myths of nature
The evolution of a discursive relationship
Tony Seaton
The late Raymond Williams once described nature as‘perhaps the most complex word in the English language’. (Williams 1976). It is also a concept that has profoundly influenced the evolution of tourism, and debate about its environmental effects. The varied meanings and ideologies associated with nature have influenced the development of tourism fashions for: sun bathing and seaside resorts; walking, hiking and backpacking; camping and caravanning;
mountaineering; seeking out locations– with paintbrush, camera or video recorders – to turn into picture opportunities and collectible‘views’; and as places to stay. Ideas and beliefs about nature are embodied in many attitudes to tourism including: meeting the‘natives’ or ‘locals’ on cultural tourism tours; seeking spiritual and emotional solace in‘unspoiled’ spaces located among rivers, streams, woods andfields; and marvelling at the inanimate grandeur of wildernesses of desert, snow, ice or rock. And, increasingly, it is beliefs about the auratic importance of nature as a spiritual presence, and as a crucial, physical sustainer of life on the planet, that have produced passionate debate about environmental conservation, including critiques of tourism and its future directions.
Nature, although often seen as a self-evident‘given’, has had many meanings. It has always been a construct, shaped by human intention and agency, under particular historical conditions, social and material. What we perceive as ‘natural’ in the physical world may be the result of decades, often centuries, of unseen human intervention and manipulation. One person’s view of nature may differ from those of others living in different places and at different times.
This chapter sketches evolving notions of nature or Nature (the use of lower or upper case in naming it is part of the history of the concept) in Western culture, and its impact on leisure and tourism behaviour. Reflecting a broadly chronological treatment, the analysis traces how nature was understood in classical and pagan culture, in Western Christianity, andfinally how social and ideological changes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, created the movement that became known as‘Romanticism’. Although both pagan classical and Christian notions of nature have had their legacy, it is Romanticism’s revaluation of the concept that has had the most far-reaching impact on recreational tastes, tourist behaviour patterns and environmental assumptions that underpin modern tourism today.
Pagan and classical ideas of Nature
Greek and Roman culture approached the natural world, including speculation on the origin of life, through the lens of myth. Creation and its manifestations on land and sea, in woods and streams, above and below the earth, were peopled with, and explained by, a diversity of indi-vidual gods and goddesses. Among them were major players like Zeus, Jupiter and Saturn, supported by lesserfigures, including a named, and nameless, collection of Nymphs and Dryads (Keightley 1890; Grant 1962: Ch. 3). These gods and goddesses were believed to control nature, and were beseeched, propitiated, praised or thanked in religious rituals by worshippers anxious to get them onside, to afford the natural conditions on which their survival and prosperity depended– fertile soil, rain for crops, good harvests, successful hunting, etc. These classical gods and goddesses inhabited the countryside, and poets celebrated an Arcadian world. Virgil did so realistically in his Eclogues and Georgics, which were almost do-it-yourself guides to best practices in agriculture. The Greek poets, Theocritus and Bion, celebrated rural life more fan-cifully, inventing a rural fairyland in which shepherd swains wooed pretty shepherdesses with pipes and song, and disported blissfully with them in grottoes, groves andfields.
One classical writer did more than devolve everything in nature to gods and goddesses. This was the Roman poet, Lucretius, whose work,‘De rerum Natura’ (‘On the nature of things’), includes an embryonic anticipation of scientific method. It was an attempt to anatomise and explain the cyclic patterns of growth, decline, death and re-birth in the natural world. It began by invoking
‘increase-giving Venus’, the goddess of love, as the ‘sole mistress of nature’ and the generative force behind all the components of the natural world– the winds, earth’s fertility, the weather, etc.
But after this fanciful introduction, Lucretius abandoned mythology and declared his aim to be more hard-edged and empirical, namely,‘to release the mind from the bond of religious scru-ples’ (superstition, as he saw it) by seeking theoretical explanations of the workings of the natural world through observation (Adler and Gormon 1952). The late Susan Sontag viewed Lucre-tius’s work as modern in its detachment, and proto-scientific advocacy of empirical evidence:
Lucretius urged the natural sciences as a mode of ethical psychotherapy. Lucretius saw man as torn between the pleasures of sex and the pain of emotional loss, haunted by the fear of bodily decay and death. He recommended scientific knowledge, which teaches intelligent detachment, equanimity. Scientific knowledge is, for Lucretius, a mode of psychological gracefulness. It is a way of learning to let go.
(Sontag 1967: 72–3)
Nature in medieval Christianity
The rise of Christianity in Europe and the West dismantled mythological accounts of nature, and revised the primary sense in which the word nature was understood. In medieval Christianity‘nature’ did not designate the external, physical world (the word describing that was more likely to be
‘Creation’), but the human condition. ‘Nature’ was the corrupt state into which all men and women were born through the legacy of original sin, brought into the world by the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and atoned for by Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Nature was not an external world to observe and study, but an internal tendency to evil lurking in every human. Christianity proclaimed the necessity of resistance to the temptations of theflesh and the devil. In extreme forms it led to monastic ascetics living by rules of mortification that denied their bodies physical pleasures and comforts.
The physical environment that we now regard as ‘Nature’ with a capital N, was hardly celebrated in early Christianity. Religious painters of the Middle Ages rarely depicted what we Tourism and romantic myths of nature
would now call landscape, except as background to foregrounded Christian subjects (Christ, the Holy Family, disciples, saints and martyrs). Animals were mainly depicted in bestiaries for their allegorical significance. Reverence for the wonders of nature was discouraged by the early Christian Church, because they were tainted with pagan rituals and pantheism that the Church was anxious to stamp out among its heathen converts. The Church was more interested in taking over former sites of pagan worship, and adapting them to Christian uses:
Fountains once inhabited by mother-goddesses, and stones on the moors haunted by fairies, became Christian… The saints replaced the spirits of the mountains, valleys, and forests.
(Male 1984: 269) Later Christian attitudes to Nature and the external world modified. Instead of allowing only some small parts of it to assume religious significance, greater emphasis was put on the whole of the physical world as a text in which to read the shaping designs of God. This came about in the early sixteenth century as the spread of printing, and vernacular translations of the Bible and Prayer Books, previously only available as manuscripts in Latin or Greek, allowed larger populations to hear, or read, for themselves, in Genesis or the Psalms, celebrations of the bounteous plenty of the natural world created by God for mankind. This textual reading of nature continued in the seventeenth century, the century of scientific revolution, as a newly evolving scientific com-munity, although empirically investigating the natural world, believed that in so doing they were revealing the details of God’s work, an assumption that crashed for many in 1859 when Darwin published Origin of Species.
Nature and the seasons
Despite its early reluctance to celebrate the physical world too explicitly, there was one discursive aspect of Nature that the Church did include in its liturgical agendas, the calendar year and seasons. From the early Middle Ages it developed elaborate ritual structuring of the year for believers on a daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal basis (Tuve 1933; Pearsall and Salter 1973;
Perez-Higuera 1998; Henisch 1999; Hourihane 2007). There were several reasons for organising the divisions of the year so exactly. Thefirst was one we have already discussed, the necessity for re-branding existing pagan, seasonal festivals as Christian. Second, irrespective of what religious significance was attributed to them, seasonal changes in the natural world structured the de facto patterns of human work, play and perception in rural communities, which included nearly everybody in the Middle Ages (Webster 1938). Seasonal changes through the year were parti-cularly visible in the temperate climates of Europe. Differentiation between seasons and months could be both dramatic and subtle, so that nature acted as a textured clock face on which rural communities observed the passages of the year. The Church was able to capitalise on these naturally occurring divisions of the year by overlaying them with religious meanings. This was done by naming days and weeks after religious festivals, saints and martyrs. Medieval breviaries, Missales, and Books of Hours included illustrations of biblical stories, saints and martyrs, alongside scenes illustrating the seasonal work associated with each month. Printed Bibles and Prayer Books later started with a 12-page calendar, one page for each month that allocated religious festivals, holy days and saints on a day-by-day basis.
The result was that the transformations in the world of nature, the world of work and play, and the world of Christian liturgy were combined in a way that put their faith at the centre of the daily life of Christians throughout the year.
Tony Seaton
The seasonal calendar also provided a fertile theatre of imagery and metaphor in both the literary and visual arts. Seasons in the natural world were compared with the stages of human life (Sears 1986). The‘springtime of life’ and the ‘seer and yellow leaf’ are only two of the many analogic ways of describing human age in terms of an implicit equivalence with the seasons.
Romanticism and the re-valuation of Nature
Romanticism was a cultural movement that first swept Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, and revolutionised attitudes to nature. It comprised a number of inter-connected ideas articulated in literature, philosophy, music, art and social life.
Figure 10.1 Medieval calendars and the seasons
Tourism and romantic myths of nature
Its dating, definition and meaning have been endlessly debated (Furst 1969; Christiansen 1988).
But the one that concerns us here is Romanticism’s intense and enduring preoccupation with nature that was to give it a privileged position within European culture. Romanticism’s first impact on nature discourse was linguistic; the word’s dominant meaning came to be the physical environment, pushing all other connotations into a subordinate place. The word became not just a noun, but an adjective. By the end of the century ‘Nature poetry’ was a recognised poetic genre, and‘Nature study’ a widely taught subject in schools.
The three orientations to Nature
Three distinct discursive orientations to the world of nature may be discerned in the writings and practices of early Romantics: the rational-scientific; the transcendental-religious; and the aesthetic-consumable.
The rational-scientific orientation involved regarding nature as a vast data field for inquiry through methodologies of empirical observation and experiment. This paradigm, which partly resembled Lucretius’ notion of detached observation of nature, had more recent roots in the
‘Scientific Revolution’ of the seventeenth century, spearheaded by canonical figures like Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and Leibniz. It has become the basis of scientific procedures since. It primed tourists into amateur, quasi-scientific habits of nature observation and specimen col-lecting – geological specimens, shells, seaweed, birds eggs, pressed flowers, fossils and other natural objects– on trips to the countryside and seaside. Cartoonists sometimes cast doubt on the real motives for such collecting jaunts.
It led to the more grandiose presumptions of modern ecotourism, in which the affluent tourist is invited to adopt the prestigious persona of quasi-scientific pilgrim and inquirer after knowledge in remote environments, rich in exotic fauna and flora, and expensive beyond consideration for the many.
Figure 10.2 Nature study and romance at the seaside, 1860s Tony Seaton
The transcendental-religious orientation embodied a more emotional relationship to Nature that imagined it to be a mystical presence that made contact with it an act of communion. The architects of this credo were poets and philosophers, whose secular ideas were implicitly influenced by models derived from monastic and hermit life, in believing that nature produced spiritual epi-phanies and revelations in places far from the abode of men: by the lakes of Cumbria; on the high hills and mountain ranges of Switzerland, the Hartz in Germany and Scotland; in uninhabited islands on Swiss and Italian Lakes; among the rolling wolds of the English West Country.
These benefits came not just from the places themselves, but from contact with the indi-genous peasantry and labouring classes who lived in them – farm workers, leech gathers, woodcutters– who were taken to have some of the uncorrupted natural goodness and, in some cases, warrior nobility of the ‘noble savages’ that Romantics imagined dwelt in the wilds of America and Oceania– and Scotland.
This Transcendental strain in the Romantic elevation of nature has been seen as a kind of secular religion that developed as Christian belief weakened in a modernising, industrialising world shaped by technology and science. Beach believed that nature was a stand-in for the spiritual isolation felt by moderns:
Figure 10.3 Scottish mountains, 1840s/1850s
Figure 10.4 The‘noble savages’ of Scotland as seen by the French
Tourism and romantic myths of nature
It provided philosophical bridges from faith to unfaith … It made possible without too great emotional strain a shift from medieval Christian faith to the scientific positivism which tends to dominate cultivated minds today … My general contention is that the metaphysical concept of nature is the joint construction of science, philosophy and religion, and is not dependent for its main force on Arcadian sentiment or on its supernaturalism.
(Beach 1936: 5–22) In relegating ‘Arcadian sentiment’ as a main force in the ideology of nature, Beach perhaps underestimated the long previous history of Arcadia, and also the fact that it was not, as he suggests, killed off by the march of science, but survives to this day in tourism behaviour, and also second home choices, which are frequently based on long-held fantasies of country living. His view that nature was a substitute, secular religion may be true for some, but not all. It fails to account for many Christians then and now who, although engaging in romantic nature discourses, still subscribe to the orthodox Christian doctrine that regards the diverse beauty of nature as evidence of God’s hand.
Nature as aesthetic-consumable: the Sublime and Picturesque
The third orientation to Nature as aesthetic-consumable owed nothing to religion or science. It was a fashionable, new construct in the developing cult of taste and personal judgement that was influencing travel (Ousby 1990). Its central premise was that nature was an array of sensory effects to be differentiated, ranked and consumed as forms of personal gratification. The differentiation and ranking were decided on the basis of what Corbin has memorably called,‘the imperative aes-thetics of natural attractions’ (Corbin 1994: 137). These imperatives were the arbitrary codes constructed by tastemakers and aesthetic theorists, which established the criteria by which the sensory world of nature should be evaluated and ranked. Two of the most important Romantic
‘imperative codes’ were those of the Picturesque and the Sublime.
The Picturesque has received considerable, modern academic attention from Hussey’s seminal study (Hussey 1927) to the more comprehensive work of Andrews (1989, 1994). It was a hierarchically ordered ideology of landscape in which places were rated on an aesthetic scale, according to their merit in offering vistas that were a suitable subject for a picture. Picturesque value was assessed on the basis of three features: content, arrangement and perspective. Content was predominantly rural landscape scenes– hills and mountains, rivers, streams, fields, cattle, dramatic skies, peasants at work or play, etc. These elements had to be carefully selected and arranged to conform to picturesque criteria. Winding streams were preferred to straight ones; gnarled trees to rows of neat, symmetrical ones; hills with irregular slopes to geometrically rounded ones; views down to views up; autumn to spring, because it produced more interesting tonal effects of light and shadow, etc. Lastly, the Picturesque vista normatively required a three-layered perspective comprising: a foreground frame made by some natural or man-made portal (a window frame, an arch or an overhanging branch), through which appeared a middle ground (where the principal subject scene was depicted), and beyond that a background that was a more distant feature, often a horizon.
The ‘Search for Picturesque’ (Andrews 1989) coincided with the development of water-colour painting in England that made the view a crucial feature for tourists (Clarke 1981).
Picturesque views virtually created the attraction of some regions of Britain (Scotland, the Wye Valley, Northumberland, Durham and Cumbria) and even today, these regions still stage catalogue exhibitions of paintings that remind us of the fact (Anon 1982; Mitchell 2010).
The Sublime was a conceptfirst discussed in the work of the Roman writer, Longinus. It had begun life as a rhetorical effect produced on audiences by the speeches of outstanding orators. It Tony Seaton
then became a more general characteristic of the work of men of genius (Nicolson 1959; Monk 1960). But the one that connects with discourses of Romantic Nature was that developed by Edmund Burke in 1757, which made it an aesthetic category for viewing the world of art and nature (Burke/Boulton 1958). For Burke, the Sublime was a quality of aesthetic pleasure that was different from beauty. If the beauty of a picture or scene pleased by its harmony and the calm contemplation it induced in observers, there were other kinds that pleased by their dis-turbing violence and power. The paradox that what induced terror and awe could be agreeable was Burke’s theme. Sublimity was what induced awe and fear, and was a matter of quantitative and qualitative scale in the natural and man-made world: great seas, numberless battalions of troops; displays of pomp and conspicuous wealth; dark clouds driven by winds; the silence of a great cemetery at dusk. It was later theorised to have two different dimensions – one sacred and one profane. The sacred sublime were sights and experiences that elevated the mind with their transcendent power and offered intimations of the infinite – moving religious music, great paintings, holy mountains, a religious procession or a wonderful sunset. The profane or negative sublime were sights and experiences that tended to‘shock and awe’ (a phrase perceptively used by the US military to describe its aerial assaults on Iraq), without elevating the mind– the clash of armies by night, the noise and glare of blackened factories, tortures and punishment, under-ground visions of dystopias and hell. Both kinds of sublimity became tourist attractions and part of Romantic nature. They included: crashing waterfalls, erupting volcanoes, vast mountain ranges, rushing torrents and dense forests.
Both the Picturesque and Sublime installed landscape – a concept that may be viewed as a
‘place constructed in aesthetic discourse’ – at the centre of the tourist experience to an extent never before envisaged, and never relinquished since. Increasingly, views had to awe or inspire with dramatic effects, or offer pretty pictures as subjects for watercolour sketches and in modern times, as photo opportunities. Without necessarily knowing much about the Picturesque or Sublime, millions of tourists joined the landscape chase, exemplifying how discourses become inscribed and activated in unconscious responses, and how the many may be enraptured in the present, by natural effects that have been historically theorised by a few.
Romanticism was articulated and theorised by many cultural figures – poets, novelists, essayists, artists, musicians, philosophers in Europe, particularly in England, France and Ger-many. Space does not allow discussion of Ger-many. We shall concentrate instead on one who was theseminal European influence in changing and advancing discourses about Nature.
Rousseau
Rousseau was a philosopher, novelist, botanist and musician. His views on nature were part of a much broader body of thought on human life and freedom and were initially conveyed in two novels that made him famous, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Emile (1762). His main contention was that humans were born good, but were corrupted by the effects of ‘civilisation’, which taught them greed, calculation and worldliness. Civilisation was, he argued, an urban disease. It was communion with nature in rural locations that brought peace and harmony in life:
It is on the summits of mountains, in the depths of forests, on deserted islands that nature reveals her most potent charms.
(La Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. 1v, letter 11) Rousseau’s idealisation of rural life was not new. It had existed in Greek and Roman writers – Theocritus, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca and Cicero– who had advocated the simple life of Arcadia as an Tourism and romantic myths of nature
antidote to the pressures of the city. Romans, like modern Europeans with second homes, had country villas for periodic escapes. In Rousseau’s time, rural innocence was also fondly imagined and mimicked at the French court. Inspired by classical literature and the paintings of Watteau and Boucher, courtiers dressed as peasants acted out pretty theatricals of Arcadian fantasy with their royal employees at picnics and fete champetres.
But Rousseau’s version of Arcadia was different. His writings on nature transformed what had previously been recreational fancies for the privileged into ontology for everyman. In his eyes Nature was a kind of transcendental, feminised being in whose presence the solitary would find the nurturing consolations of teacher and mother. It was in Nature with a capital N, that people would realise their true natures with a lower case N (Christiansen 1988: 96–7).
Rousseau sought communion with nature in several ways. He was a frequent walker who, on one occasion, journeyed from France to Turin via the Alps on foot, as the poet, Words-worth, was to do later. Rousseau used his walks as forms of spiritual exercise in which he cul-tivated habits of intense reflection. Late in life he wrote:
My whole life has been little else than a long reverie divided into chapters by my daily walks.
(Rousseau 1782, 1989: 11)
Figure 10.5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau or the Man of Nature, 1770s/1780s Tony Seaton