Abstract: “The Economic is Ecological: Mary Wollstonecraft on Nature, the Body, and Capital”
In her last publication, a short essay entitled “On Poetry” (1797), philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft set out to solve a paradox. To her, it appears that despite how “civilization, or rather luxury, has made considerable advances” the “beatures of nature” are lost to the subject of the late eighteenth century. In this presentation, I would like to unfold this paradox and address it through a reading of the work that has situated her among the early British Romantics, namely her Letters Written during a Short Residence (1796). The reason for this is, that while Wollstonecraft is only able to provide what she calls “hints” of “some of the causes” for this aesthetic loss in ‘On Poetry’, she appears to foreshadow these discussions in Letters, written during her travels in Scandinavia. Throughout the work, she develops intricate opinions on economy and the overt emphasis on capital value accumulation at the expense of both human and nonhuman nature. More precisely, she envisions how commercial value-interests not only re-organise external nature (through physical altercations of fields, forests, or lakes) but human nature as well, in that commercial interests impact sensation, taste, and the imagination, in other words, the ability to feel the “beauties of nature”. What Wollstonecraft shows through literary and poetologicalmeans is, that the economic is fundamentally tied to ecological and vice versa: That external nature is always already formed and shaped by commercial interests, or what in this CfP is called “the logic of economic exchange”. Travelling through Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft witnesses first-hand how capital endeavours and progress alter the world, either through parliamentary acts such as enclosures, canal constructions, or industrial sites and factories that rely on the consummation of wood or coal. What Wollstonecraft points to is that, despite the evident upsides of economic progress, the over-valorisation of capital gains re-shapes the aesthetic both by physically altering places of aesthetic contemplation and impacting the human’s ability to sense these. There is thus no divide between nature and human, both is partly a reflection of the other. And to her, what has been lost can only be redeemed by a re-adjustment of the spectre of value, of what parts of the environment count as preservable and what could be appropriated by capital interests for the sake of the overall betterment and progress of humanity. What emerges from Wollstonecraft’s late and more Romantic works is thus a merger of theories of political ecology, economy, and aesthetics aimed at coming to terms with the precarious flip-side of Industrialization.
Bio: University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Martin Fog Arndal is a postdoctoral student based at the University of Copenhagen, where he takes part in an ERC-project focused on the history of Scandinavian equality. He has written his dissertation on touch within the Romantic period, focused on the interchanges between the body and nature in German and British Romanticism. Earlier, he has published articles on topics such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s aesthetics, Karoline von Günderrode’s ethics, and the feminist radicalism of Mary Astell.