Animality in British Romanticism

The Aesthetics of Species

Peter Heymans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415507301
• eBook ISBN: 9781136293047
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The scientific, political, and industrial revolutions of the Romantic period transformed the status of humans and redefined the concept of species. This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism. The book's novel approach focuses on the role of aesthetic taste in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics' aesthetic views of animality influenced—and were influenced by—their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. The study reveals how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how, in political writings, the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution.

Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book brings an original perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

Part I

DOI: 10.4324/9780203114865-2

1 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation

Narrativity in the archive

DOI: 10.4324/9780203114865-3

That Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth (2006) became one of the highest grossing documentaries in US film history may have had as much to do with its reliance on the aesthetics of popular disaster fiction as with the topicality of its subject matter (the damaging environmental impact of global warming). Its trailer lured potential viewers with a fastcut montage of natural catastrophes, some dramatic taglines advertising the film's shock value (“By far, the most terrifying film you will ever see”) and more questionable selling techniques bordering on emotional blackmail (“If you love your children … You have to see this film”).¹ Although its popularity has risen in tandem with the increasing urgency of our environmental problems, the genre of eco-disaster or eco-horror is by no means a twenty-first-century invention. Blockbusters such as the Godzilla series (which started in the 1950s) and the Jurassic Park trilogy (1990s) already played upon the fear that our reckless tampering with nature would back-fire, annihilating humanity completely. The progressive urbanisation of Western society inspired similar, if less surreal, scenarios of impending doom in twentieth-century British poetry. Commissioned by the Department of the Environment in 1972, Philip Larkin's “Going, Going” suggested that our relentless drive to domesticate and consume was bound to culminate in environmental apocalypse, reducing England to a wasteland of “concrete and tyres.”² Its lethargic invitation of environmental destruction harked back to John Betjeman's misanthropic poem “Slough” (1937), a bleak portrait of a city that was so industrialised that “there [wasn't] grass to graze a cow,” and to Byron's “Darkness” (1816), which meditated on the possibility of a global cataclysm leaving the world “Seasonless, herb-less, treeless, manless, lifeless.”³ Written two years later, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein shared Byron's tragic vision, but scaled down its ecological disaster to family size and placed individual responsibility on Frankenstein. His Promethean act—the creation of new life without divine or even female involvement—produces a monstrous creature that embarks on a killing spree throughout Europe, eventually murdering several of Frankenstein's friends and family members.

Moral as its intentions may be, the eco-horror genre remains a dubious aesthetic tool with which to raise awareness of environmental issues, not least because its sensationalist portrayal of natural disaster capitalises on the problem it is meant to remedy. More problematic still is its reliance on the psychology of alienation. Environmentalism generally promotes the idea that problems such as global warming and the erosion of biodiversity are caused by our estrangement from nature. If industrialisation and the ensuing urbanisation allowed us to live a comfortable homely life, removed from nature's hardships, our retreat into the city and suburbia is also believed to have rendered us increasingly myopic to the environmental impact of our behaviour. Whether it is the exotic houseplants we buy for our homes or the hyper-stylised wildlife documentaries we watch on TV, nature has become an abstract consumer product, something that is somewhere out there but never quite here, let alone in ourselves. Paradoxically enough, eco-horror now aims to demonstrate our rootedness in nature and induce feelings of environmental empathy by presenting an overwhelming display of eco-disasters that make nature look only more alien. It thus applies the psychology of alienation as a homeopathic remedy and creates the impression that we are in fact not alienated enough.

There is an important socio-historical reason to assume that environmental alienation can generate feelings of identification. When tracing the genealogy of our contemporary animal rights movement, we see that its ideas first began to gain ground towards the end of the eighteenth century, a time in which humans had become more estranged than ever from nature and animality. While the Industrial Revolution, in conjunction with a number of agricultural laws such as the Enclosure Acts, forced rural labourers to migrate from the country to the city, the mechanisation of the production process markedly reduced the need for animal power and ostracised working animals from city life. With humans moving into the city and animals moving out, the latter were increasingly looked upon as alien creatures, belonging to a different time and place. This economic and geographical marginalisation of the animal appears to have stimulated its emancipation, leading as it did to a sense that animals were independent organisms rather than simply created for agricultural or industrial purposes. Moral historians have indicated that the animal rights issues did not arise from the farmer's pragmatic, first-hand experience of nature but came about in the intellectual circles of the urban bourgeoisie, which could afford— financially and socially—to oppose cruel farming practices and advocate more compassionate attitudes towards animal life.⁴ For the middle classes, moreover, animal rights philosophy functioned as a powerful instrument of self-definition. It offered them a social narrative with which they could distance themselves not only from the proletarian enjoyment of blood sports and the aristocratic taste for hunting, but also from the dog-eat-dog business of the natural world at large. To abstain from animal products, indeed, was to escape social and biological determinism and to flaunt the absolute autonomy of one's bourgeois subjectivity. Of course, urban alienation by itself could have merely reinforced the indifference towards non-human animals that already existed. The marginalisation of nature was counteracted by the relatively new fashions of pet-keeping and zoological gardens, which increased the number and visibility of animals in the city. These urban animals satisfied an important psychological need by reconnecting metropolitan citizens to a sense of nature that had been repressed by the Industrial Revolution, albeit one that was based not on biological reality but on a highly sentimental view of country life.

This eighteenth-century urban alienation from nature also laid the ground-work for a revolution in the biological sciences. For centuries, plants and animals had been categorised in terms of their practical, aesthetic or dietary use for humanity rather than in terms of their objective characteristics. Nature now came to be seen as a self-regulating system that was not created to satisfy man's gastronomic or economic needs but that existed in its own right. Together with an increase in vivisection experiments, this more detached and objective view of the natural world provided scientists with new insights into the anatomical and emotional similarities between species, which in turn amplified the call for a more sympathetic treatment of animal life. The rise of animal rights philosophy in Romantic-period Britain was thus a deeply paradoxical development, whereby the growing detachment from non-human animals brought about an understanding of our similarities to them.

Although the environmentalist reliance on the aesthetic of eco-disas-ter has received ample attention in ecocritical studies, most ecocritics have traced this reliance back to the religious discourse of apocalypticism rather than to the sublime.⁵ That environmentalism frequently taps into apocalyptic rhetoric should not be too surprising. Because biblical apocalypse is by nature an aesthetic of eco-disaster, manifesting itself through thunder, lightning, a hailstorm, some earthquakes and a plague of locusts, it requires little stylistic modification or allegorical interpretation to channel an environmentalist message. With its violent subversion of an old corrupted world order and advent of a new utopian regime, moreover, apocalypticism has always lent itself easily to political appropriation, whether by anarcho-pacifist groups anticipating the nuclear self-destruction of the military state apparatus or communists hoping for the Second Coming of Marx.

The ecocritical focus on apocalypticism has greatly contributed to our understanding of the eco-horror genre, clarifying its distinctive chronology of environmental ruin and millennial rebirth as well as its continuing appeal to the fearful and the paranoid. It has, however, paid little attention to the paradoxical role of alienation in environmentalist discourse. Instead of interpreting eco-horror as an outgrowth of biblical apocalypticism, I therefore suggest a different genealogy with secular roots running back to Longinus' rhetorical sublime. As an introspective investigation into mental rather than physical breakdown, the aesthetic of the sublime can arguably teach us more about the complex psychology underlying environmental alienation and redemption than the discourse of apocalypticism. A focus on the sublime also allows us to look at texts that share the revelatory power of apocalypticism without displaying the hackneyed violence that tends to trivialise its moral message. The following interior monologue from The Body Artist (2001), a novel by the postmodern American author Don DeLillo, not only shows how these private moments of disintegration and insight (or interiorised apocalypses, if you will) are crucial to environmental consciousness, it also demonstrates the pivotal role that non-human animals play in these moments. Whereas biblical apocalypse takes little interest in the animal and employs nature merely as a stick with which to punish humanity, in the secular drama of the sublime it is precisely the animal's alien existence and its ability to view us from a perspective unsullied by human concerns that restores natural balance. DeLillo's fragment is worth quoting at length, as it draws on an ecological sublime that was first developed in Romantic writings:

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. Think. What a shedding of every knowable surface and process. She wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand, and never mind the folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space set off from time. She looked and took a careful breath. She was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew it was ending already. She felt it in the blue jay. Or maybe not. She was making it happen herself because she could not look any longer. This must be what it means to see if you've been near blind all your life.⁶

The young blind boy of Burke's racist anecdote has returned, albeit in a much more moral and surprisingly green shape.

I am also thinking here of poems such as William Blake's “The Fly,” in which the encounter with an animal provokes a similar redemptive reflection on the meaning of human and non-human life:

Little Fly,

Thy summer's play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me? (1–8)⁷

Admittedly, few critics would associate DeLillo's or Blake's scene with the shock-and-awe experience of the sublime, which—as Burke reminds us—”comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros,” not in the unthreatening shape of a pretty blue jay or dead fly (Sublime 60–61). And yet, there is reason to interpret these scenes in the light of the sublime rather than the beautiful. Despite the Romantics' great interest in the physical reality of their environment, their aesthetic philosophy turned increasingly inwards, privileging the subject's psychological response to the exterior world over that world's objective characteristics. This subjective response, they believed, could radically transform one's routinised understanding of nature, so that one would come to perceive nature as though—to return to Burke once more—one had regained one's eyesight after a period of blindness. Emphasising the importance of such a perceptual renewal, Coleridge argued that “the character and privilege of Genius” is “to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar.”⁸ In A Defence of Poetry, Percy Shelley similarly stressed that “poetry … makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (681). By challenging our habituated patterns of perception, the poetic imagination alienates us from our conventional view of reality, so much so that even the most mundane display of pastoral kitsch can inspire sublime wonder. This is precisely what occurs in Blake's and DeLillo's fragments, which invest a relatively ordinary scene with an alienating and cathartic power to which usually only the sublime can lay claim. The result is a double estrangement, calling into question both our subjective construction of nature and our objective relation to animality.

That the sublime can leave a lasting impact on our moral attitude towards animality has attracted some ecocritical interest. Mary Midgley's 1979 study Beast and Man was the first to theorise an ecological sublime, even if it never paired those exact terms.⁹ Her green model took shape as a reaction against Kant's idealist sublime and its tendency to reduce nature to a prop against which transcendental reason could flaunt its superiority. Midgley's ecological sublime, alternatively, dramatised that moment when the animal appeared too inhumanly different to be conceptualised. This cognitive failure to transcend our natural surroundings, she believed, makes us instantly aware of our rootedness in biological reality and of our vulnerability as physical beings. This awareness does not throw us into a state of permanent alienation as we might expect from such a traumatic experience, but inspires a deeply moral recognition of biological interdependence. To illustrate the moral workings of this ecological sublime, Mid-gley draws attention to an anecdote in Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (1970), in which Murdoch's awareness of “the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees” nudges her out of her self-centred perspective and provides her with an insight into the proper proportions of things. The scene brings to mind Blake's “The Fly” and the bird encounter in DeLillo's The Body Artist:

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.¹⁰

Midgley's theory was not without its shortcomings, addressing as it did the sublime in a rather cursory, hit-and-run way at the end of a voluminous study.¹¹ By reducing the sublime to a uniformly positive experience, she denied the ambiguity that inhered in Burke's and Kant's theories as one of the earmarks of the sublime. The question of whether the sublime is a moral, immoral or amoral experience has in fact long puzzled scholars. Jean-François Lyotard, one of its most Kantian twentieth-century interpreters, claimed that the sublime is “close to insanity” and “irreducible to moral feeling.”¹² Paul Crowther, by contrast, went so far as to suggest that Kant “reduces the sublime to a kind of indirect moral experience,” which unites us in our communal admiration for the powers of reason and thus fosters a feeling of respect for other humans.¹³ The scholarly consensus that appears to be emerging is that the sublime constitutes an extremely protean discourse that covers the entire political spectrum and whose meaning depends on its interaction with a number of subjective parameters. While it occasionally functions as a potent environmentalist aesthetic capable of emancipating nature from our domesticating desires, at other times the sublime only seems intent on inviting and catering to those desires.¹⁴ The tiger, for instance, one of the animals Burke characterises in his Enquiry as particularly prone to producing the sublime, has been time and again portrayed as an object of admiration (think of Blake's “The Tyger” or Henri Rousseau's jungle paintings). Aesthetic feelings of respect, however, can yield various moral implications. Arguably, it is our admiration for the tiger's power and beauty that explains its desirability among wildl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Aesthetics of Species
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index