What does Nature have to do with the Establishment?

On humans and nonhumans, books and plants, canons and creatures

I am aware that my academic side sometimes gets the better of me, and that some of the previous installements in this series of essays on the Establishment and its others (or, ‘what I’m calling it this week’) were rather long. So today I shall try to aim for something that, for me, approximates concision.

In my last essay I looked at the ways in which minoritised writers have in recent decades been making inroads into mainstream literary culture and traditions in the UK, and examined to what extent they are now part of – or have been co-opted by – what we might call the Establishment (see the first essay in the series for what that might actually mean). Humans are not the only elements of a culture, however. The place, the landscape, and the other beings that inhabit it – the ecosystem, we might say, in sum – are also an indelible part of culture. Humans are a part of this ecosystem, and we are (mostly) the ones who write (or paint, or sing…), publish, promote, gatekeep, and so forth. However, our culture would not be what it is without the other elements, the other beings. English culture very specifically, strongly and recurrently, draws upon an idea of what this human-nonhuman natural-cultural world is, particularly in terms of the representation of the English countryside. Of course, many writers represent nonhuman elements of English and British culture, landscape, ecosystem (pick your term) in a variety of ways, but the pastoral tradition, and the Romantic poets’ descriptions of places like the Wye Valley and – perhaps most prominently – the Lake District (daffodils, anyone?), is at the heart of a canonical version of English culture.

Last year’s daffodils, not quite a host…