Animality in British Romanticism
Routledge Studies in Romanticism
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Richard Marggraf Turley
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3 Leigh Hunt and the London
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Michael Eberle-Sinatra
4 Tracing Women’s Romanticism
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14 Colonialism, Race, and the
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15 Keats and Philosophy
The Life of Sensations
Shahidha K. Bari
16 Animality in British
Romanticism
The Aesthetics of Species
Peter Heymans
Animality in British
Romanticism
The Aesthetics of Species

Peter Heymans

NEW YORK LONDON

First published 2012
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For Jonathan, Stijn and my parents
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Species 1

PART I

1 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation:

The Ecological Sublime 19

2 Green Masochism:
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 41

3 Hunting for Pleasure: Wordsworth’s Ecofeminism 61

PART II

4 Humans and Other Moving Things:

Wordsworth Visits London (with Deleuze and Guattari) 83

5 The Cute and the Cruel:

Taste, Animality and Sexual Violence in Burke and Blake 101

6 A Problem of Waste Management:

Frankenstein and the Visual Order of Things 118

PART III

7 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule: The Scientific Sublime 137

viii Contents
8 A Taste of God:
Natural Theology and the Aesthetics of Intelligent Design 154

9 Beauty with a Past: Evolutionary Aesthetics

in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature 169

Notes 185
Bibliography 205
Index 216
Acknowledgments

This book has its roots in the doctoral dissertation which I wrote at the Vrije
Universiteit Brussel between 2006 and 2010. I owe a tremendous intellec-
tual debt to the two supervisors of that project, Oskar Wellens and Johan
Callens, whose ideas have shaped my thinking in crucial ways. Thanks
also go to my brother Stijn, who triggered my interest in animal ethics
and academic research. On a more logistical level, I am greatly indebted to
the Research Foundation—Flanders for its generous grant and to my par-
ents for their unflagging care and interest, especially during the year that I
wrote this book. It is difficult to overstate Jonathan’s contribution. Without
his meticulous proofreading, incisive comments and ongoing support, this
book would have been much less readable (or more unreadable). At the Vrije
Universiteit Brussel, I would like to thank Liesbeth Bekers and Ann Peeters
for their down-to-earth advice on everything academic. Thanks also to the
members of my dissertation committee—in particular to Franca Bellarsi,
Noel Jackson and Jürgen Pieters—whose encouraging reviews inspired me
to upgrade my dissertation into this book. I am also extremely grateful to
Greg Garrard, Janelle Schwartz and Philip Shaw for reviewing my book
proposal for Routledge and for their thoughtful comments.
Two chapters in this book originally appeared elsewhere, albeit in very
different forms. Chapter 2 is a major update of the article “Reading the Ani-
mal: An Ecocritical Approach to the Discourse of the Sublime in Coleridge’s
‘Ancient Mariner,’” which was published in The Coleridge Bulletin 30,
no. 2 (2007). And Chapter 5 expands my article “Eating Girls: Becoming-
Animal and the Romantic Sublime in William Blake’s Lyca Poems,” which
appeared in Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies
3, no. 1 (2011). I am very grateful to Graham Davidson, Sherryl Vint and
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. for their comments and for granting me permis-
sion to recycle this material here. Final credit goes to Jonathan, my par-
ents, Stijn, Melanie, Ann, Rebekka, Emma and my friends at the University
(Bieke, Julie, Liesbeth, Marie-Eve, Sabah and Simon) for creating an envi-
ronment that is incredibly loving, supportive and inspiring.
 Introduction
The Aesthetics of Species

When Frankenstein’s Monster fi nally opens its “dull yellow eye,” its creator
instantly falls into a fit of histrionic madness.1 What leaves him so over-
whelmed is not a feeling of fatherly pride or medical accomplishment, but a
visceral disgust at the creature’s ugliness—skin too transparent to conceal
its underlying arteries and muscles, a pair of glistening teeth set in stark
contrast against its black lips, eyes that look watery and jaundiced. Fran-
kenstein never recovers from this aesthetic shock. Too disappointed and
disturbed by the cosmetic failure of his project, he neglects to appreciate its
scientific success and realise that the creature’s disfigured face actually dis-
guises the humane mind of a noble savage. What Mary Shelley’s novel thus
forcefully demonstrates is the extent to which the classification of species is
an aesthetic activity, a simple matter of specere (the Latin verb from which
the term species derives, meaning “to look at”).
It is this importance of the aesthetic that I investigate in this book. Focus-
sing on the beautiful, ugly and sublime, I argue that the Romantics’ aesthetic
perception of animality both influenced and was influenced by their ethi-
cal, scientific and religious understanding of species. Several studies within
the fields of ecocriticism and animal studies have recently called attention
to the integral part that the animal played in British Romantic thought.
All canonical Romantic poets, Christine Kenyon-Jones and David Perkins
have shown, emphasised the need to treat animal life with more respect. 2
They composed elegies for deceased pets (such as Byron’s epitaph for his
dog Boatswain), lamented the exploitation of work animals (Coleridge’s
“To a Young Ass”), urged readers to consider even the rights of insects
(Blake’s “The Fly”), criticised the sadistic pleasures of hunting (Words-
worth’s “Hart-Leap Well”) and published pamphlets promoting vegetari-
anism (Percy Shelley’s “A Vindication of Natural Diet”). One reason for
the Romantics’ commitment to animal welfare was the growing scientific
insight into the anatomical and psychological continuity between human
and non-human animals. In his 1790 study The Philosophy of Natural His-
tory, the Scottish naturalist William Smellie recognised that “man, in his
lowest condition, is evidently linked both in the form of his body and the
capacity of his mind, to the large and small orang-outangs,” an idea that,
2 Animality in British Romanticism
despite its religious and popular controversy, gained increasing currency
in Romantic-period science, most notably in the writings of James Burnett
(Lord Monboddo), Erasmus Darwin and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. 3
That Frankenstein collects both human and non-human organs to assemble
his creature clearly evinces this growing understanding of human-animal
similarities, but his panic-stricken abandonment of the Monster also sym-
bolises the reluctance of many Romantics to accept evolutionary theory in
the flesh. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for one, ridiculed the belief that “con-
templates Man as the last metamorphosis, the gay Image, of some lucky
species of Ape or Baboon” and still held fast to biblical creationism.4
Coleridge’s adamant rejection of evolutionary thought was rooted in
a more wide-ranging social anxiety that the “sacred distinction between
things and persons” was crumbling. 5 The end of the eighteenth century
witnessed a general loss of taxonomic stability, whereby the universal
and static character of social, political and biological laws was increas-
ingly disputed. Changeability and evolution had become keywords not
only in the biological sciences, but also in the radical liberal politics of
William Godwin and Thomas Paine, who criticised the conservative ide-
ology underlying class divisions and the dehumanising labour conditions
that these divisions appeared to authorise and nourish in an early-capi-
talist economy. In the disappointed assessment of many fi rst-generation
Romantics, however, the liberal revolutions sweeping through Europe
and the United States with the aim of emancipating the working classes
had given rise to a renewed devaluation of human life. In his conservative
pamphlet against the French Revolution, Edmund Burke famously com-
plained that the superior values of the ancien régime had been “trodden
down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude” and that the revolutionar-
ies had stripped the state of its “pleasing illusions,” now revealing that “a
king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and
an animal not of the highest order.”6
Although it is important to examine the socio-historical contexts in
which ideas of species were formulated and received, such an investigation
is not my principal concern here. This study fi rst and foremost explores the
aesthetic representation of these ideas and the complex interaction between
the aesthetic, the ideological and the biological. In doing so, it explicitly
responds to the call voiced by an increasing number of ecocritics and ani-
mal philosophers to take the aesthetic seriously.7 More than previous eco-
critical studies of Romantic conceptions of animality, this book interprets
species as a pliable ideological concept used to rationalise or redefi ne the
moral, political and theological status of human and non-human animals.
For this reason, it pays as much attention to culturally animalised humans
and humanised animals as to biological categories. This is not to suggest
that I take the notion of species to be a purely ideological construct uncon-
nected to biological reality. When Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Spe-
cies (1859) interpreted the term species “as one arbitrarily given for the sake
 Introduction 3
of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” he
may likewise have recognised the social fabrication of scientific discourse,
but that does not mean that he denied the objective difference between cats
and dogs.8 My focus on aesthetic ideology aims to underline that our con-
ception of species is the result of a complex historical process, whereby rival
discourses competed for epistemic dominance and either evolved into more
successful forms of thought or became extinct entirely. For eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century biologists, species was far from a well-defi ned analyti-
cal category.9 Whereas Georges Cuvier was still convinced that God had
designed all animals as fi xed and unchangeable, Erasmus Darwin already
understood that animal species had gradually evolved to assume their pres-
ent form. And if James Burnett thought that orang-utans were a variety of
humans, the historian Edward Long still cast doubt on the human nature of
Hottentots. What unites these disparate views is the emphasis each put on
the visible or phenotypic resemblances between animals, an emphasis that
often inspired scientists to judge the visual appearance of organisms not
just in a biological sense but in an aesthetic sense as well.
According to Michel Foucault, the end of the eighteenth and beginning of
the nineteenth centuries marked a watershed in zoological research as sci-
entists moved their attention away from the immediately visible character-
istics of animals towards less palpable functional and structural attributes.
“From Cuvier onward,” Foucault claims in The Order of Things (1966), “it
is life in its non-perceptible, purely functional aspect that provides the basis
for the exterior possibility of a classification. The classification of living
beings . . . now arises from the depths of life, from those elements most hid-
den from view.”10 Although this shift from the visible to the invisible was
less radical and comprehensive than Foucault suggests, Romantic-period
scientists, poets and philosophers did indeed express an increasing sense
of unease about the influence of aesthetic perception on the taxonomisa-
tion of animal species, an unease that probably found its most trenchant
articulation in Mary Shelley’s warning not to take monsters (human or
non-human) at face value.
Since the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, it is a common-
place that, aside from being socially determined, taste is also a powerful
ideological determinant capable of manipulating our political ideas with-
out our awareness.11 In “The Effects of Blackness,” a seemingly innocuous
chapter in Burke’s aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Ori-
gin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the Irish philosopher
recorded the experience of a blind boy who, after regaining his eyesight,
encountered a black woman for the fi rst time. The boy, Burke wrote with
an air of scientific objectivity, “was struck with great horror at the sight,”
a reaction that incidentally offers a clear precedent for Frankenstein’s puer-
ile hysteria.12 Although Burke intended to make an aesthetic rather than
political point, he tacitly suggested that the boy’s racism was essentially a
sensory response and, therefore, as natural and excusable as an aversion
4 Animality in British Romanticism
to vinegar. Paradoxically enough, this naturalisation of political belief is
made possible by the assumption that our taste is apolitical and ahistorical.
Our aesthetic judgments, Burke stressed, lie deeply buried in our bodies
among our most primal impulses, where they are immune to ideological
appropriation and even rational contemplation. “It is not by the force of
long attention and enquiry that we fi nd any object to be beautiful,” he
asserted; “beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning; even the will
is unconcerned” (Sublime 84). If we think pandas look cute, anteaters look
ridiculous and Tom Hanks looks trustworthy, in other words, this is sup-
posedly not through conscious choice or political ideology (in which cases,
our judgment would be considered disingenuous), but just because the feel-
ing spontaneously and physically occurred to us, like an erotic infatuation
or viral infection.
So far, critics have primarily discussed the social, racial and gender poli-
tics of aesthetic judgment. They have demonstrated how we consciously
and subconsciously employ the notion of taste to define both our own and
the other’s gender identity, social class and ethnic background. It is the
ideology of the aesthetic that leads us to believe that women like romcoms,
lower-class people like tracksuits, African Americans like ostentatious jew-
ellery and that gay men like interior design. With this book, I hope to show
that in the Romantic period taste was also frequently used to define the
species identity of the self and other. Considering that, for Burke and many
other Romantic-period theorists, aesthetic judgment was a uniquely human
faculty and non-human animals did not have a sense of beauty, it is easy
to see how the notion of taste can be drawn upon to dehumanise certain
groups in society. Unlike a long lineage of critics (from Walter Benjamin
and Theodor Adorno to Paul de Man), however, I do not interpret the aes-
theticisation of ideology (or the politicisation of the aesthetic) as a necessar-
ily reactionary or mystifying manoeuvre, for such an interpretation would
insinuate that it is entirely possible to put together a non-aesthetic system of
politics, speaking univocally to the mind instead of the heart. If Derrida’s
writings should have taught us anything, it is that we should be suspicious
of such a discourse that purports to offer a non-aesthetic and literal repre-
sentation of reality. Bearing in mind that all languages and all politics are
aesthetic, we might as well look for what Eagleton in his criticism of de
Man has called “the potentially positive dimensions of the aesthetic” (10).
One of the aims of this book, then, is to demonstrate how for the Roman-
tics the aesthetic was not only the site where political bias was naturalised
into biological truth, but how it was also a deeply moral place where one’s
supposedly intuitive perceptions of reality were exposed as cultural prod-
ucts of social inculcation and habit formation.
I focus on the British Romantics in this book not only because their
interest in animality was less anecdotal and more philosophically grounded
than the concerns of previous generations, but also because they showed
greater sensitivity to the workings of the aesthetic. The study of aesthetics
 Introduction 5
as an independent field of philosophical investigation, divorced from eth-
ics, politics and theology, is generally believed to have emerged around
the beginning of the eighteenth century, reaching its momentum in the
Romantic period and most conspicuously in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of
Judgment (1790). One of the Critique’s central and ground-breaking ideas
pertained to the autonomous or disinterested nature of taste. When we call
an object beautiful, Kant believed, we do so not because this object satis-
fies a particular interest (moral, fi nancial, dietary, scientific), but because it
pleases in our abstract and independent psychological judgment. Although
Burke located aesthetic feeling in human physiology rather than psychol-
ogy, his empirical theory lent a similar autonomy and universality to taste.
For an object to be beautiful, he claimed, it should give pleasure to our sen-
sory organs and need not cater to our moral intuitions or accord with scien-
tific truth. In fact, the popular tendency to identify beauty with virtue and
anchor moral action in aesthetic sensation rather than rational thought,
Burke argued, is in every respect “fallacious” and “has given rise to an
infi nite deal of whimsical theory” (Sublime 102, 101).
Considering this emphasis on the autonomy of taste, it may seem coun-
terintuitive to study the ideology of the aesthetic in British Romanti-
cism. Yale School critics such as Harold Bloom and Paul de Man, after
all, have repeatedly insisted that the Romantics were mainly interested in
the transcendental fl ights of the aesthetic imagination and only turned to
their physical environment when it could serve as a vehicle for introspec-
tion and self-empowerment. In what reads like a caveat against ecocritical
interpretations of Romantic literature, Bloom has memorably argued that
“Romantic nature poetry, despite a long critical history of misrepresenta-
tion, was an anti-nature poetry, even in Wordsworth who sought a reci-
procity or even a dialogue with nature, but found it only in flashes.”13 As
Eagleton has pointed out, however, the notion of aesthetic autonomy and of
an apolitical art is deeply ideological in itself, contrived by bourgeois capi-
talism in an attempt to camouflage the social conditions in which both the
artwork and the bourgeois artist came into being (8–9). New Historicists
such as Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson, too, have interpreted the
Romantics’ increasing orientation towards a subjectivist aesthetic and an
ahistorical psychology as a conservative suppression of political and socio-
economic reality.14 If Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey” was engrossed
in the ruin’s pastoral surroundings and their elevating effects on the poetic
imagination, Marjorie Levinson has argued in her influential essay “Insight
and Oversight,” it was primarily to direct attention away from the homeless
people living around the abbey and the environmental damage caused by
the local iron industry. For both Eagleton and Levinson, then, the Roman-
tic depoliticisation of the aesthetic was a profoundly political act.
The Kantian belief in perceptual autonomy, however, can also be con-
strued as part of a moral, if slightly naive, strategy to rescue the aesthetic
from political appropriation and from the physiognomic thinking that
6 Animality in British Romanticism
encouraged Frankenstein to invest ugliness with moral significance. More
importantly, we need to reconsider the widely accepted assumption that the
British Romantics uncritically adopted this belief. As Peter de Bolla and
Andrew Ashfield have amply demonstrated, the idea of aesthetic autonomy
never gained much of a foothold in British theory, which continued to assert
the interplay among beauty, truth and moral integrity in a variety of fields,
including politics, ethics, science and theology.15 Burke, for instance, may
have cautioned readers against loading aesthetic characteristics with moral
freight, but this did not stop him from claiming elsewhere in his Enquiry
that beauty is “a social quality,” capable of inspiring “sentiments of tender-
ness and affection” (39). Even Coleridge, the most Kantian of Romantic
poets, still believed in a “close analogy of Love and Beauty,” and in his
poem “Dejection: An Ode” ascribed the perception of ugliness in nature to
a lack of moral imagination and coldness of feeling.16 Far from dissociat-
ing thinking from feeling, the Romantics were prone to conflating the two
and rendering everything aesthetic. This conflation was especially perva-
sive in the political discourse produced in the wake of the French Revolu-
tion. Burke’s Refl ections on the Revolution in France (1790) interlarded
its conservative narrative with such an abundance of aesthetic arguments
that the Revolution came to constitute a crime against good taste and,
as Burke regarded aesthetic feeling as instinctive and universal, a crime
against natural law. Just as significantly, theological writings frequently
infused aesthetic sentiment with religious meaning by interpreting one’s
sensory admiration for natural or artistic beauty as a mystical avowal of
the magnificence of God’s creation. William Paley’s treatise Natural Theol-
ogy (1802), for instance, suggested that the gratuitous beauty of “the plum-
age of birds, the furs of beasts, the bright scales of fishes” was purposefully
designed by a supernatural intelligence for no other reason than to gratify
human senses.17 That aesthetic sentiment figures prominently in reaction-
ary and religious discourse should not imply that a rhetorical emphasis on
feeling mainly serves to conceal a poverty or absence of rational thought.
Humphry Davy, a chemist perhaps best known for his invention of the
gas-detecting mine lamp and as President of the Royal Society, correlated
scientific with aesthetic experience when he suggested that “the perception
of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty,” a claim
that resonates with John Keats’s idea that “what the Imagination seizes
as Beauty must be Truth” and with his more famous but rather less subtle
analogy that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”18
Of course, the Romantics were not the fi rst to predicate political,
religious or scientific thought on aesthetic sensation. What was ground-
breaking, though, was their exceptional critical insight into the ideological
purposes of this aestheticisation. For many liberal philosophers, indeed,
Burke’s high-pitched emotionalism and persistent sentimentalisation of
political thought were as reprehensible as his traditionalist ideology. In a
response to Burke’s Refl ections, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote: “Man preys
 Introduction 7
on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pile.”19
And Thomas Paine, a self-declared supporter of literalism and rational-
ism, formulated a very similar criticism, arguing with an interesting animal
metaphor that Burke “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”20
This insight into the ideological recuperation of aesthetic feeling was stimu-
lated by the growing awareness that aesthetic qualities do not reside in the
physical object itself, but are subjectively created and manipulated. “All
things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient,”
Percy Shelley argued in his Defence of Poetry (1821). 21 In reaction to John
Locke’s understanding of the brain as a passive organ determined by sense
perceptions, the Romantics highlighted the active and creative power of the
imagination and its ability to resist, in Percy Shelley’s words, “the curse
which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions”
(Defence 698). This subjectivist interpretation of the imagination was most
emphatically formulated in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant, however,
did not allow for individual variation in taste and still believed in a com-
mon aesthetic sense. If something is labelled beautiful, he stressed, it must
be so for everyone at all times. Such a universalist position received little
support from the British Romantics, who emphasised the individual char-
acter of sense perception and especially the superior aesthetic sensibility of
the poet. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth asserted that poets
possess “more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness” than the
general public and have “a greater promptness to think and feel without
immediate external excitement.”22
Once taste is deprived of its validity as an objective and universal stan-
dard of knowledge, it also loses its authenticating function in ideological dis-
course. The disgust that Burke expressed at the mob violence of the French
Revolution, then, simply becomes a matter of personal taste, as subjective
and fickle as an aversion to Bach or Brussels sprouts. This is not to sug-
gest that the Romantics drained the aesthetic of its wider political relevance.
Rather than something to be wary of, the union of aesthetic feeling and phil-
osophical thought was for many Romantics a poetic ideal that few could
consistently attain. Coleridge asserted that “a Poet’s Heart & Intellect should
be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in
Nature,” and he praised Wordsworth as “the only man who has effected a
compleat and constant synthesis of Thought & Feeling.”23 Instead of ground-
ing their ideology in a common aesthetic sense, however, the Romantics
placed to the fore the poet’s uniquely individual subjectivity as a superior
source of knowledge uncorrupted by the received ideas of collective and dog-
matic thinking. This was the age of the poet as visionary genius, someone
who is able, as Keats put it, “to see as a God sees” and to reveal the truths
and prejudices to which habituation has turned us blind.24
I will focus in this book mainly on the aesthetic categories of the beau-
tiful, ugly and sublime. With a critical history spanning two millennia,
the sublime is a versatile and frustratingly complex concept. Especially in
8 Animality in British Romanticism
recent years, it has entered so many disciplines and media that it has metas-
tasised and mutated beyond our critical grasp. The past decade alone has
witnessed the emergence of a sweatshop sublime, a holocaust sublime, a
queer sublime, a capitalist sublime, a digital sublime and a pornographic
sublime, and the list—which has the air of being generated by an academic
spambot—seems limitless. 25 As tautological as it may sound, it seems that
the concept of the sublime has come to constitute a source of sublimity in
itself. A compact but unavoidably simplified defi nition of the sublime would
be: an overwhelming experience produced by a phenomenon that is too
large or terrifying to be represented and, as a result, makes one feel insig-
nificant and impotent in comparison. The terrorist attacks on the World
Trade Center in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, have already become
a textbook example of the sublime, illustrating its political implications
and often violent character. But I am also thinking here of less dramatic or
obviously politicised experiences, such as an unexpected encounter with a
grizzly bear in a suburban park or a visit to a hectic shopping centre on the
fi rst day of the sales. It is with such unsettling and potentially traumatic
confrontations with human and non-human corporeality that I am con-
cerned in this book.
The sublime was fi rst theorised by the Greek critic Longinus in his fi rst-
century rhetorical treatise Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), which examined
the stylistic qualities and psychological effects of overwhelming language.
“By true sublimity,” Longinus asserted, “our soul somehow is both lifted
up and—taking on a kind of exultant resemblance—filled with delight and
great glory, as if our soul itself had created what it just heard.”26 Although
Longinus also attends to the beauty and power of nature, it is essentially
human language that transports both speaker and listener, writer and reader
out of their bodies and beyond material reality: “sublimity,” then, “is the
resonance of greatness of mind” (51–52). As critics have shown, however,
Longinus’ subjectivist theory did not instantly become the dominant model
when it reached Britain in 1554, and aesthetic taste in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries remained more focussed on impressive natural objects
than the impressive rhetorical or rational power of the human subject.27
It was mainly under the influence of Burke’s and Kant’s theories that the
sublime came to be seen as a quality lying in the eye of the beholder rather
than in the object itself. In his empirical study A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke interpreted
the sublime as a psychologically and physiologically disturbing experience
of terror. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and
danger,” he wrote, “that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is con-
versant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror,
is a source of the sublime” (36). Although the English literary critic John
Dennis had already signalled the importance of terror in the psychology
of the sublime, it was Burke who popularised the view of the sublime as
an oxymoronic sensation, inducing both attraction and repulsion or what
 Introduction 9
he described as a “delightful horror” (67). 28 Burke’s theory emphatically
distanced itself from earlier objectivist models in its focus on “the ideas of
pain, and danger” and in its interpretation of material nature as only “a
source of the sublime.” And yet, his compulsive interest in the classification
of these natural sources, in conjunction with his frequent backsliding into a
materialist idiom, shows just how difficult it was to disengage oneself from
the natural sublime.
Although Kant, too, still referred to volcanoes, thunderclouds, water-
falls and hurricanes as triggers of elevation, his “Analytic of the Sublime,”
published in the Critique of Judgment, rejected the natural sublime more
categorically. “Sublimity,” he unambiguously stated, “is not contained
in anything in nature, but only in our mind.”29 To better understand the
workings of Kant’s sublime, I should fi rst touch upon his transcendental
idealism and its relation to his theory of cognition. Kant posits a Platonic
split between empirical reality, or the world of the senses, and an ideal-
ist reality that transcends the material world. The faculties of imagination
and understanding operate within the fi rst realm and mainly derive their
knowledge from physical experience. Reason, on the other hand, is a so-
called supersensible faculty and has no roots in material nature. Imagina-
tion represents sensory impressions or intuitions and thus synthesises world
and word; understanding subsequently turns these feelings and intuitive
ideas into more general concepts. It is the smooth interaction between these
two faculties that allows us to understand and represent the phenomenal
world. Reason, in contrast, does not supply empirical concepts but tran-
scendental or universal ideas, such as ideas of God, morality or freedom,
which exist prior to and completely independent of experience. The sub-
lime, then, creates a conflict between imagination, understanding and rea-
son, ultimately demonstrating the absolute autonomy and superiority of the
ideal over the physical. To explain this more clearly: when we encounter an
object that is too vast, numerous or terrible to apprehend, we fi rst experi-
ence a moment of mental blockage. Our empirical faculties fail to connect
matter to consciousness and the world stops making sense: it appears, Kant
writes, “unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as it were [does] vio-
lence to our imagination” (129). This moment of blockage urges us to find
in our own mind a power that is “superior to nature within us and thus also
to nature outside us” (147). The discovery of that power, the transcendental
faculty of reason, does not enable us to represent the natural object, but at
least we can now represent the mind’s failure of representation. Just as in
Socrates’ maxim, the highest attainable knowledge for Kant is an insight
into our lack of insight. In this paradoxical way, nature’s impenetrable oth-
erness elevates human cognition to a self-conscious plane from where it
can evaluate its representational shortcomings and watch—with a sense of
masochistic satisfaction—its downfall. Kant’s sublime is thus, like Burke’s,
a very mixed experience. It allows us to transcend material reality, but at
the same time drives home our powerlessness as physical beings. “Since the
10 Animality in British Romanticism
mind is not merely attracted by the object,” Kant writes, “but is also always
reciprocally repelled by it, the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much
contain positive pleasure as it does admiration or respect, i.e., it deserves to
be called negative pleasure” (129).
Influential twentieth-century critics of the sublime such as Samuel
Monk, Neil Hertz and Frances Ferguson have generally interpreted Burke’s
empiricist and Kant’s transcendentalist theories as the main inspirational
models for the Romantic sublime.30 In his 1989 study The Discourse of
the Sublime, however, Peter de Bolla has called into question this “widely
unexamined Kantian appropriation of sublimity” and urged scholars to
disentangle British aesthetics from the high-flown subjectivism of German
idealism.31 Since then, objectivist readings of the Romantic sublime have
gained increasing ground in aesthetic philosophy, especially in those fields
with traditionally strong materialist leanings, such as ecocriticism and cog-
nitive literary theory. Working in the former field, Onno Oerlemans and
Christopher Hitt have pointed out that the sublime frequently appears in
Romantic environmentalist writings where it dramatises the impossibility
of rational transcendence and bears out nature’s radical resistance to ideal-
ist domestication.32 More recently, Alan Richardson’s The Neural Sublime:
Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (2010) has argued that the poets’
overwhelming confrontations with their environment not only expose the
irreducible materiality of nature but also render them acutely aware of the
physical wiring of their minds, and—in contrast to Kant’s disembodying
experience—entrench the imaginative process resolutely in the grey matter
of the brain.33
There is a growing tendency to politicise the sublime and interpret its
confl ict between self and other as a tug-of-war in which power relations
are negotiated and fi nally reversed or consolidated. Feminist, post-Marxist,
postcolonial and queer theorists have discerned in the sublime a discourse
that aptly addresses their concerns with the politics of representation and
the discursive repression or emancipation of otherness. 34 In The Feminine
Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (1995), Barbara Free-
man argues that “the canonical theories that seem merely to explain the
sublime also evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness
that, almost without exception, is gendered as feminine.”35 Offering a post-
Marxist perspective, Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic asserts that
the sublime exploits the aesthetics of awe and wonder for political effect.
With its masochistic indulgence in authority, pain and violence, Burke’s
sublime in particular, Eagleton believes, artfully seduces the subject into a
pleasurable submission to and even admiration for the power that exploits
it. This study emphatically engages with these moral interpretations of the
aesthetic by exploring how the sublime represents and either neutralises
or emancipates animal otherness. By focussing on the significance of spe-
cies in the aesthetic experience, I do not simply intend to add yet another
parameter to the field of ideological criticism, but hope to demonstrate how
 Introduction 11
the concept of species interacts with the more academically established cat-
egories of race, class and gender. Several chapters in this book thus con-
sciously locate themselves at the intersection of these critical perspectives:
my discussion of Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well” in Chapter 3 combines
ecofeminist and eco-Marxist viewpoints to explain how the aristocratic
abuse of animality relates to the sexual exploitation of woman; in Chap-
ter 5, I show how Burke’s Refl ections on the Revolution in France con-
flated discourses of class, race, animality and gender to invoke a sense of
universal malaise and taxonomic breakdown; and my reading of Erasmus
Darwin’s philosophical poem The Temple of Nature in the fi nal chapter
demonstrates how Charles Darwin’s grandfather provocatively represented
the reproductive potency of woman as a force so powerful that it could
endanger human existence in a sort of Malthusian sublime.
Both Romantic and postmodern theorists have tended to privilege the
sublime at the expense of the categories of the beautiful and the ugly, argu-
ably because these are typically interpreted as much less ambiguous cat-
egories and, for that reason, also less theoretically appealing. The belief,
however, that the sensation of the beautiful or ugly is an intuitive and self-
evident experience that precedes and even precludes conscious reflection
mainly rests on Burke’s and Kant’s own assumptions and therefore must be
handled with critical care. On Burke’s account, beauty inheres in the physi-
cal object itself and refers to sensory qualities such as smoothness, small-
ness and fragility. The ugly receives much less discussion in his Enquiry
and is somewhat hastily defi ned as a negative aesthetic that “proceeds from
causes opposite to those of positive beauty” (95). It can, however, also be
a source of the sublime when it is so excessive and overpowering that it
induces feelings of terror. Although Kant shares Burke’s belief in a com-
mon aesthetic sense, he rejects his objectivist interpretation and argues that
beauty creates the impression of an objective quality only because everyone
reacts to it in a comparable way. Like Burke, he interprets judgments of
beauty as uncritical and relates them to the intuitions of the imagination
rather than to the conceptual or scientific knowledge provided by the fac-
ulty of understanding. Whether we find an object beautiful, in other words,
depends on the feelings it inspires, not on our insight into the object’s tech-
nical workings. In common with Burke, Kant pays hardly any attention
to the ugly, and when he does so it is mainly to showcase the power of the
subjective imagination to transcend material ugliness. “Beautiful art,” he
writes, “displays its excellence precisely by describing beautifully things
that in nature would be ugly or displeasing,” such as “the furies, diseases,
devastations of war, and the like,” an idea that clearly demonstrates the
amoral character of Kant’s aesthetic theory (Judgment 190).
Although Romantic aestheticians usually oppose beauty (or ugliness)
to sublimity—the former a spontaneous sensation that circumvents ratio-
nal reflection, the latter a critical experience hinging on the deus-ex-
machina appearance of reason—I will argue in this book that this aesthetic
12 Animality in British Romanticism
dichotomy serves to conceal the intimate relationship between these cat-
egories and, more precisely, the inception of the beautiful in the experience
of the sublime. The beautiful, ugly and sublime, I believe, often form part
of one and the same aesthetic process, whereby the sublime operates as a
repressive mechanism domesticating the ugly and transfiguring it into an
easy-to-handle object of beauty. The aesthetic of the beautiful, in turn,
mystifies this cultural repression or what Theodor Adorno has called “the
cruelty of forming” behind a discourse of objectivity, naturalness and ahis-
toricity, so that beauty comes to be perceived as the “pure beginning,” a
quality that is not fabricated or culturally imposed, but that has always
existed and needed only to be discovered.36 The beautiful thus erases the
traces of human domestication and turns nature into a zoo behind barely
visible bars or—to use a more modern and more telling image—behind
plate-glass windows.
This study falls into three closely interrelated parts, each of which
addresses a different dimension of the aesthetic experience: morality, iden-
tity and epistemology. Focussing on the moral implications of taste, Part
1 investigates how the beautiful, ugly and sublime functioned in animal
rights discourse. More than in the following two parts, my argument here
shares and further develops the ethical concerns of ecocriticism, a fairly
young branch of literary theory that examines the representation of nature
in literature and recently also in other media.37 Like gender and queer stud-
ies, ecocriticism has its philosophical roots in the activist movements of
the sixties and pairs its cultural analysis with a pronounced moral com-
mitment. Although it arose in tandem with modern environmentalism as
a response to the increasing exploitation of nature in late-capitalist indus-
trial society, it only started to flourish and even break into mainstream
thought in the early 1990s as a reaction against the neo-Kantian idealism
of the Yale School critics and the New Historicists’ persistent politicisation
of nature and nature writing. For New Historicists, nature was primarily
a historical construct encrusted with so many political ideologies and cul-
tural meanings that its objective reality remained frustratingly out of reach
and perhaps did not even exist. In particular Alan Liu’s claim that “there is
no nature except as it is constituted by acts of political defi nition made pos-
sible by particular forms of government” provoked the indignation of green
theorists and is still regularly sampled in ecocritical discourse. 38 Taking
issue with Liu’s subjectivist conception of nature, studies such as Jonathan
Bate’s Romantic Ecology (1991) and Karl Kroeber’s Ecological Literary
Criticism (1994) insisted on the physical reality of nature as something that
exists outside and independent of human experience. 39
If Part 1 focuses on ecocriticism, it does so in a spirit of agnosticism and
challenges two particular trends of thought in ecological literary theory. In
reaction to the reality-denying readings of New Historicists (Liu: “there is
no nature”) and Yale School critics (Bloom: “Romantic nature poetry . . .
was an anti-nature poetry”), ecocritics tended to rebound into the opposite
 Introduction 13
extreme, adopting a rigorously materialist position that assumes that it is
our knowledge that alienates us from nature and that only a return to a pre-
linguistic and pre-technological world will be able to arrest the industrial
exploitation of our environment. “Once, we were powerless to challenge
nature,” the Canadian ecophenomenologist Neil Evernden has claimed with
a characteristic sense of pastoral nostalgia in his 1992 study The Social Cre-
ation of Nature. “But all of creation became our object when the Greeks
were able to capture it in a word-cage.” If we want to cleanse nature of this
“conceptual pollution,” Evernden suggests, we will need to experience our
natural environment anew in its astonishing, unknowable materiality—not
unlike the young boy experienced the black woman in Burke’s anecdote.40
It is no coincidence, then, that ecocritics have recently gained interest in the
ecological potential of the Romantic sublime, which—inducing an alienat-
ing insight into reality’s resistance to human representation, politicisation
and historicisation—accommodates exactly the sort of purging encounter
that Evernden believes to be crucial to environmental consciousness. This
ecocritical belief in the possibility of an unmediated contact with nature,
outside reason and language, is deeply problematic, however. At best, it
fails to recognise that humans (and many other animal species, in fact) are
always already reasoning beings, who cannot just switch off their rational-
ity like a light bulb. At worst, it is an ideologically fraught pose that occults
its rationalist and self-empowering workings behind a mystical rhetoric of
self-loss and epiphany. Aside from reconsidering the green ethics of materi-
alist philosophy, I also suggest in this part that Kant’s idealist understand-
ing of nature and the Romantic emphasis on the aesthetic imagination may
have greener implications than ecocritics have so far assumed. Given that
our belief in human exceptionality and concomitant exploitation of nature
are, if not produced, then at least legitimated by our subjective imagination,
it is vital to be a poet of the imagination in order to be a poet of nature—a
fact of which the Romantics were very much aware.
The second ecocritical trend of thought I tackle in this part, and in fact
throughout this book, involves the reductionist tendency of ecocriticism
to treat the non-human world as a uniform entity and to gloss over the
ontological and moral distinctions between plant and animal organisms.
In this way, ecocriticism not only replicates the anthropocentric and dual-
istic thinking it seeks to explode, it also tacitly ignores a whole range of
questions that are central to its argument, questions such as: What is the
difference between a human, a dog, a tree and a robot? What would a tree
or a lion say if they could talk, and would they speak a different dialect or
language? And why do I feel more embarrassed when I am naked in front
of my cat than in front of my cactus? Although they may sound too frivo-
lous to deserve careful academic contemplation, these questions address
deeply relevant issues pertaining to non-human subjectivity, morality and
epistemology, and are therefore entitled to a place in ecocritical debate. The
field of animal studies (also referred to as human-animal studies, animal
14 Animality in British Romanticism
philosophy or zoocriticism), by contrast, has foregrounded and thoroughly
problematised these issues, and for that reason offers a more comprehensive
understanding of nature and its cultural representation.41 Like ecocriticism,
animal studies developed as the academic offshoot of a wider social move-
ment, which revolted against the abusive deployment of non-human beings
in industry and science. Its emergence was also a scholarly reaction to those
academic disciplines that continued to work within an anthropocentric
and humanist framework, even though an array of biological sciences had
already discredited and outmoded the premises of that framework. Cary
Wolfe provocatively opened his study Animal Rites (2003) with the indict-
ment that “debates in the humanities and social sciences between well-
intentioned critics of racism, (hetero)sexism, classism, and all other -isms
that are the stock-in-trade of cultural studies almost always remain locked
within an unexamined framework of speciesism.”42 Providing a counter-
weight to the ecocritical neglect of the animal, Part 1 shows how the non-
human animal presented the Romantics with a unique sense of subjectivity
and agency, distinct from both human and plant experience. I am particu-
larly interested in how the animal embodies what Derrida has called “the
point of view of the absolute other” and in how the Romantics vested this
alien and alienating perspective with moral significance (“Animal” 380). At
the same time, my readings of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mari-
ner” and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well” demonstrate that if ecocriticism
has generally overlooked the animal’s uniquely singular point of view, this
can often be attributed to the literary material on which it tends to focus.
Although both Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s poems, for instance, initially
portray the abuse and killing of an animal, that portrayal only prefaces
an exploration of human responsibility to everything that lives—and for
Wordsworth and Coleridge that includes plants as well as animals.
If Part 1 is still fi rmly anchored in the ecocritical tradition, Part 2 owes
more to animal studies and shares its reliance on postmodern philosophy
(Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of becoming-animal in this
case), its interest in human-animal rather than human-nature relations, and
also its deconstructive readings of texts that do not articulate an explicitly
environmentalist message, such as Book 7 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude
and Burke’s Refl ections on the Revolution in France. I investigate here how
Romantic aesthetics both registered and shaped the crisis of human identity
caused by the rise of the industrial metropolis, the French Revolution and
early evolutionary theories. My focus is on that disruptive encounter with
the animal, both within and without the self, which undermines the sub-
ject’s centralised, unitary identity and creates a hybrid creature, fragmented
between its humanity and animality—at times even physically, as in the
case of Frankenstein’s Monster, whose body crudely combines human and
non-human organs. Whereas for Wordsworth this fragmentation entails
an aesthetic and moral threat to the autonomy of his humanist subject, for
Burke the hybrid body also endangers the unity of the body politic. Both
 Introduction 15
authors, in reaction, seek to repress the fragmented or animalised human
by calling for a return to natural beauty and physical homogeneity. More
liberal Romantics such as William Blake and Mary Shelley, on the other
hand, interpret hybridity and its resistance to biological representation as
a moral opposition to the oppressive and homogenising subjectivities pro-
moted by the family and the state. In their writings, I will show, the in-
between functions not as a site of abnormality but as an emancipating free
zone where the subject is immune to the patriarchal procedures of dualisa-
tion, centralisation and marginalisation.
Concentrating on the interplay between aesthetic and scientific rep-
resentations of animality, Part 3 shifts focus away from ecocritical and
zoocritical territory towards the field of literature and science studies. It
does not, however, entirely abandon the moral concerns of ecocriticism
and zoocriticism, but seeks to supplement literature and science stud-
ies with an ethical viewpoint that scrutinises the reciprocal relationship
between aesthetic, epistemological and moral judgments. Mad scientists
such as Dr Frankenstein have fi rmly fi xed in the popular imagination
the idea that the Romantics generally adopted quite negative attitudes to
Enlightenment science, ranging from scepticism and ridicule to outright
hostility and rejection. Although such negativity certainly existed, the
mad scientist and the Romantic poet were often also seen as products of
the same obsession with genius, solitude and the prophetic powers of the
imagination. Since the publications of Trevor Levere, Noah Heringman,
David Knight and Richard Holmes, among many others, the notion of
Romantic science appears to have gained ground in both Romantic stud-
ies and the history of science.43 Rejecting the central thesis of C.P. Snow’s
famous 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures,” these studies have convincingly
argued that no clear divide existed between the humanities and sciences
in the Romantic period and that both disciplines continued to cohabitate
until well into the nineteenth century. “Much of what we now call ‘sci-
ence,’” Heringman asserts in Romantic Science, “was embedded in a cul-
tural network more established and more vast than what has emerged in
the revealing literary scholarship on [Charles] Darwin.”44 This intellectual
circle brought together a vibrant and heterogeneous mixture of scientists,
poets and philosophers, who frequently ventured into each other’s fields
of expertise to borrow and adapt each other’s ideas and idiom. Focus-
sing on this early-nineteenth-century interaction, Part 3 studies how the
Romantics’ aesthetic perception of species influenced its scientific under-
standing and vice versa. Whereas Parts 1 and 2 provide the psychologi-
cal, social and political backdrop against which the Romantics developed
their attitudes towards animality, Part 3 thus historicises the scientific
ideas that underpinned the Romantics’ moral, aesthetic and epistemologi-
cal judgments. This part also widens the scope of this book to texts that
straddle literature and science, such as William Paley’s treatise on natural
theology and Erasmus Darwin’s philosophical poetry.
Part I
1 The Environmental
Ethics of Alienation
The Ecological Sublime

That Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) became one of

the highest grossing documentaries in US fi lm 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 fast-
cut montage of natural catastrophes, some dramatic taglines advertising
the fi lm’s shock value (“By far, the most terrifying fi lm you will ever see”)
and more questionable selling techniques bordering on emotional black-
mail (“If you love your children . . . You have to see this fi lm”).1 Although
its popularity has risen in tandem with the increasing urgency of our envi-
ronmental problems, the genre of eco-disaster or eco-horror is by no means
a twenty-fi rst-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-
fi re, 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 Depart-
ment of the Environment in 1972, Philip Larkin’s “Going, Going” sug-
gested 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 destruc-
tion 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.
20 Animality in British Romanticism
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 biodi-
versity 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 some-
where 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 overwhelm-
ing 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 environ-
mental alienation can generate feelings of identification. When tracing the
genealogy of our contemporary animal rights movement, we see that its
ideas fi rst 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 num-
ber 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 work-
ing 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 emancipa-
tion, 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, fi rst-hand experience of nature but came about
in the intellectual circles of the urban bourgeoisie, which could afford—
fi nancially 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-defi nition. It offered them a social narrative with which they could dis-
tance themselves not only from the proletarian enjoyment of blood sports
and the aristocratic taste for hunting, but also from the dog-eat-dog busi-
ness of the natural world at large. To abstain from animal products, indeed,
was to escape social and biological determinism and to flaunt the absolute
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 21
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 counter-
acted 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 ani-
mals 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 sat-
isfy 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 par-
adoxical 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 apocalypti-
cism 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 interpreta-
tion 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 appro-
priation, 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 para-
doxical role of alienation in environmentalist discourse. Instead of interpret-
ing 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
22 Animality in British Romanticism
the complex psychology underlying environmental alienation and redemp-
tion 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 bibli-
cal 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 per-
spective 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 reflec-
tion 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
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 23
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 blind-
ness. 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 fi rst 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 superior-
ity. 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 interde-
pendence. 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:
24 Animality in British Romanticism
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of
mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some dam-
age 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 inter-
preters, 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 pro-
tean 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 wildlife
hunters and circuses and that has driven the species to the brink of extinc-
tion. At the same time, it is precisely by virtue of its aesthetic appeal that
the animal ranks so high on the agenda of conservationists and that it has
become a powerful symbol of our ruthless exploitation of wildlife. Even if
an animal manages to provoke an unambiguous aesthetic judgment, this
does not mean that the moral response to this judgment will be as consis-
tent. The same holds, in fact, for the aesthetic of the beautiful. Pointing
out the casual and subjective relationship between aesthetics and morality,
the early-nineteenth-century natural theologian James Lawson Drummond
claimed that we “are just as eager to destroy an animal for its beauty as for
the reverse. When a brutal man sets his foot upon a frog, and crushes it to
death, why does he so? Because it is ugly in his eyes. And when the same
shoots a kingfisher why does he perform that act?—‘Why,’ he will tell you,
‘because the bird is so pretty.’”15
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 25
The sublime not only lacks inherent moral meaning; it does not even pro-
ceed along a fi xed trajectory. Most critics agree that the initial response to
the awareness of nature’s inscrutability is a feeling of humiliation and alien-
ation. Even Kant admits that impressive natural scenes “make our capac-
ity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power”
(Judgment 144). Theories start to diverge when it comes to categorising
the mind’s possible reactions to this loss of rationality. There are two ways
to cope with the threat of the sublime: either we surrender to nature and
succumb to its fundamental meaninglessness or we transcend the biological
world and saturate it with anthropomorphic significance. In the fi rst—typ-
ically postmodern—scenario, the subject fails to recover from the trauma
of the sublime and is left estranged from reality, unable to take in its bru-
tality and chaos. Let down by the Enlightenment project and its belief that
our moral sensibility would keep pace with our technological progress,
postmodernists have opted for an anti-nostalgic and at times celebratory
acceptance of reality’s intrinsic absurdity. If the Kantian subject could still
control reality’s chaos, not by representing it but by articulating the idea
of its unrepresentability, postmodern art fails to achieve such a transcen-
dental perspective and only exhibits, as Lyotard puts it, “the unpresentable
in presentation itself.”16 It is a frustratingly abstract art, which no longer
attempts to capture the excessive, but incorporates this excess into its aes-
thetic economy (think of the monolithic colour blocks of Mark Rothko’s
paintings). With threats like global warming and nuclear terrorism looming
large, the problem of the real became too acute and physical in the twenti-
eth century to be rationally controlled, or as William Faulkner phrased it
more forcefully in his 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Our tragedy
today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that
we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is
only the question: when will I be blown up?”17
Rather than presenting a radical departure from Kant’s model, the post-
modern aesthetic constitutes a beheaded sublime, cut off just before the
climactic return of reason. In Thomas Weiskel’s trendsetting interpreta-
tion, the Kantian sublime exhibits a tripartite structure, consisting of (1) a
preliminary moment during which mind and matter are in a state of equi-
librium, (2) a violent confrontation with an otherness that abruptly unbal-
ances this equilibrium, and (3) an uplifting phase that aggrandises the ego
and transports it beyond material reality.18 This final stage, Kant believes,
inverts the self’s degradation and “reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as
independent of [nature] and a superiority over nature on which is grounded
a self-preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened
and endangered by nature outside us” (Judgment 145). Like the postmod-
ern sublime, Kant’s aesthetic thus also dramatises nature’s unrepresentabil-
ity and the ensuing breakdown of subjectivity, but mainly in order to cast
the subsequent domestication of nature and recovery of subjectivity as even
greater achievements. To demonstrate the self-empowering workings of the
26 Animality in British Romanticism
Kantian sublime, suffice it to look at a fragment from Coleridge’s lectures,
which recounts a visit to a Gothic cathedral that is so overwhelming that
his self mystically dissolves into its surroundings: “Gothic art is sublime.
On entering a cathedral, I am fi lled with devotion and with awe; I am lost
to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the
infi nite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the
only sensible expression left is, ‘that I am nothing!’”19 We should not mis-
take Coleridge’s insight into his nothingness for an unconditional surrender
to material reality. In a very Kantian fashion, Coleridge here manages to
introject the cathedral’s imposing architecture, so that it comes to symbol-
ise his own epistemic power and subjective autonomy. The key for this recu-
peration lies in the utterance “I am nothing,” which paradoxically yokes
together the complete devaluation of his subjectivity with the reinstalla-
tion of his rationality. That Coleridge is able to verbalise his dissolution
in nature signals a re-empowering distancing from its threatening reality:
dead subjects, after all, are not known for declaring their own death—let
alone in such a jubilant manner.
Needless to say, neither the postmodernist’s nihilistic deflation of sub-
jectivity nor Kant’s solipsistic denial of the real has much ecological ben-
efit. In both cases a reconciliation between matter and consciousness seems
impossible, because in the former there no longer exists a subject capable
of admiring nature and in the latter there is no longer an objective world
to be admired. For the sublime to be ecological, it requires a reconciliation
between humanity and animality like the one Midgley has in mind, but
while the outcome of her sublime is deeply moral, combining as it does a
humbling awareness of the animal’s independent existence with an exhila-
rating recognition of biological interdependence, her choice to hide its ratio-
nal workings behind a discourse of mystical revelation is more dubious. Her
belief that certain natural objects—the ocean, the whale, the albatross—
are inherently sublime, moreover, not only brushes aside more than two
centuries of subjectivist aesthetic philosophy; it also fails to explain why the
same natural scene will not always inspire the same ecological insight. In
the light of her materialist beliefs, it is only surprising that Midgley chooses
a kestrel to symbolise natural sublimity, an animal whose beauty and agil-
ity are undoubtedly impressive but whose power does not jeopardise our
physical survival like, say, a tiger or great white shark might do. In an age
in which visual media have habituated us to even the rarest natural phe-
nomenon, we might well respond to the sight of a real kestrel with a shrug-
ging sense of indifference, believing that the copy was more impressive than
the original—more in focus, better lit and accompanied by a more poignant
soundtrack. In contrast to Midgley, DeLillo realises that whether or not an
animal evokes sublime wonder hinges less on its intrinsic qualities than on
a subjective receptivity to natural grandeur or a desire to be overwhelmed.
“She felt it in the blue jay,” DeLillo writes in The Body Artist, a claim
that is immediately called into doubt: “Or maybe not. She was making it
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 27
happen herself because she could not look any longer.” With its focus on an
animal as underwhelming as a dead insect, Blake’s “The Fly” made it even
more evident that these sublime moments of empathic revelation require
little sensory stimulation and are ultimately self-generated. If we want to
understand how an ecological sublime works, then, we need to factor the
interpreting subject into our analysis, addressing its socio-historical, psy-
chological and biological make-up.
Christopher Hitt’s essay “Toward an Ecological Sublime” (1999) is one
of the fi rst sustained attempts to acknowledge the sublime’s alienating psy-
chology and integrate it into an environmentalist theory. Unlike Midgley,
Hitt is aware of the sublime’s historical use as the self-justifying myth of
Western environmental colonisation and realises that its estranging effects
and tendency to self-apotheosis might turn out more harmful than benefi-
cial to nature. At the same time, he is convinced that its aesthetic concern
with natural beauty, together with its interest in the limits of rationalisation
and its potential to inspire admiration, makes it worthwhile to study the
sublime as a tool of environmental emancipation. Hitt strives to assemble
an eco-sublime that follows Kant’s tripartite trajectory without including
its fi nal elevating phase, because this usually announces the return of the
anthropocentric subject and a renewed domestication of nature. He recog-
nises, however, that it would be theoretically unfair to bypass Kant’s con-
cluding stage, for then there would be no transcendence or epiphany, which
remains crucial to the sublime’s psychological development (which is not
exactly true, as most postmodern models lack such a transcendental phase).
In Hitt’s fi nal stage, therefore, it is not reason that transcends nature, but
nature that overpowers and humiliates reason.
A patent distrust of rationality runs through Hitt’s ecocritical discourse,
a belief that reason and language are by defi nition fraught with an anthro-
pocentric conception of nature and that only a mystical understanding or
not-understanding of nature will promote more moral attitudes to the envi-
ronment. The idea that the ecological sublime can only be felt and never
rationally conceived of not only mystifies its workings and inoculates it
against critical scrutiny, it also degrades every environmentalist to a rav-
ing lunatic, whose logical faculties were short-circuited by a dangerously
close contact with natural sublimity. It is difficult to imagine how this eco-
logical insight into nature’s resistance to rational insight might manifest
itself. How to represent an experience that defies linguistic representation
without relapsing into Kantian transcendentalism? In reaction to Kant’s
model, Hitt defi nes his ecological sublime not as a conceptualisation of a
failure of representation but simply as a failure of representation, some-
thing “only possible outside the realm of conceptualization.”20 Of course,
Hitt realises that the dumbstruck nature enthusiast, rendered speechless
and thoughtless by the splendour of the natural world, will never make a
very articulate green poet, let alone a convincing green politician. He there-
fore puts forward a mode of representation that would not conceptually
28 Animality in British Romanticism
domesticate material reality. This non-conceptual language would respect
nature’s unfathomable otherness by negating human domestication (as in
“this is not a garden”) or with a lexicon that is as neutral and acultural as
possible (including words like matter). The problem is that even a language
representing its own bankruptcy—no matter how neutral or ramshackle its
vocabulary—remains a form of mediation and even an insight into nature’s
resistance to rational insight is a rational insight. As Kant and the British
Romantics well knew, the moment when the subject manages to understand
the breakdown of its subjectivity and verbalise the failure of representation
is also the moment when the subject returns with a vengeance. This is the
paradox of the Kantian sublime, a model whose sway Hitt never really
manages to elude.
Since Hitt recognises that the alienating awareness of nature’s indepen-
dence more often provokes resistance than pious compliance, it is all the
more surprising that he does not clarify the underlying rationale when this
awareness does encourage a reconciliation with nature. It might be helpful
to consider how critics without a green agenda have explained the abrupt
psychological turnaround at the heart of the sublime. Working within a
psychoanalytic framework, Thomas Weiskel construes the sublime as an
Oedipal crisis in which we would identify with a repulsive yet desirable
patriarchal force only to save ourselves.21 Weiskel’s interpretation takes its
cue from Friedrich Schiller’s claim in his essay “On the Sublime” (1793) that
sometimes man has “no other means of withstanding the power of nature
than to anticipate her, and by free renunciation of all sensuous interest to
kill himself morally before some physical force does it.”22 The sublime,
as other critics have also pointed out, tends to function as a masochis-
tic performance during which the ego anticipatively infl icts the violence of
the real upon itself, thus becoming both victimising subject and victimised
object.23 This masochistic aspect of the sublime explains why the Roman-
tics’ self-annihilation is rarely just a painful experience and more often
than not occasions hysterical outbursts of delight. A key concept in both
the sublime and the masochistic, this delight denies the power of the physi-
cal and declares the superiority of the subjective imagination. Masochists,
the Austrian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik has stated epigrammatically,
achieve “victory through defeat” and establish their subjectivity through
extreme subjection: “I will bear everything, pain, suffering, humiliation,
and disgrace, but I will not renounce my satisfaction.”24 From this Oedipal-
masochistic perspective, the self-denying identification with nature man-
dated by the ecological sublime would have little to do with respect or
admiration, but would mainly serve to guarantee one’s survival.
Both Edmund Burke and John Dennis already suggested that the sub-
lime has its biological origin in instincts of self-preservation. Positing an
empirical theory of the aesthetic of terror, Dennis argued that “the care,
which nature has inrooted in all, of their own preservation, is the cause that
men are unavoidably terrified with any thing that threatens approaching
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 29
evil.” One of the goals of his treatise, then, was to explain how fictional
representations of “serpents, lions, tigers, &c.” can alarm these self-preser-
vative instincts in the absence of any real danger. 25 Kant, too, interpreted
the sublime as an ingenious tool of self-protection, yet in his idealist theory
the sublime was not so much an instinctive reflex as a very rational method
of securing our survival as reasoning subjects rather than as merely physi-
cal beings. It is this model that Terry Eagleton follows in his interpretation
of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory. For Schopenhauer, Eagleton
argues, the key to the subject’s self-preservation lies in its power to aes-
theticise and even take delight in its own demise:

the subject cannot be entirely negated as long as it still delights, even

if what it takes pleasure in is the process of its own dissolution. The
aesthetic condition thus presents an unsurmountable paradox, as Keats
knew in contemplating the nightingale: there is no way in which one
can savour one’s own extinction. The more exultantly the aesthetic
subject experiences its own nullity before the object the more, by that
very token, the experience must have failed. (163–64)

Eagleton’s casual reference to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” should

remind us of the lyrical tradition to which DeLillo’s and Murdoch’s bird
scenes owe an obvious debt. In this tradition, the poet’s encounter with an
oscine bird prompts a meditation on literary production and its relationship
to the bird’s natural song. Reaching momentum in the Romantic period,
these odes became markedly less metafictional, exhibiting a growing inter-
est in the animal’s biological nature and moral rights (especially in John
Clare’s rural poetry) as well as a more scrupulous concern with human
psychology. For the Romantics, these bird encounters no longer underlined
the organic affiliation between the poet’s verse and the bird’s song, but
exposed an alienating rift between the writer’s ephemeral composition and
the animal’s seemingly unchanging tune, and thus also between humanity
and nature at large. In Keats’s ode, the timelessness of the nightingale’s
song throws into relief the transient character of the poet’s verse and life.
The poet, however, embraces this insight into human mortality and longs
for a self-denying union with the bird: “That I might drink, and leave the
world unseen / And with thee fade away into the forest dim” (19–20). In
Wordsworth’s “To a Skylark,” similarly, the animal’s transcendental beauty
underscores the inferiority of our earthly existence and elicits an almost
suicidal desire for ascension: “Up with me! up with me into the clouds!”(1).
Unlike some ecocritics, I would not go so far as charging these odes with
great environmentalist significance, as they are primarily concerned with
the animal’s symbolic meaning rather than its material presence. 26 All the
same, something interesting is going on here that links these poems to the
ecological sublime. Although these songbirds are typically glorified to the
point of deification, they are actually rather annoying creatures. Their songs
30 Animality in British Romanticism
render poets conscious of their mortality, mock the inferior artificiality of
their verse and underline their alienation from both the natural and the
supernatural. So why do poets masochistically identify with these animals
instead of simply pleading them to be quiet? Coleridge is quite clear on this.
In his poem “The Nightingale,” a criticism of the tradition’s anthropomor-
phic tendency to fi nd human meaning in nature, he interprets the poet’s
identification with the bird as a crafty means of self-empowerment. In his
account, the poet advertises his kinship with nature

so his fame
Should share in Nature’s immortality,
A venerable thing! and so his song
Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself
Be loved like Nature! (30–34)27

Whereas Christopher Hitt suggested that the subject effaced itself in order
to save nature, Eagleton now shows how our deaths might rescue both
nature and ourselves: suicide as a means of self-preservation and environ-
mental conservation. This suicide, of course, is only an aesthetic perfor-
mance, a masochistic theatre of self-destruction not that different in fact
from environmental apocalypticism, which similarly indulges in our total
annihilation in an attempt to secure our survival. Although this is probably
not what Jonathan Bate had in mind when he urged critics to “move from
red to green,” Eagleton’s post-Marxist interpretation of Schopenhauer’s
aesthetic allows us to outline an ecological sublime that would incorporate
a fi nal transcendental stage without including the anti-environmental poli-
tics that this stage usually entails.28 The subject now regains control over
itself not by domesticating the natural world but by surrendering to and
identifying with its superior power.
That the sublime plays on feelings of self-preservation explains why we
admire nature and retrieve beauty from its destructiveness, yet it does not
clarify why this admiration would motivate a particularly moral reconcili-
ation between the human and the non-human. Since Charles Darwin’s The
Descent of Man (1871), however, we know that self-preservative instincts
do not exclude moral action but can, strangely enough, encourage us to
behave ethically towards other humans. Moral behaviour creates the cli-
mate of stability necessary to reduce the risk of premature death and to
raise our chances of successful reproduction. Because Darwin believed in
the common origin of all species, he emphasised that this moral sympathy
would in due course extend to all living beings, fi rst “to the men of all
races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society, and
fi nally to the lower animals.”29 This theory that self-preservation provides
the main impetus for moral action is clearly seen at work in eco-horror
films such as An Inconvenient Truth, which—hardly concealing its socio-
biological opportunism—argues that if we want to survive global warming
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 31
and to pass on our genes, we will need to become more moral creatures: “If
you love your children . . . You have to see this fi lm.”
That our moral behaviour is an evolutionary product of natural selection
does not imply that every moral act in which we engage is geared toward
preserving our genes or, conversely, that every act of self-preservation is
automatically moral. It needs no argument that the sublime, although
mainly concerned with securing our survival, will not always trigger an
empathic response. Our ability to behave both more and less morally than
evolutionarily necessary clearly demonstrates that there is no one-to-one
relationship between ethics and self-preservation. Geographical, historical,
cultural and individual variations in ethical beliefs, moreover, point out
that our shared genetic material has not created a shared system of morals
and that biological factors alone do not account for the complexity of our
moral behaviour. If sociobiology allows us to explain the ecological sub-
lime in its more apocalyptic manifestations (and will in fact prove crucial in
Chapter 2), it is unnecessarily reductionist to apply Darwinian paradigms
to Blake’s “The Fly” or DeLillo’s and Murdoch’s bird scenes. Of course, our
ability to view birds as morally relevant creatures goes back to an uncon-
trollable instinctive drive, deeply buried in our selfish genes. But this view
cannot explain why we occasionally take a self-denying interest in the bird’s
autonomous existence and at other times take no notice of the animal’s
presence—or even prefer to shoot it down, stuff it and put it on display on
our mantelpiece. I am not gesturing at a more mystical or religious expla-
nation of human morality that would please Midgley (who, incidentally, is
involved in an ongoing battle with sociobiologists), but simply aim to make
clear that, aside from taking into account the larger Darwinian picture, we
also need to look at the cultural, historical and psychological particulars
that condition our day-to-day behaviour. More precisely, I am interested in
those moments when we act more morally towards other animals than is
genetically required, or what the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins
calls “misfi rings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes.”30
Before explaining why this ecological sublime occurs, let us look at how.
It is worth revisiting Schopenhauer’s idea of aesthetic suicide (as inter-
preted by Eagleton), which—unlike Weiskel’s Oedipal model—has surpris-
ingly moral consequences. Schopenhauer, interestingly, construes sublime
self-loss as a state of compassionate selflessness that allows us to act more
empathically towards other humans. What is alienated in this moment
would be not so much our subjectivity itself as our subjectively limited per-
spective. Sublime estrangement, in this view, is tantamount to a spasmodic
moment of insightful detachment during which we adopt a more objective
perspective on reality and become what Schopenhauer describes as a “pure
knowing being.”31 In Eagleton’s words:

Just as all true knowledge springs from the death of the subject, so
too does all moral value; to act morally is not to act from a positive
32 Animality in British Romanticism
standpoint, but to act from no standpoint at all. The only good sub-
ject is a dead one, or at least one which can project itself by empa-
thetic indifference into the place of every other. It is not a question of
one individual behaving considerately towards the next, but of burst-
ing beyond the whole wretched delusion of “individuality,” in a flash
of what Walter Benjamin would call “profane illumination,” to some
non-place unutterably far beyond it. (164–65)

As Eagleton notices, however, Schopenhauer’s moral theory is fatally

undermined by the paradox that “there can be no practice without a sub-
ject; and with subjects come domination and desire” (165). This profane
illumination, moreover, leans dangerously close to the anti-rationalist
epiphanies we came across in Hitt’s and Midgley’s theories and ultimately
appeared to be nothing less than double-dealing poses adopted to re-
empower the reasoning subject. Because we can never really evade our
cognitive faculty, I wonder, is it not possible to fi nd in Romantic writ-
ings a consciously rather than surreptitiously rational ecological sublime,
in which our insight into the animal’s independent existence results not
from a failure of our logical thinking patterns or a profane illumination
but from a very rational thought experiment enabled by these patterns?
Indeed, could it not be that, as Hegel suggested, “the principle of resto-
ration is found in thought, and thought only: the hand that infl icts the
wound is also the hand that heals it”?32 What I have in mind here is an
experience like the one Blake described in “The Fly,” during which we are
startled out of our self-centred viewpoint, not into some mystical, non-
conceptual condition but into a profoundly rational space, configured by
reason and only possible within its confi nes.
The idea of a rational sublime, triggered by a balanced mental exercise,
may sound oxymoronic, considering that in both Burke’s and Kant’s aes-
thetic theories sublimity is essentially defined by a frustrating feeling of
cognitive blockage and mental instability. For the Romantics, however, the
sublime did not always entail a violent subversion of reason. In his frag-
mentary essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful” (ca. 1811), for instance,
Wordsworth argues that “it is certain that [our] conceptions of the sublime,
far from being dulled or narrowed by commonness or frequency, will be
rendered more lively & comprehensive by more accurate observation and
by encreasing knowledge,” a theory that runs counter to the Burkean idea
that the sublime hinges on obscurity and novelty. The sensation of the sub-
lime, Wordsworth adds, results from the complex interplay between an
immediate sensory response and a more reflective reaction, which relates
one’s spontaneous aesthetic feeling to one’s rational memory and scientific
knowledge. To illustrate his theory, Wordsworth analyses his experience of
the Rhine Falls near Schaff hausen in Switzerland: “there is a most complex
instrumentality acting upon the senses, such as the roar of the Water, the
fury of the foam, &c.; and an instrumentality still more comprehensive,
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 33
furnished by the imagination, & drawn from the length of the River’s
course, the Mountains from which it rises, the various countries thro’
which it flows, & the distant Seas in which its waters are lost.”33 As I will
show in more detail in Part 3, Wordsworth’s belief that rational abstrac-
tion heightens rather than diminishes the sensation of the sublime reflects
the increasing tendency in Romantic aesthetics to correlate scientific and
sublime experience.
Instead of looking for moral meaning in the Romantic sublime (as eco-
critics usually do), we should perhaps look for traces of the sublime in the
Romantics’ moral philosophy and especially in their theories of empathy. In
a letter to William Sotheby, Coleridge stressed how difficult it is to inhabit
the perspectives of other beings and experience life as they do: “It is easy to
cloathe Imaginary Beings with our own Thoughts & Feelings; but to send
ourselves out of ourselves, to think ourselves in to the Thoughts and Feel-
ings of Beings in circumstances wholly & strangely different from our own /
hoc labor, hoc opus / and who has atchieved it? Perhaps only Shakespere.”34
Coleridge’s idea recalls Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s more moral argument in
Emile, or On Education (1762) that sympathy emerges by “transporting
ourselves outside of ourselves and identifying with the suffering animal, by
leaving, as it were, our own being to take on its being.”35 With its empha-
sis on sensory transportation and a sort of ethical ecstasy, this empathic
role reversal clearly evokes the out-of-body experience of the sublime and
suggests how a moral sublime may function. That Coleridge locates this
empathic ability only in Shakespeare underlines how for the Romantics
moral and aesthetic judgments resided in the same faculty. In his Defence
of Poetry, Percy Shelley similarly paired the aesthetic with the moral, assert-
ing that poetry “awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the
receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. . . . A
man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he
must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and
pleasures of his species must become his own.” And he concludes tellingly:
“The great instrument of moral good is the imagination” (681, 682). Con-
trary to what Hitt and Midgley suggest, the sympathetic insight into the
other’s moral value does not present itself in ready-made epiphanic form;
it has to be forged by exercising our aesthetic imagination or, as Coleridge
believes, through a Kantian tour de force of reason. We need not feel, he
stresses, but think ourselves into the other’s thoughts and feelings.
This identification originates in the subject’s rational mind and never sur-
passes its subjective limits completely. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759), Adam Smith repeatedly argues that we can only conjecture the
emotions of other humans by extrapolating our own feelings, not through
actual access to their experiential reality: “It is the impressions of our own
senses only, not those of [other beings], which our imaginations copy.”36
Because, as Coleridge points out, it is excruciatingly difficult to enter the
other’s private perspective, a representation of its unrepresentability might
34 Animality in British Romanticism
be the closest we come to understanding it. Such a Kantian interpretation
is also what Thomas Nagel has suggested in his well-known essay “What
Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974).37 Nagel’s article starts from the realisation
that it is fundamentally impossible to experience existence in the way non-
human creatures such as bats do. We could adopt a diet of insects, become
nocturnal or sleep hanging upside down, but we still would not understand
what it is actually like to be a bat, only what it is like for humans to imitate
bats. As in Kant’s sublime, Nagel recognises that some natural phenomena
will simply always lie beyond the compass of human reason, regardless of
scientific progress. In a very Kantian way, however, he couples this hum-
bling insight into our cognitive limitations with a re-empowering view that
emphasises our ability to know that the unknowable exists. Although our
minds are inadequately equipped to gain access to the bat’s experience of
reality, this does not preclude us from recognising that it is in all likelihood
as complex and multidimensional as our own.
Unlike in Midgley’s and Hitt’s theories, this sublime insight does not hinge
on a mystical merging with nature (even though its interest in the exchange
of viewpoints may suggest otherwise). It involves a profoundly rational
understanding, which asserts precisely the impossibility of merging with the
animal’s perspective and supplies us only with the knowledge that this unrep-
resentable perspective truly exists. That this ecological sublime has a rational
infrastructure should not suggest that it leaves no room for doubt or wonder.
Even the most rational scientists—and perhaps especially they—are aware of
their cognitive limitations. The difference from Midgley’s or Hitt’s theories
is that in this rational sublime these limitations are not mystically intuited
but rationally hypothesised. Rather than material nature, it is human reason
itself that exposes our rational shortcomings and opens up a territory beyond
scientific understanding and anthropomorphic meaning. The rational eco-
logical sublime, then, not only exhibits our cognitive limitations and nature’s
resistance to interpretation, it should also prevent us from relapsing into the
naive ecocritical materialism that assumes that we can strip off our rational-
ity like a dress and go completely natural. However wild or inhuman nature
might be, it will always remain fenced in like a national park by our rational-
ity and by our anthropomorphic conceptions of what it means to be wild and
inhuman. The human—and here we should probably include non-human
primates and any other organism with a degree of self-consciousness—is a
fragmented subject, caught between the materiality of nature and its inescap-
able subjective interpretation.
It is because of its rational workings that this ecological sublime car-
ries more moral weight than Midgley’s experience, which inspires a kind
of moral animism that ultimately proves self-refuting. “Not only does our
natural sympathy reach out easily beyond the barrier of species,” Midgley
argues in Beast and Man, “but we rejoice in the mere existence of plants
and lifeless bodies—not regarding them just as furniture provided to stimu-
late our pampered imagination.”38 Midgley’s sublime, like Wordsworth’s,
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 35
grants her an insight into the life of things that have no life, or at least no
conscious experience of life, to the extent that even the inanimate furniture
she is alluding to may start to have a pulse. When everything becomes mor-
ally relevant, nothing is moral and we descend into Disney’s nihilistic uto-
pia, where toys and trees are infused with as much moral value as human
and non-human animals and, by reverse implication, the life of an animal
becomes as trivial and exchangeable as that of an object. A rational ecologi-
cal sublime, by contrast, allows us to speculate on what it would be like
to experience pleasure and pain as a lifeless body or even a toy, but it also
bears out the dangerous absurdity of such propositions, heading as they do
to a moral cul-de-sac.
As Blake suggests in “The Fly,” it is not our reason but our lack of ratio-
nal insight or “thoughtless hand” that brushes away and kills. The poem’s
fi nal stanzas elaborate on this moral role of human rationality in more
ambiguous terms:

If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly.
If I live,
Or if I die. (13–20)

Blake here is obviously versifying the Epicurean advice that we should not
fear death, because we will never experience it consciously. Alternatively, we
could read the lines “the want / Of thought is death” as a variation on his
idealist claim in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “where man is not,
nature is barren” (plate 10, line 8). In reaction to the objectivist scientific the-
ories of Bacon, Newton and Locke, Blake argued that it is our subjective per-
ception that determines nature, rather than the other way around. Because
consciousness and life are inextricably intertwined, Blake seems to say, the
only way to experience nature “outside the realm of conceptualization,” as
Hitt put it, would be through physical death, a paradox that foregrounds
the very impossibility of sensing nature’s otherness in its stark materiality.
According to Mark Lussier, however, Blake’s statement should not be read
along rigorously idealist lines, but suggests an awareness of the dualistic yet
mutually dependent relationship between consciousness and matter: “Just as
‘nature is barren’ in the absence of man, so too, by necessity of the proverb’s
own symmetries, man is barren in the absence of nature.”39
We should remain careful of loading rational insight with too much
moral baggage and, for lack of a better alternative, sliding back into a Kan-
tian notion of reason as a faculty that transcends all subjectivity, history
36 Animality in British Romanticism
and ideology. History shows that although increasing scientific understand-
ing of the animal’s point of view has fostered more sympathetic attitudes
to animality, it certainly has not criminalised animal cruelty altogether,
and in some respects has even exacerbated animal suffering. A painful
irony, indeed, is that the growing awareness of the animal’s anatomical and
behavioural similarities to Homo sapiens has only rendered it a more suit-
able subject for medical experimentation.
Given that the experiential reality of many animal species is probably
as meaningful and deep as ours, the proper attitude to take to their lives is
surely one of moral respect. This is also what Derrida argues in his lecture
“The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” which takes Nagel’s
idea of perspectival exchange to its logical ethical conclusion. Derrida’s
article spirals around the unusually intimate confession that he feels deeply
unsettled when his cat sees him naked. What follows is a rambling medita-
tion on, among many other things, nudity, shame and the animal’s unique
point of view. Most relevant for my discussion here is his exploration of
what it means (epistemologically as well as morally) to be looked at by
a non-human animal. Derrida, interestingly, represents the confrontation
with his cat in the paradoxical terms of the sublime, characterising the
animal’s gaze, for instance, as “a gaze that is vacant to the extent of being
bottomless, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive
and impassive, good and bad, uninterpretable, unreadable, undecideable,
abyssal and secret” (381).
One would expect this exchange of glances between housecat and naked
philosopher to produce feelings of identification. That is, after all, what
usually occurred in Romantic writings, which charged the animal’s gaze
with great moral force. In Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813), as Timothy
Morton has signalled, it is the meeting of the butcher’s and the lamb’s eyes
that reveals a sense of kinship and renders the animal’s slaughter immoral:
“no longer now / He slays the lamb that looks him in the face” (8:211–12).40
In Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell” (1819), conversely, it is the failure to establish
an optical relationship between Peter and the donkey that underlines the
former’s alienation from nature:

As gently on his side he fell;

And by the river’s brink did lie;
And, while he lay like one that mourned,
The patient Beast on Peter turned
His shining hazel eye.

‘Twas but one mild, reproachful look,

A look more tender than severe;
And straight in sorrow, not in dread,
He turned the eye-ball in his head
Towards the smooth river deep and clear. (431–40)
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 37
If Wordsworth finds moral relevance in the animal’s eyes (“Such life is in the
Ass’s eyes” [566]), Derrida mainly spots unrepresentable otherness in its gaze,
an abyss dividing him from the animal’s world. This is not an abyss estrang-
ing human from non-human animals like Heidegger’s speciesist “abyss of
essence.”41 Derrida’s “infinite space” separates all species from one another
and inspires, aside from an awareness of our rational limitations, a general
respect for “the absolute alterity of the neighbor” (“Animal” 402, 380).
Derrida’s insight is crucial in that it suggests that moral respect need not
emerge from an ideologically suspicious anthropomorphisation of the ani-
mal, but can also arise precisely from recognising the distance that divides
human from non-human animals. It is easy to sympathise with wide-eyed
puppies, chimpanzees dressed in striped pyjamas or, as Coleridge sug-
gested, imaginary beings. But animal rights are also and perhaps princi-
pally a matter of acknowledging the moral relevance of the absolute other,
of those creatures whose horrifying ugliness and utter uselessness throw
us into a state of alienation and moral trauma. “One species of Egotism,”
Coleridge writes, “is truly disgusting; not that which leads us to commu-
nicate our feelings to others, but that which would reduce the feelings of
others to an identity with our own.”42 In a very similar vein, an increas-
ing number of critics have recently questioned the ecocritical tendency to
favour monistic mush over alienating dualism. Timothy Morton, for one,
has urged ecocritics to be “unafraid of difference, of non-identity” and to
stake out a viable place of moral practice in the distance that separates us
from the non-human. “If we try to get rid of distance too fast, in our rush
to join the nonhuman,” he claims, “we will end up caught in our prejudice,
our concept of distance, our concept of ‘them.’ Hanging out in the distance
may be the surest way of relating to the nonhuman.”43
A similar insight is reached in a fragment from John Aikin and Anna
Barbauld’s Evenings at Home; or The Juvenile Budget Opened (1792–96),
a collection of didactic stories written in conversational form. When the
little girl Sophia wonders what the raison d’être of flies is, which mainly
seem to exist to annoy her, her father reverses species perspectives with a
thought experiment in which the fly wonders why God created humans:

Suppose a fly capable of thinking; would he not be equally puzzled to

fi nd out what men were good for? This great two-legged monster, he
might say, instead of helping us to live, devours more food at a meal
than would serve a whole legion of fl ies. Then he kills us by hundreds
when we come within his reach, and I see him destroy and torment all
other animals too. And when he dies he is nailed up in a box, and put
a great way under ground, as if he grudged doing any more good after
his death, than when alive.44

This role reversal recasts the human as an object of sublime horror and
alienates us from ourselves. An illuminating experience, this alienation
38 Animality in British Romanticism
teases us out of our comfortable human perspective and provides us with a
more objective lens through which to examine human and non-human exis-
tence. This lens bears a remarkable resemblance to Adam Smith’s “look-
ing-glass.” For Smith, too, morality involves an exchange of perspectives
whereby “we suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and
endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us.
This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the
eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct.”45 In this
moment of moral detachment, however, we do not gain insight into what it
is actually like to be a fly. The father’s perspectival exchange may suggest
that the animal’s experiential reality is as complex as ours, yet it is drawn in
such hypothetical and self-consciously anthropomorphic ways that the fly’s
actual point of view remains inaccessible to human comprehension. In the
same way, Blake’s “The Fly” only conjectures the reciprocity between the
human and non-human in a number of suggestive questions (“Am not I / A
fly like thee?”) and hypotheses (“If thought is life . . .”); it never posits their
similarity as an empirical fact. In doing so, the poem opens up a sublime
space where the fundamental incomprehensibility and unrepresentability of
the animal’s perspective can be rationally explored and represented.
Although we will never understand what fl ies actually think, Aikin and
Barbauld stress, we should still show respect to their lives. Many species,
they point out, serve no obvious human purpose and appear even hostile
to our interests: “there are vast tracts of the earth where few or no men
inhabit, which are yet full of beasts, birds, insects, and all living things.
These certainly do not exist for his use alone. On the contrary, they often
keep man away” (216). This estranging insight into the animal’s indepen-
dent existence inspires the surprisingly utilitarian conclusion that God
created these animals simply “to be happy” (217). This fi nal resort to tran-
scendental morality illustrates that although the insight into the animal’s
independent value results from a rational thought experiment, it ultimately
still requires the stamp of divine authority.
So far, I have explained how this ecological sublime works, but not why
it works and why it often does not. Why do we willingly engage in these
alienating mental exercises? And why are we interested in what it is like
to be a bat or fly in the fi rst place? To answer these questions, we need to
understand the general appeal of the sublime. Although the sublime trig-
gers our instincts of self-preservation, Burke and Kant emphasise that in
order to enjoy the experience, our survival can never actually be at risk.
An overwhelming scene, Kant argues, “becomes all the more attractive the
more fearful it is, as long as we fi nd ourselves in safety” (Judgment 144).
There is something profoundly gratuitous and playful about the sublime,
an aspect that critics have generally overlooked. Like the bungee-jumper,
we simulate a life-threatening situation only to activate our instincts of
self-preservation and enjoy the adrenaline rush that this usually provokes.
We fool our selfish genes into thinking that their survival is threatened,
 The Environmental Ethics of Alienation 39
knowing all along that an elastic cord will prevent us from actually hit-
ting the ground. If in the Burkean or Kantian sublime we play with our
evolutionary survival mechanisms, in the ecological sublime we experiment
with evolution’s moral misfi rings. We stretch our empathy to see how far
it can reach, identifying with blue jays, flies, and even with trees, toys and
lifeless bodies. This freewheeling and subjectivist character accounts for
the unpredictability of the ecological sublime and explains why the sight
of a dead insect or kestrel will not always inspire a sense of environmental
reconciliation or ecological euphoria.
That “the danger is not serious,” as Kant puts it, should not imply that
the experience of the sublime is funny or morally meaningless (Judgment
145). Derrida’s close encounter with his housecat may well send him back
to a childlike state of naivety, but this is “a child ready for the apoca-
lypse” (“Animal” 381). The eco-horror genre transports us to an equally
ambiguous state, in which it is unclear whether the spectacular violence
with which we are confronted is real or merely the aesthetic product of an
imagination in overdrive. The trouble with global warming, to return to An
Inconvenient Truth, is that its effects are so subtle that they require imagi-
nation and dramatisation, if not to be observed, then at least to attract
popular attention. It is only by collecting fragmentary data and organis-
ing computer-based climate simulations into a coherent and aesthetically
appealing narrative that we realise that the threat of global warming is in
fact all too real. The ecological sublime thus functions as a vital moral exer-
cise, allowing us to anticipate and solve environmental problems in a state
of relative safety before they become unsolvable. We may merely be playing
apocalypse, but as anthropologists know, play is serious business. This is
also what Percy Shelley argues in his Defence of Poetry. In a theory that
suggests a prudent understanding of the physiological working and devel-
opmental function of aesthetic play, he asserts that “poetry strengthens the
faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner
as exercise strengthens a limb” (682). Poetry’s moral value, put differently,
lies not so much in the concrete socio-historical ideas it presents or prob-
lematises as in the deeper neurological workings of the aesthetic.
There is also a psychological or therapeutic reason for the Romantic
interest in the ecological sublime. Obviously, these moral exercises do not
trigger the same adrenaline rush as bungee jumping, but they can feel as
cathartic and empowering. In line with the homeopathic principle, Burke
argued that the sublime causes a brief moment of mental instability that
eventually may cure us of a “dangerous and troublesome incumbrance”
and provide us with feelings of relief and omnipotence (Sublime 123). In his
neurological theory of the aesthetic, Alan Richardson has argued to similar
effect that the sublime subversion of our tenacious belief in human excep-
tionality can have an intensely liberating outcome.46 Once we no longer
cling to our special status in nature and the immense responsibility it car-
ries, even the prospect of our own death becomes bearable. The sublime, in
40 Animality in British Romanticism
this view, can release us from the narcissism that makes us such tragically
frustrated figures, fretting alone at the centre of the world. It “calls forth
our power,” Kant maintained, “to regard those things about which we are
concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial” (Judgment 145), an idea that
was echoed in Schopenhauer’s claim that “aesthetic pleasure in the beauti-
ful consists . . . in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contempla-
tion, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and
cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.”47
It is this therapeutic use of the sublime to which Murdoch’s scene alluded,
where the sight of a kestrel helped her forget “some damage done to [her]
prestige.” And in Blake’s “The Fly,” the realisation that human life is nei-
ther more nor less important than the insect’s leads to a similar but more
hedonistic sense of fearlessness:

I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing. (9–12)

For the Romantics, these sublime confrontations with nature and animal-
ity functioned as a form of self-medication. Think of Wordsworth lying on
his proto-Freudian couch “in vacant or in pensive mood” and recollect-
ing his mystical union with the daffodils, a memory that instantly relieves
him of his loneliness and melancholy.48 Of course, the fearlessness that
these sublime thought experiments instill can easily lapse into a nihilistic
apathy towards life, a risk of which Kant and Blake seemed insufficiently
aware. If our life becomes as valuable as the fly’s, this might encourage
us to approach animals with the respect they deserve, but also to treat
humans in the same unprincipled way we usually deal with flies. Moreover,
this sublime transportation from a human to a non-human viewpoint can
simply reinforce our anthropocentrism. We travel (physically and mentally)
for many reasons, and although the disorientating contact with a foreign
perspective often deepens our empathy towards the other, at times we seem
only to abandon the familiar in order to return to it and rediscover its safe
and comfortable beauty.
2 Green Masochism
Coleridge’s “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner”

Coleridge’s literary self-criticism was often tinged with a ruthlessness that

betrayed a deeper psychological anxiety. “I do nothing,” he complained in
a letter, “but almost instantly it’s defects & sillinesses come upon my mind,
and haunt me, till I am completely disgusted with my performance.”1 This
compulsive, almost masochistic discontent drove him to annotate, revise
and reject his writings throughout his life. It explains in part why he is
such a frustratingly inconsistent thinker, whose enthusiasm easily wore
thin and sank into indifference or even resentment. Although this inconsis-
tent nature of his thought, together with the complexity of his philosophi-
cal vernacular and the intimidating breadth of his oeuvre, challenges any
scholarly study of his work, it also creates a certain interpretive elbowroom
which allows us to tailor an image of Coleridge in accordance with our
own critical agenda: Coleridge as a free-thinking feminist or Coleridge as
a Burkean misogynist; Coleridge as an armchair anarchist or Coleridge as
a sulky “Tory pensioner.”2 It requires little effort, similarly, to present him
as a green poet: reference some lines from his schmaltzy and shamelessly
unironic “To a Young Ass” to illustrate his moral outrage at the abuse of
work animals, add the didactic fi nale from “The Ancient Mariner” (“He
prayeth well, who loveth well / Both man and bird and beast”), and cast his
fuzzy “One Life” philosophy in such a light that it comes to prefigure a con-
temporary understanding of nature as a precariously balanced and tightly
interconnected system. It is just as easy, however, to profi le Coleridge as
a militant humanist pushing Kant’s anthropocentric idealism to its phal-
locentric and solipsistic extremes. “I am not the creature of nature merely,
nor a subject of nature,” he claimed in a lecture spurning mechanistic phi-
losophy, “but I detach myself from her. I oppose myself as man to nature,
and my destination is to conquer and subdue her.”3 It is hard not to be
reminded here of Francis Bacon’s equally sexually loaded scientific project
to unravel and dominate nature completely.
Much of the subtle complexity of Coleridge’s thought is lost, however,
when we linger too long on such phrases in isolation and fail to see how
they cover only parts of a lifelong philosophical struggle to conceive of the
relationship between mind, body and nature in a way that would affi rm
42 Animality in British Romanticism
human uniqueness as well as organic coexistence. More than Wordsworth,
it seems to me, Coleridge was a poet of environmental disorientation, who
felt torn between an idealist impulse towards transcendence (which exhib-
its the extraordinary powers of the mind, but leaves us alienated from
the natural world) and a materialist desire for a complete immersion in
nature (which mystically suspends our alienation, but at the cost of denying
human autonomy and superiority). In a telling reference to the Neoplatonic
philosopher Plotinus, he observed: “‘Poor Man! he is not made for this
world.’ Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfi lment; for man
must either rise or sink.”4 In this chapter, I do not intend to settle, once
and for all, whether Coleridge was a green poet or not, and if so, whether
his environmentalism was accomplished by rising over nature or sinking
into it (in fact, I will argue that sinking, at times, can amount to a sort of
rising and that rising can be a sort of sinking). Instead, I aim to show how
his views on animal rights were integrally bound up with questions of self-
hood, aesthetics and religion, and ultimately had less to do with asserting
the moral relevance of the non-human animal than with fi nding a satisfying
place for humanity in the order of things.
Unlike Burke or Kant, Coleridge never collected his ideas on the beauti-
ful and sublime in a lengthy or systematic study. It is mainly his “Essays on
the Principles of Genial Criticism” (1814) that offer a rare coherent glimpse
of his aesthetic philosophy. 5 In line with Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry,
Coleridge here interprets beauty as a quality intrinsic to the object itself.
The sublime, he claims in a later fragment, refers to the subjective mental
power to reconcile consciousness and matter by investing the physical object
with higher, symbolic significance: “I meet, I fi nd the Beautiful—but I give,
contribute, or rather attribute, the Sublime. No object of Sense is sublime
in itself; but only as far as I make it a symbol of some Idea. The Circle is a
beautiful figure in itself; it becomes sublime, when I contemplate eternity
under that figure.”6 Like Burke, Coleridge takes an interest in the aesthetic
categorisation of animality and in the decisive role which culture assumes
in this categorisation. Just as Burke claimed in his Philosophical Enquiry
that farm animals lack the otherness and aggression to engender a sublime
sensation, Coleridge’s aesthetic resolutely favours wildness over domestic-
ity.7 The ox or ass, he argues in the conclusion to the third essay “On the
Principles of Genial Criticism,” will never be as beautiful as the “cruel and
cowardly Panther, or Leopard, or Tiger.”8 That Coleridge fi nds beauty in
the cruel and cowardly exemplifies his belief that aesthetic judgments are
divorced from moral feeling, a belief which he had already voiced in 1811.
“The gate of an Inquisition may excite a thousand painful associations,” he
had argued, “but if built in consummate architectural perfection, I cannot
but allow it to be beautiful.”9 Coleridge’s defence here of the autonomy of
the imagination, however, is far from representative of his aesthetic phi-
losophy and poetry, which very much underlined the continuity between
aesthetic and moral judgments.
 Green Masochism 43
With its Neoplatonic tendency towards transcendence and symbolic
abstraction, Coleridge’s sublime bears a conspicuous resemblance to Kant’s
idealist aesthetic. Because he was one of the few canonical Romantic poets
to have actually read and acclaimed the Critique of Judgment, calling it “the
most astonishing of Kant’s works,” critics have been understandably eager
to classify his aesthetic philosophy as a mere British spin-off of German ide-
alism.10 In recent years, however, his aesthetic theory has been increasingly
construed as a reaction to rather than a continuation of Kant’s transcen-
dentalist model.11 Coleridge’s sublime, Seamus Perry has observed, occa-
sionally appears “fi rmly counter-idealist,” concluding as it does not with a
rationalist departure from material reality but with a quasi-Burkean aware-
ness of cognitive obstruction and physical rootedness.12 In The Friend, for
instance, Coleridge argues that the sublime “utterly absorb[s] the mind’s
self-consciousness in its total attention to the object working upon it,” an
idea which seems to draw its inspiration from Burke’s neurophysiological
theory that during the experience of astonishment “the mind is so entirely
filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence
reason on that object which employs it” (Sublime 53).13
Whereas Kant’s sublime enacts a violent, if liberating, divorce from
physical nature, Coleridge’s seeks to forge a harmonious dialectic between
mind and matter and to “destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things,
elevating, as it were, words into Things, & living Things too.”14 At times,
he does not only “take nature along in the experience” of transcendence,
as Raimonda Modiano has argued, but goes so far as to place the sublime
on a par with a mystical sinking into the materiality of things, as when he
writes that the sublime is a “faculty, by which a great mind becomes that
which it meditates on.”15 In a notebook entry, he expands on how such a
far-reaching reconciliation might come about: “To make the object one
with us, we must become one with the object—ergo, an object. Ergo, the
object must be itself a subject—partially a favorite dog, principally a friend,
wholly God, the Friend.”16 If Coleridge’s argument sounds confusing, to the
point of comical absurdity, this is not just because of his usual obscurantist
turn of phrase, but more because it suits his philosophical project to fuse
and confuse thing and thought, material reality and human subjectivity.
According to Paul de Man, however, Coleridge does not reconcile subject
with object here, but “simply substitutes another self for the category of
the object and thus removes the problem from nature altogether, reducing
it to a purely intersubjective pattern.”17 For de Man, Coleridge—and those
critics believing in the feasibility of a balanced relationship between thing
and thought—fail to understand that this relationship is merely an effect of
human language and can never develop into something less than human.18
But although de Man rightly exposes the naively anti-dualistic thinking that
underpins much of Coleridge’s aesthetic philosophy, his accusation is not
exactly flawless itself, failing as it does to recognise that thought and lan-
guage are not airy, transcendental faculties, but are invariably embodied in
44 Animality in British Romanticism
the fleshy materiality of the brain, something which Coleridge, too, seemed
to realise at times. In his poem “Constancy to an Ideal Object” (1804–
1807), for instance, he takes Kant’s transcendental idealism all the way
down to its neurobiological essentials, boldly suggesting that “THOUGHT
. . . liv’st but in the brain” (4).
It is illustrative of literary criticism’s long-standing apathy towards
everything non-human that a poem as concerned with animal cruelty and
ecological interdependence as Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mari-
ner” was, until recently, rarely read as an environmentalist text. Follow-
ing a moral trajectory of crime, punishment and redemption, Coleridge’s
ballad centres on the Mariner’s killing of an albatross, an unexpected and
seemingly unmotivated act of violence that triggers an eco-apocalypse of
sorts and leaves the Mariner drifting alone around the Antarctic until he is
struck by an insight into the “One Life” he shares with some water-snakes
and fi nally repents. What makes Coleridge’s text so pertinent to ecocritical
readings is its tendency to deploy animals not as mere background puppets
against which human tragedy unfolds, but as crucial, if persistently vague,
characters pushing the plot towards its redemptive conclusion. A seminal
turning point in the poem, indeed, is the Mariner’s double encounter with
the water-snakes. In the fi rst encounter, these slimy and strangely lumi-
nescent animals are described as horrifying creatures that precipitate the
Mariner into a state of environmental alienation. In the second experience,
by contrast, the Mariner praises their inexpressible beauty and instantly
becomes aware of nature’s independent moral value.
Although Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” has recently invited ample eco-
critical attention, some readers have expressed scepticism about its green
credentials.19 Grappling with the poem’s hermetic symbolism, Christine
Kenyon-Jones is not entirely convinced of its ecological message and seems
to throw in the towel at the end of her discussion: “Although an emblematic
significance or ‘moral’ seems to be constantly intimated for the albatross and
the water-snakes,” she concludes, “no single, constant meaning can be reli-
ably allocated to them.”20 This lack of a solid moral anchor, however, need
not rule out a green reading. In fact, it is in its resistance to moralisation, I
believe, that the poem’s powerful moral message resides. My interpretation
takes its cue from a letter Coleridge wrote to William Sotheby in 1802, in
which he warned against “moralizing every thing” in nature and becoming
bogged down in our limited human point of view: “never to see or describe
any interesting appearance in nature,” he argued, “without connecting it
by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of Impression.” It
is also in this letter that he puts his philosophy of biological interconnected-
ness to the service of an aesthetic theory as part of a polemic against what
John Ruskin would later call the “pathetic fallacy” (the description of non-
human phenomena or beings in human terms). Coleridge writes: “Nature
has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels,
that every Thing has a Life of it’s own, & that we are all one Life.”21 The
 Green Masochism 45
tendency to humanise nature and infer moral purpose from its biological
workings, Coleridge believes, marks a serious paucity of aesthetic vision
that can easily erupt into physical violence. To read an animal as an omen
or literary metaphor is to reduce it to a mere tool for human communica-
tion without value or purpose of its own. If tools no longer work, throw
them away; if albatrosses no longer make sense, shoot them. It is against
this consumerist logic of meaning-making that Coleridge reacts.
I read “The Ancient Mariner,” then, as a poem about the violence of
interpretation, a text which calls into question our obsessive search for
meaning in nature and proposes scepticism as a moral remedy. The scepti-
cal mood that Coleridge has in mind is not a crippling realisation of human
ignorance. Much more Kantian, it is a sublime and self-empowering insight
into our lack of insight, which prompts us—in an attitude of fearful won-
der—to keep our hands and minds off the non-human animal. It is only
logical that a poem which offers a sceptical interrogation of human cogni-
tion also resists narrative closure itself and appears, as Coleridge phrased it,
“incomprehensible / And without head or tail.”22 Admittedly, such a scepti-
cal eco-reading falters at Coleridge’s bumper-sticker conclusion that “He
prayeth well, who loveth well / Both man and bird and beast” (612–13),
which instantly buries the poem’s obfuscating ambiguities under the sim-
plistically unifying theme of Christian repentance and salvation. It is well
known, however, that Coleridge came to regret the poem’s moral didacti-
cism. “The fault of the Ancient Mariner,” he noted in 1830, “consists in
making the moral sentiment too apparent and bringing it in too much as a
principle or cause in a work of such pure Imagination.”23 And in reply to
Anna Barbauld, who had taken aim at the ballad for having no moral, he
claimed that it had “too much moral” and that “it ought to have had no
more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the
side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up, and
saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye
of the Genii’s son.”24
I am interested here in “The Ancient Mariner” not simply for its touchy-
feely animal rights message, but also because it interlocks this moralis-
tic concern with a more sophisticated examination of the ways in which
nature is aesthetically received and constructed. Although Harold Bloom
dismissed such an aesthetic interpretation, claiming that “The Ancient
Mariner is not . . . a poem about poetry,” there are several reasons to
assume the contrary. 25 In his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge briefly
alluded to his plan to prefi x an essay on “the powers and privileges of the
imagination” to “The Ancient Mariner,” an essay that was either lost or
never written. 26 At least as significant is that the water-snakes in the poem
call to mind Coleridge’s idea (in William Hazlitt’s slightly derisive account)
that “the principle of the imagination resembles the emblem of the ser-
pent . . . with undulating folds, for ever varying and for ever flowing into
itself,—circular, and without beginning or end.”27 Most likely, Hazlitt took
46 Animality in British Romanticism
this idea from Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge had compared the
dynamic operation of the imagination to the movement of water-insects—
not serpents, however. These insects clearly resemble the spectral species in
“The Ancient Mariner”—“blue, glossy green, and velvet black” (274):

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the sur-

face of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with
prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have
noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by
alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current,
and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary ful-
crum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s
self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two pow-
ers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and
this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once
both active and passive. (In philosophical language, we must denomi-
nate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the
IMAGINATION). 28

Coleridge’s belief that the proper working of the human imagination

depends upon a delicate balancing act between the passive replication of
thoughts and their active creation offers a variation on Wordsworth’s better
known formulation in “Tintern Abbey” that the senses “half create” what
they “perceive” (106–107). With this in mind, I think that “The Ancient
Mariner” problematises a critical disturbance of this balance, presenting
fi rst a sense perception that is too active and violently imposes its mental
order upon nature, then one that is too passive and fails to psychologise
the external world in a meaningful way. What is interesting and, in fact,
runs counter to Coleridge’s later belief in aesthetic autonomy is that the
poem also dramatises the deleterious moral impact of this imbalance and,
in doing so, reveals that ethical and aesthetic judgments develop in close
and continuous dialogue with each other.
At the beginning of the poem, when the ship is depicted sailing towards
the South Pole, a landscape completely devoid of familiar “shapes of men
[or] beasts” (58), Coleridge portrays a mind that, in the absence of meaning-
ful sensory stimuli, has completely fallen back upon itself and creates much
more meaning than it perceives. In what seems like a futile attempt to make
himself at home, the Mariner attributes animal qualities to the environment
and vessel, so that the ice “roar[s] and howl[s]” and the ship moves like a
frightened beast, chased by a “tyrannous” storm (61, 42). The vacuous, white
space of the Antarctic provides the Mariner with a blank screen on which
he can easily project his fears and fantasies. Coleridge’s protagonist has
what Jean-Paul Sartre called in his critique of Kantian idealism a “spidery
mind,” which “trap[s] things in its web, cover[s] them with a white spit and
slowly swallow[s] them, reducing them to its own substance.”29 It is hardly
 Green Masochism 47
surprising that when the Mariner spots the albatross, the first actually living
creature he encounters, the bird is straightforwardly welcomed “as if it had
been a Christian soul” (65). This personification is followed by a more mun-
dane and physical act of domestication when the crew offers the bird human
food—“It ate the food it ne’er had eat” (67)—and establishes, in James McK-
usick’s words, a “symbiotic exchange.”30 In return for food, the bird renders
the desolate seascape less uncanny and momentarily relieves the Mariner of
his idealist horror vacui. Soon afterwards, however, for no apparent reason,
the Mariner takes his crossbow and kills the albatross.
Critics tend to take it as a given that the shooting of the albatross is
an obscenely gratuitous act of violence, placing the Mariner squarely in
the company of literary sociopaths such as Shakespeare’s Iago or Milton’s
Satan. That the poem affords little insight into the Mariner’s motive, how-
ever, need not imply that he is a recreational sadist who shoots sitting ducks
for no other reason than to while away nautical boredom. One sensible
explanation for the shooting lies in the Mariner’s assumption that the bird
is a bad omen, responsible for the “fog and mist” hampering the ship’s
progress (102). When the albatross fi rst emerges, the crew hails it as a good
omen, which causes “the breeze to blow” and directs the ship away from
the South Pole (96). After the Mariner has killed the albatross and the fog
has dissipated, however, the Mariner’s shipmates change their minds and
consider the animal a bad portent: “‘Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
/ That bring the fog and mist” (101–102). To complicate matters further,
the wind subsequently subsides, a clear indication that either the albatross
paradoxically symbolised both a good and a bad omen, or that it simply
encompassed no supernatural meaning whatsoever. Either way, nature now
displays an error message, a blue screen of death: the ancient system of
divinatory hermeneutics has crashed. At this moment, stripped of anthro-
pomorphic projection, the natural world appears meaningless and mute, no
longer speaking to the Mariner or providing him with navigational advice.
“The silence of the sea” following the albatross’s death is ultimately also a
reticence, a refusal of nature to talk to the Mariner (110).
The murder of the albatross in this scenario would be a logical, if
extreme, outgrowth of the Mariner’s idealist frame of mind, which leads
him to read nature as a guidebook for the Antarctic explorer. Coleridge
would thus anticipate Adorno’s criticism in his Negative Dialectics (1966)
that idealism, despite its rarefied intellectualism, is an inherently violent
ideology, whose deep-seated discomfort with the irreducible material oth-
erness of nature is bound to spill over into physical aggression. “Idealism,”
Adorno writes, “gives unconscious sway to the ideology that the not-I . . .
and fi nally all that reminds us of nature is inferior, so the unity of the self-
preserving thought may devour it without misgivings. . . . The system is the
belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.”31
Coleridge, however, nowhere states that the Mariner’s violence origi-
nates in an accidental misreading of animal omens. It is the crew that offers
48 Animality in British Romanticism
this explanation and their rationalisation is little more than a speculative
attempt—no less questionable than my own—to make sense of the absurd.
The whole point of the shooting, after all, is that it does not have a ratio-
nal motive. It is obscene precisely because it is gratuitous. If the Mariner
had shot the bird to pluck and cook it or to dissect it in a fit of scientific
curiosity, it would not have been a criminal act in the fi rst place. At the
same time, I think there is sufficient reason to assume that the Mariner
killed the albatross under the delusion that it constituted a bad portent. In
George Shelvocke’s Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South
Sea (1726), the travelogue from which the idea of the shooting was bor-
rowed, a black albatross is killed because its colour is considered a sign
of bad luck.32 Moreover, the perennial interest which Coleridge took at
the time in the symbolic signification of animal behaviour lends credence
to the idea that the albatross’s function as a totemic creature is seminal
to understanding the Mariner’s act of aggression and Coleridge’s poem at
large. In “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem,” also published in Lyri-
cal Ballads, Coleridge criticised the literary propensity to attribute human
emotions to non-human animals and emphasised nature’s independent
agency: “A melancholy bird? Oh! idle thought! / In Nature there is nothing
melancholy” (14–15). Written in 1802, “A Soliloquy of the Full Moon”
offers a more mocking but no less pointed take on the same subject. In this
sardonically self-undermining poem, the moon charges those “Ventrilo-
quogusty / Poets” (12–13) (including Wordsworth and Coleridge, in fact)
for employing her as a literary metaphor for things she is not (a little canoe,
an ostrich egg, half a piece of Cheshire cheese). The moon fi nally reclaims
her autonomy with the tautological declaration of independence “I am I
myself I, the Jolly full Moon” (66). In one of his notebook entries written
in 1805, Coleridge more explicitly criticised the idealist tendency to project
human meaning onto the natural world. He called it a “narcissine part
of our nature,” which involves “the not me becoming great and good by
spreading thro’ and combining with all things, but all becoming me and to
me by the phantom-feeling of their being concentrated in me & only valu-
able as associated in the symbolical sense . . . with our own Symbol.”33
Predictably, Coleridge’s criticism of an anthropomorphic conception of
nature was far from consistent. His 1798 poem “The Raven,” for instance,
tells the story of a raven’s mate and nestlings which are killed after a wood-
man chopped down their tree in order to build a ship with its wood. Just
as in “The Ancient Mariner,” nature avenges this act and the ship’s crew
perishes in a storm. Originally, the poem precluded religious redemption
and ended with an inappropriately cheerful sense of Schadenfreude: “Very
glad was the Raven, that this fate they did meet: / They had taken his all,
& REVENGE WAS SWEET!” (41–42). In 1817, however, Coleridge added
a didactic corrective to the poem, writing that “We must not think so; but
forget and forgive, / And what Heaven gives life to, we’ll still let it live.” In
a later note, he dismissed these lines as well and took issue with his earlier
 Green Masochism 49
Christian inclination to apply moral law to the conduct of non-human
beings: “Added thro’ cowardly fear of the Goody! What a Hollow, where
the Heart of Faith ought to be, does it not betray? this alarm concerning
Christian morality, that will not permit even a Raven to be a Raven, nor
a Fox a Fox, but demands conventicular justice to be infl icted on their
unchristian conduct, or at least an antidote to be annexed.”34
After the albatross’s death, the Mariner enters what Thomas Weiskel
has singled out as the second and most harrowing phase of the Romantic
sublime, during which “the habitual relation of mind and object suddenly
breaks down.”35 What is sublime is not the albatross itself, which evidently
lacks the brutal force of Burke’s tiger or rhinoceros, but the silence of nature
which the animal’s death initiates. As Burke remarked in his Philosophical
Enquiry, silence can be a source of the sublime: “All general privations are
great, because they are terrible; Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence”
(65). The Mariner now experiences an epistemological dread, or what Vicki
Hearne, drawing on Stanley Cavell, has described as the “skeptical terror
about the independent existence of other minds.” The horror results from
the realisation, Hearne explains, that both man and animal “know for sure
about the other . . . that each is a creature with an independent existence,
an independent consciousness and thus the ability to think and take action
in a way that may not be welcome (meaningful or creature-enhancing) to
the other.”36
Nature now appears as a self-regulating system, indifferent and even
hostile to human understanding. A similar change of scenery, in fact,
occurred in “The Wanderings of Cain,” a poem on which Coleridge had
started working only a few months before “The Ancient Mariner,” but
which was never fi nished. Following Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, the
natural world is defaced and transformed into a sterile desert, populated
only by serpents and vultures. “The scene around was desolate,” Coleridge
writes, “the bare rocks faced each other, and left a long and wide interval
of thin white sand. . . . The pointed and shattered summits of the ridges
of the rocks made a rude mimicry of human concerns.”37 This awareness
of nature’s independent existence mirrors a development in historical con-
sciousness. Until the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Foucault has
argued in The Order of Things, the natural world was conceived of as
a complex fabric of analogies and resemblances, with “the earth echoing
the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding
within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.” One type of these
resemblances, the “play of sympathies,” Foucault notes, “has the danger-
ous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, . . .
of causing their individuality to disappear.” This homogenising dynamic
was counteracted around the end of the sixteenth century by the play of
“antipathy,” which emphasised the autonomy and singularity of things.38
This recognition that, to use Coleridge’s phrase, everything has a life of its
own, however, had a considerable downside. The exchange of an immanent
50 Animality in British Romanticism
god, employing animal and celestial bodies to represent divine intention,
for a more transcendental figure, operating from behind the scenes, also
cut off humanity from the supernatural and left it isolated and alone—very
much like the Mariner, who reflects: “So lonely ‘twas, that God Himself /
Scarce seemed there to be” (599–600).
Not long after nature has fallen still and mute—“We stuck, nor breath
nor motion; / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean” (116–18)—
the Mariner spots the water-snakes for the fi rst time in an encounter that
brings his environmental alienation to a new pitch of intensity. In stark
contrast to the idealist worldview presented earlier, Coleridge now displays
the raw and sordid materiality of nature, which frustrates ideation and
rational transcendence:

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea. (123–26)

This fi rst confrontation with the snakes produces a nameless feeling of

disgust, akin to the epistemic revulsion at the centre of Sartre’s Nausea
(1938). In this novel, which transposed Sartre’s philosophical critique of
Kantian idealism into fiction, the protagonist feels nauseated by his inabil-
ity to abstract material things into functional concepts. “Objects should
not touch because they are not alive,” he notes. “You use them, put them
back in place, you live among them. They are useful nothing more. But
they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them
as though they were living beasts.”39 The Mariner, too, feels sickened by the
seeping materiality of nature, a materiality that cannot be quarantined or
removed to a safe, representational distance. It is not that he loses grip on
reality, but that he becomes stuck in its slimy existence.40
The Mariner’s schematic characterisation of the water-snakes as “slimy
things . . . with legs” brings to mind what Bill Brown has called “Thing
Theory.”41 Brown is fascinated by that moment when physical objects
(including human and non-human bodies) are stripped of their conceptual
significance and become mere forms without content, surfaces without soul.
Typically, we gain this insight into thingness when objects lose their utili-
tarian or aesthetic purpose. It is the dysfunctional and the ugly that reveals
the materiality of nature—its visual appearance, texture, smell and noise.
A TV breaks down and becomes a black, angular thing; a severely disfig-
ured face or just someone with a disproportionately large nose reminds us
of their and our own fleshy existence. On a larger scale, it is environmental
problems such as global warming that, in the past two decades, have made
us acutely aware of the fragile thingness of nature. We only noticed nature
when it stopped functioning and became ugly. The water-snakes, similarly,
assert their independent material existence through the display of their
 Green Masochism 51
ugliness and uselessness. Their power is a non-power, their activism a pas-
sive defiance. They look too alien to have divinatory meaning, too fluores-
cent to be edible, too ephemeral to be recuperated as junk art, and (at least
for now) not even threatening enough to trigger a self-preservative and self-
empowering sublime. And yet, as Bill Brown’s phrasing makes clear, the
thing does engender a more sophisticated Kantian sublime: it is a liminal
presence that exceeds representation and lies “both at hand and somewhere
outside the theoretical field, beyond a certain limit, as a recognizable yet
illegible remainder or as the entifiable that is unspecifiable.”42
Hitt’s ecological sublime, too, was concerned with things and thingness.
The crucial point of difference between thing theorists or object-oriented
ontologists (such as Bill Brown, Timothy Morton and Graham Harman)
and ecocritical materialists (Hitt, Evernden and Midgley) is that the former
group fully realises that we will never be able to bypass our conceptual
mediation of nature and put ourselves into direct contact with its thing-
ness.43 At best, the thing is a liminal entity, caught between its referential
function and the inaccessible materiality of nature. Object-oriented ontolo-
gists generally do not believe that we can, as Merleau-Ponty put it, “return
to things themselves,” a phrase which crucially informed Neil Evernden’s
argument in The Social Creation of Nature.44 They reject such epistemo-
logical realism (that is, the assumption that we can acquire knowledge of
things as they really are) and instead favour an ontological realism, which
argues that things objectively exist but cannot be felt or represented inde-
pendent of human or non-human perception: even the thing or thingness is
a concept (and, conversely, concepts are things, too, travelling from brain
to brain through physical space). By factoring in non-human as well as
human perceptual perspectives, object-oriented ontologists also dispense
with the anthropocentric conviction that materialist ecocritics surpris-
ingly share with Kantian idealists. Like Kant, indeed, materialist ecocritics
tend to regard conceptualisation as an exclusively human ability, as if non-
human animals do not represent or—to use Evernden’s awkward phrase—
conceptually pollute their environment. Chimpanzees, dogs and even bees
do not have access to things-in-themselves either and socially create nature
as much as we do.45 A stick for a dog is not a thing-in-itself, but it is a func-
tional, conceptualised instrument that needs to be fetched and returned
to that bipedal thing which keeps throwing the stick-thing away only to
demand it back. Ecocritics should stop worrying about concepts.
Of course, Coleridge was far from a materialist, let alone an object-
oriented ontologist (if he had been, his ballad should probably have ended
here). He still believed in the “sacred distinction between things and
persons” and warned against becoming “lost and scattered in sensible
Objects.”46 At the same time, he felt increasingly discomforted by the
idealist inclination to view objects as mere materialised ideas and often
seemed to desire a purely sensational awareness of nature’s thingness. In
an incisive notebook entry recorded in 1804, he writes: “O! how quiet it
52 Animality in British Romanticism
is to the Eye, & to the Heart when it will entrance itself in the present
vision, & know nothing, feel nothing, but the Abiding Things of Nature,
great, calm, majestic, and one.”47
It is not surprising that object-oriented ontologists, with their inter-
est in non-human perspectives and the materiality of nature, have found
themselves in close alliance with environmental philosophers and ecocrit-
ics.48 Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” however, shows that the awareness of
nature’s defiant thingness can be a repelling and visually exhausting experi-
ence, far removed from the ecological awareness in which environmental
philosophers are interested. The Mariner now realises that animals have a
life of their own, yet he feels too bemused and disgusted to act morally on
this insight. But although it may lack instant moral relevance, his alienat-
ing encounter has substantive epistemic value. For all its melodrama, his
clumsy shorthand characterisation of the water-snake as a viscous, crawl-
ing thing with legs is a more detached and, therefore, more accurate and
scientific characterisation than his earlier, crudely anthropomorphic inter-
pretation of the albatross as a “bird of good omen.”49 Coleridge’s ballad
thus shows how environmental alienation makes possible a more scientific
understanding of animal life. In this view, it presents a coming-of-age story
of modern epistemology, a green allegory of how the urban alienation from
the animal stimulated a less folkloric and more scientific conception of
nature and animality.
In the second encounter with the water-snakes, the same animals appear
to simulate an appealing colour-coordinated spectacle that sends the Mari-
ner into raptures:

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware. (277–87)

By registering a very similar scene in two different ways, Coleridge directs

attention to the Mariner’s aesthetic mediation of nature and to the wider
moral and epistemological implications of this mediation. Clearly, what
has changed is not nature itself, but the Mariner’s perception of nature. In
his earlier encounter with the albatross, his outlook on the natural world
was determined by what Coleridge defi ned as the Primary Imagination, an
 Green Masochism 53
instinctive and passive mode of perception limited to our pre-existing stock
of knowledge, not that different in fact from Kant’s faculty of understand-
ing. When fi rst confronted with the water-snakes, the Mariner’s Primary
Imagination failed to make sense of the animals, representing them as mere
things with legs. This second encounter with the water-snakes, by contrast,
is perceived through the so-called Secondary or Poetic Imagination, which
Coleridge defi ned as a creative faculty capable of fabricating new symbols:
it “dissolves, diff uses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process
is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to
unify.” Its power to totalise and to reconcile matter and idea clearly relates
the Secondary Imagination to Coleridge’s theory of the sublime. Besides its
synthesising qualities, the Secondary Imagination also infuses matter with
life: “It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially
fi xed and dead.”50
That the Mariner blesses the water-snakes “unaware” may give the
impression that this is an intuitive and uncritical experience of beauty
rather than sublimity. For Coleridge, Burke and Kant, after all, the judg-
ment of beauty is a matter of involuntary or unaware feeling, not rational
thinking. “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful,” Kant
claimed in his Critique of Judgment, “we do not relate the representation
by means of understanding to the object for cognition but rather relate it
by means of the imagination . . . to the subject and its feeling of pleasure
or displeasure” (Judgment 89). The Mariner’s enjoyment, however, is too
ambiguously self-reflective to be a spontaneous experience of beauty. When
he exclaims that “no tongue / their beauty might declare,” he does not
represent the water-snakes themselves but displays an acute insight into the
impossibility of their representation and thus clearly veers into the muddy
philosophical waters of the Kantian sublime. This is a negative representa-
tion, and the pleasure that the Mariner takes in the unspeakable beauty of
the water-snakes is what Kant called a “negative pleasure.”
By the masochistic logic of Kant’s sublime, the Mariner’s self-deprecat-
ing recognition of his representational inadequacy fulfils a self-empowering
function. Like the masochist, the Kantian subject asserts the power and
autonomy of its mind by deriving a sense of pleasure, rather than pain, from
its physical humiliation. 51 That, in masochistic and sublime experience, the
mind does not speak what the body feels demonstrates that the human
mind is an autonomous agent able to operate in complete independence
from the body and the physical world in which it exists. Sublime masoch-
ism thus opens up a fault line between thinking and feeling, rationality
and nature. It is in this alienated mental space that Kant’s transcendental
subject is born: I enjoy my suffering, therefore I am. In a similar argument,
Julia Kristeva has suggested that the jouissance (a mixture of desire and
disgust) that we derive from the abject enables us to retain and bolster a
stable sense of identity. She interprets jouissance as that mental condition
“in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return,
54 Animality in British Romanticism
keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant.” And she con-
cludes with a statement that applies quite well to the Mariner: “One thus
understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—
if not its submissive and willing ones.”52
Although the experiences of the sublime and the masochistic both hinge
on the physical sensation of pain, they ultimately deny the authority of
the physical and exhibit the superior power of the subjective imagination,
which is capable of translating even the most chilling experience of bodily
torture into a source of emotional satisfaction. In Kant’s idealist theory,
the sublime is triggered by a menacing sensorial awareness (the sight of
a volcano, the sound of thunderclouds) which makes us “recognize our
physical powerlessness,” but eventually “calls forth our power (which is
not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned
(goods, health and life) as trivial” (Judgment 145). The Mariner, by the
same token, preserves his autonomy by rejoicing in its breakdown, or as
Coleridge puts it elsewhere: “Strange & generous Self, that can only be
such a Self, by a compleat divesting of all that men call Self.”53 Ironically, it
is by sinking into the materiality of things that the Mariner can rise above
nature and animality.
The Mariner’s ecstatic celebration of the water-snakes’ beauty thus opens
up an idealist exit from nature’s sticky materiality. If your enemy is too
numerous and elusive to be shot with a crossbow, the only sensible thing to
do might be to curry his favour by praising his pretty looks and proclaim-
ing your own worthlessness. That the Mariner acknowledges the beauty
and moral value of the water-snakes only in a strategic effort to secure his
own autonomy is perhaps a disappointingly cynical conclusion for any-
one holding some green (light or dark, superficial or deep) beliefs. On the
upside, it suggests that Kantian anthropocentrism and self-interest need not
exclude sympathetic attitudes to animality, but might, strangely enough,
even foster them. In order to transcend nature, we fi rst need to become so
intimate with it that it hurts and might kill us. We need to become animal
in order to stay human. Coleridge, furthermore, does not enact an ethereal
transcendence of physical reality here, but makes explicit the materialist
origins of Kant’s idealist sublime and thereby fi rmly grounds it in biologi-
cal reality. The desire for transcendence, he shows, is hard-wired into the
human brain. It is a physiologically conditioned reflex that, sending a surge
of adrenaline through our bodies, boosts our self-image and helps us evade
the predatory materiality of nature. Adorno seconds this theory in Nega-
tive Dialectics. The idealist denial of the real, he argues, “has its primal
history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species.”54 It is an evolu-
tionary remnant of a survival strategy which made the hunter’s prey appear
less threatening and, at the same time, provided the hunter with a feeling of
omnipotence and fearlessness. On this view, Kant’s intellectualist sublime
is merely an animal reflex.
 Green Masochism 55
What is the ontological status and moral value of the water-snakes after
the Mariner has dismantled their physical existence? Their oxymoronic
characterisation as “happy living things” nods to Coleridge’s earlier poem
“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797), which similarly represented
nature as “a living Thing.” Coleridge here addresses his friend Charles
Lamb and hopes that his journey through the Quantock Hills will provide
him with an experience of the sublime. The following extract reads like
“The Coleridgean Sublime for Beginners”:

So my Friend
Struck with joy’s deepest calm, and gazing round
On the wide view, may gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily, a living Thing
That acts upon the mind, and with such hues
As cloathe the Almighty Spirit, when he makes
Spirits perceive His presence! (20–26)

The sublime insight into the “One Life” here seems (and perhaps only seems)
to deprive nature of its concrete reality and to distil it into something “Less
gross than bodily, a living Thing / That acts upon the mind.” Although the
Mariner, too, transforms the water-snakes into “living things,” he does
not simply revert to his earlier idealist position, which led to the death of
the albatross. The difference between the albatross and the water-snakes
is that the latter are the material representation of a transcendental real-
ity and have supernatural rather than human meaning. They do not pro-
vide insipid meteorological tips like the albatross, but—by way of a more
mystical and much less functionalist vocabulary—signify a higher, divine
presence. Moreover, we should not read these lines from “This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison” as wholly emblematic of Coleridge’s sublime. In a letter
to John Thelwall, he quoted these lines and added that he rarely managed
to achieve such an idealist dematerialisation of nature: “It is but seldom
that I raise and spiritualize my intellect to this height; and at other times I
adopt the Brahmin creed, and say, ‘It is better to sit than to wake, it is bet-
ter to lie than to sit, it is better to sleep than to wake, but Death is the best
of all!’”55 It appears that Coleridge considered two routes to encounter the
divine: either by rationally disembodying the materiality of nature or by
completely switching off his reason (through physical death, not through
an ecological sublime) and becoming a thing among things. What “The
Ancient Mariner” shows, however, is that a self-annihilating materialism
may actually feed a self-empowering transcendence of nature.
The Mariner’s appraisal of the water-snakes’ beauty is not only a way of
reclaiming his position at the authoritative centre of the aesthetic experi-
ence, judging what is pretty and what is not. His judgment also assigns a
functionality to the animals and re-establishes a powerful locus of meaning
56 Animality in British Romanticism
and fi nality in nature. The snakes are no longer a random or pointless
biological phenomenon now. By providing the Mariner with aesthetic plea-
sure, they fulfi l a clear human purpose and infuse nature at large with
human significance. If one thing makes sense, everything makes sense.
“Natural beauty,” Kant writes in his Critique of Judgment, “carries with it
a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems as it were to be
predetermined for our power of judgment, and thus constitutes an object
of satisfaction in itself” (129). By labelling a natural object beautiful, we
ascribe a meaningful teleology to nature, even if the object’s purposiveness
is, as Kant insisted, ultimately devoid of actual purpose. For Kant, beauti-
ful natural objects only look as if they were designed for a particular reason
because it is so easy for us to understand them, yet in reality they have no
objective function or purpose we can grasp. Their purposiveness is only a
subjective impression produced by the harmonious and pleasurable inter-
play between our own mental faculties. When we judge a thing beautiful,
then, we mistakenly project this subjective feeling onto the physical object.
This is what the Mariner does when he assigns an objective purposiveness
to the water-snakes and interprets their beauty as proof of divine provi-
dence (“my kind saint took pity on me”).
Coleridge’s poem raises a question that is often glossed over in aesthetic
philosophy, a question pertaining to the status of the physical world after
the experience of transcendence. Does nature remain terrifying and awe-
inspiring, or is it dumped as an unwanted residue of the imaginative process,
used only to feed and inspire the sublime mind? In “The Ancient Mariner,”
the sublime appears to function as an aesthetic of waste management, recy-
cling the pointless scatological junk of material existence into an economy
of aesthetic and religious use-value. The Romantic sublime, it seems, is what
discloses the raw thingness of nature only to upgrade it almost instanta-
neously into a beautiful object of desire. It is what turns disgusting goo into
a perplexing piece of religious art. The natural ease with which this beautiful
object can be represented and, in Burke’s belief, “submits to us” is in fact
culturally enforced by the sublime’s domesticating power (Sublime 103). The
aesthetic of the beautiful, in turn, erases the traces of human domestication
by presenting itself as an unprocessed and ahistorical quality, something that
is stumbled upon or found “unaware” rather than meticulously crafted. Like
Burke and Kant, Coleridge asserted: “I meet, I find the Beautiful—but I give,
contribute, or rather attribute the Sublime.”
In a lecture from 1818, however, Coleridge contradicted such an intu-
itionist conception and claimed that the pleasure we derive from beauty
stems in large measure from a feeling of mastery: “To the idea of Life Vic-
tory or Strife is necessary—As Virtue [consists] not in the absence of vicious
Impulses but in the overcoming of them / so Beauty not in the absence of
the Passions, but on the contrary—it is heightened by the sight of what is
conquered.”56 Coleridge’s interpretation of the beautiful as a critical aes-
thetic, created by way of conflict and domestication, prefigures Adorno’s
 Green Masochism 57
idea that beauty originates in a violent repression of the ugly. “Beauty,”
Adorno explains in Aesthetic Theory, “is not the platonically pure begin-
ning but rather something that originated in the renunciation of what was
once feared, which only as a result of this renunciation—retrospectively, so
to speak, according to its own telos—became the ugly.”57 Adorno’s point is
rehearsed in Slavoj Žižek’s The Abyss of Freedom (1997), in which Žižek
claims that “contrary to the standard idealist argument that conceives ugli-
ness as the defective mode of beauty, as its distortion, one should assert the
ontological primacy of ugliness: it is beauty that is a kind of defense against
the Ugly in its repulsive existence—or, rather, against existence tout court,
since . . . what is ugly is ultimately the brutal fact of existence (of the real) as
such.”58 For the Mariner, likewise, the aesthetic of the beautiful is a defence
against reality’s moral, religious and biological pointlessness, against what
Coleridge in his poem “Limbo: A Fragment” (1811) called “the mere Hor-
ror of blank Naught at all” (23).
Although I have already indicated that the Mariner praises the animal’s
aesthetic and moral value in a barely covert attempt to save himself, the
question still pending—on a less evolutionary plane—is whether the Mari-
ner’s change of taste follows his change of heart, or vice versa. To put it
another way: does he consider the water-snakes aesthetically appealing
because he recognises their moral relevance, or does he consider them mor-
ally relevant because they look appealing? Judging from the chronology of
his assessments, his aesthetic appreciation of nature (“no tongue / Their
beauty might declare”) would determine his moral view (“A spring of love
gushed from my heart”). Coleridge, in this case, would side with Burke’s
idea that love is one of the defi ning psychological effects of beauty. “By
beauty,” Burke claimed in his Philosophical Enquiry, “I mean, that qual-
ity or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion
similar to it” (83). In Burke’s objectivist understanding, beautiful objects
produce a pleasurable relaxation of the senses, which in turn instils a feel-
ing of affection as an emotional after-effect. Coleridge, however, took issue
with such an empiricist account in his idealist poem “Dejection: An Ode”
(1802), which shared with “The Ancient Mariner” references to sailing,
divination and environmental alienation as well as a thematic exploration
of the relationship between consciousness and material nature:

O Lady! we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth. (47–55)
58 Animality in British Romanticism
Following Kant’s subjectivist view, Coleridge here suggests that the experi-
ence of beauty requires a particular moral aptitude and, for this reason,
does not manifest itself to the “poor loveless ever-anxious” subject, a char-
acterisation that would well fit the Mariner—at least before his epiphanic
insight. Love, put differently, is one of the primary conditions for and not,
as Burke assumed, an emotional effect of beauty.
That the subject’s “beauty-making power” (63) animates the natu-
ral world also underscores Coleridge’s belief in the close interconnection
between beauty and Life, a connection that is perhaps stronger than the
one between beauty and love. “Every beautiful Object,” he argued in a lec-
ture on aesthetics, “must have an association with Life—it must have Life
in it or attributed to it—Life or Spontaneity, as an Action of Vital Power.”59
Beauty, it appears, is the physical manifestation of Life: “Beauty is either
universal, or particular—and in both it is the expression of Life sensibly.”60
Although Life can reside in both the subject and object (“it must have Life in
it or attributed to it”), it chiefly appears in the shape of beauty, which only
the subjective imagination can perceive and create. Without the vitalising
power of the Secondary Imagination, the subject will never be able to see
“into the life of things,” as Wordsworth phrased it, and the natural world
will appear inimical and dead. Although Coleridge’s “One Life” philoso-
phy contributed in no small way to a more holistic understanding of nature,
it would be a mistake to regard it as an environmentalist theory. Life does
not function in Coleridge’s philosophy as a very useful moral parameter,
because not only human but also non-human animals, vegetables and even
crystals and metals possess the property of Life. In Coleridge’s monistic
theory, living and being are entirely synonymous: “whatever is, lives. A
thing absolutely lifeless is inconceivable, except as a thought, image, or
fancy, in some other being.”61 Coleridge, however, maintained that some
creatures are more alive than others and added a hierarchy to his classifica-
tion, which positioned all creatures on a ladder of life, with humanity—
“the fi rmest, . . . the truest, because the most individual”—occupying the
highest rung.62
Although Coleridge asserts in “Dejection: An Ode” that the animate
appearance of physical reality is little more than a projection of the sub-
ject’s inner life, the poem at once casts doubt on such an idealist view when
it proposes that the life-creating imagination has material roots in nature:
“each visitation / Suspends what nature gave me at my birth / My shap-
ing Spirit of Imagination” (84–86). Such ideas of an active, deterministic
natural world appear more pronounced in several other of the so-called
conversation poems, a collection of eight poems composed between 1795
and 1807 that all revolve around the “One Life” philosophy. “Frost at Mid-
night” (1798) approaches the mind as a physical organ shaped in one’s
childhood encounters with nature. In the poem, Coleridge addresses his
baby son Hartley, named after the materialist philosopher David Hart-
ley, and tells him that nature and its “lovely shapes and sounds” “shall
 Green Masochism 59
mould / [his] spirit” (59, 63–64). Alan Richardson, however, has shown
that even though Coleridge frequently praised David Hartley’s materialist
psychology in the 1790s, his enthusiasm proved short-lived, and as early as
1800 he began to dismiss Hartley’s theories as mere “nonsense.”63 Even so,
Richardson notes, Coleridge’s poetry and philosophy never wholeheartedly
embraced idealist theories of mind and retained an ambiguous fascination
with physical nature as a deterministic force.64
When we read “The Ancient Mariner” alongside the conversation poems,
it becomes clear why the former is such a uniquely green text in Coleridge’s
oeuvre. Despite their preoccupation with organic unity and environmental
redemption, the conversation poems primarily attend to a crisis of human
psychology and apply nature as an antidepressant, mitigating Coleridge’s
social insecurity and inducing a squishy, homely feeling of rootedness. Like
“The Ancient Mariner,” the conversation poems typically portray a subject
that has too much “Life of its own” and feels, as a result, completely alien-
ated from its social and natural community. In “This Lime-Tree Bower My
Prison,” Coleridge is left alone under a lime tree, while his friends enjoy
the countryside. “Frost at Midnight” presents the poet’s solitary contem-
plations on a night which is “so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes medita-
tion with its strange / And extreme silentness” (8–10), lines that should
recall the disturbing stagnation of nature in “The Ancient Mariner.” Both
“This Lime-Tree Bower” and “Frost at Midnight,” however, culminate in a
mystical insight into the “One Life,” which promptly relieves Coleridge of
his social and spiritual anxiety. “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” most
evidently, argues that nature (and God) is everywhere and—as in “The
Ancient Mariner”—provides us with moral and aesthetic instruction:

Henceforth I shall know

That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! (59–64)

“The Ancient Mariner,” too, explores the theme of social alienation,

but it combines this exploration with a biological perspective and thereby
extends the “One Life” philosophy with an ecological reach it generally
did not have. More than the conversation poems, “The Ancient Mariner”
points to the beneficial ecological effects of alienation and to the moral
risk of too much sympathy or environmental identification. The tendency
to regard nature as a comfortable homely place, Coleridge suggests, can
easily lead to a violent instrumentalisation of animals, whereby their
value is reduced to what they mean and can do for us humans. Instead, we
need to experience nature as something that feels both intrusively famil-
iar and shockingly uncanny (in German the uncanny is aptly called das
60 Animality in British Romanticism
Unheimliche or “the un-home-like”). In spite of its moralistic conclusion,
“The Ancient Mariner” demonstrates that environmentalism is not about
being nice to birds because they remind us of ourselves or of things we
know. Rather, it is about becoming aware of the ugly, dysfunctional and
inhuman quality of the things we thought we knew. It is this sense of
alienation that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain stimulated a
more detached and scientific perception of nature, which in turn revealed
that everything was mired in the same interdependent biological reality.
The abstinence from animality thus inspired a new and far more physical
experience of intimacy.
3 Hunting for Pleasure
Wordsworth’s Ecofeminism

Wordsworth did not think much of “The Ancient Mariner.” In a letter to

Joseph Cottle, the publisher of the fi rst edition of Lyrical Ballads, he dis-
missed Coleridge’s poem as an “injury to the volume” and claimed that its
eccentricity and antiquated vocabulary had kept the collection from attain-
ing commercial success. Were a second edition to be published, he added in
the business spirit of a literary entrepreneur, the poem should be replaced
by “some little things” that are more palatable to public taste.1 When the
second, two-volume edition appeared in 1800, Coleridge’s ballad was still
there, but Wordsworth had demoted it to an inconspicuous penultimate
position in the fi rst volume. The new, second volume, however, opened
with a poem by Wordsworth that with suspicious precision followed the
narrative and moral trajectory of Coleridge’s ballad, as though Words-
worth had tried to deliver his own, more commercially oriented version of
“The Ancient Mariner.” That poem, “Hart-Leap Well,” probed the same
themes of animal abuse, environmental apocalypse and organic recovery,
but it downplayed the influence of the supernatural and instead put nature’s
redemptive power to the forefront.
In the fi rst part of the poem, an aristocratic hunter, Sir Walter, kills a
deer after a gruelling pursuit, only to abandon the animal “stone-dead”
(77). Sir Walter’s violence, unlike the Mariner’s, does not ensue from a
brooding epistemological anxiety nor does it leave him riddled with self-
doubt or neurotic guilt. As a man of action and little introspection, he kills
for the sheer physical sense of satisfaction and control which it gives him.
This hedonistic motivation becomes most obvious when, in a question-
able attempt to honour the animal and commemorate the hunt, he erects
a “pleasure-house” on the site where the hart died, “a place of love for
damsels that are coy” (57, 60). The second part of the poem moves forward
in time and shows how the bucolic brothel turned into a place of decay, as
if it was mysteriously struck by natural holocaust. The poem’s conclusion,
however, holds out the promise of environmental regeneration, as “Nature,
in due course of time, once more / Shall here put on her beauty and her
bloom” (171–72).
62 Animality in British Romanticism
“The Ancient Mariner” was not the only text Wordsworth had in mind
when he composed “Hart-Leap Well.” His poem was also loosely inspired by
Walter Scott’s “The Wild Huntsmen” (1796), which in turn was a translation
of Gottfried August Bürger’s “Der Wilde Jäger” (1786). Compared to these
poems, “Hart-Leap Well” is much less violent and vindictive. In “The Wild
Huntsmen,” God eventually appears from behind the clouds and punishes the
hunter with the stock-in-trade of apocalyptic reckoning: forests are scorched,
some “dogs of hell” enveloped by “sulphureous flames” emerge from the
earth and—in rigorous accord with retributive justice—the hunter is now
doomed to be chased until the end of time.2 Wordsworth, alternatively, does
not depict the demolition of Sir Walter’s pleasure-house and instead jumps
immediately forward in time, showing only the aftermath of ecological disas-
ter. In doing so, he leaves it open whether Sir Walter was punished at all for
his crime and shuns the morally dubious sense of Schadenfreude that drove
Scott’s poem towards its emotional catharsis.
By opting for a less sensationalist depiction of the chase, Wordsworth clearly
distances himself from the explicitness with which Scott portrays the hunter’s
violence. The danger of such an explicit and spectacularised account, after all,
is that it simply reproduces the brutality which it set out to condemn. In its
re-enactment of the hunt, it forces the animal to suffer and die a second time,
so to speak, for the purpose of moral edification and popular entertainment.
Scott’s revenge fantasy is even more insidious in that, rather than censuring the
hunter’s sadistic logic, it merely relocates this logic to a different level of the
aesthetic experience. When God dooms the hunter to be chased until the end
of time, it is the reader, in fact, who becomes the hunter and finds emotional
satisfaction in the victimisation of other creatures. Sadism, Scott’s poem thus
insinuates, is not fundamentally wrong; it just depends on whom one tortures.
Wordsworth’s criticism goes much further. He refuses to punish the hunter
in explicit terms and thereby frustrates the sadistic attitude which Scott’s
poem clearly invites and satisfies. “Hart-Leap Well,” then, not only criticises
the obscene violence of the hunt, but also formulates a more far-reaching self-
reflective critique of the violence of reading and the spectatorship of suffering.
This critique is articulated most forcefully in the didactic lesson at the end
of the poem, which tells us “Never to blend our pleasure or our pride / With
sorrow of the meanest thing that feels” (179–80). In its most obvious reading,
Wordsworth cautions us here not to take pleasure in the suffering of even the
most insignificant being. If we interpret meanest to denote “most immoral,”
however, the characterisation would refer to Sir Walter, and Wordsworth
would argue that even a sadistic philanderer like Sir Walter is entitled to our
compassion. This second interpretation supplements the poem’s moral argu-
ment with a pronounced aesthetic message that addresses the reader as reader
and advises us to shun the exploitation horror of sensationalist literature, a
genre Wordsworth famously attacked in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
In the Preface, Wordsworth lamented “this degrading thirst after out-
rageous stimulation” and asserted that “the human mind is capable of
 Hunting for Pleasure 63
being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants.”3
His criticism is usually interpreted as a thinly veiled rejection of the then
immensely fashionable genre of the gothic.4 With its empirical focus on
perceptual stimulation, however, his attack also takes aim at the psy-
chological modality which underpinned the gothic and accounted for
its popular appeal: Burke’s discourse of the sublime. Wordsworth never
openly criticised Burke’s aesthetic, but his sublime clearly departed from
the violent physiological model promoted in the Philosophical Enquiry.
Whereas Burke’s sublime hinged on aggressive sensory stimulation and
cognitive obstruction, Wordsworth’s was an intricate psychological and,
at times, intellectualist experience, developed not at the expense but by
virtue of his rational powers. During the sensation of the sublime, he
wrote, “the thoughts are not chained down by anguish, but they are free,
and tolerate neither limit nor circumscription.”5 The sublime, for him,
was less about witnessing extraordinary things than about seeing ordi-
nary things in an extraordinary light. This privileging of subjective cre-
ation over external stimulation was one of the defi ning characteristics
of Wordsworth’s poetics. “The Poet,” he wrote in the Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, “is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness
to think and feel without immediate external excitement.” What differ-
entiates “these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day,” then, is “that
the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation
and not the action and situation to the feeling.”6
With this in mind, we should read “Hart-Leap Well” as a critical riposte to
the prevailing position which Burke’s physiological aesthetics had assumed
in popular literature. The fundamental problem with Burke’s theory, Word-
sworth seems to say, is that it reduces aesthetic experiences to mere stim-
ulus-response patterns which bypass and, in due course, may incapacitate
rational judgment: it is coarsening and factually dehumanising. Excessive
sensory stimulation, he argues in the Preface, “blunt[s] the discriminating
powers of the mind” and “reduce[s] it to a state of almost savage torpor.” A
sensationalist conception of the aesthetic experience thus indirectly encour-
ages literary sensationalism or a constant “craving for extraordinary inci-
dent” that is wholly insensitive to the value of human and non-human life. 7
Because repeated or prolonged exposure inevitably leads to habituation and
desensitisation, moreover, a physiological aesthetics requires increasingly
powerful sensory stimuli to retain its appeal: the sublime needs increasingly
more gore to shock, the beautiful more lewdness to arouse. Without reflec-
tive judgment or moral temperance, Wordsworth fears, Burke’s aesthetics
of the sublime and beautiful may slide into the sadistic and pornographic.
This is, in fact, what happens in Wordsworth’s poem, in which Sir Walter’s
heart can only leap up when he beholds extremely graphic scenes of sex and
violence—incidentally also the twin pillars of gothic fiction. What Word-
sworth tries to do in “Hart-Leap Well” is to reinject a dose of cerebrality
and spirituality into Burke’s physiological aesthetics.
64 Animality in British Romanticism
The sublime, for Burke, was not just an aesthetic of perceptual domi-
nation, intoxicating our sensory organs with vast landscapes and terrifying
natural phenomena. It was also an aesthetic of political domination, which
renders “kings and commanders” at once threatening and admirable and, in
doing so, throws us into a pleasurable state of revering submission (Sublime
62). Basically, the sublime is that elusive quality which leads us to idolise
the power that exploits us. “I know of nothing sublime,” Burke wrote in his
Enquiry, “which is not some modification of power” (59). His Reflections
on the Revolution in France would make it abundantly clear that he was not
thinking of just any kind of power here. What was sublime for Burke was the
patriarchal autocracy of the ancien régime, a political system that Sir Walter
epitomises to parodic effect. Quite fittingly, then, Wordsworth represents his
protagonist in the elevated and hyperbolic style of the Burkean sublime. Just
as Burke proceeded in his Enquiry from natural symbols of power (tigers,
wolves, bulls) to political ones (kings, commanders) in a subtle rhetorical
sleight of hand to naturalise autocratic authority, Wordsworth portrays the
aristocratic hunter as a sublime natural force, comparing him to “a summer’s
cloud,” “a falcon” and “a veering wind” (2, 11, 17). The hunt, similarly, is
said to be “not like an earthly chase,” but a “glorious feat” taking place on “a
glorious day” (26, 38, 8). The contrast, however, which thus arises between
Sir Walter’s primitive behaviour and Wordsworth’s lofty representation has
a mock-heroic effect and opens up a sceptical fissure between political real-
ity and aesthetic representation. Sir Walter becomes a caricature of Burke’s
sublime patriarch, a Romantic Don Quixote who has lost touch with reality
and mistakes the brutal killing of an animal for an act of chivalry.
Wordsworth’s criticism in “Hart-Leap Well” is clearly aimed at Burke’s
anachronistic attachment to the politics and aesthetics of the ancien régime.
Burke had most emphatically defended chivalric tradition in his Refl ections
on the Revolution in France. “The age of chivalry is gone,” he lamented
there with a wistful sense of nostalgia that pervaded his entire pamphlet,
“that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain
like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which
ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil,
by losing all its grossness” (Refl ections 76). Although Wordsworth would
later endorse Burke’s traditionalist views, in his 1793 Letter to the Bishop
of Llandaff he alluded to this fragment from the Refl ections to attack the
hypocrisy of Burke’s political philosophy: “Mr Burke, in a philosophical
lamentation over the extinction of chivalry, told us that in those times vice
lost half its evil by losing all its grossness; infatuated moralist!”8 Playing
on the same anti-royalist sentiment, “Hart-Leap Well” exposes chivalry as
a deeply duplicitous system, whose obsession with decorum mainly serves
to conceal its moral decrepitude and to glamorise its retrograde brutality.
If a stain feels like a wound for Sir Walter, this is only because a wound
feels like a stain for him and because his ethical principles are dictated by a
tightly regulated set of aesthetic codes.
 Hunting for Pleasure 65
As though to compensate for his loss of power in the political sphere,
Sir Walter has relocated his restless desire for domination to nature, which
can still be easily conquered and controlled. Wordsworth now reintroduces
Burke’s sublime into its original habitat, and—as in Kant’s aesthetic—explores
an environmental rather than political power conflict. What follows, how-
ever, is not a high-minded epistemological struggle between consciousness
and matter, engendered by Sir Walter’s inability to represent the hart-in-itself
or conceptualise his failure of representation. In keeping with Burke’s physi-
ological aesthetics, the conflict between Sir Walter and the hart is a mere
muscular struggle between two mechanical bodies taking place in a purely
materialist space. Sir Walter finally transcends this sublime power conflict
not by way of a cerebral tour de force, but simply by killing the hart. In a
physiological interpretation of the sublime, it seems, the question of the other
can be resolved by obliterating the other physically. If your supersensible fac-
ulty of reason fails to conceptualise Mont Blanc, try detonating it. Perhaps
this is what the Mariner, too, attempted to do by shooting the albatross:
transcendence-through-destruction. But in his case, the animal’s death did
not initiate a return of civilised society but only gave way to the sweltering
psychological horror of the Kantian sublime. That Sir Walter abandons the
dead hart immediately after the chase illustrates the wasteful consumerism of
both the aristocratic economy and the Romantic sublime. Clearly, Sir Walter
does not care about the animal itself, but mainly hunts because it has a revi-
talising effect on his body. Kant, likewise, was more concerned with hunting
for the Real than with catching it: “we have no interest at all in the object,”
he writes in the Critique of Judgment, “i.e. its existence is indifferent to us”
(133). The strenuous but self-empowering effort to capture the thing-in-itself
is what ultimately matters. In fact, once one manages to represent it and
gratify one’s epistemic craving, the sublime subsides and the object of desire
loses its enigmatic appeal. It becomes a mundane thing—beautiful at best.
Let us attend more closely to a crucial scene in “Hart-Leap Well,” when
Sir Walter has just killed the animal and gazes upon its corpse—fi rst with a
complacent feeling of manly pride, then in a state of hysterical elation:

Dismounting, then, he leaned against a thorn;

He had no follower, dog, nor man, nor boy:
He neither cracked his whip, nor blew his horn,
But gazed upon the spoil with silent joy.
...
And now, too happy for repose or rest,
(Never had living man such joyful lot!)
Sir Walter walked all round, north, south, and west,
And gazed and gazed upon that darling spot. (33–36, 45–48)

Whereas the Ancient Mariner was a psychologically troubled masochist,

Sir Walter is a pure-bred sadist, who asserts his virility through the extreme
66 Animality in British Romanticism
debasement of non-human animals and women. Masochism and sadism,
it seems, are the two strategies at hand to keep the threat of the other at
bay and to retain our selfhood: either we inflict the violence of nature pre-
emptively upon ourselves and affirm our autonomy by delighting in our
worthlessness, or we redirect the violence back onto the physical world and
reclaim our authority by taking pleasure in nature’s vulnerability. The mas-
ochist turns his idealist rage inwards; the sadist turns it outwards. It was
Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry that inadvertently tied the sublime to sadis-
tic experience. Burke was fascinated, yet at the same time deeply troubled
by the emotional satisfaction we tend to derive from witnessing violence.
“I am convinced,” he recognised, “we have a degree of delight, and that
no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others” (Sublime 42).
Previous discussions of the sublime had already shown interest in the aes-
thetics of pity and Schadenfreude, but Burke’s account markedly differed
from these in its emphasis on authenticity. Whereas Joseph Addison, for
instance, claimed that we can only enjoy fictional suffering, Burke believed
that the spectatorship of real agony is much more emotionally rewarding.9
To demonstrate his point, he famously suggested that the public execution
of a notorious criminal would attract vastly more public attention than the
most realistic staging of the most ghastly tragedy (Sublime 43).
As a Christian moralist, however, Burke could not tolerate that our
enjoyment of human agony would be without ethical purpose. This enjoy-
ment, he therefore claimed, serves to direct our attention and, ultimately,
our sympathy towards the suffering subject. If the distress of others pro-
voked only grief or disgust, we would avert our eyes from scenes of misery
and our feelings of empathy would never be elicited. Given that sympathy is
“a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man,”
pity prompts us to feel the pain of others as if it was our own (Sublime
41). At this moment, when sensationalist pleasure blends with vicarious
discomfort, we experience a delightful horror—which is perhaps not as
powerful as the horror caused by the sublime, but which is certainly struc-
turally related. It is our own discomfort, then, that encourages us to relieve
the pain of others. Pity and Schadenfreude, for Burke, are thus complex
biological mechanisms, poised between pleasure and pain, sympathy and
self-interest. What Burke neglects to take into account, however, is that
the delight we derive from human or non-human suffering often greatly
outweighs our discomfort and that, in an attempt to trigger this pleasur-
able sensation deliberately, we might turn from the passive spectatorship
of suffering to active sadism. Burke tries to preclude this risk by interpret-
ing pity—like the sublime—as a feeling that catches us by surprise, not as
something that can be purposely or—as in Sir Walter’s case—recreation-
ally generated. Whereas sadism is predicated on a feeling of domination,
pity would engender precisely a temporary loss of rational control and
personal identity. It is a sort of knee-jerk response, Burke believes, that
occurs deeply below the radar of our rational awareness. Feelings of pity,
 Hunting for Pleasure 67
he claims, have little to do with our “reasoning faculty” and merely “arise
from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from the natural frame and
constitution of our minds” (Sublime 41).
Wordsworth’s emphasis on Sir Walter’s gaze (“[he] gazed upon the spoil
with silent joy”; “And gazed and gazed upon that darling spot”) draws
attention to the violence of the hunter’s spectatorship and, indirectly, to
our own sadistic gaze. By taking pleasure in the hart’s death struggle—
even if it is the negative pleasure produced by pity—we tap into the same
affective register that fuelled Sir Walter’s sadism and thus become unwit-
tingly complicit in his violence. Wordsworth is very conscious of this risk
and grapples with the problem of how to criticise violence and inspire an
empathic awareness without slipping into a sensationalist voyeurism that
would perpetuate the sacrificial cycle of sadism in the reader’s experience.
In order to shield his poem from the reader’s sadistic gaze, Wordsworth
punctuates its descriptive passages with some reflections on the representa-
tion of violence and the ethics of reading. In Part 1, he explicitly refuses to
portray the animal’s death and writes: “I will not stop to tell how far he
fled, / Nor will I mention by what death he died” (30–31). And he opens
Part 2 by distancing himself more obviously from the sensational violence
of the gothic: “The moving accident is not my trade, / To freeze the blood I
have no ready arts” (97–98). At the same time, this ethical problem that one
cannot criticise violence without showing and thereby rehearsing it presents
a commercial opportunity. With its reliance on subtle parody and sparse
authorial commentary, Wordsworth’s criticism of gothic sensationalism
in Part 1 is so underplayed that many readers might miss it completely
and take the fi rst part as a realistic, even slightly glorifying account of
the hunt—not that different in fact from Bürger’s or Scott’s versions.10 It
seems, indeed, that Wordsworth’s poem sought to placate two oppositional
audiences at the same time, with the neutral account of the hunt in Part 1
capitalising on the popular success of the gothic and the moralising second
part buttering up the critics, who tended to vilify gothic fiction as a vulgar
and morally debased genre.
Wordsworth’s moral denunciation of sadistic pleasure becomes more
problematic in the light of the poetic programme he set forth in the Preface
to Lyrical Ballads. The principal task of the poet, he argued there, is to sup-
ply the reader with intellectual and sensory enjoyment: “The Poet writes
under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immedi-
ate pleasure to a human Being.” In his defence of pleasure, Wordsworth
suggests that even the experience of pity is slightly gratifying: “wherever we
sympathize with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and
carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure.”11 Coming dangerously
close to Burke’s interpretation of pity, Wordsworth here seems to disregard
the fi nal warning of “Hart-Leap Well,” which adopts a very critical stance
against the enjoyment of suffering. All the same, there is still a significant
moral difference between Sir Walter’s sadistic impulse and the “subtle”
68 Animality in British Romanticism
pleasures we presumably derive from pity. Sir Walter does not sympathise
with the animal’s pain but causes it. And his pleasure—which is by no
means subtle—does not produce or carry on feelings of moral obligation,
but it drives him towards physical aggression and sexual violence. Words-
worth realised that excitement is an inflammatory and extremely volatile
state of mind which can easily escalate into more violent passions: “If the
words . . . by which this excitement is produced be in themselves powerful,
or the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with
them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its
proper bounds.”12 It is for this reason, he argued, that the poems in Lyrical
Ballads heavily relied on metre, as its familiar and regular cadence would
rein in “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” What Wordsworth
wanted to do in Lyrical Ballads, then, was to push human emotion to its
furthest viable limits without inducing the creative exhaustion and moral
fatigue which the gothic tended to cause. This is also what Coleridge held
to be the poet’s main duty. In a scathing review of Matthew Lewis’s gothic
novel The Monk (1796), he wrote: “To trace the nice boundaries, beyond
which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions,—to
reach those limits, yet never to pass them,—hic labor, hoc upus est [this
is the labour, this is the task].”13 “Hart-Leap Well,” in this sense, appends
an imperative note to Wordsworth’s plan in the Preface to concentrate on
“men in a state of vivid sensation.”14 Sir Walter clearly fi nds himself in such
a state of extreme excitement, but his pleasure is exclusively geared towards
bodily self-gratification and lacks moral feeling, which makes up an indis-
pensable component of the aesthetic experience for Wordsworth.
After the hunt, Sir Walter plans to construct a monument on the place
where he killed the hart:

I’ll build a pleasure-house upon this spot,

And a small arbour, made for rural joy;
‘Twill be the traveller’s shed, the pilgrim’s cot,
A place of love for damsels that are coy. (57–60)

This pleasure-house has all the earmarks of the so-called locus amoenus
(literally “pleasant place”), a trope in Latin and English pastoral literature
referring to an Arcadian enclave, geographically and ideationally removed
from the city’s social mores and sexual prudishness. The construction of
this genteel bordello may seem a gratuitous plot element, haphazardly
connected to the violent death of the hart and inserted for no other pur-
pose than to add a more pronounced chivalric ambience to a text that was
already steeped in the medieval ballad tradition. This trope, however, has
an important symbolic function in the poem’s moral development, as it
locates “Hart-Leap Well” within that tradition of chivalric poetry which
recruited the deer as a stand-in for woman and the hunt as a metaphor for
the pursuit of love or sexual intercourse (think of Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso
 Hunting for Pleasure 69
List to Hunt”). The locus amoenus should thus alert us to the metaphorical
significance of the chase and, in retrospect, suggests that Sir Walter was not
only trying to kill a deer, but also to woo a woman. If we keep in mind the
brutality of the chase, however, it appears that Sir Walter did not seduce
a woman in the refi ned and respectful mode dictated by the courtly love
tradition. He raped her and, once he had satisfied his physical desire, left
her behind “stone-dead.” Rather than paying homage to chivalric romance,
Wordsworth reprehends it and uncovers its sexually exploitative underside.
The courtly love tradition, he shows, does not partake of a civilising proj-
ect that restrains male sexual desire, but it seeks to romanticise a ruthless
libidinal economy of female appropriation and sexual accumulation. That
Wordsworth introduces the gender trope only after the hunt suggests that
we should not reduce the hart to its metaphorical double and that it rep-
resents both femininity and animality. As an ecofeminist critique of sorts,
indeed, his text allows two layers of meaning to operate and interact at
the same time, thus demonstrating the aesthetic and ideological interplay
between the patriarchal exploitation of the non-human animal and the
sexual domination of woman.
By revealing the masculine aggression underpinning the courtly love tra-
dition, Wordsworth unsettles the psychological dichotomy between erotic
desire and the death drive as well as the correlative aesthetic distinction
between beauty and sublimity. Whereas the beautiful is traditionally con-
ceived of as a refi ned feminine aesthetic, provoking but also softening male
sexual desire, the sublime is seen to play on primeval masculine instincts
of self-preservation. In a reductionist evolutionary account, the beautiful
is the aesthetic of the loving housewife and mother; the sublime refers to
the monosyllabic violence of the hunting and fornicating husband.15 The
distinction is not this simple or binary, however. In the course of its criti-
cal history, the sublime forayed into the sexual sphere of the beautiful and
developed into an aesthetic of rape and female molestation. John Dennis,
most notably, related rhetorical prowess to sexual aggression when he inter-
preted the sublime as a “pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader.”16
Even Kant’s frigidly intellectualist account is couched in ambiguous sexual
terms and compares the sublime interaction between consciousness and
matter to a “vibration, i.e. . . . a rapidly alternating repulsion from and
attraction to one and the same object” which is “followed by a stronger
outpouring of the vital force” (Judgment 141, 111).17 Not surprisingly, it
is Burke’s physiological aesthetics that eroticises the sublime most plainly.
Initially, Burke locates sexual instinct within the affective domain of the
beautiful. Beauty, he argues, induces “gratifications and pleasures” which
can be subdivided into passions of “propagation” and less sexualised feel-
ings of love and sympathy (Sublime 37). But although Burke fi rst places
lust within the category of the beautiful, he later in the Enquiry charges
it with sublime power, defi ning it as a “violent and tempestuous” passion
and “an energy of the mind, that hurries us on to the possession of certain
70 Animality in British Romanticism
objects” (23, 83). Lust is thus an androgynous emotion, blending the libidi-
nal energy of the beautiful with the virile brutality of the sublime and, in
this way, undercutting the dichotomous power and gender relations that
structure Burke’s aesthetic model.
Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well” destabilises this dichotomy by showing
that sublime violence can be a source of sexual arousal. That Sir Walter
experiences a “silent joy” or a sort of postcoital relief after he has killed
the hart and that he erects a pastoral brothel on this place suff used with
violence clearly drives home the erotic undercurrent of his sadistic excite-
ment. The hunt, it seems, provides him with a socially sanctioned outlet for
his atavistic sexual and aggressive drives. Wordsworth here looks forward
to Freud’s evolutionary interpretation of male sadism as the outgrowth of a
strain of violence intrinsic to male sexuality. “The sexuality of most male
human beings,” Freud would argue, “contains an element of aggressive-
ness—a desire to subjugate; the biological significance of it seems to lie in
the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other
than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggres-
sive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and
exaggerated, and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.”18
Burke, too, realised that there is an element of sexual aggression lying dor-
mant within the aesthetic of the beautiful, but he trusted moral law and
social custom to contain its violence.
Sir Walter’s construction of a pleasure-house on the site where the hart
died topographically relates his death drive to his libido and thus further
breaks down Burke’s barrier between beauty and sublimity. As a feminine
space designed to incite and gratify male sexual desire, Sir Walter’s locus
amoenus is a clear reification of the Burkean beautiful. By tracing the cul-
tural history of the pleasure-house, however, Wordsworth reveals that the
beautiful brothel is built on an infrastructure of environmental appropria-
tion and sexual degradation. Beauty, he shows in this way, is not an organic
quality springing spontaneously from the soil, as Burke argued. But it origi-
nates from the repressive politics of the sublime—an idea that Coleridge also
brought forward in “The Ancient Mariner.” The difference is that whereas
the Mariner created beauty symbolically through the psychological mas-
ochism of the Kantian sublime, Sir Walter domesticates nature physically
through the sadism unwittingly promoted by Burke’s empirical aesthetics.
As in “The Ancient Mariner,” the aesthetic of the beautiful in “Hart-Leap
Well” counteracts the isolating politics of the sublime and reconciles Sir
Walter to his human and natural environment. Sir Walter is no longer a
lone hunter now, with “no follower, dog, nor man, nor boy” (34), but he
seems to have matured into a gregarious and socially integrated man. And
yet, in accordance with Burke’s corporeal interpretation of the beautiful as
a quality that “acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system,” Sir Walter’s
materialist take on the “One Life” philosophy boils down to an orgiastic
 Hunting for Pleasure 71
interaction that offers him only a very physical and spasmodic kind of relief
from his sublime alienation (Sublime 136).
Sir Walter also implants three stone pillars on the site, phallic symbols
through which he stakes out his territory and colonises female space. Eco-
logical terror and sexual exploitation, Wordsworth shows, operate as mutu-
ally sustaining practices, turning the animal into a rape victim and woman
into a piece of meat. Wordsworth’s criticism here anticipates the ecofeminism
of Carol J. Adams. In The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), Adams has argued
that the consumption of meat is a deeply symbolic act through which man
represents and reinforces his social and sexual authority.19 Although feminist
theory had already signalled and reprobated the bestialisation of woman in
patriarchal culture, Adams brought a new and provocative perspective to
this discussion, a perspective which saw the male objectifying gaze at work
not only in the pornographic consumption of the female body but also in
the commercial visualisation of the non-human animal, whose flesh tends
to be advertised both as a stimulant of sexual appetite (a fit heterosexual
man loves his meat) and as an object of sexual desire in itself (think of those
rather obscene adverts in which cartoon animals seductively promote their
own flesh). Woman and animal thus appear to share a fundamental sense of
victimhood in patriarchy’s visual regime of taste—an insight Wordsworth’s
“Hart-Leap Well” formulates with equal acumen.
Adams’s feminist-vegetarian project received indirect backing from
Jacques Derrida’s concept of carnophallogocentrism, which problematised
the same cultural dialectic between the violent formation of male subjec-
tivity and the institutionalised victimisation of the non-human animal.20
Derrida’s concept is worth mentioning because it adjoins a notion of sacri-
fice to its interpretation of carnivorism, a notion that also plays a constitu-
tive role in “Hart-Leap Well,” where—considering that the animal’s body
is never consumed—the hunt clearly performs a ritualistic function. But
exactly who or what needs to be sacrificed? For Derrida, carnivorous prac-
tice and discourse seek to exorcise the animalistic from patriarchal culture
and to position man as an autonomous rational subject at the centre of the
social order. “Carnivorous sacrifice,” he writes, “is essential to the struc-
ture of subjectivity, which is also to say to the founding of the intentional
subject.”21 In a riff on Derrida’s point, Cary Wolfe explains that “the full
transcendence of the ‘human’ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal’ and the
animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which we
can engage in a ‘non-criminal putting to death’ (as Derrida puts it) not only
of animals, but other humans as well by marking them as animal.”22 This
sacrificial transcendence of the animal has little to do with the mysophobic
enlightenment reached in Kant’s sublime. As Wordsworth shows in “Hart-
Leap Well,” the establishment of civil society and cultural construction of
the male subject is facilitated by a brutal and very physical repression of the
non-human. By killing the hart, Sir Walter supposedly also eradicates the
72 Animality in British Romanticism
animal within and becomes a self-ruling human subject, in perfect control
of his primordial drives. It is blatantly paradoxical, of course, that he can
only shake off his primitivism by engaging in an act of bestial violence.
Moreover, he does not really abandon his animal instincts, but only discov-
ers a way to satisfy them at a more favourable cost-benefit ratio: accumu-
lating women in a brothel, after all, is much less arduous and controversial
than molesting them in the woods. Although the pleasure-house is pre-
sented as a place of high culture, then, it does not mark a watershed break
away from primitive desire and is still a place of bestial lust and violence.
That the creation of beauty and human autonomy requires the sacrifice
of animality is also what Burke argued in his Enquiry. Humans, he rea-
lised, share with non-human animals many instincts and affects, including
their reproductive drives. Whereas in other animals, these sexual drives
operate without social restraint, humans tend to refi ne their lust into more
socially hygienic sentiments such as love or sympathy: “The passion which
belongs to generation, merely as such, is lust only. This is evident in brutes,
whose passions are more unmixed, and which pursue their purposes more
directly than ours” (Sublime 39). Because love (and not lust) is the defi n-
ing emotional response to the beautiful, it is by purifying our animal lust
into more social affections that we achieve beauty and become human. The
beautiful, for Burke, is thus a human and humanising aesthetic.
In the fi rst stanza of Part 2, the poet-narrator ostentatiously moves his
voice to the foreground to distance his narrative from both the empirical
and moral sensationalism of the Burkean sublime:

The moving accident is not my trade;

To freeze the blood I have no ready arts:
‘Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts. (97–100)

The poet’s intention “to pipe a simple song for thinking hearts” rather than
freeze the blood marks a clear shift away from Burke’s physiological sub-
lime towards a more cerebral aesthetic that relies on both sensory stimula-
tion and rational reflection. And yet, this authorial intervention does not
provide a very accurate preview of the poem’s further development, but it
primarily pays lip service to Wordsworth’s criticism in the Preface of the
gothic and its recourse to “gross and violent stimulants.” Although there
is defi nitely more room in the second part for rational contemplation and
spiritual morality, its topographical interest in ruin and its low-key ecofemi-
nist revenge fantasy still clearly play on gothic motifs. Rather than rejecting
Burke’s beautiful and sublime altogether and putting forward an intellec-
tualist or Wordsworthian sublime, then, “Hart-Leap Well” tries to rescue
Burke’s physiological aesthetics from its inherent exploitative tendencies
by transplanting its interest in ruin, power, domesticity, female beauty and
sensory pleasure into an ecofeminist discourse.
 Hunting for Pleasure 73
The second part of the poem shows how Sir Walter’s sumptuous plea-
sure-house was levelled to the ground. What remains is a bleak and sterile
landscape:

The trees were grey, with neither arms nor head;

Half wasted the square mound of tawny green;
So that you just might say, as then I said,
“Here in old time the hand of man hath been.”

I looked upon the hill both far and near,

More doleful place did never eye survey;
It seemed as if the spring-time came not here,
And Nature here were willing to decay. (109–16)

Wordsworth’s refusal to reveal what actually happened is decidedly double-

edged. Although his reticence seeks to eschew the exploitation horror of
gothic fiction, it also insinuates, in its calculated suggestiveness, a supernatu-
ral catastrophe which perhaps never happened. Given the unidentified time
lapse between Part 1 and Part 2, the pleasure-house may well have been
ruined by a gradual process of natural evolution rather than supernatural
revolution. But although Wordsworth clearly gestures at this possibility, his
deliberate vagueness leaves room for much less rational explanations. That
it is, moreover, a superstitious shepherd—not exactly a dependable source—
who suggests that Sir Walter’s “jolly place” was demolished by divine agency
in an act of supernatural retribution only adds to the ambiguity (133). This
shepherd, however, plays a more complex and integral role than the typical
subsidiary characters that Wordsworth often employs in his poetry (the most
famous example probably being his sister Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey”).
Rather than legitimating the poet’s voice—as these subsidiary characters
usually do—the shepherd serves to counterpoint it. “Small difference lies
between thy creed and mine,” the poet says, addressing the shepherd (172).
The difference is small, indeed, but crucial. Whereas the shepherd resorts to
supernatural explanation and believes God cursed the place, the poet is more
prudent and never posits a causal relationship between Sir Walter’s sadism
and the destruction of the pleasure-house. At the limit, he observes a vague
sense of moral justice inherent in nature’s workings:

The Being, that is in the clouds and air,

That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves. (175–78)

The disagreement between the shepherd and the poet is aporetic rather
than polemical, in that it allows Wordsworth to consider two completely
opposite viewpoints without dismissing either. That Wordsworth never
74 Animality in British Romanticism
unequivocally distances himself from the shepherd’s folkloric and anthropo-
morphic account, I believe, reflects his own ongoing ambivalence about the
role and status of the supernatural. In his later poem The Excursion (1814),
he would elaborate on this ambivalence, writing that he still preferred—
with a measure of reluctance—to hold fast to that “rustic ignorance” or
superstitious view which invested owls and magpies with ominous meaning
rather than believe in a completely mechanistic world, “Where soul is dead,
and feeling hath no place” (4:15, 4:21). As a clear embodiment of this rustic
ignorance, the shepherd allows Wordsworth to funnel a pattern of reason-
ing which he clearly still appreciates but thinks too contentious to voice
himself. The shepherd, who is the principal narrator in “Hart-Leap Well,”
also exonerates Wordsworth from the charge of callousness. If the spiteful
account of Sir Walter’s death seems to blend pleasure with sorrow of the
meanest thing that feels, the poet-narrator can easily shift responsibility to
the shepherd, whose story he is merely recording. Clearly aware of the risk
of Schadenfreude, the poet-narrator also strikes a much more elegiac tone
than the shepherd and emphasises the redemptive rather than vindictive
power of nature.
The decay of the pleasure-house evokes what Vincent Arthur De Luca
in his study of William Blake has called the “sublime of ruins.” 23 This
aesthetic of ruins overwhelms us by reminding us of the grandeur of past
tyrannies and, at the same time, confronting us with a superior force that
transcended and destroyed these tyrannies. In his discussion of pity and
Schadenfreude, Burke in fact outlined a very similar sublime:

The prosperity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agree-

ably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon, and the
distress of its unhappy prince. Such a catastrophe touches us in history
as much as the destruction of Troy does in fable. Our delight, in cases
of this kind, is very greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent
person who sinks under an unworthy fortune. (Sublime 42)

It is easy to see why the sublime of ruins—much to Burke’s indignation—

moved to prominence in revolutionary discourse and became a popular
prism through which to refract the downfall of the French monarchy. It
also frequently emerged in religious rhetoric, where it served to contrast
the transient nature of material values with the permanent spiritual truths
of Christianity. 24 Although these political and religious meanings are defi-
nitely at play in “Hart-Leap Well,” Wordsworth charges the sublime of
ruins here primarily with environmental importance and interprets it as a
discourse of ecological change, demonstrating human insignificance in the
face of natural disaster or biological evolution. With his focus on violent
environmental and political destruction, Wordsworth may still be operat-
ing within Burke’s aesthetic model here, but he tries to calibrate that model
to make it more sensitive to animal suffering.
 Hunting for Pleasure 75
The sublime of ruins bears a strong resemblance to the aesthetic of the
picturesque, which incidentally shares with the gothic an architectural
interest in medieval ruin. In An Essay on the Picturesque (1794), Uvedale
Price defi ned the picturesque as a variety of beauty created by the corrosive
effects of time. “Time,” he wrote, “converts a beautiful object into a pictur-
esque one.”25 Despite this emphasis on time, the picturesque is a profoundly
ahistorical category that is generally very secretive about its own cultural
origin. In Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” most notably, the ruined abbey
blends in completely with its natural surroundings and is not even men-
tioned in the poem—the reference in the title aside. The picturesque, it
seems, induces a permanent loss of cultural memory, so that political arte-
facts come to appear as natural objects and even Auschwitz might look
like a quaint train station or a dilapidated amusement park (this is, by the
way, why the desire of some ecocritics to experience nature as though they
encountered it for the fi rst time is not without political risk). The pictur-
esque, then, is that aesthetic quality which sanitises political trauma into
pastoral nostalgia and which is able to market a disaster scene as a tourist
attraction. Very much like the beautiful, it is a discourse of aesthetic recu-
peration, which simultaneously results from and masks the political vio-
lence of the sublime. But there is a difference. Whereas the aesthetic of the
beautiful occludes the cruelty that formed it behind a screen of spontaneity
and organicism, the picturesque manages to display its ideological wounds
openly and unapologetically without triggering historical consciousness or
provoking moral suspicion. As such, it constitutes an even more successful
mystification of the violence of the sublime.
“Hart-Leap Well,” too, in part mystifies the ideological origin of ruin.
In a well-intentioned attempt to mute the sensationalist violence of the
gothic and sublime, Wordsworth does not clarify why or how the pleasure-
house decayed. Instead, he opts for an explanation that ambiguously vacil-
lates between natural evolutionism and supernatural catastrophism. But
although he does not historicise the destruction of the pleasure-house, he
does provide a detailed and systematic account of the monument’s violent
construction and exploitative function. The central narrative act in “Hart-
Leap Well,” indeed, is archaeological. The poem is an attempt to reconstruct
the past from the cryptic detritus of the present. From the ruins, it retraces
the building of the pleasure-house, Sir Walter’s brutal chase and eventually
goes all the way back to the hart’s family life. By chronicling the history of
the pleasure-house, Wordsworth exposes the physical violence that under-
lies picturesque ruin and compromises the political amnesia and falsely
nostalgic gaze it tends to inspire. It was this gaze that John Ruskin would
come to reject half a century later in his discussion of the English pictur-
esque, which in his view nourished a politically naive aesthetic attitude that
was “fondly garrulous of better days.” Ruskin criticised what he described
as the “lower” picturesque, whose obsession with aesthetic formalism, he
believed, went in tandem with moral apathy: “the lower picturesque ideal
76 Animality in British Romanticism
is eminently a heartless one: the lover of it seems to go forth into the world
in a temper as merciless as its rocks. All other men feel some regret at the
sight of disorder and ruin. He alone delights in both.”26
Whereas Sir Walter’s sublime was a testosterone-driven turbo discourse,
aggressively submitting animal and woman to male authority, the sublime
of ruins operates as an ecofeminist aesthetic that emancipates nature by
gently restoring its wildness and inhumanity. The trees of the pleasure-
house now look grey and have “neither arms nor head,” as if Sir Walter’s
harem has been stripped of its anthropomorphic guise (109). The shep-
herd’s failure to classify these trees in an accurate way—“Some say that
they are beeches, others elms” (135)—recalls the semantic obstruction
that the Ancient Mariner experienced and his maladroit description of the
water-snakes as slimy things with legs. For the shepherd and the poet, too,
nature appears dismantled to its bare thingness—useless unnameable stuff
that resists the cold unsparing eye of the hunter. Here, as in “The Ancient
Mariner,” the ecological sublime sets nature free by defacing it and turning
it into a desert. As a space that withstands cultivation and human control,
the desert radically inverts the anthropocentric politics of Sir Walter’s gar-
den. 27 It is an anti-garden, a site which emphasises that nature exists in its
own right, oblivious to the human desire for meaning and purpose.
Just as in the fi rst part of “Hart-Leap Well,” where the violent tension of
the sublime hunt gave way to the sexual release of the beautiful pleasure-
house, Wordsworth shifts focus in Part 2 from the sublime destruction of
the brothel to two beautiful scenes—one set in the past, the other one set in
the future. The fi rst scene is a lachrymose flashback to the hart’s life before
Sir Walter put an untimely end to it. Whereas Sir Walter sought to mitigate
the solitary aggression of the chase through the carnal entertainment of the
pleasure-house, Wordsworth now presents a more durable kind of social
bonding, based on biological rather than sexual relationships:

This water was perhaps the first he drank

When he had wandered from his mother’s side.

In April here beneath the flowering thorn

He heard the birds their morning carols sing;
And he, perhaps, for aught we know, was born
Not half a furlong from that self-same spring. (151–56)

In his Philosophical Enquiry, Burke also defined the beautiful as a familial

aesthetic designed to strengthen social cohesion and emotional attachment.
But his emphasis on the father as the legislating nucleus of the family, in con-
junction with his physiological interpretation of the aesthetic and his persis-
tent eroticisation of the female body, reduced the beautiful to an expression
of spurious domesticity, an aesthetic of whoring that stripped the family of
its social functions and commercialised its sexual relations. For Wordsworth,
 Hunting for Pleasure 77
on the other hand, the male and the violent seem too intimately connected to
allow even a single father figure into his pastoral family portrait. His ecologi-
cal beautiful involves a reconciliation based on maternal values, not on the
patriarchal sexual politics of Burke’s heteronormative family model.
The second scene of beauty looks forward to a period of organic renewal:

The pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before,

This is no common waste, no common gloom;
But Nature, in due course of time, once more
Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. (169–72)

The beauty of Sir Walter’s garden was a painstakingly manufactured kind

of beauty, meant to illustrate his domesticating power. Wordsworth now
contrasts this cultivated space with a species of beauty that is not human-
made or designed to gratify man’s sexual desires, a beauty that arises and
thrives without his gardening expertise. Like Burke’s aesthetic, this organic
beauty is gendered as feminine, but it is an active and autonomous female
force that sabotages rather than affirms Sir Walter’s phallocentric politics.
In Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (1994), Judith Page has
convincingly argued that this development from a red-blooded, anti-social
sublime to an aesthetic of beauty valorising community and domestic expe-
rience also occurs in the poem that is generally referred to as “The Two-Part
Prelude,” written in 1799. 28 In Book 1 of this autobiographical volume, Page
has noticed, the younger Wordsworth often goes out to explore nature on
his own, combining the intellectual pleasure of geographical discovery with
the sadistic gratification of ransacking and exploiting: he steals woodcocks
trapped in other people’s snares, plunders a raven’s nest and even steals a
boat. These vignettes portray Wordsworth as a solitary aggressor, who,
pursued by prepubescent feelings of guilt, fi nally becomes aware of some
vague transcendental presence, which makes both his crimes and his own
being look immensely petty. Just as in “Hart-Leap Well” and “The Ancient
Mariner,” his violent exploitation of nature provokes a sense of alienation
and ultimately a sublime revelation—if only on a smaller, infant’s scale.
When he recounts the environmental estrangement felt after having stolen
a small boat, he does not sound that different from the Mariner. Robbed
of its knowable semantic veneer, nature is now brought down to its blank
thingness, its familiar objects reduced to “huge and mighty forms”:

There was a darkness—call it solitude,

Or blank desertion—no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields,
But huge and mighty forms that do not live
Like living men moved slowly through my mind
By day, and were the trouble of my dreams. (1:123–29)29
78 Animality in British Romanticism
Wordsworth recorded this evolution from the juvenile violence of the
sublime to the feminine serenity of the beautiful on several occasions
around the turn of the century. In “Nutting,” published in the 1800 edition
of Lyrical Ballads, he portrays himself as a young Sir Walter, penetrating
a piece of wild, unexplored nature. His enjoyment, which is suggestively
sexual, brings to mind the “silent joy” that Sir Walter experienced after
killing the hart:

Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook

Unvisited, where not a broken bough
Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign
Of devastation; but the hazels rose
Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung,
A virgin scene!—A little while I stood,
Breathing with such suppression of the heart
As joy delights in; and, with wise restraint
Voluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyed
The banquet. (16–25)

Unlike Sir Walter, however, the boy comes to regret his predatory usur-
pation of nature and, seeing into the life of things, discovers that “there
is a spirit in the woods” (56). These fragments from “The Two-Part Pre-
lude” and “Nutting” throw a different light on Wordsworth’s mock-heroic
depiction of Sir Walter’s chase. Maybe Wordsworth’s lofty portrayal was
not a sign of ironic detachment but of nostalgic identification, and maybe
Wordsworth genuinely sympathised with Sir Walter’s specious attempts at
heroism and gallantry. Take this other scene from “The Two-Part Prelude,”
in which a young ice-skating Wordsworth “wheel[s] about Proud and exult-
ing, like an untired horse / That cares not for its home” and imitates “the
chace / And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn, / The pack loud bel-
lowing, and the hunted hare” (1:154–55, 1:158–60). But unlike Sir Walter,
the poet has grown up, and although nesting, snaring, nutting and hunting
might be pardonable sins of childhood, they become grossly immoral acts
when committed in adulthood.
Judith Page goes so far as to interpret this aesthetic evolution from the
sublime to the beautiful in biographical terms. In his later poetry, she
argues, Wordsworth would come to favour the matriarchal domesticity of
the beautiful over the muscular soliloquy of the sublime. Page refers to his
essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” in which he asserted that the sub-
lime mainly appeals to the adolescent mind, whereas more mature individ-
uals tend to prefer the “love & gentleness” of the beautiful.30 We should be
careful, nevertheless, of extrapolating the aesthetic development in poems
such as “Hart-Leap Well” and “Nutting” to Wordsworth’s evolution as
a writer and person. The progression from the sublime to the beautiful is
also one that inheres in the basic developmental structure of the Romantic
 Hunting for Pleasure 79
sublime, which is such a physically intense and cognitively taxing experi-
ence that it cannot last long without infl icting permanent neural, moral or
political damage. That the violence of the Romantic sublime, then, is often
relieved by the mellow ambience of the beautiful—which can be both con-
servative (see Sir Walter’s pastoral bordello) and progressive (see the return
of nature in Part 2)—has arguably as much to do with the biology as with
the ideology of the aesthetic.
Part II
4 Humans and Other Moving Things
Wordsworth Visits London
(with Deleuze and Guattari)

For a brief but intensely traumatic moment, the Romantic sublime suspends per-
sonal identity. It induces “a sense of self-annihilation” according to Coleridge;
Percy Shelley talks of a “trance sublime”; and Wordsworth believes its nar-
cotic effects virtually place the body in a state of hibernation: “the motion
of our human blood / Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body.”1 This
experience of self-loss has been variously interpreted. It has been politicised
as a deprivation of civil liberty, gendered as a subversion of male selfhood and
pathologised in terms of hysteria and obsessional neurosis.2 Burke’s physio-
logical account, however, suggests a more pervasive impact on human subjec-
tivity that reaches well beyond our political, sexual or psychological identities
and that transforms how we see ourselves not just as individuals but also as
biological beings. His sublime sends us back into survival mode. We become
vacantly transfixed by the source of danger, our frontal cortex shuts down
and we fall back on our amygdala—that primitive part of the brain where our
fight-or-flight responses are elicited. Burke’s sublime, it would seem, tempo-
rarily robs us of those qualities that are typically, if often wrongly, regarded
as uniquely human, such as speech, a sense of personal identity, self-reflective
consciousness and intentional agency. We become animals. That is also what
the French naturalist Comte de Buffon suggested in his eighteenth-century
encyclopaedic study Natural History. In his view, intoxicating bouts of panic
and excitement are profoundly dehumanising and supply us with a rather
accurate insight into the mental state of non-human animals:

We may, perhaps, acquire some notion of the consciousness of exis-

tence which animals possess, by reflecting on our own condition, when
strongly occupied with any object, or so violently agitated with passion
as to preclude every reflex idea of ourselves. This condition is expressed
by saying, A man is absent, or out of himself. We are out of ourselves
when fully immersed in actual sensations, and especially when these sen-
sations are violent, rapid and leave the mind no leisure to reflect. . . . This
condition, in which we have momentary impressions of our existence
only, is the habitual state of animals; deprived of ideas, and furnished
with sensations, they know not their existence, but they feel it.3
84 Animality in British Romanticism
Buffon puts his fi nger on a curious paradox in the discourse of the sub-
lime. That ecstatic moment when the mind seems to disengage itself from
the body and to fly off to ethereal heights, he reasons, is exactly the moment
when it is most deeply immersed in its corporeal existence. Buffon’s belief,
however, that these intervals of thoughtlessness and complete sensory
absorption can teach us what it must be like to experience reality as a non-
human animal is fraught with the same contradiction that compromises
the epistemological logic of the Romantic sublime. After all, how can one
possibly reflect on a mindset that is defi ned precisely by its absence of self-
reflexive thought and its defiance to memorisation? As non-human animals
supposedly lack rational self-awareness, can our vicarious understanding
of their consciousness ever be less speculative than the account of a dream
we fail to remember? Moreover, it makes little sense to say that the sublime
animalises humanity (after all, you cannot become what you already are).
Rather, it reduces us to that state which humanist culture tendentiously
has come to associate with animality, that is, a state of moral inertia and
mindless automaticity. It would, therefore, be more accurate to say that the
Romantic sublime is a dehumanising aesthetic or that it engenders a con-
vulsive throwback to an earlier stage in human evolution.
This sense of dehumanisation is not only an effect of the sublime. For
many Romantic-period writers, the prospect of losing their fi xed species
identity was also a source of unspeakable horror. The mind-numbing
monotony of factory labour, the exceeding brutality of political violence
and the new scientific understanding of humanity’s animal anatomy pro-
voked exactly the kinds of distressing emotional reactions that Burke had
analysed in his Enquiry. With its interest in liminality, transgression and
self-dissolution, the sublime became a very malleable diagnostic category
with which to assess and articulate the rapidly changing meaning of human
identity in modernity.4 What was overwhelming for the urban poet was not
the mountain veiled in matinal fog or the tiger slinking ominously through
the jungle, but the Industrial Revolution—its “dark Satanic Mills,” its ruth-
less exploitation of a growing immiserated proletariat, and its pervasive
technocratic mechanisation of human physicality. 5 On the face of it, Blake’s
“The Tyger” seems to present just another example of Burke’s natural sub-
lime. But what is so unsettling about the animal is that it is actually a
cyborg version 0.1, an eerily flawless assemblage of organic vitality and
technological innovation—“What the hammer? what the chain? / In what
furnace was thy brain?” (13–14). This industrial mechanisation of the flesh,
many Romantic-period poets and philosophers feared, would in due course
lead to a total moral devaluation of human life. It reduced, Robert Southey
believed, the human subject to “a manufacturing animal” whose ethical
worth rested solely in its physical capacity to produce, circulate and con-
sume tradable goods.6
It is also this dehumanising industrial logic and its sweeping impact on
public space and social relations that occasions the urban sublime in Book
 Humans and Other Moving Things 85
7 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. The Book recounts Wordsworth’s four-
month stay in London in the first half of 1791, but rather than offering a
chronological account of his residence, it presents a purposely disjointed
montage of sensory impressions interspersed with more sedate philosophi-
cal meditations on the nature and value of human life in urban mass cul-
ture.7 Wordsworth’s experience of London street life is one of overpowering
estrangement. In a tone wavering between disbelief and disgust, he tries
to capture the city’s feral underclass (immigrants, beggars, pimps, pros-
titutes, invalids, street performers, circus animals), laments its capitalist
instrumentalisation of human beings (“life and labour seem but one”), and
struggles to take in the audiovisual overload of London’s thriving entertain-
ment industry (“What a shock / For eyes and ears”) (69–71, 685–86). As
quite a number of critics have already signalled, Book 7 heavily relies on
the stylistic register of the sublime.8 With its resistance to representation
and alienating evocation of human insignificance, London’s cityscape has
the same effect on Wordsworth as his journey through the Alps, which he
famously described in Book 6 of The Prelude and which has become one of
the classic examples of Wordsworth’s natural sublime. The urban sublime
proceeds more or less along the same trajectory as its organic counterpart:
it starts with a scene of domestic tranquillity that is suddenly disrupted
by a disturbing recollection of urban reality. This confrontation with the
city initially defies rational understanding and provokes a crisis of human
identity and cognition. As in the natural sublime, however, Wordsworth
ultimately overcomes this crisis when he discovers in himself a superior
intellectual power that enables him to control the city’s “unmanageable
sight” and to ward off its encroaching physicality (732).
Rather than devising a new technical vocabulary to represent the over-
whelming reality of urban life, Wordsworth continually filters the city
through the discourse of nature and describes its eccentric population and
strange spectacles in the haphazard way an aspiring naturalist might docu-
ment an alien and potentially threatening life form:

Rise up, thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain

Of a too busy world! Before me flow,
Thou endless stream of men and moving things!
Thy every-day appearance, as it strikes—
With wonder heightened, or sublimed by awe–
On strangers, of all ages; the quick dance
Of colours, lights, and forms; the deafening din. (149–55)

The city’s chaotic choreography conjures up the erratic movement of the

scintillating water-snakes in Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” a species that
seemed as repugnant yet visually enthralling. Wordsworth’s mechanistic
categorisation of these urban creatures as “moving things” also recalls
Coleridge’s schematic characterisation of the water-snakes as “slimy things
86 Animality in British Romanticism
. . . with legs” and demonstrates how the sublime has the tendency to strip
reality of its knowable human surface. Like the Mariner, Wordsworth
draws on the sublime in Book 7 to represent and repair an imbalance in the
power relationship between the perceiving subject and the natural object.
What interests me here in the fi rst place, however, is how the sublime func-
tions in Book 7 as a discourse of species, bringing Wordsworth face to face
to humanity’s animal nature. In the bedlam of urban ecology, it seems, the
human subject loses not just its individuality and self-possession; it is also
robbed of its stable biological identity. We become animal or, to put it in a
more accurate way, we gain an enhanced sense of our animality and of a
fundamental physicality we share with other life forms.
To better understand why and how these biological transgressions
occur, I suggest introducing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept
of becoming-animal here. By remixing the sublime with this poststructur-
alist concept, I am not just looking to add a crispy postmodern beat or
fashionably French groove to my discourse. There is something far more
substantial to be gained. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory will allow me to
explain why these sublime species mutations tend to take place in large
urban crowds where there are few actual non-human animals rather than
in localist pastoral settings, why they fill a generally animal-friendly poet
like Wordsworth with such horror and trepidation and how the aesthetic of
the beautiful can counteract the urban assault on human integrity.
First, what is becoming-animal? The concept received its most extensive
treatment in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the second volume of Deleuze
and Guattari’s double study Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where it was
embedded in a wide-ranging criticism of Western ontology and epistemol-
ogy. In reaction to metaphysical and dualistic notions of identity, Deleuze
and Guattari urged the patriarchal subject to become-animal, woman,
nomad and even vegetable. How to become-dog then (to take one example)?
We should not try to turn ourselves into actual dogs, even if this were possi-
ble, for such an absolute transformation would simply substitute one stable,
monolithic category (the human) with another one (the dog) and would
deepen the dualistic identity structures that Deleuze and Guattari intend to
abrogate. Becoming, they write, has nothing to do with “a resemblance, an
imitation, or, at the limit, an identification.”9 Instead, you should “make
your organism enter into composition with something else” (320). This
something else might refer to objects directly or indirectly related to dogs
(such as a leash or a muzzle) or to a kind of relationship dogs engage in with
other animals. There is no need to start barking like a dog—although this
might help, but eating dog biscuits or chasing cats down the street in the
middle of the night might suffice. When a man eats dog biscuits, after all, he
redefi nes not only his own taxonomic status but also those of the biscuit and
of its traditional eater. While the biscuit infects the man with its dogness,
the man in turn infects both the biscuit and the dog with his humanness:
species categories disintegrate and dualism turns fluid. Becoming-animal
 Humans and Other Moving Things 87
thus spreads “by epidemic, by contagion,” travelling from dog via biscuit
to man and back (266). It eventually gives birth to what Deleuze and Guat-
tari call the “Body without Organs,” frequently shortened to BwO. “The
BwO,” they write, “is what remains when you take everything away. What
you take away is . . . the . . . significances and subjectifications as a whole”
(168). Becoming-animal, then, is a reciprocal process of desubjectification
and designification that erodes the human-animal dualism and configures a
new and extremely volatile concept of identity out of the debris, an identity
fluctuating along the constantly changing dynamic of becoming, not fi rmly
based on the ontological stability of being.
All these becomings are becomings-molecular, a concept Deleuze and
Guattari define in opposition to molarity. Whereas the molar pertains to
centralised blocks of being, such as the state or the family, the molecular
involves a heterogeneous group or pack that proliferates too erratically to
be controlled by an immobile legislating centre. These becomings-molecular
participate in a larger epistemological and political project that seeks to chal-
lenge the supremacy of the hierarchal tree model in Western thinking and to
replace this so-called arborescent model of classification with a rhizomatic
system, that is, “an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without
a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defi ned
solely by a circulation of states” (23). This rhizomatic model privileges cha-
otic excess over ascetic structuralism, fragmentation over unity, wildness
over domesticity, or—in aesthetic terms—sublimity over beauty.
Admittedly, becoming-animal is a hardcore theoretical concept that is
much more concerned with the abstract ideological workings of human
representation than with the physical reality of animal existence. With cer-
tain justification, Donna Haraway has criticised Deleuze and Guattari’s
minimal to absent interest in animal life.10 Of course, they never claim
that becoming-animal developed from a moral concern with the rights
and relevance of the non-human, but why rely on a zoological lexicon and
introduce a concept as morally charged as animality in a discourse with
ethical and scientific pretensions when one is not fundamentally interested
in it? More questionable still is Deleuze and Guattari’s tendency to reduce
animality to a site of non-identity, social anarchy and freewheeling sexual
desire, as if wolves cannot be repressive patriarchs or emus cannot have
Oedipal fi xations. Man, accordingly, would only become-animal when he
is swept up in lawless acts of sublime violence and sexuality, not when he
engages in domestic or beautiful activities such as child-caring or small
talk (basically a human variant of social grooming). This persistent resent-
ment towards the beautiful and familial not only reveals Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s glaring lack of zoological insight; it also shows how the concept of
becoming-animal remains problematically grounded in a narrow humanist
understanding of animal behaviour.
Considering Deleuze’s interest in Kantian aesthetics and the renewed
concern with the sublime in postmodern theory, it is surprising that Deleuze
88 Animality in British Romanticism
and Guattari never commented on the rhetorical and structural similari-
ties between their concept of becoming-animal and the sublime.11 To begin
with, both becoming-animal and the sublime initially manifest themselves
as a semiotic crisis, triggered by the subject’s inability to represent reality’s
perceived chaos and fragmentation. Thomas Weiskel interprets the sub-
lime as “that moment when the relation between the signifier and signified
breaks down and is replaced by an indeterminate relation.”12 His semiotic
interpretation clearly resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of
becoming-animal. “To become animal,” they write, “is . . . to fi nd a world
of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations,
signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterrito-
rialized flux, of nonsignifying signs.”13
When signifiers can no longer be logically connected to signifieds, our
stable and autonomous sense of selfhood disintegrates and identity becomes
a fluctuating event rather than a passive ontological essence. Longinus
already observed that the inebriating experience of the rhetorical sublime
unanchors our perceptual centre and renders it virtually impossible to tell
where the self ends and the other begins. “By true sublimity,” he writes,
“our soul somehow is both lifted up and—taking on a kind of exultant
resemblance—fi lled with delight and great glory, as if our soul itself had
created what it just heard” (42). Like becoming-animal, sublime ecstasy
inflicts a wound in our sharply demarcated human identity, causing our
subjectivity to ooze out and the materiality of nature to seep in. While
nature is thus abstracted into something “less gross than bodily,” the mind
simultaneously materialises into a physical thing or, as Coleridge puts it:
“Gothic architecture impresses the beholder with a sense of self-annihila-
tion; he becomes, as it were, a part of the work contemplated.”14 Without
a stringent perspectival centre that monitors incoming sensory impressions
and outgoing mental projections, then, our subjectivity is all over the place.
But when we are everywhere and everything, we are also nowhere and
nothing. This sums up the irresolvable ontological paradox at the heart of
the Romantic sublime.
This sublime confusion between self and other is also central to Keats’s
concept of the chameleon poet. In his often-quoted letter to Richard
Woodhouse, where he also memorably distanced himself from Words-
worth’s “egotistical sublime,” Keats argued that poets should not have
a fi xed identity, but should be able to assume different cultural and even
biological shapes:

As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort, of which, if I am

any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the words-
worthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands
alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It
has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul
or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much
 Humans and Other Moving Things 89
delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtu-
ous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. . . . A Poet is the most
unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is
continually in for—and fi lling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon,
the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical
and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no
identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.

And in a letter written a year earlier in 1817, he talked of an equally far-

reaching act of sympathetic identification: “if a sparrow come before my
Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.”15 Keats’s
assertion that the poet’s identity should function as a temporary repository
for a continually changing cast of characters is strikingly congruent with
Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that “writing is a becoming” (Plateaus 265).
“A writer isn’t a writer-man,” they argue, “he is a machine-man, and an
experimental man (who thereby ceases to be a man in order to become
an ape or a beetle, or a dog, or mouse, a becoming-animal, a becoming-
inhuman . . . ).”16 Writing, for Keats as for Deleuze and Guattari, is a
process of self-evisceration whereby subject and object, creator and cre-
ation contaminate each other and form a new hybrid identity defi ned by
its capacity to interact, transgress and mutate. As many scholars have indi-
cated, Keats’s categorical resistance to identity-thinking took its inspira-
tion from contemporary discussions of literary genius.17 Especially Hazlitt’s
critical work exerted a formative influence on Keats’s poetics. In an 1818
lecture, with which Keats was familiar, Hazlitt argued that Shakespeare
“was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in
himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. . . . He
had only to think of anything in order to become that thing.”18 Compare
this to Coleridge’s belief that the imagination is “that sublime faculty, by
which a great mind becomes that which it meditates on.”19 And in a similar
argument, Coleridge stated that Shakespeare could “become by power of
Imagination another Thing—Proteus, a river, a lion, yet still the God felt
to be there.”20 Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, however, Coleridge still pos-
ited an invariable agent at the centre of authorial experience, writing that
“SHAKESPEARE becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself.”21
The keyword that links the self-annihilating effects of the sublime to
Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming is contagion. Becoming-animal, Deleuze
and Guattari claim, does not spread through procreation between two
creatures of the same species in a straight line of descent, in the way that
a father “becomes” his daughter. Instead, it spreads “by contagion, epi-
demics, battlefields, and catastrophes,” and proliferates in a horizontal
line between heterogeneous elements, such as a human and a non-human
animal (Plateaus 266). The sublime has similarly been conceived of as a
contagion that catches the subject by surprise and contaminates its think-
ing with power, insight and rhetorical wit or, if things go wrong, with
90 Animality in British Romanticism
disorientation and hysteria. For Longinus, sublime passion induces a kind
of delirium or “madness” in the orator (51). Commenting on Longinus’
rhetorical model, Philip Shaw claims that “one does not learn the sublime;
one catches it, like a divine contagion.”22 The rhetorical sublime inflames
not only the speaker but also the listener. In Clio; or A Discourse on
Taste (1769), James Usher writes that the “enthusiastic orator expresses
his own feelings, and his discourse is infectious.”23 The eighteenth-cen-
tury Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid suggests that “no passions are so
infectious as those which hold of enthusiasm” and Burke similarly talks
about “the contagion of our passions” (Sublime 160). 24 The sublime, it
seems, is a sort of bug chasing, whereby one wittingly engages in a risky
intercourse with nature in order to contract its superhuman qualities, so
that the limitlessness of the seascape or the aggression of the tiger comes
to symbolise the power of human reason. Or, as Byron put it in Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, “we . . . dilate / Our spirits to the size of that they
contemplate” (4:1421–22).
Of course, for most fi rst-generation Romantics the sublime deflation of
human subjectivity was only a temporary phase en route to self-aggrandise-
ment. In the end, they still managed to fi nd stable ground and reconstruct a
uniform and self-contained centre of identity, whether it be Kant’s logocen-
trism, Burke’s phallocentrism or Wordsworth’s bourgeois egocentrism. As
Neil Hertz has paradigmatically concluded: “although the moment of block-
age might have been rendered as one of utter self-loss, it was, even before
its recuperation as sublime exaltation, a confi rmation of the unitary status
of the self.”25 Becoming-animal and the Romantic sublime are thus oppo-
sitional movements, related mainly during the second stage of the sublime.
The third, compensating phase of the Romantic sublime, however, does not
drastically diminish its affinity with the dynamic of becoming. Deleuze and
Guattari, too, recognise that—to repeat Brian Massumi’s metaphor—all
muck eventually becomes rock and all molecular systems sooner or later
coagulate into stable molar ones: “no flow, no becoming-molecular,” they
write, “escapes from a molar formation without molar components accom-
panying it” (Plateaus 334). 26 This entropic tendency towards inertia and
homogeneity is apparently one that inheres in the developmental structure
of both the sublime and becoming-animal.
As a site of self-loss and biological dislocation, Wordsworth’s Lon-
don bears a remarkable resemblance to the poststructuralist ecology that
Deleuze and Guattari put forward in their philosophical work. But whereas
they ascribe positive, emancipatory potential to such a lawless social set-
ting, Wordsworth fi nds it intellectually stifling and offensive to human dig-
nity. The city’s speed and nondescript chaos, he believes, appropriates one’s
individuality and moulds a collective identity or non-identity that overrides
the ontological and hierarchical distinctions between people, non-human
animals and commodities:
 Humans and Other Moving Things 91
Oh, blank confusion! true epitome
Of what the mighty City is herself,
To thousands upon thousands of her sons,
Living amid the same perpetual whirl
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end. (722–28)

Wordsworth’s recurrent reliance on hydraulic images—“stream” (151),

“overflowing streets” (626), “might of waters” (644), “the great tide of
human life” (657), “whirl” (725)—to characterise the dynamicity of the
crowd is typical of the rhetorical repertoire of the sublime. When Longi-
nus, for instance, talks about the sublimity of Homer’s Iliad, he speaks of
its “pouring of emotions one on the other” and the “ebbing of [Homer’s]
greatness, as the ocean withdrawing gradually gives room to itself and des-
erts within its own measures” (61). What Wordsworth wants to prevent at
all costs, then, is to be swallowed up by London’s “thickening hubbub” and
to become an interchangeable part of its molecular flow (211). Whereas in
the beginning of Book 7 he still portrays himself as a stable, if imperma-
nent, centre in the city’s pulsating throng—“a transient visitant: / Now,
fi xed amid that concourse of mankind” (68–69)—it becomes increasingly
difficult for him to maintain that detached, outsider’s perspective and to
keep the city’s encroaching hordes at arm’s length.
London’s multitude produces what Kant defi ned as the mathematical
sublime (Judgment 131–32). Unlike the dynamical sublime, which is caused
by stultifying displays of power (a storm, an earthquake, a terrorist attack),
the mathematical model harnesses its energy from the unquantifiable num-
ber or size of a phenomenon (a vast mountain range, a stampeding herd
of bison, a self-multiplying computer virus). This mathematical sublime,
Wordsworth shows in Book 7, is not only hostile to human individuality; it
also undercuts the subject’s biological identity and subsumes it into a larger
bestial arrangement that includes both animalised humans, such as a “beg-
ging scavenger,” and humanised animals, such as dancing dogs, a pair of
monkeys sitting on the back of a dromedary and “the learned Pig” (213,
175–78, 708). According to Deleuze and Guattari, such hybrid identities
are endemic to collective milieus. A becoming-animal, they specify, is not
caused by the singular animal like the pet or mythical beast, but it “always
involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling” (Plateaus 264), which—
just like London’s “endless stream of men and moving things” (151)—fol-
lows a route that “has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival,
origin nor destination” (Plateaus 323).
Kant’s mathematical sublime may offer some insight as to why the pro-
cess of dehumanisation is inextricably linked to mass culture. Although
his mathematical model manifests itself fi rst and foremost in an abstract
92 Animality in British Romanticism
cognitive way (unlike, say, Burke’s empirical aesthetic), its secondary effects
are very corporeal. Because the face is the body’s primary signifier, the sub-
lime dismantlement of the sign causes a defacement and creates an unset-
tling sense of anonymity and human interchangeability. This is precisely
what happens in Book 7. “The face of every one / That passes by me,”
Wordsworth exclaims, “is a mystery!” (628–29). His failure to fi nd meaning
in people’s faces stands in stark contrast to the following lines from Book 4,
in which he returns from Cambridge to the Lake District and recalls: “The
face of every neighbour whom I met / Was like a volume to me” (67–68).27
Clearly, the difference between an urban and rural demographic is not only
one of quality, but also and more significantly one of quantity: if there are
too many subjects, subjectivity cancels itself out.
Without a legible face, the body recedes into nameless thingness and
turns into something other than human. There is an influential strand of
thinking in Western philosophy according to which the face is the primary
site of human identity. 28 It is where the anonymous thing becomes an inter-
subjective being with a personal history and a moral destiny. The sublime,
now, defaces. It scorches natural space and leaves it bare as a desert, emp-
tied of all human meaning and purpose (think of the anti-landscapes in
“The Ancient Mariner” and “Hart-Leap Well”). It also defaces people and
disassembles the face into an anonymous, expressionless head. The subjects
in Wordsworth’s metropolis, likewise, are disfigured into bodies without
faces or, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, Bodies without Organs.
The audience in a London theatre looms as a “many-headed mass,” and
Bartholomew Fair is depicted as a disturbing place eerily vibrant with
mechanically driven bodies: “the open space, through every nook / Of the
wide area, twinkles, is alive / With heads” (434, 689–91). Whereas for
Wordsworth the face is the primary signifier of human identity and moral
depth, for Deleuze and Guattari it is an oppressive aesthetic grid on which
racist and sexist doctrines are constructed, ideologies which are in the fi rst
place perhaps ideologies of the face and surface. 53 When the individual is
divested of its recognisable face, then, as in Wordsworth’s amorphous mass
or in Francis Bacon’s portrait studies (which Deleuze discusses at length in
his study Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation), it enters “another regime,
other zones infi nitely muter and more imperceptible where subterranean
becomings-animal occur, becomings-molecular, nocturnal deterritorializa-
tions over-spilling the limits of the signifying system” (Plateaus 128). 29
What Wordsworth fi nds so objectionable about capitalist mass culture,
I believe, is not so much that it commodifies social interaction and ano-
nymises human individuals (Book 7, in fact, is remarkably unsympathetic
to human suffering) as that it incapacitates his own taxonomising bour-
geois gaze and—because human identity for him essentially resides in the
representational transcendence of material reality—thus dehumanises him
as well. Wordsworth’s attitude towards these sublime becomings, how-
ever, had not always been this negative. When in Book 6, the younger and
 Humans and Other Moving Things 93
still liberal-minded poet recounts his visit to a festive, post-Revolutionary
France, he describes the “merry crowd” as an amusing band of party ani-
mals: “Like bees they swarmed, gaudy and gay as bees” (386, 391). The
encounter is infectious as it encourages Wordsworth to become-animal as
well: “I seemed to move along them, as a bird / Moves through the air, or as
a fish pursues / Its sport” (770–71). Clearly, there is a strong link between
liberal thought and the positive evaluation of collective self-loss.
London’s demographic excess and frenetic pace not only affects one’s
biological species; it also brings about an even more fundamental onto-
logical transformation, reducing living beings to “moving things,” “triv-
ial objects,” “perverted things,” and “forms and objects” (151, 726, 714,
623). It is tempting to read Wordsworth’s mechanistic idiom as part of
a socio-economic criticism of the capitalist objectification of human and
non-human life. When he talks of “The comers and the goers face to face
/ Face after face; the string of dazzling wares, / Shop after shop, with sym-
bols, blazoned names,” for instance, he syntactically yokes together the
metropolitan accumulation of faces to the increasing number of retail
enterprises and, in doing so, establishes a clear causal relationship between
urban dehumanisation and commercial capitalism (156–58). Although its
cause partly lies in capitalist work culture, this thingification is also a much
less politically laden biological or, as Alan Richardson would have it, neu-
rological effect of the mathematical sublime. Mental overload and cognitive
depletion, after all, compel the brain to shift to a lower gear, leading to
more rudimentary representations of reality and drastically impairing one’s
face recognition performance.
One might think that the city’s artistic sphere, with its presumed empha-
sis on self-expression, authenticity and craftsmanship, could act as an intel-
lectual enclave against capitalism’s homogenising technocratic forces. In
Wordsworth’s view, however, London’s cultural economy is wholly con-
ditioned by capitalist notions of production and consumption that have
mechanised the aesthetic experience into a market-driven industry geared
towards cheap physical gratification. The street performers at Bartholomew
Fair are perhaps the most obvious and obnoxious manifestation of the
urban subversion of human identity in Book 7. Considering the Romantics’
well-documented anti-theatrical prejudice, it hardly surprises that Words-
worth characterises these actors and performance artists as

perverted things,
All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts
Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats
All jumbled up together, to compose
A Parliament of Monsters. (714–18)30

What Wordsworth dislikes perhaps most about these urban entertainers

is that they symbolise and magnify the mutable subjectivity of the urban
94 Animality in British Romanticism
population to inescapable proportions. Identity, they show, is a perfor-
mance. Like Keats’s chameleon poet, who “is continually . . . fi lling some
other Body,” the actor is defi ned by a capacity for self-transformation
rather than by a fi xed or unitary identity. The actor is the Body without
Organs par excellence—something that should not sound too surprising,
as Deleuze and Guattari derive their concept from the French avant-garde
playwright Antonin Artaud. Acting, Deleuze and Guattari believe, is not
simply imitating or becoming someone else; it is interacting between self
and other, and transforming one’s body into a passageway through which
other bodies can circulate and disseminate, so much so that the body comes
to substantiate “only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multi-
plicities” (Plateaus 275).
The protean performers at Bartholomew Fair underline that meaning
does not passively inhere in the signified, but is actively produced and
manipulated by a theatrical process of signification. As such, they put into
practice—much to Wordsworth’s horror—David Hume’s theatrical inter-
pretation of human cognition as a fragmented and unbalanced process
without a stationary centre of perception. “The mind,” Hume wrote in A
Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), “is a kind of theatre, where several
perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away
and mingle in an infi nite variety of postures and situations.”31 Deleuze
rehearsed this theatrical metaphor in his discussion of Hume’s Treatise,
relating human cognition to “a collection without an album, a play without
a stage, a flux of perceptions.”32 Hume’s Treatise, incidentally, also rejected
the idea which would become fundamental to the Romantic sublime and
which assumes that the mixture of pain and pleasure ultimately consoli-
dates a sense of self:

There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment inti-
mately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and
its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a
demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. The strongest
sensation, the most violent passion, say they, instead of distracting us
from this view, only fi x it the more intensely, and make us consider
their influence on self either by their pain or pleasure.33

Just as Deleuze and Guattari deny the existence of a stable metaphysical

sense of identity, Hume argued that we have no “idea of self” and that
we “are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which
succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual
flux and movement.”34 Wordsworth’s Book 7 enacts Hume’s epistemologi-
cal theory in geographical and bodily terms, presenting London as chaotic
space where countless characters make short, random appearances, where
actors mingle unnoticeably with spectators, and where identity is produced
by a free-ranging play of interaction, adaptation and transformation.
 Humans and Other Moving Things 95
For Wordsworth, the epistemological fissure between authenticity and
theatrical performance, or between being and playing, has a profoundly
dehumanising effect. This becomes especially clear when he visits a pan-
oramic painting in London, offering a 360-degree cylindrical view of what
appears to be an exotic place:

At leisure, then, I viewed, from day to day,

The spectacles within doors,—birds and beasts
Of every nature, and strange plants convened
From every clime; and, next, those sights that ape
The absolute presence of reality. (229–33)

The word ape carries great weight here as it suggests that the epistemologi-
cal disjunction between reality and representation triggers a dehumanising
ontological breakdown. The following scene illustrates the same. At the
beginning of Book 7, Wordsworth recounts an anecdote from his child-
hood about a crippled boy who was sent to London, which for the young
Wordsworth still had the appeal of some “Fairy-land” (98). When the boy
returned, however, his stories from the city were surprisingly underwhelm-
ing: “every word he uttered,” Wordsworth remembers, “on my ears / Fell
flatter than a caged parrot’s note” (99–100). Verbs such as ape and parrot
bespeak a deep-rooted cultural belief that imitative behaviour is character-
istically non-human: monkey see, monkey do. Why is this? Already before
the eighteenth century, apes and parrots were known and often scorned for
their capacity to simulate human manners and sounds. In his Discourse on
the Method (1637), Descartes noted that although parrots possess the nec-
essary vocal apparatus to talk, they would never be able to produce intelli-
gent speech, because they lacked the rationality and spirituality required to
communicate in a sensible way. For this reason, “the most perfect monkey
or parrot of its species,” he claimed, will never manage to sound less dim-
witted than “the most stupid child.”35 Buffon similarly observed that “by
the relations of figure, an ape mimics human gestures . . . and a parrot imi-
tates speech.” But if the imitative behaviour of these animals reveals some-
thing, he added, it is mainly their insurmountable inability to say anything
that is even remotely interesting or original: “in an idiot, or in a parrot,” he
writes, language “serves only to mark the last degree of stupidity, the inca-
pacity, in either, to produce thought or reflection, though both be endowed
with proper organs for expressing what passes within them.”
The obvious underlying rationale is that the moods and movements of
non-human animals would be mere mechanical reflexes to sensory stim-
uli, unlike human behaviour, which would be creative, premeditated and
authentic. “Animals,” Buffon claims, “never invent, nor bring any thing to
perfection; . . . they uniformly do the same things in the same manner.”36
This deeply entrenched assumption that the exercise of creative agency is
a uniquely human capacity explains why London seems such a bestial site
96 Animality in British Romanticism
to Wordsworth. Bartholomew Fair, he believes, lays “the whole creative
powers of man asleep” and thus reduces people to “chattering monkeys”
(681, 694). Urban language, it seems, is too vacuous and trite to serve as a
legitimate marker of human identity. The animated talk of the “shameless
women” and “dissolute men,” similarly, reminds Wordsworth of “the songs
of birds / Contending after showers” (361, 360, 363–64). Not surprisingly,
the theatre is the most dehumanising place in London’s urban ecology, as it
supposedly stimulates a passive sensory absorption and a wholly unreflec-
tive mode of spectatorship. It turns humans into mindless automata with
the attention spans of frisky kittens:

how eagerly
And with what flashes, as it were, the mind
Turned this way—that way! sportive and alert
And watchful, as a kitten when at play,
While winds are eddying round her, among straws
And rustling leaves. (436–41)

It is with Bartholomew Fair that Wordsworth’s sublime descends into

the grotesque, a discourse that seems as endemic, if not more, to anti-urban
poetry as the sublime. Lawrence Kramer has linked the entertainers at Bar-
tholomew Fair to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body, which
incidentally appears congenial to Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without
Organs.37 This congeniality becomes most evident when Bakhtin defines
this grotesque body as a “combination of human and animal traits” and “a
body in the act of becoming. It is never fi nished, never completed; it is con-
tinually built, created, and builds and creates another body.”38 Also par-
ticularly relevant in this context is Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque.
Carnival, Bakhtin writes, “does not acknowledge any distinction between
actors and spectators”; it “is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live
in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the peo-
ple.”39 As a collective experience of self-loss, the carnivalesque clearly runs
counter to the individualist and self-empowering spectatorship and author-
ship that Wordsworth generally favoured. For the imagination to operate
at its optimum level, he believed, it requires a sense of social seclusion.
“Grand thoughts,” he wrote in his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,”
“are most naturally and most fitly conceived in solitude.”40
The transgressive politics of the carnivalesque also explains why Word-
sworth’s urban experience initially fails to induce an egotistical sublime.
For Wordsworth, as for Burke and Kant, the successful outcome of the
sublime hinges on a sense of uninvolved spectatorship, which allows one to
experience terror as something emotionally agitating yet physically harm-
less. In his essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” Wordsworth argues: ‘‘if
that Power which is exalted above our sympathy impresses the mind with
personal fear, so as the sensation becomes more lively than the impression
 Humans and Other Moving Things 97
or thought of the exciting cause, then self-consideration & all its accom-
panying littleness takes place of the sublime, & wholly excludes it.’’41 The
trouble with the carnivalesque is that it dissolves the perceptual distance
and commensurate asymmetrical power relationship between actor and
public, and thus prevents Wordsworth from extracting himself from Lon-
don’s toxic materiality in a sublime fl ight of the mind. The problem, in
other words, is that Bartholomew Fair is nothing like the panorama which
Wordsworth visited earlier. Whereas the panorama positions the viewer at
the safe, detached midpoint of the aesthetic experience, the carnivalesque
violently pulls its spectators into its action and enmeshes them in its high-
octane drama. The aesthetic mode of the carnivalesque thus advances a
profoundly ecological vantage point, as it emphasises our inextricable
involvement in nature and shows that we cannot watch nature from a safe
dispassionate distance, as if it were a mere panorama or a play on a stage.
More to the point, I can see some parallels between the carnivalesque and
what Timothy Morton has called “dark ecology,” which gives similar short
shrift to the theatrical logistics that have for so long now conditioned our
experience of nature. Morton, too, associates dark ecology to an aesthetic
mode, but he relates it to film noir, in which often the narrator fi rst exam-
ines a situation as a distant, uninvolved observer only to fi nd out later that
he or she was crucially involved in the plot all along.42
In order to turn carnivalesque self-loss into sublime self-inflation and
to reclaim his bourgeois and human identity, Wordsworth needs to re-
establish a safety perimeter between himself and the metropolitan popula-
tion, and to mark out a place of solitary reflection. First, he retreats from
the “roar” of the bestial crowd by seeking shelter “into some sequestered
nook” (168, 170). Then, he interrupts his narrative more drastically and
resorts to the discourse of nature, which allows him to quieten the cacoph-
onic noise of the city and catalogue his urban impressions in the spirit of
an amateur biologist:

Enough;—the mighty concourse I surveyed

With no unthinking mind, well pleased to note
Among the crowd all specimens of man,
Through all the colours which the sun bestows,
And every character of form and face. (219–23)

Relying on a dilettante biological discourse, Wordsworth casts himself here

in the role of a naturalistic observer-narrator, a sort of David Attenbor-
ough who documents the strange wonders of urban wildlife in the low
ceremonial voice of a knowledgeable outsider. This detached ethnographic
narration reinstalls a hierarchical distance between Wordsworth and the
city, and shields him from its intrusive physicality. It is a self-alienating
and self-empowering manoeuvre that enables him to watch urban ecology
as if it was a play on a stage and to preserve his human autonomy. Recent
98 Animality in British Romanticism
ecocritical studies have rightly challenged the aesthetics and ethics of the
wildlife documentary format.43 It should be no surprise that many of their
criticisms also apply to Book 7. By plotting nature into a TV show, these
documentaries tend to create a false sense of detachment, with human and
non-human animals inhabiting altogether different biological realms; they
also invite a voyeuristic spectatorship, allowing the viewer to indulge in
explicit displays of sexuality and violence while avoiding the social stigma
that typically accompanies pornography and sadism; and despite their pre-
tence at scientific realism, they rely heavily on montage and present a very
condensed and manipulated account of nature, which narrows down the
broad spectrum of animal emotion to primal instincts and thus fosters the
illusion that animals spend their days hunting and copulating or, in Word-
sworth’s poem, with bacchanal parties and visits to the theatre.
Although wildlife films are often unapologetically anthropomorphic,
the introduction of human characters into this naturalistic format tends
to have an opposite, dehumanising effect. (Imagine David Attenborough
describing your daily activities in voice-over narration and you might begin
to understand what it feels like to be non-human.) Just so, Wordsworth’s
naturalistic account turns London into a zoo, a wonderful, if frighten-
ing, spectacle populated by exotic species of all kinds. Among these urban
animals, Wordsworth does spot one human or “superhuman” creature:
Edmund Burke (of all people). When he witnesses Burke delivering a speech
in the House of Commons, he is struck by his oratorical dexterity and
experiences, quite appropriately, a rhetorical sublime:

All are charmed,

Astonished; like a hero in romance,
He winds away his never-ending horn;
Words follow words, sense seems to follow sense:
What memory and what logic! till the strain
Transcendent, superhuman as it seemed
Grows tedious even in a young man’s ear. (505–11)

So far, Wordsworth’s taxonomisation of urban ecology allows him to

make out its individual parts—its species, artefacts and activities—but not
to synthesise the bigger picture. In Kant’s nomenclature, Wordsworth is
able to apprehend the mathematical sublime (apprehension refers to the
relatively easy perception of the parts of an immensely vast object), but still
fails to comprehend it (comprehension pertains to the excruciatingly ardu-
ous understanding of the whole) (Judgment 135). He only arrives at such a
comprehensive or panoramic overview towards the end of Book 7:

But though the picture weary out the eye,

By nature an unmanageable sight,
It is not wholly so to him who looks
 Humans and Other Moving Things 99
In steadiness, who hath among least things
An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole. (731–36)

Wordsworth’s progression to a stable third-person perspective signals a final

withdrawal from the city that emphasises his uninvolved spectatorship (“pic-
ture,” “the eye,” “looks / In steadiness,” “sees”) and that restores his privi-
leged position as an omniscient or god-like orchestrator. He can now see “the
parts / As parts, but with a feeling of the whole,” lines that clearly resonate
with Coleridge’s definition of the beautiful—not the sublime, however: “The
distinct Perception of a Whole arising out of a clear simultaneous Perception
of the constituent Parts, in the relations of All to Each, and of each to each
and to all, constitutes the BEAUTIFUL.”44 It is not entirely clear, indeed,
whether Wordsworth here renders a picture of an urban sublime or an urban
beautiful. In both Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s aesthetic theories, after all,
the sublime requires a suspension of the comparing power and thus goes one
step further than the experience of the beautiful, in which part and whole
can still be distinguished. Coleridge writes: “Let there be (i.e. as Objects of
our Conscious Attention) neither Whole, or Parts, but an All suspending the
Comparative Power, and there results the SUBLIME.”45 In his essay “The
Sublime and the Beautiful,” Wordsworth suggests exactly that: “whatever
suspends the comparing power of the mind & possesses it with a feeling or
image of intense unity, without a conscious contemplation of parts, has pro-
duced that state of the mind which is the consummation of the sublime.”46
Wordsworth seems to reserve the lofty register of the sublime for the
fi nal lines of Book 7, in which analytic observation is exchanged for a more
synthetic and less cerebral meditation on the city. He now rises from street
level to a higher, transcendental standpoint:

This did I feel, in London’s vast domain.

The Spirit of Nature was upon me there;
The soul of Beauty and enduring Life
Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diffused,
Through meagre lines and colours, and the press
Of self-destroying, transitory things,
Composure, and ennobling Harmony. (765–71)

What is sublime, in the end, is not the metropolitan crowd but the leap of
imagination that is required to represent it. “Though reared upon the base
of outward things,” Wordsworth reflects in Kant’s subjectivist fashion,
“Structures like these the excited spirit mainly / Builds for herself” (650,
651–52). The city’s boundless energy, which initially left him despondent
and cognitively depleted, now fuels an anodyne sense of rational stability
as it “Quickens the slumbering mind, and aids the thoughts, / However
multitudinous, to move / With order and relation” (759–61).
100 Animality in British Romanticism
Interestingly, Wordsworth only manages to quarantine urban life and
reassert his sovereignty as a human individual by taking recourse to a
natural sublime and recasting the cityscape as an awe-inspiring natural
landscape, an environment he is used to domesticate and transcend. In a
fragment alluding to the “endless stream of men and moving things,” he
now tellingly compares his transcendence of the metropolis to the exal-
tation experienced by “the roving Indian” overlooking “the everlasting
streams and woods, / Stretched and still stretching far and wide” (747,
745–46). This naturalisation of London’s population into streams, trees
and—a few lines later—“shoals of life” at once naturalises and excuses the
exploitative ideological mechanisms that gave rise to the city’s underclass
(751). It erases the violent political history and marginalised economic situ-
ation of the beggar, prostitute and mutilated veteran by mapping social
hierarchy onto natural taxonomy and by turning these urban stock char-
acters into specimens of different biological species: the beggar species, the
prostitute species, the mutilated veteran species. The sublime thus purifies
the city and gentrifies its slums, seedy bars and sordid theatre district into
immaculate sites of organic beauty where social change becomes impos-
sible because deemed unnecessary.
Like the Ancient Mariner’s epiphanic insight into the “One Life,” Word-
sworth’s tribute to organic harmony and totality sounds suspiciously abrupt
and unmotivated. Remember how, earlier in Book 7, the prospect of becom-
ing stuck in the city’s homogenous clutter or “one identity” still inspired
horror and recoil. So, clearly mystical oneness is not always desirable. But
what has changed? Wordsworth, I believe, has found a way of looking at
the city that mitigates its offensive otherness while, at the same time, allow-
ing him to retain his own otherness vis-à-vis urban reality. It is by success-
fully representing London’s fragmentation and excess that he manages to
manoeuvre himself out of the city and to secure his human autonomy. It
is his representational transcendence that makes him human. The irony
is that the representational mode which enables Wordsworth to distance
himself from urban ecology is a discourse that emphasises precisely organic
proximity and biological continuity. His discourse of nature practises the
exact opposite of what it preaches. Just as some vegetarians might abstain
from meat in order to abstain from their own animality, Wordsworth
stresses biological sameness with an eye on asserting his difference. From
a safe spectatorial distance, he is now able to enjoy urban ecology as if it
were a mere fictional panorama—with the poet “upon some lofty pinnacle”
and “with a world / Of life, and life-like mockery beneath / Above, behind,
far stretching and before” (244, 245–47). Everything is organic now, apart
from the bourgeois poet, who might be surrounded by nature 360 degrees,
but still manages to keep himself safely out of the picture.
5 The Cute and the Cruel
Taste, Animality and Sexual
Violence in Burke and Blake

It is a short journey from Wordsworth’s London to the bestial space that

Burke maps out in his reactionary pamphlet Refl ections on the Revolution
in France (1790). Like the urban mass in The Prelude, the Parisian crowd
looms as a monolithic tribal mob with no hierarchical structure, no moral
discipline and—what troubles an aesthete like Burke perhaps most—no
sense of style or etiquette. The democratic movement, Burke fears, seeks
to impose its own organisational disorder and ideological confusion onto
the state and to outmode the traditional benchmarks of human subjectiv-
ity. Although its main intention is to destabilise the political and economic
division between the old aristocratic elite and the rising middle classes, the
impact of this egalitarian struggle does not remain confi ned to the social.
Gender distinctions, too, are readily dissolved when women abandon the
private sphere of the domestic to engage openly in the public and exclusively
male sphere of political debate.1 In Burke’s view, such political promiscu-
ity also breaks down racial boundaries and relates the revolutionaries to
the Native Americans. “It was,” he writes, “a spectacle more resembling
a procession of American savages, entering into Onondaga, after some of
their murders called victories, and leading into hovels hung round with
scalps, their captives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as
ferocious as themselves” (67). What started out as a political struggle thus
rapidly escalated into a far-reaching biological struggle, in which humanity
was divested of those capacities that—at least according to Burke—set it
apart from the rest of the animal world. The aristocratic landlords, Burke
complains to the addressee of the Refl ections, are now “so displumed,
degraded, and metamorphosed, such unfeathered two-legged things, that
we no longer know them. . . . Physically, they may be the same men; though
we are not quite sure of that, on your new philosophic doctrines of personal
identity” (225).
It has become a scholarly platitude to say that the advent of the French
Revolution confronted Burke with not only a moral but also an aesthetic
crisis, as it exposed the ideological inconsistencies latent in his own
102 Animality in British Romanticism
Philosophical Enquiry.2 Although the lynch mob that had stormed the Bas-
tille and intruded Versailles exhibited most aesthetic qualities of Burke’s
sublime, it aimed to overthrow the conservative ideology that the Enquiry
had sought to warrant. In other words, the Revolution may have been aes-
thetically sublime, but politically it was a “monstrous tragi-comic scene”
(Refl ections 10). In a letter to Lord Charlemont written on 9 August 1789,
Burke fi rst described the coup d’état in a style that almost exactly rehearsed
the wording he had used thirty-two years earlier to characterise the psy-
chological effects of the sublime: “As to us here our thoughts of every thing
at home are suspended, by our astonishment at the wonderful Spectacle
which is exhibited in a Neighbouring and rival Country—what Specta-
tors, and what actors!”3 By 1790, however, his ambivalent admiration for
the Revolution had turned into outright “scorn and horror,” and he now
explicitly distanced himself from those commentators who had been fi lled
with “rapture and exultation” (Refl ections 10).
Burke continued to grapple with the bracing aesthetic effects of politi-
cal violence. In An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), he
acknowledged that the revolutionaries’ disruptive energy could provoke a
temporary sublime sensation. “For a while they may be terrible indeed,”
he conceded, “but in such a manner as wild beasts are terrible. The mind
owes to them no sort of submission.”4 Burke’s naturalistic metaphor here
contradicted his Enquiry, in which he had associated the sublime—and not
just the terrible—with wild animals such as “the lion, the tiger, the panther,
or rhinoceros” in an attempt to naturalise the autocratic order of the ancien
régime (61). In his 1791 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, too,
he related the sublime to wildness and animality when he wrote that the
king was captured and exhibited “like some wild beast at a fair.”5 So, who
is the sublime beast? The revolutionary crowd or the king? Clearly, Burke’s
dubious naturalistic discourse had spun beyond his authorial control, and
his patriarchal sublime had accidentally become an aesthetic celebrating
social anarchy and political self-loss.
Burke had integrated a series of conservative safety catches in his Enquiry
that should have prevented the sublime from being repurposed as a revolu-
tionary aesthetic. Its normative insistence on traditional or natural symbols
of power (such as the lion or tiger) clearly sought to preclude seismic shifts
in the political landscape. The concept of uninvolved spectatorship, too,
proved politically very useful. Terror is only sublime, Burke argued, “when
it does not press too closely” and when it is “so modified as not to be actu-
ally noxious” (Sublime 42, 123). This idea of passive spectatorship had a
convenient political side-effect in that it prevented people from becoming
directly involved in any act of radical social or political change. Burke’s
aesthetic of the sublime, indeed, operates as a kind of shark cage: while it
protects us from danger, it also limits our freedom of movement and incar-
cerates us under the pretence of protection. In this logic, the French Revolu-
tion could not be sublime, because there was no safe theatrical distance that
 The Cute and the Cruel 103
allowed the British to sit back and enjoy “this strange chaos of levity and
ferocity” (Refl ections 10). Although he himself had initially characterised
the Revolution as a “wonderful Spectacle,” Burke now reproached British
radicals such as Richard Price for theatricalising regicide as an impressive
performance. For these radicals, he argued, political change cannot occur
gradually or organically, but “there must be a great change of scene; there
must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse
the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years’ secu-
rity” (Refl ections 65). Their revolutionary sublime, Burke believed, not
only glamorises the brutal reality of political rebellion; it also creates a
false sense of domestic security by presenting the Revolution as merely a
play on a stage.
To underscore the importance of distance in the experience of political
violence, Burke introduced in his First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796) an
interesting animal metaphor that seemed to hark back to his Enquiry:

I can contemplate, without dread, a royal or a national tyger on the

borders of PEGU. I can look at him, with an easy curiosity, as prisoner
within bars in the menagerie of the Tower. But if, by Habeas Corpus,
or otherwise, he was to come into the Lobby of the House of Commons
whilst your door was open, any of you would be more stout than wise,
who would not gladly make your escape out of the back windows. I
certainly should dread more from a wild cat in my bedchamber, than
from all the lions that roar in the deserts behind Algiers. But in this
parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and the lions and tigers that
are in our anti-chambers and our lobbies.6

In A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), Burke similarly represented revolution-

ary thought as a predator that had left its habitat to intrude upon England:
“Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our
streets in the name of reform.”7 Tigers figured quite often in anti-revolu-
tionary discourse at the time. In The Prelude, Wordsworth described Paris
as a site that “Appeared unfit for the repose of night, / Defenceless as a
wood where tigers roam” (10:92–93). Surprisingly, Mary Wollstonecraft,
too, acknowledged that the revolutionary “mob were barbarous beyond
the tiger’s cruelty.”8 The animal also appeared as a more positive symbol
in radical discourse. In Blake’s “The Tyger,” it links violent destruction
with energetic renewal and epitomises the beauty and terror of the French
Revolution. “Burning bright / In the forests of the night” (1–2), it recalls
the combustible powers of Longinus’ rhetorical sublime as well as Richard
Price’s revolutionary “blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and
illuminates EUROPE!”9
The tiger, however, was an ambiguous metaphorical vehicle. While the
animal was frequently invoked to render a picture of the revolutionaries’
unprincipled aggression, it simultaneously continued to be a symbol of
104 Animality in British Romanticism
royal power. In his seminal chronicle The French Revolution: A History
(1837), Thomas Carlyle notes that after the Revolution “the Royal Bengal
Tiger” was renamed as “the National Bengal one, Tigre National”—a tell-
ing example of how easily a political lexicon enters aesthetic and zoological
discourse.10 With the exception of the tiger, the large cast of animal char-
acters that Burke brings into play to represent the revolutionaries are rarely
individualised creatures and show more similarities to Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s pack animals. They are characterised as “a swinish multitude,” “fl ies
of the summer” and as a cloud of grasshoppers, “little, shrivelled, meagre,
hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour” (Refl ections
79, 95, 85). Grasshoppers also figure in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thou-
sand Plateaus, but there they function as a positive symbol of the corrosive,
nomadic and infectious politics of becoming-animal (Plateaus 289, 359).
Burke contrasts the strident noise of the revolutionary grasshoppers with
the silence of “thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the
British oak” (Refl ections 85). The obvious distinction drawn here is one
between the rhizomatic violence of the revolutionaries and the arborescent
stability of the conservatives, who circle calmly and respectfully around the
great British oak, Burke’s preferred symbol of conservatism. In Book 7 of
The Prelude, incidentally, Wordsworth had characterised Burke himself as
an “oak whose stag-horn branches start / Out of its leafy brow, the more
to awe / The younger brethren of the grove” (520–22). And Burke had
used a similar arborescent image in a self-portrait to give meaning to the
emotional uprootedness he had experienced after the death of his son: “The
Storm has gone over me,” he wrote, “and I lie like one of those old oaks
which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my
honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth!”11
By characterising radicals as a raucous cloud of insects and conservatives
as a beautiful herd of grazing cows, Burke suggests that what differentiates
them is not an absolute distinction between humans and animals, but a
relative and very delicate distinction between different species of animals.
Already in his Enquiry, he had demonstrated keen insight into the anatomi-
cal continuity between human and non-human animals, habitually using
phrases such as “men and other animals” and “the parts of the human and
other animal bodies” (94, 96). In the Refl ections, too, he often alludes to
humanity’s animal biology to validate his ideological tenets, as when he
writes that “man is by his constitution a religious animal” (90–91). Unsur-
prisingly, Burke’s insistence on the intimate organic relationship between
species does not work to democratise social or biological taxonomy. In fact,
his emphasis on biological sameness only makes it easier for him to stress
biological difference. Because the anatomical boundary between humans
and other animals is extremely porous, he believes it does not take much
to lose one’s human identity in the rapid developments of modernity and to
evolve or regress into a different species. What is even more remarkable is
Burke’s assertion that one’s cultural background or so-called second nature
 The Cute and the Cruel 105
can have an impact on one’s biological or first nature and can seemingly
give rise to different species of animals. In his discussion of ancient politics,
he writes: “The legislators who framed the antient republics . . . were sen-
sible that the operation of this second nature on the fi rst produced a new
combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according
to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives,
their residence in towns or in the country . . . all which rendered them as it
were so many different species of animals” (185). Burke’s belief that social
stratification reflects and creates deeper biological distinctions also seemed
to inform the urban ecology that Wordsworth put forward in Book 7 of
The Prelude, where the city’s stock characters—the prostitute, the beggar,
the veteran—were similarly naturalised into different species of animals.
One of the defi ning differences between human and non-human animals,
according to Burke, is the former’s aesthetic sensibility. In the Enquiry,
he had already argued that the intuitive recognition and appreciation of
beauty is an exclusively human capacity. Non-human animals, in his view,
have only instinctive drives; they do not have aesthetic preferences. “The
only distinction they observe with regard to their mates,” he writes, “is
that of sex.” And he goes on: “It is true, that they stick severally to their
own species in preference to all others. But this preference, I imagine, does
not arise from any sense of beauty which they fi nd in their species, as Mr.
Addison supposes, but from a law of some other kind, to which they are
subject” (Sublime 39).12 For Burke, then, a lack of taste is not just a sign
of aesthetic retardation or cultural primitivism; it indicates a more serious
lack of humanity as well.
In his Refl ections, he infuses his biological conception of taste with
political significance in order to reclassify the republicans as a subhuman
species. This works in two stages. First, he presents his political prefer-
ence as an aesthetic taste by advertising the ancien régime as a cultural
rather than political movement—a sort of fashion or fastidiously defi ned
collection of dress codes, verbal mannerisms and social protocols. That
the ancien régime is an aesthetic movement need not imply that it does not
serve a deeper biological purpose. Its refi ned customs and alluring dress,
Burke believes, play a momentous civilising and humanising role in that
they inspire an attitude of reverential admiration, and, in doing so, pre-
vent the proletariat from regressing to subversive political behaviour. The
aristocracy’s “pleasing illusions” also make “power gentle, and obedience
liberal” and “beautify and soften private society.” Without these illusions,
he adds, “a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an
animal; and an animal not of the highest order” (Refl ections 77). If we pur-
sue this line of thought, the Revolution becomes a crime against fashion,
robbing society of its pleasing illusions and stripping humanity down to its
stark animality. Interestingly, Burke couches his reactionary politics in sur-
prisingly progressive terms. He rejects the idea “that the crown is held by
divine, hereditary, and indefeasible right” and emphasises its “artificial” or
106 Animality in British Romanticism
socially constructed character (Refl ections 26, 34). But although he spurns
supernaturally sanctioned regimes, he only exchanges divine law for a more
subtle and, therefore, more effective natural law, which anchors the legiti-
macy of political power not outside the subject (where it is a good deal more
susceptible to ideological criticism) but in the “flesh and blood beating in
our bosoms” (Refl ections 86). And it is here that the notion of taste comes
in. What is organic and incontestable, Burke argues, is not the political or
religious institution itself, but our taste or aesthetic preference for these
institutions. Humans, he stresses, are physically wired to fi nd kings sub-
lime and queens beautiful: “We look up with awe to kings, with affection
to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and
with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before
our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are
false and spurious” (Refl ections 86–87). The ancien régime might be an
ideological construction, but it responds to an instinctive human need and
derives its legitimacy from this biological response. The aesthetic, in this
way, allows Burke to ground his political preference in the natural fabric
of human anatomy.
Once he has managed to reduce political thought to aesthetic feeling, it
becomes very easy for Burke to dehumanise anyone holding opposite ideo-
logical opinions. If politics is a matter of taste, we might say that the revo-
lutionaries simply have a different sense of taste. Just as some people prefer
brown to white chocolate or Rachmaninov to Radiohead, others prefer
democracy to autocracy. In Burke’s empirical aesthetics, however, the idea
that tastes can differ is “highly absurd”: either you have taste or you do not
(Sublime 14). Because all humans have identical organs arranged in exactly
the same anatomical configuration, it necessarily follows for Burke that the
same physical object will provoke more or less the same sensory response
in every perceiving subject. Consequently, if you do not have a sense of
beauty—like the republicans, who are supposedly “destitute of all taste
and elegance”—you must have a different anatomy and cannot be human
(Refl ections 77). In Burke’s mind, indeed, anyone who does not swoon at
the sight of Marie Antoinette must be an aesthetically challenged beast.
The revolutionaries’ supposed lack of taste and concomitant inhuman-
ity become most palpable when they intrude Marie Antoinette’s bedroom at
Versailles and virtually gang-rape her: “A band of cruel ruffians and assas-
sins, reeking with his [Marie Antoinette’s sentinel’s] blood, rushed into the
chamber of the queen, and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and
poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to
fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers, had escaped
to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life
for a moment” (Reflections 71). As a pristine object of desire falling prey to
the unbridled political and sexual violence of a sublime pack of radicals, the
queen here obviously embodies Burke’s aesthetic category of the beautiful. In
a lengthy portrait a few pages later, it becomes clear that Burke’s feelings of
 The Cute and the Cruel 107
pity for Marie Antoinette are mainly aroused by her pretty looks and not by
her moral character or political virtue: “It is now sixteen or seventeen years
since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely
never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delight-
ful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the ele-
vated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star,
full of life, and splendour, and joy! Oh! what a revolution!” (Reflections 75).
Burke’s puns are telling here. It seems that the only revolution he can approve
of is the seductive rotation of Marie Antoinette’s body parts. His resort to
aesthetic sensibility and maudlin sentimentality did not go unnoticed. His
friend Philip Francis wrote in a letter to Burke that his characterisation of the
queen looked like “pure foppery.” “If she be a perfect female character,” he
added, “you ought to take your ground upon her virtues. If she be the reverse
it is ridiculous in any but a Lover, to place her personal charms in opposition
to her crimes.” And he concluded: “are you such a determined Champion of
Beauty as to draw your Sword in defense of any jade upon Earth provided
she be handsome?”13
Considering Burke’s systematic reliance on metaphors of clothing and
unclothing, it is no coincidence that Marie Antoinette flees her bedroom
“almost naked,” something which, as many critics have pointed out,
entirely sprang from Burke’s overheated imagination and never actually
happened.14 In Burke’s view, this disrobing of the queen and the ancien
régime is a dehumanising act, revealing “the defects of our naked shivering
nature” (Refl ections 77). For the revolutionaries, meanwhile, it is precisely
polite society and aristocratic fashion that are dehumanising and nudity
which is emancipating. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790),
Mary Wollstonecraft explicitly responded to Burke’s claim that without her
clothes “woman is but an animal” and asserted that it is not liberal thought
but upper-class etiquette that denies woman’s bodily integrity. A woman is
only an animal, she retorted, “if she is not more attentive to the duties of
humanity than queens and fashionable ladies in general are.”15 The revolu-
tionary act of disrobing thus obtains a double meaning. To Burke, it entails
a stripping of everything that makes us human and implies an animalisa-
tion; to the revolutionaries, it is a rejection of the dehumanising political
corset of the ancien régime and takes part of a liberating becoming-animal.
Marie Antoinette’s nudity, however, is rather more problematic. Although
it seems as if she tries to escape from her bedroom and its oppressive social
and sexual politics, her nudity does not signal a becoming-animal, as she
eventually seeks “refuge at the feet of a king and husband” and aims to re-
establish her submissive, pet-like position. Unlike the revolutionary pack,
Marie Antoinette does not become-animal, but is in fact thrice animalised:
as prey to anti-royalist sentiment, as the king’s beautiful pet and, fi nally, as
Burke’s beautiful fetish.
Rather than giving an accurate representation of historical reality, the vio-
lence and suggestive eroticism of the bedroom scene are dictated by Burke’s
108 Animality in British Romanticism
own aesthetic theory, which claimed that “beauty in distress is much the
most affecting beauty” (Sublime 100). Insofar as his account of the queen’s
near rape is an entirely fictional fabrication, then, it is Burke who strips and
dehumanises her—not the revolutionaries. When he describes how they
penetrate “with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed” and
how the queen runs away “almost naked,” he takes his platonic admira-
tion for her to a more physical level and relegates her to the role of helpless
victim in a rape fantasy or snuff scene. Through figurative displacement,
this scene provides Burke (or his literary persona) with a socially acceptable
context or text in which he can freely yet safely, that is subliminally, satisfy
his erotic desires and in which he can escape from his own aesthetic, sexual
and political ideology of abstention and state-monitored self-discipline.
The bedroom, that most private and feminine part of the palace, now turns
into a sublime arena where man violently consummates his political and
sexual desires and where Burke, too, becomes animal. It is in sexuality,
Deleuze and Guattari write, that man becomes woman and that the human
becomes animal (Plateaus 307).
That Burke becomes animal and is, as it were, infected by revolution-
ary thought through his fictional construction of the bedroom scene con-
fi rms Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that becomings are contagious and
that “writing is a becoming” (Plateaus 265). It may sound surprising, but
writing was also for Burke an anarchic act during which he could let his
imagination roam freely. In the fi rst pages of his Refl ections, he remarks:
“Indulging myself in the freedom of epistolary intercourse, I beg leave to
throw out my thoughts and express my feelings just as they arise in my
mind, with very little attention to formal method” (10). Despite its reac-
tionary content, indeed, Burke’s Refl ections on the Revolution in France
is stylistically and generically a very liberal, even transgressive piece of
literature, blending empirical aesthetics with political theory, a judicious
historical analysis with rambling anecdotalism, a progressive defence of
pacifi sm with a demagogic rationalisation of despotic violence, and high-
minded philosophical argumentations with frantic nationalist tirades.
Inadvertently, his accusation that the revolutionaries “are involved,
through a labyrinth of confused detail, in an industry without limit, and
without direction” thus also gives a very apt characterisation of his own
sprawling political discourse (Refl ections 168).
The bedroom scene illustrates that the aesthetic of the beautiful can be
as risky an undertaking as the sublime. Originally a symbol of preternatu-
ral beauty, Marie Antoinette now appears to be a sublime object of desire,
luring Burke to revoke his spectatorial uninvolvement and sexual self-dis-
cipline. Apart from animalising woman, the category of the beautiful thus
also threatens to undermine the humanity of man, who—mesmerised and
tongue-tied by woman’s physical appeal—stands in danger of losing his self-
control and being reduced to a will-less lusting animal. That the aesthetic of
the beautiful can be as overwhelming and destabilising as the sublime was
 The Cute and the Cruel 109
already evident in the Enquiry, where Burke had carefully listed the physi-
cal effects of beauty in a description that teetered rather weirdly between a
physiological defi nition of the human orgasm and a pathology of cerebral
haemorrhage: “The head reclines something on one side; the eye-lids are
more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the
object; the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now
and then a low sigh: the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to
the sides” (Sublime 135).
Frances Ferguson has pointed out that beauty “recurs throughout the
Enquiry in the form of a seductive and indirect assault on the reason.”
Lacking the self-preservative agenda of the sublime, moreover, the beauti-
ful does not caution us against the dangers we fi nd ourselves in: it is an
alluring trap in which we are caught obliviously and which, as Ferguson
puts it, “leads us toward death without our awareness.”16 This menace of
the beautiful object stands out most clearly when Burke describes the visual
appeal of the female body: “Observe that part of a beautiful woman where
she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smooth-
ness; the softness; . . . the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady
eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fi x, or whither it is carried”
(Sublime 105). In Burke’s curiously prurient description, it seems, breasts
have the same spellbinding effect on man as the craggy mountaintops that
would become central to the experience of the Romantic sublime. In both
cases, the male gaze is unable to fi xate on a steady point and fi nds itself
unmoored and undirected. Inadvertently, woman’s charismatic appeal may
thus have a sublime impact on the male observer, an impact Burke tried to
inoculate his theory against by keeping woman at a safe distance and by
emphasising that the aesthetic interest in beauty should on no account be
confused with sensuous desire. Burke’s notion of uninvolved spectatorship,
which protected the monarchy from the insurgent politics of the revolution-
ary sublime, appears in his aesthetic of the beautiful in the form of sexual
abstinence. There is no small irony in this. Although woman’s beauty is
displaced from her clothes and made to reside ultimately in her physique,
Burke’s anxiety over its potentially emasculating and dehumanising side-
effects forces him to sanctify woman so much so that she is stripped of
her three-dimensionality and becomes an absent presence, an ephemeral
object of desire starring in a softcore pornographic drama of male self-
empowerment. The fulfi lment of that desire is continually promised yet
should at all costs be perpetually delayed. It is in the sexual consummation
or consumption of the female body, after all, that man loses his humanity
and that Burke’s oppressive mechanism of animalisation breaks loose into
Deleuze and Guattari’s emancipating dynamic of becoming-animal.
With Wordsworth’s Book 7 of The Prelude and Burke’s Refl ections on
the Revolution in France, I have discussed two texts that adamantly rejected
the sublime’s subversion of human identity and that marshalled all their aes-
thetic and ideological resources to re-empower a unitary and autonomous
110 Animality in British Romanticism
male subject. Their political conservatism resurfaced in the mystified shape
of a biological conservationism, which privileged species preservation over
species loss, species sedentarity over species migration and species recovery
over species mutation. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to contrast
these conservative dismissals of the sublime’s dehumanising effects with
William Blake’s positive, liberal reading. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Blake
interprets the hybrid’s resistance to straightforward biological classifica-
tion as a moral recalcitrance to humanist and heteronormative standards
of subjectivity. Instead of regarding the non- or post-human as a destabilis-
ing threat, he believes it presents a creative opportunity and plays out its
potential as a site of taxonomic originality and organic renewal. I am cer-
tainly not the fi rst critic to see a link between Blake’s poetry and Deleuze
and Guattari’s poststructuralist philosophy. In a brief but perspicacious
aside, Saree Makdisi has related the plates of his Songs of Innocence and of
Experience to Deleuze and Guattari’s arborescent and rhizomatic taxono-
mies.17 What is striking about the visual designs is that nearly all of them
depict trees, roots, branches or leaves, botanical elements that underscore
the environmentalist character of the poems and make explicit the pastoral
tradition within which Blake was writing. Makdisi singles out two types of
trees in Blake’s plates: the isolated, vertical tree, which functions as a sym-
bol of autocratic oppression and also figured in Burke’s and Wordsworth’s
writings as an organic metaphor for conservative morality and traditional
class hierarchies; and an extremely pliable kind of tree, which seems to
curve strangely in the wind or mutates halfway into a horizontal bush. It is
this dynamic species that Makdisi links, if tentatively, to Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s rhizomatic system of thought.
The chaotic knitwork of trunks, branches and leaves that frames the
Songs, indeed, serves as a particularly fitting image of the rhizomatic
power structure that Blake advances in his poetry, that is, a power struc-
ture where patriarchal centres appear either absent or emasculated and
where it is instead heterogeneous packs of children, animals and outcasts
that dictate the verse. Critics have signalled that Blake’s poetry and designs
abound with species transformations whereby humans and animals come
to participate in an economy of humanisation, dehumanisation and re-
humanisation.18 Especially in Blake’s later work, this loss and recupera-
tion of selfhood takes on a very physical character and often induces a
sublime effect. In line with the dialectical workings of the sublime, these
transformations highlight the traffic between humanity and nature, and
demonstrate the fragile and mutable character of human subjectivity. Like
Deleuze and Guattari’s dynamic of becoming-animal, this sublime traffic
is a two-way movement that affects the human and non-human animal
alike. In Jerusalem, for instance, “Lion, Tyger, Horse, Elephant, Eagle,
Dove, Fly, Worm” all appear to “Humanize / In the forgiveness of Sins”
(plate 98, lines 43–45). In Vala, or The Four Zoas, on the other hand,
it is humans who lose their subjectivity and adopt animal forms: “Then
 The Cute and the Cruel 111
he beheld the forms of tygers & of Lions dishumanizd men / Many in
serpents & in worms stretchd out enormous length” (“Night the Sixth,”
page 70, lines 34–35).19
I want to focus here on two poems, “The Little Girl Lost” and “The
Little Girl Found,” which were originally included in Songs of Innocence
(1789) but later relocated to Experience when the combined volume Songs
of Innocence and of Experience was published in 1794. In the fi rst poem,
the prepubescent girl Lyca wanders off from her parents and is eventu-
ally adopted or abducted by a pack of lions, tigers and leopards. In the
second poem, the parents meet the “beasts of prey” in a surreal encounter
that unexpectedly concludes with a millennial scene of reconciliation as the
parents follow the animals into their cave to fi nd their daughter Lyca. I am
pairing Blake with Burke here not simply to juxtapose a progressive with
a conservative take on becoming-animal. I am also interested in the Lyca
poems because they seem to reimagine the symbolic rape of Marie Antoi-
nette for a liberal audience, presenting her animalistic nudity and violent
removal from the domestic sphere as socially and sexually emancipating
rather than denigrating. I am not saying that Blake had Burke’s Refl ections
in mind when he composed his poems or that he deliberately sought to
antagonise a conservative readership with his rewriting (after all, the Lyca
poems were written before the publication of the Refl ections). Instead, I
believe that Blake’s poems and the fictional bedroom scene dramatised in
Burke’s Refl ections share very similar concerns (such as an interest in the
Oedipal family, sexual violence, self-loss, patriarchal power, female beauty
and animality) and that both texts refract these concerns through the lens
of the sublime and beautiful—albeit with altogether different moral and
political agendas. The Lyca poems, indeed, seem to psychologise the moles-
tation of Marie Antoinette into an abstract, conceptual crisis, whereby
Lyca takes up the sacrificial role of the queen and the “band of cruel ruf-
fians and assassins” are played by an actual pack of predators. Uncluttered
by historical specifics or political particulars, Blake’s double poem, then,
brings into sharper focus the moral and aesthetic patterns of thought that
undergird Burke’s Refl ections.
Like the Refl ections, the Lyca poems record the loss of prelapsarian
beauty and the disruptive transition from innocence to a state of sublime
anarchy. Enticed by “wild birds song,” the seven-year-old Lyca strays into
“the desart wild” and eventually encounters “the beasts of prey” that
“Come from Caverns deep” (“Lost” 16, 7, 34, 35). The “Lovely Lyca,”
as Blake characterises her time and again, clearly embodies Burke’s aes-
thetic of the beautiful. Beauty, Burke argued in his Enquiry, “is highest
. . . in the female sex” and “almost always carries with it an idea of weak-
ness and imperfection” (100). That the girl, like Marie Antoinette, is asleep
when the beasts of prey arrive compounds her weakness and only makes
her more physically appealing—at least to Burke, for whom the prettiest
woman seems to be a narcoleptic—mute, immobile and totally oblivious to
112 Animality in British Romanticism
her surroundings. Lyca’s young age, too, adds to her beauty. In his Enquiry,
Burke wrote that “the young of most animals, though far from being com-
pleatly fashioned, afford a more agreeable sensation than the full grown”
(70). Burke’s aesthetic of the beautiful shows some striking similarities
to what is now known as cuteness, a category generally associated with
the attractive display of paedomorphic physical characteristics in human
and non-human animals. Although the word cuteness, in its meaning of
“endearing,” only entered the English language in the Victorian period,
the category clearly has its roots in the Romantics’ saccharine portrayals
of childhood experience and animal beauty. Think of the “Wee, sleeket,
cowran, tim’rous beastie” in Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” or the kitten
staging “a pretty baby-show” in Wordsworth’s “The Kitten and the Falling
Leaves.”20 In addition to its important biological function (the twentieth-
century zoologist Konrad Lorenz interpreted cuteness as an adaptive trait
intended to elicit nurturing instincts), it also fulfi ls a dubious ideological
role. Mary Wollstonecraft already suggested that the recurrent association
of female beauty with the infantile and the domesticated tended to render
female powerlessness and dependency socially appealing. In A Vindica-
tion of the Rights of Woman (1792), she incisively observed that women’s
“strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty,
to the desire of establishing themselves,—the only way women can rise in
the world,—by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them,
when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act:—they
dress, they paint, and nickname God’s creatures.”21 As an extremely accu-
rate personification of Burke’s category of the beautiful, Lyca thus fi nds
herself reduced to the inferior status of the non-human animal well before
the beasts of prey have a fi rst sniff at her body.
When the girl ventures into the desert, she enters the no man’s land of the
sublime, where moral and species boundaries appear extremely precarious.
The inhabitants of Blake’s desert—lions, leopards and tigers—represent the
typical features of the Burkean sublime, such as wildness, exoticism and terri-
fying physical force. Wild animals recur as symbols of the sublime throughout
Blake’s Songs. In “The Tyger” and “Night,” predators produce the character-
istically Burkean mixture of admiration and terror, and in doing so, reflect
Blake’s ongoing struggle to formulate a satisfying answer to the theological
problem of evil, a problem famously expressed in that line from “The Tyger”:
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” (20). This moral question is also
left open in the Lyca poems. Although the animals are initially pejoratively
characterised as “beasts of prey,” a few lines later the lion receives the epithet
“kingly” and in “The Little Girl Found” it even appears to wear a “crown”
(“Lost” 34, 37; “Found” 37). The animals’ habitat is similarly first referred
to in “Lost” as “caverns” and “caves,” but it appears to be refurbished into a
“palace” in “Found” (“Lost” 35, 52; “Found” 43).
Because the animals’ moral nature and motives remain obscure through-
out, it is not entirely clear whether we should interpret the lion’s licking and
 The Cute and the Cruel 113
the lioness’s undressing of Lyca as an expression of sexual or carnivorous
appetite or, more innocently, as a parental gesture of care and concern:

While the lion old

Bowed his mane of gold,

And her bosom lick,

And upon her neck,
From his eyes of flame,
Ruby tears there came;

While the lioness

Loosed her slender dress,
And naked they conveyed
To caves the sleeping maid. (“Lost” 43–52)

Blake’s pronouncedly sexual imagery and the prurient visual designs have
inspired a number of critics to read the Lyca poems as a dramatisation of
a sexual rite of passage or what Robert Gleckner describes as a “rape of
experience.”22 Gleckner’s interpretation fits the category of the sublime,
which has similarly been conceived of as a discourse of female molestation.
On this reading, the bestial rape—or near rape—of Lyca would drive home
how in the eighteenth-century aesthetic debates the category of the beauti-
ful was constantly under the threat of being overpowered and ingested by
the masculinist sublime.
The psychological effects of the sublime surface most dramatically in
the second poem, in which the parents encounter the wild animals and are
eventually escorted to their daughter. This encounter is fi rst presented as an
immobilising experience of fear and terror until the lion licks the mother’s
hand and the parents’ initial feelings of horror are replaced with a sense
of “deep surprise” and “wondering”—the primary emotional response to
Burke’s sublime (“Found” 34, 35). The licking, which still looked ambigu-
ously sexual and carnivorous in the fi rst poem, now appears as an unequiv-
ocal act of sympathy that initiates a millennial reconciliation of opposites.
Such a radical reversal also characterises the moral trajectory of Blake’s
poem “Night,” but here the reconciliation between predator and prey is only
achieved after the violent catharsis of slaughter and ingestion, something
which is perhaps insinuated in the Lyca poems yet never made explicit:

When wolves and tigers howl for prey,

They pitying stand and weep;
Seeking to drive their thirst away,
And keep them from the sheep.
But if they rush dreadful,
The angels, most heedful,
114 Animality in British Romanticism
Receive each mild spirit,
New worlds to inherit.
...
And now beside thee, bleating lamb,
I can lie down and sleep;
Or think on Him who bore thy name,
Graze after thee and weep.
For, wash’d in life’s river
My bright mane for ever.
Shall shine like the gold
As I guard o’er the fold. (25–32, 41–48)

Ingestion in “Night” emerges as a process of metabolic and psychological

interchange, whereby the eater and the eaten come to alter each other’s spe-
cies identity. By consuming the sheep, the tigers adopt their passivism and
vegetarianism; by being consumed, the sheep are absorbed into the tigers’
bloodstream and become—in a cellular sense—tigers. This belief that food
can have a noticeable impact on the eater’s mental condition proved par-
ticularly influential in the dietary philosophy of Romantic-period vegetar-
ians such as Percy Shelley, who assumed that meat consumption renders
people more prone to aggression, whereas a vegetable diet would pacify
the mind.23
Although Lyca is never eaten by the beasts of prey, she, too, loses her
species identity. Her human nature is already called into question from the
very beginning of the poem by the etymological origin of her name, which
derives from the Greek word for wolf. As a portrait of a lupine child of
sorts, Blake’s double poem typifies the Romantic interest in infants that had
been raised outside the pale of human society, the most famous one prob-
ably being Victor of Aveyron, who was found in a French forest around the
end of the eighteenth century. In the tenth and most important edition of
his influential taxonomic study Systema Naturae (1758), Linnaeus inter-
preted these wild children not as a different species but as a different class of
Homo sapiens, called Homo ferus or “wild man.”24 Although there existed
no scientific consensus on the biological meaning of these feral children,
they suggested that the human was an extremely fragmented and mutable
creature that could easily shapeshift into something other than human.
For Deleuze and Guattari, however, these transformations are progressive
rather than retrograde, and exemplify the undermining politics and organic
creativity of becoming-animal. The becoming of wolf-children, they argue,
“is not a question of a real production, as if the child ‘really’ became an ani-
mal; nor is it a question of a resemblance, as if the child imitated animals
that really raised it; nor is it a question of a symbolic metaphor, as if the
autistic child that was abandoned or lost merely became the ‘analogue’ of
an animal” (Plateaus 301). What happens is a far more sweeping revision
of human-animal relations. By demonstrating that human identity does
 The Cute and the Cruel 115
not reside in an immediately visible quality, these wild children drastically
complicate the aesthetics of species. It is perfectly possible, they suggest, to
have a human physiognomy but to display the cognitive, communicative
and moral behaviour of a non-human animal—the reverse, in fact, of what
Frankenstein’s Monster would demonstrate.
Lyca is most palpably stripped of her human identity when the lioness
loosens “her slender dress,” a highly transgressive act which—according
to Burke’s sartorial theory—would reveal that “a woman is but an ani-
mal.” But whereas female nudity launches Burke into paroxysms of either
anthropological anxiety or uninhibited sexual delight, it is a non-issue
for Blake. Lyca’s nakedness is not the dehumanising nudity that Burke
simultaneously feared and desired, nor is it the self-conscious, shameful
nudity which Derrida experienced when his cat caught him naked. Hers
is the nudity of a child, which shares its trivial and unapologetic charac-
ter with the nudity of the non-human animal. It is, as Derrida puts it, a
“nonnudity”: given that the non-human animal is always naked, it can
never be actually naked (“Animal” 374). Because Blake never explains
why the lioness undresses Lyca, however, this disrobing might be a much
less innocuous act. Maybe it is sexual and anticipates a bestial gang-rape.
Or maybe the lioness removes Lyca’s clothes in the way a predator skins
its prey or a human unwraps a piece of meat in order to prepare and eat it.
In these cases, Lyca’s dehumanisation would be no different from Marie
Antoinette’s and would form part of a degrading animalisation rather
than an empowering becoming-animal.
This raises a crucial question about what essentially differentiates wom-
an’s being-animalised from her becoming-animal. In The Sexual Politics of
Meat, Carol Adams has convincingly demonstrated how woman and ani-
mal are forced to participate in the same visual economy that reduces their
flesh to the object of man’s carnal and carnivorous desires. Both woman
and animal, she claims, are fi rst objectified into meat, then fragmented into
consumable body parts (breasts and genitalia or spare ribs and steaks), and
fi nally aesthetically and orally ingested. Adams’s moral evaluation of the
mechanism of animalisation, needless to say, is very different from Deleuze
and Guattari’s. Whereas she regards the bestialisation of woman as part of
a masculinist strategy to muzzle and consume female otherness, they inter-
pret becoming-animal as an emancipating movement that liberates woman
from her subaltern position within patriarchal society. Interestingly, the
main targets of Adams’s sexual politics—objectification, fragmentation
and consumption—refigure in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical project
as the primary instruments in a deconstruction of the male subject. What
makes objectification and fragmentation victimising mechanisms, Deleuze
and Guattari seem to say, is not so much their intrinsic structure as their
exclusive application to woman. Instead of trying to reassemble a stable
sense of female and animal identity—as feminist and animal rights groups
might want to do—Deleuze and Guattari want to dismember, disorganise
116 Animality in British Romanticism
and ingest man like an animal, so that man, too, is—to put Adams’s phrases
to new use—“severed from [his] ontological meaning” and subjected to a
total “annihilation of . . . identity.”25
The victimising process of animalisation only inverts into the emancipat-
ing performance of becoming-animal when it affects both parties equally
and undercuts the idea of a stable human and animal identity. “Man
becomes animal,” Deleuze writes in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation,
“but not without the animal becoming spirit at the same time, the spirit of
man.”26 This spiritualisation of the material body is precisely what happens
in “The Little Girl Found” when the lion is divested of its physicality and
sublimes into “a spirit arm’d in gold” (36). As their speech, tears and palace
bear out, the beasts of prey now display human and superhuman character-
istics without, however, entirely losing their animality. So, while in Burke’s
aesthetic of the beautiful the discourses of animalisation and infantilisation
forced woman to regress to the pet-like state of the child or the childlike
state of the pet, in Blake’s poetics of becoming these discourses counter the
marginalisation and consumption of female and animal otherness by stak-
ing out a zone of indeterminacy where both man and woman, human and
non-human, adult and child are stripped of their stable identities. It is not
just that humans become animals and that animals become humans, but
more that the signifier of species loses its stable significance and becomes,
as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, undone.
Interestingly enough, it is by animalising woman and treating her as a
tasty piece of meat that man loses control over both himself and woman.
In his Refl ections on the Revolution in France, Burke’s objectifying dis-
course of the beautiful appeared so volatile and contagious that it ended
up objectifying and animalising him as well. If Marie Antoinette found
herself degraded to a thing of beauty, Burke himself became an irratio-
nal libidinous machine, controlled by deeper biological compulsions. In
this sense, male sexuality and the symbolically congruent practice of car-
nivorism challenge rather than reinforce patriarchal power. (And arguably,
this explains why feminists and conservatives make strange bedfellows in
their criticism of pornography.) Even so, it remains morally questionable,
at the very least, to interpret the eating of girls and other animals as an act
of female and animal empowerment, for it once more forces them into the
role of sacrificial victims, whose bodies have to be consumed—sexually or
gastronomically—in order to relieve man of his annoying Oedipal tensions
and disciplining desires.
That the parents eventually fi nd Lyca should not imply that they re-
establish closure and that the Oedipal family is reinstated. Although there
is no radical parricide as Deleuze and Guattari may propose, there is no
return of the Oedipal family either, as the poem’s title might misleadingly
suggest. Lyca’s passage into experience is not a passage into the arborescent
stability of adulthood, but it causes a caving in of patriarchal structures
and transports man, child, animal and woman into the ontological flux
 The Cute and the Cruel 117
of becoming. In Blake, the child does not become “father of the Man,” as
Wordsworth famously put it, but Man becomes a child, becomes a girl. 27
Following the predators into their palace, the parents now emulate their
daughter’s becoming and enter the community of the beasts of prey:

Then they followed

Where the vision led,
And saw their sleeping child
Among tigers wild.

To this day they dwell

In a lonely dell,
Nor fear the wolvish howl
Nor the lion’s growl. (“Found” 45–52)

It is in its indeterminate and inconclusive reconciliation between the

human and non-human animal that Blake’s sublime most emphatically
takes issue with Burke’s theory. Whereas Burke’s sources of delightful ter-
ror—tigers, panthers, Louis XVI of France—immobilise the subject into
a state of pusillanimous veneration, Blake’s sublime stakes out an arena
where the human and non-human animal continually move in and out
of the centre without ever settling into conventional identities or lodging
themselves into static hierarchies. In the dynamic and open-ended ecology
of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, organisms of different species,
ages and sexes engage in a series of casual but extremely intimate relation-
ships. In “Night,” the process of digestion unites the eater and the eaten
and engenders a new, more powerful and more moral creature, combining
the overwhelming physical force of the tiger with the moral tolerance of the
lamb. In “The Rose,” a worm penetrates a flower and both form a hetero-
geneous and rather unorthodox sexual alliance. In “The Tyger,” nature’s
brutal force hybridises with industrial technology to give life to a turbo
assemblage. And in the Lyca poems, a cute seven-year-old girl teams up
with a pack of predators to combat the patriarchal regime of the family and
the state. What these unusual partnerships suggest is that the monstrous
is far more viable and powerful than the monochrome identity structures
favoured by patriarchal ideology.
6 A Problem of Waste Management
Frankenstein and the
Visual Order of Things

When Deleuze and Guattari complained in their typically facetious yet

deadly serious style that they were “tired of trees,” the reason for their
discontent was not exactly ecological or dendrological (Plateaus 17). What
they were tired of was the persistent recourse of Western epistemology to
arborescent systems of classification, which compulsively try to tidy up,
divide and subdivide the apparent mess of human existence into rigorously
hierarchical tree diagrams: family trees, trees of life, trees of the knowledge
of good and evil, linguistic trees. It is time, Deleuze and Guattari asserted
with iconoclastic fervour, to uproot the tree from Western thinking and sup-
plant it with a rhizome—a freeform taxonomic system characterised by the
usual postmodern buzzwords of fragmentation, hybridity and mutability.
Mary Shelley, too, seemed tired of trees when she wrote her novel Fran-
kenstein (1818). As early as the fi rst chapter she has one “utterly destroyed”
when Victor Frankenstein recounts how the “old and beautiful oak” stand-
ing close to his family’s home was once spectacularly “reduced to thin
ribbands of wood” by “a most violent and terrible thunder-storm” until
“nothing remained but a blasted stump” (24). It is difficult to overstate the
importance of this incident in the novel. Symbolising the explosive force
of both natural process and scientific enlightenment, the scene prefigures
the dramatic turn which the story will take. Its full symbolic significance
becomes most apparent when Shelley towards the end of the novel recycles
the same tree metaphor to convey a sense of Frankenstein’s psychological
and social breakdown. With his family dead and his scientific theories fal-
sified, Frankenstein has no genealogical trees or arborescent taxonomies
left to give meaning to his life. He appears as mentally, geographically and
biologically uprooted as his Monster. “I am a blasted tree,” he laments,
“the bolt has entered my soul” (133).
As Barbara Freeman has observed, the combustion of the “old and beau-
tiful oak” is not only thematically but also aesthetically a crucial scene
in the novel.1 What Shelley registers here, in fact, is the total destruction
of the composed aesthetic of the beautiful by the all-consuming violence
 A Problem of Waste Management 119
of the sublime. Longinus already drew on lightning metaphors to capture
the revelatory and transformative power of the rhetorical sublime, writing
that “sublimity, brought out at just the right moment, makes everything
different, like lightning, and directly shows the ‘all-at-once’ capacity of the
speaker” (9). In his Philosophical Enquiry, Burke remarked that astonish-
ment, the primary effect of his sublime, etymologically derives from attoni-
tus, meaning “thunder-struck” (54). And more recently, Jean-François
Lyotard has argued that “sublime violence is like lightning” and like “a sud-
den blazing.”2 On this reading, Frankenstein’s anecdote would anticipate
the novel’s gradual but irrevocable descent from beauty into sublimity.3 But
what does this aesthetic development imply ideologically? Considering that
Wordsworth personified Burke as an oak in Book 7 of The Prelude and that
Burke’s Refl ections represented reactionary politics pictorially in the form
of a “British oak,” the explosion of the tree in Frankenstein might well be a
cryptic topical reference to the ravaging violence of the French Revolution,
which—in Thomas Paine’s words—had “exterminate[d] the monster Aris-
tocracy, root and branch” and had shaken up the foundations of Burke’s
political and aesthetic ideology.4 In the light of Romantic ecology, on the
other hand, the scene would play on the cultural anxiety that the scientific
and technological manipulation of organic life could easily spiral out of
human control and have calamitous environmental consequences, leaving
the natural world—as Byron had put it in “Darkness”—“treeless, manless,
lifeless” (71).
Although Shelley’s novel makes a powerful political and ecological
statement, I am not really interested in conservative oaks or actual trees
here. My principal concern in this chapter is with the arborescent taxono-
mies that feed into Frankenstein’s understanding of species and with what
Mary Shelley in her post-apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) calls “the
uprooted tree of humanity.”5 Bearing in mind that Frankenstein fabricates
his creature with both human and non-human body parts, it seems plau-
sible to say that human identity for him is not a question of a single meta-
physical or anatomical essence, but arises in the tangled interplay between
biological, socio-cultural and moral factors. What defines us as humans, in
his view, is our biological embeddedness in the social ecology of the family
and our innate capacity for moral and rational action. Or to carry on with
Deleuze and Guattari’s dendrological nomenclature, his conception of the
tree of life is tightly interconnected with the family tree and the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil. What Shelley’s novel captures—perhaps bet-
ter than any other Romantic text—is the tremendous extent to which these
social, moral and biological taxonomies are shaped by aesthetic principles.
This aesthetic determination manifests itself in at least two ways. Structur-
ally, Frankenstein’s tree models are beautiful systems with a transparent
and regular configuration that is supposedly invariable because objec-
tively rooted in nature and unquestionable because a matter of intuitive
understanding. Beauty also plays a more concrete role in Frankenstein’s
120 Animality in British Romanticism
arborescent classifications in that each of them invests aesthetic appeal with
their own distinctive meaning. To be more precise (or less vague), through-
out the novel Frankenstein mobilises an aesthetic vocabulary to appraise
social relations (domesticity is beautiful), evaluate moral integrity (crimi-
nals are ugly), and defi ne biological status (hybridity is pretty disgusting).
As a physical reflection of social, moral and biological law, beauty thus
also serves a cohesive function. It is the common ingredient that makes the
whole stick together and lends it its defi ning taste. Although this reliance
on the visual protocols of the beautiful accounts for much of the appeal of
arborescent thinking (it is, after all, nicer to look at trees than at the lumpy
shapes of a rhizome), the trouble with predicating a biological taxonomy on
aesthetic principles is that its scientific legitimacy and operational efficiency
wholly depend on something as fickle and flimsy as looks. It does not take
much—a harmless creature with an anaemic complexion and pitch-black
hair—for the entire system to collapse and plunge into rhizomatic chaos.
Frankenstein’s scientific project to reanimate dead matter is also a cos-
metic experiment dedicated to reversing the physical effects of aging even
beyond the point of death. The creature he has in mind should not only be
properly functioning but its anatomy should also be aesthetically appealing.
Things do not work out as planned. Frankenstein’s shocked disappointment
at the Monster’s putrid ugliness—“I had selected his features as beautiful.
Beautiful!”—may seem needlessly melodramatic, given that he collected his
materials from charnel houses, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses and
could have easily anticipated that the whole would never look less sicken-
ing than the sum of its parts (39). And yet, his surprise does not necessarily
reveal a hysterical personality or lack of technical foresight. Despite the
cutting-edge quality of his research, Frankenstein still seems to hold fast
to the vitalist belief in the so-called principle of life, an abstract energetic
force that, aside from imparting motion to the creature, would also render
it physically attractive. Life, for Frankenstein, is a biological function with
pronounced aesthetic effects, as its presence beautifies human anatomy
and its absence decomposes the body completely. His visit to the grave-
yard in search of usable organic materials inspires the following reflection:
“a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life,
which from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for
the worm” (33–34). This pairing of aesthetics and biology is also seen at
play in Coleridge’s vitalist philosophy, according to which “every beau-
tiful Object must have an association with Life—it must have Life in it
or attributed to it.”6 Frankenstein seems to assume that by infusing life
into the creature’s patchwork anatomy, he will transform it into something
charmingly harmonious and homogeneous. In Romantic aesthetic theory,
after all, beauty has the power to reconcile divergent parts and weld them
into an organic whole. Beauty, Coleridge writes, lies in “the unity of the
manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.”7 That the Monster still looks
ugly after it has been regenerated, however, suggests either that life is not a
 A Problem of Waste Management 121
beautifying property or, more radically, that the Monster was vivified with-
out any metaphysical hocus-pocus and that there is no abstract principle
of life. What Frankenstein sees, then, when he is shocked into fascinated
disgust by the Monster’s egregious appearance is the face of mechanistic
philosophy, of matter animating and moving itself.
Frankenstein’s much-discussed obsession with the creature’s looks
should not suggest that he is less a rational scientist than a body sculp-
tor singularly preoccupied with crafting pretty forms and establishing an
artistic reputation. Aesthetic appeal, for him, is not a gratuitous quality,
but it has tremendous biological significance. Although he never fleshes out
this significance in scientific detail, his repeated association of beauty with
youthfulness, mental health and physical resilience—both in reference to
the Monster and himself—hints at an acute insight into the relationship
between beauty and biological success. I would not go so far as to say that
Shelley here prefigures Charles Darwin’s understanding of the evolutionary
role of physical attractiveness in sexual selection, but her novel clearly reso-
nates with contemporary scientific theories on beauty. In his discussion of
the effects of environmental variability on human morphology, Buffon pos-
tulated a clear causal relationship between nourishment and beauty, claim-
ing that “in those villages where the people are richer and better fed than
in others, the men are . . . more handsome and have better countenances.”8
In his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expecta-
tions (1749), the English philosopher David Hartley claimed that “health
and sickness have many connections with beauty and strength, deformity
and imbecility, respectively.”9 And Erasmus Darwin, whose influence is
acknowledged in the fi rst sentence of Frankenstein’s Preface, similarly
pointed out the broader biological importance of beauty in the animal and
vegetable world. In The Botanic Garden (1791), an extremely zoomorphic
poem about plant reproduction and evolution, he wrote that “Love and
Beauty rule the willing world” and interpreted physical appeal as a major
selling point in nature’s sexual economy: “What Beaux and Beauties crowd
the gaudy groves, / And woo and win their vegetable Loves.”10
It is tempting to interpret Frankenstein’s determination to supply his crea-
ture with a beautiful face as part of an effort to humanise it and provide it
with everything that faciality presumably signifies: individuality, emotional
depth, intentionality, moral relevance. It is never clear, however, whether
Frankenstein intended to create a human being in the fi rst place. Initially,
he plans to “give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man,” then
he claims to have started on “the creation of a human being,” and fi nally
he talks about manufacturing a “new species” (35–36). Although he speaks
of “the superior beauty of man,” moreover, he does not seem to regard
physical attractiveness as a criterion of human identity (138). In fact, in his
hagiographic description of Elizabeth’s delicate appearance and tempera-
ment, it is precisely her superior looks that dehumanise her. Shelley here
clearly echoes the feminist criticism of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft,
122 Animality in British Romanticism
who had argued that society’s preoccupation with female beauty effectively
reduces women to “gentle, domestic brutes”:11

She was docile and good tempered, yet gay and playful as a summer
insect. . . . Her person was the image of her mind; her hazel eyes,
although as lively as a bird’s, possessed an attractive softness. Her fig-
ure was light and airy; and though capable of enduring great fatigue,
she appeared the most fragile creature in the world. While I admired
her understanding and fancy, I loved to tend on her, as I should on a
favourite animal; and I never saw so much grace both of person and
mind united to so little pretension. (20–21)

Frankenstein’s intention to create a beautiful being thus also carries an

ideological charge. In line with Burke’s aesthetic theory, which associ-
ated beauty with domesticity and submissiveness, he seems to believe that
a beautiful specimen will be more easily cowed into submission than an
ugly one. Although the fragment quoted above no longer appeared in the
1831 edition, Frankenstein there still interpreted Elizabeth’s beauty as a
dehumanising quality. In the later version, however, her pretty looks relate
her no longer to a non-human animal but to a superhuman species. She
is so beautiful, Frankenstein says, “that none could behold her without
looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a
celestial stamp in all her features.”12 Exceptional beauty—like exceptional
ugliness—clearly affects one’s ranking in Frankenstein’s species hierarchy.
For Frankenstein, beauty is a defi ning feature not so much of human
anatomy as of species stability. The Monster is off-putting in his eyes
because it is a liminal creature without a clear biological identity or evolu-
tionary past. Looking eerily human but at the same time not quite human
enough, it induces what Masahiro Mori famously called “the uncanny val-
ley.”13 In his 1970 essay, which charted the affective responses to humanoid
robots, Mori argued that the more familiar or human robots look, the more
positive and empathic our reactions towards them will be. If their resem-
blance to the human form is too strong, however, they will appear alienat-
ing and repulsive, causing the familiarity curve to drop sharply down. At
this moment, we experience the uncanny, which Freud defi ned as a harrow-
ing feeling of uncertainty triggered by our inability to make out whether
something inanimate is animate (and vice versa) or something human is
non-human (and vice versa).14 When robots, however, cross this point of
uncanniness and start to look even more human, the familiarity curve will
drastically rise again, thus creating the shape of a valley in the graph.
In her recent book Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? (2010), Seo-
Young Chu has also linked Frankenstein’s Monster to the uncanny valley,
but in her opinion the uncanny valley thrives not on the tension between
the human and non-human or the animate and the inanimate, but on
the distinction between that which arose spontaneously and that which
 A Problem of Waste Management 123
was artificially constructed.15 To bolster her view, Chu refers to chimpan-
zees, which despite their strangely anthropomorphous appearance do not
inspire the uncanny valley but elicit what Konrad Lorenz called “the cute
response.”16 Chu’s reference to apes is telling in that it inadvertently reveals
the extent to which our aesthetic judgments of animal appearance are his-
torically conditioned by our scientific understanding of human-animal
relations. Although humanoid primates might currently be perceived as
exceptionally adorable creatures, this has not always been the case. In fact,
it is difficult to fi nd in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings an ani-
mal whose looks were more often scorned, ridiculed, vilified and abhorred
than the ape’s. William Smellie referred to apes as “imitative animals” and
thought they had “a detestable resemblance to the human frame and man-
ners.”17 And in his Philosophical Enquiry, Burke wrote that “there are few
animals, whose parts are better contrived than those of a monkey; he has
the hands of a man, joined to the springy limbs of a beast; he is admirably
calculated for running, leaping, grappling, and climbing; and yet there are
few animals which seem to have less beauty in the eyes of all mankind” (95).
Burke’s view of the monkey as a human being manqué is remarkably conso-
nant with Frankenstein’s attitude towards his Monster.18 Primates, it seems,
were negatively stereotyped not because they looked so radically different
from human beings, but precisely because they looked disturbingly similar
and because their anatomical and behavioural resemblance weakened the
belief in human exceptionalism. To label apes as ugly or ludicrous was part
of a more general strategy to keep the almost-human at a safe taxonomic
distance from the human. This anthropocentric anxiety towards apes also
explains why Frankenstein’s creature continues to be demonised even after
it has taught itself to read, talk and eat like an enlightened philosophe. In
fact, the more human-like it behaves, the uglier it looks.
With its abrupt psychological transition from sympathetic recognition to
alienated repugnance, the uncanny valley also charts an aesthetic descent
from the affective register of the beautiful into the sublime. That an object
can appear so attractive that it suddenly morphs into something horrible
is clearly at odds with Burke’s and Kant’s theories, which assume that the
beautiful and sublime are separated by an insuperable experiential barrier.
It remains a moot point in Frankenstein criticism, however, whether the
Monster should be classified in terms of the sublime or the ugly. While some
scholars interpret the creature and its feverish fabrication as a parody of the
sublime, others have reasoned that it looks simply too repulsive to induce
the elevating feelings of delight and admiration that typically underwrite
the Burkean sublime.19 Even so, these elevating feelings do not always make
up an integral part of the sublime for Burke. In his disappointingly compact
section on ugliness, he argues that the ugly, too, can occasion a sense of
sublimity when it is “united with such qualities as excite a strong terror”
(Sublime 109). In my readings of “The Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s
Book 7, in fact, I showed that ugliness and the sublime often participate in
124 Animality in British Romanticism
the same aesthetic experience, whereby the sublime operates as a waste
management tool that sanitises human ecology and restores social hygiene
by recycling the abject into a thing of immaculate beauty. Shelley’s novel
offers a very physical rendition of the sublime’s purgative workings. What
Frankenstein tries to do by giving new form and purpose to a pile of decom-
posing body parts, I think, exemplifies in a brutally literal way the tendency
of the Romantic sublime to reintegrate the filth of material reality into a
clean social and aesthetic teleology. In comparison to Coleridge’s Mariner
and Wordsworth in Book 7, however, Frankenstein is much less adept at
such aesthetic recycling. Lacking the transcending power of the Kantian
sublime, he remains mired in the dirt of physical existence and is ultimately
even chased and destroyed by his trashy creature. Some junk, apparently, is
too foul and toxic to be rehabilitated into polite society.
Another reason why the Monster causes universal outrage is because it
looks unlike anything else. “I had never yet seen a being resembling me,” it
complains (97). A monster, Derrida has argued, “shows itself in something
that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes
the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to
identify this figure.” In short, it “is a species for which we do not yet have a
name.”20 Monstrosity, of course, is only the superlative degree of original-
ity. It refers to something which looks even too ground-breaking and novel
to be tolerated as a piece of avant-garde art. In his Enquiry, Burke listed
novelty as one of the defi ning characteristics of beauty, writing that physical
appeal does not exist in the mundane but in those forms that deviate from
the norm and that take us by surprise. When something, however, strikes
us as so extraordinary that it falls completely outside our common frame of
reference, the result is not a pleasurable interest but straightforward disgust
(Sublime 94). Frankenstein, it appears, has carried the Romantic concern
with novelty and originality beyond its proper limits and has created some-
thing that is too unique, something that sickens rather than surprises.
Despite their predilection for originality and eccentricity, the Roman-
tics—especially those with organicist leanings—still put great emphasis on
literary continuity, imitation and adaptation. 21 In his Defence of Poetry,
Percy Shelley tellingly praised Virgil as a poet who “created anew all that
he copied,” a phrase that seems to play on the process of sexual reproduc-
tion, whereby new life forms are created by replicating old ones (692). The
analogy that Shelley gradually builds up and sustains throughout his liter-
ary pamphlet between aesthetic and biological evolution was widespread
in Romantic aesthetic theory. In his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,”
Wordsworth argued that whereas a bad poem occasionally achieves more
popular success than a good one, the genre of poetry—like a biological
species—will not become extinct just because it includes a few hideous or
developmentally challenged specimens: “this advantage attends the good,”
Wordsworth writes, “that the individual, as well as the species, survives
from age to age; whereas, of the depraved, though the species be immortal,
 A Problem of Waste Management 125
the individual quickly perishes.”22 Not only is the concept of species in part
aesthetically constructed, then, but aesthetics is also conceptually associ-
ated with biological species. If texts are like species of animals, what does
the literary equivalent of Frankenstein’s Monster look like? Maybe like Rob-
ert Southey’s Orientalist verse. At least that is what the critic Thomas Love
Peacock believed. In The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), Peacock contended
that Southey’s poetry gathers—through what seems a process of unnatural
selection—the most degenerate components of literary history and fudges
them together in a crossbreed species of text: “Mr Southey wades through
ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully
selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical;
and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them
into an epic.”23 Mary Shelley’s own Frankenstein is perhaps a better of
example of a monstrous text, stitching together as it does multiple nar-
rators, ideological perspectives and literary styles into a literary medium,
the novel, which at the time was still so nascent that it was perceived, in
Bakhtin’s phrase, as “a creature from an alien species.”24
Although it does not look exactly human, the Monster’s intellectual and
moral ontogenesis suggests that it does possess a human brain. With sur-
prising ease and alacrity, it evolves from a grunting brute to a Rousseau-
esque prodigy—a vegetarian, well-read and extremely gregarious android
that behaves perhaps too perfectly human-like to be actually human. Fran-
kenstein, however, abandons his creature not because it lacks the margins
of error that defi ne human identity, but because his physiognomic belief
in the correlation between facial appearance and moral character deludes
him into thinking that the Monster’s intolerable ugliness must be a sign
of supernatural evil and that, consequently, the creature cannot belong to
the species Homo sapiens. 25 Aesthetic appearance, from his physiognomic
standpoint, unambiguously reflects moral consciousness, which in turn is
an indicator of humanity. By hiding an extremely humane mind behind an
ugly façade, however, the Monster invalidates Frankenstein’s physiognomic
doctrine and uproots his Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which
is as much an aesthetic and biological as a moral tree. Frankenstein, now,
fi nds himself unable to make accurate moral judgments and, worse, to tell
apart the human from the non-human.
Even when the Monster turns evil and thereby belatedly affi rms Fran-
kenstein’s physiognomic views, it continues to drain the beautiful of its
moral and biological significance by strangling Frankenstein’s little brother
William and by making the beautiful Justine Moritz seem guilty of the
crime. Like the creature, Justine destabilises Frankenstein’s physiognomic
ideas, not as the Monster did by conflating ugliness with virtue, but by sup-
posedly masking her moral debasement behind a beautiful face. She, too,
becomes monstrous now. “Ever since I was condemned,” she tells Franken-
stein in prison, “my confessor has besieged me; he threatened and menaced,
until I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was” (66).
126 Animality in British Romanticism
Frankenstein solves the mystery of William’s murder by relying on the aes-
thetics of species. That the killer harmed a beautiful child, he reasons, must
mean that he or she does not have taste and, accordingly, cannot be human.
As Frankenstein puts it: “Nothing in human shape could have destroyed
that fair child. He was the murderer. I could not doubt it!” (56). When the
supposedly transparent and mutually sustaining relationship between aes-
thetic appearance and moral integrity founders, an ethical vacuum opens
up. “When falsehood can look so like the truth,” Elizabeth wonders, “who
can assure themselves of certain happiness?” (71–72). This inability to
make moral sense has sweeping ontological effects and engenders a sense of
biological malaise. “Now misery has come home,” Elizabeth laments, “and
men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood” (71). If this
conjures up images of vampirism or zombieism, it is because monstrosity
surfaces in Frankenstein as a viral condition, which—like vampirism or
Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-animal—gradually multiplies through
Frankenstein’s social circle and fi nally reduces him as well to “a miserable
spectacle of wrecked humanity” (133).
The sublime breakdown of the interdependent relationship between
aesthetic appearance, moral character and biological species reveals what
Friedrich Schiller in his essay “On the Sublime” (1793) called “the uncer-
tain anarchy of the moral world.” Unlike Frankenstein, however, Schiller
regarded such a loss of moral purpose and hermeneutical certitude as epis-
temologically liberating: “How different it is if one abandons the possibility
of explaining Nature and takes this incomprehensibility itself as a principle
of judgment. . . . We are led much further by nature viewed as terrible
and destructive than as sensuously infi nite, provided we remain merely
free observers of her.”26 Shelley’s—very poststructuralist—point, however,
is that Frankenstein fails to remain a free observer of his experiment. As
a parodic criticism of Enlightenment notions of scientific objectivity and
clinical detachment, her novel calls into question the visual economy of
anatomical inquiry, an economy in which the researcher adopts the tran-
scendental position of an uninvolved spectator and reduces the animal
to a mute and passive object of study, something that can be killed, cut
open and inspected at will from a safe and dispassionate distance. Unlike
Wordsworth in Book 7, however, Frankenstein fails to retain that antiseptic
detachment from his experiment. He cannot safely gaze upon his creature
as though it was merely a monster in a freak show or a tiger in Pegu (to use
Burke’s image). But it escapes his visual regime, chases him and eventually
turns the medical gaze back upon himself when, in one of his nightmarish
delusions, he dreams that he is subjected to a brutal medical experiment. “I
saw continually about me,” he says, “a multitude of filthy animals infl ict-
ing on me incessant torture, that often extorted screams and bitter groans”
(123). Like Burke’s Refl ections, Shelley’s Frankenstein problematises a sub-
lime object that cannot be rationally quarantined and that violently breaks
through the fourth wall.
 A Problem of Waste Management 127
Initially, the Monster chases Frankenstein not with the intention of kill-
ing him but in search of fatherly recognition and genealogical kinship. With
its thematic interest in parental neglect, orphanage and adoption, Shelley’s
novel reads like a study on the statics and dynamics of the nuclear family.
It portrays orphans and characters rejected by their creators (the Monster,
Elizabeth, Justine, Frankenstein’s mother), characters abandoning their
families to pursue a self-centred interest in science (Frankenstein, Walton),
characters adopted by other families (Justine, Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s
mother) and fi nally also characters refused adoption (the Monster). Before
the Monster arrives, the two main families in the novel, the Frankensteins
and the De Laceys, constitute fi rm enclaves against moral and political
change, arborescent systems which either assimilate the outsider or safely
exorcise it to their and society’s margins. The family, Frankenstein believes,
offers the stability and security indispensable to both personal and political
well-being: “if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the
tranquillity of his domestic affections,” he tells Walton, “Greece had not
been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have
been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had
not been destroyed” (37–38). In a very similar fashion, Burke asserted that
the family unit, with its naturally centralised hierarchy and strong empha-
sis on compassion, provided the organic model according to which the state
should be structured. In his Refl ections on the Revolution in France, he
argued that we should bind up “the constitution of our country with our
dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of
our family affections” (34).
As a serene yet rigidly structured site of harmony and maternal sympa-
thy, the family also served as a symbol of Burke’s category of the beautiful.
Burke conceived of the beautiful as a socialising aesthetic that inspires fem-
inine feelings of compassion and tenderness, and that, unlike the sublime,
confi rms rather than transgresses moral and social boundaries. Franken-
stein’s relatives easily meet the aesthetic requirements of Burke’s beautiful,
preternaturally attractive as they are. Justine is “extremely pretty,” Fran-
kenstein’s brother William is “the most beautiful little fellow in the world,”
and Elizabeth is described as “the most beautiful child [Frankenstein’s
mother] had ever seen” (47, 25, 20). With its extremely heterogeneous and
almost monstrous composition, they have more difficulty in implementing
the social programme of Burke’s beautiful. Aside from lacking a mother,
the family also includes Victor’s adopted cousin, Elizabeth, as well as the
unrelated Justine. Fragmented as it may look, this family does not have a
grotesquely mismatched morphology like the Monster. It succeeds where
the Monster fails by coordinating its diverse parts into a harmonious com-
position, thus living up to Coleridge’s definition of beauty as “Multeïty
in Unity.”27 “Although there was a great dissimilitude in our characters,”
Frankenstein says, referring to his relationship with Elizabeth, “there was
an harmony in that very dissimilitude” (21). Ever since Frankenstein’s
128 Animality in British Romanticism
mother died, the father—usually a figure of the sublime in Burke’s aes-
thetic—has taken up the maternal and pacifying role of the beautiful. He
constantly tries to rekindle Frankenstein’s “feelings of affection,” wants to
see him “restored to health and peace of mind,” and attempts to stitch the
family back together after the Monster’s attacks have severely undercut its
unity (154, 156). “Our circle will be small,” he says, “but bound close by
the ties of affection and mutual misfortune” (161).
Frankenstein, however, tries to hide his scientific project and moral
angst from his father by turning away from the familial and the beautiful
and by seeking “refuge in the most perfect solitude” of the sublime (124).
In a typically Romantic fashion, he uses the natural sublime—induced by
the spectacular scenery of the Alps—for self-medicating purposes. The sub-
lime has a sedative effect on his brain and makes human existence (but also
human morality) just not worth the worry. “These sublime and magnificent
scenes,” he says, “afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable
of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although
they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it” (74). As in
Wordsworth’s Book 7, the typical preference of the natural sublime for the
grand scheme of things over the immediacy of the here and now removes
moral responsibility from day-to-day human action and inspires a gleeful
sort of nihilism. If you feel burdened by guilt because the new life form you
fabricated has started wiping out your family, a leisurely stroll in the Swiss
Alps and a peripatetic meditation on human insignificance might offer a
welcome relief from your moral discomfort.
The sublime “desert mountains and dreary glaciers” are also the places
where the Monster is forced to hide out and live in isolation (78). With no
genetic relatives, it takes Frankenstein’s social isolation to its biological
extremes. While spying on the De Lacey family, the Monster begins to won-
der where its own “friends and relations” are, an observation that leads it to
question both its personal and species identity, as it asks itself “Who was I?
What was I?” (97). The Monster’s biological isolation, Shelley seems to sug-
gest, largely results from its lack of genealogical or family roots. By joining
the De Laceys, then, it hopes to remedy its ugliness, solitude and homeless-
ness with the beauty, social cohesion and domesticity of the family. In short,
it hopes to become human or at least to enjoy human rights. Despite being
exiles themselves, however, the De Laceys show no sympathy to the Monster’s
orphanhood and refuse to adopt it into their circle. Horrified by the creature’s
physical appearance, they promptly leave their home. In a fit of revenge, the
Monster sets their cottage on fire, a highly symbolic act that, recalling the
combustion of the “old and beautiful oak,” makes explicit the disintegration
of both the arborescent family and the aesthetic of the beautiful.
When Frankenstein, too, refuses to adopt the creature, the Monster
demands him to construct a female partner. This desire for a female com-
panion does not just stem from a cultural impulse for heterosocial bonding
or homely comfort; it also reveals the presence of a deep-seated biological
 A Problem of Waste Management 129
instinct to reproduce and establish a stable species identity. The rudimen-
tary but not entirely flawless defi nition of species, after all, is that two
creatures belong to the same species if they can produce fertile offspring
together. This generative conception of species informed the theories of
Linnaeus and Buffon, and was already put forward in Lucretius’ On the
Nature of Things.28 With a female partner and a family, the Monster would
no longer be considered a taxonomic anomaly, but it would be perceived as
a biological species in its own right—still hideous in all likelihood, but at
least perfectly natural. Frankenstein, however, realises that the Monster’s
nesting instinct might have far-reaching biological implications and fears
that this new species could endanger “the existence of the whole human
race”: “Even if they [the Monster and its partner] were to leave Europe and
inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the fi rst results of those
sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race
of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very
existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror”
(138). The Monster had already declared “everlasting war against the spe-
cies,” but now its personal feud with Frankenstein threatens to careen out
of control and escalate into a biological confl ict (111). The family—the tra-
ditional social habitat of Burke’s concept of beauty—would thus turn into
a breeding ground for the sublime and become an uncontainable source of
putrefaction and terror.
Because Frankenstein refuses to father his creation and to grant it a fam-
ily of its own, the Monster decides to respond in kind by murdering Fran-
kenstein’s family members and turning him, too, into a monstrous and
rhizomatic character—ugly, isolated and displaced. In doing so, the Mon-
ster establishes the kinship that Frankenstein so insistently tried to deny
and produces its own motley family of outcasts and social rejects, a family
which already included Justine Moritz. In Frankenstein’s worsening sense
of social isolation, he increasingly takes after his Monster. His physical
appearance, too, begins to resemble the creature’s. His cheeks are described
as “livid like those in death” and he continually “sinks . . . into apparent
lifelessness” (150, 182). Frankenstein and his creature now seem caught
up in a folie à deux to the extent that they appear almost genealogically
and evolutionarily related, both monsters living what Coleridge in “The
Ancient Mariner” called “the nightmare Life-in-Death” (193). That Fran-
kenstein so easily regresses to the monstrous brings home the structural
similarity between his anthropocentrism and his rhetoric of monstrosity.
While anthropocentrism constitutes an ontology of the supernatural and
monstrosity one of the subnatural, both are essentially discourses of taxo-
nomic exceptionality that hinge upon the exclusion of the other and nour-
ish a politics of social and biological segregation. It does not take much,
then, for Frankenstein’s anthropocentric procedures of dualisation and
marginalisation to turn against himself and for the extraordinary to lapse
into the abnormal.
130 Animality in British Romanticism
When Frankenstein and the Monster are chasing each other around the
Continent and beyond, both have clearly become embroiled in the psy-
chogeographical chaos of Deleuze and Guattari’s dynamic of becoming-
nomad—one of their better-known becomings. The nomad’s location, they
write in A Thousand Plateaus, “is always between two points, but the in-
between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy
and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo” (419).
Nomads, they proceed, have “no points, paths, or land” and thereby escape
the structuralising and oedipalising regime of the family and the state (421).
Schiller makes a very similar argument in his essay “On the Sublime,” where
he links the liberating potential of the natural sublime to nomadism, writ-
ing that “the mind of the nomad remains as open and free as the fi rmament
beneath which he camps.”29 Of course, with no geographical or genetic
roots, the Monster was already a nomad from its very conception, always
on the run and roaming the margins of society and scientific theory. “He
had loitered in forests,” Frankenstein says, “hid himself in caves, or taken
refuge in wide and desert heaths” (138–39). And when the Monster won-
ders “Whence did I come? What was my destination?,” it visibly embodies
the volatility and aimlessness of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-nomad,
which similarly lacks a transparent origin and telos (104).
It is only after its excommunication from the Frankenstein and De
Lacey families, however, that the Monster renounces its centripetal urges
to become human and that it becomes nomad and animal in Deleuze and
Guattari’s self-empowering sense, now seeking to corrode rather than par-
ticipate in the repressive arborescent structure of the family: “When night
came, I quitted my retreat, and wandered in the wood; and now, no longer
restrained by the fear of discovery, I gave vent to my anguish in fearful
howlings. I was like a wild beast that had broken the toils; destroying the
objects that obstructed me, and ranging through the wood with a stag-
like swiftness” (111). The Monster, importantly, does not actually trans-
form into a wild beast, for such a straightforward mutation would sustain
the binary species model that Shelley’s novel and Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of becoming problematise. Instead, it now exploits its in-between
status and enters what Deleuze refers to as the “zone of indiscernibility
or undecidability between man and animal.”30 This zone functions as a
rhizomatic or sublime site where meaning and being become undone and
where the Monster is immune to Frankenstein’s territorialising and taxono-
mising gaze. By exploding the human-animal dualism, Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s becoming-animal sweeps up both the human and the non-human
until “there is no longer man or animal,” only monsters and hybrids. 31
Shelley’s repeated emphasis on Frankenstein’s loss of control and on his
“haggard and wild appearance” suggests that he, too, has become animal
(223). This becoming-animal emerges most dramatically when the initial
creator-creation or doctor-patient relationship between Frankenstein and
the Monster backslides into a primitive hunter-prey affi liation. That it
 A Problem of Waste Management 131
appears progressively difficult, moreover, to make out whether Franken-
stein is the hunter or the hunted only contributes to his becoming-animal.
Initially, Frankenstein urges that the Monster “be hunted like the chamois,
and destroyed as a beast of prey” (169). But towards the end of the novel,
the roles seem to have switched and Walton now calls Frankenstein “the
prey of [the Monster’s] accursed vengeance” (188).
The root cause of Frankenstein’s loss of humanity, however, lies not in
his gradual withdrawal from human society but in his fi rst encounter with
the Monster. It is his first aesthetic confrontation with the creature’s stom-
ach-churning ugliness that incapacitated the rational workings of his mind
and seemingly threw him back to an earlier phylogenetic stage. The obvi-
ous irony is that Frankenstein’s reason has given birth to something which
falls outside its own purview and, in the long run, will destroy all rational
cognition. He has accidentally “short-circuit[ed] thinking with itself,” as
Lyotard has put it in a comment on the workings of the sublime.32 Although
its origins may lie in the logocentric structure of Kant’s aesthetic model, the
effects of this self-inflicted biotechnological sublime are Burkean through
and through. It is a crushingly physical experience that shuts down Fran-
kenstein’s rational understanding and spirals him into an ever-deepening
state of delirious obsession. His mind, to reuse Burke’s words, “is so entirely
filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence
reason on that object which employs it” (Sublime 53). According to Buf-
fon, who incidentally appears on Frankenstein’s reading list, such a state of
neurotic obsession and psychomotor excitation is profoundly dehumanis-
ing. He interprets it as an experience “which depends solely on corporeal
organs, and is common to us with the brutes.” It fosters a false percep-
tion of reality and “forces us to act, like the brutes, without deliberation
or reflection.”33 Buffon’s pathology of the sublime provides a surprisingly
accurate diagnosis of Frankenstein’s mental state.
It is rhetorically appealing to carry the tree metaphor to the end and
interpret the Monster’s eradication of Frankenstein’s Tree of Knowledge
and family tree as a proleptic subversion of Charles Darwin’s tree of life.
Several critics have pointed out, however, that although Darwin certainly
contributed to the popularisation of the tree of life image, his dynamic
and a-centred evolutionary diagram has more in common with a rhizome
than with an arborescent taxonomy.34 Darwin realised that the tree was
not the most accurate image with which to capture the complex relations
between species. On one of his manuscript sketches, he wrote down the
remark: “Tree not good simile—endless piece of seaweed dividing.” And
in a notebook entry he suggested that “the tree of life should perhaps be
called the coral of life, base of branches dead, so that passages cannot be
seen.”35 Although Frankenstein makes a provocative point about the bio-
logical nature and ideological cooptation of human-animal relations, I
fi nd its interrogation of the aesthetics of species more intriguing. Shelley, I
believe, takes deliberate aim at the visual emphasis in anatomical science
132 Animality in British Romanticism
by showing how its attempts at objectivity and rationality are seriously
compromised by inveterate aesthetic biases. That the only character who
gains a relatively accurate insight into the Monster’s nature is the blind
father of the De Lacey family clearly underscores Shelley’s point that the
classification of species should be less a matter of spontaneous specere or
looking and more a matter of rational contemplation and critical investiga-
tion. The Monster, too, realises that the reason for its social and biologi-
cal marginalisation lies in humanity’s tenacious aesthetic principles. “The
human senses,” the creature understands, “are insurmountable barriers to
our union” (119).
Shelley’s criticism of the aesthetics of species should be read in the context
of a broader historical evolution in the biological sciences, where the empir-
ical concentration on palpable morphological resemblances and differences
was increasingly displaced in favour of a focus on less visible but more fun-
damental qualities. In his Physiological Lectures (1817), for instance, the
English surgeon John Abernethy maintained that he “confide[d] more in the
eye of reason than in that of sense, and would rather form opinions from
analogy, than from the imperfect evidence of sight.”36 And in what could be
read as a warning for Frankenstein not to trust his own eyes, he reflected:
“How strange is it, that anatomists, above all others of the members of the
community of science, should hesitate to admit the existence of what they
cannot discern, since they, more than all the rest, have such constant assur-
ance of the imperfection and fallibility of sight?”37 In The Order of Things,
Foucault has argued that around the end of the eighteenth and beginning
of the nineteenth centuries a new scientific paradigm arose which posited
that the essence of organic life lay beyond the immediately perceivable.38 In
his Natural History, for instance, Buffon stressed that the scientist should
not dwell on the variable surface of things, which is only “the envelope,
or external cover,” but ought to examine deeper organic infrastructures,
which are “the most essential parts of the animal economy, because they
are the most constant, and least subject to variation.”39
One way to make the invisible visible is by removing the surface or
skin of things and laying bare the underlying tissue and bone structures.
But comparative anatomy was not the only discipline that fundamentally
extended the limits of scientific perception. New instruments of observa-
tion, such as the microscope, equally reshaped the visual order of science
and revealed biological patterns that had so far gone unnoticed. In the
nineteenth century, moreover, the emphasis in anatomical science gradually
shifted from morphology (which focuses on the outward form of organs)
to physiology (which focuses on their function).40 The realisation grew that
one can never fully understand the workings of animal anatomy by con-
centrating exclusively on the static appearance of dead bodies. One needs
to study organic life forms in action, too. This focus on function rather
than aesthetic appearance disclosed deeper structural analogies (such as
the functional resemblance between gills and lungs) and showed how all
 A Problem of Waste Management 133
organic forms are essentially interconnected. Buffon even went so far as
to claim that “there was originally but one species, who, after multiplying
and spreading over the whole surface of the earth, have undergone various
changes by the influence of climate, food, mode of living, epidemic dis-
eases, and the mixture of dissimilar individuals.”41
Frankenstein’s tragic flaw is that he focuses too much on faces and sur-
faces. His science lacks depth. If he had paid more attention to the Monster’s
physiology than its aesthetic morphology, or if he had examined it through
a microscope or telescope, he may have realised that he had actually created
a perfectly functioning organism rather than a “fi lthy daemon” (56). Wal-
ton, in fact, fi rst spots the Monster from a distance through a telescope and
recognises that it has “the shape of a man,” a judgment that is a good deal
more accurate than any of Frankenstein’s wild claims (12). Frankenstein
should have moved beyond the immediately visible, or as Foucault writes:
“we must direct our search towards that peak, that necessary but always
inaccessible point, which drives down, beyond our gaze, towards the very
heart of things.”42 This sounds a lot like a sublime science—informed not
by the visual protocols of Burke’s empirical aesthetics, but by Kant’s ratio-
nalist model. What Frankenstein’s science needed, it seems, was less Burke
and more Kant.
Part III
7 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule
The Scientific Sublime

Romantic-period writers went to great lengths to fi nd that unique skill or

special quality that would, once and for all, position the human species at
the hierarchical apex of biological existence. Most of the characteristics
they suggested were fairly orthodox. The Scottish philosopher James Beat-
tie referred to speech (“man is the only animal that can speak”), William
Hazlitt repeated Aristotle’s emphasis on humour (“man is the only animal
that laughs and weeps”), and Aikin and Barbauld believed it was tool-mak-
ing that distinguished Homo sapiens from the animal world (“man is the
only animal that makes use of instruments in any of his actions”).1 Some
of their suggestions were rather less conventional and included the ability
to survive without teeth (“man is the only animal that can counteract the
fatal consequences of the loss of teeth”), an immoderate indulgence in rec-
reational sexual behaviour (“man is the only animal that uses coitus where
nature does not require it”) and the use of printed material to attract pub-
lic interest in commercial activity (“man is the only animal that publishes
advertisements”). 2 One of the more sophisticated distinctions appears in
Hegel’s introduction to his Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel recognises that
humans are essentially animals, but he believes that our rational capacity to
understand our own animality at once propels us from the stringent condi-
tions of animal existence towards a higher, metaphysical plane: “precisely
because [man] knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and
attains knowledge of himself as spirit.”3 If our fall into self-consciousness
terminated our cosy and blissfully ignorant relationship with nature, Hegel
believes it also enabled us to elude nature’s bestialising violence and to
watch its casual disregard for human life from a safe, alienated distance. To
be sure, Hegel’s argument that scientific thought serves a humanising func-
tion and renders us virtually exempt from biological determinism was not a
novel idea at the time. In his Pensées, the seventeenth-century French math-
ematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal memorably compared humanity
to “a thinking reed” and already wrote that “if the universe were to crush
the reed, the man would be nobler than his killer, since he knows that he is
dying, and that the universe has the advantage over him. . . . All our dignity
consists therefore of thought. It is from there that we must be lifted up and
not from space and time, which we could never fill.”4
138 Animality in British Romanticism
Needless to say, my gnomic treatment of Hegel’s and Pascal’s ideas
here does little justice to their full philosophical complexity or historical
weight. But rather than expatiating on their specific genesis and ramifi-
cations, I want to use Hegel’s and Pascal’s statements as compendious
heuristic tools that encapsulate rather neatly (if too simplistically) the
contradictory effects which Romantic-period science had on human iden-
tity. On the one hand, the incremental advances in scientific knowledge
and instrumentation hinted at the limitless potential of human reason
and suggested that Homo sapiens was fundamentally elevated above the
animal world. On the other hand, the new insights provided by these
advances showed precisely that humanity was inextricably mired in physi-
cal reality and that the human individual was an ordinary actor—not
director and not even uninvolved spectator—in the struggle for life. Sci-
ence was thus a profoundly paradoxical undertaking, simultaneously
moving the subject away from and towards animality. It should not come
as a surprise that the Kantian sublime figured saliently in scientific dis-
course, considering that it played on a very similar paradox and, more
importantly, was able to bend this paradoxical situation to the advantage
of the human subject. Kant, too, was very much aware of our physical
and cognitive shortcomings, but his aesthetic of the sublime managed to
rewrite such a humiliating admission of physical impotence and imma-
nence as the most cogent demonstration of rational transcendence. As
in Hegel’s and Pascal’s arguments, his subject derives its invulnerability
from its rational capacity to look upon its own corporeal insignificance in
a mood of contemptuous indifference that borders on the masochistic. We
are at our most rational and human, for Kant, when we can watch nature
attack and consume our bodies without showing the slightest inkling of
grief or emotional involvement. What I aim to show in this chapter, then,
is that Romantic-period scientists and writers about science often posed
as just such gleeful masochists, enthusiastically asserting their humanity
and rational latitude at the cost of their own physical integrity.
The affiliation between science and the sublime has its earliest roots in
Longinus’ exemplary reference to the biblical phrase “And God said ‘Let
there be light,’ and there was light.”5 Ever since Longinus mentioned this
line from Genesis, it has become a staple in the discourse on the sublime,
making its appearance in the theories of Hugh Blair, Henry Home (Lord
Kames), Thomas Reid and, more recently, Paul de Man as well.6 Initially,
theorists alluded to the biblical scene either in a rhetorical context to dem-
onstrate that sublime discourse should balance thematic depth with stylis-
tic simplicity or in a religious context to praise God’s astonishing ingenuity
and craftsmanship. In the eighteenth century, however, the sublime fi at
lux scene entered theories whose main concern was neither rhetorical nor
theological. As new fi ndings in cosmogony and optics exposed the physi-
cal composition and technical workings of light, God’s creative act became
charged with secular layers of meaning and the sublime increasingly
 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule 139
emerged as a discourse of scientific discovery rather than biblical revelation.
Alexander Pope’s “Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster-
Abbey” (1730) mockingly suggested that Newton’s research on optics and
the refraction of light had challenged God’s omnipotence and that it was,
in fact, Newton—not God—who had illuminated the earth and dispelled
darkness and ignorance: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. /
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was Light.”7 Although Humphry Davy
recognised that the fi at lux scene did not give a very accurate account of the
origin of light, he did not reject biblical cosmogony altogether. “I believe
that light was the creation of an act of the Divine will,” he wrote in his
Consolations in Travel (1830), “but I do not mean to say that the words,
‘Let there be light, and there was light,’ were orally spoken by the Deity,
nor do I mean to imply that the modern discoveries respecting light are at
all connected with this sublime and magnificent passage.”8
Showing much less deference to scriptural science, Thomas Paine repudi-
ated biblical cosmogony as a “puerile and pitiful idea” flying in the face of
common sense. He interpreted the phrase from Genesis as a self-empow-
ering rhetorical sublime that mainly sought to manoeuvre the speaker,
Moses, to the centre of creative power. “Longinus calls this expression the
sublime,” he incisively observed, “and by the same rule the conjurer is sub-
lime too; for the manner of speaking is expressively and grammatically
the same.”9 Paine’s criticism prefigures Paul de Man’s interpretation, which
would similarly place the phrase in a Longinian tradition, reading it as a
rhetorical sublime by way of which Moses reclaims control over language
and himself. De Man emphasises that God is not pronouncing the words,
but that they are quoted by Moses, a point made more obvious perhaps
in Longinus’ phrasing: “‘God said’—what?—‘Let there be light, and there
was; let there be earth, and there was’” (58). In a world where the Word
is God and where the human subject is reduced to what de Man calls a
“ventriloquist’s dummy,” a slave to God’s word, Moses’ capability to ver-
balise God’s creative act, indeed, points to a superior language that allows
humanity to bracket God’s power and to transcend His Word.10
Science put the human species into a startlingly different perspective.
As the telescope radically stretched the boundaries of human perception,
it became increasingly clear that Homo sapiens was not the showpiece of
biological life, immovably lodged at the axis of the universe. In his lengthy
cosmological study Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens
(1755), Kant brushed aside the conviction that life originated exclusively on
Earth and speculated that “most of the planets are certainly inhabited, and
those that are not will be in the future,” an idea that was surprisingly wide-
spread at the time.11 For Byron, the scientific insight into cosmic magnitude
and the so-called plurality of worlds painfully demonstrated the triviality
of terrestrial life and left him deprived of his faith in human immortality.
In a letter to William Gifford, he wrote: “It was the comparative insig-
nificance of ourselves & our world when placed in competition with the
140 Animality in British Romanticism
mighty whole of which it is an atom that fi rst led me to imagine that our
pretensions to eternity might be over-rated.”12
Although science also challenged Joseph Addison’s religious beliefs,
he rather swiftly moved from a distressing reminder of “that little insig-
nificant figure which [he] bore amidst the immensity of God’s works” to
a reverential appreciation of divine power. In a fragment recollecting his
nocturnal observations on the beauty and magnitude of the sky, Addi-
son fi rst wonders how to delimitate a space that was created by an infi-
nite power and that gives all the impression of being limitless itself. The
more sensitive our telescopes become, he realises, the wider the cosmos
appears and the smaller we come to look, until we may fi nally disappear
completely out of God’s sight. Addison’s awareness of his trivial role in
the cosmic scheme of things induces a sublime fear of self-annihilation,
whereby humanity threatens to be effaced by the myriad of terrestrial and
extraterrestrial life forms and to become completely invisible to God’s
eye. “I was afraid,” he admits, “of being overlooked amidst the immen-
sity of nature, and lost among that infi nite variety of creatures, which
in all probability swarm through all these immeasurable regions of mat-
ter.” Like Wordsworth in Book 7, Addison fears that the numerical excess
of life forms might engulf his own subjectivity. In order to preserve his
humanity, he will need to re-establish a panoptic viewpoint raised above
the vibrant mess of physical existence. Whereas Wordsworth transcended
urban ecology, rather paradoxically, by way of a mystical discourse that
celebrated organic unity, for Addison it is exactly such a register of bio-
logical interdependence that jeopardises human autonomy. He needs
something different, something less down-to-earth.
Ultimately, Addison recovers his selfhood when he gains insight into
God’s omniscience and realises that we will never appear invisible to God’s
eye, which is more powerful than any optical lens humanity can fabricate.
This insight into God’s superior perceptive power, however, is not a ques-
tion of biblical revelation, but needs to be enforced through a Kantian spe-
cies of reason that is able to rectify the misconceptions supplied by the
inferior faculty of imagination. “The poorness of our conceptions is such,”
Addison explains, “that it cannot forbear setting bounds to every thing it
contemplates; until our reason comes again to our succour, and throws
down all those little prejudices which rise in us unawares and are natural
to the mind of man.”13 In arguing so, Addison inadvertently suggests that
religious belief and human autonomy hinge on our rational competence
to perceive God’s panoptic eye and that fi nal perceptive power resides in
humanity. In his hierarchy of focalisation, our ability to understand God’s
omniscience and watch ourselves being watched through this divine lens
allows us not only to recuperate our autonomy but also to establish a sense
of perceptual superiority. Addison’s cosmological sublime, although set out
to demonstrate divine power, thus appears to proceed along a very Kantian
trajectory and ends up exhibiting the breadth of human reason.
 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule 141
Thomas De Quincey’s cosmic sublime moves along the same trajec-
tory, but shoves divine agency out of the picture entirely. In “System of
the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” (1846), a discussion
of the research of the English astronomer Lord Rosse (William Parsons),
De Quincey argues that although the telescope reveals a boundless uni-
verse and thus provides a poignant snapshot of human insignificance, it
also hints at the possibility—however remote or theoretical—of controlling
that boundlessness: “It is the famous nebula in the constellation of Orion;
famous for the unexampled defiance with which it resisted all approaches
from the most potent of former telescopes; famous for its frightful mag-
nitude, and for the frightful depth to which it is sunk in the abysses of
the heavenly wilderness; famous just now for the submission with which it
has begun to render up its secrets to the all-conquering telescope.” A few
paragraphs later, De Quincey’s subjectivism assumes an even more explicit
character when he suggests that the perceived limitlessness of the cosmos
actually reflects the boundless potential of human knowledge: “[Man]
trembles at the abyss into which his bodily eyes look down, or look up; not
knowing that abyss to be . . . the mirror to a mightier abyss that will one
day be expanded in himself.”14 That the immensity of the cosmos is predi-
cated on the power of our optical lenses, indeed, fosters the impression that
the universe only expands in conjunction with our scientific knowledge and
that infi nity resides as much within as outside the self.
De Quincey’s mapping of cosmic onto cognitive topography recalls
Kant’s claim in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) that “two things fi ll
the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more
often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above
me and the moral law within me.” The fi rst, cosmic sort of limitlessness
compels us to recognise our insignificance as material beings and suspends
any belief we may have in human exceptionality. This insight, according to
Kant, “annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which
after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not
how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter
from which it came.” The second, subjective kind of limitlessness coun-
teracts this physical degradation and, like Hegel’s self-empowering insight
into his animal existence, evacuates us or, at least, our humanity from
nature’s crushing materiality. Kant writes: it “infi nitely raises my worth as
an intelligence, by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a
life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world.”15 In
the drama of the Kantian sublime, now, the physical and psychic are pitted
against each other and it is the ineffable magnitude of the starry heavens
that provides us with an insight into the superior power of the interior,
moral world. The oppressive force of nature, Kant argues in his Critique
of Judgment, allows us to “become conscious of being superior to nature
within us and thus also to nature outside us (insofar as it influences us)”
(147). Science may teach us that we are mere worms crawling in the dirt
142 Animality in British Romanticism
of physical reality, but our intellectual ability to understand and concep-
tualise our bestial existence at once demonstrates our freedom as rational
agents and removes us spiritually from the animal world, even if we can
never physically transcend its callous determinism. In the experience of the
sublime, likewise, “the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even
though the human being must submit to that dominion” (Judgment 145).
This Kantian reciprocation between exteriority and inwardness, whereby
nature’s seeming chaos induces a state of mental disorientation until reason
restores order in the mind and finally in external nature as well, stands out
as a stock pattern in Romantic-period scientific writings. In a lyrical report
on a field trip with James Hutton, the Scottish scientist John Playfair claimed
that geological research opens a window on the passing of time and places
humanity not into a spatial perspective as in Addison’s or De Quincey’s
fragments, but in a vertiginously historical one. “The mind,” Playfair notes,
“seemed to grow giddy, by looking so far into the abyss of time.” This loss of
rational control is immediately redressed, however, when Hutton’s scientific
exposition points to the systematicity of geological evolution and, subjec-
tively, restores Playfair’s faith in human reason. In a strikingly Kantian way,
Playfair concludes with postulating the superiority of the faculty of reason
over the imagination: “while we listened with earnestness and admiration to
the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these
wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may some-
times go than imagination can venture to follow.”16
It is less challenging to sustain a Kantian belief in the absolute immunity
of human reason when studying natural phenomena that are historically or
geographically removed from us than when studying zoology or compara-
tive anatomy, which directly implicate humanity in their research and rule
out the prophylactic sense of detachment or uninvolved spectatorship on
which the experience of the scientific sublime usually depends. And yet,
biologists, too, still found a philosophical loophole to exempt humanity
from the evolutionary rat race. In his Letters to a Young Naturalist on
the Study of Nature and Natural Theology (1831), the Irish anatomist and
physiologist James Lawson Drummond wondered how to reconcile the idea
of a benevolent God with the existence of predatory animals—a classic pre-
dicament in theodicy. It is easy, he argued, to perceive a divine scheme of
causality and instrumentality at work in nature and to claim that God cre-
ated animals solely to satisfy our appetite when we focus on the food that
is on our plates. That same scheme, however, appears much less appealing
when we end up in their mouths, beaks or muzzles. In an astute, if slightly
bizarre, thought experiment, Drummond asks himself: “when a sailor falls
overboard, and is devoured by a shark, if the latter could speak, might it
not with as much truth say that the sailor was made for him to feed upon?”
In his somewhat evasive answer to this theological problem, Drummond
argues that the belief that God fabricated the natural world for our enjoy-
ment alone is clearly not a biological reality, but only a phantasm created
 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule 143
by the effortlessness with which our rational faculty can understand and
classify natural phenomena. “Man owes every thing to his superior intel-
ligence,” Drummond writes, “and in this sense he may consider that every
thing was made for him, because there is nothing in existence which he
may not mentally apply to use—even the wild beast, or the fi sh that would
devour him.”17
Drummond’s belief that we can think ourselves into a state of complete
invincibility—even when the body is ground to pieces by nature’s jaws—
carries Kant’s sublime denial of the physical to its logical conclusion.
Although material reality violates our bodily integrity, our faculty of reason
shields us from natural law both within and outside ourselves, so much so
that we can watch the destruction of our own animal bodies with the cruel
detachment of a vivisectionist and the complacent enjoyment of a masoch-
ist. We know we are part of nature, Drummond claims, but this knowledge
paradoxically elevates us above its biological reality and affords our minds
impunity from its physical influence. In this way, “a predatory world is dis-
armed,” as Eagleton suggested in his discussion of the sublime—not “to a
kind of fiction,” however, but to a kind of scientific non-fiction (164).
Eagleton’s claim that “the aesthetic is . . . a kind of psychical defence
mechanism by which the mind, threatened with an overload of pain, con-
verts the cause of its agony into innocuous illusion” thus also applies to the
scientific sublime, which very similarly permits us “to contemplate hostile
objects with absolute equanimity, serene in the knowledge that they can
no longer harm us” (163–64). But whereas Eagleton insists that the aes-
thetic transcendence of physical danger requires a stoic sense of emotional
withdrawal, the geologist Robert Bakewell adopted a more masochistic
approach which argued that it is precisely our excitement at scientific dis-
covery that defi nes us over and against other animals. In his Introduction
to Geology (1813), Bakewell writes that “there is no science [like geol-
ogy] which presents objects that so powerfully excite our admiration and
astonishment.” This astonishment is not the Burkean brand of bewilder-
ment reducing the human subject to a bestial creature conditioned by self-
preservative drives and sexual instincts. Much more cerebral and Kantian,
it stimulates scientific curiosity and helps us transcend our animal nature.
“Without this excitement,” Bakewell believes, “man would for ever remain
the mere creature of animal sensation, scarcely advanced above the beasts
of the forest.” Bakewell recognises that science subverts human power,
but—in a display of Kantian table-turning—he recuperates the capacity to
understand this subversion as evidence of human uniqueness and ingenuity.
“Such speculations,” he claims, “are somewhat humbling to human pride
on the one hand, but on the other, they prove our superiority over the rest
of the animal creation.”18
Like the telescope, the microscope opened up a new world, one that
was much smaller and closer to home yet as diverse and seemingly infi nite.
Whereas the natural sublime traditionally revolved around exotic predators
144 Animality in British Romanticism
whose reputation verged on the mythical, the microscope now shifted
attention to species that were native to the British Isles but whose appear-
ance was no less alienating or astonishing. In his Philosophical Enquiry,
Burke had stressed that the sublime usually involves “great objects” and the
beautiful “small ones.” “In the animal creation, out of our own species,”
he explained, “it is the small we are inclined to be fond of; little birds, and
some of the smaller kinds of beasts” (103). In his chapter on vastness, how-
ever, he claimed that the infi nitesimal, too, can be a source of terror and
that sublimity has more to do with atypical size than with size per se:

It may not be amiss to add to these remarks upon magnitude, that, as

the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of little-
ness is in some measure sublime likewise: when we attend to the infi nite
divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively
small, and yet organized beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of
the sense; when we push our discoveries yet downward, and consider
those creatures so many degrees yet smaller, and the still diminishing
scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the
sense; we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minute-
ness; nor can we distinguish in its effects this extreme of littleness from
the vast itself. (Sublime 66)

This microbiological or—in subjectivist terms—microscopic sublime

hinges on a play of decreasing scale and proportion, whereby our gradu-
ally sharpening view discloses increasingly smaller worlds until the imagi-
nation reaches its optical zoom limit, leaving us visually exhausted and
nonplussed. With its epistemological interest in the threshold of human
perception, Burke’s microscopic aesthetic carries a surprisingly Kantian
ring. Even so, it still retains a characteristically Burkean sense of physi-
cal terror. The microscope reveals that small animals, too, can endanger
human survival. As they escape the natural ambit of our visual field, more-
over, these animals generally fail to elicit our instincts of self-preservation
and thus pose a more serious threat to human existence than large preda-
tors. This threat is vividly conveyed in the cut-throat drama of Erasmus
Darwin’s philosophical poem The Temple of Nature (1803), in which the
mosquito appears as menacing as Burke’s tiger and panther:

So from deep lakes the dread Musquito springs,

Drinks the soft breeze, and dries his tender wings,
In twinkling squadrons cuts his airy way,
Dips his red trunk in blood, and man his prey.19

By exposing the innumerable multitude of life forms moving and multi-

plying under our eyes and even inside our own bodies, microbiology readily
discarded the conventional view of nature as passive inert stuff. As Paine
 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule 145
put it in The Age of Reason: “the earth, the waters, and the air that sur-
round it” are “crowded with life, down from the largest animals that we
know of to the smallest insects the naked eye can behold and from thence
to others still smaller, and totally invisible without the assistance of the
microscope.”20 When read against the backdrop of this new insight, Word-
sworth’s ability to see into the life of things comes to sound a lot less mysti-
cal and pantheistic than customarily assumed. 21 Microbiology provided the
Romantics with an understanding of what Jane Bennett has recently called
the “vibrant materiality” of things. 22 It demonstrated that nature, rather
than being inanimate or static like a landscape painting, is in constant
motion and interactive development. At times, such a radical expansion of
the categories of life and subjectivity appealed to a deeper human need for
a sense of environmental belonging and counteracted the physical isolation
that unavoidably accompanied an anthropocentric worldview. By suggest-
ing that the human body does not dissolve into thin air after the heart has
stopped beating but only changes physical shape, microbiology also opened
up an avenue for a secular and materialist kind of immortality—think of
Wordsworth’s dead Lucy, whose body “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal
course / With rocks and stones and trees.”23 Such a vital materialism also
informs Percy Shelley’s belief in Queen Mab that

those viewless beings,

Whose mansion is the smallest particle
Of the impassive atmosphere,
Think, feel and live like man. (1:131–34)

On the other hand, this realisation that nature is densely populated by an

uncontainable number and diversity of life forms, each with its own agency
and drives, is simply uncanny. It is not so much like fi nding a rat in one’s
cupboard as like fi nding out that the cupboard itself was a rat all along.
Microbiology, Marjorie Nicolson pointed out some decades ago, breaks
down the barrier between the human and non-human and between subjec-
tivity and objecthood.24 After all, insofar as our bodies house and depend
on a multitude of micro-organisms for their physical well-being (according
to the molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler, humans are 90–99% bacterial),
we are these organisms just as they are us. 25 In this light, Walt Whitman’s
pompous self-characterisation “I am large, I contain multitudes” appears
to give a surprisingly naturalistic representation of human subjectivity (if
perhaps unintentionally so). 26
It may seem counterintuitive, but the new technological and theoreti-
cal advances in scientific visualisation did not lead to a more objectivist
conception of aesthetic experience. Some Romantic-period scientists were
certainly wary of the sublime and found its introspective idealism and epis-
temological attachment to epiphany difficult to reconcile with the objec-
tivist and rationalist procedures of scientific research. In an 1807 lecture,
146 Animality in British Romanticism
Humphry Davy asserted that “men of science, instead of worshipping idols
existing in their own imaginations, have examined with reverence and awe
the substantial majesty of nature.” And he went on using the same meta-
phor that Mary Shelley would employ to illustrate the sublime power of sci-
entific revelation: “Discovery has not visited them and disappeared again,
like the flashes of lightning amidst the darkness of night; but it has slowly
and quietly advanced, as the mild lustre of the morning promising a glori-
ous day.”27 Rather than just mounting a case against the idealist sublime,
Davy here advances a more radical aesthetic break that seeks to relocate
scientific inquiry from the self-involved drama of the sublime to the com-
posed objectivist register of the beautiful. Thomas Paine rejected the use of
the sublime in scientific discourse more categorically, arguing that its pen-
chant for the hyperbolic was bound to nourish inaccurate representations
of nature. “The sublime of the critics, like some parts of Edmund Burke’s
sublime and beautiful,” he believed, “is like a windmill just visible in a fog,
which imagination might distort into a flying mountain, or an archangel,
or a flock of wild geese.”28
The criticism that the subjectivism of the sublime was inimical to the pro-
tocols of scientific research was not entirely justified. Science, in fact, was
partly responsible for the subjectivist emphasis in Romantic aesthetics. When
perceived through the microscope or telescope, those objects that initially
looked uninteresting appeared no less overwhelming than the traditional
sources of the sublime. The scientific sublime thus seemed to be a question
of subjective perception or, at least, of the right visual instruments. In his
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), John Her-
schel, the son of the astronomer William Herschel and a scientist himself,
showed how both science and aesthetics had turned their attention away from
the extraordinary to the everyday to find there a new, unexplored ground of
wonder and grandeur. “To the natural philosopher, there is no natural object
unimportant or trifling,” he wrote; “in circumstances where the uninformed
and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the
midst of wonders.”29 When every natural object becomes a potential source
of sublimity, however, the sublime in nature disappears and the power of aes-
thetic judgment shifts entirely to the subjective perceiver. Although science
promoted an objective and objectivist understanding of nature that sought to
transcend the individual’s point of view, it thus firmly placed the subject at
the centre of scientific and aesthetic experience.
In the fragments I have discussed so far, the scientific sublime emerges
as a resolutely idealist discourse whereby the metaphysical faculty of rea-
son recovers the subject’s humanity from the clockwork cruelty of nature.
Some poets, Byron and Percy Shelley among them, were significantly less
confident about such a Kantian rescue operation and expressed deep scepti-
cism about the humanist faith in the indisputable authority and salvational
potential of scientific rationality. For them, scientific reason seemed too
closely connected to objective nature—both in its empirical focus on the
 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule 147
physical object world and in its own status as a non-subjective faculty—to
liberate humanity from nature’s ruthless determinism. In order to construct
an entirely free and self-regulating subject, they put forward a sceptical
or anti-scientific sublime steeped in mordant satire and self-deprecating
wit. These sceptical models retain the sacrificial structure of the scientific
sublime, but whereas in the scientific aesthetic, reason sacrifices the body
in order to pull itself free from physical existence, the sceptical sublime
goes one significant step further and sacrifices the power and legitimacy
of human reason as well. Byron’s and Shelley’s aesthetic models also share
the physical masochism inherent in Kant’s theory, but they direct its auto-
mutilative violence inwards, too, where it develops into a sort of epistemo-
logical masochism or scepticism. Humans, for them, are not just physically
powerless (as Kant contends), but also intellectually they leave much to be
desired. Relying on a highly effective mix of erudite pastiche and juvenile
ridicule, their sceptical sublime reveals a superior mental faculty, less tran-
scendental perhaps yet no less powerful than Kant’s reason. It is this faculty
that shields them from terror, truth and the terror of truth.
God’s creative formula “Let there be light” found its antithesis in Percy
Shelley’s negative imperative “Be not!” from his 1820 closet drama Pro-
metheus Unbound. The phrase concludes Shelley’s brief poetic expedition
down to the earth’s geological strata, exposing an “Infi nite mine of ada-
mant and gold” (4:280) but also an impressive collection of skeletons and
fossils, which stand as a grim testament to the wealth and variety of past
life and—perhaps even more—to the catastrophe which violently termi-
nated that life:

The anatomies of unknown winged things,

And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jagged alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,
And weed-overgrown continents of earth,
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe
Wrapped deluge round it like a cloak, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God,
Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried,
“Be not!” and like my words they were no more. (4:303–18)

Like the telescopic and microscopic sublime, Shelley’s geological model

is fi rst, and most obviously, mathematical in that it attempts to capture
148 Animality in British Romanticism
the multiplicity of terrestrial life by indexing its organic and inorganic
materials. This mathematical sublime, however, does not inspire the vital
materialism that was typically occasioned by cosmological or microbio-
logical discovery. Shelley’s fragment does not take stock of an infi nite
number of worlds within worlds, each crawling with life and buzzing with
activity, but it exhibits only the relics of that life, “sepulchred emblems /
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!” (4:294–95). Just as Addison ulti-
mately turned his attention skywards to celebrate the divine agency that
created life, Shelley’s gradually ascends from the earth’s strata to “some
God / Whose throne was in a comet,” not to pay tribute to that creative
power but to make a travesty of its wanton destructiveness and exploit
for comic effect the growing polarisation between biblical apocalypticism
and scientific cosmology. Instead of trying to reconcile religious with sci-
entific explanation, he plays them out against each other by placing them
in a randomised sequence, not so much to demonstrate the superiority of
either as to produce a lawless multiplicity of truths that dispenses with a
metaphysical notion of truth altogether.
Shelley’s mocking attempt to understand and represent the cataclysmic
power of nature reads like a spoof of Kant’s dynamical sublime, which
similarly tries to keep in check overwhelming natural force. Whereas Kant
defuses this physical power by taking recourse to the transcendental fac-
ulty of reason, Shelley asserts his subjective autonomy precisely through
a sceptical distortion of human rationality. Despite this different empha-
sis, Kant’s rationalist and Shelley’s sceptical models share the same syntax
and are geared towards the same end. Like Kant’s subject, Shelley’s is a
profoundly alienated creature. This alienation, however, is not a debili-
tating mood suff used with an elegiac longing for a lost unity. It is a posi-
tive condition playing a crucial role in the formation and emancipation of
human subjectivity. For Kant, the alienated interstice opened up by the
sublime between humanity and nature functions as a fecund buffer zone
where the self-governing subject can arise and thrive without being cir-
cumscribed by biological necessity. In Shelley’s fragment, alternatively, the
subject regains control over itself in the sceptical distance between sense
and nonsense. This sceptical chasm is not only an ontologically empow-
ering space, but—contradictory though this might sound—it also boosts
the subject’s epistemic power. Aside from displaying the absolute authority
of truth, which is so powerful that it remains permanently out of human
reach, scepticism also reveals the human power to question and subvert
transcendental truth. James Noggle has similarly argued in The Skeptical
Sublime (2001) that “the very distance discovered between the uncertain
subject and reason unleashes a subjective power that can demolish reason
itself.”30 Although sceptical reason never manages to reach the unassailable
status of Kant’s a priori truths, it proves more potent in the end because it is
capable of calling these truths into question. This sceptical sublime is thus
more Kantian than it seems for it exchanges metaphysical reason with a
 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule 149
faculty that enjoys even more immunity from physical reality and empirical
scrutiny. To question scepticism, after all, absurdly adds to the strength of
its argument and authorises its epistemic value.
But what exactly is the nature of this sceptical faculty? The fi nal line from
the fragment quoted earlier—“‘Be not!’ and like my words they were no
more”—suggests that Shelley’s scepticism is a product of his poetic imagi-
nation. His laconic inversion of biblical creationism here draws attention
to the fictional construction of his own text—a case in point of Romantic
irony. More to the point, it pillories the discursive construction of scientific
and religious theories, and places their institutionalised truths on a par
with the nonsensical explanation put forward by the poet, who ultimately
appears to be the superior creative director of this cosmological drama.
Shelley’s sceptical poet, then, is not a weary doubter, too benumbed by
the liquidation of truth to take any meaningful action.31 Rather, his scep-
tic is an epistemological masochist, who fantasises himself into a Kantian
state of heroic impunity by laughing human, natural and supernatural law
phlegmatically in the face.
Although Kant had argued in his pre-Critical Observations on the Feel-
ing of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) that the phlegmatic contains “no
ingredients of the sublime or beautiful . . . in any noticeable degree,” he
changed his mind in the Critique of Judgment, where he wrote that “affect-
lessness (apatheia, phlegm in significatu bono) in a mind that emphati-
cally pursues its own inalterable principles is sublime, and indeed, in a far
superior way, because it also has the satisfaction of pure reason on its side”
(154).32 In a particularly fitting image of fossilisation, de Man similarly
maintained that for Kant “the dynamics of the sublime mark the moment
when the infi nite is frozen into the materiality of stone, when no pathos,
anxiety, or sympathy is conceivable; it is, indeed, the moment of a-pathos,
or apathy, as the complete loss of the symbolic.”33 Shelley’s sublime satire,
likewise, is characterised by a stoic defiance to the violence of nature and
theory. But this is not the stone-cold moral apathy which de Man has in
mind. A profoundly socially conscious aesthetic, Shelley’s geological sub-
lime seeks to protect the subject less against natural law (which is futile
anyway) than against the terror of political and religious law. Whereas
Kant’s sublime arose from a phobic antagonism to animality and nature,
Shelley’s principal target is social hierarchy. This anti-authoritarian thrust
of his sceptical sublime clearly stands out when he focuses on the geological
remains of imperial power:

the melancholy ruins

Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turned to marble, quivers, helms, and spears,
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythèd chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts. (4:288–93)
150 Animality in British Romanticism
The “monarch beasts,” such as the alligator and the biblical behemoth,
which are mentioned a few lines later, evoke the aristocratic grandeur
of Burke’s sublime animals (4:311). By recording their destruction and
fossilisation, however, Shelley suggests the existence of a more destruc-
tive sublime force capable of consuming these robust creatures and, by
implication, human society and its patriarchal ideologies as well. Shel-
ley’s geological sublime shows a clear moral affi liation with the sublime
of ruins that we came across in Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well,” where
ecological disaster (or perhaps natural evolution) put an equally dras-
tic end to the exploitative reign of that other monarch beast, Sir Walter.
Geological ruin appears in Shelley’s work (and, in fact, throughout the
writings of the Romantics) as an egalitarian force that liberates the indi-
vidual from political oppression and persecution—even if, paradoxically
enough, this liberation is so indiscriminately violent that it eradicates all
terrestrial life. 34
Critics have long understood that the sublime, with its exhibitionist dis-
play of private sentiment, can easily slip into the ridiculous and become a
source of public embarrassment. In his Analytical Inquiry into the Prin-
ciples of Taste (1805), Richard Payne Knight observed that “the ridicu-
lous seems . . . always lying in wait on the extreme verge of the sublime
and pathetic.”35 And Thomas Paine believed that both discourses are so
closely connected that “one step above the sublime makes the ridiculous,
and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.”36 In these
cases, the ridiculous is conceived of as an accidental discourse or a sublime
gone wrong, resulting from a lack of authenticity or stylistic originality. In
Byron’s poetry, however, the ridiculous sublime figures as an intentional
rather than accidental register, which shares with the Kantian sublime not
so much its grandiose vocabulary as its self-empowering masochism. In the
following excerpt from Don Juan (1819–24), for instance, the ridiculous
emerges as an independent discourse, neither aspiring to sound sublime nor
wilfully parodying its highfalutin rhetoric. Although its subject matter—
the apocalyptic destruction of human civilisation—was a returning topic
in the Romantic sublime and had, in fact, received serious treatment in
Byron’s earlier End of Days poem “Darkness,” Byron here stages geologi-
cal disaster in a style that is purposely misplaced and farcical. He does not
ridicule transcendence in this scene, but achieves transcendence by way of
the ridiculous:

When this world shall be former, underground,

Thrown topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled,
Baked, fried, or burnt, turned inside-out, or drowned,
Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled
First out of, and then back again to Chaos,
The Superstratum which will overlay us.
 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule 151
So Cuvier says;—and then shall come again
Unto the new Creation, rising out
From our old crash, some mystic, ancient strain
Of things destroyed and left in airy doubt:
Like to the notions we now entertain
Of Titans, giants, fellows of about
Some hundred feet in height, not to say miles,
And Mammoths, and your winged Crocodiles. (9:291–304)

When this fragment is read alongside “Darkness,” which strikes a much

more sinister and elegiac tone, it becomes clear how the discourse of the
ridiculous—like the Kantian sublime—can eliminate the anxiety of human
transience and inspire a superhuman sense of fearlessness. The best way to
respond to nature’s indifference to human life, Byron seems to suggest, is
with more indifference. Two paradoxical strategies now stand out to defend
oneself against the violence of the real. Either one celebrates one’s physi-
cal frailty and sycophantically praises nature’s supremacy (as the Ancient
Mariner does), or one ridicules one’s own powerlessness (as Byron does).
Both strategies are deeply ironic, inverting as they do physical descent into
spiritual ascent, but only the latter is truly ridiculous.
The scientific sublime and Byron’s satirical discourse are both tools of
self-deification, but they achieve this empowerment in different ways and
at the expense of different agents. In the scientific sublime, it is nature and
animality that pose the principal threat and reason that comes to the rescue.
In Byron’s fragment, meanwhile, scientific reason (personified by Georges
Cuvier) does not play such an auxiliary role and is, in fact, held account-
able for the subject’s dehumanisation. By presenting geological disaster as a
subjective theory rather than an unquestionable reality (“So Cuvier says”),
Byron foregrounds the discursive production of scientific truth and cre-
ates the impression that science, rather than emancipating the subject from
nature, conspires with nature to undercut the self’s autonomy. If in the
masochistic theatre of the scientific or Kantian sublime, it is nature which
punishes the body and—following the ironic logic of masochism—nature
which is eventually defanged, in Byron’s fragment it is scientific reason
that chastises the subject and science that is ultimately chastised. The mas-
ochist, Deleuze has argued in “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), punctures
the violent authority of the law by implementing it with neurotic zeal and
detail. “By scrupulously applying the law,” he writes, “we are able to dem-
onstrate its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is intended to
prevent or to conjure.”37 This is precisely what Byron does in this fragment.
Instead of openly repudiating scientific law, he applies it with such exces-
sive enthusiasm that it comes to sound wholly irrational and ludicrous. His
irrationalism is a rationalism in overdrive. When he imagines, for instance,
how future archaeologists might one day dig up the notoriously obese King
152 Animality in British Romanticism
George IV and mistake him for a gargantuan animal (“the new world-
lings of the then new East / Will wonder where such animals could sup!”),
Byron does not explicitly question the value or principles of paleontological
research, but he pushes its methodology to its extremes so that palaeontol-
ogy becomes a wholly absurd enterprise (9:306–307). This absurdist aspect
is fundamental to masochistic experience, according to Deleuze. Masoch-
ists, he argues, are humourists who parody their worst fears, ironise their
sexual desires and laugh their punisher in the face in order to obtain abso-
lute independence.38
Unlike Kant’s transcendental faculty of reason, Byron’s satirical wit does
not make the human less of an animal. As Claire Colebrook has observed,
satire pokes merciless fun at the fallibility of human knowledge and thereby
“recognises the lowly animal being behind all our ideas of self-creation.”39
For Byron, geological discovery is not, as Bakewell claimed, “somewhat
humbling to human pride,” but it completely destabilises the belief in human
exceptionality and reveals that “Men are but maggots of some huge Earth’s
burial” (9:312). In a very telling fragment, furthermore, Byron rejects the
Socratic axiom that energises the recuperative movement in the Kantian
sublime. In his view, the idea that the negative understanding of our intel-
lectual shortcomings would somehow eject us from the animal world is
merely a counterproductive gimmick that dehumanises us even more:

Socrates said, our only knowledge was

“To know that nothing could be known;” a pleasant
Science enough, which levels to an ass
Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present. (7:33–36)

And yet, Byron’s satire retains a hint of Kantian salvationism. His scep-
tical sublime may be powerless to protect humanity from the brutality of
nature, but it does emancipate the individual from the grip of institutiona-
lised epistemologies, whether they be scientific, theological or political. His
sceptical reason improvises a uniquely individual sense of truth, unaffected
by and indifferent to scientific law and religious dogma. This indifference
is not completely devoid of human feeling. I am inclined to follow Anne
Mellor’s well-known, if also regularly criticised, positive interpretation of
Byron’s irony as a register that “can potentially free individuals and even
entire cultures from totalitarian modes of thought and behavior.”40 Aside
from liberating the subject from the political (and dietary) greed of George
IV, Byron’s mythomania also comically undermines the biblical catastro-
phism that still informed the theories of Georges Cuvier and most contem-
porary scientists. His ridicule does not promote a resignation from reality
into the nihilistic consciousness of the ironist, but it combines a defeatist
embrace of physical destruction with an antithetical yearning for moral
vitality and absolute creative freedom.
 Revelation, Reason, Ridicule 153
There is something of a parallel here with Deleuze and Guattari’s becom-
ing-animal, which suggests a very similar ontological flattening in order to
disengage human individuality from the constraining identity structures
imposed by bourgeois humanism. Byron, however, does not share their
proselytising belief in human improvement and self-reinvention. In his
view, the patriarchal desire for power and domination is not a superficial
ideological urge that can be easily dismantled or shaken off. As much a
biological as an ideological phenomenon, it is inextricably and ineluctably
intertwined with the structure of human identity. If we want to rid our-
selves of our exploitative organs and organisations, then, we cannot just
become-animal. We need a more radical redefi nition of selfhood. We need
to become fossils. This cynical strand of utopianism (or perhaps upbeat
dystopianism would be a more precise characterisation) also permeates the
following fragment from Byron’s closet drama Heaven and Earth (1821),
where the millennial reconciliation between humanity and nature, and
more symbolically, between the tiger and the lamb only appears possible
after a levelling process of fossilisation:

The creatures proud of their poor clay,

Shall perish, and their bleached bones shall lurk
In caves, in dens, in clefts of mountains, where
The deep shall follow to their latest lair;
Where even the brutes, in their despair,
Shall cease to prey on man and on each other,
And the striped tiger shall lie down to die
Beside the lamb, as though he were his brother;
Till all things shall be as they were,
Silent and uncreated, save the sky. 41

Byron’s flash-forward to the past parodies an iconic scene from Isaiah, in

which it is prophesied that “the wolf . . . shall dwell with the lamb, and
the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion
and the fatling together.”42 Although Byron’s brutally materialist picture
of environmental reconciliation highlights the very impossibility of utopia,
it shows that even in their most deadpan despair and jaded cynicism, his
writings leave some room for hope and moral creativity.
8 A Taste of God
Natural Theology and the
Aesthetics of Intelligent Design

Humphry Davy and Thomas Paine expressed an increasingly common sen-

timent when they asserted that the sublime was neither a realistic nor a
desirable vehicle with which to represent scientific discovery. Their pro-
posed movement away from the caffeinated monodrama of the sublime
towards the visual economy and emotional poise of the beautiful proved
paradigmatic. With its focus on natural order instead of psychological
disorder, the register of the beautiful was more in keeping with science’s
mandate to describe things as they intrinsically are rather than as how they
appear to the alienated consciousness of the singular subject. As a social
discourse, it was also consistent with the increasingly widespread view that
science ought to be a public enterprise, both in its methodological reliance
on peer review and in its moral commitment to improve the quality of life
of the entire human community.1
Not only the scientific sublime was questioned. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century the very link between science and aesthetics came under
unprecedented scrutiny. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant categorically
dismissed the relationship between science and beauty, stating that “there
is neither a science of the beautiful, only a critique, nor beautiful science,
only beautiful art” (184). Although I am less concerned here with Kant’s
fi rst rejection, it still merits some attention for it plainly reveals the anthro-
pocentric anxiety that motivated his effort to keep aesthetic sensibility far
removed from scientific inquiry. According to Kant, taste is not susceptible
to empirical analysis because aesthetic and rational judgments arise in two
completely separate mental spaces. Judgments of beauty, he believes, are
produced by the intuitive faculty of imagination and conjure up questions
such as “how does this painting make me feel?” rather than “does it give an
accurate representation of historical reality?” or “how many eggs did the
painter use to create this kind of yellow?,” which are questions triggered by
the cognitive faculty of understanding and should be tackled by scientific
inquiry. In arguing so, Kant brushed aside Burke’s ambition to make an
inventory of the “fi xed principles” or “invariable and certain laws” that
 A Taste of God 155
regulate taste (Sublime 12).2 Despite Kant’s uncompromising rejection, it
was Burke’s empirical model that would prove to be the most influential
in Romantic-period aesthetics and science. In Zoonomia, or, The Laws of
Organic Life (1794–96), Erasmus Darwin clearly adopted Burke’s physio-
logical position when he disputed the disinterested and disembodied nature
of Kant’s idealist aesthetics and put forward a utilitarian and sensationalist
theory that ascribed the intuitive appeal of beautiful objects to “the plea-
sure, which they have afforded to many of our senses: as to our sense of
warmth, of touch, of smell, of taste, hunger and thirst.”3 Like Burke, who
attributed one’s preference for sweet tastes and oily textures to the craving
for breast milk in infancy, Darwin oedipalised taste by rooting it in child-
hood experience (Sublime 140). “The sentiment of Beauty,” he claimed in a
note to The Temple of Nature, “appears to be attached from our cradles to
the easy curvatures of lines, and smooth surfaces of visible objects, and to
have been derived from the form of the female bosom.”4
If one grounds aesthetic preference in the basic physical structure of the
senses rather than in some ethereal mental capacity, it is only logical that
non-human animals, too, should have a sense of beauty. Whereas Burke
denied non-human animals the faculty of taste without much further elabo-
ration, others were less hostile to the idea. In one of his essays on “The
Pleasures of the Imagination,” Joseph Addison endowed aesthetic prefer-
ence with vital evolutionary significance, not only in humans but in all
animal species. “Unless all animals were allured by the beauty of their own
species,” he argued, “generation would be at an end, and the earth unpeo-
pled.”5 Richard Payne Knight, too, believed that beauty played a key role
in sexual attraction and maintained that “all male animals probably think
the females of their own species the most beautiful part of the creation.”6
The only difference between the taste of human and non-human animals,
he added, is that the former appears to be overdetermined by so many psy-
chological and socio-historical parameters that its original motivations can
no longer be traced, let alone scientifically systematised.
Empiricists thus conceived of the human subject as an animal whose aes-
thetic judgments were nothing more than culturally purified expressions of
hard-wired infantile drives and sexual instincts. With this in mind, I believe
that Kant rejected empiricist interpretations of taste not just because their
descriptivism and utilitarianism confl icted with the normative and disin-
terested thrust of his own transcendental aesthetics, but also because they
threatened to erode the biological distinction between human and non-
human animals. In a manoeuvre to prevent such an erosion and to secure
a sense of human uniqueness, Kant inserts in his Critique of Judgment
an aesthetic opposition between the beautiful and the agreeable. Whereas
judgments of beauty are invariable and require a modicum of abstraction,
the agreeable refers to very personal cravings prompted by concrete animal
impulses such as hunger or lust. In other words, my taste for pastoral sun-
sets would fall within the sphere of the beautiful; my taste for chips with
156 Animality in British Romanticism
large dollops of mayonnaise would have more to do with the agreeable.
Kant encodes this aesthetic opposition with biological meaning so that the
former preference would defi ne me as a human being and the latter would
merely underline my primitive animal nature. “Agreeableness,” he notes
dryly, “is also valid for nonrational animals; beauty is valid only for human
beings” (Judgment 95). What empiricists interpret as beauty, then, falls for
Kant under the rubric of the agreeable.
In addition to his rejection of a science of beauty, Kant also disapproved
of a beautiful science for he feared that an overemphasis on style and form
in scientific writings would put off the reader (Judgment 184). The belief
that natural science does not require cosmetic enhancement to develop and
disseminate its theories ran particularly strong in the sort of common-sense
realism professed by the English surgeon William Lawrence. In his Lectures
on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man (1819), Lawrence
argues that the main goal of empirical research is to deliver objective knowl-
edge, not aesthetic entertainment. “Truth is like a native rustic beauty,” he
claims, “most lovely when unadorned.” Taking aim at John Abernethy’s
vitalist theory of life, Lawrence maintains that an insistence on beauty in
scientific writings generally works to camouflage an intellectual paucity. In
an emasculating attack on Abernethy, he remarks: “Your fine hypotheses
and specious theories are like the unfortunate females who supply the want
or the loss of native charms and repair the breaches of age or disease by
paint, fi nery, and decorations.”7
According to Kant, the assumption that science should be formally
appealing originated in a misinterpretation of the idea that art requires
a certain measure of empirical accuracy to be aesthetically convincing
(Judgment 184). This commitment to scientific realism also emerged in
British aesthetic theory. In his Essay on the Application of Natural His-
tory to Poetry (1777), John Aikin mounts a sustained argument against
“faint, obscure, and ill-characterized” descriptions of nature and stresses
that poetry demands “accurate and attentive observation, conducted upon
somewhat of a scientific plan.”8 His sister Anna Barbauld strongly endorsed
this imperative. In a letter to her brother, she wrote: “I hope your essay will
bring down our poets from their garrets to wander about the fields and hunt
squirrels. I am clearly of your opinion, that the only chance we have for nov-
elty is by a more accurate observation of the works of nature.”9 Although
the emphasis which poets such as Wordsworth placed on a fi rst-hand expe-
rience of nature certainly chimed in with the scientific focus on sensory
observation, many Romantics feared that science would soon become the
sole arbiter of truth, pushing aside other purveyors of knowledge—be they
poetic or religious. In reaction, Wordsworth located not scientific but aes-
thetic experience at the epistemic centre, writing that “poetry is the fi rst
and last of all knowledge.”10 And Percy Shelley argued in the same spirit
that “poetry . . . is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is
 A Taste of God 157
that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be
referred” (Defence 696).
I am not interested here, however, in chronicling once more the troubled
relationship between Romantic-period scientists and poets, a relationship
that has already been exhaustively analysed in the numerous publications
that appeared in the wake of M.H. Abrams’s pioneering chapter “Science
and Poetry in Romantic Criticism” in his 1953 study The Mirror and the
Lamp.11 What is at least as intriguing but has drawn much less critical
attention is the elementary role which the aesthetic of the beautiful took up
in scientific argument. While the interest in beauty found its most obvious
and probably most disreputable manifestation in pseudo-sciences such as
phrenology and physiognomy, it also permeated—albeit to a more moder-
ate extent—the studies of anatomy, chemistry, botany and geology, all of
which frequently sidestepped their technical discourse to praise the ele-
gance, order and regularity of both nature and scientific theory. In a lecture
on geology, for example, Davy celebrated human intellect for revealing that
behind the sublime chaos of terrestrial and cosmic life lay a meticulously
structured organisation, impervious to the untrained eye: “By wise and
beautiful laws the equilibrium of things is constant. Life is preserved by
operations which appear destructive, order and harmony arise from what
at fi rst view seems derangement and confusion, the perfection of the work
is perceived the more it is studied, and it declares, in distinct language, the
power and the wisdom of the author.”12
Davy’s recourse to divine agency here is symptomatic of the way in
which Romantic-period science tended to colour its empirical propositions
with biblical allusion and aesthetic sentiment. This interlocking of science,
beauty and religion was particularly manifest in the discipline of natural
theology (or physico-theology), which marshalled zoological, botanical,
geological and cosmological evidence to support the thesis that a system
as complex yet beautiful as nature could not result from pure chance but
required a supernatural designer. Beauty has traditionally played a pivotal
role in theological literature and especially in theological aesthetics, a field
of religious philosophy which speculates that the existence of beauty—both
in nature and art—reveals the hand of a superior intelligence.13 In his essay
“On the Beauty of the Universe” (1724), Henry Needler maintained that
“there is nothing that affords a more sensible proof both of the existence
and goodness of God, than the beauty of the universe, those innumerable
gay appearances and delightful spectacles, which are scattered through
all the scenes of the visible creation.”14 And he continued his discussion
with an impassioned laudation of the beauty of horses, peacocks, swans,
dolphins, butterflies and women. Considering the perennial importance of
beauty in religious argument, it is no surprise that it was in natural theol-
ogy that beautiful science or the scientific beautiful found its most regular
and rigorous application.
158 Animality in British Romanticism
The premise that God’s existence could be inferred from the ordered
appearance of nature was not without controversy. Whereas Thomas Paine
had enthusiastically embraced science as the “true theology,” William
Lawrence summarily rejected the alliance between both disciplines with a
metaphor that had, ironically enough, scriptural roots.15 “Let us not then
open the fair garden of Science to this ugly fiend,” he cautioned, “let not
her sweet cup be tainted by the most distant approach of his venomous
breath.”16 Although the Ancient Mariner clearly put into practice natural
theology’s analogical and teleological modes of argumentation, interpret-
ing as he did the water-snakes’ beauty as an indication of divine provi-
dence, Coleridge was far from an acolyte of natural theology. Aside from
criticising its “hollowness and tricksy sophistry,” he believed its argument
rested on a circular logic that presupposed the presence of the entity it was
supposed to prove.17 For him, God’s existence could not be substantiated
with intricate scientific theorising but required a simple leap of faith. In a
very Kantian attempt to reclaim the autonomy of the aesthetic, he also dis-
missed the contention that natural beauty was causally connected to utility,
an idea that was central to natural theology. In his conclusion to the third
essay “On the Principles of Genial Criticism” he writes: “The shell of the
Oyster, rough and unshapely, is its habitation and strong hold, its defence
and organ of loco motion: the Pearl, the beautiful ornament of the Beauti-
ful, is its disease.”18
It was such views that William Paley strove to discredit in his tremen-
dously popular Natural Theology, or Evidence of the Existence and Attri-
butes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). In his
discussion of the tulip, for instance, he acknowledges that its sudden change
of pigmentation when reaching full growth does not serve any practical
purpose, but he quickly adds that this lack of functional relevance does not
need to imply that its beauty is a degenerative feature or, as Coleridge might
have it, “a disease of the plant” (108). Unlike Joseph Addison or Erasmus
Darwin, Paley does not invest the extraordinary physical appeal of certain
organisms with biological functionality. Instead, he claims that beauty is a
gratuitous characteristic. In a natural world imbued with religious purpose,
however, gratuity is a potentially subversive phenomenon as it connotes
arbitrariness, absurdity and divine absence. The aesthetic, now, permits
Paley to confer an aura of fi nality and necessity to this meaninglessness
without having to resort to biology’s secular teleology, which emphasises
nature’s self-regulation and thus tends to sideline supernatural agency com-
pletely. For the aesthetic philosopher as for the theologian, gratuity has
a point. In Kant’s Critique of Judgement, beauty derives its purpose and
legitimacy from its negation of use-value or its so-called purposelessness.
What distinguishes Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain from a common urinal is
that one cannot (or should not) use the former. It is in its passive resignation
from the instrumentalist logic of means and ends that Duchamp’s urinal
outs itself as an autonomous artwork. The point of art is that it does not
 A Taste of God 159
have one. For Paley, likewise, the tulip’s gratuitous beauty suggests that
there is a more enigmatic dimension lying beyond the mundane causality
of biological explanation. In his discussion of the tulip, he wonders: “Is it
not more probable, that this property, which is independent, as it should
seem, of the wants and utilities of the plant, was calculated for beauty,
intended for display?” (108). Just as in the water-snake scene from “The
Ancient Mariner,” aesthetic consciousness comes to the rescue and saves
humanity from its horror vacui. This is not a question of repurposing the
pointless object into a thing of beauty (as though one would turn a broken
urinal into a flowerpot), but it is a matter of rehabilitating the abstract
category of uselessness itself, so that the useless urinal will be perceived
as useful in its uselessness. What I am trying to show here is that aesthetic
devotion operates in large part analogously to the devotional experience
promoted by natural theologians in that both modes of worship fetishise
the useless object and re-inscribe its shadowy meaninglessness and ethereal
je ne sais quoi into an economy which is no less instrumentalist than the
one it initially and emphatically resisted. For Kant as for Paley, uselessness
is so important because it gestures towards the presence of an entity that
transcends ordinary biological law, that is, the subject’s rational power in
Kant’s case, God’s supernatural power in Paley’s.
Paley’s teleological view of nature as a Technicolor spectacle designed
for humanity’s aesthetic enjoyment calls to mind Kant’s argument that
“nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art; and art can
only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to
us like nature” (Judgment 185). Even so, Kant’s identification of natural
with artistic beauty remains very different from Paley’s. For Kant, a beau-
tiful animal should look like a beautiful artwork (and vice versa) in that
both should appear spontaneous, arbitrary and self-regulating. To give an
example: the accidental encounter with a fox in one’s garden should be no
different from the premeditated encounter with a beautiful painting in a
museum. One should not wonder how the fox or painting ended up there,
who designed them or what material they are made of. In the unreflective
state of aesthetic judgment, Kant believes, one should only be enthralled
by the harmonious interaction between one’s mental faculties triggered
by the physical perfection of the fox or the painting. Paley, on the other
hand, relates nature to art for the exact opposite reason. In his theological
argument, the encounter with the fox would not be fundamentally differ-
ent from finding a beautiful watch in one’s garden (the watch being his
preferred metaphor for intelligent design) and it would only be natural to
speculate about its maker and function. In Kant’s aesthetic theory, too, the
beautiful object is so pleasing to our imagination that it looks as though
it was purposefully fabricated for our satisfaction alone. But in his view,
this purposiveness is only a subjective impression, not an objective reality:
it is a “purposiveness without an end” (Judgment 111).19 Paley reverses this
argument. He initially experiences the object’s biological purposelessness
160 Animality in British Romanticism
and, in response to such gratuity, ascribes a divine intentionality to it: it is
a purposelessness with a purpose.
Although the sublime figured importantly in biblical discourse, the
beautiful was more suited to achieve the textbook clarity in which natural
theology was interested. Even when the sublime climaxed with religious
epiphany and a sense of reconciliation, after all, it remained a violent and
morally muddled experience that left ample room for spiritual confu-
sion. In fact, the traditional sources of sublimity—earthquakes, storms,
predators—presented serious problems for natural theology, because they
called into question God’s benevolence and thus threatened to weaken the
argument from design. At the same time, it was precisely from these prob-
lems that natural theology—like theodicy—had traditionally harnessed its
strength and rhetorical appeal. If one could demonstrate that even preda-
tors had been created by God, one did not need to take pains to prove that
less dangerous animals had been purposefully contrived as well. According
to John Ray, whose study The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works
of the Creation (1691) exerted a formative influence on Paley’s Natural
Theology, God had manufactured predators in order to “chastize or punish
wicked Persons or Nations.”20 Paley’s theology, however, sounds more in
tune with the Romantic conception of divinity as a distant benevolent force
rather than a meddlesome patriarch. Instead of reducing animals to puni-
tive tools or torture devices, he recognises their individual autonomy and
places fi nal responsibility on humanity. “We invade the territories of wild
beasts and venomous reptiles,” he sermonises, “and then complain that we
are infested by their bites and stings” (245).
Paley’s Natural Theology is a surprisingly light-hearted study that pays
little attention to violence or the sublime. Its lack of interest in the sub-
lime is indicative of a broader aesthetic trend in Romantic-period religious
thinking to search for evidence of God’s existence in the prosaic beauty
of domestic life rather than in the emotional turbulence of sublime revela-
tion. A proponent of this trend and great admirer of Paley, Anna Barbauld
wrote disapprovingly of the calculated abstractions and excessive enthu-
siasm of the scientist or natural philosopher and, in reaction, advanced a
more composed and personal liturgy modelled on the intuitive worship of
the “devout man.”21 In her essay “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, and
on Sects and Establishments” (1775), she claims: “Philosophy does indeed
enlarge our conceptions of the Deity, and gives us the sublimest ideas of his
power and extent of dominion; but it raises him too high for our imagi-
nations to take hold of, and in a great measure destroys that affectionate
regard which is felt by the common class of pious Christians.” Barbauld’s
preference for a spontaneous sense of religiosity goes along with a rejec-
tion of the sublime’s topographical focus on vast landscapes and with an
renewed insistence on “home views and nearer objects”—in other words,
on local organic beauty. 22 This movement from a sublime to a beautiful
theology is also a gendered movement away from the traditional vestiges
 A Taste of God 161
of male subjectivity (rationality, visual domestication, violent agitation) to
affective domains that were traditionally considered feminine (intuition,
sentimentalism, localism, domesticity).
A similar but more understated criticism of the sublime appears in “The
Travelled Ant,” a gently absurdist short story from the didactic collection
Evenings at Home, which Barbauld wrote together with her brother John
Aikin. Offering a brief but action-packed travelogue of an ant smitten by
wanderlust, the story reads like “The Ancient Mariner” reimagined for a
young audience. 23 It interrogates the same themes of environmental alien-
ation, sceptical panic and physical vulnerability, but bleeps out the Mari-
ner’s morose sense of self-loathing and spiritual emptiness. Interestingly,
the narrative is focalised through the down-to-earth viewpoint of the ant
and thus provides an outlook on nature that comically unsettles human
patterns of perception. (Its play of perspectives, incidentally, recalls the
didactic conversation which I discussed in Chapter 1 between Sophie and
her father about the raison d’être of fl ies.) Like the Ancient Mariner, the
ant deploys an awkwardly infantile and mechanistic discourse to record
the strangeness of its natural surroundings. It describes the sea (or maybe
just a pool or puddle) as “this great plain . . . consist[ing] of that fluid
which sometimes falls from the sky”; fish are called “wonderful forms of
living creatures” and birds are conceptualised as “two-legged feathered
creatures” (52–53). When the ant characterises what seems to be a cat as
a “huge four-legged monster,” Aikin and Barbauld farcically subvert the
high-flown bombast of the sublime and insinuate that sublimity is only a
false subjective impression resulting from a lack of biological insight (52).
The obvious theological message is that if our moral evaluation of nature
were to reckon with different non-human points of view, we would easily
see that monstrosity and evil do not objectively exist. As in “The Ancient
Mariner,” the ant’s defamiliarising confrontation with nature’s thingness
is also a scientific rite of passage which counters its myrmecocentric and
instrumentalist view of nature and shows that everything has a life of its
own. Upon its return, the animal confides the following piece of philo-
sophical wisdom to another ant: “I have seen such vast tracts not at all fit
for our residence, and peopled with creatures so much larger and stronger
than ourselves, that I cannot help being convinced that the Creator had
in view their accommodation as well as ours, in making this world.” This
didactic conclusion, however, is comically deflated by the other ant’s rather
Byronic insight into the limits of ant cognition. In an obvious satirical com-
ment on humanity’s epistemological arrogance, it says: “you know we ants
are a vain race, and make high pretensions to wisdom as well as antiquity.
We shall be affronted with any attempts to lessen our importance in our
own eyes” (55).
In addition to the problem of violence, theologians also struggled to
account for the existence of ugliness. If God had designed nature solely for
human benefit, what was the divine scheme, then, underlying ugly animals?
162 Animality in British Romanticism
For both natural theologians and scientists, ugliness constituted a major
flaw in an otherwise aesthetically perfect universe and, accordingly, needed
to be repressed or explained away. If beauty called to mind virtue, health,
prosperity and youth; ugliness signalled vice, disease and social margin-
ality, and theologically, it brought up associations with the profane and
the occult. A lack of elegance, symmetry or clarity was—and to a certain
extent still is—also considered an indication of bad science. If a beautiful
theory suggests intelligent and sound judgement, an ill-formulated or need-
lessly complicated one is more likely to be perceived as having less empirical
value. 24 What is as interesting as William Paley’s persistent harping on the
marvellous beauty of nature is his evasive treatment of the question of the
ugly. When one compares his Natural Theology to Burke’s Enquiry, whose
influence is clearly at work in the background of Paley’s aesthetic thought,
one can easily detect the strategies which Paley built into his theological
argument to defuse the subversive meaning of animal ugliness. Both Paley’s
religious treatise and Burke’s Enquiry develop a prescriptive science of aes-
thetic affect that often draws attention to the physical properties of the
same animals and the same body parts. Like Burke, Paley roots aesthetic
judgments in human physiology and argues that taste is “the produce of
numerous and complicated actions of external objects upon the senses, and
of the mind upon its sensations” (109). Paley, however, fine-tunes Burke’s
empiricist aesthetics on various levels in an attempt to cast doubt on the
objective existence of ugliness.
One of the main disagreements between Paley and Burke pertains to the
variability of taste. Burke simply dispatches the notion of personal taste
and believes that, because aesthetic sentiments originate in the body and
because all human beings have the same anatomical groundwork, their
sense of beauty should be more or less the same. If you have a different
taste, it must mean that there is something seriously wrong with your body.
Despite his recognition of the sensory basis of taste, Paley cannot accept
such a belief in a common aesthetic sense for it would imply that those
animals that are universally regarded as ugly are also intrinsically ugly and
that nature is in part objectively imperfect. One of the central goals of his
theological treatise is to demonstrate that the perceived imperfection of
nature resides in the limitations of the subjective imagination rather than
in reality itself. In order to do so, Paley inserts a different experiential sub-
ject into his aesthetics: the philosopher or scientist, whose cut-and-dried
aesthetic judgments stand in stark contrast to the intuitive taste of the
“common observer” (116) or, in Burke’s phrase, the “ordinary man” (Sub-
lime 98). The difference between these two observers becomes explicit in
Paley’s discussion of the covering of birds. First, Paley draws attention to
“its lightness, its smoothness, its warmth” and “its variety of colours,” “so
beautiful, and so appropriate to the life which the animal is to lead, as that
. . . we should have had no conception of anything equally perfect, if we
had never seen it, or can now imagine anything more so.” Following this
 A Taste of God 163
Burkean celebration of the bird’s superficial physical appeal, Paley praises
its physiology, arguing that “every feather is a mechanical wonder” and
that “it is one of those cases in which the philosopher has more to admire
than the common observer” (116). For Paley, the empirical explanation of
nature’s workings heightens rather than destroys religious awe by disclos-
ing an entirely new field of beauty, impenetrable for the lay observer. Paley
here departs from Burke’s aesthetic theory in two ways. First, his assump-
tion that scientific insight contributes to an object’s beauty is evidently at
variance with Burke’s interpretation of aesthetic sentiment as a pre-rational
or intuitive feeling. Second, his idea that the understanding of an object’s
functionality adds to its aesthetic appeal confl icts with Burke’s position
that beauty has nothing to do with utility. In an image prefiguring the
watchmaker analogy which Paley made famous (and which made Paley
famous in twentieth-century atheist philosophy), Burke underlines that the
knowledge of an object’s purpose does not enhance its appeal because the
experience of beauty precedes rational understanding:

When we examine the structure of a watch, when we come to know

thoroughly the use of every part of it, satisfied as we are with the fitness
of the whole, we are far enough from perceiving any thing like beauty
in the watchwork itself; but let us look on the case, the labour of some
curious artist in engraving, with little or no idea of use, we shall have
a much livelier idea of beauty than we ever could have had from the
watch itself. . . . In beauty, as I said, the effect is previous to any knowl-
edge of the use. (Sublime 98)

In his discussion of human anatomy and its relation to beauty and reli-
gious worship, Burke goes even further and claims that a scientific perception
of the body at times stands in the way of aesthetic enjoyment. Contrasting
the intellectual satisfaction felt by an anatomist when inspecting the body’s
intricate internal organisation with “the affection which possesses an ordi-
nary man at the sight of a delicate, smooth skin, and all the other parts of
beauty, which require no investigation to be perceived,” Burke maintains
that a medical understanding of the body may inspire one to “look up to
the Maker with admiration and praise,” but it will not produce the simple
visual pleasure experienced by the ordinary individual. Occasionally, it
seems, ignorance is a sine qua non for aesthetic enjoyment. By suggesting
that the “odious and distasteful” appearance of the body’s interior can
stimulate religious wonder, Burke also empties the aesthetic of its theo-
logical weight (98). In a more explicit rejection of theological aesthetics,
he writes: “It is by a long deduction and much study that we discover the
adorable wisdom of God in his works: when we discover it, the effect is
very different, not only in the manner of acquiring it, but in its own nature,
from that which strikes us without any preparation from the sublime or the
beautiful” (97). Judgments of taste, in short, should operate in complete
164 Animality in British Romanticism
independence of scientific and theological judgments. Paley’s Natural The-
ology also attends to the aesthetics of animal anatomy, but whereas Burke
counterpoints the middlebrow focus on the skin’s superficial beauty to the
anatomist’s reflective understanding of what lies beneath, Paley examines
the skin through a scientific lens that appreciates both the skin’s intuitive
appeal and its anatomical function as a membrane that “converts the dis-
gusting materials of a dissecting-room into an object of attraction to the
sight, or one, upon which it rests, at least, with ease and satisfaction” (107).
In his view, scientists retain the common observer’s spontaneous apprecia-
tion of the skin and supplement it with a more reflective enjoyment of its
practical purpose.
The skin is a very appropriate image for Paley’s own discursive prac-
tice, which similarly hides the crude ugliness of material existence beneath
a veneer of scientific fact talk and religious pep talk. Considering that,
in Paley’s view, it is not just the existence of beauty but also its conceal-
ing function that incontrovertibly proves God’s presence, the denial or
repression of ugliness (and of its social analogues: otherness, abnormal-
ity, marginality) becomes a divinely sanctioned act of religious devotion.
Incidentally, the importance that Paley attaches to the skin’s mystifying
function also explains why Frankenstein’s Monster is received with such
fear and religious paranoia. “Were it possible to view through the skin the
mechanism of our bodies,” Paley believes, “the sight would frighten us out
of our wits” (110). The Monster, as Shelley points out, has weirdly pellucid
skin, which “scarcely cover[s] the work of muscles and arteries beneath”
(Frankenstein 39). That the creature lacks a beautiful cover suggests that
it was fabricated not by supernatural agency, but by a man who clearly did
not fully understand what he was doing. It is a walking advert for athe-
ism. Providing a raw, uncensored view of the body’s interior operations
and machinery, the Monster also reminds people of their own physicality.
Such a reminder is unsettling at the very least and may inspire the sort of
physical discomfort or even panic that one experiences when one lingers
too long on the mechanical rhythm of one’s own heartbeat or breathing.
It is a reminder not just of one’s animality, but of the vulnerability and
impermanence of one’s animal body. As the eighteenth-century scientist
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre suggests in a fragment quoted by
Paley: “‘Durst we make a single movement,’ asks a lively French writer,
‘or stir a step from the place we were in, if we saw our blood circulating,
the tendons pulling, the lungs blowing, the humours fi ltrating, and all the
incomprehensible assemblages of fibres, tubes, pumps, valves, currents, piv-
ots, which sustain an existence at once so frail, and so presumptuous?’”
(Natural Theology 110). 25
Along with the common observer and the scientist, Paley introduces a
third experiential subject that enables him to explain away the existence
of ugliness: the non-human animal. In his discussion of natural beauty,
he contends that physical appeal is one of the defi ning characteristics of
 A Taste of God 165
animal form, but he is quick to add that he is not thinking here of an abso-
lute or universalist standard of beauty that would render one animal more
attractive than another one of the same or a different species. What does
he mean then? “I mean, generally, the provision which is made in the body
of almost every animal, to adapt its appearance to the perception of the
animals with which it converses” (107). Paley sounds rather vague here and
that vagueness never really leaves him in this chapter. With its reference to
adaptation, his argument has an unexpectedly evolutionary ring to it, but
unlike contemporary theorists such as Richard Payne Knight or Erasmus
Darwin, Paley does not even interpret beauty as a trigger of reproductive
drives, let alone that he would be aware of its evolutionary significance.
It sounds as though he is referring to superficial cosmetic adaptations by
way of which an animal would deliberately enhance its physical appeal
towards other members of its species, yet his discussion of the aesthetics
of the skin in the same paragraph contradicts such intentionality and sug-
gests an adaptive mechanism that lies beyond the individual control of the
animal. More likely, Paley here argues that God implanted in animal bod-
ies the innate capacity to develop a physiology that appears beautiful to
members of its own species.
What is more interesting than Paley’s belief in such an innate capacity
is its implication that non-human animals, too, have a sense of beauty.
It is obvious why he allows non-human animals to have aesthetic pref-
erences of their own. Whereas Burke’s wholesale rejection of non-human
taste, together with his insistence on a common aesthetic sense, forced him
to recognise the objective ugliness of some animal species, Paley proposes
a watered-down version of aesthetic subjectivism that allows him to deny
the objective existence of ugliness without denying the objective existence
of beauty. Beauty, for him, is still an immanent quality of animals, but it
depends on the observer’s biological species and scientific knowledge to
reveal itself. That I fail to appreciate the beauty of anteaters, then, does not
mean that anteaters are objectively ugly (as Burke would have it) or that
taste is personal (as aesthetic relativists would say). It only shows that I am
not an anteater (or, at least, that I do not know enough about anteaters to
take pleasure in their looks).
Despite his adherence to a species-specific notion of beauty, Paley still
feels it necessary to explain why some animals, such as bats and elephants,
look so eccentric. Bats frequently recurred in Romantic-period treatments
of ugliness. Scientists and theologians typically ascribed their unusual
appearance to the fact that they seemed to integrate species features of
both rodents and birds. As seemingly hybrid creatures, they undermined
the belief that God had created all animals as homogeneous and unchange-
able. In his Letters to a Young Naturalist on the Study of Nature and Natu-
ral Theology, James Lawson Drummond undertook a lengthy criticism of
Comte de Buffon’s theory that “the bat, which is half a quadruped and half
a bird, and which, upon the whole, is neither the one nor the other, must
166 Animality in British Romanticism
be a monstrous being.”26 Relying on Cuvier’s Lectures on Comparative
Anatomy (1802) and Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789),
Drummond argued that the bat is a wonderful creature whose somewhat
bizarre morphology and physiology are, in fact, perfectly suited to its hab-
its and habitat. Paley similarly disputed the bat’s monstrosity in his chapter
on the principle of compensation. Offering a religious alternative to Lama-
rck’s notion of evolutionary adaptation, this principle held that God had
designed certain organs in order to compensate for the deficiencies of other
organs. On this view, the elephant has a trunk to remedy its short neck
and the bat has wings to make up for its imperfect legs and feet. Although
Paley introduces the principle of compensation as a functional mechanism,
it often operates as a cosmetic principle that rationalises away the unusual
morphological appearance of an organ by referring to its physiological pur-
pose. As Paley puts it: “our business at present, is simply to point out the
relation which this organ bears to the peculiar figure of the animal to which
it belongs” (147). Natural theology fi xes ugliness with utility.
It requires considerably more imaginative effort to discern a divine pur-
pose behind congenitally malformed animals, whose anomalous appear-
ance separates them not only from other species but also from their own
kind. Whereas Paley shrugs off the existence of physical deformation as
a minor hiccup in an otherwise perfect universe, Drummond explains it
in more detail. In his account, nature does not produce deformity, but it
is humanity’s excessive manipulation of animal life—through inbreed-
ing and overdomestication—that has given rise to degenerate specimens. 27
Drummond’s negative view of human civilisation directly taps into the
anti-cultural bias of Romantic primitivism. It bears a particularly strong
resemblance to Percy Shelley’s claim that “man, and the animals whom he
has infected with his society, or depraved by his dominion, are alone dis-
eased. The wild hog, the mouflon, the bison, and the wolf, are perfectly
exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence,
or natural old age.”28 Shelley’s conviction that diseases and degeneration
are primarily caused by domestication was an often-heard complaint in
Romantic-period philosophy. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
Mary Wollstonecraft already drew upon the same argument to condemn
society’s treatment of women. In an analysis that skilfully interwove a
gender critique with an aesthetic and evolutionary perspective, she associ-
ated the social pressure put on women to look pretty and act obediently
with the domestication of dogs. Relying on Buffon’s theory of generation,
she claimed that cultural restrictions can be so invasive and physically
oppressive that they are ultimately incorporated and even transferred
across generations, thus becoming factually natural or genetic traits: “ser-
vitude not only debases the individual, but its effects seem to be transmit-
ted to posterity. Considering the length of time that women have been
dependent, is it surprising that some of them hug their chains, and fawn
like the spaniel? ‘These dogs,’ observes a naturalist [that is, Buffon], ‘at
 A Taste of God 167
fi rst kept their ears erect; but custom has superseded nature, and a token
of fear is become a beauty.’”29
William Lawrence broadened Wollstonecraft’s criticism and claimed that
the technological and cultural advances in Western society had dramati-
cally undermined the health of the entire human species. In his view, the
“artificial mode of life” of the modern urban citizen had not only produced
physical and moral defects but also allowed these defects to persist across
generations. This was particularly evident in royal circles, he believed, where
the process of degeneration was exacerbated by a long-standing tradition of
inbreeding. In “savage nations,” by contrast, degenerate traits are sifted out
of the gene pool because dysmorphic individuals rarely survive infancy and,
if they do, “are prevented, by the kind of aversion they inspire, from propa-
gating their deformities.” Although this reads like an awkward defence of
eugenic selection and although Lawrence elsewhere asserts that in selective
breeding programmes of domestic animals “the great object is to preserve
the race pure,” it would be unfair to place him in the rather unpleasant
philosophical company of fascist ideologues. On the whole, Lawrence’s
aesthetic anthropology actually departs from the then prevailing Western
belief in the superior visual appearance of white man. He praises the Jew-
ish people for their racial hygiene and ensuing beauty, and when evaluat-
ing some portraits of Hottentots, who had “become almost proverbial for
ugliness,” he reaches the then controversial conclusion that “in animation,
in beauty, symmetry and strength of body, in ease and elegance of attitude,
they are infi nitely superior.”30
Although Lawrence and Percy Shelley blame modernity for corrupting
the originally pristine state of nature, they do not believe that the remedy
lies in a primitivist rejection of scientific consciousness. Quite the opposite,
they recommend a leap forward to a more rational understanding of ani-
mality, whereby scientific thought and spontaneous feeling would collabo-
rate to enhance the beauty and morality of human society. “The whole of
human science,” Shelley writes, “is comprised in one question:—How can
the advantages of intellect and civilization be reconciled with the liberty
and pure pleasures of natural life?”31 In Lawrence’s diagnosis, the main
shortcoming of human thought is that it is not scientific enough. We would
be far more beautiful and healthy, he reasons, if we applied the principles
developed in the selective breeding of domestic animals to our own species
with equal neutrality and rigour: “A superior breed of human beings could
only be produced by selections and exclusions similar to those so success-
fully employed in rearing our more valuable animals. Yet, in the human
species, where the object is of such consequence, the principle is almost
entirely overlooked.”32
Lawrence’s call to select one’s sexual partner on the basis of clear-eyed
rational criteria rather than a whimsical feeling of physical attraction or
emotional connection exemplifies a more general tendency in Romantic-
period aesthetics to interpret beauty as a quality that was or could be
168 Animality in British Romanticism
purposefully made—by God, scientists, theologians, aestheticians. This
growing distrust of intuitionist conceptions of beauty is also noticeable in
Drummond’s advice to fi lter aesthetic judgments through scientific thought.
“Never,” he writes, “contemn an animal because it may seem deformed, or
ugly, uncouth. Try to fi nd out its history, the uses of its different parts, and
as much of its whole economy as you can; and depend upon it you will fi nd
no marks of imperfection or ugliness there.”33 This confidence in the beau-
tifying potential of empirical research goes as far back as Aristotle’s Poet-
ics. “Objects which in themselves we view with pain,” Aristotle claimed,
“we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as
the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.”34 And Kant
would argue something similar, but for him it was not scientific precision
but aesthetic transformation that could upgrade the ugly into an object of
beauty. “Beautiful art,” he wrote in the Critique of Judgment, “displays its
excellence precisely by describing beautifully things that in nature would be
ugly or displeasing” (190).
The obvious difference is that, for Aristotle and Kant, the human sub-
ject creates beauty, whereas for natural theologians, the subject can only
fi nd the beauty that God created. Of course, the theological premises that
beauty is an objective property of things and that God designed most things
in nature to be—in some way or other—beautiful are incompatible with
a universalist notion of taste, for that would imply that everyone would
fi nd everything beautiful and that we would be living in a wonderland of
nonstop aesthetic excitement, which is sadly not the case. Natural theolo-
gians, therefore, need to figure in different experiential subjects (such as the
common observer, the scientist and the non-human animal), and aesthetic
feeling loses—at least partially—the absolute and normative character that
it had for Burke and Kant. To interpret taste as an individual instead of
universal faculty, however, is a very risky move if one predicates religious
faith on aesthetic sentiment, as natural theologians tend to do. In order to
prevent religious feeling from becoming subject to the random whims of
personal taste, natural theologians anchor aesthetic judgment in scientific
judgment, which is universal, prescriptive and absolute (at least in their pre-
postmodern views). To deny the beauty of a bat or an anteater becomes an
absurd thing to do, then, because it reveals a lack not of aesthetic sensibility
(as in Kant or Burke) but of scientific knowledge.
By making beauty dependent on truth, natural theologians provided
taste with a universal validity and binding power that was crucial for their
argument. At the same time, their resort to scientific knowledge, a much
less mystified and mystifying faculty than aesthetic preference, reinforced
the move away from intuitionist interpretations of aesthetic feeling and
exposed the calculated process of domestication underlying the production
of beauty. What Paley’s study demonstrated in surprisingly candid terms,
indeed, is that the aesthetic of the beautiful functions as a skin, hiding from
view the raw visceral mess of animal existence.
9 Beauty with a Past
Evolutionary Aesthetics in Erasmus
Darwin’s The Temple of Nature

In the operatic closing paragraph to On the Origin of Species, Charles Dar-

win famously stated the following:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted
object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of
the higher animals directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of
life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the
Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has
gone cycling on according to the fi xed law of gravity, from so simple a
beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being, evolved.1

Darwin here puts into terms of evolutionary biology what I have been argu-
ing so far in terms of aesthetic and ideological development. The beauti-
ful appearance of nature, he stresses, is not an ahistorical or immutable
property of things, but it is the product of a violent process of competition,
selection and adaptation. Darwin’s remarkably anti-elegiac interpretation
of the war of nature takes its cue from Romantic-period scientists and theo-
logians, who similarly tended to proceed from an alienating awareness of
nature’s seemingly random violence to a discovery of the deeper purpose
of that violence. Like his grandson, Erasmus Darwin construed death as
an efficient sifting mechanism necessary for personal health, social stabil-
ity and natural beauty. Before the establishment of civil society, with its
organised medical support of the weak and sickly, he claimed, “the animal
world existed uniformly in its greatest strength and perfection,” an idea
that also informed William Lawrence’s tribute to the superior visual appeal
of Hottentots. 2 And in Evenings at Home, Aikin and Barbauld conceded
that “there is a perpetual warfare going on, in which the stronger prey
upon the weaker, and in their turns are the prey of those which are a degree
stronger than themselves,” but in a Malthusian comeback they added that
if animals did not die or were not killed, overpopulation would soon upset
natural balance and lead to general starvation (217). The beauty of the
170 Animality in British Romanticism
natural world, many Romantic-period philosophers agreed, is generated
and preserved by the violence of the sublime.
This evolutionary sublime retains the homeopathic and self-preservative
characteristics with which Burke charged his model, but it transfers these
beneficial effects from the individual animal to the level of the species.
Whereas in Burke’s sublime a diluted experience of psychological horror
inoculates the individual against a greater and more physical danger, the
evolutionary sublime applies a certain degree of violence in order to ensure
the continuity of the entire species. For Burke as for the Darwins, a small
but regular dose of pain and death is surprisingly good for one’s health.
Like Burke’s and Kant’s models, the evolutionary sublime is also a power-
ful detergent. It gets rid of old and diseased organisms and, in doing so,
continually recreates a sense of original, spotless beauty. Linnaeus puts it in
a rather more ghoulish manner. “The whole earth would be overwhelmed
with carcases, and stinking bodies,” he writes, “if some animals did not
delight to feed upon them.”3 Unlike Kant’s idealist model, however, this
evolutionary sublime still has a fi rm foot in biological reality. It is not only
the scientific mind that is propelled by a desire for order and harmony,
Charles Darwin shows. The natural world itself also progresses “from
famine and death” to “forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” On
this view, the characteristic development of the Kantian sublime towards
rational transcendence and conceptual control does not prove the mind’s
independence from nature. If anything, it merely interiorises the standard
pattern of animal evolution, which similarly leads to a triumph of reason
or—in more accurate materialist terms—to a triumph of the fittest and
most intelligent species. (And considering the biological success of insects,
we should not reduce intelligence to its narrow human sense here.)
The idea that the war of nature is necessary to guarantee the beauty and
viability of animal species was frequently transposed into cultural terms
in a dubious effort to rationalise political warfare and sanction a policy of
laissez-faire in social and economic affairs. In his Essay on the Principle of
Population (1798), Thomas Malthus argued that not just famine or disease
but also tribal fights and even cannibalism were crucial to reduce popu-
lation pressure.4 Kant, too, linked war to human progress and claimed,
albeit with some reservations, that it was an “incentive . . . for developing
to their highest degree all the talents that serve for culture” (Judgment
300). Unsurprisingly, the conviction that cultural violence played a valu-
able biological role was met with great hostility from many Romantics. In
a criticism of Malthus’s Essay, Percy Shelley wrote: “War, vice, and misery
are undeniably bad, they embrace all that we can conceive of temporal and
eternal evil. Are we to be told that these are remedyless, because the earth
would in case of their remedy, be overstocked?”5 And in Don Juan, which
contained several references to population theory, Byron brilliantly paro-
died Malthus’s idea that it was not education or law enforcement but war
and disease that would civilise the Native Americans:
 Beauty with a Past 171
The population there so spreads, they say
‘Tis grown high time to thin it in its turn,
With war, or plague, or famine, any way,
So that civilization they may learn. (1:1043–46)

In the following paragraphs, I want to explore in more depth the bio-

logical trajectory from sublimity to beauty as it appeared in Romantic-
period evolutionary theory and population ecology. I will do so by taking
a closer look at Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin
of Society (1803), one of the most ambitious attempts in the Romantic
period to establish a dialogue between evolutionary science and aesthetic
philosophy. The poem loosely and often confusingly combines ancient
mythology and more traditional religious imagery with an impressively
wide array of up-to-date scientific theories, which Darwin had often
developed himself in previous writings. He now aligned these theories—
ranging from cosmology, botany and zoology to psychology and aesthet-
ics—to dramatise and explain the evolution of animal life. Despite its
evolutionary focus and its working title “The Progress of Society, a Poem
in Five Cantos,” Darwin’s text does not follow a simple teleological devel-
opment, but it presents biological history as an endlessly repeating cycle
of generation, degeneration and regeneration. If there is any progression
pushing forward the poem’s narrative, it mainly manifests itself in Dar-
win’s growing understanding of nature, which—like nature itself—is open
to evolution and improvement. With its messy palimpsestic structure,
Darwin’s poem seems to weave the chaos of not only biological evolution
but also of its various philosophical interpretations into its own narrative
fabric. Darwin’s point, indeed, is as much about the development of ani-
mal life itself as it is about the creation, dissemination and extinction of
discourse. Martin Priestman, too, is convinced that the poem’s apparent
lack of narrative coherence and its confusing concatenation of rival forms
of thought are at least partly deliberate.6 Darwin, he thinks, tried to cover
up the blasphemous implications of his scientific theories by burying them
under a plethora of recondite religious, mythological and aesthetic lay-
ers. Reading The Temple of Nature, then, is an exhausting forensic act,
whereby one has to sift the poem’s provocative scientific arguments from
its muddy mythological imagery and cryptic lyricism.
Although heavily influenced by Burke’s empiricist model, Darwin
rewrites the latter’s aesthetic theory in some essential ways. For a start,
his analysis of taste pursues a reformist instead of a reactionary agenda.
Unlike Burke, he also sees a seamless continuity between the aesthetic
preferences of human and non-human animals. And his evolutionary
scope provides Burke’s ahistorical interpretation of taste with a sweeping
diachronic perspective that explains rather merely describes the physio-
logical nature of aesthetic judgment. What interests me here most, though,
is how his focus on beauty and its affective registers (love, sympathy,
172 Animality in British Romanticism
femininity) challenges the monopoly that the sublime had acquired in the
aesthetics of the male Romantics. Darwin privileges beauty in at least
two ways. Like natural theologians and later Charles Darwin as well, he
discerns meaning and purpose in the violence of nature and construes
biological evolution as an aesthetic process geared towards the creation of
beauty and physical perfection. What is more original and deserves more
scrutiny is that he repeatedly connects beauty with properties that were
traditionally reserved for the sublime, such as organic excess, domesti-
cating power and sexual aggression. In doing so, he unsettles not only
Burke’s aesthetic dualism but also the gender hierarchy which this dual-
ism sought to ratify. Like his earlier poem “The Loves of the Plants,” the
second half of The Botanic Garden, Darwin’s The Temple of Nature is
a distinctly matriarchal poem in which female characters—priestesses,
goddesses, muses, virgins—are in the vast majority and in which it is the
female animal that controls the natural order.7 While this emphasis on
beauty and femininity may have been inspired by crass economic oppor-
tunism—the target audience of Darwin’s philosophical poetry generally
being “ladies and other unemploy’d scholars”—I believe that the grounds
for the feminist politics of The Temple of Nature should be sought in the
liberal intellectual circles that Darwin frequented.8
Although written by one of the most erudite figures of the Romantic
period, The Temple of Nature occupies a rather peripheral position in
both the Romantic canon and Darwin’s own oeuvre. Unlike The Botanic
Garden, it was received with almost unanimously negative reviews, which
dramatically accelerated the decline of Darwin’s reputation as a poet and
philosopher. Published in 1803, a year after his death, the philosophi-
cal poem was criticised for both its medium and its message. What had
changed between the publications of The Botanic Garden in 1791 and The
Temple of Nature was not so much Darwin’s scientific, political or liter-
ary ideas as the context in which he formulated them. In reaction to the
French Revolution, English politics had swung to the right and Christian
religion had resorted to more literalist interpretations of the Bible.9 As a
result, Darwin’s liberal political views and scientific materialism—typically
considered a French and atheist philosophy—elicited increasing suspicion
and even visceral rejection. “We are full of horror, and will write no more,”
the reviewer of The British Critic concluded in his piece on The Temple
of Nature.10 In 1798, “The Loves of the Plants” was serially parodied in
the reactionary Anti-Jacobin as The Loves of the Triangles, which scath-
ingly portrayed Darwin as an atheist revolutionary on the loose and, in his
grandson’s judgment, caused “the downfall of his fame as a poet.”11 Liter-
ary taste had drastically changed as well. With the publication of Words-
worth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and the new penchant for
simplicity of feeling and expression, Darwin’s manneristic philosophical
poetry sounded excessively cerebral and ridiculously fastidious. “Darwin’s
 Beauty with a Past 173
Temple of Nature,” Coleridge mocked, “may . . . be too faithfully charac-
terized, as claiming to be poetical for no better reason than that it would
be intolerable in conversation or in prose.”12
It may seem specious to concentrate here on a text that was already con-
sidered hopelessly passé in its own time and that, accordingly, is far from
representative of Romantic-period poetry. But although Darwin’s awk-
ward blend of science and sentiment sounds distinctly out of tune with the
Romantic vogue for spontaneous feeling, it does provide an exceptionally
comprehensive, if consistently confusing, mosaic view of late-eighteenth-
and early-nineteenth-century scientific theory. Its empirical interpreta-
tion of taste, moreover, clearly prefigures the evolutionary aesthetics that
Charles Darwin would put forward in The Descent of Man. As such, it
demonstrates that Charles Darwin’s preoccupation with physical beauty
was not only rooted in natural theology (as some critics have claimed), but
also belonged to a more controversial genealogy of works which were, in
fact, attacked for their atheism.13
The charges of atheism laid against The Temple of Nature, however,
seem largely exaggerated, as the poem is still indefatigably intent on locat-
ing the divine plan that underlies and explains the violent chaos of nature.
“Where can Sympathy reflecting fi nd,” Darwin wonders, “One ray of
light in this terrene abode / To prove to Man the Goodness of his God?”
(4:31, 4:33–34). And yet, the poem’s predominant concern with worldly
science, aesthetics and ethics secularises that question and reformulates it
as a search for biological rather than theological meaning. In contrast to
natural theologians, Darwin also appears more interested in the depiction
of violence than in its religious legitimation or transcendence. The graphic
gore and unapologetic eroticism that colour his poem, indeed, remind the
reader of his authorial warning that his goal is not “to instruct by deep
researches of reasoning,” but “simply to amuse by bringing distinctly to the
imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature”
(p. 3). Those operations, Darwin believes, are determined by the laws of
biological competition and predation:

Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish’d day

One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display!
From Hunger’s arm the shafts of Death are hurl’d,
And one great Slaughter-house the warring world! (4:63–66)

Like his grandson, Erasmus Darwin repeatedly casts the struggle for
existence in images of warfare and talks of the “elemental strife” (1:3), the
“bestial war” (2:361), “eternal war” (2:179) and even the “vegetable war”
(4:42). The long-term effect of this perpetual antagonism is a sublime of
ruins, an aesthetic of slow yet total degeneration that puts worldly power
and the entire human species into a disconcerting historical perspective:
174 Animality in British Romanticism
Where mouldering columns mark the lingering wreck
Of Thebes, Palmyra, Babylon, Balbec;
The prostrate obelisk, or shatter’d dome,
Uprooted pedestal, and yawning tomb,
On loitering steps reflective TASTE surveys
With folded arms and sympathetic gaze;
Charm’d with poetic Melancholy treads
O’er ruin’d towns and desolated meads;
Or rides sublime on Time’s expanded wings,
And views the fate of ever-changing things. (3:231–40)

The struggle for life, Darwin shows, does not favour the politically pow-
erful over the powerless, as social Darwinists would later claim. “When
a Monarch or a mushroom dies,” he notes in a deadly effective conjunc-
tion of the high and low, “Awhile extinct the organic matter lies,” until it
spontaneously transforms into new life (4:383–84). Evolution is brutally
democratic. Darwin’s memento mori recalls Shelley’s and Byron’s satiri-
cal treatments of the geological sublime, which similarly highlighted the
futility of worldly power in the face of time’s destructive force. As in Shel-
ley’s and Byron’s fragments, this sublime of ruins provides Darwin with a
sense of visual pleasure that is also characteristic of the mode of the pictur-
esque, but in his case this pleasure seems sincerely sympathetic rather than
sadistic, existential rather than political. In a long, essayistic footnote, he
launches into a more in-depth examination of the nature of this aesthetic
enjoyment. Unlike Shelley or Byron, he does not think that it derives from a
sense of Schadenfreude or from the promise of a natural revolution fi nally
putting things right. In a surprisingly Burkean argument, he asserts that the
sublime of ruins is mainly inspired by a nostalgic and sympathetic reflec-
tion on the beauty of past times (3:237n22).
More than Burke, however, Darwin is aware that sympathy can eas-
ily slip into sensationalism and even unscrupulous sadism. He therefore
claims, if rather unconvincingly, that the pleasure we take in other people’s
agony essentially derives from the enjoyment of their beauty and virtue,
not of their suffering. From this view, our moral sympathy would be much
more easily triggered by the distress of physically attractive creatures. That
is also what Darwin claims: “The same distressful circumstance attending
an ugly or wicked person affects us with grief or disgust; but when distress
occurs to a beauteous or virtuous person, the pleasurable idea of beauty or
of virtue becomes mixed with the painful one of sorrow, and the passion of
Pity is produced” (3:246n23). Darwin’s aesthetics of pity should remind us
of Frankenstein’s physiognomic views, but there is a significant difference in
that Darwin provides an explanation rather than a justification of aesthetic
morality. Problematic though his theory still may sound, Darwin is surely
right to claim that empathy is at least in part an aesthetically conditioned
response, elicited more readily by a nicely framed shot of a cute seal pup
 Beauty with a Past 175
being clubbed to death than by the troubles of, say, a naked mole rat. One
only need glance at recent campaigns of major animal rights movements to
see that pity, indeed, thrives best in the presence of the pretty.
Darwin most decidedly parts company with Burke when he argues that
realistic violence defies aesthetic appreciation. Whereas Burke claimed in
his Enquiry that one’s enjoyment of human suffering increases the more
authentic it appears, Darwin develops a more empathic theory of the spec-
tatorship of violence which posits that actual distress is too emotionally
disturbing to invite an aesthetic mood. He revisits a passage from the
Roman poet Lucretius, who admitted taking pleasure in witnessing a ship-
wreck from afar because it underlined his own sense of safety (3:246n23).14
Darwin looks askance at such a cynical mode of spectatorship and claims
that realistic violence is simply too agonising to give aesthetic pleasure. It
is surprising, however, that for Darwin calamities such as Lucretius’ ship-
wreck “may be objects of curiosity from their novelty, but not of Taste,”
whereas in the case of the gradual evolutionary destruction of Thebes or
Babylon, “reflective TASTE surveys / With folded arms and sympathetic
gaze.” In other words, evolution produces the feeling of the sublime for
Darwin, but a shipwreck does not. Taking into account the emphasis that
both Burke and Kant place on uninvolved spectatorship, one would expect
the opposite to be the case for in the experience of the shipwreck there is
at least a physical distance between the observer and the source of terror.
The evolutionary sublime of ruins, in contrast, underlines one’s inescapable
involvement in the struggle for existence. So why can Darwin enjoy the war
of nature with a frame of mind that delicately balances between dispas-
sionate detachment (“folded arms”) and moral identification (“sympathetic
gaze”) but fail to take pleasure in the shipwreck scene? What makes vio-
lence aesthetically appealing for Darwin, it seems, is not a physical safety
perimeter, but a historical and rhetorical one. The perception of the nauti-
cal disaster, he holds, lacks the discursive and temporal distance required
to airbrush the sublime into a pleasurable aesthetic—be it the beautiful or
the picturesque. That pleasure, Darwin specifies, primarily arises not from
the physical experience of destruction, which is “dreadful” and “horrid,”
but from its “scenical representations” (3:246n23).
That Darwin describes the ruins of the sublime war of nature in the
selectively amnesiac mode of the picturesque may seem misplaced in a poem
whose primary interest is historical, but it is symptomatic of our own day-
to-day perception of nature. Although biological evolution is undeniably
more destructive than a single shipwreck, its violence is much less palpable
and therefore less intimidating. I am not suggesting anything new when I
say that life is a death struggle in slow-motion which requires a time-lapse
rendition in order to disclose its true visceral brutality. As Charles Dar-
win put it in On the Origin of Species: “Nothing is easier than to admit
in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at
least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.”15
176 Animality in British Romanticism
Biological evolution moves at such a slow pace that it not only seems unreal
(as creationists like to believe) but also fosters a false sense of impunity,
which is further reinforced by science’s insistence on personal detachment
and critical distance. It is this illusion of uninvolvement that allows us to
watch and even enjoy the war of nature as though it was an emotionally
chilling but physically harmless piece of fiction, not realising that what we
are enjoying is the story of our own imminent and unavoidable death. In
Kant’s Critique of Judgment, this self-deception is taken one step further
and is legitimated by the faculty of reason, which upgrades the wishful
belief in our exemption from the struggle for life into transcendental truth.
His sublime not only depends on the physical safety of the subject, but also
produces that sense of safety and, in doing so, enables us to regard even our
own death as a trivial incident.
That Erasmus Darwin presupposes the possibility of such a safe discur-
sive position outside nature is perhaps strange, especially because earlier on
in The Temple of Nature he entrenched reason and language fi rmly within
material reality:

Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,

Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthly sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens! (1:309 –14)

Although Darwin wavers here between a Kantian paean to human ratio-

nality and a misanthropic narrative that reduces humanity to the primor-
dial mud from which it arose, it is the latter view that ultimately prevails
in his poem. In his materialist philosophy, thought is an embodied rather
than a transcendental faculty, whose complex workings developed from a
long and gradual process of organic evolution.16 The mind, he argues in
Zoonomia, comprises “the medullary part of the brain, spinal marrow,
nerves, organs of sense, and of the muscles,” which are activated by the
“spirit of animation, which resides throughout the body, without being
cognizable to our senses, except by its effects.” This “living principle” is
not the abstract force of animation that many Romantics had in mind.17
It is a physical property that humans share with other animals and even
with vegetables to some extent. Our capacity for rational thought, Darwin
believes, issued from the unique physiological structure of the hand, which,
as an extremely sensitive organ, imprinted memories and experiences onto
the brain and thus gradually programmed the mind’s intricate thought pro-
cesses: “Nerved with fi ne touch above the bestial throngs, / The hand, fi rst
gift of Heaven! to man belongs” (3:121–22).
The importance which Darwin attaches to the hand recalls Martin
Heidegger’s discussion of the human hand in “What Calls for Thinking?,”
 Beauty with a Past 177
but whereas Darwin invests the mind with animality by relating it to the
hand, Heidegger does the precise opposite and disembodies the human
hand by relating it to thought and language:

In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the
hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained by its being an
organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they
do not have hands. The hand is infi nitely different from all the grasping
organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence. Only
a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can handily
achieve works of handicraft.18

The transcendental idealism in Heidegger’s analysis clearly stands out when

we juxtapose his fragment to a very similar argument from Coleridge. “In
the different species of the Ape,” Coleridge believed, “I find nothing in the
Physiognomy that forbids me to imagine that the mind of the creature has
its mold in its body—but in man’s I see at once that the Body must have
received the impress from a mind.”19 In the exceptional case of the human,
in other words, it is reason that shapes the body, which is accordingly “but
the fi xture of the mind,” or as Heidegger would put it: “all the work of the
hand is rooted in thinking.”20 Heidegger’s rejection of animal conscious-
ness perpetuates the phobic disgust with which many Romantic-period
philosophers regarded non-human primates. 21 Although Erasmus Darwin,
too, writes in the Temple of Nature that humanity possesses a “superior-
ity of understanding” accruing from a fi ner sense of touch, he repeatedly
stresses that this superior understanding is only a biological product of our
evolution and is hardly any more exceptional than other animals’ “finer
powers of nostril, ear, or eye” (3:122n11, 3:119).
For a materialist and anti-dualistic thinker like Erasmus Darwin, the
Kantian transcendence of physical reality is little more than a rational hal-
lucination produced by the extraordinary workings of the human imagi-
nation. By discarding transcendental reason and stressing humanity’s
animal nature, however, Darwin risks pulling the plug on the scientific
sublime. As Weiskel claimed: “without some notion of the beyond, some
credible discourse of the superhuman, the sublime founders; or it becomes
a ‘problem.’”22 Darwin solves this problem by allowing for a lateral rather
than vertical transcendence of phenomenal reality through which he can
reflect on nature from a relatively safe distance without actually trans-
gressing its physical borders. It is this lateral understanding of biological
reality that is celebrated in the fi nal stanza of The Temple of Nature,
in which the poet-scientist gains insight into “TRUTH DIVINE” in the
typical rhapsodic terms of the scientific sublime (4:524). Despite Darwin’s
sacral tenor in these fi nal lines, he does not simply genuflect to religious
power, but his astonishment purposefully veers here, as elsewhere in his
poem, between a pious appreciation of divinity, a Kantian encomium to
178 Animality in British Romanticism
reason and a materialist recognition of the self-regulating workings of
nature. True, it is science that “pierces the realms of Chaos and of Night;
/ Of space unmeasured marks the fi rst and last, / Of endless time the pres-
ent, future, past” (3:38–40), but this celebration of science’s power to
structure time and space ends on a remarkably critical note which admits
that the scientist “weighs and measures all things but himself” (3:48), a
sobering corrective that deftly punctures the epistemological arrogance of
Kant’s idealism. At the same time, Darwin’s scientific sublime—like most
Romantic models—draws its strength from precisely this self-undermin-
ing insight and thus continues to operate within the contours of Kant’s
theory. There is a difference, however. Whereas Kant acknowledges the
limitations of human understanding, he never questions the faculty of
reason itself, which remains safely immune from sceptical doubt. Without
such a belief in the transcendental status of reason, scepticism becomes
a much more dangerous stance to take and Darwin’s self-undermining
realisation risks reducing the scientific sublime to a paper exercise with-
out objective validity or practical purpose.
And yet, Darwin still finds a sense of sublime impunity. Unlike Kant,
he discovers this sublime in biological reality itself and not—or at least not
entirely—in its rational or religious transcendence. As one contemporary
reviewer keenly observed: Darwin “substitute[s] the religion of nature for
the religion of the Bible.”23 In The Temple of Nature, it is not a foggy,
supersensible faculty of reason but nature itself that antidotes the suffer-
ing of everyday life with beauty and purpose. This phenomenological shift
from subjective reason to objective nature occurs in conjunction with a gen-
der movement away from male rationality to female physicality and with
an aesthetic movement away from the discourse of the sublime towards the
beautiful. Burke, in fact, accidentally initiated a similar aesthetic move-
ment when he recognised that the beauty of the female body had a prob-
lematic affinity with the sublime because its erotic appeal could induce “an
inward sense of melting and languor” in the male observer (Sublime 135).
In an attempt to prevent such a disempowerment of the male gaze and to
uphold the division between beauty and sublimity, he emphatically dissoci-
ated man’s aesthetic interest in woman’s visual presence from his sexual
desire for her body. Darwin, alternatively, dismisses such a distinction
and allows both categories to flow into one another. Female beauty, in his
poem, becomes a powerful recuperative force that counteracts the blithe
violence of nature with boundless sexual energy and creative abundance.
“The births and deaths contend with equal strife,” he writes, “And every
pore of Nature teems with Life” (4:379–80). Although this vision of nature
as an inexhaustible source of life clearly borrows its lopsided optimism
and resilient cheerfulness from natural theology, Darwin’s celebration of
the beauty and fecundity of biological reality is rather more sophisticated.
Unlike natural theologians, he does not rationalise away the sublime, but
he displaces its explosive power to the beautiful and, more radically, to
 Beauty with a Past 179
woman. In doing so, he creates a hermaphroditic aesthetic that undercuts
Burke’s gendered distinction between the beautiful and sublime.
Beauty, for Darwin, is in the fi rst place an organic quality conveyed
by the bodies of human and non-human animals. “The characteristic of
beauty,” he clarifies in a footnote to the Temple of Nature, “is that it is the
object of love” and should inspire a “wish to embrace or salute” that object
(3:176n17). We are attracted to beautiful things, he believes, because they
remind us of the “nice curves” of our mothers’ nourishing breasts, which
provided us with “countless joys” and “unextinct delight” during the first,
formative years of our lives (3:216, 3:217, 3:219). On this view, Words-
worth’s reunion with the rolling landscape around Tintern Abbey—“These
beauteous forms, / Through a long absence, have not been to me”—and his
ensuing “feelings . . . / Of unremembered pleasure” take on a whole new
meaning (23–24, 30–31). If for Burke the breast was the distinctive site of
female beauty, however, it was also “a deceitful maze” where the beauti-
ful slipped into the sublime and man lost control over his gaze (Sublime
105). Darwin, now, intensifies this female empowerment by oedipalising
the breast and showing how it transports the male observer back to a pas-
sive state of infantile dependence and longing. The beautiful, in this way,
becomes a domesticating aesthetic whose spurious promise of sexual and
dietary fulfi lment entraps man in a pacifying mother-child relationship.
Unlike Burke, Darwin celebrates rather than fears this Oedipal regres-
sion and sees in it the potential to restore peace and stability to a warring
world. No longer a passive, domesticated object, woman now becomes a
potent conciliatory force that manages to muzzle the patriarchal archetypes
of Burke’s sublime:

The Lion-King forgets his savage pride,

And courts with playful paws his tawny bride;
The listening Tiger hears with kindling flame
The love-lorn night-call of his brinded dame.
Despotic LOVE dissolves the bestial war,
Bends their proud necks, and joins them to his car;
Shakes o’er the obedient pairs his silken thong,
And goads the humble, or restrains the strong.—
Slow roll the silver wheels,—in beauty’s pride
Celestial PSYCHE blushing by his side.—
The lordly Bull behind and warrior Horse
With voice of thunder shake the echoing course,
Chain’d to the car with herds domestic move,
And swell the triumph of despotic LOVE. (2:357–70)

Darwin’s oxymoronic characterisation of love as a despotic emotion illus-

trates how he hijacks Burke’s autocratic discourse of the sublime and
turns its domesticating power against its own patriarchal symbols, thus
180 Animality in British Romanticism
deconstructing the gender dyad according to which Burke customised his
aesthetic categories. Although the claim that “Despotic Love dissolves the
bestial war” taps into the millennial register of Blake’s and Percy Shelley’s
vegetarian utopias, Darwin offers a more scientific picture, which leaves
room for biological competition, as it suspends hostilities only between the
sexes, not among males or between the species. A few stanzas earlier, in
fact, he maintains that beauty and love feed the struggle for existence by
stimulating sexual antagonism between males. In a suggestively animalis-
ing analogy, he compares the chivalric quest for romance with the pre-
mating behaviour of quails, stags, cocks and boars, and thereby strips the
courtly love tradition down to its bare biological essentials:

So Knight on Knight, recorded in romance,

Urged the proud steed, and couch’d the extended lance;
He, whose dread prowess with resistless force,
O’erthrew the opposing warrior and his horse,
Bless’d, as the golden guerdon of his toils,
Bow’d to the Beauty, and receiv’d her smiles. (2:327–32)

By highlighting the knight’s submission to female beauty, Darwin

locates fi nal power in woman and further emasculates Burke’s patriar-
chal discourse of the sublime. His evolutionary biology thus participates
in the revolutionary undressing of the old chivalric moral, political and
sexual codes. From an evolutionary perspective, after all, chivalry is not
a civilising construct refi ning our deeper animal desires or covering “our
naked, shivering nature,” as Burke contended in his Refl ections (77). But
its attachment to rigidly codified sexual norms and ritualised violence is
merely a biologically conditioned predisposition that also drives the behav-
iour of stags, boars, quails and cocks, and that primarily serves to stimulate
sexual reproduction and ensure self-preservation. Instead of elevating the
human species above its animal nature, the refi ned customs of the ancien
régime end up demonstrating the point which they were intended to dis-
prove: that is, that the king is “but an animal; and an animal not of the
highest order.” In a certain way, somewhat paradoxically, Burke claimed
exactly the same. He, too, brought into play an evolutionary discourse
which posited that the hierarchies and mannerisms of the ancien régime
had organically evolved to repress humanity’s intrinsically violent nature.
In his Refl ections on the Revolution in France he argued that “action and
counteraction . . . in the natural and in the political world, from the recipro-
cal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe”
(35). Defending natural law, he asserted that the political world—like the
biological world—should be determined by a process of gradual evolution
whereby new ideologies would peacefully take over weakened or degen-
erate systems: “Our political system . . . is never old or middle-aged or
young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through
 Beauty with a Past 181
the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation and progression. Thus,
by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we
improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly
obsolete” (34). In Burke’s optimistic view, however, organic evolution is a
smooth and bloodless process—beautiful in every sense—and thus very
different from the brutal war that Erasmus Darwin discerned in nature.
Burke’s disagreement with the revolutionaries, accordingly, is supposedly
not so much over their ideological beliefs per se as over their refusal to
play the political game by the laws of nature. By abruptly installing a new
regime and eradicating an entire political species, he believes, they try to
“change and pervert the natural order of things” and violate the biological
laws that make us human (49).
Supplying the subject with a sense of immunity from the invariable degen-
eration of biological life, Darwin’s aesthetic of the beautiful also displays the
self-preservative qualities of Kant’s and Burke’s discourses of the sublime.
“Potent Love with torch sublime,” he writes, “Relights the glimmering lamp,
and conquers Time” (1:447–48). His initial view that “Organic forms . . . Live
but to die” (2:41–42) is now made more tolerable by the realisation that they
“die but to revive” (2:42). The biological world, in Darwin’s graphic narra-
tive, is troped as both a slaughterhouse and a maternity ward, where new life
is continually being conceived and the impression of “immortal Happiness” is
created (4:405). Darwin repeatedly couches this process of organic regenera-
tion in aesthetic terms, as when he writes that “BEAUTY broods with angel
wings unfurl’d / O’er nascent life, and saves the sinking world” (2:261–62).
His materialist rendition of the notion of immortality often assumes a gothic
character. It is difficult not to think of Shelley’s Frankenstein when coming
across lines such as “The Wrecks of death are but a change of forms” or
“Emerging matter from the grave returns, / Feels new desires, with new sen-
sations burns” (3:398, 4:399–400). The atheism that lurks behind such lines
did not go unopposed at the time. One reviewer commented that “Dr Dar-
win teaches, indeed, the doctrines of a future state, of future happiness, and
immortality: but his future state is that of the future existence of man in the
form of worms or maggots.”24 Whereas Kant located a superhuman power in
the mind, a power that transgressed the limitations of the sensible and that
scorned natural law, Darwin achieves a sense of invulnerability within, not
at the expense of, material reality. Admittedly, his escape from the violence
of the real still depends on a logical sleight of hand, which maps ontogeny
onto phylogeny and dubiously identifies the lifespan of the individual organ-
ism with the lifetime of its organic material. The immortality that Darwin
thus proposes is no less theoretical than Kant’s. For Kant, it is the rational
insight into our physical triviality that emancipates us from nature’s violence.
Darwin, meanwhile, finds comfort in the thought that, after our death, our
bodies will morph into different life forms. Neither Kant’s transcendentalist
nor Darwin’s materialist answer to human mortality, however, would be well
received on a sympathy card.
182 Animality in British Romanticism
As The Temple of Nature progresses, it swells to an increasingly buoyant
crescendo. In addition to celebrating the unbounded creative and regenera-
tive powers of life, Darwin now also praises death as nature’s own inge-
nious way of keeping population growth in check. Without the unstoppable
degeneration and ultimate death of individual life forms, he maintains,
sexual reproduction would lead to overpopulation, whose effects would be
more disastrous and painful still. This seeming paradox that death is pre-
requisite to species preservation further muddles the conceptual distinction
between beauty and sublimity in two directions. Whereas Burke claimed
that “ideas of pain, sickness and death, fi ll the mind with strong emotions
of horror” and form an essential part of the psychological repertoire of
the sublime (Sublime 36), Darwin now puts death to the service of beauty
and shows that beauty has a history of sublime violence. The second way
in which he undermines the duality between the sublime and beautiful is
by speculating that the aesthetic of the beautiful and its effects of love and
sexual attraction can easily tip over into sublime forces, which without
population control would lead to pain, sickness and death. The libidinal
energy of the beautiful, it seems, can fuel sublime destruction:

So human progenies, if unrestrain’d,

By climate friended, and by food sustain’d,
O’er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.
Thus while new forms reviving tribes acquire
Each passing moment, as the old expire;
Like insects swarming in the noontide bower,
Rise into being, and exist an hour;
The births and deaths contend with equal strife,
And every pore of Nature teems with Life;
Which buds or breathes from Indus to the Poles,
And Earth’s vast surface kindles, as it rolls! (4:369–82)

Darwin here invokes the Malthusian terror of overpopulation in the typ-

ical hydraulic terms of the mathematical sublime (“prolific hordes! would
spread / Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed”). 25 Despite its transfer
of power from male rationality to female corporeality, the Malthusian sub-
lime is not a feminist aesthetic for it simply rehearses the Burkean fear of
female physicality and continues to present sexual desire as a negative force
that needs to be curbed. The Malthusian sublime does not so much regen-
der Burke’s patriarchal paradigm as it makes explicit the subversive power
of the female with which that paradigm struggled. Woman may be in con-
trol for Malthus, yet he never conceives her authority along the ambivalent
lines of the Burkean sublime, which should induce a “delightful horror”
 Beauty with a Past 183
rather than just horror. Darwin’s The Temple of Nature, conversely, pres-
ents woman as a much more ambiguous force that inspires both a Mal-
thusian fear of female reproductive power and a Deleuzian celebration of
sexual desire. Sexual reproduction, for Darwin, is not bestialising or life-
threatening—as it is for Burke and Malthus, but it is “the chef d’oeuvre,
the master-piece of nature.”26 It is something so powerful that it jeopar-
dises one’s survival in a sort of Malthusian sublime and, at the same time,
enables one to transcend the war of nature in a materialist take on the
Kantian sublime. The female animal, her beauty and sexual energy, then,
become as ambiguously charged as Burke’s patriarchal symbols of sublim-
ity, forces to be both feared and admired.
Despite its tedious lyrical tics and lifeless cast of allegorical characters,
Darwin’s The Temple of Nature still holds tremendous relevance for aes-
thetic and scientific research today. Like Erasmus Darwin, we need to turn
our attention away from the male power fantasy of the sublime towards
more common but chronically under-theorised registers such as beauty,
cuteness, sentimentality and kitsch. That academics in the past few decades
have primarily focussed on the intellectualist machismo of the sublime, I
think, reveals more about their humanist phobia of the female and ani-
mal than about the reality of Romantic culture. Like Darwin, we should
also abandon the metaphysical distinction between the taste preferences
of humans and those of non-human animals. Instead of trying to deter-
mine what exactly separates my preference for Byron over Keats from my
dog’s preference for her orange over her blue ball, we need to dedicate more
time and effort to understanding what our tastes have in common, what
basic biological needs they fulfi l and what brain regions they stimulate. It
might be a good idea to follow the example of very recent studies such as
Alan Richardson’s The Neural Sublime and John Onians’s article “Neuro-
science and the Sublime in Art and Science,” which instead of disclosing
once more the sociologies, economies and ideologies of taste have tried
to understand the cognitive and neurochemical components that condi-
tion it. 27 What we need is a far more committed relationship between the
sciences and the humanities than the casual interdisciplinary intercourse
in which we have been engaging so far. We need fMRI scans of human
brains in a state of sublime exultation, behavioural studies of housecats
exposed to naked French philosophers, and semiotic analyses of the sounds
albatrosses produce when encountering melancholy mariners. Such a new
approach to the study of aesthetics may teach us something valuable about
the biological complexity of taste and about how much of it we share with
other animals.
Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text

(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 38.
2. Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writ-
ing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal
Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003).
3. William Smellie, The Philosophy of Natural History, 2 vols. (Edinburgh:
1790), 1:523.
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. Jackson
and J.R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), vol. 11 of The
Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969–2001), 2:894.
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of
My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2
vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Sam-
uel Taylor Coleridge, 1:205.
6. Edmund Burke, Refl ections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitch-
ell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 79, 77. Hereafter cited in the text as
Refl ections.
7. See, for instance, Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and
Representation (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993), 10; Timothy Morton,
Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 2009), 171.
8. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2008), 43.
9. My discussion is obviously cursory. For an excellent historical overview of
the concept of species, see John S. Wilkins, Species: A History of the Idea
(Berkeley: U of California P, 2009).
10. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-
ences (New York: Routledge, 2005), 292.
11. See, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Routledge, 1984); Terry
Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Eagleton
hereafter cited in the text.
12. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 131. Hereafter cited in
the text as Sublime.
186 Notes
13. Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” in Romanticism
and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, 3–24 (New
York: Norton, 1970), 10.
14. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1983); Marjorie Levinson, “Insight and Oversight: Reading
‘Tintern Abbey,’” in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 14–57 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1986).
15. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader in British Eigh-
teenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 4.
16. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:422.
17. William Paley, Natural Theology, or Evidence of the Existence and Attri-
butes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2006), 108. Hereafter cited in the text.
18. Humphrey Davy, The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy,
9 vols. (London: Smith, 1839–40), 3:308. John Keats, Selected Letters, ed.
Robert Gittings, rev. Jon Mee (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 36. John Keats,
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” line 49. All references to John Keats’s poetry are to
Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003).
19. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the
Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His “Refl ections on the
Revolution in France,” ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterbor-
ough: Broadview, 1997), 95.
20. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the
French Revolution, in “Rights of Man,” “Common Sense,” and Other Politi-
cal Writings, ed. Mark Philp, 83–331 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 102.
21. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in The Major Works, ed. Zach-
ary Leader and Michael O’Neill, 674–701 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 698.
Hereafter cited in the text as Defence.
22. William Wordsworth, “Preface,” in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Thomas
Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt, 734–41 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936),
737.
23. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed.
Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon P, 2000), 2:864, 2:1034.
24. John Keats, “The Fall of Hyperion,” 1:304.
25. Bruce Robbins, “The Sweatshop Sublime,” Publications of the Modern Lan-
guage Association of America 117, no. 1 (2002): 84–97; John Sanbonmatsu,
“The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of
Everyday Life,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 68, no. 1
(2009): 101–26; David Grindstaff, “The Fist and the Corpse: Taming the
Queer Sublime in Brokeback Mountain,” Communication and Critical/
Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (2008): 223–44; Luke White, “Damien Hirst’s
Diamond Skull and the Capitalist Sublime,” in The Sublime Now, ed. Luke
White and Claire Pajaczkowska, 155–71 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2009); Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT P, 2005); Franklin Melendez, “Video Pornography, Visual
Pleasure, and the Return of the Sublime,” in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Wil-
liams, 401–28 (Durham: Duke UP, 2004).
26. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. James A. Arieti and John M. Crossett
(New York: Edwin Mellen P, 1985), 42. Hereafter cited in the text.
27. See, for instance, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Moun-
tain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infi nite (Seattle: U of
Washington P, 1997), 29–31.
28. After having crossed the Alps in 1688, Dennis wrote that the experience had
inspired a “delightful horrour” and “terrible joy.” John Dennis, The Critical
 Notes 187
Works of John Dennis, ed. E.N. Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1939), 2:380.
29. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans.
Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 147.
Hereafter cited in the text as Judgment.
30. Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century
England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1935); Neil Hertz, The
End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York:
Columbia UP, 1985); Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanti-
cism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
31. Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthet-
ics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 293.
32. Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: U
of Toronto P, 2002); Christopher Hitt, “Toward an Ecological Sublime,”
New Literary History 30, no. 3 (1999): 603–23.
33. Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic
Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010).
34. For a gender interpretation, see, for instance, Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s
Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolu-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). A discussion of the postcolonial sub-
lime can be found in E. San Juan Jr., “Globalized Terror and the Postcolonial
Sublime: Questions for Subaltern Militants,” in The Postcolonial and the
Global, ed. Revathi Krishnaswamy and John Charles Hawley, 157–65 (Min-
neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008). For a queer sublime, see Grindstaff, “The
Fist and the Corpse: Taming the Queer Sublime in Brokeback Mountain.”
35. Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in
Women’s Fiction (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 3.
36. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiede-
mann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (New York: Continuum, 2010), 65, 62.
37. The term ecocriticism fi rst appeared in William Rueckert, “Literature and
Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” Iowa Review 9, no. 1 (1978):
71–86. We fi nd, however, ecocritical readings well before Rueckert’s publi-
cation. See, for instance, Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory
(1959). For general introductions to ecocriticism, see Cheryll Glotfelty and
Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecol-
ogy (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996); Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York:
Routledge, 2004).
38. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989),
104.
39. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental
Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1991); Karl Kroeber, Ecological Liter-
ary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York:
Columbia UP, 1994).
40. Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1992), 89, 50.
41. Donna Haraway has addressed the ontological differences between humans,
animals and robots in her well-known article “A Cyborg Manifesto: Sci-
ence, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81 (New
York: Routledge, 1991). Cary Wolfe has interrogated Wittgenstein’s claim
that “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” in his chapter “In
the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of
the Animal,” in Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species
and Posthumanist Theory, 44–94 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003). And
188 Notes
in his quirky yet thought-provoking article “The Animal That Therefore I
Am,” Derrida has criticised the philosophical refusal to study the animal as
a knowing and perceiving subject in its own right. “It has its point of view
regarding me,” he writes referring to his cat. “The point of view of the abso-
lute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through
this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself
seen naked under the gaze of a cat.” See Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That
Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28,
no. 2 (2002): 380. Hereafter cited in the text as “Animal.”
42. Wolfe, Animal Rites, 1.
43. Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981); Noah
Heringman, ed., Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History
(Albany: State University of New York P, 2003); David M. Knight, ed., Sci-
ence in the Romantic Era (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Richard Holmes, The
Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and
Terror of Science (London: Harper, 2008).
44. Heringman, “The Commerce of Literature and Natural History,” in Roman-
tic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, 1.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Davis Guggenheim, “An Inconvenient Truth Trailer,” New York Times video,
2:30, accessed on 17 October 2011, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/342290/
An-Inconvenient-Truth/trailers (Hollywood: Paramount Classics, 2006).
2. Philip Larkin, “Going, Going,” in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite,
133–34 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), line 49.
3. John Betjeman, “Slough,” in John Betjeman’s Collected Poems, ed. the Earl
of Birkenhead, 21 (London: John Murray, 1958), line 3. George Gordon
Byron, “Darkness,” in The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford:
Oxford UP), line 71. All references to Byron’s poetry are to this edition.
4. See, for instance, Keith Tester, Animals & Society: The Humanity of Animal
Rights (New York: Routledge, 1991); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural
World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1984). My argument here is mainly based on their accounts.
5. For discussions of the discourse of environmental apocalypticism, see
Lawrence Buell, “Environmental Apocalypticism,” in The Environmental
Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Cul-
ture, 280–308 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1995); Garrard,
“Apocalypse,” in Ecocriticism, 85–107.
6. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001), 22.
7. All references to Blake’s poetry are to The Complete Poems of William
Blake, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
8. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:80–81.
9. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, rev. ed. (New
York: Routledge, 2002).
10. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge, 1970), 84.
11. See, for instance, Tester’s criticism in Animals & Society, 29–31.
12. Jean François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Eliza-
beth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), 55, 127.
13. Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clar-
endon P, 1989), 166.
 Notes 189
14. For interpretations of the sublime as a domesticating aesthetic, see William
Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong
Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed.
William Cronon, 69–90 (London: Norton, 1995); Donald Pease, “Sublime
Politics,” in The American Sublime, ed. Mary Arensberg, 21–50 (Albany:
State U of New York P, 1986).
15. James Lawson Drummond, Letters to a Young Naturalist on the Study of
Nature and Natural Theology (London: Longman, 1831), 12.
16. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowl-
edge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Min-
nesota P, 1984), 81.
17. William Faulkner, “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech,” in Nobel Lectures: Lit-
erature (1901–1967), ed. Horst Frenz (Singapore: World Scientific Publish-
ing, 1999), 444.
18. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psy-
chology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), 23–24.
19. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R.A.
Foakes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), vol. 5 of The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2:79.
20. Hitt, “Toward an Ecological Sublime,” 614.
21. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 92–97.
22. Friedrich von Schiller, “On the Sublime,” in “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,”
and “On the Sublime”: Two Essays, ed. and trans. Julius A. Elias, 191–212
(New York: Ungar, 1966), 208.
23. See, for instance, Philip Shaw, The Sublime (New York: Routledge), 79–80.
24. Theodor Reik, Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sex-
ual Emotions (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002), 362, 321.
25. John Dennis, “John Dennis, from The Advancement and Reformation of
Modern Poetry (1701),” in Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, 38.
26. See, for instance, Oerlemans, Romanticism, 84–85.
27. All references to Coleridge’s poetry are to Poetical Works, ed. J.C.C. Mays,
3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), vol. 16 of The Collected Works of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
28. Bate, Romantic Ecology, 8–9.
29. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 103.
30. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam P, 2006), 221.
31. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J.
Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 1:390.
32. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, Being Part One of the Ency-
clopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace (Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1975), 44.
33. William Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” in The Prose Works
of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3
vols., 349–60 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1974), 2:349, 2:356.
34. Coleridge, Letters, 2:810.
35. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Barbara Foxley
(London: Everyman’s Library, 1974), 184.
36. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2nd ed. (London: Millar,
1761), 2.
37. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83,
no. 4 (1974): 435–50.
38. Midgley, Beast and Man, 348.
190 Notes
39. Mark S. Lussier, Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 58.
40. Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the
Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 28–29. All references to
Shelley’s poetry are to The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael
O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).
41. Martin Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking?,” in Basic Writings, ed. David
Farrell Krell, 341–68 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 357.
42. Coleridge, Poetical Works, 1:1246.
43. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 5, 204–205.
44. Anna Laetitia Barbauld and John Aikin, Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile
Budget Opened, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1839), 216. Hereafter cited in
the text.
45. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 201.
46. Richardson, The Neural Sublime, 35–36. Richardson’s argument here relies
on V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s Phantoms in the Brain: Prob-
ing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1998),
58.
47. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:390.
48. Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 20.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1. Coleridge, Letters, 1:629.

2. It was an anonymous critic from The Westminster Review who called
Coleridge a “Tory pensioner.” See “Article XVI—Specimens of the Table
Talk of S.T. Coleridge,” The Westminster Review 21, no. 44 (1835): 286.
3. Coleridge, Lectures, 2:535.
4. Coleridge, Biographia, 1:242.
5. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:353–86.
6. Ibid., 1:596.
7. For Burke’s discussion of the aesthetics of wildness and domesticity, see Sub-
lime, 60–61.
8. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:384.
9. Ibid., 1:280.
10. Coleridge, Biographia, 1:153n2. For influential Kantian interpretations of
Coleridge’s sublime, see, for example, Thomas Weiskel, Frances Ferguson
and Neil Hertz.
11. See Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Tallahassee:
Florida State UP, 1985); Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999); Christopher Stokes, Coleridge, Language and
the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2010).
12. Perry, Coleridge, 159.
13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princ-
eton: Princeton UP, 1969), vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, 1:367.
14. Coleridge, Letters, 1:625.
15. Modiano, Coleridge, 101. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Sam-
uel Taylor Coleridge, vols. 1–3 ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. 4 ed. Kathleen
Coburn and Merton Christensen, vol. 5 ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony
John Harding (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 3:3290.
 Notes 191
16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae: From the Unpublished Note-Books
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: William
Heinemann, 1895), 294.
17. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism, ed. Wlad Godzich, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1983), 198.
18. For de Man’s rejection of this pattern of thought in contemporary criticism,
see also The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 8.
19. For ecocritical interpretations of “The Ancient Mariner,” see Oerlemans,
Romanticism, 85–87; James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism
and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000), 44–50.
20. Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes, 73.
21. Coleridge, Letters, 2:864.
22. Coleridge, “To the Author of the Ancient Mariner,” in Biographia, 1:28,
lines 3–4.
23. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Prince-
ton: Princeton UP, 1990), vol. 14 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, 1:149.
24. Ibid., 1:272–73.
25. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic
Poetry, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971), 211.
26. Coleridge, Biographia, 1:306.
27. William Hazlitt, Criticism and Dramatic Essays of the English Stage, 2nd ed.
(London: Routledge, 1851), 149.
28. Coleridge, Biographia, 1:124–25.
29. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenom-
enology,” trans. Joseph P. Fell, in Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of
Leading Philosophers, ed. Rudolf Bernet, Donn Welton and Gina Zavota,
257–60 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 257.
30. McKusick, Green Writing, 45.
31. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Rout-
ledge, 1990), 22–23.
32. See George Shelvocke, Voyage round the World by Way of the Great South
Sea (London: Senex, 1726), 73.
33. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2:2495.
34. Coleridge, Poetical Works, 1:320.
35. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 24, 23.
36. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Aka-
dine, 2000), 233, 108–109.
37. Coleridge, Poetical Works, 1:362–63.
38. Foucault, The Order of Things, 19, 26, 27.
39. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Direc-
tions, 2007), 10.
40. My idea and turn of phrase here are somewhat influenced by Timothy Mor-
ton’s in Ecology without Nature, 157–58. Morton, interestingly, also links
the water-snakes’ viscous appearance to Sartre’s interest in the slimy.
41. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
42. Ibid., 5.
43. See for instance, Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of
Object-Oriented Ontology,” Quie Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sci-
ences 19, no. 2 (2011): 163–90; Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phe-
nomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court P, 2005).
44. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2002), ix.
192 Notes
45. For an insightful discussion of conceptual thinking in non-human animals,
see Cary Wolfe, “Language, Representation, and Species,” in What is Post-
humanism? (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010), 31–47.
46. Coleridge, Biographia, 1:205; Coleridge, Notebooks 3:3935.
47. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2:2045.
48. See, for instance, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of
Things (Durham: Duke UP, 2009).
49. Coleridge’s gloss to lines 71–74.
50. Coleridge, Biographia, 1:304.
51. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between the sublime and
the masochistic, see Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender: Male Masoch-
ism at the Fin-de-Siècle (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998).
52. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 9.
53. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:215.
54. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 22.
55. Coleridge, Letters, 1:349–50.
56. Coleridge, Lectures, 2:224.
57. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 62.
58. Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1997), 21.
59. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 2:1312.
60. Ibid., 2:1318.
61. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State,
ed. John Colmer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), vol. 10 of The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 183.
62. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:551.
63. Coleridge, Letters, 1:626.
64. Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 9–10, 41.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

1. Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest

de Selincourt, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967), 1:264.
2. Walter Scott, “The Wild Huntsmen,” in Ballads and Lyrical Pieces, 148–61
(Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1806), line 185, line 184.
3. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 735.
4. For a discussion of Lyrical Ballads in the light of the gothic, see Michael
Gamer, “‘Gross and Violent Stimulants’: Producing Lyrical Ballads 1798
and 1800,” in Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon
Formation, 90–126 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004).
5. Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” 355.
6. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 737, 735.
7. Ibid., 735.
8. Wordsworth, Prose Works, 1:36.
9. Joseph Addison, “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” in The Spectator: With
Notes and a General Index, 2 vols., 2:137–53 (Philadelphia: Woodward,
1836), 2:149.
10. According to Don H. Bialostosky, for instance, phrases such as “that glorious
day” and “this glorious act” suggest that Wordsworth actually sympathises
with the hunter. See Bialostosky, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s
Narrative Experiments (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 92.
11. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 737.
 Notes 193
12. Ibid., 739.
13. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:59.
14. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 734.
15. For a more thorough discussion of the gendering of the beautiful and sub-
lime, see Freeman, The Feminine Sublime.
16. John Dennis, “John Dennis, from The Advancement and Reformation of
Modern Poetry (1701),” in Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, 37.
17. For a sexual interpretation of this fi nal phrase, see also Jacques Derrida,
“Economimesis,” in Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodern-
ism, an Anthology, ed. Richard Kearney and David M. Rasmussen, 431–50
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 447.
18. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ed. and trans.
James Strachey (New York: Perseus Books, 2000), 23–24.
19. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical
Theory, rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2010).
20. For a discussion of carnophallogocentrism, see, for instance, Jacques Der-
rida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with
Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronnell, in Who Comes
after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy,
96–119 (New York: Routledge, 1991).
21. Jacques Derrida, “Force of the Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Author-
ity,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 953.
22. Wolfe, Animal Rites, 6.
23. Vincent Arthur De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the
Sublime (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), 162.
24. For a discussion of the religious and political meanings of the sublime of
ruins, see Cian Duff y, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2005), 37–48.
25. Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime
and the Beautiful (London: Robson, 1794), 47.
26. John Ruskin, Modern Painters Part 5: Of Mountain Beauty (London: Smith,
1856), 3, 10.
27. For an ecocritical discussion of the desert as an anti-anthropocentric space,
see Don Scheese, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (New
York: Routledge, 2002), 78–80.
28. Judith W. Page, “From the Sublime to the Beautiful: Solitude and Commu-
nity in the 1799 Prelude and Beyond,” in Wordsworth and the Cultivation
of Women, 11–28 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994).
29. William Wordsworth, “The Two-Part Prelude of 1799,” in The Prelude,
1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen
Gill (New York: Norton, 1979).
30. Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” 349.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. Coleridge, Lectures, 2:60; Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” line 35; Words-
worth, “Tintern Abbey,” lines 44–46.
2. See Eagleton’s Aesthetic Ideology for a political interpretation of sublime
self-loss. For an interpretation of the sublime as an emasculating aesthetic,
see Catherine Maxwell, The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne:
Bearing Blindness (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001). Thomas Weiskel
has linked the sublime to melancholia and neurosis in The Romantic Sub-
lime, 96.
194 Notes
3. Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular,
trans. William Smellie, 2nd ed., 9 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1785),
3:249–50.
4. For a wide-ranging discussion of these socio-economic, political and sci-
entific changes in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, see Dror
Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eigh-
teenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006).
5. Blake, Milton, book 1, plate 1, line 8.
6. Robert Southey, Essays, Moral and Political, 2 vols. (London: John Murray,
1832), 2:267–68.
7. All references to The Prelude in this chapter are to the 1850 edition and to
Book 7 (unless specified otherwise).
8. For discussions of the sublime in Book 7, see, for instance, Hertz, The End of
the Line, 52–57; Andrew Smith, Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy
and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2000), 103–28; Anne Janowitz, “The Artifactual Sublime: Making Lon-
don Poetry,” in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture,
1780–1840, ed. James K. Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, 246–60 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).
9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thou-
sand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Continuum, 2004), 262.
Hereafter cited in the text as Plateaus.
10. For Haraway’s criticism of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-ani-
mal, see When Species Meet (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008), 27–30.
11. See Gilles Deleuze, “The Relationship between the Faculties in the Sublime,”
in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habber-
jam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 50–52.
12. Thomas Weiskel, qtd. in Portia Williams Weiskel, “A Personal Introduc-
tion,” in The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence, by Thomas Weiskel, xii–xv (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1976), xiii.
13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans.
Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 13.
14. Coleridge, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” line 23; Coleridge, Lectures,
2:60.
15. Keats, Selected Letters, 147–48, 37.
16. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 7.
17. See, for instance, Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 241; Jack Stillinger, Romantic Complexity:
Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006), 33.
18. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 3rd ed. (New York:
Derby and Jackson, 1857), vol. 4 of The Miscellaneous Works of William
Hazlitt, 5 vols. (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1857), 55–56.
19. Coleridge, Notebooks, 3:3290.
20. Coleridge, Lectures, 1:69.
21. Coleridge, Biographia, 2:28.
22. Shaw, The Sublime, 13.
23. James Usher, “James Usher, from Clio; or A Discourse on Taste (1769),” in
Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, 152.
24. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John
Bell, 1785), 730.
25. Hertz, The End of the Line, 50–51.
26. Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”: Devia-
tions from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992), 48.
 Notes 195
27. For a more extensive discussion of faciality and especially of the faciality of
natural objects in Wordsworth’s poetry, see John Beer, “Wordsworth and the
Face of Things,” The Wordsworth Circle 10 (1979): 17–29.
28. Levinas’s hesitation to acknowledge the face of the animal—“I don’t know
if a snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A more specifi c analysis
is needed”—is paradigmatic of this strand. It is most forcefully rejected by
Derrida. See Jacques Derrida, “But as for Me, Who Am I (Following)?” in
The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David
Willis, 52–118 (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), 107–109. See also Mat-
thew Calarco, “Facing the Other Animal: Levinas,” in Zoographies: The
Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, 55–77 (New York:
Columbia UP, 2008).
29. Also see Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter “Year Zero: Faciality,” in Plateaus,
185–211.
30. Jonas A. Barish speaks of “a natural antipathy between romanticism and
the theatre.” And he adds: “Romanticism, like Puritanism, leans toward
inwardness, solitude, and spontaneity. It shares with Puritanism a belief in
an absolute sincerity which speaks directly from the soul, a pure expressive-
ness that knows nothing of the presence of others.” See Jonas A. Barish, The
Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981), 362.
31. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1986), 300–301.
32. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory
of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP,
1991), 23.
33. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 299.
34. Ibid., 299, 300.
35. René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, trans. Ian Maclean (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2006), 47.
36. Buffon, Natural History, 3:280, 3:281, 3:236.
37. Lawrence Kramer, “Gender and Sexuality in The Prelude: The Question of
Book Seven,” English Literary History 54, no. 3 (1987): 634.
38. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloom-
ington: Indiana UP, 1984), 316, 317.
39. Ibid., 7.
40. Wordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” in Complete Poetical
Works, 751.
41. Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” 354.
42. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2010), 16–17.
43. See, for instance, Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with
Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999); Cynthia Chris,
Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006).
44. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:350.
45. Ibid., 1:351.
46. Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” 2:353–54.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

1. For a discussion of this gender transgression, see Linda M.G. Zerilli, “The
‘Furies of Hell’: Woman in Burke’s ‘French Revolution,’” in Signifying
Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill, 60–94 (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1994).
196 Notes
2. For a wide-ranging analysis of Burke’s Refl ections in the light of his aesthetic
philosophy, see Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology.
3. Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W.
Copeland, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1958–78), 6:10.
4. Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 3rd ed. (London:
Dodsley, 1791), 109.
5. Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, in Refl ections on the
Revolution in France, 251–92, 266.
6. Edmund Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, in The Writings and
Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
P: 1981–2000), 9:259.
7. Burke, Writings, 9:152.
8. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Prog-
ress of the French Revolution, in “Vindication of the Rights of Men” and
“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” ed. Janet Todd, 285–371 (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2009), 370.
9. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London: Cadell,
1790), 50.
10. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, 2 vols. (London: Chap-
man and Hall, 1857), 2:14.
11. Burke, Writings, 9:171.
12. Burke is referring to the following argument in Addison’s essays on “The
Pleasures of the Imagination”: “We see . . . that every different species of
sensible creatures has its different notions of beauty, and that each of them
is most affected with the beauties of its own kind” (2:139). The Scottish
philosopher Thomas Reid also quoted this passage in his Essays on the Intel-
lectual Powers of Man, 744.
13. Burke, Correspondence, 6:86–87.
14. See, for instance, Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology, 166; Ronald
Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale UP,
1983), 60.
15. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men, 56.
16. Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, 51, 52.
17. Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chi-
cago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 177–78.
18. See Mary R. and Rodney M. Baine, “Blake’s Other Tigers, and ‘The Tyger,’”
Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 15, no. 4 (1975): 563–78.
19. Vincent Arthur De Luca has argued that the “enormous length” of these
transformative species and their terrifying psychological effects clearly hint
at Burke’s sublime. See De Luca, Words of Eternity, 73–74.
20. Robert Burns, “To a Mouse,” in The Best Laid Schemes: Selected Poetry and
Prose of Robert Burns, ed. Robert Crawford and Christopher MacLachlan,
47–48 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009), line 1. William Wordsworth, “The
Kitten and the Falling Leaves,” line 2.
21. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Stric-
tures on Political and Moral Subjects, ed. Miriam Brody, 3rd ed. (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin 2004), 15.
22. Robert F. Gleckner, The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake
(Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959), 223.
23. Onno Oerlemans discusses the same idea, calling it a process of “symbolic
osmosis.” See Oerlemans, Romanticism, 102.
24. For a discussion of Linnaeus’ Homo ferus, see Adriana Benzaquén, “The List,
the Class, the Story-Form,” in Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation
 Notes 197
and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature, 42–72 (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006).
25. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, 73.
26. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.
Smith (New York: Continuum, 2005), 16.
27. Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up,” line 7.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

1. Freeman, The Feminine Sublime, 84–85.

2. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 54, 55.
3. Several critics have already pointed to the role of the beautiful and the sub-
lime in Shelley’s text. See, for instance, Barbara Freeman, “Frankenstein
with Kant: A Theory of Monstrosity or the Monstrosity of Theory,” in Fran-
kenstein: Mary Shelley, ed. Fred Botting, 191–205 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1995); Anne K. Mellor, “Frankenstein and the Sublime,” in Approaches to
Teaching Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” ed. Stephen C. Berhendt, 99–104 (New
York: Modern Language Association, 1990); Nancy Fredericks, “On the
Sublime and Beautiful in Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Essays in Literature 23,
no. 2 (1996): 178–89.
4. Paine, Rights of Man, 134.
5. Mary Shelley, The Last Man, 3 vols. (Paris: Galignani, 1826), 3:18. Shelley
here uses the same lightning image to characterise the psychological break-
down of Lionel Verney, the last man, who says: “I am a tree rent by lightning;
never will the bark close over the bared fibres—never will their quivering life,
torn by the winds, receive the opiate of a moment’s balm. I am alone in the
world” (3:205).
6. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 2:1312.
7. Coleridge, Lectures, 2:257.
8. Buffon, Natural History, 3:206.
9. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expec-
tations, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Bath: Richard Cruttwell, 1810), 1:461.
10. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, a Poem, in Two Parts; Containing
“The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of the Plants,” with Philo-
sophical Notes (London: Jones, 1825), part 1, canto 4, line 62; part 2, canto
1, lines 9–10.
11. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 29.
12. Mary Shelley, “Appendix B,” in Frankenstein, 206.
13. Masahiro Mori, “Bukimi no tani” [The Uncanny Valley], trans. K.F. Mac-
Dorman and T. Minato, Energy 7, no. 4 (1970): 33–35.
14. See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Sigmund Freud: Art and Literature,
trans. James Strachey, 339–76 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), vol. 14 of
The Pelican Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson, 15 vols. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973–85).
15. Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional
Theory of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010), 216–17.
16. For a discussion of the cute response, see James A. Serpell, “Anthropomor-
phism and Anthropomorphic Selection—Beyond the ‘Cute Response,’” Soci-
ety & Animals 11, no. 1 (2003): 83–100.
17. Smellie, The Philosophy of Natural History, 1:523.
18. Judith Barbour has linked the Monster to contemporary zoological accounts
of the orang-utan in her essay “The Professor and the Orang-Outang: Mary
198 Notes
Shelley as a Child Reader,” in Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and
Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Jane
Goodall, 33–48 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
19. Andrew Smith argues that the Monster is a sublime object “created through
a parody of Burkean sublime inquiry.” See Smith, Gothic Radicalism, 36.
Denise Gigante, alternatively, maintains that the Monster is merely ugly
because “the principal factor of sublime experience—being elevated from
terror to a comprehension of greatness—is absent from Victor’s experience.”
See Gigante, “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein,” English Literary
History 67, no. 2 (2000): 575.
20. Jacques Derrida, “Passages—From Traumatism to Promise,” in Points . . .:
Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al.,
372–98 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 386.
21. See, for instance, Tilar J. Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the
Romantic Period (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007).
22. Wordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” 751. The analogy has
a long critical history, with roots stretching back into Aristotle’s Poetics. For
a discussion of literary genre as biological species, see David Fishelov, Meta-
phors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory (University Park:
Pennsylvania State UP, 1993).
23. Thomas Love Peacock, Peacock’s “Four Ages of Poetry,” ed. H.F.B. Brett-
Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 15.
24. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of
the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist,
3–40 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), 4.
25. For an elaborate overview and history of the concept of physiognomy, see
Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth
Century (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995).
26. Schiller, “On the Sublime,” 205, 207–208.
27. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:372.
28. The term generative conception is John S. Wilkins’s. See his study Species: A
History of the Idea (Berkeley: U of California P, 2009).
29. Schiller, “On the Sublime,” 204.
30. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 16.
31. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 22.
32. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 54.
33. Buffon, Natural History, 3:263.
34. For a discussion of the rhizomatic characteristics of Darwin’s tree, see Michael
Mikulak, “The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to Biotechnology,”
Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 15 (2007), accessed on
16 November 2009, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue15/mikulak.html. Linking
Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Colin
Milburn similarly concludes that Darwin’s tree of life is in fact a “structure
without structure, of endless connections, intertwinings and ecological profu-
sions, where plants and animals, trees and humans, ‘depend on each other in a
complex manner.’” See Colin Nazhone Milburn, “Monsters in Eden: Darwin
and Derrida,” Modern Language Notes 118, no. 3 (2003): 617.
35. Charles Darwin, qtd. in Howard E. Gruber, “Darwin’s ‘Tree of Nature’ and
Other Images of Wide Scope,” in Creativity, Psychology and the History
of Science, ed. Howard E. Gruber and Katja Bödeker, 241–58 (New York:
Springer, 2005), 248.
36. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret this—as Foucault does—in
terms of a general evolution. In fact, William Lawrence, a prominent Eng-
lish surgeon whose influence on Frankenstein has been widely documented,
 Notes 199
quoted Abernethy’s phrase to reject his line of thought. He construed the lat-
ter’s preference for analogical reasoning over empirical observation as a dis-
guised attempt to rationalise his scientific prejudices. See William Lawrence,
Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man (London:
Callow, 1819), 14.
37. John Abernethy, Physiological Lectures, Exhibiting a General View of Mr.
Hunter’s Physiology and of His Researches in Comparative Anatomy (Lon-
don: Longman, 1817), 203, 204.
38. Foucault, The Order of Things, 288.
39. Buffon, Natural History, 3:216.
40. For a discussion of this development from morphology to physiology, see
Peter J. Bowler and Iwan R. Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical
Survey (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 166–67.
41. Buffon, Natural History, 3:206–207.
42. Foucault, The Order of Things, 259.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

1. James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, 2 vols. (London: Cadell, 1790),

1:13; Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 1; Anna Laetitia Bar-
bauld and John Aikin, Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile Budget Opened,
185.
2. Anonymous, Notes to Assist the Memory in Various Sciences (London: John
Murray, 1825), 217; Alexander Ramsey, “Observations on Peculiar Diseases
Incident to the Sexes of the Human Species,” The Medical and Physical Journal
31 (1814): 212; Anonymous, “To the Editor,” in The Babbler: or, Weekly Liter-
ary and Scientific Intelligencer, 2 vols., 1:200–203 (Leeds: Barr, 1822), 200.
3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans.
T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), 1:80.
4. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, in “Pensées” and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi,
1–181 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 72–73.
5. Gen. 1:3 (King James Version). The relationship between science and the
sublime has provoked some critical interest. See, for instance, William Pow-
ell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery
in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Berkeley: U of California P, 1966);
Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory; Eric Wilson, Emerson’s
Sublime Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
6. Hugh Blair, “Hugh Blair, from A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian
(1763),” in Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, 223; Henry Home, “Henry
Home, Lord Kames, from Elements of Criticism (1765),” in Ashfield and de
Bolla, The Sublime, 232; Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man,
730; Paul de Man, “Hegel on the Sublime,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej
Warminski, 105–18 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002), 112–13.
7. Alexander Pope, “Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster-
Abbey,” in Selected Poetry, 67 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), lines 1–2.
8. Humphry Davy, Consolations in Travel; or The Last Days of a Philosopher
(London: John Murray, 1838), 132.
9. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and of
Fabulous Theology, in Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner, 664–830 (New
York: Library of America, 1995), 828.
10. De Man, “Hegel on the Sublime,” 112.
11. Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or An
Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Entire Structure
200 Notes
of the Universe Based on Newtonian Principles, trans. Ian Johnston (Arling-
ton, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2009), 133. For a discussion of the
importance of extraterrestrials in European thought, see Michael J. Crowe,
The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1986).
12. George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and
Journals and His Life, ed. Thomas Moore, 17 vols. (London: John Murray,
1837), 2:216.
13. Addison, “Friday, July 9, 1714,” in The Spectator, 2:349, 2:350.
14. Thomas De Quincey, “System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s
Telescopes,” in De Quincey’s Works, 3:167–98 (Edinburgh: Adam and
Charles Black, 1863), 179, 176.
15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 133–34.
16. John Playfair, Biographical Account of Dr James Hutton, in The Works of
John Playfair, 4:33–118 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1822), 81.
17. Drummond, Letters to a Young Naturalist, 85.
18. Robert Bakewell, Introduction to Geology, ed. B. Silliman (New Haven:
Noyes, 1839), 436–37.
19. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society: A Poem,
with Philosophical Notes (Teddington: Echo Library, 2007), 1:347–50. Ref-
erences are to canto and line. Hereafter cited in the text.
20. Paine, The Age of Reason, 706.
21. See also W.J.T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of Things,” in What
Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, 169–87 (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2005).
22. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii.
23. Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” 7–8.
24. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 163.
25. Bonnie Bassler, “Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria ‘Talk,’” fi lmed February
2009, TED video, 18:11, posted April 2009, accessed on 8 January 2010,
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_ com-
municate.html.
26. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, 28–96 (London: Pen-
guin, 2005), line 1316.
27. Humphry Davy, “Introductory Lecture to the Chemistry of Nature,” in The
Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, 8:179.
28. Paine, The Age of Reason, 828.
29. John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), 14–15.
30. James Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the
Tory Satirists (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 11.
31. Anne K. Mellor has similarly distinguished the Romantic ironist from the
postmodern deconstructivist, whose sceptical insight is merely alienating and
debilitating. See Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1980), 5.
32. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,
trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004), 70.
33. De Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” in Aesthetic Ideology, 127.
34. See, for instance, Christine Kenyon-Jones, “‘When this world shall be for-
mer’: Catastrophism as Imaginative Theory for the Younger Romantics,”
Romanticism on the Net 24 (2001), accessed on 26 September 2010, http://
users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/24jones.html.
 Notes 201
35. Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste,
2nd ed. (London: Payne and White, 1805), 416.
36. Paine, The Age of Reason, 751.
37. Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil,
9–138 (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 88.
38. Ibid., 89.
39. Claire Colebrook, Irony (New York: Routledge, 2004), 105.
40. Mellor, English Romantic Irony, 188. For a rejection of Mellor’s positive
interpretation, see McGann, Romantic Ideology, 21–30.
41. Byron, Heaven and Earth, in The Works of Lord Byron, 13:1–53, act 1,
scene 3, lines 173–82.
42. Isa. 11:6.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

1. William Powell Jones has similarly argued that the poetic interest in the sci-
entific sublime petered out towards the end of the eighteenth century, but he
points to science’s increasing didacticism and technicality as the main causes
of this dwindling interest. See Jones, The Rhetoric of Science, 200.
2. For Kant’s criticism of Burke’s Enquiry, see Critique of Judgment, 38,
158–59.
3. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life (Teddington:
Echo Library, 2007), 100. Darwin quoted the fragment again in a footnote
to The Temple of Nature (3:176n17).
4. Erasmus Darwin, “Additional Notes XIII: Analysis of Taste,” in The Temple
of Nature, 160.
5. Addison, “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” 2:141.
6. Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem (London: 1795),
260.
7. Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, 106.
8. John Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (War-
rington: Johnson, 1777), 10.
9. Barbauld, Works, 2:15.
10. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 738.
11. M.H. Abrams, “Science and Poetry in Romantic Criticism,” in The Mirror
and the Lamp, 298–335 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971).
12. Humphry Davy, “Mr. Davy’s Lectures on Geology,” The Philosophical Mag-
azine 37 (1811): 468.
13. For discussions of the relationship between beauty and theology, see Pat-
rick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics
(Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992); Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics:
God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999).
14. Henry Needler, “On the Beauty of the Universe,” in The Works of Mr. Henry
Needler, Consisting of Original Poems, Translations, Essays, and Letters,
3rd ed., 63–76 (London: Watts, 1735), 63.
15. Paine, The Age of Reason, 691.
16. Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, 10.
17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Refl ection, ed. John Beer (Princeton: Princ-
eton UP, 1993), vol. 9 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
254. For Coleridge’s criticism of the circular logic of natural theology, see
Table Talk, 1:462–63.
18. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:384.
202 Notes
19. For an analysis of Kant’s ideas on natural theology, see Peter Byrne, Kant on
God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
20. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation
(London: Smith and Walford, 1750), 386.
21. Barbauld, “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, and on Sects and Establish-
ments,” in Works, 2:239. For a discussion of Barbauld’s ambiguous rela-
tionship to natural theology, see Colin Jager, “Theory, Practice, and Anna
Barbauld,” in The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic
Era, 73–101 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007).
22. Barbauld, “Thoughts,” in Works, 2:237, 2:239.
23. Barbauld and Aikin, “The Travelled Ant,” in Evenings at Home, 50–56.
Hereafter cited in the text.
24. Recently, a number of studies have been published on the relationship
between science and its aesthetic representation. Ernst Peter Fischer claims
that the aesthetic does not simply mediate, but also informs scientific argu-
ment. He goes so far as to claim that Copernicus’ “primary motivation was
aesthetic” and that “aesthetic reasons more than any others led Einstein to
the theory of relativity.” See Fischer, Beauty and the Beast: The Aesthetic
Moment in Science, trans. Elizabeth Oehlkers (New York: Plenum, 1999), 1,
11. Such a reductionist view is criticised in James W. McAllister, Beauty and
Revolution in Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996), 65–66. McAllister argues
that the link between science and beauty only emerges after a scientific the-
ory has gained wide recognition. Beauty is thus an effect of scientific validity
rather than a cause. The aesthetic appeal of a successful theory, he claims, is
heightened by habituation (the more familiar it becomes, the more positive
its aesthetic valorisation) as well as by its social prestige and in particular the
prestige of the scientists applying the theory.
25. The original quote can be found in Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,
Studies of Nature, by James-Henry-Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, trans. Henry
Hunter, 5 vols. (London: Dilly, 1796), 2:174.
26. Buffon, Natural History, 4:318, qtd. in Drummond, Letters to a Young Nat-
uralist, 16.
27. Drummond, Letters to a Young Naturalist, 11.
28. Percy Shelley, “Notes to Queen Mab,” in Works, 84.
29. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 105.
30. Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, 458–60.
31. Percy Shelley, “Notes to Queen Mab,” 85.
32. Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, 459.
33. Drummond, Letters to a Young Naturalist, 12.
34. Aristotle, Poetics (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008), 6.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

1. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 360.

2. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature, 2:3n2.
3. Carl Linnaeus, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Hus-
bandry, and Physick, trans. Benjamin Stillingfleet, 2nd ed. (London: Dodsley,
1762), 121.
4. See, for instance, his chapter “Of the Checks to Population among the Amer-
ican Indians,” in Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population;
or, A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, 6th ed., 2
vols., 1:35–65 (London: John Murray, 1826).
 Notes 203
5. Percy Shelley, Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists, in The Prose
Works, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd, 1:263–83 (Boston: Adamant Media
Corporation, 2006), 1:281.
6. Martin Priestman, “The Progress of Society? Darwin’s Early Drafts for The
Temple of Nature,” in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith
and Robert Arnott, 307–19 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 319.
7. For an insightful discussion of the progressive gender politics of Darwin’s
“The Loves of the Plants,” see Janet Browne, “Botany for Gentlemen: Eras-
mus Darwin and ‘The Loves of the Plants,’” Isis 80, no. 4 (1989): 593–621.
8. Erasmus Darwin, The Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, ed. Desmond
King-Hele (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 195.
9. For a discussion of these political and philosophical changes and their
impact on the reception of Darwin’s writings, see Norton Garfi nkle, “Sci-
ence and Religion in England, 1790–1800: The Critical Response to the
Work of Erasmus Darwin,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16, no. 3
(1955): 376–88; Julia List, “Erasmus Darwin’s Beautification of the Sub-
lime: Materialism, Religion and the Reception of The Economy of Vegeta-
tion in the Early 1790s,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 3
(2009): 389–405.
10. Anonymous, “Dr. Darwin’s Temple of Nature,” The British Critic 23 (1804):
174.
11. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s “The Life of Erasmus Darwin,” ed. Des-
mond King-Hele (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 34.
12. Coleridge, Biographia, 2:30.
13. For a discussion of the relationship between Charles Darwin and natural
theology, see John Hedley Brooke, “Darwin and Victorian Christianity,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Charles Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and
Gregory Radick, 192–213 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); Dov Ospovat,
The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology,
and Natural Selection, 1838–1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981).
14. It is in his philosophical poem De Rerum Natura that Lucretius writes:
It is pleasant enough to see other people in trouble;
The shore is an excellent place for watching a shipwreck:
Not that one enjoys the cries of the drowning,
But it is reassuring not to be drowning oneself. (2:1–4)
See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura: The Poem on Nature, trans. C.H. Sisson
(New York: Routledge, 2003).
15. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 50.
16. For a more extensive discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s theory of the mind, see
Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, 12–19.
17. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, 15–16.
18. Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking?,” 357.
19. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 2:1410.
20. Coleridge, Biographia, 1:151. Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking?,” 357.
21. Heidegger’s discussion of the hand and his rejection of animal conscious-
ness prompted a well-known critical response from Derrida. See Derrida,
“Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P. Leavey, in Deconstruction
and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis, 161–96 (Chi-
cago: U of Chicago P, 1987).
22. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 3.
23. Anonymous, “Darwin’s Temple of Nature,” The Critical Review: or, Annals
of Literature 39 (1803): 168.
24. Ibid., 167.
204 Notes
25. My interpretation of Malthus’s fear of overpopulation in terms of the math-
ematical sublime is not entirely original. Clara Tuite has linked the Malthu-
sian sublime to Kant’s mathematical sublime in her article “Frankenstein’s
Monster and Malthus’ ‘Jaundiced Eye’: Population, Body Politics, and the
Monstrous Sublime,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22, no. 1 (1998): 148. In her
discussion of the discourse of the sublime in Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the
Principle of Population, Frances Ferguson draws an interesting parallel with
Book 7 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which similarly dramatises how the
excess of population threatens to swallow up the subject’s individuality and
humanity. See Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, 114.
26. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, 334.
27. John Onians, “Neuroscience and the Sublime in Art and Science,” in Beyond
the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, ed. Roald Hoff mann and Iain
Boyd Whyte, 91–105 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011).
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Index
A animality
Abernethy, John 132, 156, 199n36
Abrams, M.H. 157
Adams, Carol J. 71, 115–16
Addison, Joseph 66, 105, 140, 142,
148, 155, 158, 196n12
Adorno, Theodor W. 4, 12, 47, 54,
56–57
aesthetic, the
autonomy of 4–7, 42, 46, 158–60
and biology 2, 27, 28–29, 44–45,
79, 105–6, 112, 119–20, 121,
124–25, 158–59, 166–67,
169–72, 180, 183
and common aesthetic sense 7, 11,
106, 162, 165
ideology of 2–7, 10, 79, 105–6, 112,
119, 122, 123
and morality 4, 5–6, 10, 24, 33,
42, 45, 46, 57–58, 62, 119–20,
125–26, 128, 174–75
and science 3, 6, 123, 132–33, 138,
145–46, 154–57, 163, 171, 183,
202n24
and subjectivism 5, 7, 8, 10, 23, 24,
26–27, 39, 63, 99, 145–46, 165
Aikin, John
Essay on the Application of Natural
History to Poetry 156
Evenings at Home 37–38, 137, 161,
169
alienation 13, 14, 20–23, 27, 29–30,
31, 37–38, 44, 52, 59–60, 77,
123, 137, 148, 169
anatomical science 84, 126, 131–33,
142, 163–64
ancien régime 2, 64, 102, 105–6, 107,
180
and aesthetic taste 4, 105–6, 126,
155–56, 165, 183
and creativity 84, 95–96, 123
and faciality 1, 92, 93, 121, 195n28
and nudity 36, 107–8, 111, 115
and personal identity 83–84, 101
and rationality 84, 95, 116, 131,
152, 176–77
and sexuality 72, 87, 98, 106–9,
115–16, 137, 143, 155, 180,
183
and violence 63, 71–72, 83, 87, 98,
101, 103–4, 106–8, 111
animal philosophy. See animal studies
animal rights 1, 12, 20–21, 29, 37, 45,
115–16, 175
animal studies 1, 13–14
anthropocentrism 13, 14, 27, 40, 51,
54, 123, 129, 145, 154, 193n27
anthropology 39, 167
anthropomorphism 25, 30, 34, 37, 38,
47, 48–49, 52, 74, 76, 98
apes 2, 95–96, 123, 177. See also chim-
panzees; orang-utans
apocalypse 19, 21–22, 30, 39, 44, 61,
62, 148, 150, 188n5
Aristotle 137, 168, 198n22
Artaud, Antonin 94
Ashfield, Andrew 6
atheism 163, 164, 172, 173, 181
Attenborough, David 97, 98
B
Bacon, Francis (painter) 92
Bacon, Francis (scientist) 35, 41
Bakewell, Robert 143, 152
Bakhtin, Mikhail 96, 125
218 Index
Barbauld, Anna 45, 165–66
Evenings at Home 37–38, 137, 161,
169
“Thoughts on the Devotional Taste,
and on Sects and Establish-
ments” 160–61
Bassler, Bonnie 145
Bate, Jonathan 12, 30
bats 34, 165
Beattie, James 137
beauty
as a cause of the sublime 69–70,
108–109, 116, 172, 178–79,
182–83
as dehumanising 107–9, 111–12,
121–22, 166–67
evolutionary significance of 121,
165, 179–80
and the family 76–77, 119–20,
127–28, 129
moral meaning of 5, 6, 24, 42, 54,
57–58, 70, 119–20, 121, 125,
127, 154, 162, 174
relationship to the sublime. See sub-
lime, relationship to beauty
relationship to ugliness 11–12, 24,
56–57, 122, 123–24, 164, 165,
168
and science 6, 146, 154, 156, 157,
162, 202n24
sexual politics of 69–70, 77, 78, 109,
111–12, 116, 127–28, 160–1,
166–67, 172, 178–79
in theology 6, 157, 158–61, 163–64,
168, 169
Beer, John 195n27
Benjamin, Walter 4, 32
Bennett, Jane 145
Betjeman, John 19
Bible 2, 21, 22, 138–39, 147–48, 152,
153, 172, 178
birds 6, 7, 22, 24, 31, 41, 161, 162–63,
165–66
as metaphors 29–30, 46–47, 48, 93,
96
See also Coleridge, “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” the albatross;
nightingales; parrots
Blair, Hugh 138
Blake, William 15, 110–11, 117, 180
compared to Deleuze and Guattari
110, 114, 116
“The Fly” 1, 22–23, 27, 31, 32, 35,
38, 40
“The Little Girl Found” 112, 113,
116, 117
“The Little Girl Lost” 111, 112–13,
115
Lyca Poems. See Blake, “The Little
Girl Found,” “The Little Girl
Lost”
“Night” 112, 113–14, 117
Songs of Innocence and of Experi-
ence 110, 111, 112, 117
on the sublime 74, 110–11, 112, 113,
117, 196n19
“The Tyger” 24, 84, 103, 112, 117
Bloom, Harold 5, 12, 45
Bourdieu, Pierre 3
Brown, Bill 50–51
Buell, Lawrence 188n5
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc 83–84,
95, 121, 129, 131, 132, 133,
165, 166
Bürger, Gottfried August 62, 67
Burke, Edmund 102, 103
compared to Deleuze and Guattari
104, 107, 108, 116
A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful 10, 32,
49, 90, 101, 108, 119, 123, 124,
144, 146, 154–55
on Addison 105, 196n12
on aesthetic taste as a uniquely
human faculty 4, 72, 105, 155,
165
on beauty and domestication 56,
122
on beauty and the family 76–77,
127, 129
on beauty as a spontaneous qual-
ity 4, 11, 53, 56, 70, 163
on cognitive blockage as an effect
of the sublime 32, 43, 63, 83,
131
on cuteness 112
on dehumanising effects of the
sublime 63, 83, 109, 131, 143
on female beauty 72, 109, 111–12,
178, 179
on love as an effect of beauty
57–58, 69–70, 72
on lust 69–70, 72
race and racism in 3–4, 13, 22
sadism in 66, 70, 174, 175
on self-preservation as a cause of
the sublime 28–29, 38–39, 170

on ugliness 11, 123, 165
on variation in taste 106, 162,
165
on wild animals as a cause of the
sublime 22–23, 24, 42, 49, 84,
102–3, 112, 117, 144
Refl ections on the Revolution in
France 6–7, 11, 14–15, 103,
109–10, 111, 116, 126, 127
defence of chivalry in 64, 180
on humanity’s animal nature 2,
104, 105–6, 115, 180–81
on revolution as dehumanising 2,
101, 104–6, 107, 108, 115
Burnett, James 2, 3
Burns, Robert 112
Byron, Lord George Gordon 1, 90,
146, 152
compared to Deleuze and Guattari
153
“Darkness” 19, 119, 150, 151
Don Juan 150–53, 170–71
Heaven and Earth 153
on science 139–40
on the sublime 90, 147, 150, 151,
174
C Crowther, Paul 24
Carlyle, Thomas 104
carnivalesque 96–97
carnivorism 71, 113, 115–16
Cavell, Stanley 49
chimpanzees 37, 51, 123
chivalry 64, 68–69, 180
Chu, Seo-Young 122–23
Clare, John 29
Colebrook, Claire 152
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 6, 7, 23, 26,
33, 34, 42, 44, 49, 51, 58–59,
68, 89, 158
anthropocentric views of 41, 51, 58,
177
on anthropomorphism 30, 37,
44–45, 48–49, 52
on apes 2, 177
on beauty 6, 42, 53, 56, 58, 70, 99,
120, 127
compared to Kant 25, 26, 43
“Dejection: An Ode” 6, 57–58
on Erasmus Darwin 172–73
“Frost at Midnight” 58–59
on human-animal relations 2, 51–52
on the imagination 45–46, 52–53,
58, 89
Index 219
“Limbo: A Fragment” 57
“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”
55
“The Nightingale: A Conversation
Poem” 30, 48
“One Life” philosophy 41, 44, 55,
58, 59, 70–71
“The Raven” 48–49
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
14, 59–60, 61, 70, 77, 92, 100,
123–24, 129, 151, 158, 159
the albatross in 44–45, 47–48, 52,
55, 65
criticism of idealism in 46, 47, 50
in ecocriticism 14, 44
masochism in 53–54, 65, 70
role of aesthetic perception in
45–46, 52–53, 57–58
the water-snakes in 44, 45, 50–51,
52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 76,
85–86, 158, 159, 161
“A Soliloquy of the Full Moon” 48
on the sublime 25–26, 42, 43, 83,
88, 89, 99, 117
“To a Young Ass” 1, 41
cosmology 139–40, 148, 149
Cronon, William 189n14
cuteness 4, 112, 123, 174–75, 183
Cuvier, Georges 3, 151, 152, 166
cyborgs 84
D
Darwin, Charles 11, 15, 121, 131, 172,
198n34
The Descent of Man 30, 173
On the Origin of Species 2–3, 169,
170, 175
Darwin, Erasmus 2, 3, 158, 165
The Botanic Garden 121, 172
The Temple of Nature
beauty in 155, 171–72, 173, 174,
178–82
on the biological and aesthetic
purpose of death 169, 173–74,
175, 178, 181, 182
compared to Burke 171–72, 175
materialism in 172, 176, 177, 178,
181, 183
the picturesque in 174, 175
the role of sexuality in 172, 178,
179, 180, 182, 183
the sublime in 11, 144, 173, 174,
175, 177–83
220 Index
Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic
Life 155, 157, 176
Davy, Humphry 6, 139, 145–46, 154,
157
Dawkins, Richard 31
de Bolla, Peter 6, 10
De Luca, Vincent Arthur 74, 196n19
de Man, Paul 4, 5, 43–44, 138, 139,
149
De Quincey, Thomas 141, 142
dehumanisation 4, 63, 83–84, 91, 92,
95, 96, 98, 106, 108–9, 110,
115, 121–22, 131, 151, 152
industrialisation as a cause of 2,
84–85, 93
Deleuze, Gilles 87, 94, 130
“Coldness and Cruelty” 151–52
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensa-
tion 92, 116
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 14,
94, 110
on arborescence 87, 104, 110, 116,
118, 119–20, 127, 128, 130, 131
on becoming-animal 86, 94, 109,
111, 114, 116, 130, 153
compared to the sublime 88–90,
110
as contagious 87, 89–90, 108, 126
and the pack 91, 104
and sexuality 107–8, 109, 115–16
and writing 89, 108
on becoming-molecular 87, 90, 91,
92
on becoming-nomad 86, 130
on the Body without Organs 87, 92,
94, 96
on the rhizome 87, 104, 110, 118,
120, 129, 130, 131, 198n34
DeLillo, Don 22, 23, 26, 29, 31
Dennis, John 8, 28, 69, 186–87n28
Derrida, Jacques 4, 71, 124, 193n17,
195n28, 198n34, 203n21
“The Animal That Therefore I Am
(More to Follow)” 14, 36, 37,
39, 115, 187–88n41
Descartes, René 95
disgust 1, 7, 41, 50, 52, 53, 66, 85,
121, 124, 174, 177
domestication
of animals 42, 47, 122, 166, 167
of nature 10, 12, 19, 24, 25, 27–28,
30, 70, 77, 100
Drummond, James Lawson 24,
142–43, 165–66, 168
Duchamp, Marcel 158
E
Eagleton, Terry 3, 4, 5, 10, 29, 30,
31–32, 143, 193n2
ecocriticism 1, 2, 5, 10, 12–14, 15, 21,
23, 33, 37, 44, 51, 52, 97–98,
187n37
eco-disaster 19, 20, 21
ecofeminism 11, 69, 71, 72, 76
eco-horror 19–21, 30, 39
ecological sublime 22, 23, 27–28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 34–35, 38–40, 51,
55, 76
empathy 20, 27, 31–32, 33–34, 39, 40,
122
compared to sadism 66–67, 174–75
environmentalism 12, 20, 21, 27, 42,
60
eugenic selection 167
Evernden, Neil 13, 51
evolutionary aesthetics 38–39, 54, 69,
155, 165, 166, 169–70, 171, 173
evolutionary theory 2, 14, 30–31, 54,
70, 121, 131, 166, 171, 174, 180
extraterrestrial life 139, 140
F
Faulkner, William 25
Ferguson, Frances 10, 109, 204n25
fossils 147, 149, 150, 153
Foucault, Michel 3, 49, 132, 133,
199n36
Freeman, Barbara Claire 10, 118,
193n15
Freud, Sigmund 70, 122
G
Geoff roy Saint-Hilaire, Etienne 2
geology 142, 143, 149–52, 157, 174
global warming 19, 20, 25, 30–31, 39,
50
Godwin, William 2
gothic 26, 63, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 88,
181
grotesque 96
Guggenheim, Davis 19
H
Haraway, Donna 87, 187n41
Harman, Graham 51
Hartley, David 58–59, 121
Hazlitt, William 45–46, 89, 137
Hearne, Vicki 49
 Index 221
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 32, Critique of Practical Reason 141
137, 138, 141 Observations on the Feeling of the
Heidegger, Martin 37, 176–77, 203n21 Beautiful and Sublime 149
Heringman, Noah 15 Universal Natural History and
Herschel, John 146 Theory of the Heavens 139
Hertz, Neil 10, 90 Keats, John 6, 7, 29
Hitt, Christopher 10, 27–28, 30, 32, compared to Deleuze and Guattari
33, 34, 35, 51 88–89, 94
Holmes, Richard 15 Kenyon-Jones, Christine 1, 44
Home, Henry 138 Knight, David 15
Hottentots 3, 167 Knight, Richard Payne 150, 155, 165
humanism 14, 41, 84, 87, 110, 146, Kristeva, Julia 53–54
153, 183 Kroeber, Karl 12
Hume, David 94
hunting 1, 20, 54, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, L
68–69, 70, 71, 76, 78, 130–31 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 166
Hutton, James 142 Lamb, Charles 55
hybridity 14–15, 89, 91, 110, 117, 118, Larkin, Philip 19
120, 122, 130, 165 Lawrence, William 156, 158, 167, 169,
199n36
I Levere, Trevor H. 15
idealism 9, 10, 12, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, Levinas, Emmanuel 195n28
50, 145, 177, 178 Levinson, Marjorie 5
Inconvenient Truth, An 19, 30, 39 Lewis, Matthew 68
Industrial Revolution 20–21, 84 Linnaeus, Carl 114, 129, 170
intelligent design 3, 6, 56, 157, 159, literature and science studies 15
160, 161–62, 166, 168 Liu, Alan 12
irony 149, 151, 152 Locke, John 7, 35
Long, Edward 3
J Longinus 8, 21, 88, 90, 91, 103, 119,
Jones, William Powell 201n1 138, 139
Lorenz, Konrad 112, 123
K Lucretius 129, 175, 203n14
Kant, Immanuel 5, 13, 23, 24, 27, 131, Lussier, Mark S. 35
158, 159, 170 Lyotard, Jean-François 24, 25, 119,
Critique of Judgment 65, 69, 123, 131
178
on the agreeable 155–56 M
on beauty 11, 53, 56, 154–55, Makdisi, Saree 110
156, 158–59, 168 Malthus, Thomas 170, 182–83,
on the dynamical sublime 91, 148 204n25
on the mathematical sublime Massumi, Brian 90
91–92, 93, 98, 147–48, 182 materialism 9, 10, 13, 26, 34, 51–52,
on science 138, 139, 141, 154–56 54, 55, 58–59, 145, 148, 172,
subjectivism in 7, 8, 11, 58, 99, 176, 177, 183
168 McGann, Jerome 5, 201n40
on the sublime 9–10, 25, 28, 39, McKusick, James 47
40, 43, 69, 90, 138, 141, 143, mechanism 41, 74, 85–86, 93, 121, 161
149, 170 Mellor, Anne K. 152, 200n31
on the sublime and masochism microscope 132, 133, 143–45, 146,
53–54, 147, 150, 151 147
on the sublime and self-preserva- Midgley, Mary 23–24, 26, 27, 31, 32,
tion 28, 29, 38, 54, 141, 176, 181 33, 34–35, 51
on ugliness 11, 168 Monk, Samuel 10
222 Index
monstrosity 102, 117, 124, 125, 126,
129, 165–66
Mori, Masahiro 122
Morton, Timothy 36, 37, 51, 97,
191n40
Murdoch, Iris 23–24, 29, 31, 40
N Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 33
Nagel, Thomas 34, 36
natural disaster 19, 20, 21, 62, 74,
150, 151
natural theology 6, 24, 157, 158, 160,
162, 166, 168, 172, 173, 178
Needler, Henry 157
New Historicism 5, 12
Newton, Isaac 35, 139
Nicolson, Marjorie 145, 187n37
nightingales 29–30, 48
Noggle, James 148
O 40
object-oriented ontology 51, 52
Oerlemans, Onno 10, 196n23
Onians, John 183
orang-utans 1, 3, 198n18
P beauty in 118–22, 127–28, 129
Page, Judith W. 77–78
Paine, Thomas 2, 7, 119, 139, 144–45,
146, 150, 154, 158
Paley, William
on beauty 6, 158–60, 162, 164, 165,
168
compared to Burke 162–64
on ugliness of animals 162, 166
parrots 95
Pascal, Blaise 137, 138
Peacock, Thomas Love 125
Perkins, David 1
physiognomy 5–6, 125, 157, 174,
198n25
picturesque 75–76, 174, 175
Playfair, John 142
Plotinus 42
Pope, Alexander 139
pornography 8, 63, 71, 98, 116
postmodernism 11, 14, 22, 25, 26, 27,
86, 87, 118, 200n31
Price, Uvedale 75
Priestman, Martin 171
R species 36, 84, 121, 124, 128, 143–44,
race and racism 3–4, 11, 14, 92, 167
Ray, John 160
Reid, Thomas 90, 138, 196n12
Reik, Theodor 28
Richardson, Alan 10, 39, 59, 93, 183
ridiculous 150–51, 152
Rosse, Lord William Parsons 141
Rothko, Mark 25
Rousseau, Henri 24
Ruskin, John 44, 75–76
S
sadism 47, 62, 63, 65–67, 70, 98, 174
Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri Bernardin
de 164
Sartre, Jean-Paul 46, 50
scepticism 45, 64, 146–47, 148–49,
152, 178, 200n31
Scheese, Don 193n27
Schiller, Friedrich von 28, 126, 130
Schopenhauer, Arthur 29, 30, 31–32,
Scott, Walter 62, 67
Shakespeare, William 33, 47, 89
Shaw, Philip 90
Shelley, Mary 15, 146
Frankenstein 2, 14, 15, 19, 115, 181
and Deleuze and Guattari 118,
119, 126, 130
importance of aesthetic percep-
tion in 1, 3, 119, 124–26, 131,
132–33, 164, 174
the sublime in 118–19, 123–24,
126, 128, 129, 131
ugliness in 5–6, 120–21, 122,
123–24, 125, 129, 131
The Last Man 119, 197n5
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 83, 146, 166, 167,
170
A Defence of Poetry 7, 23, 33, 39,
124, 156–57
Prometheus Unbound 147–50
Queen Mab 36, 145
on vegetarianism 1, 114, 180
Shelvocke, George 48
Smellie, William 1, 123
Smith, Adam 33, 38
Snow, C.P. 15
sociobiology 30–31
Socrates 9, 152
Southey, Robert 84, 125
155, 165, 170
defi nition of 129, 137, 139, 177

and gender 10–11, 112, 121–22,
166–67
in evolutionary theory 2–3, 30, 129,
131, 166, 169, 180–81, 182
and literary genre 124–25
and race 3, 10–11, 101, 167
role of aesthetic perception in clas-
sification of 1, 3, 4, 114–15,
119–20, 121–22, 125, 126,
131–33, 165–66
role of culture in classification of
100, 104–5, 115, 122–23,
166–67, 170–71, 180–81
transformations of 86, 89, 93, 104,
110, 114, 116, 117, 130
See also animality
speciesism 14, 37
sublime 1, 3, 36, 94
alienating effects of 13, 23, 25, 27,
28, 31, 37–38, 161
and apocalypticism 21–22, 30, 39,
148, 150
compared to becoming-animal 86,
87–90, 92–93, 110, 116, 130
in cosmology 138–39, 140, 141, 157
defi nition of 7–11, 25–26, 31, 38–39
dehumanising effects of 63, 83–84,
86, 91–92, 109–10, 131, 152
ecological sublime. See ecological
sublime
ethics of 10–11, 23–24, 27, 30, 31,
33, 34, 39, 42, 63, 64, 66–67,
149–50, 152
and evolutionary theory 38, 54, 142,
169–70, 173–75, 180
feminist sublime 10, 76, 179–80,
182–83
geological sublime 142, 143, 147–48,
149, 150, 174
importance of uninvolved spectator-
ship in 96–97, 99, 102–103,
109, 126, 175–76
and masochism 28, 30, 53–54, 65–66,
138, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151
and materialism 9, 10, 26, 34, 43,
51, 54, 55, 65, 84, 88, 148, 170,
177, 181, 183
in microbiology 143–45, 148
neural characteristics of 10, 39, 43,
44, 79, 93, 183
nihilism of 26, 40, 128
and rationality 13, 27–28, 32–33,
34, 35, 38, 63, 72, 131, 133,
140–41, 151, 170, 177–78
Index 223
relationship to beauty 11–12, 56–57,
65, 69–70, 76, 78–79, 99, 100,
108–9, 118–19, 124, 129, 146,
154, 157, 160–61, 169–70, 172,
175, 178–79, 182
relationship to picturesque 75, 175
relationship to sadism 63, 66–67,
174
relationship to ugliness 11–12,
56–57, 65, 70, 78–79, 108–109,
123–24
rhetorical sublime 8, 21, 88, 90, 98,
103, 119, 139
and the ridiculous 150–53
and ruins 72, 74–76, 147–50,
173–75, 193n24
and scepticism 49, 147, 148–49, 152,
178
scientific sublime 133, 138–39, 142,
143, 144, 145–46, 151, 154,
177–78, 201n1
as self-empowering 25–26, 30, 45,
53, 55, 65, 90, 97, 100, 138,
139, 143, 148, 150, 178
and self-loss 31, 83, 88, 90, 93, 96,
97, 102, 140
and self-preservation 25, 28–29,
30–31, 38–39, 69, 144, 170,
181
and sexual violence 69–70, 76,
106–7, 113
therapeutic benefits of 39–40, 128
urban sublime 84–85, 91, 99
wild animals in 22–23, 42, 102, 103,
112, 113, 143–44
T
taste
biological significance of 155, 158,
162, 165, 171, 173
as marker of humanity 4, 105, 106,
126, 155, 165
variation in 7, 105, 106, 162, 168
See also the aesthetic
telescope 133, 139, 140, 141, 146
theatre 92, 93–97, 195n30
thing theory 50, 51
tigers 23, 24, 64, 103–104, 114, 153
U
ugliness 1, 11, 24, 51–52, 60, 120–21,
122, 131, 158, 167, 168
of apes 123
hybridity as a cause of 122, 165–66
224 Index
moral meaning of 6, 37, 120, 125,
174
relationship to beauty. See beauty,
relationship to ugliness
relationship to the sublime. See sub-
lime, relationship to ugliness
as a theological problem 125,
161–62, 165–66
uncanny 59–60, 122, 145
uncanny valley 122–23
Usher, James 90
V beauty in 70–71, 76–77, 78–79
vegetarianism 1, 100, 114, 125, 180
vivisection 21, 36, 126
W 70–71, 72, 74, 76, 77–78
Weiskel, Thomas 25, 28, 31, 49, 88,
177, 193–94n2
White, Gilbert 166
Whitman, Walt 145
Wolfe, Cary 14, 71, 187n41, 192n45
Wollstonecraft, Mary 103
on Burke 6–7, 98, 107
on female beauty 112, 121–22,
166–67
Wordsworth, William 5, 29, 36–37,
40, 42, 48, 88, 103, 110, 112,
117, 124–25, 145, 156, 172
Book 6 of The Prelude 85, 92–93
Book 7 of The Prelude 14–15,
84–86, 90–100, 101, 104, 105,
109, 119, 123–24, 128, 140
compared to “The Ancient Mari-
ner” 85–86, 92, 100
the sublime in 84–86, 91, 92,
96–97, 99–100
Book 10 of The Prelude 103
on Burke 63, 64, 98
“Hart-Leap Well” 1, 11, 14, 61–77,
78, 92, 150
compared to “The Ancient Mari-
ner” 61, 65, 70, 76, 77
the sublime in 63, 64, 65, 69,
Preface to Lyrical Ballads 7, 62–63,
67–68
“The Sublime and the Beautiful”
32–33, 78, 96–97, 99
“Tintern Abbey” 5, 46, 58, 73, 75,
83, 179
“The Two-Part Prelude” 77, 78
Z
Žižek, Slavoj 57
zoocriticism. See animal studies
zoos 21, 98