Queering Material Nature: Bewitched Bodies and the Limits of the Enlightenment

Summary

“The notions of less abstract natures, as man, dog, dove, … do not deceive us materially, yet even these are sometimes confused by the mutability of matter and the intermixture of things.”

“The old woman would at one moment be stroking the little dog, at the next talking to the bird … A s I regarded her, I began to shudder, for her face twitched the whole time and she kept shaking, … so that I could not tell what she really looked like.”

FROM GOETHE's GRIMOIRES to Lessing's lessons, the literatures and philosophies of the eighteenth century mark many turning points in the discursive and material relationships between humankind and nonhuman nature. A renegotiation of the boundaries between observation and intuition, these discourses articulate a gendered natural world that is at once static, vulnerable, and ripe for the intellectual plucking, while also dynamic, incomprehensible, and unexpected. From the “Man of Reason’s” dominion over the landscape3 to Kant's claim that, for the entirety of the “fair sex,” the step into Enlightened maturity is both too onerous and too dangerous, the bifurcation of a feminized nature at odds with a rational masculine civilization is predicated on long-standing culturally codified norms. Despite these pervasive binaries, the literature of this period is alive with queerly material oddities and marvelous bodies, embodied within the transgressive figure of the witch or witch-like woman. To engage with these mercurial materialities, I propose a queer ecocritical framework that explores depictions of the natural world as a subversive, agential force that resists perception and control. O ne example of this resistance can be found in Ludwig Tieck's Der Blonde Eckbert (“Eckbert the Fair”), which, I argue, queers Enlightenment epistemes by exploring taboo relationships and desires, unruly nature, and unexpected, transgressive bodies. Reading Tieck's 1797 novella through a queer ecocritical lens sheds light on our understanding of the human and more than human and reveals new potential for transgressing and transcending heteropatriarchal norms.

Given the gendered and, at times, contradictory conceptions of nature and the natural world within Enlightenment discourses, feminist material ecocriticism provides a fruitful lens through which to consider binary structures such as culture/nature, reason/emotion, conqueror/conquered, and heteronormative/queer, all of which relate by analogy to the overarching male/ female dichotomy.