Victorian moral ecologies: Sight, insight, and the nature-culture nexus in Ruskin, Hopkins, and Morris

This study argues that John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Morris write about nature in ecological terms that constitute a moral discourse founded upon the close visual observation of nature. Their moral ecologies are moral in two senses: as a "top-down" ethical or Christian system that obliges the human subject to practice careful stewardship of nature, and as a "bottom-up" moral impulse in the subject resulting from his/her insights experienced as deontic urges; they are ecological because they consist of differentiated yet interrelated economies---those of nature, humankind, and God. Nature acts as a moral index of human activity, with environmental (or external) pollution signifying moral (or internal) pollution.;The Introduction defines basic terms and examines the existing literature. Chapter One argues that, for Ruskin, ecological perception is a moral issue grounded in intuited insight rather than scientific observation. Chapter Two argues that Ruskin's law of help conflates aesthetic and ecological values, and that this eco-aesthetic requires a cooperative rather than competitive political economy. Chapter Three argues that Ruskin's economic writings lay out grounds upon which humankind may consume nature morally and sustainably. Chapter Four argues that, in asking whether nature has a soul, Ruskin considers the relationship of human instrumental value to nature's intrinsic value, and posits that a natural entity's intrinsic value is its intrinsic power to manifest its own being. Chapter Five argues that top-down and bottom-up morality create two corresponding models of seeing in Ruskin---a hierarchical model that requires the formal education of human perceptual faculties, and an intuited delight of seeing. Chapter Six argues that, for Hopkins, to see entities as possessing selfhood is to perceive their Christ-likeness, and that this is an ecological perspective supporting a moral ecology in that it is grounded in a recognition of the fundamental interrelatedness of the divine, human, and natural economies and asserts the moral obligation of humankind to nature. Chapter Seven argues that, in his Icelandic journals and the poem "Iceland First Seen," Morris develops a moral ecology that considers not only humankind's relationship to wilderness nature, but the relationship of wildness to human nature.