One theme I have been noticing during our recent studies on Victorian Sexualities is the theme of women being connected to nature. In John Keats’ poem, “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad” the woman is described as ethereal and immersed in her natural setting. The scene is described near a lake with birds, squirrels, and harvests. Although the scene is being set up as eerie and lacking of life, the poem is still placed in the natural world immediately. One particularly striking stanza is when Keats writes, “I see a lily on thy brow,/ With anguish moist and fever-dew,/ and on the cheeks a fading rose/ Fast withereth too.” The mention of flowers and dew in this stanza is one of the many ways the narrator using aspects of the natural world to describe the beauty of the woman he is enchanted by. This portrayal of the beautiful woman as immersed in nature is also shown in the painting titled, “The Fair Dreamer.” This piece, published by the Illman brothers in the nineteenth century, depicts a young woman lounging on a tree, immersed in the shrubbery. Both the woman in the poem and the woman in the painting are portrayed as the epitome of beauty, and both are connected to the natural world. As I mentioned once in class, Sherry B. Ortner’s, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture” describes how women have been linked throughout history to nature whereas men have been connected to culture and progress. I noticed this in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as well where the women were always somehow connected to nature whereas Frankenstein was the epitome of science and progress. I have been thinking about why this is and one theory I have come up with is that women and nature have two things in common; they are seen as mysterious and as beautiful. Man has been entranced from the beginning of time by nature and its force. In fact, most pronouns for nature are she/her/hers. Nature has also been linked to women as it has been ‘dominated’ by men, similar to the way men have ‘dominated’ society and women, in particular. As a result, in much of our literature and art, women are described as and portrayed as very close to the natural world.
2 thoughts on “Women, Nature, and Beauty”
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I agree with your observations on how women are closely tied to nature. I especially found your theory about how the beauty of women is related to the mysteriousness of nature and the domination of men quite interesting. Indeed, the relationship between the female and the natural world is notable and can be connected to Romanticism, a movement that was occurring during this time period. This arts and literature movement, which emphasized the beauty and preservation of nature, was prominent in European culture so it’s not surprising to see written texts and art works of the Victorian Era such as “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad” and “The Fair Dreamer” containing natural themes. Along with the general attitude towards women of Victorian society, connections between women, nature, and beauty were created. An example of this blend of the three can be seen in George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” when Latimer describes Bertha as resembling a beautiful nymph of the river.
That nature/culture dichotomy shows up in interesting ways that intersect with colonialism in Through the Looking Glass, in which Alice, from the civilized, cultured world of her home, travels into the mirror-world in which almost everything that makes up the society is a part of nature– animals and flowers all mixing together and blending with queens and kings and trains, shops blending into rivers, a garden as a controlled form of nature, gridded by the chess board. While there are hallmarks of her own civilization back home like capitalism (the store) and the train, they are all still connected with the natural world in a way that makes them appear absurd, as with the animals riding the train with Alice. This makes the world on the other side of Alice’s own seem unnatural and not truly civilized, representing the beliefs of colonizers towards the colonized.