"Nature as Monster" (Survival - Margaret Atwood)

 

Nature as Monster

                                        - Margaret Atwood

 

Introduction:

Nature poetry is seldom about Nature. It is usually about the poet’s attitude towards the external natural universe. The same tendencies can be present in the descriptive passages of novels or stories with natural settings. With this idea in mind, Atwood critiques the types of landscape that portrayed in Canadian literature and the kinds of attitude they mirror.

Nature in Canadian Literature:

It is not surprise that in Canadian literature “Nature” has a prominent place. But it often dead or unanswering or actively hostile to man or seen as unreal in summer or in spring, because in Canada most of the season is winter. So Canadian writers do not trust Nature. According to them Nature is ‘distrusted’ in Canada as written in Alden Nowlan’s poem. In English Canadian poetry during the 18^th century “Nature” was portrayed as sublime and picturesque, in the line of Edmund Burke’s ideology. But in the beginning of the 19^th century it was Wordsworthian Romanticism – “Nature was kind Mother or Nature who would guide man if he would only listen to her.” However, in the mid   19^th century Nature’s personality underwent change – “She became redder in tooth and claw” as Darwinism infiltrated literature. Thus, Canada was still under Burke or Wordsworthian influence. For example, in the early part of 19^th century in Susanna Moodie’s description of the “Surpassing grandeur” Nature is attributed Wordsworthian concept – Nature is a Kind Mother. But in her later work “Roughing It in the Bush” Mrs. Moodie doubtfully writes whether Nature is benign or not. This tension between expectation and actuality was not confined to Mrs. Moodie alone.

The Manitou:

In Alexander McLachlan’s “The Emigrant”, he expresses that he cannot understand or interpret the bogs, wading rivers, crossing logs, songs of birds in Canada, as he is an immigrant in the land. Like this, Charles Sangster and Leigh Hunt also give the “double” attitudes - such as benign and unfriendly - of Nature in their works.  Douglas Lepan in “a Country Without a Mythology” a stranger is wandering in a landscape without any “monuments or landmarks” but among “savage people” who were silent and moody and their langue was incomprehensible. In the following days he almost snatched berries and fishes forgetting that he is an English educated man. Probably “what is missing for him in this alien land are the emblems of tradition-saturated European civilization”. The landscape is harsh – it is too cold in winter and too hot in summer. However, the traveller maintains his desire for a Wordsworthian experience of Nature as divine and kind. Though he continues his journey, he does not get the vision that he aimed for. According to him Nature is ‘empty’ and there is no revelation. But for an Indian there is an image of the divine present in the landscape – the “manitou”.

Nature - Dead and Hostile: The mythic figure the “manitou” is not a “golden-haired Archangel”. It is rejected as impure or “lust-red”. Whereas the traveller’s Wordsworthian and European Christian fantasies are only wishful thinking, and of a destructive kind: they prevent him from making meaningful contact with his actual environment. That is why he remains a stranger. In fact, the person who demands Divine Mother may conclude that Nature is dead. Nature seen as dead or actively hostile towards man is a common image in Canadian literature.

Death by Nature:

While the author writers “Death by Nature”; it is the author who intends to murder the character. In fact, the Canadian authors’ two favourite “natural” methods for dispatching his victims are drowning or freezing – drowning is preferred by poets and freezing by prose writers. The reason is that there is lots of water and snow in Canada and both are good murder weapons. There are no deserts or jungles. There aren’t many venomous reptiles or vermin in Canada. In Canadian psyche, Death by Wild Animal is infrequent. Death by Indian has something akin to Death by Nature in Canada. Yet another way of killing is Death by Bushing in which a character isolated in Nature goes crazy as in Joyce Marshall’s story, “The Old Woman”.

The attitude towards Death by Nature vary based on the guilt ascribed to Nature. For example, in F.P. Grove’s “Snow” the protagonist is found dead in the frozen snow, after many days of his death. Hearing the news, his mother-in-law collapsing into tears says “God’s will be done”. Here Nature is dead or indifferent rather than actively hostile. “Death by Nature” has a different aspect in Earl Birney’s poem, “David”. In the poem, when two men went for an expedition to reach the peak called “the Finger”, one of them, David slipped and fell down on ice six hundred feet below and died. The death of David is ostensibly a kind of accident and any guilt for it belongs to the narrator who caused David’s fall by his carelessness. But the imagery of the poem casts a different light on the story. In  a sense, it is the beckoning of the “Finger” that has lured David’s fall, Nature-is-indifferent but after his fall Nature-is-hostile. Symbolically, David’s vision of Nature as a destructive and hideous monster.

Nature as Monster:

David’s name is suggestive as it alludes to the story from the Bible and so the Goliath is of course, Nature herself. But in many ways, Canadian David-and Goliath, stories, Goliath wins. In E.J. Pratt’s “The Titanic” once again Nature is shown as ‘hostile’. The description of ice berg that sinks the Titanic is worth some attention. Though this monster is of uncertain sex, yet in Pratt’s “Towards the Last Spike” Nature-monster is definitely female. In “Towards the Last Spike” that the monster is the Canadian shield which is in the form of female dragon or lizard. In fact, war is declared against her by Sir John A. Macdonald who wants to build a railroad through her. In the war, this time, he makes man win against the female giant. After this, one thing is very strong in Frye’s “The Bush Garden” – “the conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it” – started sympathizing at the defeated giantess. Now the concern is how to avoid destroying her – the female monster – the Nature.

Human as Monster:

So, now the concern is from  “Nature is hostile” and it should be won over to, how to save Nature. Now the understanding is destruction of Nature is equivalent to self-destruction on the part of men. Earle Birney’s “Transcontinental” is a sort of “Towards the Last Spike” revisited. But in Birney’s, it is not that the Divine Mother, but the man will have to clean up the ‘mess’ he has made. Man-the-aggressor is taken a step further in Peter Such’s novel, “Fallout”. In the novel man rapes the land using technology and Nature punishes him in the form of an ‘hurricane’. Dennis Lee’s “Civil Elegies” implies that North American war on Nature is not an enhancing of human civilization but a stunning of it. Once again it is “Four Basic Victim Position.”

 

Four Basic Victim Positions:

Position One is that Nature poetry in 19^th  century is Wordsworthian view which looks at Nature as Divine Mother. But in Position Two – there are many variations: (i)some poems talk about the hardness of the Nature and difficulties of coming to term with it. (ii) some poems talk about ‘believe’ and you say it is too cold, if you experience coldness. (iii) some poems talk about struggling against a terminology (probably a natural scene) which is foreign to you. (iv) the chronological reading of Canadian poems reveals that the gradual emergence of language appropriate to its object.

In Position Two you realize that you cannot win over Nature. But deciding to “win the war against Nature can move you into Position Three. Yet in Position Three you find the continuation of Position Two because you believe that Nature may not destroy weak man but it is giant towards giant man. In pre-Position Four, Nature is not looked as “Divine Mother” but as “evil Monster”. In the Position Four man himself is seen as part of the process; he does not define himself as ‘good’ or ‘weak’ as against a hostile Nature or as ‘bad’ or ‘aggressive’ as against a passive, powerless Nature. Such kind of Position Four is very rare in Canadian literature except some poets like Irving Layton, because he transcends the alternatives and moves into the processes of life-as-energy.

Conclusion:

Thus, in this essay, Atwood describes how the perception of the Canadian writers ranges from Nature as Divine Mother to Nature as Monster and the reflection of it in their writings.