Helena Feder's thesis—that the Bildungsroman is as much a coming of age story for an individual as it is for culture in general, is a fascinating exercise in connecting the seemingly disparate elements of non-human nature and human culture together. Disparate because, at face value, and thanks to various scholastic boundaries that impede the holistic study of the latter, it becomes difficult to establish just how desperately the two are bound up in one another.
In doing this, her purpose is to take a genre that is usually considered to be strictly inward looking and solipsistic and reveal the various faultlines along the way. Her selections are as intriguing as her thesis. She does not go for one specific theme, choosing instead to opt for texts which have been interpreted throughout literary history to mean starkly different things. The ability to read these texts ecocritically, far from being a reductive task, enagages the reader in a slew of ideas that demand, under such a lens, a multiplicity of interpretations.
The texts themselves are Candide, by Voltaire; Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; Orlando, by Virginia Woolf; and Among Flowers and A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid. They roughly represent the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernity and the Post-Colonial Era. Feder takes as her starting point, and motif, however, a quote from Candide that returns again and again to illuminate the readings of the latter texts: "We must cultivate our garden."
This quote has been interpreted to mean various things. For instance, Freud saw it as a deflection, as a way of, as it were, looking away from the anxieties of modern life, a psychological deviation. But Feder reads that line most literally. The garden becomes not just a Biblical symbol of plenitude and purity, but a common ground for both society and nature; a striving towards from the inside to approach that which it has always been defined against.
In many examples, she makes use of instances where animals play a role in the proceedings of the texts. At first glance, these roles might seem minor, but it seems to be Feder's contention that non-human nature is, more often than not, inscribed negatively. It pressures the text into a certain shape, spurs it in a certain direction, informs the reading of other texts by the same author. Kincaid's finding a fox in her garden in Among Flowers, and her conclusion that it is part of a world that Kincaid herself can never enter, colors her otherwise ambivalent notions of what her humanity entails: while she might very well be ambivalent, that hesitation tilts dangerously towards a kind of speciesism that raises uncomfortable questions about her other works.
It is precisely this asking of difficult questions that might seem morally irrelevant or intellectually untenable that elevates this book above similar scholarly monographs, which often concern themselves only with self-consciously ecocritical texts. Feder's broad reading carries her arguments to their often startling conclusions splendidly, and her agenda seems to be nothing less than unearthing a hidden, and silenced history of human complicity in looking away from 'nature' in its own self-construction and critique. Today, more than ever before, such an investigative attitude is only to be applauded.
