicators of the tree’s inexorable aging. Time does not in fact preexist such ex-scription but derives from the différantial “opening” of the register, wherein it leaves its traces over and over again. (Marder 2013, 112, emphasis in the original)

Similar to Marder’s reading of tree-rings as the reinforcement of their material existence and their own distinctive modes of being in the world, Hardy’s poem lays a strong emphasis on the genealogical connectedness of human and plant persons while paying due respect to plants’ faculty of inscribing not only the physical universe but also the human life, keeping the graphic record of their stories beginning from their birth till their death. Congruously, the poem dismantles the inelastic boundaries drawn between human and nature, culture and nature, textual and material world, metaphor and the matter. As Barbara Hardy succinctly pins down, Hardy, in his works, brings together “the green world” and “human story” so extensively that “nature and human beings are joined in symbol, ceremony, and tradition” (Hardy 2000, 156). More specifically, humans’ textual spaces, discursive narratives, and stories are not discordant with the material inscriptions of plants who write and narrate their stories through their physical performativities. Almost every phase of human life is permeated symbiotically with plant life, being acted on, transformed, and produced by them. Hence, in “The Felled Elm and She,” Hardy goes one step further beyond dovetailing the material lives of humans and plants to consolidate human and plant stories textually and

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

81

metaphorically. In Ooijen’s words, literature evokes “a pan-cultural interest in vegetal life [that] suggests a further biological bind between humans and plants—a bind that exceeds the physiological level of oxygenic exchange, to occur at the symbolic level” (Ooijen 2019, 2). In brief, plants gain a strong foothold in the poetry of Hardy not only by contributing to the material and biological evolution of human beings, but also by participating in the textual composition of their poetry, acting fruitfully and dominantly on the imaginative performativity of the poet. In Hardy’s poetry, the material universe is envisaged to be a repository of heterogeneously embodied natural beings so intensively and inextricably that it is almost unachievable for human beings to disentangle themselves from this multi-species enmeshment. Hardy’s perception of poetic and material universe incorporates, borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase, “rhizomatic multiplicities” which transcend species boundaries, spatial limitations, and hierarchical orderings with no precise beginnings and endings, and elongating in all directions like unperceivable expansion of the roots of a tree under earth (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 371). Hardy’s avid interest in the concept of “arboreal time” triggers him to renounce the linearity of human life and embrace a cyclic view of nature in which there is an arrestingly “elongated timescale,” epitomizing the growth and decay concurrently (Bowden 2022, 90). Besides Hardy’s attempt to combine human and plant histories in “The Felled Elm and She,” Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” brings together humans and plants on shared feelings of pain and suffering. The persona’s vegetal imagination amplifies her sensitivity and enables her to hear the sound of every natural entity, seeming to be sympathizing with the pain and agony of the persona. The poem offers an entirely bleak picture of the universe in which both human and nonhuman beings are suffering. The persona’s mind is taken completely over and shaped by the physical nature which is described as: “The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue” (Plath 1981, 172). The mind of the persona substantiates her intuitively to perceive plants as intentional and self-autonomous individuals who are interconnected to the persona not only physically but also emotionally, sensing, understanding, and sharing the same feelings of desperation with her. Divergent thoughts of the persona are depicted as black trees whose branches grow into different directions as evocations of her dejection, dismay, and mental distortion. In synchronic emotional attunement with the persona’s tormented mind, the grasses under her feet are going through similar feelings of suffering. The poem notes that: “The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,” (Plath 1981, 172). Plants and the human persona are clustered intimately on the relatedness of their emotions. The striking image of the grasses beseeching the persona in a desperate need of help underpins a vitally important premise

82

Chapter 2

of plant consciousness as a result of which neither the human persona nor the grasses are numbly oblivious to each other’s grief but there is a communal emotional engagement and a transmission of affectionate understanding between the grasses and the persona as two vulnerable victims of their social environment. The persona’s powerlessness in alleviating the anguish of the grasses induces an additional helplessness and emotional despair in the mind of the persona. In contrast to the spiritual companionship of the persona and the grasses whose affiliated emotional turbulences bring them together, the moon is depicted in a godlike image who inhabits the skies and prefers to remain detached and indifferent to the suffering of the earthly beings. Associating the moon’s emotional coldness with her mother’s lack of apathy, the persona envisages the universe as a place of violence and terror. The poem portrays an intimidating universe which appears to be polarized between two opposing groups of earthly and heavenly entities with a complete lack of communication and interaction between them. While the earthy bodies are struggling to survive in pain, the celestial bodies are neglectful of the ongoing tragedy on earth. Apart from the moon who lacks in compassion, clouds also seem to be indifferent to the suffering of earthly beings. Within this dichotomous separateness of the earth and the sky, the yew tree, with its roots enfolding the earth and branches reaching into the sky, undertakes a intermediary role between the earthy bodies and the moon, hoping to recover the interconnected system of universe in which there is a perpetually ongoing physical and emotional interaction between every human and nonhuman being. The network of this system of interdependency is operating so perfectly that any injury, inflicted on a single entity is swiftly repaired by other entities in nature’s ecosystemic balance. However, Plath’s poem does not offer any possibility of the recovery or evading the earth’s endless suffering from an unidentified cataclysm, the ramifications of which is felt strongly by the whole living organisms on earth. Although the yew tree aims towards the skies with its branches, the persona asserts that “the message of the yew tree is blacknesss—blackness and silence” (Plath 1981, 173). There is no specific reference made in the poem to the question of what is the major cause of human-plant suffering but it is noticeably clear that there is a suffocative overbearing of blackness, bleakness, hopelessness, and pain on earth, which is intensely felt by human and nonhuman entities equally. While the persona, the grasses, and the yew tree are quite extensively aware of and disturbed by this ominous silence and blackness in nature, the moon and the clouds do not seem to be affected by it, and thus, remain unresponsive. The yew tree struggles in vain to fix this problem of the failure of communication between natural entities since it is, through its roots, able to connect itself to the earth while having the opportunity to contact with the skies through its trunk, branches, and leaves. This

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

83

lack of communication between different living organisms, stemming from the fracture in nature’s networking system can be interpreted as an ecological implication of the destruction of the ecosystem, leaving every human and plant persons suffering helplessly in an extreme agony and pain making it impossible for each natural entity to exchange information, convey its feelings, emotions, and messages to each other. Once nature’s balance is lost, the harmonious relationship between its organisms is also lost, intercepting the constitution of a meaningful interaction and emotional attunement between natural units. Even though the persona hears, sympathizes, and understands the pain of the grasses, she is still incapable of helping them, and this feeling of helplessness constructs the somber tone of the poem. In opposition to Plath’s poem which combines humans and plants on common experiences of doom and gloom, Hardy’s “Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard” is an enticing poem which auspiciously exemplifies Hardy’s arboreal sense of time, mantling life and death within itself concomitantly. The setting of the poem is a cemetery in the churchyard where the poet hears voices coming from plants, growing on the graves. According to Trevor Johnson, the place is “Stinsford churchyard, which Hardy visited with the poet Walter de la Mare, having just written the poem, on 17 June 1921” (Johnson 1991, 155). In the first part, the poem gives voice to daisies blooming on the grave of a little girl named Fanny Hurd: “These flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd, / Sir or Madam, A little girl here sepultured” (Hardy 2017, 429). The poem is vested upon the idea that prior to her death, Fanny Hurd was playing over the grass as a little child and after her death, she is transformed into these beautiful flowers: “Once I flit-fluttered like a bird / Above the grass, as now I wave” (Hardy 2017, 429). The poem expresses that there is no significant change in the life of the little girl since her cheerful life continues in the shape of plants: “In daisy shapes above my grave, / All day cheerily,” (Hardy 2017, 429). The metempsychosis of the little girl as flowers on the graveyard, waving cheerfully comes out as a weighty counterpoise to Hardy’s pessimism detected in his novels and “elegiac note in his evocation of a world that will inevitably pass away” (Harvey 2003, 77). The untimely death of the little girl is not seen by the poet as a showcase of a purposeless fatality, residing in the physical universe, conversely, it offers a valid proof of the posterity of the material universe which is in an incessantly evolving and enhancing process of revival, transmutation, and new births and new becomings. The poem, in this respect, dives deep into the stunningly resilient biological kinship between humans and plants whose co-evolution and interdependencies are never disrupted even after death and they continue to live trans-corporeally within each other’s bodies. As Indy Clark also states, the poem reflects on a “concern with a complex environment that involves decomposition and

84

Chapter 2

regrowth” (Clark 2015, 78). The little girl’s decomposed body provides sufficient minerals for the growth of plants. Hardy, in his poem, clearly insinuates that the death of a human being cannot be considered as a total enclosure of life since he/she perpetually lives in different bodies and in different forms. So, each stanza of the poem is voiced by a different speaker who is a human being, transfigured physically and spiritually into a plant body. A man named, “Bachelor Bowring” succeeds in living for more than a hundred years “as a shingled oak” while a person who, “forgotten as Thomas Voss,” is turned into a yew tree (Hardy 2017, 429). Similarly, a woman, named “Lady Gertrude” narrates her transformation into a laurel tree and says that: “Into its veins I have stilly sped, / And made them of me; and my leaves now shine” (Hardy 2017, 429–430). In the fifth part of the poem, the speaker is an “innocent withwind” whose previous human name is “Eve Greensleeves,” hinting at her occupation as a prostitute who is “[k]issed by men from many a clime, / Beneath sun, stars, in blaze, in breeze” (Hardy 2017, 430). Comparing her life as a human being to her life as a plant, the withwind, defined as a “kind of bindweed” (“Withwind” def. 2023, 1), talks about her everlasting joy of life which is never interrupted by death. In her new bodily form and identity as a plant, the withwind is now being kissed by “glowworms and by bees” as she was kissed by men during her lifetime as a human being (Hardy 2017, 430). An “old Squire Audeley Grey,” on the other hand, complains about the difficulty of his human life when he was “[a]weary of life, and in scorn withdrew / Till anon I clambered up anew” and stresses that he carries on living as an “ivy-green,” living more happily day and night (Hardy 2017, 430). All of these miscellaneously pluralistic voices in Hardy’s poem proffer a common idea of a relentlessly transmuting and resuscitating universe in which human and plant stories and histories, genetically and emotionally, are interwoven together, sowing the seeds of new becomings and diverse species who are all intricately affiliated with each other. Donna Haraway, underlines a similar notion that a “corpse is not the body” and clarifies her averment by noting that “the body is always in-the-making; it is always a vital entanglement of heterogeneous scales, times, and kinds of beings webbed into fleshly presence, always becoming, always constituted in relating” (Haraway 2008, 163). Similarly, Hardy’s poem is not a fatalistic and despondent illustration of dead corpses but a deployment of cheerful animism and the bodily entanglement of human and plant individuals who are constantly in a state of mutual interaction, finding their way towards new becomings. As Hardy stresses in his poem, the “murmurous accents” and “lively speech” of these different trees and flowers offer a great opportunity for listeners to explore the shared intentionality of human and nonhuman individuals in the material universe, each is capable of narrating its own unique story which, as the poem underlines, “[a]ffords an interpreter much to teach” (Hardy 2017,

Human-Plant Entanglement in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

85

430). The conjoint intentionality and shared agency of the material universe necessitates a non-discriminative enfoldment of every species who grow into maturity with an absolute consciousness of their ancestral ties and biological kinship to each other. The poem is rested upon unsettling humans’ superiority over plants by reinforcing the ecological notion of how humans are intrinsically and inseparably linked to plants. The prestigious status quo of humans as the ultimate authorial power over nonhuman world is unsettled with the poem’s portrayal of humans’ being underground, turning into decomposed materials and fertilizers while plants, over the ground, are actively involved in meaningful communication with their environment. Variegated plant species in nature are portrayed with self-cognizance and intelligence, keeping the memory of their past lives alive in their consciousness and narrate their stories in amalgamation with human stories. Drawing, once again, on Myers’ neologism, Hardy’s poem extricates humans from the narrow compartmentalization of anthropocentricism and envisages them within the wider contours of “planthropology” that situates humans in a boundlessly conglomerating universe, highlighting “affective ecologies taking shape between plants and people” so that humans gain a supreme consciousness of their organic relatedness to plants while coming into the realization of their insignificance and disempowerment in the face of an extremely developed complexity, sensitivity, and attentiveness of the natural world which is shown to be fully intact with self-percipient and emotional plant individuals, aspiring to tell their own versions of stories (Myers 2017, 300). Analyzing Hardy and Plath’s poetry from the theoretical perspective of critical plant studies brings a magnifying glass to these two poets’ biological understanding of the universe the survival of which depends crucially on the perpetuation of human-plant interactions. In this respect, there is no stratified exclusionary dividing lines between humans and plants in Hardy and Plath’s poetry, on the contrary, plants are incessantly situated on equal moral grounds with humans, having soul, intellect, personality, and self-determination with a clear sense of events. Thereby, humans are often invited to listen to the songs and narratives of plants as their kindred spirits. Moreover, both Hardy and Plath’s poems are unanimously saturated with a strong ethical commitment to exhibit respect and care for plant subjectivity and recurrently enact the necessity of adopting plant perspective of the world in order for humans to be non-domineeringly involved in the dynamic performance of the world not as exploiters and oppressors but as mutual and equal participants, acting in alliance with nonhuman beings. Human-plant interaction is given the foremost priority in Hardy and Plath’s poetry in which humans do not hold a special status but are re-adjusted and incorporated into the permeable structure of the physical world in which all bodies, human and non-human, are impregnated with each other, constituting a cobweb of interdependencies. There is always

86

Chapter 2

a “reciprocal interpenetration” between different bodies, Coccia writes, and coming out of one body “always means to enter into something else, into its forms and its aura; to return to oneself always means to prepare oneself to encounter all sorts of forms, objects, images” (Coccia 2019, 68). In the same manner, both Hardy and Plath’s human speakers, most frequently find themselves in plant bodies, seeing the world from vegetal point of view, and expanding their horizons to take the interests of plants into moral consideration. A plant-centered reading of Hardy and Plath’s poetry has explicitly shown that these two poets demand accountability from humans for their ferocious utilization of plants and specifically underscore the affinities of humans with plants. Living in isolation from the green universe in modern urban societies, humans are dislocated from their true nature of being with plants in a physical and emotional connectedness to them and dragged into standing in constrictions as separately and externally with a privilege to make infinite use of plants without recalling their internal bonds with plants. Both Hardy and Plath, hence, allow their readers to discover the magical complexity of plants and the confounding similarities between humans and plant beings whose communion and partnership instead of hostility is prerequisite for the continuity of the universe’s ongoing dynamic materialization.

Chapter 3

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

What brings together Hardy and Plath in this chapter is their common perception of plant intelligence and agency that are most unequivocally observed in their poetry, challenging the traditional and stereotypical understanding of plants as insensitive and taciturn elements of literature. This chapter, therefore, traces Hardy and Plath’s vegetal attentiveness in order to reveal the agential capacities of plants and delineate them as sentient and perceptive beings who can have a meaningful understanding of the world. A detailed reading of Hardy and Plath’s poetry from the critical lens of plant studies will plainly reveal that both poets have an acute consciousness of the plant subjectivity and agency, furnishing them with a distinguished ability to hear sometimes cheerful and sometimes suppressed voices of plants and listen to their complaints of human brutality. In complement to the previous chapter’s hypothesis about the physical and emotional connectedness of human and plant beings, this chapter’s focus on the agential capacity of plants will expose Hardy and Plath’s poetic endeavor to rebuild a sympathetic and meaningful human-plant communion for which it is imperative to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive plant personality, subjectivity, and intentionality. In other words, Hardy and Plath’s foregrounding the agential capacity of plants, in particular, efficiently serves to demonstrate the inextricable relatedness of human and plant beings on an egalitarian basis where agency and intelligence are not vested exclusively in humans but distributed uniformly among human and plant individuals. Elucidating humanity’s of denial of the plant agency as a “deliberate political ploy,” organized systematically “to achieve the untrammeled use of plant resources” (Hall 2011, 25), Matthew Hall argues that the constitution of human identity and human personhood can never be procured “by ignoring 87

88

Chapter 3

the personhood of plants” that would certainly lead humans to internalize the false consciousness about their distinguished and exceptional position in the universe (Hall 2011, 14). Ignoring personhood means the rejection of plant agency and intentionality which lies at the heart of devastating ecological problems like the brutal extermination of diverse plant species, destruction of forests, and receding of green areas in addition to plants’ alienation from cultural and ethical considerations of humans whose only preoccupation seems to lead extravagantly comfortable lives at the cost of nonhuman beings. In his denunciation of the unavailing categorization of humans as subjects and nonhumans as objects, Bruno Latour argues that the attribute of “social actors,” is myopically refused by the traditional ideologies to be given to nonhuman beings (2004, 76). However, Latour suggests that the “pairing of humans and nonhumans,” is indispensable for the maintenance of the abundance of “actants” that would be positively contributing to the meaningful materialization of this universe (Latour 2004, 80). For Latour, rather than positioning humans as the ultimate governing forces of the universe, which is an extremely biased and unjust system that would certainly lead into the subordination of certain species under those who hold the power, fostering the multiplicity of actants bears an utmost importance, especially for the preservation of the ecosystemic balance and diversity. Similar to Latour, Karen Barad also confirms the impracticality of reserving agency merely to humans since there is an “ongoing flow of agency” in the physical universe which is itself a “dynamic process of intra-activity and materialization” (2007, 140). In Barad’s “agential realist understanding of the notion of agency” (Barad 2007, 172), humans are neither the sole subjects at the center of the universe nor are they the only intelligent beings due to the fact that the “space of agency is not restricted to the possibilities for human action” (Barad 2007, 178). The world, indeed, is replete with multifarious species who are extraordinarily competent in exhibiting intelligent behavior and joining actively in the ongoing interactivity of the world’s coming into being. In line with this frame of conception, plants are also the one among the most vital nonhuman participants of the world’s materialization and are dynamically involved in its intra-activity as actants, social actors, and agential beings. It has already been proven scientifically and should be accepted socially that plants display agency so much so that “each nonhuman entity is full of material agency that can only be manifested through its mutual interaction with other entities, and each one is empowered enough to produce alteration on its environment” (Sarıkaya 2023, 31–32). Significantly enough, plant biologist Anthony Trewavas complains about some biologists’ hesitancy to attribute intelligence and intentionality to plants and blatantly declares that plants exert almost every feature of biological intelligence

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

89

among which are “[i]nformation processing, decision making, associative memory, sensory integration, and control of behavior” (Trewavas 2006, 8). Hence, just because they do not possess the feet of animals or the speech of humans, it does not mean that plants are muted, passive, and unintelligent, and thus, do not deserve to be paid attention as much as animals and humans. As a counterclaim to the prejudiced concept of plant stagnancy, Luce Irigaray puts forward human passivity and stagnancy in the face of highly sensitive, instantly growing, developing, dynamic, and competitive plant world. She aptly states that compared to trees who continue to grow, develop, and flourish at almost every stage of their lives, we as humans “remain passive with respect to our natural development; we barely take charge of its blossoming” (Irigaray 2017, 128), and most frequently we are rendered inactive, unthinking, and submissive objects of our societal impositions, political systems, consumerist cultures, and economies which are organized systematically to use, abuse, and exploit humans and nonhumans as marketing materials. The unremitting dynamism and the agency of the vegetal world undeniably hold a critical importance on the agenda of critical plant studies which emerges as a posthumanist project of misplacing the human-oriented view of the world and replacing it with a non-human centered world view. Plants, as one of the more-than-human species, are also capable of demonstrating highly developed forms of wisdom, intentionality, agentic behavior, and emotional response. Developing a strong case for attributing agency to plants, critical plant studies highlights that no matter how hard humans try to detach themselves from the rest of the non-human world, there is certainly a biological as well as emotional continuation between humans and plants. Critical plant studies, hence, entails dismantling the duality between humans and plants as well as recognizing the permeable bodily structures of every human and non-human individual. Critical plant studies’ vigilant concentration on the necessity of reinvigorating plant agency derives from the difficulty of unsettling a deeply entrenched anthropocentric ideology which insistently disavows to ascribe agency to plants by dismissing scientific explorations about the vitality of plant life. Assuming themselves as the only species who are conferred with agency, humans found in themselves an authorial legacy of destroying nature’s well-being by callously treating them as nonliving objects. Ryan also pinpoints this paradoxical human attitude to plants and notes that “[a]lthough biologically alive, plants have been conceptualized as unthinking assemblies which only react when acted upon” (Ryan 2012, 106). For that reason, instead of asking the question of whether or not plants are represented in literature, in what ways and with what purpose they are represented in literature comes to fore as the more important question that is recurrently raised by critical plant studies. All throughout the Western literary tradition, plants have always been diminished into the most inferior position

90

Chapter 3

of being dull, unresponsive, insentient beings whose existence may gain importance only through a human subject or a human goal. Even if plants are given their speech, it is, predominantly, to function as symbolic literary devices of expressing human emotions or thoughts through anthropomorphic personifications. It appears, therefore, as the most important theoretical assignment of critical plant studies to create a profound change in the conventional textual configurations of plants as passive accessories of literature, the background materials or intermediaries of human feelings. Such a radical change of calcified categorizations of plants can begin by preparing a necessary literary platform for plants to reclaim their agency, enabling them to gain their textual existence with their real, biological reality so that it can be possible for readers to hear their actual voices, listen carefully to their stories, and comprehend plants’ own perspectives of the world, different from or even opposite to human point of view. At this point, we may better understand the necessity of a critical plant theory which undeniably plays a key role in incorporating an interdisciplinary perspective of botanical, scientific, and biological understanding of plant beings in literary sphere rather than being content with an abstract, unrealistic, and metaphoric presence of plants. Since these metaphoric conceptualizations of plants, which are quite far from biological and historical accuracy, play a lethally detrimental role in pushing plants into peripheral by way of increasing already widened distances between humans and plants, it becomes almost impossible for humans to understand the true nature of plant intelligence, wisdom, and sensitivity. Critical plant studies, therefore, promises to open a democratic literary space for the plant beings to exert their own true identity and personality. The propitious outcomes of such a change of perception in literary realm, (we may more appropriately use the popular expression of “plant turn” in literature) will inevitably create a wide-spread social transformation in the society that would reverberate with the social and cultural practices of human beings so that they will be able to look into plants from a different vantage point, in a new light and a new perspective. PLANT AGENCY AND INTENTIONALITY IN THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY AND SYLVIA PLATH The notion of agential plant subjects finds an effective way to the poetic imagination of Hardy and Plath and permeates into their poems, rendering plants as actively dynamic individuals who are constantly encountered to be in a symbiotic relationship with human and nonhuman beings in their social environs. Plants’ unflagging enthusiasm for forming new relationships and the exceptional power of acclimatizing themselves into constantly changing

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

91

environmental circumstances are painstakingly reflected in poems of Hardy and Plath which prove solid evidences for the agency of plants. Hardy and Plath’s unprejudiced outlook to the nonhuman world makes itself apparent in their unbiased appreciation and reverence for trees, flowers, and weeds, and other plant species who are portrayed as distinct individuals having personalities, identities, and intellects. In Hardy and Plath’s poetry, plants are endowed with a necessary willpower to respond back to the human exploitation of plants, rather than showing a passive compliance. Instead of treating plants as devalued objects whose domination, oppression, and extermination are seen as indispensable by humans, these two poets manifest through their poetry a deep compassion for plants who are ascribed with personality, spirituality, and intelligence. Having acquired the consciousness of their human selves not in opposition to but in fusion with the vegetal beings in their vicinity, both Hardy and Plath have a deep understanding of the resonance of souls other than their own, and strive to help their readers hear what plants feel and experience. Victimized plant existence and the tremors of plant souls are efficiently transmitted by Hardy and Plath who construct an everlasting bridge that would connect humans and plants both physically and emotionally through their poetry. What is continually reinforced in the poetry of Hardy and Plath is that as soon as humans can internalize a dis-anthropocentric mindset of plants’ being soulful, mindful, and sensitive living organisms who can feel and suffer from pain, they will have a thorough comprehension of the needs and desires of plants and will be able to hear the perturbations of plants about humans’ mistreatment of the green universe. So, it is vociferously perceived both in Hardy and Plath’s poetry that plants are reinvested with an innate power to voice their agony and torture, and further, question the legitimacy of humans to insensitively causing such a large-scale destruction of plant populations. Groundbreaking botanical studies on plant vitality find a powerful expression in Hardy’s poetry that draws largely upon the miscellaneous world of plants, populated by dynamic plant persons who have their own concerns and life interests, independent of humans. Hardy’s allurement of the boundlessly active and complicated inner dynamics of the vegetal world is explicitly observed in “In a Wood” in which the traditionally accepted notion of plants as silent, passive, and peaceful inhabitants of nature is deconstructed by Hardy’s Darwinian outlook on each species’ struggle for survival in an extremely conflictive, competitive, and untamed natural environment. Trying to get rid of the psychological encumbrance of the modern life, the poet tries to escape into the woods where the trees are, as he assumes, to be a welcoming host, offering a spiritual remedy for his weariness. The persona’s diseased spiritual condition is described with these words: “Heart-halt and spirit-lame, / City-opprest,” (Hardy 2017, 42). Feeling oppressed by the turmoil of the

92

Chapter 3

city life, the persona comes into the wood which he thinks, will be a “nest,” offering “a soft release / From men’s unrest” (Hardy 2017, 42). The poem goes against the preceding century’s romantic concept of nature according to which nature proffers peaceful consolation for the mentally and emotionally exhausted writers and poets who struggle to break out from the filthiness, noisiness, and stressful complexity of the industrial cities and urban environments. The wood, in the sense, disappoints the persona who is “[d]reaming that sylvan peace / Offered the harrowed ease” (Hardy 2017, 42). Conversely, the persona’s expectations are not fulfilled with his discovery of the fact that the wood, as depicted in the poem, is governed by a vastly complex system of interrelationship between its heterogeneously different entities who are in a restless struggle for survival and power with each other. The poem, thus, casts a bright light on the radical conversion of the eighteenth century’s romantic concept of nature into the biological and scientific concept of nature in the nineteenth century. Apart from that, the poem, also, upends the conventional anthropocentric duality between nature and culture that pushes nature into an inferior position on account of its presumed simplicity, immobility, and under-developed status in comparison to the complication, sophistication, and ultra-advanced progressiveness of human culture. Hardy provides an insight to a factual, not fictionalized nature whose complexity, intelligibility, and intricacy far outshines those of humans. The poem, in the following lines, displays the wood as a living ecosystem that is forged by the belligerent entanglement of its diverse plant species. Commenting on the contest between the “[p]ale beech and pine so blue” who dwell on the same environment and “in one clay,” Hardy asks them: “Bough to bough cannot you / Live out your day?” (Hardy 2017, 42). The poem undertakes a botanical inspection of the semiotic relationship between different tree species, which is not consistently characterized by friendship and attunement. The plants’ sharp grasp of self-concept and highly advanced skills of building a relationship with their environment are most overtly revealed in this poem where Hardy, quite interestingly, underpins dissimilar and complicated nature of plants’ social relationships. The persona’s curiosity of plant behavior increases when he sees that an extremely mortal combat replaces the “sweet comradeship” between various tree species who try to kill other species “with poison-drip” (Hardy 2017, 42). The conflict-laden atmosphere of the wood involves a never-ending struggle of domination and contestation not only among the beech and pine trees but also among the sycamore, oak, ivy, elm, ash, and poplar trees who are all seen as “combatants” by the poet, pursuing similar passions, destinations, and intentions like human beings (Hardy 2017, 42). Hardy, in his poem, reflects upon the differential thriving of each tree species that emerges as thinking and acting self, having the potentiality to destroy other selves once its own

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

93

interests fall in conflict with the interests of others. The poet, in this regard, asks a series of rhetorical questions about the reason of their inability to live together “bough to bough” without harming, blighting, and poisoning each other (Hardy 2017, 42). The poet’s revelation of plants who “[s]how them to men akin” (Hardy 2017, 42), also triggers his noncompliance to use idealistic and sentimentalized images of nature and ratifies the validity of nature’s law of predation, necessary for the prolongation of the vegetal biodiversity. In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn expresses a similar idea of limitations of human reasoning to understand the inner workings of the complex ecological interactions of trees since “the entire cosmos reverberates with the contradictions intrinsic to life” (2013, 18). The principle of incongruity between differing species, stemming out of the clash of interests, as Kohn asserts, emerges as controlling element of the whole universe in which human and plant species are intersected with each other. It is through conflicts and contestations as well as companionships that the universe makes itself meaningful and intelligible. A similar biological inspection of the relationship between different plant species is also observed in Hardy’s novel, The Woodlanders, to which Hardy refers inter-textually at the beginning of his poem and directs his readers to his novel for further meditation on the enchanting life of trees: On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling. (Hardy 2005, 48)

As it is plainly manifested both in The Woodlanders and “In a Wood,” the scientific, more than poetic, examination of the intercommunication between different plant species assists Hardy to make an exclusive sense of the material universe which is full of ongoing inter-activity and an “Unfulfilled” intentionality with its individual biological organisms, having different goals and purposes for further development and enhancement (Hardy 2005, 48). For instance, the irreplaceable foundational role of the fungi in maintaining the network of communication between trees and ensuring their healthy growth is powerfully observed by the poet who makes a botanical evaluation of the fungi, functioning as the lungs of older trees. What is more, competition between species is conferred in the poem as necessary and an ordinary configuration of all life forms. Underpinning the fact that there is a perpetual competition even among the branches of the same tree, T. Sachs argues that “[c]ompetition means that the plants not only respond to local environmental conditions but they also actually ‘choose’ for continued development

94

Chapter 3

the most promising of the available alternatives” (2006, 59). The stressful environmental conditions coerce plants to develop skills of competition which, correspondingly, foster their growth and survival. Accordingly, Hardy re-compromises human and plant life at this juncture, as coextensive units of the same biotic life, having too many ambitions and plans for future to fortify their existential positions and leave their permanent inscription on the earth. So, it may be argued that Hardy has attained a reasonably developed scientific knowledge of plant biology and physiology to achieve a comprehension of intelligible plant behavior and plants’ intricate and most of the time dramatic and audacious interactions among themselves. Hardy’s botanical recognition of plants’ complex life cycles forestalls him from making fictionalized generalizations about plants’ being fragile, vulnerable, silent, and passive objects of poetry that ignite idyllic pastoral scenes in the imagination of the poet. Subsequently, plants appear, in Hardy’s poetry, as predominantly active and intelligent organisms with adequate self-consciousness, and self-determination, having certain desires in life, competing with each other, and in this way, resembling human beings. “Hardy’s response to the vegetal world,” as Tait suggests, “acknowledged the complex and sometimes inimical interplay of nonhuman forces that enlivened it, forces that in turn disrupt the elegiac tone” of poems (Tait 2021, 380). The poem, “In a Wood,” therefore, points at Hardy’s awareness and allurement of the vegetal world, exceeding the human-self, and reveals his faculty of adopting a non-dualistic and non-human-focused mindset about the subjective experiences of plants. Along with Hardy’s “In a Wood” which draws a picture of a forest in which there is an infinite competition between plants who are all endowed with self-awareness, Sylvia Plath’s “Dark Wood, Dark Water” provides its readers with an audacious access to the mysteriously dark and unexplored world of the woods which possess amazingly self-sustaining and self-repairing ecosystems and an incessant vitality and interactivity. Similar to Hardy’s perceptible notion of the wood in which trees are in a permanent state of interaction with each other, the wood, in Plath’s poem, is presented as a self-sufficient universe with its unique rules, orders, and systems, epitomizing a wide variety of natural entities who are all animate, spiritual, sensitive, and intelligent beings with an alertness to their environment. At the very beginning of the poem, the wood’s mysterious power and sanctity are strongly emphasized. The crime of incense that is committed by unidentified members of the wood is punished through a pantheistic rite of burning. The poem evokes conflicting feelings of awe and fear for the dark and misty atmosphere of the wood while eliciting respect and admiration for its ancient mystic laws, codes, and traditions. Breaking of these codes is punished by the godlike figure of the wood. The trepidation of this punishment is reflected in the pale face of the moss who grows like the beard of trees. “Blue mists” moving over the trees,

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

95

produced naturally by the wood’s humidified air, inspire the poet to envision an imaginary tribal community with a smoke which arises out of ritualistic burning of sinners (Plath 1981, 127). Similar to indigenous societies in which there are deeply rooted set of conventions, kinship bonds, social affinities, the wood in the poem, is affirmed to be a primordial place of intimate social relations, organic, genetic connectedness, and interdependent relationships between its soulful components. In Plath’s poem, the wood is densely populated by multifarious biotic organisms, plants and animals like fish and snails. The persona’s witnessing this intense animism and dynamism in the wood’s ecosystem entails a notion of agential activism, a process through which each natural entity exerts its self-identity in its distinguished relationship to other selves. In this sense, the moss acquires its own unique character only in its corporeal connectedness to an old tree. Similarly, “[o]ld pewter roots twist” in an urge of new connections while “bright waterlights are / Sliding their quoits” (Plath 1981, 127). The prevalent animism and vivacity of the wood grants its individual members a distinctive personality, self-identity, subjectivity, and intentionality so that each plant and animal person is observed to be indulged in a goal, destination, and activity. The persona’s mind, accordingly, is shaped by a consecrated view of nature in which every entity is self-conscious, intentional, and poignant divinity who behaves willfully, spiritually, and knowingly. Instead of configuring the wood in a state of machine-like monotony and sluggishness, Plath, in her poem, bears an intuitive testimony to the unrelenting vivacity and constantly revitalized relationships in the wood’s ecosystem. Apart from Plath’s poem in which the wood is sanctified and treated as a living being, an analogous notion of nature, suffused with an inextinguishable storage of energy is endorsed in Plath’s another remarkable poem, “Tulips” which is equally significant in confirming that plants, instead of being passive objects of ostensibly active human species, have rigorous metamorphic power over other species in their environment, including animals and humans. The poem narrates a patient’s feelings of depression and helplessness while staying in a hospital room and surrendering herself to the hands of doctors and nurses. From the very first line of the poem, the speaker’s inactivity is contrasted with the refreshing energy of tulips: “The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here” (Plath 1981, 160). The domineering white color of the hospital in a harmonious transaction with the persona’s internal passivity and desolation steers her to envisage the hospital room as a season of winter whose lifeless stagnancy and passive tranquility are disturbed by an abrupt intrusion of red tulips who are emitting a fidgeting life energy, excitement and enthrallment as a reminiscence of an enlivening season of the spring. In contrast to the threatening self-exertiveness of the tulips, the persona stresses her “peacefulness,” quietness, and nothingness; “I have given my name and my day-clothes up

96

Chapter 3

to the nurse, / And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons” (Plath 1981, 160). Similar to the previous poem in which each natural entity appears as more than simple inert objects but as individual subjects, this is a poem which is radically dedicated to shifting the roles of humans as subjects and plants as objects, and in this way, overthrowing the duality constructed between the activism of humans and the passivity of plants. While the human persona of the poem is turned into an unnoticeably tiny and passive object of the hospital room where she is no one and feels lack of sensation under medication, the tulips enter into the hospital room as dominant actors, enforcing the persona to enter into a communion with them: “Their redness talk to my wound, it corresponds” (Plath 1981, 161). The persona expresses that she can feel their breathing. It should be taken into account that the persona’s present situation as a patient, surrounded by doctors and nurses inevitably requires her to be the submissive object of the medical operation while the presence of tulips fuels her to be an energetic actor in a process of healing. The persona’s reluctance to participate in the tulips’ cheerful invitation and her resistance are displayed in the lines where she says: “I did not want any flowers,” (Plath 1981, 161). Her stoic acceptance of the passivity which she describes as a form of peacefulness is disturbed with the upcoming of tulips, compelling her to actively connect and interact with the outside world. The poem, in this respect, not only reveals the curative impact of plants on human psychology but also presents them as convivial beings who constantly desire for reunion and companionship. Hartigan argues that “sociality in plants stems from the growing recognition of their capacity to communicate with conspecifics and even other species. Plants communicate through volatile organic compounds” (Hartigan 2017, 257). In her depiction of the tulips as frisky and social individuals who yearn for new entanglements, connections, and companionships, Plath is underpinning the surprisingly advanced communicative capacity of plants who are creatively competent in finding new partners and constructing intimate relationships in opposition to humans who are trammeled by their dualistic boundaries, ideologies, ego-centric preconceptions, mental and psychological disorders which all come out as the fundamental causes of their failure of communication. No matter how hard the persona endeavors to separate herself from the outside world, she is drawn magnetically towards tulips whose presence in the poem is unmediated, impulsive, and genuine, working as rudimentary actors, self-autonomous individuals, and most apparently superior to humans. In fact, the entire poem is predicated on humans’ susceptibility to the unmitigated power of plants who are demonstrated to be self-assertive, and communicative subjects who try restlessly to expand themselves and penetrate into new environs. While the human persona is rendered as a selfless object without having an identity, the tulips stand as powerful agents of the poem in which

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

97

they restlessly show signs of vitality and agency. Plants are purported as the foremost masters of the hospital room where everything except tulips seem to be motionless, unmoving, and passivized. The permeation of the plants into the dormant and silent atmosphere of the hospital room is encountered by the persona as a menace to her internal inertness and vulnerability, impelling her to delve into an interactive engagement with them. The poem’s foregrounding the activism of tulips can be seen as direct evidence denoting Plath’s having a botanical consciousness of plants as living entities of nature. As Michael Pollan suggests, “It takes a leap of imagination over the high fence of our self-regard to recognize not only our utter dependence on plants, but also the fact that they are considerably less passive than they appear, and in fact are wildly protagonists in the drama of their own lives—and ours” (Pollan 2015, xi). Hence, upon reading Plath’s poem as a phytosemiotic poem in which vegetative beings dominate the literary arena as active forces summoning humans and nonhumans into a mutual and meaningful interactivity with them, it can easily be inferred that Plath, as a twentieth century modernist poet, has an astonishingly developed scientific eye for plants which extends beyond a systematic bestowal of a metaphoric meaning and an instrumental value on them. Conversely, she allows plants to exert their own material identity as plant beings. Therefore, intentionality, agency, and mobility come forward as non-negligible features of plants who occupy Plath’s poem as ensouled beings who have their own perspective of the world. Physically and emotionally intimated and distressed about being observed by another living being in the room, the persona, to her surprise, notices that tulips are turning their faces towards light and watch her. The poet specifically upends the hierarchical positioning of humans as the dominant observer of the other who is victimized and objectified. For the first time, the human persona is turned into a vulnerable object and exposed to the controlling gaze of the tulips—the vegetal beings—as a result of which she feels a deep sense of shame and humiliation by thinking herself as “ridiculous” (Plath 1981, 161). The poem effectively dethrones humans’ authoritative power over natural entities by way of eliminating their objectifying and mortifying gaze on the other and replacing it with that of plants to give an exactly true sense of being watched, controlled, and fixed object of a hegemonic power structure. Although, at the beginning, it seems to be a terrifying experience for the persona to be in the same room with tulips, a considerable improvement is observed in her psychological situation as the poem proceeds. The overwhelming influence of the tulips is felt by the persona once she begins to give attentiveness to a nonhuman person by moving beyond her own human self. Tulips, finally, achieve to attract the persona’s attention. The attention that is indicated in the poem is not an unrequited, one-sided attention that is given only by the poet but it is a reciprocal transmission which is initiated

98

Chapter 3

by the tulips and belatedly answered by the human persona. At this point, the stubborn intransigence that is previously shown by the persona, turns into a felicitous communion with tulips, an experience which is alleviating for the persona. Hence, the poem lays bare an important fact that the psychological suffering of the persona emanates from her own trepidation to surrender herself totally to the transmogrifying power of plants, the tulips. The persona is forced to respond directly to tulips, have confidence in them, and unhesitatingly unlock her corporeal self to the congenial company of the tulips who demand nothing in return except friendship. She is pervasively changed and even healed by letting herself be involved in the refining power of tulips. Consequently, she starts to pay attention to her physical environment. Once keeping up to the rhythm of her heart beats, the persona can realize that tulips, in fact, help her unexpectedly in overcoming her fears and impediments and strive to open a channel of communication and the possibility of human-plant friendship which is based upon an unbiased love. The red color of the tulips resonates with the red blood of the persona forming a bridge of intimacy and friendship between them. The poem demonstrates the incontestable healing power of flowers in spite of the irrational resistance of human beings in turning their face to plants. From diverse perspectives, humans’ privileged status of being the only species who are social, intentional, and meaningful subjects, and therefore, deserving to be the primary focus of the whole universe is destabilized by Plath’s plant poetics. Plants dominate the poetic sphere as governing forces who can influence and produce a perceptible change on their co-species and other species, causing a chain effect which begins on the textual sphere of poetry and extends towards the physical universe, shaping the ultimate structure of human-plant relationship that depends on inter-species fellowship rather than on hostility. Just like Plath’s poem about tulips who have an absolute self-awareness of the outside world, Hardy’s “The Last Chrysanthemum” depicts plants as self-conscious individuals who can decide on their actions and behaviors. Hardy’s exceptional botanical enticement with the complex plant behavior is strongly felt in “The Last Chrysanthemum” which embarks on Hardy’s inquisition of the biological life span of chrysanthemums, waiting till the early winter to bloom. Hardy’s thoughtful reflection on the reason behind the chrysanthemum’s choosing winter as the season of flourishing culminates in his poignant self-identification with the flower and his attempt to look into the world from a plant perspective. Upon seeing the untimely blooming of the chrysanthemum, the poet sympathizes with the flower by saying that: “Too late its beauty, lonely thing, / The season’s shine is spent” (Hardy 2017, 118). Foreseeing the troubles and difficulties that the chrysanthemum will have to face during winter, the poet laments that: “Nothing remains for it but shivering / In tempest turbulent” (Hardy 2017, 118). These lines expose Hardy’s

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

99

feelings of compassion for the chrysanthemum’s perplexity, sense of exile, and isolation from other plant species who have either vanished or lost their prime. Transcending the threshold of his own human existence, Hardy, in this poem, strains to apprehend the chrysanthemum’s self-motivation of blooming in a winter season which will obviously bring torment, struggle, and death for the flower. “Had it a reason for delay, / Dreaming in witlessness” (Hardy 2017, 118). The poem gives a powerful expression to Hardy’s poetic attention to the plant experience and the way of its orienting itself within the world. What it is like to be a chrysanthemum, does it feel alone? Is there any reason of delaying its time of bloom? These are some of the questions that occupy the mind of the poet who feels a great sense of respect and admiration for the chrysanthemum that shows an example of resilience in coming into flower in a difficult season. “That for a bloom so delicately gay / Winter would stay its stress?” (Hardy 2017, 118). The enigmatic questions, asked repeatedly by the poet about the biotic life of the flower throughout the poem are also a revelation of his confused but keen mind, fervently dedicated to discovering the secret life of the chrysanthemum. Far from perceiving plants as commodity materials either for aesthetic or literal consumption, Hardy regards them as living and thinking individuals with self-determination and free will whose lives are full of mysteries, difficult to be deciphered by a human mind. The flower can make its own choices as a self-autonomous individual of nature and is not simply a dull, indifferent creature to the outside phenomena, on the contrary, the chrysanthemum is deeply aware of the material conditions of nature as stressed by the poet: “It must have felt that fervid call /Although it took no heed” (Hardy 2017, 118). Hardy’s poem proves that humans are not the only perspicacious species of the world; plants also, emerge as watchful and self-reliant individuals who have preferences, dreams, and ambitions. Hence, distinctive borders, drawn between humans and plants are shifted in the poem to disclose the commonalities of humans and plants rather than stressing their differences. Hardy’s poem discusses that although, sometimes, it is difficult for a human brain to understand the complexity of the plant life, this does not mean that plants do not have the capacity of intentional behavior. Hardy, with his keen eye for botanical universe, appears as an unrelenting explorer of the plant life which is startlingly full of enduring activism and dynamism. Consequently, the delayed blooming of the chrysanthemum flower is the one and only preoccupation of Hardy’s poetic as well as botanical imagination, allowing the poem’s coming into being, synchronically with the coming into being of the flower. The active plant presence, as we can claim, contributes to the materialization of Hardy’s poem, in other words, the composition of “poetry-as-plant-script” which seeks to provide an illuminative light into plants who are portrayed as sentient, self-regulating, and complex entities of

100

Chapter 3

nature (Ryan 2017, 129). The chrysanthemum’s corporeal existence is made possible by its flourishing which is a unique practice of its self-exertion and signing its signature on earth as well as on Hardy’s poem. So, the poem reinforces the view that what plants make of themselves is often different from how humans make meaning of plants. A plant’s distinguished way of making a meaning of the world, most of the time, is beyond human reasoning and understanding. The difficulty of situating plants in humans’ anthropocentric meanings, narratives, and stories become the primary concentration of the poem. It is also important to note that “The Last Chrysanthemum” as a plant script, probing into the complexity of plant life is not hampered by the anthropomorphic discourse of idealization, sentimentality, or pessimism about the impending doom of the chrysanthemum. Although Hardy’s limited human intellect remains insufficient to understand the hidden purpose of the flower to bloom in winter, the poem, as a plant script succeeds in kindling human curiosity towards the mysterious lives of plants and establishing a reciprocal human-plant interaction. In concert with Hardy’s “The Last Chrysanthemum” which explores an unrevealed peculiarity of a chrysanthemum’s existential story of being in the physical world, Plath’s “Mushrooms” is a poem which gives a magnificent account of plants’ unique perception of the universe and their understanding of the world. The poem provides botanically accurate insight into the marvelous lives of mushrooms whose communal self-determination, interconnectedness, intelligence, cooperative and organizational powers adroitly attract the approbation of the poet and her readers. Diverging from traditional human perspective of mushrooms as unwanted fungi, invasive organisms leading a parasite-like life, feeding on other plants in nature and sucking their energy, the poem unravels the inbred tenacity of mushrooms and their brilliant way of looking into the world which is quite meaningful, intentional, and purposeful. Plath draws a vivid picture of silent, inconspicuous but compatible and persistent popping up of mushrooms that happens “[o]vernight,” “discreetly” and “quietly” (Plath 1981, 139). Going against symbolic readings of the poem which encumber mushrooms with allegorical associations, the critical plant studies provides a truthful lens to Plath’s poem through which the outstanding complexity and the animated world of mushrooms are brought into light. The plant perception of the poem opens an illuminative doorway to the innate web of mushrooms’ communicative systems as well as the solidarity and competition between them so that they achieve everything that seems impossible. Although they sometimes appear as “[n]udgers and shovers,” mushrooms are still locked on their target and continue to proliferate (Plath 1981, 139). The species fellowship and the interconnectivity between mushrooms is repeatedly expressed by the mushroom speaker, saying that there are “[s]o many of us” (Plath

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

101

1981, 139). By the poem’s proffering microscopic details about the hidden life of mushrooms, it is clearly understood that Plath’s commitment is not to collect evidence for her human-oriented ideological arguments but to sustain her readers with astonishing biological truths about mushrooms. Drawing on Haraway’s notion of companion species, the anthropologist, Anna Tsing describes mushrooms as companions and points out that: Mushrooms are well known as companions. The concept of “symbiosis”—mutually beneficial interspecies living—was invented for the lichen, an association of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria. The non-fungal partner fuels lichen metabolism through photosynthesis; the fungus makes it possible for the lichen to live in extreme conditions. Repeated cycles of wetting and drying do not faze the lichen, because the fungal partner can re-organise its membranes as soon as water appears, allowing photosynthesis to resume. (Tsing 2012, 142–143, emphasis in the original)

Brilliantly enough, Plath shares similar scientific information about mushrooms in poetic language and endorses that mushrooms have enormous capacities of finding new places and spaces to inhabit, evolve, and interact with each other without necessarily needing any extra sustenance. As the poem clarifies, mushrooms, dieting on water, are quite powerful, resistant, and can live almost everywhere without needing anything. The poem ends with the affirmation of mushrooms to achieve their ultimate life goal that is to conquer the world. Similar to Hardy’s “The Last Chrysanthemum” that shows outstanding features of being a chrysanthemum in the world, mushrooms, in Plath’s poem, have their distinctive purposes and different ways of being in the world and exerting their peculiarities. The plant poetics in “Mushrooms” revolutionarily brings down a destructive anthropocentric human motive to construct an absolute control over nonhuman species of plants and animals. Hence, mushrooms’ humorous plan of inheriting the earth can, actually, be seen as a parody of human’s brutal attempt of colonizing the natural universe, exploiting, using, and abusing the natural entities selfishly as if they are non-living, unwanted, insentient objects, inferior to humans. One of the prominent figures of plant studies who restores personhood to plants, Matthew Hall argues that “plants are not passive, unperceptive beings,” contrarily, they are “autonomous and share subjective experience with human beings” (Hall 2011, 132). Similarly, the revival of a plant-centric awareness about the vitality, agency, and animism of plants is the prevailing objective that is achieved by Plath in “Mushrooms” which advocates drastic changes in humans’ anthropocentric moral concerns with its acknowledgment of plant subjectivity and personality so that plants can be seen as living individuals, deserving respect and self-esteem for their

102

Chapter 3

intrinsic value rather than their functionality for humans. Plath’s poem also puts forward the idea that humans’ self-delusional anthropocentric ideology of their allegedly being the only self-conscious, spiritual, and communicative species on earth obstruct their view, making it impossible for them to perceive the gigantic interactivity ongoing between the heterogeneous nonhuman species who are equally complicated, spiritual, and intentional living beings who exert their selves in the world in diversely varied manners. Thus, with its light-hearted portrayal of mushrooms who have a fantastic scheme of inheriting the world, the poem holds a realistic mirror to humans’ self-centered fantasies of having an absolute authorial power over the rest of the universe, dominating, exploiting, and misusing the natural entities by jettisoning their individuality and personality. In accordance with the active agency of mushrooms in Plath’s poem, Hardy in “Ivy Wife” portrays the dynamic and complicated life of plants in nature. Plants’ unfathomable desire for activism and the pain they go through to preserve this vitality along with their intelligence, vivacity, and intentionality are most perceptibly come to fore in “The Ivy-Wife,” one of Hardy’s early poems, in which the physical and emotional alliance between plants is remarkably delineated. Without necessarily requiring an intermediary of a human speaker, the poem directly gives voice to an ivy tree who gives a personal account of a series of romantic and at the same time destructive love affairs that she has engaged with other trees: “I longed to love a full-boughed beech / And be as high as he:” (Hardy 2017, 33). These lines play an important role in fluttering the minds of Hardy’s readers to ponder upon what plants really are and what kind of aspirations they have in life. Within the context of the poem, the ivy falls in love with a beech tree and tries to transmit her love by sending meaningful signals to him. “I stretched an arm within his reach, / And signalled unity” (Hardy 2017, 33). The ivy’s advances are not responded mutually by the beech who, in return, tries to poison the ivy: “But with his drip he forced a breach, / And tried to poison me” (Hardy 2017, 33). Unsettling the traditional preconceptions about plants’ being monotonous, tedious, and inactive elements of nature, Hardy’s poem discloses the prodigious intricacy of plant life by giving a vivid account of an ivy’s yearning for interactive engagement and corporeal involvement with other plants and describing her love and physical entanglement with a beech, plane, and an ash tree even if all these adventures would result in failure. So, advanced communicative skills of plants are plainly shown in the first stanza in which the ivy tree conveys her message of love into a beech tree by sending signals, and in return, the beech tree expresses his nonconformity through his poisonous drips. In the second stanza of the poem, the ivy tries to “give a grasp of partnership” to a plane tree who does not respond to the ivy’s physical and emotional advances (Hardy 2017, 33). Ivy’s physical

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

103

entanglement with the plane tree brings about the stripping of the barks of the tree that makes it impossible for the ivy to weave around the tree. After a series of unsuccessful attempts of love, the ivy is finally loved mutually by an ash tree that allows the ivy to grow freely on his body. However, the ivy’s unique style of expressing her love brings a disaster for the ash tree: “I cramped and bound him as I wove . . . / Such was my love: ha-ha!” (Hardy 2017, 33). The ivy’s growing around the body of the tree drains the life out of the tree, leaving him unable to grow without restraint, “I gained his strength and height / Without his rivalry” (Hardy 2017, 33). The tragic consequence of this romantic love entanglement between the ivy and the ash tree is the death of both trees: “Being bark-bound, flagged, snapped, fell outright, / And in his fall felled me!” (Hardy 2027, 33). Hardy, in this poem, draws attention to the social intricacy of the life of plants whose sophisticated form of inter-species relationship can outstrip human imagination. Destabilizing the fundamental differences between humans and plants, Hardy auspiciously adopts a plant discourse to project upon the colorful life of plants who are perpetually reciprocating information, sending messages to their surroundings, and using exceptional signaling systems. In its depiction of the plants’ bodily exchange of feelings and emotions, Hardy’s poem epitomizes a distinct form of plant writing, in Vieira’s theoretical term, “phytographia,” illustrating the “communion between the photographic language of plants and the logographic language of literature” (Vieira 2017, 225, emphasis in the original). Similarly, the ivy’s intense and entangled relationship to other plant species, her own distinct way of offering love, and her desire for companionship are eloquently handled in the poem that reveals itself as a phytographic poem. The ivy’s willingness and courage to leave her inscription in the physical universe is instantiated through a struggle for exerting her own existence and forging union with other trees, her own subjective experience of being-in-the-world by means of a continually evolving and changing state of the “intra-activity of becoming” that is her emotional and physical interaction with other entities (Barad 2007, 36). Moreover, Hardy’s portrayal of plants as living, thinking, and caring individuals who are capable of interaction with their environment is reminiscent of Michael Marder’s notion of plant thinking which confirms that “plants are capable, in their own fashion, of accessing, influencing, and being influenced by a world that does not overlap the human Lebenswelt but that corresponds to the vegetal modes of dwelling on and in the earth” (2013, 8, emphasis in the original). In the same manner, Hardy’s plant thinking allows him to observe varying chemical reactions of each tree in response to the advances of the ivy through a botanical lens instead of anthropocentric perspective. Hardy’s botanical imagination on complex plant behavior and cognizance permits his readers to overcome their anthropocentric reticence, impeding

104

Chapter 3

them to familiarize with plants and encourage them to perceive plants as coextensive units of human beings, sharing similar experiences of love, friendship, intrigue, and treachery. While Hardy’s “The Ivy-Wife” dramatizes trees in an advanced network of interaction, Plath’s “Elm” gives expression to an elm tree who narrates her own perception of the world which is entirely different from a human outlook. “Elm” specifically gives voice to an elm tree who reflects its own distinctive plant perspective of the world. Contrary to the majority of critics who tend to read the poem biographically, symbolizing Plath’s feelings of “depression and alienation” carrying an elegiac tone for “Plath’s lost baby” (Clark 2022, 193), Knickerbocker argues for the un-symbolic physical existence of the tree who speaks for its own concern and states that Plath shows the “inseparability of poetry and nature” in “Elm” which is “based on an actual tree outside Plath and Hughes’s house” (Knickerbocker 2012, 140). Likewise, David Young is in a strong discrepancy with some critics who “make the poem an allegory of Plath’s relation with her mother and her prophetic agony (she didn’t know of it yet, at least not officially) at her husband’s infidelity” (Young 1998, 22) and clarifies the confusion over the speaker of the poem by claiming that Plath is not the speaker of the poem, yet, finds an illuminative insight into her own inner world through “the tree’s perspective” (Young 1998, 22). According to Young, Plath has an exclusively distinguished style of employing an actual tree as the active speaker of the poem but interpreting the poem simply as “a symptom of her personal pathology” is a way of reducing “its meaning, along with her energy and artistry” (1998, 22). Plath, as Young concludes, shows her unique poetic talent by allowing the elm to “speak for itself” (1998, 23). Indeed, from a theoretical perspective of critical plant studies, it is radically groundbreaking event to obfuscate taken for granted assumptions by foregrounding plants as the dominant actors of poetry and opening a necessary space for them to speak for their own interests. In doing this, Plath exterminates strongly established ideological biases which repudiate to ascribe activism, intelligence, and agency to plants. According to this biased mindset, the only possible way for plants to be mattered in literature is through overloading them with symbolic meanings to validate that they, in fact, serve to a higher ethical purpose as means to human ends than their simple interests. In Hartigan’s words, “[u]nless plants fit into a frame of meaning—as aesthetic, symbolic, or useful . . . —then we urban dwellers generally have little interest or capacity to focus attention on them” (Hartigan 2017, 260). Accordingly, the poem, “Elm” proves that trees, beyond doubt, are capable of exchanging information and speaking for themselves without an intermediary of humans. Furthermore, their vast knowledge of the world, the centuries-old wisdom, and the experience of life definitely are far beyond human knowledge and intelligence. The elm tree, in the poem, looks into

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

105

the world in a non-identical way that cannot be consciously acquired by a human reasoning. From this angle, this poem, similar to the previous poems, overshadows the prioritized human subjectivity by highlighting extremely sophisticated, sharp cognitive capacity of the elm tree. In the very first line of the poem, the tree’s awareness of the world is revealed through its speech: “I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root” (Plath 1981, 192). The prevailing idea of these lines is to show how humans are restricted by their limited perspectives which allow them to understand the things that can be seen clearly with their own eyes. However, a tree’s intelligence does not stem from a single bodily organ and it can make a meaningful sense of the world through both its roots and branches. While its roots move towards the depths of the earth under the ground, enabling her to know what is unseen and unknown; its branches are capable of growing and enhancing towards the sky and expanding her horizons. A tree’s multi dimensional scope of understanding of the natural phenomena cannot even be compared to humans’ anthropocentric hindrances, deluding them to perceive humans as the only goal and the meaningful center of the whole universe in which everything is created with an ultimate purpose of becoming a useful servant of humans. The elm tree underscores the fundamental difference between humans and trees and states that she has an immense knowledge of the world through her roots elongating underground contrary to humans who are afraid of everything that is beyond their perception. By giving expression to an elm tree, the poem invites its readers to hear and understand a plant’s perspective of the world. In recounting her own version of events, the elm tree offers an opportunity for humans to re-evaluate their preconceptions about the prioritized status of human language as the only means of ensuring healthy communication and evinces that trees also quite effectively can articulate meaningful messages through their roots, branches, and leaves. The poem’s message, at this point, perfectly complements Michael Marder’s statement that: “We are sure not to hear plants speak if we continue to hold onto the anthropocentric prejudice that sees in our intelligence, cogitation, and languages the gold standards of intelligence, cogitation, and language as such” (Marder 2017, 104). Likewise, Plath, in her poem summons her readers to listen to what plants are telling them. In a direct address to her human companion, the elm tree affirms that “I do not fear it: I have been there” (Plath 1981, 192). Emphasizing her perseverance and strength against the hidden fears and threats, the elm tree pinpoints human weaknesses and their lack of confidence and encouragement in confronting problems in the world. At first, the tree speaker questions her human observer about what sort of symbolic meanings she makes out of the tree and asks: “Is it the sea you hear in me” (Plath 1981, 192). In her broader plant perspective, the tree persona reflects upon the likelihood of a plant-human dialogue and surmises that even if humans could hear the voices of trees, it is still, most of

106

Chapter 3

the time, the voice of a human mind, giving metaphoric meanings into plant words. The elm tree thinks that deducing human meanings out of plant speech is a form of human “madness,” and instead of hearing human madness, she invites her human companion to listen to her own real story (Plath 1981, 192). After contending the apertures between a tree’s own meaning of the world and humans’ imposition of their own meanings on trees, the tree persona, in ensuing parts of the poem, alludes to another discrepancy between the triviality of human suffering and the more serious and complicated problems of plants. Love is mentioned as one of the root causes of human suffering which is temporal and not real according to the tree persona. “Love is a shadow” (Plath 1981, 192). In her affable attempt to provide consolation for her human friend, the elm tree encourages her to come to terms with her suffering by assuring her that it is only a shadow and will inevitably depart from her in a speed of a horse. With her therapeutic speech, the elm tree consoles her human friend. Human pain proves itself ephemeral in the face of more convoluted problems that trees are forced to undergo all throughout their life. Most of these complications are occasioned by humans while some others are caused by natural circumstances. Nonetheless, a more dangerous threat to the elm tree comes not from other natural entities but from humans who destroy every natural entity through the use of poisonous chemicals. One significant cause of the destruction of trees is their exposure to ecological contaminants, poisoning not only vegetal beings but the entire ecosystem. So, the elm tree invites her human companion to listen to the sound of rain which, appears, on the surface, to be bringing quietude and calmness with a promise of resuscitation of life but, in reality, it brings an unfortunate death for all non-human entities in nature. Within the interdependently organized structure of the ecosystem, nothing is excluded from the wide-ranging impact of ecological poisoning. As the persona overtly argues, the only fruit that is brought by the rain is poison: “And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic” (Plath 1981, 192). The poem deals with an important environmental issue of water pollution which transgresses limits and reaches into lethal magnitudes during the twentieth century. The tree persona of the poem goes through a painful process of arsenic poisoning which is one of the most calamitous types of environmental pollution. When the water, as the only necessary source of life for all living beings on earth, is polluted severely by the industrial activities and the use of chemicals like pesticides and herbicides, it becomes impossible for human and nonhuman entities of the universe to thrive healthily or even stay alive. If the water is infected by the arsenic, it cannot be easily cleansed, and the arsenic “can contaminate lakes, rivers, or underground water by dissolving in rain, snow, or through discarded industrial wastes” (Chung, Yu, and Hong

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

107

2014, 253). Plath’s poem gives an emphatic voice to a painful plant experience of the arsenic, bringing a slow but progressive death to the elm tree. What is most clearly bespoken in the poem is that when plants are unchained of human symbolizations and abstractions, they can also be free to communicate their authentic experiences of the world which is unraveled to be entirely different from human concerns and interests. The elm tree as the narrator of her own story quite skillfully develops an argument on the crucial problem of the environmental destruction, the impacts of which are felt more extensively on a global scale unlike a conventional human narrative which makes use of plants as abstract conceptualizations. With a naivety of plant perception, the elm tree confesses that she is unable to comprehend the underlying reason of this arboreal poisoning. The elm tree’s immense knowledge of the world remains insufficient to explain the rationale of her bodily poisoning which begins in the soil, infuses into her roots, and then, continues to infect her branches and leaves till it is totally permeated into her whole body. In an insightful dialogue between the tree speaker and her human friend, Plath’s poem discloses a great dissimilarity between the human perspective of the universe and a plant perspective of the universe. In renunciation of the biographical approaches, reading the elm’s physical torture as a poetic expression of the poet’s psychological torture, this poem can better be understood from a distinctive plant perspective, more appropriately, the perspective of the critical plant studies which would uncover a more seriously concerning and deeply rooted environmental problem which is thoroughly hidden behind human-centered and greatly biased anthropocentric interpretations. The poem, in this respect, proves that a shift in perspective or taking position at a different angle can produce profound changes in humans’ understanding of the nonhuman selves as well as their own existential status. The poem, in this manner, shows the appropriate ways of attaining a meaningful existence in the world only in relation to non-human beings. The plant persona of the poem teaches human beings how to practice empathy for beings other than ourselves in order to conceive what they feel and how they experience this extreme agony that is wreaked by humans. With his distinguished metaphysical approach to critical plant studies, Michael Marder underlines the prerequisite of adopting multiple perspectives for destabilizing humans’ hegemonic annexation of the plant poetics: Perspectival variations on truth do not leave metaphysical totality intact, but shatter it into a myriad of fragments, including the truth of and for a non-human being, such as a plant, that signifies something radically different from everything measured in human terms. The operation of a mere overturning does not suffice, both because it ignores this irreversible fragmentation and pulverization of truth and because metaphysics already anticipates its own reversals, co-opts

108

Chapter 3

them, and occasionally draws its energy from them. Only a non-totalizable multiplicity of perspectives, only anarchic radical pluralism comprised of the all-too-human and the other-than-human existences and “worlds” is capable of countering originary metaphysical violence, opposing the human to the plant. (Marder 2013, 58, emphasis in the original)

In complement with Marder’s argument in this quotation, there is a disavowal of human perspective in Plath’s poem which opens the prospect of a more altruistic and less totalitarian interaction between humans and plants, depending on reciprocation rather than suppression. It is only through a divergence of perspective from humans towards plants that an extensive feasibility is ensured in order to grasp completely the traumatic and painful experiences of plants that emanate from human caused pollution and destruction of the environment. The tree persona of the poem shows how the imaginary world, constructed for plants in literature is extensively removed from the actual reality of plants who are poisoned, exploited, and strangled by humans and left little space to thrive freely on earth. Plath’ poem, in this regard, comes to forth as an important “plant script” in which a dialogue between plants and humans “will be posited as a basis for interspecies collaboration in which botanical life is an agent, participant within, and contributor to compositional process” (Ryan 2017, 128). In a similar vein, the elm tree takes over the power of representation from humans with a promise of giving more accurate information about the realities of plant kingdom, and further, ushers humans to question their exploitative treatment of nature and ruthless poisoning of plants. Above all, plants are no longer considered to be muted, inanimate, instrumental objects in Plath’s poem which enfolds plants within humans’ system of moral principles and holds it mandatory for humans to accept the accountability for the disruption of the vigorous agency, and perplexing mechanism of nature by poisoning it imprudently through industrial activities. For internalizing a decent ethical maturity, it is essential for humans to be aware of their primordial, innate selves which connect them to the selves other than humans. This authentic self will enable humans to construct their social identity not in opposition to nonhuman identities but will grant them the faculty of relating themselves to trees, plants, and animals as well as helping them discover their long-forgotten set of moral values which require them to show respect and conviviality to plants and restore dignity to each natural entity who should be seen as a decent person. What is achieved by Plath in her poem is exactly this kind of respect and compassionate identification with the elm tree, compelling humans to face with the appalling reality that the major culpability for the acidic pollution and the toxic poisoning of trees as the most vicious form of environmental devastation should be laid on humans. For this reason, it is an important moral obligation for humans to come to the realization of

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

109

a self-knowledge which does not mean self-absorption but outstretching the contours of self-identity with an awareness that no one stands, exists, and means alone in its entirety. Human identity, thus, should generate from its relatedness to other selves and grow into maturity in a symbiotic relationship with nonhuman beings in nature. In addition to Plath’s allegation of humans for inflicting harm and grievance on plants who are self-conscious, mindful persons, “Throwing a Tree” is another remarkable poem by Hardy in which he gives expression to the inaudible injury of a tree who is murdered by humans. The poem focuses on the sentience of plants and gives voice to their emotional trauma, brought about by human violence. Hardy, in this poem, demonstrates a dramatic scene of an execution of a two-hundred-year-old tree by humans who are presented as the greatest source of damage, done to the green universe. The poem, quite strikingly, describes humans as “two executioners,” “[b]earing two axes with heavy heads shining and wide” (Hardy 2017, 502). Human brutality and inattentiveness are juxtaposed with the vulnerability of the old tree who is doomed to suffer because of human beings. Without skipping every single detail, the poem meticulously describes the cutting of the tree as humans’ criminal act of murder. Ironically however, technical terms, instead of sentimental expressions, are used to expose human ferocity and emphasize humans’ hard-heartedness to understand and hear the suffering of the tree: “And a long limp two-handled saw toothed for cutting great boles, / And so they approach the proud tree that bears the death-mark on its side” (Hardy 2017, 502). In using mechanical terms to designate the throwing of a tree, Hardy, also, succeeds vociferously in conveying the fallacious human opinion of trees who are seen as material commodities for industrial economies. Likewise, undergirding the tree’s pride, the poem uncovers the same anthropocentric mindset which is inclined to acknowledge nonhuman nature as a menace to human existence, and therefore, in need of domination and control. In the face of unswerving human determination to throw down the tree, the tree is discerned to be shivering at the verge of death: “The saw then begins, till the top of the tall giant shivers: / The shivers are seen to grow greater with each cut than before:” (Hardy 2017, 502, emphasis added). These two lines quite deftly foreground the victimized plant persons who are trembling and shivering because of human brutality and mercilessness. The repetition of the word ‘shiver’ conveys an extremely significant notion of plant sensibility, proving that trees are not inanimate objects of human use, but they are embodied with souls and therefore, capable of feeling pain and suffering. “They edge out the saw, tug the rope; but the tree only quivers, / And kneeling and sawing again, they step back to try pulling once more” (Hardy 2017, 502, emphasis added). The reiteration of the tree’s shivering and quivering in the poem prompts its readers to take a serious notice of the tormented

110

Chapter 3

vegetal soul, victimized by the ruthless human persecution and deemed to be an obstacle on the path of the technological and industrial development of human beings. An important anthropocentric presumption about humans’ deserving a moral consideration for the reason of their being the only species on earth, possessing soul, self-consciousness, and rationality with an inward aptitude for feeling pain and suffering, is adroitly turned upside down by the poem’s deliberate focus on the shivering and the quivering of the tree. While the old tree is shown to be in an extreme agony, the two woodcutters, totally uninterested in the tree’s quivering in anguish, seem to be entirely concentrated on finishing their job mechanically without showing any sign of emotional reaction. Humans’ failure in finding a sympathetic identification with the natural world constitutes a perilous hindrance for them to conceive natural entities as spiritual beings, having distinctive personalities, desires, and concerns similar to humans. Depicting these two woodcutters as unmoved by the shivering of the tree, Hardy scrutinizes humans’ moral principles which are solely centered on pursuing human interests while denying nonhuman beings the right to exist on earth. Their anthropocentric convictions prevent humans from caring for the feelings of trees and taking the moral responsibility of hurting or injuring them. Commenting on humans’ pervasive incitement to marginalize plants from their social and cultural lives, Michael Marder accuses humans of conducting “ethical monstrosities” because of their incapacity of looking into the world through the eyes of plants (Marder 2013, 2). In their prevarication to feel any kind of physical and spiritual connectedness to plants, humans insistently keep plants out of the frontiers of their ethical consideration and consider plants as “unconditionally available for unlimited use and exploitation” (Marder 2013, 3). Correspondingly, it is exactly this exploitative motive of humans that Hardy most fervently reproaches in his poem where the human negligence of plant vitality reaches into such a devastating extent that all the nonhuman neighbors, witnessing the murdering of the tree are shuddered at the horrendous sight of human aggressiveness while humans are depicted as the only species who are not disturbed by this horrific scene: “The tree crashes downward: it shakes all its neighbours throughout,/ And two hundred years’ steady growth has been ended in less than two hours” (Hardy 2017, 503). These lines, without using sentimentalized expressions, compellingly illustrate that humans’ alleged exceptionality as the ultimate governing authorities over nonhuman nature has subsequently turned them into cold-blooded tyrants and the unaffectionate masters of the nonhuman life. Trees, in this sense, are presented as the vulnerable victims who are mercilessly slaughtered by humans. Apart from the inexpressible pain of a silenced tree in Hardy’s “Throwing a Tree” which presents humans as the murderers of trees, Plath’s “Fable of Rhododendron Stealers” is an identical poem which takes as its subject matter

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

111

the human violation of the rights of plants to exist and flourish on earth. The poem displays the poet’s extraordinary wakefulness to the vitality and uniqueness of flowers in a public park. The persona of the poem explains her habitual act of taking a single rose from the garden to her home to feed her imagination as a reminder of the garden’s beauty. In the second stanza, the highly animated world of plants, and the vitality of flowers are contrasted to an inert statue of an animal, standing in the middle of the park and described as “sluggish green,” lacking any sensitivity, and alertness of the flowers (Plath 1981, 103). Becoming aware of the agency of flowers who have a life of their own, the persona feels a deep sense of remorsefulness for picking up one flower at her every visit to the public park. She tries to resist her guilty conscience which tells her that she is destroying the beauty of the garden. While the persona’s conscience is tortured by the pain that she gives to plants, she sees a group of young girls who are quite carelessly and viciously cutting all the rhododendrons. The persona’s respect and thoughtfulness for the flowers are in complete opposition to the recklessness and brutality of three girls who do not pay attention to the ache of flowers. Upon watching the mass extermination of flowers by the girls, the persona identifies with the injury of flowers and feels that: “A spasm took the rhododendron bushes” (Plath 1981, 104). The persona’s incredulity increases when she notices the girls’ arrogant behavior, their flippancy and ignorance of the damage they give to flowers by killing them. The garden is swept out all of its flowers. The extensiveness of the harm is observed with anger by the persona in the lines where the girls are collecting all the flowers. The girls’ displaying no mortification of their action implies their lack of knowledge about the sentience of plants. As the poem clearly demonstrates, the tragic consequence of human ignorance, namely, the plant blindness, is humans’ lack of empathy with plants and the plants’ exposition to irresponsible human vandalism which brings a total devastation of rhododendrons in the public park. The persona underlines the obliviousness of the girls by saying that they “wouldn’t pause for my straight look” (Plath 1981, 104). In opposition to the persona’s respect for the flowers’ rights to flourish in the park without any human interference into their life cycles to maintain the natural process of their thriving and fading, the girls in the park do not show any sign of respect or concern. The poem employs a striking juxtaposition of two contradictory human behaviors towards plants; one is defined by the plant sensitivity and the other is characterized by plant blindness. Plant sensitivity requires showing responsible human behavior not only to humans but also to all more-than-human beings without usurping their natural rights to exist in the world. The persona’s plant sensitivity allows her to feel the tremor of the rhododendrons at the moment of their being brutally slaughtered by human species. The persona’s keen awareness of plant agency enables her to see rhododendrons as

112

Chapter 3

living individuals, having the faculty of feeling pain and torture. Contrarily, plant blindness prevents these three girls in the park from feeling and hearing the suffering of rhododendrons since they do not have an awareness of plant vitality and agency. Having lost their power of empathy to understand the feelings of plants, these girls are incapable of realizing the damage they inflict on plants. Their ego-centric human absolutism authorizes them to destroy everything nonhuman without taking any responsibility so much so that they do not even seem to be disturbed by the judgmental gaze of the persona. The plant blindness constitutes an overwhelming handicap for these girls precluding them from recognizing the inherent value of plants and feeling any accountability for the killing of flowers. Along with Plath’s poem which illustrates the poet’s plant sensibility, enabling her to hear the suffering of rhododendrons, Hardy’s “The Voice of the Thorn” is a poem which depicts Hardy’s listening to the voice of a lonesome thorn. It is a marvelous poem revealing the poet’s botanical alertness to communicative plant persons. The poem provides an emotional reactivation of human-plant engagement and, as often seen in the previous poems, invites its human readers to listen to the imperceptible voice of a lonely thorn on the hills who longs for companionship, communication, being heard and understood. “When the thorn on the down / Quivers naked and cold,” (Hardy 2017, 186). Hardy’s persona is not an insensitive person who is stricken with plant blindness; on the contrary he is quite efficiently capable of understanding how the changing physical conditions affect the life of the thorn who is usually considered to be one of the most insignificant plant species. Concentrating on the naked thorn’s quivering in the winter cold, the persona, in fact, shares a scientific knowledge about plants’ being “sessile organisms” having an acute consciousness of their constantly changing environments and developing strong immune systems towards those changes (Baluška et al. 2006, 31). Hardy’s persona is “mid-aged and old” man who shows a highly developed skill of empathy for the thorn who seems to be “sighing” (Hardy 2017, 189). Regardless of its own weakness caused by the harshness of the winter cold, the thorn is still capable of feeling compassion for the sojourners who will be tremendously affected by the cold weather when they visit the area. The quivering thorn seems to be warning visitors about harsh wintry weather by saying that: “‘O winter is trying / To sojourners here!’” (Hardy 2017, 186). Thistles and thorns are assumed to be wild, uncultivated, prickly plants with sharp spikes and are usually considered as unwanted, problem-causing weeds which grow naturally in wilderness unlike sophisticated flowers that are planted by human hand for economic or aesthetic concerns, and therefore, far more valued and cherished than thorns. Hardy’s distinguished plant perception furnishes him with an exceptional aptitude to have an entirely different vision of the thorns, enabling him notice heretofore neglected aspect

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

113

of thorns as delicate, kind-hearted, and caring living beings who have a perceptual recognition of their constantly changing environment. Remarkably, the poem, on the one hand, is based upon affectionate yearning of a thorn for a longstanding companionship, while, on the other hand, it radiantly reflects humans’ indulgent comprehension of plant thinking, feeling, and longing. In this sense, the poem founds a perfect balance between human and plant individuals whose relationship depends on a mutual understanding of each other’s needs and desires. In reflecting a unique experience of being a thorn and its excellent proficiency in transmitting its feeling of loneliness, the poem as a plant text, bestows dignity upon distinctive plant experiences without necessarily aligning them with anthropomorphic symbols and metaphors. The thorn’s conviviality is more strongly stressed in the second part of the poem in which the hot summer season ends the thorn’s loneliness and brings joy and happiness with the company of animals: “And the ewes there astray / Find its shade a sweet rest,” (Hardy 2017, 186). While the first part provides lucid insight onto the thorn’s difficulty of survival in the winter chilly, the second part delineates its blissful life during the summer season. Unlike its desperate loneliness and fragility in the winter season, the thorn, in the summer, is fully clothed with its petals and flowers and enjoys the companionship of different animals like a group of ewes who come near it and benefit from its shade. The poem continually stresses the sociability of the thorn who impatiently wants to entertain itself with new friendships, keep its interactivity with its environment and “inquires of each farer” if they want to come near it and find joyful companionship (Hardy 2017, 186). The thorn encourages every traveler, human and nonhuman, to come and share its beautiful cooling shade that would protect them from the scorching summer heat: ‘Who would not be sharer / Of shadow with these?’ (Hardy 2017, 186). The thorn’s intentionally and its talent for inter-species communication is extensively elaborated in the poem with an emphasis on the socializing capacity of the loving thorn who wants nothing except for staying in connection to the myriads of other species in an exchange of love and friendship. Subverting the dualistic ideology which insistently associates intelligence with brain, Nancy Baker unveils the absurdity of looking for the existence of a human-like brain in plants as “criteria for the application of the word intelligent to plant behavior” and argues that it is not the organ of brain that is intelligent but it is humans, plants, and animals who display intelligible behavior through diverse means (Baker 2017, 149). Appropriately, Hardy’s poem remarkably bears testimony to the intentional agency of plants who are unraveled to be astonishingly developed, complex life forms, empowered with the necessary communicative and emotional skills that would enable them to live in an interdependent and rhizomatic relationship with other species. Through the end of the poem, the thorn directly speaks to the persona: “In its voicing to me / Only one speech is spoken”

114

Chapter 3

(Hardy 2017, 186). This last part of the poem interweaves the life of plants together with the human life which is full of tragedies and unreturned love. The persona is reminded by the thorn about an upsetting scene of love that he lived in the past: “Here once was nigh broken / A heart, and by thee” (Hardy 2017, 186). Whilst the first two parts of the poem concentrate on the thorn’s longing for friendship, the last part moves the attention towards the human persona who recalls a past memory of a heartbreaking incident in which he broke a woman’s heart. The only witness of this event is the thorn who, years later, refreshes the thoughts of the persona and reminds him about the quarrel that took place between his lover and himself. Nishumura confirms that “The Voice of the Thorn” is an autobiographical poem in which the thorn is known by Hardy and Sparks [Hardy’s lover], in a place where they come together frequently, and “it may also be the case that the last two lines of the poem are about the quarrel between them that broke out there” (2017, 150). In accordance with this, Hardy’s diligent observation of the thorn foregrounds the significance of this plant as an animate, sentient, and conscientious testament to the composition and evolution of human stories. That is to say, the thorn’s active involvement in human life as well as its eagerness to interact with its environment is the essential constitutive unit that gives its present shape to Hardy’s poem. The textuality of Hardy’s poem, therefore, is constructed by effective participation of the thorn in the poem. Hardy’s imagination, suitably, is animated by his interactive engagement with the external world which has a great transformative power on his internal imaginative world. So, it would not be wrong to claim that a tiny thorn emerges as an immensely powerful governing force over Hardy’s mind, directing him to refresh his memory about his past life and dictating him to write his poem. The poem, in this manner, combines the stories of plants with the stories of humans whose mutual interaction gives the universe its ultimate meaning and the sole reason of existence. The thorn, in the poem, emerges as an important natural entity that constructs the way humans generate their own meaning of life and make their inferences out of it in an emotionally and physically interconnected alliance with other life forms. Human life is meticulously knitted together with plant life in commonly shared feelings of loneliness, yearning for unions, love, and friendship. It is through one of the most undistinguished life forms that Hardy accomplishes to reveal the heterogeneousness of the universe in which even the tiniest, insignificant elements can be capable of making meaningful sense of the world around them by means of their affiliations. As a result, Hardy proves that this intricate connectivity in the universe is not always conducted through competition between species but also through companionships and partnership as represented by the thorn’s unconditional cross-species love for other living beings around it.

Vegetal Agency in the Plant Poetics of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath

115

Leaving aside the traditional notion of plants as necessary technical tools for textual practices, Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath are two prominent poets who are specifically interested in restoring the agentic capacities of plants like communicative competency, thinking, reasoning, feeling pain, and suffering in their poetry. As it is unmistakably inferred from Hardy and Plath’s poems, the active presence of plants in human life is fundamental to humans’ understanding of the material universe in which plants are amazingly dexterous to wield their influence on their environment, exchanging information, and expressing their feelings in uniquely nonhuman ways. In this regard, both Hardy and Plath contribute to the democratization of poetry by emancipating plants from the imprisonment of the stereotypical human representations in which plants are allowed to occupy barely secondary positions as inert objects, metaphors, elusive connotations, or simple background decorations. Plants play jointly constructive roles in the composition of Hardy and Plath’s poems. Hardy and Plath’s poetic sensitivities to vegetal world and their conceptualization of plants as self-conscious and communicative individuals who raise their voices against human brutality also provide a practical and fertile ground for elucidating the theoretical arguments of critical plant studies which aims to draw more scholarly and social activist attention from all segments of societies towards plant populations of the world, suffering from human exploitation and abuse. Reading Hardy and Plath’s poems from critical plant perspective uncovers the agential faculty of plants in telling their own version of events, outlook of life, their desires and ambitions which are proved to be not less important and complicated than human stories. In fact, Hardy and Plath’s poetry are totally packed with plant narratives as evidences of plant agency, intelligence, and meaningfulness. By way of plant narratives, both Hardy and Plath shatter humans’ hegemonic anthropocentric positions as the only peerless species, possessing reason and agency in the material universe. Rational and intentional plant persons in Hardy and Plath’s poems urge humans to confront with a disturbing truth that humans, irresponsibly and irrationally, commit a serious crime of destroying green universe, eradicating forests, and ignoring the individuality and spirituality of plant beings.

Conclusion

Plants are the most sociable beings in the universe, trying to connect indiscriminately with everybody in their physical environment. Deleuze and Guattari perceive it as the sagacity of plants and write that: “The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal, human beings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 11). Plants’ splendid trait of managing rhizomatic inter-species interactivity is always symbiotic, meaningful, and steered to achieve a certain purpose or goal in their life. However, the stubborn plant blindness is an impediment to humans’ recognition of the keenness of plants to communicate with their environment. Although the expedited disappearance and extinction of plants from the earth contribute a lot to the dearth of a meaningful human-plant interaction, plant blindness, with a large trans-disciplinary consensus of plant biologists and scholars of humanities, stands as the foremost obstruction for the possibility of human-plant intimacy. According to Gagliano, modern societies are “afflicted by plant blindness, a pervasive condition inherited from our forefather Aristotle and accountable for the current state of vegetal disregard and hence environmental catastrophe” (Gagliano 2016, 19, emphasis in the original). Day by day, plants’ withdrawal from the surface of the planet is in escalation on par with the dispersion of humans all around the world, invading and displacing plants by fiercely destroying everything that stands in their way. As Gagliano convincingly argues, what lies at the core of plant problem and environmental catastrophe that the world is grabbling with today is plant blindness, hinting at humans’ insufficiency of knowledge about plants and their refusal to know plants better because of their anthropocentric self-indulgence which renders every non-human being as a means for human ends. What lies underneath this disjointed and problematic relationship between humans and plants is also the plant blindness which prevents us from seeing our biological kinship with plants. The complicated nature of plants and their activism and agency have always remained unrecognized by human beings. Plants’ “ethical neglect” is what comes after plant blindness as an unsurprising outcome of humans’ illiteracy and misconceptions in spite of the 117

118

Conclusion

interminable messages and proclamations of scientists about plant vitality and indispensability of plants for the future of life on the planet (Marder 2013, 3). Admittedly, it is tremendously challenging to recuperate persistent human denial of plant sentience and vibrancy, especially, when we take into consideration the complete human apathy towards recent developments in botanical studies which aim at increasing cultural awareness about plant thinking. The ethical neglect of plants serves practically to humans in absolving them from any kind of moral responsibility for using, abusing, and exploiting vegetal world since plants are wrongly assumed to lack sentience, self-awareness, value, and meaning on their own. It is pretty clearly understood so far that this kind of instrumental relationship with plants is not pursuable for the future of planet since it aggravates humans’ plant neglect and deepens the precipice between human and nonhuman beings while bringing swiftly the end of the green universe. The Anthropocenic age is characterized by an unfortunate human failure to understand that they are insignificant, tiny little spots within a boundlessly extensive and interpenetrated macrocosm. Blindsided by this unsustainable anthropocentric fervor, human species continue to demolish the balance of nature and the intricate order of the universe and autocratically use their so-called exceptional human agency to suppress and devitalize the nonhuman agency. In a reasonably authentic attempt to define an exceptional plant theory which will defend the rights of plants against human exploitation, critical plant studies initiates a path-breaking project of plant emancipation which endorses plants as actively intelligent, self-conscious, and emotional individuals, fully awake and sensitive to their environment. Critical plant studies entails the view of plants as co-species of humans and restores the communal entanglement of humans and plants. In advocating connections, cohesions, and continuities, critical plant studies demands respect for differences allowing plants to be themselves and to live their distinctive plant identities without being overloaded with symbolic configurations. Drawing most of its theoretical paradigms from accurate scientific observations and evidences of biology and botany, critical plant studies serves also to a great purpose of demystifying the unrealistic, yet strongly established and widespread misconceptions about plants’ being the most insensitive, inactive, and dullest creatures of the universe, completely unresponsive to their environment. From this perspective, critical plant studies can be considered as a radical alternative to the Anthopocenic epoch and the disastrous results of its human-oriented industrial and technological activities. Critical plant studies emerges out of environmental activist movements as a branch of ecocritical studies as a prerequisite, yet seeming to be an “obscure-sounding project” at first but with a rightful proclamation of an urgent saving plan for plants from the oppressions of humans (Nealon 2016,

Conclusion

119

ix). This project of critical plant studies requires a huge change in the traditional human conceptualizations of plants’ being insentient, nonliving, and passive entities whose destruction does not bring any kind of moral accountability for humans. There are, of course, compound dimensions of such an overall change and radical shift of principles that should begin from the top of the societies, encompassing the change of politics, decision-making mechanisms, and economic activities, and later, descend towards the majority of populations, demanding to recompose their cultural, ethical, religious, and personal practices and mindsets. To compensate the damage done to the green world by the Anthropocenic age that is marked by its consumerist practice of putting a monetary price over trees, flowers, and other plants, it is an utmost necessity to move towards a new era, borrowing Myers’ term, an epoch of “Planthroposcene” where plants are not taken for granted for their financial values but respected and valued for their inherent values as they are the autochthonous inhabitants and owners of this universe (Myers 2017, 299). Literature, without doubt, has an important role in shaping the thoughts of humans about plants through fictional representations which are, most of the time, unrealistically stereotypical by draining plants out of their physical reality and detaining them within abstract conceptualizations. What is advocated by critical plant studies is that independent of humans’ bestowal of symbolic meanings, plants are capable of making meaning of their own lives and without the valuation of humans, they have their intrinsic worth and carry moral significance in their plant existence. Without an intermediary of a human subject, as the scholars of critical plant studies suggest, plants can narrate their own stories and experiences of the world. For Vieira, for instance, distinctive plant writing is imperative to learn “[w]hat would plants say about themselves, about their environment, and especially, what would they say about us?” (Vieira 2017, 215). Vieira names this form of plant writing as “phytographia,” a term she uses to discriminate between traditional plant representations as “writings on plants” rather than “writings of plants” in which plants play a more domineering and active role and “inscribe themselves on human texts” (Vieira 2017, 225, emphasis in the original). Correspondingly, while the introductory chapter has presented a comprehensive discussion of critical plant studies and its major premises, chapter 1 has endeavored to trace back the historical roots of plant attentiveness to the emergence of the nineteenth-century British and the twentieth-century American environmental movements. Chapter 1 is specifically essential in terms of situating Hardy and Plath’s plant sensitivity within the scientific and historical context of their own periods during which the catastrophic ecological repercussions of aggressive industrial activities were coincided with a growing environmental consciousness about the innumerable problems like pollution, extinction, deforestation, and ecosystem destruction. It has also

120

Conclusion

been shown unequivocally that environmental problems are not only complicated and multi-dimensional but also global, and therefore, require more systematic, organized, and a widespread radical transformation throughout the world, inviting every segment of world societies to be actively involved in the problem solving process since these issues have far surpassed national and political borders and become the common concern of every society. Particularly, the study of Hardy and Plath’s poetry points to this fact of environmental problems which are transnational and beyond geographical boundaries, bothering poets from diverse backgrounds and periods. Reminiscent of his period’s increasing plant awareness by virtue of the abundance of biological and scientific debates, Hardy devotes his poetry to attracting public attention to the significance of plants in human life. Botanical discoveries of plant vitality and the nineteenth-century scientific debates about the necessity of protecting forests to cope up with the enormous degree of air pollution that is caused by industrial activities become a real source of inspiration for Hardy’s biological concept of plants as sentient beings who have an awareness of their environment. Similarly, Plath’s concern with environmental problems is reflected vividly in her poems in which the most dangerous effects of radioactive and toxic poisoning caused by industrial products are strongly felt by plants whose suffering and pains are responded with sympathy and grief by the poet. Like Hardy, Plath also conceives plants as self-conscious individuals whose needs and interests should be respected by humans. While Rachel Carson whose revolutionary book, Silent Spring during the 1960s becomes a primary source of inspiration for Sylvia Plath’s environmental consciousness and plant perception, Darwin’s work, The Power of Movement in Plants at the end of the nineteenth century creates a similar effect in Hardy’s recognition of plants as intentional living beings with an agency to move and change their positions. From this perspective, Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath’s plant poetry, as chapters 2 and 3 have attempted to demonstrate, are more than writings on plants but appear as phytographic poems in which plants exercise their power and influence and leave their footprints, or more appropriately, leaf prints, on the textuality of literature. As it is frequently observed, both poets give voice to plants, leaving the poetic platform to plant personas who courageously express their feelings, emotions, concerns, views of the world, and criticisms of human torture and malpractice of natural entities. Correspondingly, the female persona in Hardy’s “Pine Planters” can hear sighs, fears, and sufferings of the pine tree that is transplanted into a foreign soil while an elm tree in Plath’s “Elm” takes over the role of the narrator to tell her own plant perspective of the world which is full of tragedy and pain caused by humans. She accuses humans of poisoning her roots and killing her. Likewise, the ivy in Hardy’s “Ivy-Wife” gives voice to her endless desire for inter-species

Conclusion

121

companionship and emotional relationship while tulips in Plath’s “Tulips” forcefully transmit their life energy to a female patient in a hospital room to help her recover from her illness and hopelessness. Hence, all these plant persons exert their own true selves and intentional agencies in Hardy and Plath’s poems which come into being as plant transcriptions rather than human words on absentee plants who do not hear, talk, or think. A close scrutiny of Hardy and Plath’s poems from the standpoint of critical plant studies also lays bare the botanical awareness of these two poets and their alertness to the ecological significance of plants who are perceptive and sensitive to their environment. Contrary to dominant anthropocentric assumptions of plants’ being silent background objects of literature, serving to a higher human purpose, both Hardy and Plath move plants to the center of their poetry and allow them to be themselves without turning them into symbolic representations. Far more than being only a subject of poetry, plants enliven the heart, mind, and imagination of Hardy and Plath, and thus, animate their poetry. In this regard, while these two poets approach plants as living biological entities similar to humans, they also turn plants into dynamic actors in the materialization of their poetry. The vital plant energy invigorates the poetic creativity of Hardy and Plath just like they supply the universe with constantly refreshing life energy. Moreover, with a discernment of genetic resemblance and spiritual continuity between humans and plants, both Hardy and Plath emphasize human kinship with plants and recurrently deal with the theme of human-plant connectivity and interactivity in their poetry. Similar to Plath’s amazement of the physical resemblance between humans’ bodily organs and trees in “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” Hardy’s “The Tree: An Old Man’s Story” draws attention to the striking continuity between the stories of humans and plants. Similarly, while Plath expresses her aspiration to be transformed into a tree and completely unified with the vegetal life in “I’m Vertical,” Hardy’s “Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard” displays how humans are physically transformed into plant beings when their bodies are decomposed in their graves to sustain the minerals for the growth of plants. All throughout chapters 2 and 3 which are internally connected to each other, it has been observed that plants are the most important invigorating agents in Hardy and Plath’s poems. Both chapters, on that account, are structured upon demonstrating two important principles of critical plant studies, which are the perpetuation of human-plant inter-activity and the affirmation of the vegetal agency. Hardy and Plath’s attentiveness to plants enables them to recognize the agentic faculties of plants who are intentional, emotional, and intelligent beings. This recognition of plant vitality comes into foreground as an important unifying element, intersecting Hardy and Plath’s plant poetry through which an unfaltering bridge of communion and companionship between humans and plants

122

Conclusion

is constructed. Consequently, the book has demonstrated the exceptional achievement of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath in extricating plants out of symbolic representations and abstract conceptualizations and holding a testimony to the power of fictional realm of literature in revealing the botanical accuracy of vegetal beings. Eradicating the seemingly irreconcilable differences between humans and plants, Hardy and Plath exhibit an unprecedented talent in transforming humans’ anthropocentric ways of thinking about plants in symbolic terms towards a biological understanding of plants by creating, in their poetry, every possible circumstance for an intimate, physical encounter between human and plant individuals. Thus, rather than instrumentalizing plants for signifying human imagination and discourse, Hardy and Plath instrumentalize language to initiate non-symbolic, actual, and solidly new ways of physical human-plant entanglements which are not constrained within the literary world but needed to be conveyed into the everyday lives and cultural practices of humans in the outside world.

Bibliography

Aberth, John. 2013. An Environmental History of the Middle Ages: The Crucible of Nature. London: Routledge. Baker, Nancy E. 2017. “The Intelligence of Plants and the Problem of Language: A Wittgensteinian Approach.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 136–154. Baluška, František, Dieter Volkmann, Andrej Hlavacka, Stefano Mancuso, Peter W. Barlow. 2006. “Neurobiological View of Plants and Their Body Plan.” In Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life. Eds. František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso, and Dieter Volkmann. Berlin: Springer, 19–35. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Baratta, Christopher. 2012. “Transcendental Ideas: Religion.” Accessed on 20.05. 2023.  https:​//​archive​.vcu​.edu​/english​/engweb​/transcendentalism​/ideas​/ baratta​.html Barker, T. Herbert. 1863. Malaria and Miasmata and Their Influence in the Production of Typhus and Typhoid Eeyers, Cholera, and the Exanthemata. London: John W. Davies. Barton, Gregory A. 2004. Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bassnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Palgrave. Bayley, Sally. 2011. “‘The trees of the mind are black, the light is blue’: Sublime encounters in Sylvia Plath’s ‘tree poems.’” In Representing Sylvia Plath. Eds. Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 91–109. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Bentham, George. 1887. Handbook of the British Flora: A Description of The Flowering Plants and Ferns Indigenous to, or Naturalized in the British Isles. London: L. Reeve & Co. Bloom, Harold. 2001. Introduction. In Comprehensive Research and Study Guide: Sylvia Plath. Ed. Harold Bloom. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 9–10.

123

124

Bibliography

Bowden, Mary. 2022. “Cultivating Arboreal Time in Hardy’s Fiction.” Dibur Literary Journal Unusual Gardens: Toward a Poetics of Cultivated Earth 11: 89–100. Brain, Tracy. 2014. The Other Sylvia Plath. New York: Routledge. Bristow, Tom. 2016. “‘Wild Memory’ as an Anthropocene Heuristic: Cultivating Ethical Paradigms for Galleries, Museums, and Seed Banks.” In The Green Thread Dialogues with the Vegetal World Eds. Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan. Lanham: Lexington, 81–106. Brulle, Robert J. 2000. Agency, Democracy, and Nature: The U.S. Environmental Movement from a Critical Theory Perspective. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Cartwright, Mark. 2017, February 16. “Leda” World History Encyclopedia. Accessed on 10.02.2023. https:​//​www​.worldhistory​.org​/Leda/. Chang, Elizabeth Hope. 2019. Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Chung, Jin-Yong, Yu, Seung-Do, Hong, Young-Seoub. 2014. “Environmental Source of Arsenic Exposure.” Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health. 47. 5. 253–257. Clapp, B. W. 1994. An Environmental History of Britain Since the Industrial Revolution. London: Longman. Clark, Indy. 2015. Thomas Hardy’s Pastoral: An Unkindly May. London: Macmillan. Clark, Heather. 2022. “Non Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Sillitoe”: Sylvia Plath and Ruth Fainlight in the 1960s.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath. Eds. Anita Helle, Amanda Golden, & Maeve O’Brien, London: Bloomsbury. 187–198. Coccia, Emanuele. 2019. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Trans. Dylan J. Montanari. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cohen, William A. 2014. “Arborealities: The Tactile Ecology of Hardy’s Woodlanders.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19: 1–19. doi: https:​ //​doi​.org​/10​.16995​/ntn​.690 Conrad, Jessica Stoller. 2017. “Tree Rings Provide Snapshots of Earth’s Past Climate.” January 25, Accessed on 5.04.2023. https:​//​climate​.nasa​.gov​/news​/2540 /tree-rings-provide-snapshots-of-earths-past-climate/ Corlett, Richard T. 2016. “Plant Diversity in a Changing World: Status, Trends, and Conversation Needs.” Plant Diversity 38: 10–16. Darwin, Charles. 1880. The Power of Movement in Plants. London: William Clowes and Sons. De Landa, Manuel. 2000. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Egan, Michael. 2007. Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo.1950. “Nature.” In The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Ed. Brooks Atkinson. The United States of America: Random House. 3–42.

Bibliography

125

———. 1950. “The Poet.” In The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Ed. Brooks Atkinson. The United States of America: Random House, 319–341. Estok, Simon C. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. New York: Routledge. Gagliano, Monica, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Vieira. 2017. Introduction. In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. vii–xxxiii. Gagliano, Monica. 2017. “Breaking the Silence: Green Mudras and the Faculty of Language in Plants.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 84–100. ———. 2016. “Seeing Green: The Re-discovery of Plants and Nature’s Wisdom.” In The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World. Eds. Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan. Lanham: Lexington. 19–35. ———.2018. “Inside the Vegetal Mind: On the Cognitive Abilities of Plants.” In Memory and Learning in Plants. Eds. Frantisek Baluska, Monica Gagliano, Guenther Witzany. Switzerland: Springer. 215–220. Galla, Edit. 2019. “Medical Dehumanisation: in Sylvia Plath’s Late Poems.” The AnaChronisT vol. 19: 84–104. Gill, Jo. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gossin, Pamela. 2010. “Hardy’s Poetic Cosmology and the ‘New Astronomy’” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy. Ed. Rosemarie Morgan. England: Ashgate Publishing, 235–251. Haeckel, Ernst. (1899). 2018. The History of Creation or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Cause, Vol I. New York: Routledge. Hall, Matthew. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hardy, Barbara. 2000. Thomas Hardy: Imagining Imagination, Hardy’s Poetry and Fiction. London: The Athlone Press. Hardy, Florence Emily. 1962. The Life Of Thomas Hardy 1840­–1928. Macmillan & Co, London. Hardy, Thomas. 2005. The Woodlanders. Ed. Dale Kramer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A New Selection. London: Macmillan Collector’s Library. Hartigan Jr. John. 2017. Care Of the Species: Races of Corn and The Science of Plant Biodiversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harvey, Geoffrey. 2003. The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy. London: Routledge.

126

Bibliography

Holbrook, David. 1988. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. London: The Athlone Press. Houle, Karen L. F. “A Tree by Any Other Name Language Use and Linguistic Responsibility.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.155–172. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. 2012. “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3: 448–475. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 2017. “What the Vegetal World Says to Us.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 126–135. Johnson, Trevor. 1991. A Critical Introduction to the Poems of Thomas Hardy. London, Macmillan. Jones, Owain and Paul Cloke. 2002. Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in their Place. Oxford: Berg. Karban, Richard. 2015. Plant Sensing and Communication. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kerridge, Richard. 2019. “Plath and Nature.” In Sylvia Plath in Context. Ed. Tracy Brain. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 221–232. Knickerbocker, Scott. 2012. Ecopoetics: The Language and Nature, The Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Krampen, Martin. 2010. “Phytosemiotics.” In Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary. Ed. Donald Favareau. London: Springer. 257–277. Laist, Randy. 2013. Introduction. In Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies. Ed. Randy Laist. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 9–17. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Leaning, Jennifer. 2000. “Environment and Health: Impact of War.” CMAJ 163.9, 1157–1161. Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Scetches Here and There. London: Oxford University Press. Mabey, Richard. 2015. The Cabaret of Plants. Botany and the Imagination. London: Profile Books. MacDuffie, Allen. 2014. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maher, Neil M. 2008. Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conversation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mancuso, Stefano and Alessandra Viola. 2013. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Trans. Joan Benham. Washington: Island Press.

Bibliography

127

Marder, Michael. 2017. “To Hear Plants Speak.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 103–125. ———. 2016. “What is Planted in the Event? On the Secret Life of a Philosophical Concept.” In The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World. Eds. Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan. Lanham: Lexington. 3–17. ———. 2013. Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Marks, Robert B. 2015. “‘Exhausting the Earth’: Environment and History in the Early Modern World.” In The Cambridge World History, Volume VI: The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE. Ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29–53. Marsh, George Perkins. 1864. Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography As Modified by Human Action. London: Sampson Low, Son and Marston. Martinez, J. Michael. 2014. American Environmentalism: Philosophy, History, and Public Policy. Boca Raton, London: CRP Press. McHugh, Susan. 2021. “Plants and Literature.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Ed. Paula Rabnowitz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1–28. Mill, John Stuart. 1966. “An Economic and Social Forecast.” From Principles of Political Economy in John Stuart Mill: A Selection of His Works. Ed. John M. Robson. Macmillan Publishers Limited, 322–342. Millgate, Michael. 2004. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, John MacNeill. 2020. “Mischaracterizing the Environment: Hardy, Darwin, and the Art of Ecological Storytelling.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 62. 2, 149–177. Miller, Theresa L. 2019. Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press. Miller, Elaine P. 2002. The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine. New York: State University Press of New York. Moran, Emilio F. 2005. “Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Ecosystems: An Introduction.” In Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Ecosystems. Eds. Emilio F. Moran and Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 3–21. Morris, William. 2012. “Lectures on Socialism.” In The Collected Works of William Morris. New York: Longmans Green and Company, 143–277. Myers, Natasha. 2017. “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution.” History and Anthropology, 297–301. Nealon, Jeffrey T. 2016. Plant Theory: Biopower & Vegetable Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Neumann, Peter M. 2006. “The Role of Root Apices in Shoot Growth Regulation: Support for Neurobiology at the Whole Plant Level?” In Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life. Eds. František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso, and Dieter Volkmann. Berlin: Springer, 65–73.

128

Bibliography

Nishumura, Satoshi. 2017. “Thomas Hardy’s THE VOICE OF THE THORN: Its Significance as a Prosopopoeial Poem.” The Explicator 75 (3): 150–152. Ooijen, Erik van. 2019. “Making Mythopoeic Meaning Out of Plants” Cogent Arts & Humanities 6. 1: 1–14. Oppermann, Serpil. 2013. “Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of Storied Matter.” Frame 26.2, 55–69. Parkins, Wendy. 2018. Introduction: “Sustainability and the Victorian Anthropocene.” In Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture. Ed. Wendy Parkins. London: Routledge, 1–13. Pattberg, Philipp and Michael Davies-Venn. 2020. “Dating the Anthropocene.” In The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay Between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age. Eds. Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes. New York: Routledge. 130–149. Plath, Sylvia. 1981. The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Harper & Row Publishers. ———. 2010. Letters Home by Sylvia Plath: Correspondence 1950–1963. Ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. London: Faber and Faber. Pollan, Michael. 2015. Foreword. In Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. By Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola. Trans. Joan Benham. Washington: Island Press. xi–xiii. ———. 2002. Cannabis, Forgetting, and The Botany of Desire. Ed. Christina M.Gillis. Townsend Center Occasional Papers, no 27. Pontin, Ben. 2007. “Integrated Pollution Control in Victorian Britain: Rethinking Progress within the History of Environmental Law.” Journal of Environmental Law 19.2. 173–199. Ransome, Arthur. 1877. Foul Air and Lung Disease. Manchester: Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association. Richardson, Angelique. 2002. “Hardy and Biology.” In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Phillip Mallett. Palgrave, New York. 156–179. Ritchie, Hannah. 2021. “The World has Lost One-Third of its Forest, but an End of Deforestation is Possible.” Accessed on 04.08.2022. https:​//​ourworldindata​.org​/ world​-lost​-one​-third​-forests. Ruskin, John. 2007. The Two Paths, Being: Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture Delivered in 1858–9. Dodo Press. Ryan, John Charles. 2020. “Writing the Lives of Plants: Phytography and the Botanical Imagination.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35.1: 97–122. ———. 2018. Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination. New York: Routledge. ———. 2017. “Poetry as Plant Script: Interspecies Dialogue and Poetic Collaboration in the Northern Tablelands Region of New South Wales.” Transformations 30: 127–149. ———.2012. “Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies.” Societies 2: 101–121.

Bibliography

129

Sachs, T. 2006. “How Can Plants Choose the Most Promising Organs?” In Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life. Eds. František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso, and Dieter Volkmann. Berlin: Springer, 53–63. Sarıkaya, Dilek Bulut. 2023. The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II. Lanham: Lexington. Scherer, Bernd. 2020. “When Humans Become Nature.” In The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay Between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age. Eds. Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes. New York: Routledge. 150–156. Simard, S. W. 2018. “Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory.” In Memory and Learning in Plants. Eds. Frantisek Baluska, Monica Gagliano, Guenther Witzany. Switzerland: Springer. 191–213. Simmons, I. G. 2001. An Environmental History of Great Britain: From 10,000 Years Ago to Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stark, Hannah. 2015. “Deleuze and Critical Plant Studies.” In Deleuze and the Non/ Human. Eds. Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark. London: Palgrave, Macmillan. 180–196. Tait, Adrian. 2021. “Seeking Signs Amongst ‘Sylvan Phenomena’: Trees in the Work of Thomas Hardy.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 25. 4, 377–389. Taylor, Jesse Oak. 2016a. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction From Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Taylor, Dorceta E. 2016b. The Rise of American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection. Durham: Duke University Press. Thornsheim, Peter. 2017. Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Thoreau, Henry David. 2004. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. “Huckleberries.” In Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays. Ed. William Rossi. Athens, London: The University of Georgia Press. 166–202. ———. 2002. “Walking.” In Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays. Ed. William Rossi. Athens, London: The University of Georgia Press. 59–92. ———. 2002. “Autumnal Tints.” In Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays. Ed. William Rossi. Athens, London: The University of Georgia Press 109–139. Trewavas, Anthony. 2014. Plant Behavior and Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. “The Green Plant as an Intelligent Organism.” In Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life. Eds. František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso, and Dieter Volkmann. Berlin: Springer. 1–18. Tsing, Anna. 2012. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities 1: 141–154. Wandersee, James H. and Elisabeth E. Schussler. 1999. “Preventing Plant Blindness.” The America Biology Teacher. 61. 2. 82–86. Wapner, Paul. 2010. Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

130

Bibliography

West, Anna. 2016. “Two Brains, and a Tree: Defining The Material Bases for Delusion and Reality in Woodlanders.” Victorian Network 7. 1: 36–60. Williams, Michael. 2006. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, An Abridgment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Winter, Juan R. Duchesne. 2019. Plant Theory in Amazonian Literature. Switzerland: Palgrave. “Withwind.” 2023. Collins English Dictionary. Accessed on 9. 04. 2023. https:​//​www​ .collinsdictionary​.com​/dictionary​/english​/withwind. Witzany, Guenther. 2018. “Memory and Learning as Key Competences of Living Organisms.” In Memory and Learning in Plants. Eds. Frantisek Baluska, Monica Gagliano, and Guenther Witzany. Bonn: Springer, 1–16. Wohlleben, Peter. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries from a Secret World. Trans. Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver: Greystone Books. “Vegetative State.” 2023. APA Dictionary of Psychology, American Psychological Association. Accessed on 20. 05. 2023. https:​//​dictionary​.apa​.org​/vegetative​-state. Vieira, Patricia. 2017. “Phytographia: Literature as Plant Writing.” In The Language of Plants Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. London: University of Minnesota Press, 215–233. Young, David. 1998. “Tree with an Attitude: Reading Plath Irreverently.” Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 59: 18–23. Young, Charles Y. 1979. The Royal Forests of Medieval England. America: The University of Pennsylvania Press. Zhang, Xiaohong. 2018. “An EcoFeminist Perspective on Sylvia Plath and Zhai Yongming.” Comparative Literature Studies, Special Issue: Ecocriticism in East Asia: Toward a Literary (Re) Construction of Nature and Environment 55. 4: 799–811.

Index

actant, 17, 88 agriculture, 3, 38, 40 anthropocene, 2, 34, 70, 75 anthropocenic, 2, 32, 39–40, 43, 45, 73, 118–19 anthropocentric, 3–6, 8–10, 12, 14–15, 17, 22–25, 27–28, 32–35, 37–38, 41, 47, 50, 53–55, 57–58, 62, 65, 69, 71, 77–78, 85, 89, 91, 100–103, 105, 107, 109–10, 115, 117–18, 121–22 arbori-culture, 25–26 arche-writing, 18 Aristotle, 6, 117 A Sand County Almanac, 50–51. See also Leopold, Aldo assemblage, 19, 27–28 autotrophic, 7 Barad, Karen, 8, 12, 14–15, 17, 21, 24–25, 56, 88, 103 Barker, Thomas Herbert, 37 Bentham, George, 41–42 biodiversity, 5, 13, 32, 56 botanical, 3, 9, 16, 22, 34, 41, 45, 51, 56, 58, 69–70, 74–76, 78, 90–94, 97–100, 103, 108, 112, 118, 120–22 Carson, Rachel, 51–53, 62–63, 120 cosmogonic, 25

critical plant studies, 1–3, 5–6, 8–10, 12–13, 16–17, 20, 22–23, 26–28, 31, 55, 57, 60, 85, 89, 90, 100, 104, 107, 115, 118–19, 121 “Dark Wood, Dark Water,” 94–95 Darwin, Charles, 3, 10, 12, 58–59, 91, 120 DDT, 49, 51 deforestation, 29, 31–32, 35–36, 39, 44–45, 73, 119 Deleuze and Guattari, 19, 21, 81, 117 Derrida, Jacques, 18 ecology, ecological, ecologically, 3, 24–25, 32, 36–38, 43, 45, 47, 50, 53–54, 56, 62, 63, 71, 73–74, 77, 78, 83, 85, 88, 93, 106, 119, 121 ecophobia, 65 ecosystem, 4–5, 32, 34–36, 38–40, 45, 51, 53, 65, 73, 82–83, 88, 94–95, 119 “Elm,” 104–9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 46–47, 49 epigenetic, 12 “Fable of Rhododendron Stealers,” 110–12 “The Felled Elm and She,” 78–81 First World War, 43 131

132

Index

Forest Reserve Act, 44 forestry, 3, 34, 73, 75

organic chemistry, 4 other-than-human, 9, 108

gardening, 3, 65 genetically modified foods, 5

photosynthesis, 4, 10, 17–18, 101 phototropism, 10 phytography, 17–18 phytosemiotic, 69, 71, 97 phythographia, 18 “The Pine Planters,” 72–75 Pittsburgh, 43 plant blindness, 13–14, 48, 50, 57, 73–75, 111–12, 117 planthropology, 85 planthroposcene, 2, 75, 119 plant-phobic, 6 plant intelligence, 2–3, 8, 12, 16, 78, 87, 90 plant personhood, 6–7, 80 plant poetics, 8, 29, 31, 56, 78, 87, 98, 101, 107 plant vitality, 2–3, 11, 18, 29, 39, 55, 66, 91, 110, 112, 118, 120, 121 Plath, Sylvia, 1, 29, 31–32, 54–55, 58, 62–66, 69–72, 75–78, 81–87, 90–91, 94–98, 100–112, 115, 119–22 Plato, 6 posthumanist, 2, 5, 6, 17–18, 28, 68–69, 89 The Power of Movement in Plants, 3, 120

Haeckel, Ernst, 42, 58 Hall, Matthew, 3, 5, 7, 87, 101 Haraway, Donna, 26, 56, 84, 101 Hardy, Thomas, 1, 29, 31–32, 54–55, 58–62, 66–69, 72–76, 79–81, 83–87, 90–94, 98–104, 109, 112–15, 119–22 Harrison, Benjamin, 44 “I’m Vertical,” 75–78, 121 “Ivy Wife,” 102–4 immersion, 22, 24, 48, 57, 66 “In a Wood,” 91–94 inscribableness, 18 insentience, 2–3 intentional agency, 2, 10, 23, 42, 68, 113 inter-penetration, 12, 23, 25, 57, 86 inter-species, 3, 51, 62, 67, 98, 103, 113, 117, 120 intra-action, 8, 15, 17, 56 kinship, 2, 7–8, 23, 29, 48, 58, 61, 66, 77, 83, 85, 95, 117, 121 “The Last Chrysanthemum,” 98–100 Lebenswelt, 103 Leopold, Aldo, 50–51 Liverpool, 39 logographic, 103 Marsh, George Perkins, 45 mesolithic, 34 Mill, John Stuart, 38–39, 41 Middle Ages, 34 mineralization, 67, 77 “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” 81–83 Morris, William, 40–41 morphological, 5 “Mushrooms,” 100–102

Ransome, Arthur, 37, 41 rhizomatic, 19, 81, 113, 117 rhizome, 21, 117 Roosevelt, Theodore, 44–45 Ruskin, John, 39–41 self-autonomous, 7, 25, 77, 81, 96, 99 Silent Spring, 51, 120. See also Carson, Rachel storied-matter, 16 “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” 63–66, 121 symbiosis, 54, 56, 69, 79, 101 Thoreau, Henry David, 47–49

Index

“Transformations,” 66–68 “The Tree: An Old Man’s Story,” 59–61, 121 “Throwing a Tree,” 109–10 Trewavas, Anthony, 3, 10–11, 88–89 “Tulips,” 95–98 utilitarian agriculture, 40 vegetal agency, 6, 17, 29, 87, 121 vegetal memory, 12 vegetal phenomenology, 11 vegetative soul, 68

vegetative state, 33 vegetal textuality, 66, 69 “The Voice of the Thorn,” 112–14 “Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard,” 83–85, 121 “Winter Trees,” 69–72 woodland, 35 The Woodlanders, 72, 93 zoocentrism, 14 zoochauvinism, 14

133

About the Author

Dilek Bulut Sarıkaya is associate professor of English Literature at Cappadocia University, Turkey. She is the author of The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature, published by Lexington Books in 2023. She completed her Doctoral Dissertation titled as “The Making of Afro-Caribbean Consciousness and Identity in the Poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar” at Hacettepe University in 2009. She took her MA degree at Hacettepe University with her thesis titled as “The Ecocritical Study of Ted Hughes’s Later Poetry.” She worked at Hacettepe University as a research assistant between the years 2002–2010, and as an assistant professor at Kirikkale University between 2010–2013. She is currently affiliated with Cappadocia University, teaching courses and pursuing her academic studies.

135