Climbing to the heart of Stone. Reading Moffat through Plumwood

Abstract

Gwen Moffat is celebrated in the mountaineering world for becoming the first woman mountain guide in the UK in 1953. However, though she authored 35 books – fiction and non-fiction – so far, her works have received very little scholarly attention. The purpose of this paper is to focus mainly on her first autobiography Space Below My Feet (1961) and to provide a literary analysis of it from the ecofeminist point of view elaborated by Val Plumwood. Though Moffat and Plumwood seemingly never met nor read each other, their attitude towards nature and the points in common between the British mountaineer and the Australian philosopher are astoundingly numerous. In one of her last writings Journey to the Heart of Stone (2007), Plumwood claimed that a “radically intentionalising anti-reductionist writing of the world might make visible whole new interspecies dialogues [...]that can re-open the door to the world of wonder”1, adding that such “a radical writing project should encourage us [...]to reinvest with speech, agency and meaning the silenced ones, including the earth and its very stones” 2 . This paper will show how Space Below My Feet, with its depictions of animal intelligence and personality, and its being “so passionately in love with the rock”3, prefigures Plumwood’sinvitation to reconceive nature “as capable of agency and intentionality,”4 and presents Moffat as one of Plumwood’s “climbers who can see themselves [...] as being in conversation with stones”.