MIAMI UNIVERSITY
The Graduate School
Certificate for Approving the Dissertation
We hereby approve the Dissertation
of
David Christopher Washington
Candidate for the Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
________________________________
Director
(Dr. Laura Mandell)
__________________________________
Reader
(Dr. Tobias Menely)
__________________________________
Reader
(Dr. Mary Jean Corbett)
__________________________________
Graduate School Representative
(Dr. Jonathan Strauss)
ABSTRACT
FACING SYMPATHY: SPECIES FORM AND ENLIGHTENMENT
INDIVIDUALISM
by Chris Washington
My dissertation identifies a significant aporia in Enlightenment thought
concerning human and animal life. Eighteenth-century moral philosophy, I argue,
predicates social relations on face-to-face identification. However, sympathetic
identification limits itself to human form. Sympathy, like species form, promotes twin
impulses: the formation of group identities and the exclusion of dissimilar others.
Consequently, sympathy recognizes animals as other and excludes them from the social
sphere. Eighteenth-century novels, for instance, struggle with the limitations of
sympathy, brimming with human sensibility although equivocal about whether it can be
directed toward animals. These concerns about the nature of sensibility and affect
animate not only eighteenth-century sentimental novels but also surface as one of the
central problems of Romanticism.
Conventionally, the Romantic period has long been understood as a fulfillment of
the Enlightenment promise that autonomous human subjects will govern the social and
political imaginary. But this conventional narrative obscures how Romantic thought
critiques this institutionalization of what are, in fact, biopolitical narratives that shape
human-animal relationships. Romanticism demonstrates how the universalizing gestures
of egalitarianism guarantee humans freedom only at the expense of the non-human.
Moreover, such universalizing gestures legitimate competing exclusionary narratives that
authorize prejudice, suppression, and subjugation of the other however that other is
construed (in other words, humans conceived as non-human). As I argue, species form is
the twilight of sympathy between not only humans and animals but between humans as
well. Following prosopopoeia—the trope that links face and voice with personhood—I
show how this trope undermines sympathy’s specular insistence on the human form and
refutes species determinism as integral to maintaining sociopolitical systems.
Prosopopoeia both limns and attenuates form, suggesting the fluidity of the humananimal divide. For the Romantic poets therefore, the problem of sympathy has
biopolitical force that can only be countered by anti-institutional poetics that do not
privilege human exceptionalism. Theoretically, the project allows new ways to read the
long eighteenth century as a site of post-human richness, bridging Levinasian ethical
concerns with the urgent problems raised by what Jacques Derrida calls “the living in
general.
FACING SYMPATHY:
SPECIES FORM AND ENLIGHTENMENT INDIVIDUALISM
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to the Faculty of
Miami University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
by
David Christopher Washington
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2012
Dissertation Director: Laura Mandell
Table of Contents
Introduction: “Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast”
1-23
Chapter 1: An Inquiry into the Causes and Nature of the Zoopolitical Wealth of Nations
24-44
Chapter 2: Facing the Soul: Enlightenment Physiognomy in Laurence Sterne and Johann
Lavater
45-75
Chapter 3: Jane Austen’s Frankenstein
76-98
Chapter 4: Lord Byron’s Chains: Species and Being in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
99-123
Chapter 5: John Clare’s Autopoiesis
124-151
Works Cited
152-170
ii
Introduction:
I.
“Man Differs more from Man, than Man from Beast”
Recent trends in literary theory and criticism have prompted a reevaluation of
human and non-human species relations.1 Since Linnaeus and Buffon in the eighteenth
century, species has been defined as a classificatory system that groups members based
upon empirically observed homogeneity in the physical traits of those members. Because
of the emphasis on homogeneity, the formation of species distinctions as, broadly
speaking, human and non-human life, has contributed to the institution of violence
between human and non-human species that defines modernity. These species
distinctions are a contemporary scientific mainstay, but they can also be linked to what
Michel Foucault calls “biopolitics,” the management of the bodies of citizens who inhabit
the State by means of institutionalized forms of power that mandate discriminatory
practices, a process of control emerging, like taxonomic categories, in the eighteenth
century. The formation of species, for Foucault, is linked to the emergence of racism,
gender discrimination, and homophobia.2 Specifically, as Foucault shows, State powers
in the emergent democratic system needed to conceptualize human beings as a species in
order to organize and control them.3 Conceptualizing humans as one homogeneous group
allows States to exclude those who do not fit certain schemas: healthy/unhealthy,
1
Jaques Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, trans. Marie-Louis Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008).
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2009). N.
Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtural Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago:
Chicago UP, 1999). Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (New York: Routledge,
2004). Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (New York: Continuum, 2010). Graham Harman, Prince of Networks:
Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (New York: re:press, 2009). Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham: Duke UP, 2010). Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2009).
2
Michel Foucault, “Society must be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New
York: Picador, 2003), 247, hereafter SD. Foucault first discusses biopolitics in the final chapter of The History of
Sexuality. The History of Sexuality, Vol I: An Introduction, trans. Richard Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 138.
3
“By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of
mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political
strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern
Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I
have called biopower." Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978 (New
York: Vintage, 2009), 6.
1
normal/abnormal, human/non-human. Concurrently, these categorizations granted to the
state radical new ways to measure, experiment on, classify, produce, discipline,
understand, and manage human life at the bodily level, at the biological level of species.4
Given this epistemic shift, Foucault sets out “not to analyze power at the level of
intentions or decisions” but to study “peripheral bodies” to show where power works “in
real and effective practices… at the point where it relates directly and immediately to
what we might, very provisionally, call its object, its target, its field of application, or, in
other words, the places where it implants itself and produces it real effects.”5 However,
despite his intention to study species formations and their biopolitical implications,
Foucault does so only by analyzing “the peripheral bodies” of humans and thus overlooks
the full field on which the management of bodies of all stripes are tilled: he does not
consider non-human life.
What is odd about Foucault’s singular focus on the human and the biopolitical
arrangements of democracies is that the later period of the long eighteenth century also
witnessed the nascent animal welfare, animal rights, and environmental movements,
giving full scope to questions about how far egalitarianism extended in this new,
democratic era.6 And yet, nevertheless, it is paradoxically true that the time period also
saw the mainstreaming of Descartes’ ideas about natural philosophy: that humans are
fully autonomous subjects whereas non-human life, animals for instance, are soulless
machines, incapable of feeling pain.7 Moral-sense Enlightenment philosophy that helped
shape democratic sovereignties inherits aspects of this Cartesian binary. Enlightenment
theories of how people sympathize with each other, while expansive in their proposed
scopes, run aground when it comes to the prospect of facing non-human life and thereby
encourage the continued centralization of violence between humans and non-humans in
4
See also: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994); and Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995).
5
SD 28.
6
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes:
Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (New York: Ashgate, 2001). Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social
Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York:
Palgrave, 2000). Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007); and The Ecological
Thought (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009). Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of
Vegetarianism from 1800 to Modern Times. (New York: Norton, 2008).
7
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (New York: Penguin, 1999), 39-42.
2
the public sphere. As a mechanism of identificatory processes, sympathy was crucial to
the construction of an idealized vision of the public sphere, the social environment that is
formed by the communal consensus of a group of human beings concerning their likeminded scientific, economic, cultural, and political aspirations. Until recently, the
production of this public sphere has endured in scholarly accounts of Enlightenment
secular humanism as one of its main contributions to the constitution of modern
democratic nations and progressive social ideals.8 Even more recently, the contemporary
sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann has challenged this view of the social
sphere, specifically the idea that it is anchored, as it remains in Foucault’s archeological
account of biopolitical genealogies, by human beings. Luhmann argues that social
systems actually function as what he calls autopoietic self-referentially closed systems.
This theory questions the foundational premises of the species categorization of living
systems as groups of like members. In his theory of social systems, Luhmann makes it
clear that neither a human nor a group of humans can be a system: “a human being may
appear to himself or to an observer as a unity, but he is not a system. And it is even less
possible to form a system out of a collection of human beings.”9 Although Luhmann is
not discussing the concept of species here, his rejection of the Cartesian subject as the
center of the universe renegotiates the concept of what “the human” means and what it
means to be human. It follows from this that if there are no humans as classically
understood subjects, then there is no human species composed of such subjects.
Connecting Luhmann’s sociological remodeling of cybernetics and information theory to
Derrida’s phenomenological deconstruction of the fully present subject helps us discern a
posthuman conception of the world and the life forms living in it.
Analyzing the long eighteenth century through the lens of Luhmann’s critique of
systems proves fruitful because the period was itself obsessed with understanding the
world, and human and non-human species, in radically new ways, both scientifically and
socially. The formation of the Royal Society in 1660, at the onset of the Restoration of
8
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
(Boston: MIT P, 1991).
9
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. & Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 40.
Hereafter SS.
3
the Stuart Charles II, for example, led to Robert Boyle’s chemical discoveries, Robert
Hooke’s microscopic investigations of cells (Micrographia, 1664), and culminated in
Isaac Newton’s complete reordering of the universe in his Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica (1687-1726).10 However, natural history also inherited several
ideas from the Platonic and Christian Pauline traditions that intertwined as the concept of
“The Great Chain of Being,” which, according to Arthur O. Lovejoy, “attained [its]
widest diffusion and acceptance” in the eighteenth century.11 The idea of “The Great
Chain of Being” entailed that the world was composed of a chain of life forms that began
with the lowest creatures on Earth and rose to hierarchies of angels and other
cosmographical figures before culminating at the top of the chain with a divine ruler
named God. As the first historian of the Royal Society puts its, the mission of the Society
was to fill in humans’ knowledge of this chain:
Such is the dependence amongst all orders of creatures; the animate, the sensitive,
the rational, the natural, the artificial; that the apprehension of one of them, is a
good step towards the understanding of the rest. And this is the highest pitch of
humane reason: to follow all the links of this chain, til all their secrets are open to
our minds; and their works advanc’d or imitated by our hands. This is truly to
command the world; to rank all the varieties and degrees of things so orderly upon
one another, that standing on top of them, we may perfectly behold all that are
below, and make them all serviceable to the quiet and peace and plenty of Man’s
life. And to this happiness there can be nothing else added: but that we make a
second advantage of this rising ground, thereby to look the nearer into heaven…12
On Lovejoy’s account of the history of this idea, human beings were only a middle link
in this chain. Therefore the consequence of this was, logically, as he says, that humans
must be able to improve, that the “scale is a ladder to be ascended.”13 Non-human life, as
10
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (John Martyn, 1667). Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: the
Third edition (1726), eds. Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen & Anne Whitman (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972).
11
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper, 1936), 183.
12
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (1667), 110, qtd. in Lovejoy, 232.
13
Lovejoy, 205.
4
the above mission statement details, must be subordinated to human life for this
ascension to occur.
However, the idea of “The Great of Being” led to a paradoxical crisis in terms of
species in the eighteenth century: species distinctions were no longer as rigidly defined at
the biological level as had been supposed. As John Locke, whose An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690) superseded Descartes’ as the dominant influence in
eighteenth-century natural history, put it:
There are some brutes that seem to have as much reason and knowledge as some
that are called men; and the animal and vegetable kingdoms are so nearly joined,
that if you will take the lowest of one and the highest of the other, there will
scarce be perceived any great difference between them; and so on until we come
to the lowest and the most unorganical parts of matter, we shall find everywhere
that the several species are linked together, and differ but in almost insensible
degrees. And when we consider the infinite power and wisdom of the Maker, we
have reason to think, that it is suitable to the magnificent harmony of the universe,
and the great design and infinite goodness of the architect, that the species of
creatures should also, by gentle degrees, ascend upwards from us towards his
infinite perfection, as we see they gradually descend from us downward.14
Because of the widespread belief in the infinitesimal differences—what Locke here terms
“the almost insensible degrees”—between links on the chain, Buffon and most other
natural historians of the period rejected the concept of unified species only to later
endorse this idea again.15 According to Lovejoy, the result of this scission in belief about
the relational paradox of species was that “the general habit of thinking in terms of
species, as well as the sense of separation of man from the rest of the animal creation,
was beginning to break down in the eighteenth century.”16 In other words, the eighteenth
century saw “The Great Chain of Being” work paradoxically to institute both the
affirmation of species difference—as humans are above non-human animals on the
14
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III, chap. Vi, § 12, qtd. in Lovejoy, 184.
15
Lovejoy, 230.
Lovejoy, 231.
16
5
chain—and the effacement of human beings as biologically distinct in essential form
from non-human animals.
But the Age of Newton was also the Age of Johnson, and literature was no less
investigatory of life in general and the concept of “The Great Chain of Being”
specifically. Lord Rochester, in contrast to Descartes and Locke, rejects rationality as the
baseline capacity that distinguishes humans from animals in his poem “A Satyr against
Reason and Humankind” (1679)—“reason, an ignis fatuus in the mind/ which leaving
light of nature, sense, behind/ pathless and dangerous wandering ways it takes/ through
error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes” (l.12-15)—and concludes with a Cartesian apogee:
“man differs more from man, than man from beast” (l. 221).17 In contrast, Alexander
Pope, in his Essay on Man (1733), conjoins and endorses the precepts and purpose of the
theory of “The Great Chain of Being”:
…can a part contain a whole?
Is the great chain, that draws all to agree,
And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee?
Presumptuous Man! The reason wouldst thou find,
Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind!
First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,
Why form’d no weaker, blinder, and no less!
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller or stronger than the weeds they shade?
Or ask of yonder argent fields above,
Why Jove’s Satellites are less than Jove?
17
John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, The Complete Poems, ed. David M. Wieth (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002),
94-101.
6
Of systems possible, if ‘tis confest
That Wisdom infinite must form the best,
Where all must full or not coherent be,
And all that rises, rise in due degree;
Then, in the scale of reas’ning life, ‘tis plain
There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man;
And all the question (wrangle e’er so long)
Is only this, if God has plac’d him wrong? (I, l.32-50)18
For Pope, the world is a great chain of creatures, with God at the top of the ladder of
beings and humankind on the next rung down; animals of various types mark different
links of descending priority. Each link, or part of this chain, however, does not contain
the whole, Pope concludes, because the chain is itself created by the differential
capabilities of each creature to reason (as I show in chapter 4, Byron will flatten this
ontological hierarchy). Therefore, given this hierarchical order humans should “presume
not God to scan” as the “the proper study of Mankind is Man” (II, 1-2). In the same
period, on the other hand, in an endorsement of Locke, Joseph Addison writes in The
Spectator,
This progress in Nature is so very gradual, that the most perfect of an Inferior
Species comes very near to the most imperfect of that which is immediately above
it…. Nor is the goodness [of the Supreme Being] less seen in the Diversity than in
the multitude of living Creatures. Had he made only one Species of Animals,
none of the rest would have enjoyed the Happiness of Existence; he has,
therefore, specified in his Creation every degree of Life, every Capacity of Being.
The whole Chasm in Nature, from a Plant to a Man, is filled up with diverse
Kinds of Creatures, rising one over another by such a gentle and easie Ascent, that
18
Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” The Poems of Alexander Pope: A Reduced Version of the Twickenham Text,
ed. John Butt] (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), 501-548.
7
the little Transitions and Deviations from one Species to another, are almost
insensible.19
As this brief survey of a diverse pool of eighteenth-century writers demonstrates, a
genuine anxiety about human relations to other non-human creatures arose during this
time. The idea that humans were not fundamentally separated from non-human life in
some transcendental fashion intermingled with assurances that humans were, in fact,
ascendent over non-human creatures. These debates led to the nascent concerns about
animal welfare that would fuel early-nineteentch-century social and political challenges
to the established order of hierarchies. For if humans and non-humans are inseverably
linked as co-existents with no clearly privileged position granted to humans by some
higher power, then the everyday violence condoned towards animals, for example, should
spark ethical concerns. A crisis in thinking about life, in other words, had begun and
would reach its apotheosis, as I will show, in a similarly diverse group of later Romanticperiod writers.
But although speciesism, as recent theorists term it, is often crucial to the
exclusion of animals from human ethical concerns—as exemplified by Emmanuel
Levinas’s identification of the human face as the site of ethical obligation—it also has the
potential to foster violence of another sort in a different direction, aimed at human beings.
Enlightenment philosophers initiate a retooling of communal humanity as thinkers like
David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Mary
Wollstonecraft reframed views of how imaginative and affective states established social
connections and emotional bonds. As Cary Wolfe eloquently puts it (linking him with
Foucault):
as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically
exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the
humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans
19
Joseph Addison, The Spectator No. 519, qtd. in Lovejoy, 185.
8
against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of
whatever species—or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference.20
Enlightenment writing is refulgent with such discursive biopolitical equations. When
Mary Wollstonecraft launches her attack against Rousseau and Edmund Burke in A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she notes how societal divides in education,
status, and philosophical beliefs conspire to establish women not as a different gender,
but as a different species: “[women] are treated as kind of a subordinate being, and not as
part of the human species.”21 Across the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson, an intimate of
Paine’s, offered the observation, in his Notes on Virginia (1785-1787), that slaves
“participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition
to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labor. An animal
whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect must be disposed to sleep.”22 Given the
human discriminatory possibilities to which they allow humans access, species
distinctions thus participate in what Jacques Derrida, in identifying a condition of
modernity inherited from this eighteenth-century tradition, calls the autoimmune function
of the modern nation-state.23 Autoimmunity, as Derrida defines it, is the process by which
the sovereignty of a nation state depends on its continual attempts to enclose or immunize
itself from outside dangers, such as, literally and metaphorically, pathogens, diseases, and
viruses that may harm it. According to Derrida the immunological system, so to speak, of
the community, always incorporates rather than expels the virus inhabiting it. This act of
self-immunizing viral incorporation results in a sovereign community poisoning itself. In
this diagnosis, communities, or sovereignties, turn against themselves to repel invaders,
and, in the process, destroy themselves.24 Despite the underlying privileging of human
20
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2003), 8.
21
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1994), 8.
22
Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Virginia,” Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America,
1984).
23
Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” Philosophy
in a Time of Terror, eds. Giovanni Borradori (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 85-136; and “Faith and
Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” Acts of Religion (London: Routledge,
2002), 40-101. See also: J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham UP, 2009), 124-7, 222-4; and Martin
Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), passim.
24
For example, in its inexorable drive to defend its Constitutional liberties following 9/11, the United States
actually dismantled those liberties in the name of fighting the terrorists Republican and Democratic officials
9
life, species distinctions, like viruses, ultimately turn against the society they are meant to
inoculate and begin destroying it, as they authorize human-on-human violence by
classifying humans as different species. Species concerns, therefore, are not simply
contained by matters of violence directed at the animal kingdom (the topic of my reading
of Jane Austen in chapter 3).
I track these concerns over the reticulate fracturing of life instantiated by
species’ divisional labors by identifying a significant aporia in Enlightenment thought
concerning human and animal life discussed above: sympathy. Eighteenth-century moral
philosophy, I argue, predicates social relations on face-to-face identification. Sympathetic
identification, in limiting itself to human form, instantiates species violence. Sympathy,
like species form, promotes twin impulses: the formation of group identities and the
exclusion of dissimilar others. Consequently, sympathy recognizes animals as other and
excludes them from the social sphere. Sympathy, as a theory of how people recognized
fellow feeling for other human beings and took action on their part, lent structure to
moral ideas that founded legal alternatives to the state of nature.
Adam Smith, for example, theorizes sympathy as a context-based act that
reproduces normative humanness.25 “By the imagination we place ourselves in his
situation,” he says of the sympathizing self and the sufferer (TMS 9). Seeing emotions
expressed on another person’s face gives rise to imaginative associations and
substitutions in the mind of the observer. The contours of Smith’s theory extend beyond
the imagination, though, to a specular economy of the body, to the self-evident nature of
the human form. Smith precedes Levinas, widely known for articulating the ethical
imperatives of the human face, because sympathy, it turns out, requires the mediation of
face-to-face interaction, a process premised on the identification of another whose face
and figure are recognizably human.26 According to Smith, communities are formed on
claimed were invading the body of the nation. In a very real sense, the United States replicated the very terrorist
measures it sought to prevent, a paradoxical logic paralleling how autoimmunity works.
!" Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976).
Abbreviated hereafter as TMS and cited parenthetically with page number.
26
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
UP, 1969). Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP,
2008). Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley & Robert Bernasconi
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996).
10
this model, and moral action undertaken, based upon empirical observations converted to
affective affinities by this imaginative transference. Hence, in Smith’s example of seeing
a body on a rack being tortured, “we enter as it were into his body, and become in some
measure the same person with him,” precisely because we can identify with his body as
like ours (TMS 9). But if sympathy enacts social incorporation, it also, at the level of
species identity, stages social differentiation. “Were it possible that a human creature
could grow up,” Smith writes, “without any communication with his own species,” he
would be “provided with no mirror” to view “the beauty or deformity of his own face,” a
problem fortunately mitigated “in the countenance and behaviour” presented by the
bodies of humans sharing social networks. Smithian sympathy works explicitly to
exclude the deformed and the non-human—forms which do not fit a normative standard:
as the reference to a homogeneous species implies, this social mirror indicates the a
priori assumption of a universally recognizable human form, one that distinguishes faces
as beautiful or deformed. Therefore, for Smith and other theorists of sympathy, limning
human form produces social solidarity just as, equally, the self-evident otherness of nonhuman form excludes them from social inclusion. In effect, to sympathize with another is
to recognize his or her personhood, a form of identification crucial in structuring the
economic, legal, and ethical institutions that lend themselves, in Smith’s words, to the
“multiplication of the species” (TMS 185). My dissertation examines how Romantic-era
writers, reacting to these species distinctions, discover within the aporias of sympathy a
posthuman conception of face-to-face relationships that situates the face of the nonhuman other as foundational to the social sphere.
I interrogate this aporia by means of Luhmann’s social systems theory outlined
above. Luhmann distinguishes between psychic and social systems, the former belonging
not to the individual consciousness but rather dispersed across the fields of organic lifeform consciousnesses. It is discontinuous in the sense that it belongs to no single subject.
By contrast, sympathy, as conceived in the Enlightenment, merges the psychic and the
social, as the imagination is required to traverse the boundaries of the physical human
body and place a given human being in the virtual situation of another. A human
11
witnessing someone in pain—a body on a rack in Adam Smith’s above example for
instance—can then imagine what she would feel in this same situation and sympathize
with the person being tortured. But for Smith sympathy governs social interaction as a
whole because it is this imaginative faculty that allows humans to form connections and
establish societies, the social sphere.
These concerns about the nature of sympathy animate eighteenth-century
sentimental novels (a subject I take up in my reading of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental
Journey in chapter 2) and also surface as a central problem of Romanticism.
Conventionally, the Romantic period has long been understood as a fulfillment of the
Enlightenment promise that autonomous human subjects will govern the social and
political imaginary. But this conventional narrative obscures how Romantic writers
critique the institutionalization of what are, in fact, biopolitical narratives that shape
human/non-human relationships. For writers of this time, the problem of sympathy has
biopolitical force that can only be countered by anti-institutional poetics that do not
privilege human exceptionalism. Romantic-era writers, therefore, are no less concerned
with the human species conceptually, and revise and redirect sympathy toward nonhuman life. I show how the trope of prosopopoeia—the trope that links face and voice
with personhood—in the work of the Shelleys, Byron, and Clare undermines sympathy’s
specular insistence on the human form and refutes species determinism as integral to
maintaining sociopolitical systems. I read the disavowal of human sovereignty in
prosopopoeia to show how this trope actualizes a persuasively powerful account of
autopoiesis (rather than simply poiesis).
As theorized by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and elaborated on by
Luhmann, autopoiesis is the process by which a given system emerges as distinct from
the massive sets of inchoate cultural, discursive, and scientific data that make up the
environment of which it is a part.27 Such systems work by means of the paradoxical
27
Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding
(Boston: Shambhala, 1992).
12
concept of operational closure, that is, they are closed and open to the environment of
which they are part:
the concept of a self-referentially closed system does not contradict the system’s
openness to the environment. Instead, in the self-referential mode of operation,
closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure
increases, by constituting elements more capable of being determined, the
complexity of the environment that is possible for the system (SS 37).
A system remains closed and functional by filtering information only through its own
internal, localized processes. If a system did not filter information based on internal
parameters (remain operationally closed), then it would overload (without parameters
nothing is enforced), like a computer that crashes when it receives too much input or
receives input that it is has not been programmed to process (a virus for example—hence
Roberto Esposito figures autopoiesis as an analogue of autoimmunity).28 Luhmann calls
this filtering process differentiation, the mechanism of operational closure:
“Differentiation provides the system with systematicity; besides its mere identity
(difference from something else), it also acquires a second version of unity (difference
from itself)” (SS 40). Differentiation allows a system to contrast itself against its
environment, which, in turn, paradoxically contrasts the system to itself insofar as this
relational contact signals that difference exists.
Prosopopoeia, understood as a Luhmannian system, differentiates the human
speaking voice of poetic verse from the non-human: it differentiates from it in order to
work even as it announces its difference from itself: it needs the non-human for selfactualization. In this fashion prosopopoeia both limns and attenuates form, suggesting the
fluidity of the human/non-human divide. From a theoretical perspective, therefore, my
dissertation allows us new ways to read the long eighteenth century as a site of posthuman richness, extending Levinasian ethical concerns to what Jacques Derrida calls “the
living in general.”29 Beyond contributing to new ways of understanding the limits of
28
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008).
Jacques Derrida, “’Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject.” Points...Interviews, 1974-1994, Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1995, 255-288, 282.
29
13
sympathy in the eighteenth-century discourses of sentiment and its reemergence as a
contested site in Romantic poetics, my dissertation, by working at the limits of
Levinasian ethics and Derridean deconstruction, also informs current animal studies
debates about the place of the non-human life in contemporary society.
II.
The Posthuman Condition
One of the defining documents of Romantic poetics, Wordsworth’s “Preface” to
his Lyrical Ballads (1802), defines the stakes of the human/non-human distinction for
Romantic verse. According to Wordsworth, poetic language, more than simply being “the
spontaneous overflow of emotions” that takes “everyday objects” and presents them in
“an unusual way” by means of a certain “colouring of the imagination,” must also avoid
“personifications of abstract ideas” since “such personifications do not make any natural
or regular part of that language” and fail, in Wordsworth’s larger mission, “to keep the
Reader in the company of flesh and blood.”30 Wordsworth makes it clear that the flesh
and blood under discussion here is the “company of men,” specifically, rural and laboring
men who toiled outside of the industrialized cities. Wordsworth wants to do away with
personification because he thinks it perverts human discourse. Therefore poetry of the
type Wordsworth wants to write is not possible if it metaphorizes the natural world rather
than empirically observes it. Personification is unnatural. In her book Romanticism after
Auschwitz, Sara Guyer reads this disavowal of personification as emblematic of
Romanticism’s attempt to figure “a life beyond life,” that is, to create an enduring
testimony of the past by capturing the limninal quality of what is for her Romantic
temporality’s fundamental disjunction.31 In other words, Guyer thinks the eschewal of
personification also allows Wordsworth to achieve a testimonial form of verse that
endures beyond mortal life because it captures what is essential to human life by not
infusing it with the non-human via personification. Yet for Guyer this “life beyond life”
exclusively means human life, whereas for other Romantic writers besides Wordsworth,
30
William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2008), 605.
31
Sara Guyer, Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 26.
14
the Shelley circle for example, life includes every sentient being, human and non-human
alike.32
Lord Byron reflects this different sentiment that nonetheless speaks to the same
anxieties about mortality that Guyer finds in her reading of Wordsworth. Byron, writing
to his friend and confidante, Francis Hodgson, in September 1811, eschews the idea of
life continuing on beyond its expiration date: “I will have nothing to do with your
immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating
upon another. If men are to live, why die at all?”33 As the most famous writer of the time
Byron’s influence during the period was indelible and his thoughts here encapsulate a
distinct alteration in attitudes about life that begins to appear in Romantic discourse
during the Regency, surfacing in the novels of Austen and Shelley as well peasant poets
like John Clare (who claimed, incidentally, he was Byron in a past life and wrote his own
version of Childe Harold and Don Juan). This reorientation of thinking about life from a
preoccupation with the finitude of human life to demotic lived experiences anticipates
current theories of posthumansim. Cary Wolfe (drawing on the work of Luhmann and
Derrida) defines posthumanism as that which comes before and after the secular
humanism of Enlightenment thinking.34 On the one hand, posthumanism is rooted in
philosophical theories of embodiment and technicity historically prior to Foucault’s
location of “the human” as an eighteenth-century production. On the other hand,
posthumanism comes after humanism in that “it names a historical moment in which the
decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and
economic networks is increasingly impossible to deny.”35 As Wolfe points out in his
32
In Guyer’s reading of prosopopoeia, the non-human and the non-living, the othering function of “non-selfidentity,” are dead humans, figures for whom the poet ventriloquizes a life beyond life. Although there are
posthuman implications one can derive from Guyer’s work, the focus remains determinedly on the human
(even her chapter on Frankenstein looks at the novel in terms of “how lyric figures effect human life,” 72).
33
Another letter later that month to Hodgson continues in the same vein: “As to immortality, if people are to
live, why die? And our carcasses, which are to rise again, are they worth raising? I hope, if mine is, that I shall
have a better pair of legs, than I have moved on these two-and-twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the
squeeze into Paradise. Did you ever read ‘Malthus on Population’? If he be right, war and pestilence are our
best friend, to save us from being eaten alive, in this ‘best of all possible worlds.’” This latter phrase comes
from Gottfried Leibniz, a theorizer of “The Great Chain of Being” and opponent of Newton, and is harshly
condemned by Voltaire (who was a major enthusiast of Sterne) in his Candide. Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and
Journals, Vol 2, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973), 88, 97-98.
34
Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009), hereafter, WP, xv.
35
WP xv.
15
introduction to volume one of his Posthumanities series, Michel Serres’s The Parasite,
“what we have come to call ‘posthumanism’ is not in any sense what simply comes
‘after’ humanism.”36 The reason why “posthumanism,” in the iteration Wolfe prefers,
does not simply come after humanism is because (and here he paraphrases the title of
Bruno Latour’s We have never been modern) “we have never been human.”37
Posthumanism, at least according to Wolfe, comes before and after humanism in the
sense that humanism, as both a historically locatable movement and intellectually
chartable theory, has never fully met its own stated goals of reifying into a stable
ontological category this biological being called “human.” Posthumanism, as a set of
discourses that attempts to adjudicate competing economic, social, cultural,
communicative, and intellectual theories to fill in this concept “human,” therefore, can be
said to come before and after humanism if, in fact, humanism has never fully filled in this
concept itself.
While the secular humanism of the Enlightenment has come to be understood as
the triumph of rational empiricism over faith-based cosmographies (as part of the dualism
seen in “The Great Chain of Being” debates above), Byron’s rejection of immortality not
only denies to religious discourse its dominance, it also denies epistemological access to
the human subject that preoccupies secular humanist theory. Instead of concerning
ourselves with our own mortality or immortality, that is, humans’ ability to endure
beyond their own death, Byron suggests that life and death will continually remain
misunderstood while humans suffer from the existential torments raised by religious
orthodoxy. By making this turn to the demotic, Byron places humans within the larger
network of earthly ecology: the technical, scientific, and informational imbrications of a
nascent modernity. But he does so only by denying cosmographical privilege to the
human before (the human as mortal has not yet been theorized) and after (by locating
humans within a larger ecology) the Enlightenment and thus gestures toward a posthuman conception of life.
36
Cary Wolfe, “Bring the Noise: The Parasite and the Multiple Genealogies of Posthumanism,” introduction to
Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007), xi.
37
Ibid., xi.
16
Percy Bysshe Shelley offers a more expansive vision of this conception in his
revision of poetics in A Defence of Poetry (1821) and links it to a revision of poetic
language itself. The other major canonical Romantic theory of poetics besides
Wordworth’s, Shelley’s Defence, though its ostensible focus is poiesis, nevertheless
provides a powerful account of autopoiesis. Although he has an essay titled “On Life,”
which is putatively about life, it is the Defence that most completely answers the
question, left dangling at the end of The Triumph of Life—“what is life?”—by the
untimely end of Shelley’s own.38 Much of Shelley’s work has always been read as NeoPlatonic, and the Defence is not an exception. Rather than being simply his doctrine
comporting “poet” with its classical Greek definition as “maker” (thereby including
sculptors, architects, and philosophers in addition to writers of verse), and his attempt to
position the poet as the one who will lead society up out of the Platonic cave and into the
truthful light of the sun, the text relies on certain unannounced ideas directly reminiscent
of Adam Smith’s theory of imaginative sympathy that it also reenvisions.39 In other
words, Shelley’s Defence is not only a philosophical manifesto on poetry, but also a
Romantic manifesto that outlines how the poetic imagination enlarges the human
conception of what life consists of, by, paradoxically, circumscribing and eschewing life
as explicitly human in the dimensions and capacities shaped by the imaginative work of
poeisis.
Like Rochester, Shelley opens his text by downplaying reason as the locus of
humanity’s human capacity, what classically distinguishes them from animals, and
juicing up the role of the Imagination (to poeien): “Reason is to Imagination as the
instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance” (674).
But Imagination, more than simply being the animating agential quality driving the
human body, “respects…the similitude of things,” while “Reason respects the
differences” (674). The crucial word here is “respect,” which in Latin means “to look
38
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, The Major Works, eds. Zachary Leader & Michael O’ Neill (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2009), 674-701. “On Life” can be found in the same volume, 633-636. “ ‘Then what is Life?’ I
said…the cripple cast/ his eye upon the car which now rolled Onward, as if that look must be the last/ And
answered…‘Happy those for whom the fold of…’” The Triumph of Life, 604-621.
39
M.H. Abrams first noticed this aspect of the work. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958), 130. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael & A.
L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976).
17
back on.” Imagination, as Shelley conceives it, discovers for humans the similitude of
things not only by paying them renewed attention (the popular understanding of
“respect”); it also marks that similitude only during a reconsideration, during an
explicitly specular reappraisal. In David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s theories of
sympathy, imagination’s affective affinities depend on sight, depend on looking—and
looking back on—the face of the person whom one is observing. But for Shelley the
imagination can also look at “the similitude of things” (and thus non-human life in
general) and not just the similitude of persons. Thus, in the next few paragraphs of the
Defence, when Shelley offers a Rousseau-like narrative about the “origin of man” that
poetry is “connate with,” and asserts that the language of poets “is vitally metaphorical,”
this not only, by the word “vitally,” signals that the real topic of the Defence is life, but
also indicates that metaphor, making dissimilar things similar, is not a substrate of poetry
but rather a critical aspect of how the poetic imagination, and the imagination in general,
works (674).
Metaphor, according to Shelley, is the instrument to “Imagination’s” agent; while
poetry’s motor is Imagination, Imagination’s is metaphor. He sketches a narrative about
humankind’s progression from a state of nature wherein they danced and sang and
imitated the natural world around them, attempting to mimic its perfect harmony. This
harmony, or “rhythm,” equates with Imagination’s metaphoric powers of looking again
(re-specting) at the world of things and articulating the similitude of those things (675).
However, this is not the end of the story regarding metaphor’s use as an instrument to
accurately understand the ways the world works. As Shelley will point out later in the
text:
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials
of knowledge, and powers, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a
desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order,
which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never
more to be desired than at periods when from an excess of the selfish and
calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the
quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.
The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it. (696)
18
This final sentence recalls the first page of Hobbes’ Leviathan (1581) in which he
describes the State, what he calls an automaton body, as animated by the people who
created it according to the laws of the natural world.40 Just as in Hobbes, in Shelley’s
conception of the social world of his time, “the selfish and calculating principle” of
accumulation exceeds society’s assimilation to the internal principles of a benevolent
human nature, and the State, and society, are thus in need of corrective measures to
equilibrate them (696). Artifice, as Shelley says in another passage, can “outrun our
conceptions” until “we have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know
how to reduce into practice” (695). This passage points out that the work of poetic
imagination is paradoxical in that to observe the things of the larger world and make
them new, what Shelley calls elsewhere “making the familiar be as if unfamiliar” is a
process of reprocessing, or re-specting, to make the unfamiliar familiar again as
imagination shows how the external forces of the world cohere with the natural rhythm of
the world. Thus, “to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the
good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and
secondly between perception and expression” (hence Shelley’s neoplatonism) (676-677).
A poet must determine, through metaphor, which shows how unalike things are alike,
how the external world, though to the casual viewer a higgeldy-piggeldy chaos, amounts
to a harmony. Metaphor makes the unfamiliar familiar—that that thing is actually like
this thing—and, as Jacques Derrida pointed out long ago, catechresis also reveals how
familiar things really are fundamentally unfamiliar.41
Poetry’s goal therefore is to make sense of a world in new ways precisely by
determining how the new is actually old: how, for instance, gravity has always been with
us and Isaac Newton only discovered it because he understood something about the
harmony of the natural world that those before him did not. It is in this sense that, as
Shelley famously puts it in the end of the Defence, “poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world”: they literally keep society functioning by leading it out of the
cave and into reality, a world where the similitude of things is made self-evident by the
40
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, of the Matter, Forme, and Power of A Common wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Edwin
Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 3-4.
41
Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978), 207-272.
19
poet’s revealing their harmonious dissimilitude (701). As in the contemporary film The
Matrix, the people must be led out of the messiness of the virtual reality they live in and
into the “desert of the Real,” the real world obfuscated by illusory simulacra.42
But more than simply accurately reading the world through metaphor, the poet’s
imagination operates to preserve the human species. The origin story Shelley tells at the
beginning of the essay parallels earlier Enlightenment theories of community in that
community’s genesis is the face-to-face, and hence specular, meeting between human
beings: “The social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements society
results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings co-exist”
(675). From this initial ontic meeting, according to Shelley, sympathy develops, and it
does so along Smithian lines. As makers of society poets entail moral responsibilities in
their legislations: “the whole objection however of the immorality of poetry rests upon a
misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of
man” (671). Poetry produces this improvement through sympathy, which “lifts the veil
from the hidden beauty of the world; and makes familiar objects be as if they were not
familiar” (681). In his discussion of morals, Shelley frames it in terms of love, claiming
that “the great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and as
identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person,
not our own” (681). Love, like sympathy, and like the poetic imagination, entails “going
out of our own nature” and identifying with things unlike ourselves, other people. “A
man to be greatly good,” he continues, “must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he
must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of
his species must become his own” (681). But whereas Smith thought imaginative
sympathy constitutive of the social sphere, Shelley turns to the passions that underlie
imaginative poetic sympathy. Shelley’s conception of imaginative sympathy differs from
Smith’s in that Shelley thinks that a person can actually feel the affective states of others,
that humans can experience the “pains and pleasures” of other humans. Smith, as I show
in chapter 1, distinguishes sympathy as limited by the human body: you cannot breach
the epidermis of the other physically; you can only, in the end, read the codings of your
own sensate data, not the pains and pleasures of others.
42
The Matrix, dir. Larry and Andy Wachowski, Warner Brothers, 1999.
20
Shelley’s model, then, offers a much more intimate view of bodily affection and
psychological intersubjectivity. In his story of human origins, once two humans coexist,
once they come face-to-face and discern the other’s face, once one poetic soul begins to
apprehend that which has before gone unapprehended—how the larger world’s
familiarity stems from its being made unfamiliar—a poet makes something by preserving
the inner harmony of the world and those who possess the imagination to observe it: “the
pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.” Poets, as Shelley says, are the
unacknowledged legislators not because they make something new, but because they
reveal a here-to-fore unknown truth of the universe. Poets help us imagine “that which
we know,” as Shelley puts it (695). In describing the logjam disrupting the poetic
imagination in his time, Shelley’s language takes on crucially biopolitical contours: “The
body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it,” he says, just as he earlier
writes that in the current crisis we not only lack the imagination to know that which we
know, we have also “eaten more than we can digest” (695). If metaphors make the
familiar unfamiliar and vice versa, if the poetic imagination unveils eternal, natural truths
of the world, then Shelley’s metaphors here reveal the animating biopolitical context of
his work: the human species. To be a poet requires imaginative sympathy, going outside
of oneself, and going into the bodies of the rest of the species. And this is, finally, what
he calls “the poetry of life” (696). And, as it turns out, we don’t just have the poetry of
life, but poetry is life, human life. In other words, the poet’s work is the work of
autopoiesis: the systemic reiteration of a species’ operations as means of that species’
perpetuation. Thus the poet both captures the “spirit of the age” and sees the shadows of
futurity. In their temporal displacement poets invent (Latin: “to come upon”) eternal
truths that allow for the continuance of life. Poetry is the work of living, of making things
live. Not poeien, then, but autopoeien. As this reading of Shelley’s theory makes clear,
autopoiesis is fundamental to the Romantic conception of life.
In my dissertation, I trace this genealogy of autopoietic sympathy by showing
precisely how Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy in his A Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759) excludes animals from its entail. This exclusion features in Wealth of Nations
(1776) as animals are converted into meat on a national scale. Smith’s four-stages theory
of history conjectures a dramatic change in human-animal relationships from intimate
21
shepherding societies to delocalized butcher economies. I demonstrate how this two-step
process of sympathetic exclusion and the resulting production of affordable meat for all
citizens are key to creating national equilibrium and prosperity in Smith’s zoopolitical
(that is, a concern with all living creatures) economy.
In my second chapter, “Enlightenment Physiognomy,” I show how sympathy’s
focus on human form helps explain why in much eighteenth-century literature animals
are viewed sentimentally but not sympathetically. Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental
Journey (1768), for instance, presents characters that can only sympathize with fellow
creatures whose moral character can be discerned by accurately tracing it in their face.
For Sterne, animal life provokes expressions of sentimental affection but only as the
precursor to a reflexive turn to “fellow feeling” for humans who suffer in the same
conditions as that particular animal. Sterne’s starling, for instance, leads him to think
about the circumference of his own social entrapment. By contrast, Johann Lavater
argues in his physiognomy studies (1771-1776) that the human countenance is defined by
its animal signification. If human features are defined as animalistic, then this signifies
not an irresolvable boundary, but the indeterminate nature of facial identification.
I take up similar concerns in my third chapter, “Jane Austen’s Frankenstein.”
Frankenstein’s monster seeks sympathy from a similar creature throughout the novel but
his deformed appearance bars any pathetic connectivity. I read Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice (1812) as a speciesist allegory of Shelley’s novel. The courters in Pride and
Prejudice seek to discover sympathy by accurately reading the countenance of another
person and discovering a similar character as their own. When society rejects
Frankenstein’s creature as non-normative, he wishes to live alone with a female version
of himself. A similar heteronormative drama plays out in Pride and Prejudice, only, here,
it is from the inverse perspective of the quintessential English couple in Darcy and
Elizabeth. Pride and Prejudice suggests that species difference manifests itself among
humans as well as non-humans because the establishment of heteronormative systems
requires the creation of excluded monsters.
My fourth chapter follows Lord Byron’s poetic depiction of the world as a flat
ontological realm where all creaturely lives, including monsters, are given the same
22
priority. Lord Byron’s Childe Harold (1812-1818) testifies to a rethinking of humananimal relations underway in the Romantic period. I argue that Byron shapes his own
“fleshly chain” of co-existing forms of life in opposition to the hierarchical species
distinctions of “The Great Chain of Being” derived from antiquity that endures and
fractures in the eighteenth century. “The Great Chain of Being” adheres to the idea of a
universal good that only humans can reach. But for Byron humans and animals share an
even more fundamental affinity: suffering is immediate and communally self-evident.
Byron admonishes the reader to discern the moral of the poem, which, I suggest, is that
species boundaries aver sympathetic affiliation while mortal affect and finitude, in
contrast to concerns about human immortality, affirm it.
If prosopopoeia is a grounding force of poiesis it is so because of its autopoietic
possibilities. In my final chapter, “John Clare’s Autopoiesis,” I show how John Clare’s
birds’ nest poems establish a face-to-face human-animal economy. Here I track how
Clare’s creation of this economy depends on his efforts at modeling a form of
autopoiesis. Clare’s poem “The Badger,” though, disavows the human as a fully present
poetic voice, sketching instead a prosopopoeia that differs from classical personification
because animals have face, voice, and presence and do not require it to be granted to
them. To accomplish this, Clare’s work seeks to fragment historical and philosophical
views of the human as an autonomous self who possesses sovereignty over animals. For
Clare an individual is only a part of a larger autopoietic ecological system of living
things: that is, humans are not distinct from animals as a species but are bound up as
elements that grant a human system its apparent stability even as it unveils this system’s
non-human foundation. Sympathy, as these Romantic writers conceive it, no longer
seems to run up against speciesist limits, but rather leads us to see the virtues of those
limits by directing our attention to non-human others. In their revision of sympathy, these
authors writers outline not just “a life beyond life,” contra Guyer, but a vision of posthuman life.
23
Chapter 1
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Zoopolitical Wealth of Nations:
Adam Smith on Sympathy and Species
As books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran
Foer’s Eating Animals have recently reminded us, the mass production of animals into
human food, particularly in Controlled Animal Feeding Operations, takes place largely
outside the sight of consumers. The spectacle of suffering animals, they suggest, could
potentially lead to a radical transformation in the production, distribution, and
consumption of food, as well as leading to a renewed ethical understanding of
human/animal relations.43 As a number of scholars have traced, the development of
modern agricultural politics and technology takes shape in the eighteenth century.44
Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to how Enlightenment political
economists theorized an agricultural system premised on the erasure of animals from
public sight and concern. By the early eighteenth century, in fact, the paradoxical
intertwinement of animal welfare and the industrialization of meat production had
already taken on contemporary contours as citizens of London protested the food
abattoirs of Smithfield while consuming meat in larger amounts than before.45 This
chapter considers how at a time of emergent democratic ideas of autonomy, natural
rights, and a nascent animal cruelty movement, these same Enlightenment values
produced economic and social systems that anticipated, and ensured, modern global food
production that removes animal suffering from the equation.
43
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin, 2007). Eric Shlosser, Fast Food Nation (New
York: Harper, 2005). Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).
44
Several scholars have added to Marx’s detailed account of the developments of the agricultural revolution.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 Vols. (New York: Penguin, 1992-1993). Raymond Williams,
The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975). Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England 1500-1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002). Richard Twine, Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability and Animal
Studies (London: Earthscan, 2010). Abbreviated hereafter as AB.
45
Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998, 5864. Abbreviated hereafter as AR.
24
I locate the answer to this historical problem at the intersection of Adam Smith’s
theory of sympathy and his analysis of the free market, concerns that appear throughout
what he called his “Science of Man.” The modern commercial market appears, pace
Smith, at the endpoint on a continuum of changing practices and relationships between
humans and animals. According to Smith’s conjectural history, as human migration led to
more populous settlements, hunter societies began a gradual transformation to
commercial societies, where demand negotiates the exchange value of meat.46 His
analysis of this commercial society focuses on animals’ new, crucial function as livestock
in market exchanges as human domestic, economic, and political interest finds expression
in carnal consumption. In perhaps his most famous statement in An Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he writes that, “it is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from
their regard to their own self-interest.”47 This statement on the lack of benevolent
interaction in the marketplace links Smith’s theory of sympathy in his 1759 A Theory of
Moral Sentiments with the consumption and production of food. As I’ve said in my
introduction, sympathy, as Smith defines it in Moral Sentiments, is the imaginative
process that ensures social incorporation even as it also creates social divisions.
Sympathy functions in this paradixocal manner because it requires face-to-face
interaction which foregrounds human form as primary. For Smith, recognizing human
form produces social solidarity even while the self-evident otherness of animal form
excludes animals from social inclusion. Sympathy, then, is a biopolitical problem, as the
imaginative divisions on which sympathy is predicated are directly tied to the increased
consumption of animals in this new carnal economy. According to Michel Foucault,
biopolitics emerged within the eighteenth century and it centered on how state institutions
shaped citizens into “docile bodies.”48 In Smith’s theorization of it, sympathy similarly
46
Early in the nineteenth century, Lewis Gompertz, author of Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes,
and secretary to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, would call animal anatomists
“philosophical butchers.” AR 37.
47
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S.
Skinner (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976), 27. Abbreviated hereafter as WN and cited parenthetically with page
number.
48
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1990), 135-159. Foucault explicitly identifies modern agricultural techniques as a primary contributor
to what he calls “Western man gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world…” (142).
25
shapes non-human life into docile bodies that are foundational for the continuance of
human life.49 Enlightenment egalitarianism, rather than recognizing the self-evident right
to life, in fact, demands the self-evidence of human form as the underlying condition of
that liberating guarantee.
I.
Sympathy and Species in A Theory of Moral Sentiments
Most scholars agree that sympathy is, in Smith’s account, an imaginative act,
which triggers mental functions that engender social bonding and establishes modes of
community.50 Yet, beyond these general contours, debates about the precise mechanism
of Smith’s theory of sympathy continue among scholars of the Enlightenment, especially
with the renewed interest in A Theory of Moral Sentiments.51 The problem centers on
what Charles Griswold has called the “perplexing ambiguity” in Smith’s description of
sympathy itself: it appears to be anchored by self-centeredness even while it purports to
49
Twine shows how modern animal agriculture continues to code for docile animal bodies through selective
breeding practices, genetic modification and an ongoing implementation of genomic technologies (AB).
50
For David Marshall there is also a slippage in sympathy in that it requires an accurate reading of the face of
the other. Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1988). As Robert Mitchell reminds us, Smith’s idea of sympathy and imagination was newly
emergent at the time and that if Smith “had proposed even a generation earlier that imagination and sympathy
mediated most…social interactions, such a claim would have met with surprise and incredulity.” Robert
Mitchell, Sympathy and the State: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (New York: Routledge, 2007).
Abbreviated hereafter as SSS and cited parenthetically with page number.
51
No footnote could exhaust all of the scholarship on Adam Smith, let alone on his work in the context of the
Enlightenment, especially the work of his teacher Francis Hutcheson and his friend David Hume. For Smith’s
work in terms of Hume and Hutcheson see: David Fate Norton, David Hume: Common Sense Moralist, Skeptical
Metaphysician (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984); Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural
Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). Much of the recent scholarship
focuses on the so-called Adam-Smith problem, namely, the thesis that Smith’s ideas in his earlier book about
sympathizing with others are contradicted in his later book by the inherent selfishness at the heart of the
division of labor and property that occurs in a capitalist system. Oddly, given the attention paid to it, the
problem seems like not much of a problem, as most Smith scholars have recently argued that no such problem
exists. According to D.D. Raphael, outside of one instance, he has found no Smith scholar who takes it
seriously. The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 119. In a
comprehensive look, Gocmen shows, similar to Raphael, how the problem is a non-sequitur. Dogan Gocmen,
The Adam-Smith Problem: Reconciling Human Nature and Society in A Theory of Moral Sentiments and A Wealth of
Nations (New York: Tauris, 2007). Knud Haakonssen and Donald Winch give a thorough account of how the
problem arose. “The Legacy of Adam Smith,” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 366-394.
26
be about selflessly substituting oneself in the place of the other.52 On the one hand,
sympathy seems entirely self-motivated: “How selfish soever man may be supposed,
there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of
others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it
except the pleasure of seeing it.”53 Interest in the well-being of the other would appear to
derive from one’s own self-interest. On the other hand, sympathy is predicated on the
situationality for which the imagination provides: “By the imagination we place ourselves
in his situation” (TMS 9). Smith paints a dire picture to illustrate this principle, asking us
to imagine the torture of another person:
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea
of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves
should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as
we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.
They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the
imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.
Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us
what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own
senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. (TMS 10)
Since “we have no immediate experience” of what others feel, affective states belong to
each individual alone, as if the somatic protects the psychological in a repudiation of
Cartesian dualism, the body as cuirass of the mind, protecting it from alien sensations.
We cannot, therefore, be carried “beyond our own person.” As he writes later in the text,
“our imaginations can more readily mould themselves upon his imagination, than our
bodies can mould themselves upon his body” (TMS 12). Hence, we cannot feel what the
body on the rack feels, even as “we enter as it were into his body, and become in some
measure the same person with him,” as Smith says shortly thereafter (TMS 9). This is
why humans can rely on “our own senses only,” which are then copied, in a sense, by the
52
Charles L. Griswold, Jr., “Imagination: Morals, Science, and Arts,” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 22-56, 30. Mehta offers a comprehensive look at self-interest in Smith.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Self-Interest and Other Interests,” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, 246-269.
53Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976),
9. Abbreviated hereafter as TMS and cited parenthetically with page number.
27
imagination. But, nevertheless, Smith’s vision of the imagination is limited in its entail:
humans cannot traverse their own affective bodies to feel the affective states of another
and, concurrently, they cannot affectively conjure up imaginative feelings other than their
own.
Self-interest does not mean, then, that sympathy as Smith describes it is a selfish
act, but rather that Smith’s theory is fundamentally egocentric in that it focuses on the
self as physically isolatable in a primal way even as it co-implicates the self in
intersubjective arrangements that lend mental and social substance to the individual.
Unable to travel beyond our own bodies and sensations, sympathy can occur only through
mental situational positioning: we can only “imagine what we ourselves would feel in
that situation.” As Smith conceives it, for sympathetic associations to occur we must
imagine ourselves in the situation of another, which then activates our own acute
sensations that were otherwise dormant and indifferent to the situation of that other
person. This sympathetic mechanism serves to reinforce the conception of humans as
fully formed individuals who interact with other, different individuals, even as it
establishes, through its interactive situationality, an affective community of similarly
interpenetrative, yet autonomous, beings.
But, another factor in the “perplexing ambiguity” of which Griswold speaks is
that scholars cannot agree on whether sympathy means the imaginative mechanism that
allows humans to situate themselves in the place of another and whether or not sympathy
also means the feeling this situationality generates. Alexander Broadie, for instance,
thinks that sympathy is both the mechanism that produces feeling and the feeling itself.54
D.D. Raphael, in contrast, thinks the mechanism (imagination) that produces sympathy
must be differentiated from the feeling it produces; otherwise this is an irresolvable
psychological contradiction that collapses under its own weight.55 However, Smith is
clear that sympathy can mean any feeling whatever, not just compassion for the sufferer,
even as it is also the mechanism that produces this feeling. As Smith writes, “pity and
compassion are words appropriated to signify our fellow-feeling with the sorrow of
54
55
Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, 166.
D. D. Raphael, The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 15.
28
others. Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps, originally the same, may now,
however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with
any passion whatsoever” (TMS 10). In other words, sympathy has a dual meaning in
Smith, one that subtly alters the received meaning of it as feeling bad for someone who is
suffering: we can sympathize, rather, with any emotion another human is feeling if
sympathy transfers us into that particular mindframe that imagines what we would feel in
that situation.
Smith’s most startling example illustrating the importance of situationality to his
model of sympathy closes the first section of the book and concerns human ability to
imagine themselves in non-living bodies, contexts that deliberately seem to set up a
distinction between human life and non-human life. Following the work of Esther Schor,
Robert Mitchell, in his book Sympathy and the State, quite rightly calls our attention to
the fact that the dead, although mentioned only in one brief paragraph, factor largely in
Smith’s book, more so than previous commentators have noted.56 But whereas Mitchell
mines the passage for its concerns with our “debt” to the dead, which he connects to the
systemic effects of state finance, the passage also reveals how the limits of human form
work within the circuits of sympathy. In regards to the dead, sympathy is again
situational and occurs “from our putting ourselves into their situation, and from our
lodging…our souls in their inanimated bodies” (TMS 13). From the projection of this
imaginative act, “the dread of death” arises and “guards and protects the society” (TMS
13). Society, as has been shown, stems from, and receives, an affective structure from
sympathy. Moreover, according to the life-death schema sketched out in this passage,
sympathy allows humans to enter into non-living bodies, the bodies of the dead, and
imagine this lifeless state, a kind of life without the animating principle of life. Death,
then, is not simply an end to life in Smith, but a vital part of life itself. In guarding
against death, humans configure dead bodies as live ones in order to “guard and protect”
the social sphere constructed by sympathy. It is only by thinking through death, through
the dead, that sympathy safeguards society—because to live is to imagine that nonhuman state, death, and devise a society whose larger purpose is to prolong human life.
56
Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1994). Mitchell, SS, 79-82.
29
This example exposes the species fault-lines of the imaginative transference with
the dead. Although we cannot enter into the bodies of the living, we can enter into the
bodies of the non-living but only insofar as they, the non-living, are human, and not
animal, even in their current non-human state. The dead function somewhat
paradoxically, though, because, in death they are no longer animate, are no longer,
strictly speaking human, but rather non-human. But, crucially, the focus on the body here,
even in its inanimate state, is a focus on the human body, which suggests that, for Smith,
humans cannot imagine themselves in non-human situations. In other words, we can
share “fellow-feeling” with dead humans, but not with live non-humans. Such an idea is
doubly odd as Smith says later in the book that humans do share certain passions with
animals. So the question arises, why does Smith insist that sympathy is a human event,
that humans can only share “fellow-feeling” with their fellow humans if the possibility of
sympathizing with what is non-human in human form exists? Why does sympathy so
decidedly foreclose sympathy for animals? The answer appears to be that human form,
whether animate or inanimate, somehow always exerts control over sympathetic
identification.
In this regard, Smith’s theory of sympathy departs from other influential
Enlightenment discussions that likewise position sympathy as the motor powering the
creation of social communities. Bernard Mandeville, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David
Hume all allow that animals do enter into social relations with humans, the distinctive
variety of physical form notwithstanding. Mandeville, for his part, thinks that “we are
born with a repugnancy to the killing, and consequently the eating of animals,” and
further, that the sight of suffering animals leads humans to feel pity and compassion for
them.57 Rousseau’s ideas about animals neatly track with Mandeville’s theory of innate
affective affiliation; “the cry of nature” pierces us and we can feel what animals feel,
moving us to a state of pity. Rousseau’s idea of pity, like that of his fellow author David
Hume, includes the more provocative provision that the imagination allows us to feel
what others feel. The piercing “cry of nature” literally enters us at some affective level.58
For Hume, too, the imagination is a vehicle that transfers the dispositions of one person
57
58
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 172-181.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, ed. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1985).
30
into the other.59 Smith’s remarkable originality, then, lies in his insistence that sympathy
is situational and context-based. But this raises a further question: given that Smith’s
innovative theory of sympathy is contextually dependent upon imagining ourselves in the
situation and environment of the other, why then does the theory also contradictorily rely
on the non-contextual, that is, the empirical physical form of the other?
The answer, I argue, is that in Smith’s account it is sympathy’s limits that direct
its construction of the human species. Sympathy relies on the specular economy of the
body, of self-evident human form, for its generation just as much as it does on the
imagination.60 Indeed, as the passage quoted earlier indicates, human corporeality is
primary to the establishment of communal concern: “we enter as it were into his body,”
figuratively transforming ourselves into “the same person.” In this sense, humans are
imagining, literally, that they are one and the same with the person they identify as
similarly human like them. The process works paradoxically, though, since sympathy
requires the identification of human traits in the other person even while it
simultaneously grants to the other the very humanity that it identifies. The specular
identification of the self-evidentness of the human form casts and confirms that selfevidence. Smith explains the specular in two different ways: as the spectator who watches
another person and as what Smith calls “the man within the breast” who watches the self
and regulates moral behavior.61 The spectator who looks at another functions as the
baseline for Smith: “the spectator must, first of all, endeavour, as much as he can, to put
himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little
circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer” (TMS 21-22). Without
sight, therefore, sympathy is not possible, and specifically without the sight of others,
individuality itself is not possible:
Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some
solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no
59
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. David Fate Norton & Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2007).
60
This “source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others…may be demonstrated by many obvious
observations,” Smith declares, were it not “sufficiently evident of itself” (TMS 10).
61
The spectator is discussed throughout, but principally in section I, Chapter V.
31
more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments
and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or
deformity of his own face. All these are objects which he cannot easily see, which
naturally he does not look at, and with regard to which he is provided with no
mirror which can present them to his view. Bring him into society, and he is
immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the
countenance and behaviour of those he lives with which always mark when they
enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments; and it is here that he first
views the propriety and impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and
deformity of his own mind. (TMS 110)
Although the passage distinguishes aesthetic features of human form (“beauty and
deformity of his own face”), the idea that human forms, in general, mirror each other,
indicates the a priori assumption of a universally recognizable human form, as the
reference to the legibility of the members of homogenous species implies. For Smith it
follows from this that living in social networks with other human beings is a fundamental
necessity to becoming fully human because one needs these mirrors to reflect back that
universally recognizable humanness of oneself. Scholars like Knud Haakonssen and
Charles Griswold are right then to emphasize that sympathy humanizes us, but without
adequately spotlighting the speciesist dimension of sympathetic humanization.62 It is
crucial to understand that sympathy does not simply reinforce the individualizing process
of the imaginative complex, but refashions other individuals as preconceived versions of
the sympathizing spectator: they are all of the same species.63 Smith’s Robinson Crusoe-
62
Haakonssen: “The universality in question was entirely a matter of empirically observable generality; Smith
was suggesting that without certain elementary and quite general features we would not be able to recognize an
existence as a human life.” Knud Haakonssen, “Introduction: The Coherence of Smith’s Thought,” The
Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, 5. Griswold: “This would be impossible outside society because we do not
have a moral self outside the human community. Presumably, this is why he uses the striking and almost
oxymoronic phrase ‘human creature’ in the passage just quoted, a ‘creature’ being less than fully human. […] By
means of them (other humans], we humanize ourselves.” Charles L. Griswold, Jr., “Imagination: Morals,
Science, and Arts,” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, 22-56, 36-37.
63
Elsewhere in Moral Sentiments Smith again affirms this idea: “in each species of creatures, what is most
beautiful bears the strongest characters of the general fabric of the species, and has the strongest resemblance
to the greater part of the individuals with which it is classed. Monsters, on the contrary, or what is perfectly
deformed, are always most singular and odd, and have the least resemblance to the generality of that species to
which they belong. And thus the beauty of each species, though in one sense the rarest of all things, because
32
like example proves this as it cites the human species as constitutive of an individual
human, an individuality that is itself already constitutive of the species through
sympathy’s imaginative labor. Therefore the humanization process of sympathy
contributes to the social formation of individuals as but a subset of a larger speciesist
categorization.
Despite sympathy’s speciesist orientation, animals do nevertheless feature in A
Theory of Moral Sentiments as they relate to the human consumption of food. Discussing
human and non-human corporeality, Smith says that “the cutting or tearing of the flesh,
is, perhaps, the affection of the body with which the spectator feels the most lively
sympathy” (TMS 143). This statement seems odd when we consider that the butcher
recurs as a symbol of the march to national stability and profitability in the conjectural
political economy that Smith describes in Wealth of Nations. The issue becomes more
perplexing when one considers Smith’s more general comments on eating and bodily
passions. Discussing eating, for instance, he says that “violent hunger…is always
indecent, and to eat voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill manners” (TMS
27). “Such,” he claims, “is our aversion for all the appetites which take their origin from
the body: all strong expressions of them are loathsome and disagreeable” (TMS 28).
However, “according to some ancient philosophers, these are the passions which we
share in common with the brutes” and we also share other passions with the brutes,
evidently, such as “resentment, natural affection, even gratitude” (TMS 28). Nevertheless,
although humans share similar passions with animals, even those found to be revolting,
“we have,” he says, “very little fellow-feeling with any of the passions which take their
origin from the body” (TMS 143). Hence, “though animals are not only the causes of
pleasure and pain, but are also capable of feeling those sensations, they are still far from
being complete and perfect objects, either of gratitude or resentment; and those passions
still feel, that there is something wanting to their entire gratification” (TMS 95). What all
of this amounts to is a variation on animal exclusion from sympathetic identification and
its investiture in eating: humans cannot feel for animals as animals’ passions are entirely
bodily in nature. A stark distinction is drawn here: whereas human sympathy stems from
few individuals hit this middle exactly, yet in another, is the most common, because all the deviations from it
resemble it more than they resemble one another” (TMS 198-199).
33
imagining oneself in the bodily situation of a similar being, humanity’s relations to
animals are not situational at all since bodily difference debars this imaginative
maneuver. As seen above, on this basis, humans can, “as it were,” enter into the bodies of
humans and even dead humans, but imagining oneself inside an animal body, despite
sharing some of the base passions with them, remains impossible. This comports with
Smith’s conception of the larger purpose of life: “the happiness of mankind, as well as of
all other rational creatures seems to have been the original purpose intended by the
Author of nature, when he brought them into existence” (TMS 166). Smith rephrases this
along species lines elsewhere: “Nature…seems…to have intended the happiness and
perfection of the species” (TMS 104-105). It’s ironic therefore that what provokes
sympathy between humans—an attention paid to bodily form—distinguishes them in this
social calculus as rational creatures while animals, meanwhile, are defined as irrational
precisely because of similar attention paid to their bodily form. If we feel very little
fellow feeling with the passions of the body, passions similar to what animals feel, we do
so because we immunize ourselves against feeling these passions by means of the
sympathetic identification with other humans. Hence, what’s doubly ironic is that
animals, excluded from social standing, are paradoxically included as vital to life’s
continuance in the form of domestic food product.
II.
Animals and Conjectural History
Adam Smith’s conjectural history of political economy in his Lectures on
Jurisprudence charts the conversion of animals from wild beasts to commercial livestock.
It is Smith’s theorization of sympathy as a social differentiation mechanism between
humans and animals that makes such a conversion not only socially palatable but also
attractively desirable. The Lectures on Jurisprudence were written in 1762, the same
period during which Smith was writing Wealth of Nations, in which a condensed version
of the material recurs at the beginning of book V, titled “Of the Revenue of the Sovereign
of Commonwealth” and they set the stage for the more formally developed theory of
34
government of Wealth of Nations.64 In the Lectures the main function of government, he
asserts, “is to maintain justice; to prevent the members of society from incroaching on
one another’s property, or seizing what is not their own.”65 From this groundwork, Smith
follows in the footsteps of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
maintaining the security of property as the defining moment in the formation of
communities between human beings. And like Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, and James
Dunbar, Smith believed in a four-stages theory of human history, with the notable
difference that in Smith’s version, animals’ status changes as property is redefined by
shifting socioeconomic conditions that occur in each stage: “there are four distinct states
which mankind pass thro: 1st, the Age of Hunters, 2nd the Age of Shepherds, 3rd the Age
of Agriculture, and 4th the Age of Commerce” (LJ 14). At each stage, though, the right to
property remains paramount to defending the individual and the state as a whole, even as
what property consists of remains mutable (LJ 17). And it is in relation to the mutability
of property that Smith delineates the conversion of animal bodies into biomass and
circulating capital.
In the early hunter societies, animals are construed as wild, unconstrained
creatures who belong to an unconquered natural world. In such societies humans gather
“wild fruit” and engage in “hunting the wild beasts or catching the fishes” to sate their
dietary needs (LJ 19). Predation between humans and animals prevails in hunting
societies. Animals are not property insofar as they are not controlled by humans, are not
bartered and exchanged or in any sense in a continual state of dominion by human beings.
But all of this begins to change as humans learn to breed animals as flocks in sustainable
living arrangements. Initially, after the age of hunters, “three kinds of animals arose”:
what Smith calls the “ferae,” animals always in a wild state; “the mansuefactae,” animals
that have been made tamed (in Latin, literally “to have been made tame”); and “the
mansuetae,” animals that are always found tame (although in Latin this can mean the
64
One of the editors of the Glasgow edition of Smith’s works, Ronald L. Meek, provides the historical context
for this theory. Meek convincingly argues that Kames and Dalrymple, who propose similar versions of the
theory in works published before Smith’s, nonetheless received it from Smith’s lectures. Meek, “Smith, Turgot,
and the ‘Four Stages’ Theory,” Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998), 411-430.
65
Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R. L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1982), 5. Abbreviated hereafter as LJ and cited parenthetically with page numbers.
35
same thing as “mansuefactae” Smith nevertheless distinguishes between them) (LJ 20).
However, these schematic categories make little sense, as the idea of mansuetae, animals
who are a priori tamed, as if by nature’s decree, does not accord with what Smith says
about animals in hunting societies who are never tame. Rather than simply a change in
animals’ status as property, a conceptual slippage develops as well, wherein the Age of
Shepherds rewrites the former historical stage to revise animals as always having been
under the dominion of human beings. In other words, certain animals who are found in
the original state as wild can be tamed to such an extent that they become always tame,
no longer found in a wild state in the wild.66 Eventually shepherding, too, proves
unsustainable as the population grows overly large and cannot subsist on the flocks and
herds they have been raising, and society begins to cultivate the ground. Agricultural
husbandry introduces a further change in animals’ status: they become beasts of burden
(LJ 21). What Smith mainly has in mind here are sheep, oxen, and cattle, all animals that
the laborers of the fields tame as agricultural agents necessary to increasing the produce
of land and, as Smith will make clear, the wealth of the entire nation—the goal, in the
end, of maintaining property.
At this stage of human history, according to Smith’s interpretation of it, society’s
members begin to specialize in various arts and crafts that they trade for goods with other
specialists (weavers, blacksmiths, potters, cobblers, haberdashers) in their own society
and with specialists in other societies abroad, officially codifying commerce as the main
driver of national industry. The Age of Commerce ushers in several problems, the most
prominent one of which, for Smith, is how to achieve national equilibrium among
laborers, buyers, sellers, stock, and the price of products. Smith conceives of his project
in Wealth of Nations as one that figures out how a nation can negotiate a mechanism that
will induce this equilibrium in the national polity. When society achieves what Smith
calls the “equity” of a society—when society as a whole reaches an equilibrium between
producers and consumers—a general, and desirable, stability is achieved within a nation66
His discussion here emphasizes the division between species: “Nature produces for every animal every thing
that is sufficient to support it without having recourse to the improvement of the original production. Food,
cloaths, and lodging are all the wants of any animal whatever, and most of the animal creation are sufficiently
provided for by nature in all these wants to which their condition is liable. Such is the delicacy of man alone,
that no object is produced to his liking. He finds that in every thing there is need of improvement” (LJ 48).
36
state. In describing this equilibrium, he describes the market in terms that again recall us
to the egalitarian nature of his vision of the nation state. As for the earlier political
thinkers Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the guiding principle of a sovereign nation-state
according to Smith is the greater good of the whole, for whatever “improves the
circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the
whole” (WN 96). Rather than suggest a moral order maintained by the unequal rewards
accrued by different kinds of laborers at different levels of the social spectrum, this
division does not discount the basic needs of the laborers. For the labourers “who feed,
cloath, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce
of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged” (WN 96).
However, the age of commerce is nevertheless an age of natural structural inequality
between the laborers and those who buy their goods, between the greater population of
the city and the lesser, more productive population of the country, from which the city
derives all of its sustenance for the simple fact that laborers have no means to increase
their stock without readier access to capital liquidity denied by these same divisions (WN
65-67). In the age of commerce “the whole annual produce of the land and labour of
every country…naturally divides itself…into three parts; the rent of land, the wages of
labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of
people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by
profit” (WN 265). That Smith recognizes the inequalities produced by the system, and
claims that the laborers should profit too as their bodily labor feeds and cloths the whole
commonwealth of the sovereign body, pointedly demonstrates that his work does not
comport with the free-market, capitalist ideologies of the modern era.67 Rather, Smith
believes his system will in fact nourish and provide for, arrange, and employ the bodies
of all the nation’s citizens but also, at an even more fundamental level, that his system
will provide bodies to the citizens.
67
Giovanni Arrighi makes a persuasive case in this regard. Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (London: Verso,
2010). Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008). Copley and
Sutherland’s edited collection provide various readings that show how Smith’s work deviates from free-market
interpretations (the Chicago School, the Thatcherites) of it. Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland, eds.,
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995).
37
Smith argues that a state can achieve this equilibrium by regulating production at
such a scale that meat becomes affordable for all citizens instead of only the well-to-do
merchants, lawyers, doctors, politicians, and others of the professional and aristocratic
class. If the state does not implement regulation, then the long process of gradual change
that Smith sketches in Western economic development concludes in economic inequality,
a clear failure in terms of achieving national power to defend, combat, and colonize other
countries in the increasingly globalized world of the time. As described in Wealth of
Nations, such inequality initially stems from the movement to commercial economies,
wherein the explosion in population has necessitated the cultivation of larger plots of land
for agrarian production:
Corn, besides, or whatever else is the common and favourite vegetable food of the
people, constitutes, in every civilised country, the principal part of the subsistence
of the labourer. In consequence of the extension of agriculture, the land of every
country produces a much greater quantity of vegetable than of animal food, and
the labourer everywhere lives chiefly upon the wholesome food that is cheapest
and most abundant. Butcher's meat, except in the most thriving countries, or
where labour is most highly rewarded, makes but an insignificant part of his
subsistence; poultry makes a still smaller part of it, and game no part of it. (WN
236)
In this shift the cultivation of corn becomes paramount as “vegetable food” is more easily
grown than the amounts of “animal food” sufficient to sustain the growing populations of
cities like London, the result being that bread becomes cheaper than butcher’s meat. This
was not always so: “in the original state of things butcher’s meat is cheaper than bread.
But as cultivation begins this reverses and bread becomes more available and butcher’s
meat more expensive” (WN 164). During the age of agriculture, the division of labor, the
primary condition that induces economic growth, as Smith puts it at the beginning of
Wealth of Nations, and the attendant change in agricultural methods made labor itself
productive only insofar as the quantity produced proved adequate to feed and clothe the
members of society outside of the laborers’ immediate family as in the earlier hunters and
38
shepherds epoch (WN 178).68 Although the divisions of labor cordon off various groups
of laborers, this condition, in itself, does not achieve the desired national equilibrium.
Rather, as Smith says, “the desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity
of the human stomach,” meaning that edible goods, raised in excess by laborers, must
become affordable, exchangeable commodities that will supply the necessities of every
citizen’s body (WN 181).
The flesh of animals as food and clothing is no longer sufficient, and necessitated
a reinvention of production methods on a national scale to reflect the changing needs of
human bodies. For Smith, the practice of enclosure proved paramount in this regard as it
remade thousands of acres of arable land into pasturable land, dramatically increasing the
number of animals raised for slaughter.69 No longer could laborers plan and plot their
farms according to shared land covenants and local crop rotation practices; rather the
State invested farmers in a national campaign to optimize animals as commercial product
and bodily sustenance. Theoretically, with laborers working as another set of gears within
the national economic body, the price of meat and bread would ideally stabilize, thus
completing the gradual movement to a full-scale carnivorous nation as meat becomes a
staple cheaply available to the middle and lower classes.70 This change, as Smith reveals
in the notorious “invisible hand” passage, is the telos of the age of commerce.
III.
Zoopolitical Wealth
68
“The skins of the larger animals were the original materials of clothing. Among nations of hunters and
shepherds, therefore, whose food consists chiefly in the flesh of those animals, every man, by providing himself
with food, provides himself with the materials of more clothing than he can wear” (WN 178).
69
WN 167.
70
“The use of the artificial grasses, of turnips, carrots, cabbages, and the other expedients which have been
fallen upon to make an equal quantity of land feed a greater number of cattle than when in natural grass, should
somewhat reduce, it might be expected, the superiority which, in an improved country, the price of butcher’smeat naturally has over that of bread. It seems according to have done so…” (WN 167). As Campbell and
Skinner point out in their footnotes to this passage, the actual historical reality was more complicated at the
time of Smith’s writing, with meat remaining expensive due to a cattle plague.
39
In keeping with his beneficent assertion that a nation takes care of all its
members, Smith’s ultimate version of a commercial nation envisions what I call a
regulated butcher economy that excludes animals from the circuits of sympathy in order
to include them as a national commodity, feeding the individual homo economicus who
compose the national political body. This process is similar to how an animal is actually
butchered: an animal is measured, then divided, then sold with the cuts indexed to how
fat and lean they are, distinctions indexed, at least in terms of nutrition, to the capacities
of the human body. But in a butcher economy, butcher’s meat will eventually become a
stable, regulated commodity after it has risen to its price zenith and consumption and
demand align over time. The rude vegetables that feed the poor will, likewise, eventually
stabilize in price, making vegetable food and animal food affordably purchasable by
every member of society.71 However, the precise mechanism that achieves and regulates
national equilibrium remains obscure in Wealth of Nations. The obscurity exists, I think,
because Smith’s idea of regulation is itself the “invisible hand” found in his previous
book Moral Sentiments—but the mechanism of the invisible hand is quite different than
the historical understanding of it.72
The invisible-hand passage encapsulates the speciesist nature of the imaginative
economy of sympathy and the literal carnality of the butcher economy. The passage in
question begins with a long discourse on the admiration of the poor for the luxuriance of
the rich. Smith turns to the body, again, as an exemplum, noting that for the rich man “the
capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will
receive no more than that of the meanest peasant”:
The rest he is obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest
manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the
71
As Carol Adams and Tristram Stuart have shown there are gender, class, and racial assumptions at work—
and this ties into Cary Wolfe’s point cited above that speciesism authorizes many types of divisions and
violence—when it comes to eating meat. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical
Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2010). Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of
Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: Norton, 2008).
72
Obviously, many previous commentators have pointed to this passage and the idea of the “invisible hand”
has become an economic catchphrase meant to pithily summarize Smith’s stance on how markets function. As
Smith scholars have long pointed out, however, the invisible-hand passage and Smith’s apparent use of it, bear
little resemblance to its modern economic usage.
40
palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep
in order all the different baubles and trinkets, which are employed in the
oeconomy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that
share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his
humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil maintains at all times nearly that
number of inhabitants which it is capable of maintaining. The rich only select
from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than
the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean
only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the
labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own
vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their
improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same
distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth
been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without
intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford
means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth
among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to
have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it
produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no
respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body
and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the
beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security
which kings are fighting for. (TMS 183-185)
Smith draws an important distinction between the philosopher and the fiction writer here.
Rather than viewing the luxuriance of the rich in a proper philosophical light, human
beings replace reality with the fiction of a system: “we naturally confound it in our
imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the
machine of oeconomy by means of which it is produced” (TMS 183). This confounding,
as it turns out, is fortunate, because this “deception…rouses and keeps in continual
motion the industry of mankind.” This deception has, in turn, Smith asserts, led to the
cultivation of the ground, “entirely changed the whole face of the globe,” and led to a
41
greater “multiplication of the [human] species,” a very clear statement of the speciesist
drive of both the invisible hand and sympathy (TMS 184). When the poor observe and
envy the greater splendors of the rich, the imagination produces a fiction: rather than see
inequality in stations, the spectator sees only a system of capital. Recurring to my analysis
of sympathy above helps explain how and why such fictionalization occurs. The
imagination sees this system of capital at work here, because that, as Smith’s theory of
imaginative sympathy details, is how the perpetually replicating egocentricity of
sympathy works: the spectator can only see herself in that situation when looking at
another person, entering, as it were, into her body and becoming her. Continually
replicating oneself in this manner produces the fiction of a well-oiled, natural order of
society while at the same time creating a species of individuals, a process that crystallizes
the fictionalization of the virtual replication of the individual.
The description of the rich as naturally selfish in this passage lends weight to this
interpretation. For if everyone, according to the doctrine of sympathy, is naturally
egocentric and driven by a natural selfishness, then the rapaciousness of the wealthy is
not an aberration, but simply the necessary accumulation of the industry of a large pool of
individuals who have become a species. Hence, although poor citizens see wealthy
citizens live in greater comfort, this elevation comes from the wealthy citizens’ industry
and not divine providence. Instead, as is made clear in this passage, the invisible hand
that leads the wealthy to make these divisions is imaginative sympathy (which after all
turns on the limitations of the imagination to trespass the body’s limits) as the invisible
hand itself is a process tied to the limitations of the wealthy person’s own bodily
capacity, the capacity to hold food (“they consume little more than the poor”). The body,
once again, trumps the imagination and Smith reveals the invisible hand as the
mechanism of imaginative sympathy and its limits: the body of another that the spectator
cannot, in point of fact, actually enter into bodily or imaginatively. But since the
spectator actually imagines her body in the place of another body and since this
imaginative act relies on the sensate data (which sympathy itself depends on) of fullness,
it leads her to the easy realization that she can eat no more than others. Therefore this is
why Smith says that the rich, the spectators in this particular example, distribute excess
food and in the process materially extend, without even necessarily realizing it, the
42
human species. As Smith says at the beginning of the book, “it is not from the
benevolence” of others that society is supplied with its wants. It is, as my reading makes
clear, from sympathy’s insistence on bodily form and function.
As such, it is in this sense that Smith’s moral system tacitly fosters the speciesist
discourse that fuels his economic discourse (and so vice versa) such that the two
discourses become irreducibly linked. When it comes to animal life, sympathy’s effects
have a biopolitical orientation: that is, they contribute to the commodification,
distribution, and consumption of animals as food.73 Nicole Shukin, in her book Animal
Capital, contends that what Giorgio Agamben, following Foucault, calls biopolitics—a
distinction between bios (“the form of a way of life proper to an individual or group”)
and zoe (“the simple fact of living common to all living beings”)—pertains beyond the
merely human, a category, as Cary Wolfe has noted, that is itself unstable, still in flux.74
Agamben’s distinction is useful because it clearly spells out the stakes of speciesism
while helping Shukin to intervene in biopolitical debates. Bios, from which Foucault
derived the concept “biopolitics”—the study of how power affects, organizes, and alters
the bodies of citizens and non-citizens within the global network of state relations—
explicitly refers to the sociality of people whereas zoe makes no species distinctions
(though, as I suggest above, it is itself part of the larger species distinction). But the
eventual pressing of these two categories into an irreducible one has, Agamben argues,
created a discursive and material environment in which the political economy Smith
proposes emerges: “in particular, the development and triumph of capitalism would not
have been possible, from this perspective, without the disciplinary control achieved by
the new bio-power, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak
created the docile bodies that it needed” (HS 3). However, the irreducibility of the
exclusionary gesture of sympathy affirms Shukin’s replacement of the term “biopolitics”
with “zoopolitics,” the study of biopower’s maneuverings to create docile bodies out of
73
Broadie reminds us that sympathy had a physiological and medical meaning to the Stoics, the sympathetic
transfer of pain from one part of the nervous system to another. Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the
Impartial Spectator,” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, 161.
74
Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009), 1-20. Giorgio Agamben, Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 1. Abbreviated hereafter as HS and cited
parenthetically with page numbers.
43
all living bodies in a society, be they human or non-human.75 What is at stake here then
ultimately comes down to the question, “what counts as a living being?” As my reading
indicates, Smith’s theory of sympathy is zoopolitical, the communal creation of social
spheres composed of individual human and non-human bodies. Or, to think in different
terms, imaginative sympathy individualizes people but the species distinctions this
process generates, and the subsequent progression to a modern butcher economy, defines
life as human life. It defines, in short, life in the biopolitical plotlines Foucault, Agamben,
and Shukin trace. Imaginative sympathy forecloses sympathy for animal life by defining
life as anchored in human form via its counterintuitive preoccupation with the body that
supersedes the more readily apparent imaginative aspect of the affair.
What this means for animals is that when humans conceive of themselves as a
species, they are still thinking with their stomachs, the physical limit of the limited
imaginations of sympathy. Since sympathy does not mean "pity" but any “fellowfeeling," the speciesist orientation of sympathy helps explain why the sight of suffering
animals, contrary to what Pollan and company believe, does not necessarily lead to the
discontinuance of eating meat: humans sympathize along Smithian lines. That is to say,
Smith's sympathy disallows fellow-feeling of humans towards animals even when
witnessing the plight of animals’ torn and butchered bodies, the spectacle that should
foster the most “lively sympathy.” The bodily limitations of sympathy prove too
inhibitary. It is this lesson about fellow feeling that makes it possible to say that
sympathy, in the eighteenth-century discourse that structures modernity, quite literally,
begins and ends with the human stomach.
75
Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009), 7-8.
44
Chapter 2
Facing the Soul:
Enlightenment Physiognomy
Given that the novel contains the same puzzling tonal shifts, surprising
digressions, use of unexplained textual spacing, abrupt chapter fragmentation, recursive
narrative chattiness, subtle allusions to unnamed literary works, ironic surface and
subtext, and an often inscrutable narrator, it seems perfectly fair to apply J. Paul Hunter’s
description of Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) to Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey
(1768). Hunter, commenting on the “two-level self-consciousness” of Tristram Shandy,
says that “it is annoying and sometimes infuriating because not only are things not what
they seem; they are not the opposite of what they seem either, and a good deal of
attentive engagement is necessary to sort things out.”76 Following Jonathan Lamb’s
similar claim that Sterne’s work in general is structured according to a “double principle”
of self-conscious paradox, I’d like to suggest that the same level of doubled selfconsciousness is at work in A Sentimental Journey.77 Given this paradoxical structure, in
order to figure out the novel one must come to grips with Sterne’s ambiguous smoke-andmirrors rather than ignore them as some critics have done. The novel’s ambiguity has
long beguiled scholars who see it variously as a hindrance obscuring our understanding
of the novel and as the mechanism fundamental to Sterne’s critique of society and
sentiment (as these are traditionally assumed to be Sterne’s satirical targets). But
whatever else is true, it is undoubtedly the case, as Hunter says, that it is often frustrating
to figure out what Sterne’s goals are in his fictions because he relies so much on
ambiguous, and often contradictory, styles, devices, and tones. It is a function of Sterne’s
masterful irony, though, that whatever he and his fictional counterpart Yorick, are up to,
that one of the things he is not ambiguous about is the novel’s ambiguity. Unlike Arthur
Cash, for whom Sterne was a straightforward moralist who used Yorick as a cautionary
tale to illustrate the failure of the man of feeling to transcend his own self-aggrandizing
76
J. Paul Hunter, “Response as Reformation: Tristram Shandy and the Art of Interruption,” Novel 4 (1971): 132146.
77
Jonathan Lamb, Sterne’s Fictions and the Double Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989).
45
limits, I would like to argue that the novel’s notoriously ambiguous nature deliberately
obscures Yorick’s moral and instead forces readers to reassess their own affective
responses to non-humans by adopting the self-reflexive mental posture of Yorick.78 Such
self-reflexivity puts pressure on the dialectic of sympathy and sentiment that fuels the
novel. Indeed, Sterne’s novel postulates that the paradoxical circumvolutions that
structure sentimentality and sympathy require constant revisionary attention because
fresh encounters will always continue to challenge the basic premises of human
emotional response. These revisionary encounters are essential to the novel and figure
sympathy and sentiment as both fluxionally exposed to each other and concretely
separate from each other.
The novel’s foundational ambiguity is famously encapsulated by the textual pun
on the final page of the novel in which Yorick reaches out a hand to the Parisian woman
he is sharing a room with only to encounter the woman’s Fille de Chambre. The white
expanse of the page between Yorick’s comment that “I caught hold of the Fille de
Chambre’s” and the text “END OF VOL II” nudges the reader to believe that Yorick is
perhaps grabbing the woman’s end, or bottom, while at the same time bringing the novel
to a full, conclusive stop.79 Although a blank space on a page is not commonly read as an
elucidating clue for interpretation, in A Sentimental Journey, the blank space recalls the
reader to the fact that Yorick’s narrative is similar to this blank space in that it never
offers a clear summation of its purpose or meaning. This space therefore functions as a
visual mirror of Yorick’s refusal to draw any moral from his own tale despite his
continued self-reflexive ruminations: as a character and narrator he offers only a
figurative blank space. It is this same ambiguous nature that lends his tale its devilish
tricksomeness and makes the extraction of definite meaning precarious. Even though, as
Martin Battestin points out, the “final broken sentence…is…most certainly completed in
the imagination of Sterne’s reader,” in the “END,” Yorick ultimately leaves the narrative,
and the reader, with only this self-reflexivity as a guide to figuring out how to understand
78
Arthur Cash, Sterne’s Comedy of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimension of the Journey (Piitsburgh: Duquesne UP,
1966), 31-54.
79
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence
Sterne, Vol. VI, eds. Melvyn New & W. G. Day (Miami: UP of Florida, 2002). All references are to this edition.
46
his journey’s sentimental reflections.80 Thus, as Battestin reminds us, part of Sterne’s
nominal intentions are, as stated by Yorick, for readers to become “Sentimental
Travellers” along with Yorick. They must fill in the abyssal blank space of not only the
final page but of the novel as a whole.81 But Yorick’s refusal to outline what he learns, or
whether he learns anything, is a precise strategy meant to open up the sentimental—
which he foregrounds in his preface as the subject of his work—in a fashion that reveals
sentimentality’s own constantly revisionary nature.82 In other words, Yorick avoids
providing a definitive statement of the meaning or morality of his travels specifically so
as to give way to the larger thematic that animates his purpose: the split-level
consciousness of the novel that demands the reader’s own interpretive skill to fully grasp
its contours and textures (thus placing the reader in Yorick’s grasping position at the end
of the novel) and thereby explicates the sentimental aspect of the journey.
Although the eighteenth century is marked by its intensive engagement with
sentiment and sensibility, and witnesses the literary creation of the man of feeling, Sterne,
like Henry Mackenzie and Sarah Fielding, complicates how the language of sentimental
feeling manifests meaning during the period. As many critics have pointed out, the
relationship between sentiment and sensibility in eighteenth-century discourse is a
confusing affair. In recent years, scholars have undertaken an exploration of the
differences between the concepts, emotions, and psychological states that often
80
Martin Battestin, “Sentimental Journey and Syntax of Things,” Augustan Worlds, ed. J.C. Hilson (Leicester:
Leicester UP, 1978), 237.
81
Ibid., 233.
82
The precise status of the “sentimental” in Sterne has long befuddled scholars. Sterne used his two
characters—Tristram and Yorick—as masks in social settings, playing up the autobiographical elements of each
as befit the audience he was with. For most of his contemporary readers, the difference was associational, with
Tristram connected to the rude and bawdy novel and Yorick with the tender and gentle feelings labeled
sentimental (though of course A Sentimental Journey was only published in Sterne’s final year so much of his play
on his likeness to Yorick stems from the sermons he published bearing this name that winkingly suggested he
was Yorick). Ian Campbell Ross, “Laurence Sterne’s Life, Milieu, and Literary Career,” The Cambridge Companion
to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 5-20, 12. On the failure of sentiment
in the novel Enest Nevin Dilworth argues that Sterne is a complete jester, intent only on mockery. Dilworth,
The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948). For Keymer, Sterne’s
sentimentality is shot through with self-aggrandizement and suggests we can live quite comfortably with the
misfortunes of others after fleeting tender feelings have passed by. Thomas Keymer, “A Sentimental Journey and
the Failure of Feeling,” The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2009, 79-94.
47
characterize sentiment and sensibility.83 Jerome McGann, in his Poetics of Sensibility,
describes the difference as one of emphasis: “sensibility emphasizes the mind in the
body, sentimentality the body in the mind.”84 John Mullan, on the other hand, offers that
only a person could have sensibility whereas printed media were sentimental.85
Christopher Nagle reduces these formulae more succinctly: “one can say that Sensibility
is the shorthand for a dominant cultural belief in feeling as the glue that holds society
together.”86 Janet Todd, in her concise history of sentimentality, provides a much sharper
definition that features Sterne as the crux:
A “sentiment” is a moral reflection, a rational opinion usually about the rights and
wrongs of human conduct; the early eighteenth-century novel of sentiment is
characterized by such generalized reflections. But a “sentiment” is also a thought,
often an elevated one, influenced by emotion, a combining of heart with head or
an emotional impulse leading to an opinion or principle. … After Sterne’s novels
it frequently takes the meaning of refined and tender emotion, although the
denotation of moral reflection also continues.87
For Todd Sterne’s novels institute a decisive shift in meaning regarding how sentiment is
understood—but Todd, like the other critics, has little to say about sympathy in regards to
Sterne. Sympathy, for all of these critics, remains an unproblematic concept. In this
chapter, I add sympathy to the critical conversation about sentiment and sensibility, and
show how Sterne’s work mobilizes sympathetic ideas reflective of Adam Smith’s
theories of moral sentiment.
83
Raymond Williams, in Keywords, argues that sentiment and sensibility were linked in the eighteenth century by
their mutual concern with tender feeling. However, according to Williams, sentiment came to be mocked and
used pejoratively in the nineteenth century whereas sensibility survived as a term in aesthetic discussions until
the mid-twentieth century. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1983),
280-283.
84
Jerome McGann, Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 7.
85
Mullan: “‘sentimental’ was usually a description of representation: a person possessed ‘sensibility’;…a text was
‘sentimental’.” “Sentimental Novels,” Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 236-254.
86 Christopher Nagle, Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era (New York: Palgrave, 2007),
5.
87
Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 7.
48
As I’ve shown in my first chapter, sympathy for Smith is the psychological
mechanism by which the human imagination creates affective bonds between people.
Face-to-face encounters between human beings allow a human to examine the other’s
countenance and imagine herself in the place of that other person. This imaginative
transference, in effect, allows people to react to the emotional state of others and take
action on their behalf, to relieve their distress, celebrate their joys, or simply feel pity for
them (sympathy, in other words, is not the means by which we feel pity only with
others—it may give rise to pity but more broadly it governs all human emotional
interaction as the mechanism of emotional transference). On Smith’s account it is this
basic psychological fact that leads to the creation of community and social order. But
because for Smith this mechanism is an exclusively human one, it does not allow for
humans to place themselves in the subject position of non-human life. Smith’s work thus
establishes speciesist limits to forming affective bonds between humans and non-humans
and categorizes social life as self-evidently human in nature because sympathy is a faceto-face interaction. Smith’s work, in other words, sketches out a democracy of human
communities on the basis of forms differentiated from nonhumans, whose lack of
sympathetic imagination places them beyond the social sphere. The face—as a site of
emotional, mental, and moral signification—thus informs Enlightenment thought much
the same way Isaac Newton’s attempt to transmute gold informed his laws of motion: the
face indexes the obscure and the popular, the modern and the arcane, the analeptic and
the proleptic.
Sterne’s ostensible subject, as announced by the novel’s title, is sentiment, yet he
also relies on Smithian ideas of sympathy on his journey, with the result that his novel
presents a vision of how sentiment and sympathy inform each other even as they work to
inculcate social divisions. Moreover, given the exclusionary decisiveness of sympathy,
Sterne’s work presents an important shift precisely because, as Nagle argues, “the circles
of Sensibility…expand exponentially in Sterne’s hands” to include the non-human of
whatever variety.88 In this chapter I trace how Sterne views the relations of humans and
non-humans in his novel and the demands made upon the social sphere by the limits of
88
Nagle, 23.
49
sentiment and sympathy. These demands help explain, I argue, why in eighteenth-century
discourse non-humans are ultimately viewed sentimentally but not sympathetically
despite Sterne’s efforts to lend to this discourse an open-ended ethical potentiality
intended to pressure his readers into rethinking their own ideological assumptions.
In addition to Smith’s influential conception of sympathy, and its reemergence in
sentimental novels, these discourses are further complicated by a late-century resurgence
in the Aristotelian pseudo-science of physiognomy. Sterne’s novel reflects the
reemerging physiognomical idea that the soul is expressed in the facial features, which
anticipates Johann Kaspar Lavater’s reintroduction of physiognomy a few years after A
Sentimental Journey is published. Sterne uses physiognomy as a central mechanism of
Yorick’s sentimentality; his reading of the faces of others allows him to negotiate the
encounters of everyday life:
There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this
short hand, and be quick in rendering several turns of looks and limbs, with all
their inflections and delineations, into plain words. For my own part, by long
habitude, I do it so mechanically, that when I walk the streets of London, I go
translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where
not three words have been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues
with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and sworn to. (77)
The shorthand Yorick speaks of is similar to physiognomy. He configures society in this
passage as an amorphous blend of gestures that must be rendered into coherence by
someone who can read this shorthand. And the word “shorthand” literally encompasses
the hands of that society, as mastering this shorthand entails reading the “looks and
limbs” of those passing him by on the street. Human bodies are thus established in the
novel as a kind of non-verbal linguistic code that must be translated by a skilled
interpreter of corporeal signs. As Martin Battestin puts its, “for the purpose of
communication and relationship, then, words are less useful than the body, reason than
the sympathic imagination.”89 Yorick’s mastery of this art allows him to convert his
89
Battestin, 230.
50
translations of human bodily code into scripted form: the novel is a record of his
translations of the sprawling text imprinted across the physical attributes of the book that
is the human species.
Sterne’s digressional technique in the novel establishes the face and body as a
primary site of communicative explication. Yorick interrupts his narrative early on to
write a preface well after one would normally expect a preface to appear. This
unexpected narrative rearrangement thus suggests that the opening pages of the novel can
be taken as a preface to the preface, a sneaky way for Sterne to foreground the subject of
physiognomy and its relation to sympathy as one of the main motifs of the novel,
displacing “the sentimental” announced by the title as the main focus of the book. Yorick,
when first we meet him in Calais, recounts the curious accident of meeting, and spurning
a monk, because he finds him physiognomically suspicious. As Yorick says, “the
moment I cast my eyes upon him, I was predetermined not to give him a single sous” (7).
As he retells the incident, he relates that, “I have his figure this moment before my eyes,
and think there was that in it which deserved better” (7). Yorick’s observation of the
monk’s face led to admiration:
It was one of those heads which Guido has often painted,—mild, pale—
penetrating, free from all commonplace ideas of fat contented ignorance looking
downwards upon the earth;—it look'd forwards; but look'd as if it look'd at
something beyond this world.—How one of his order came by it, heaven above,
who let it fall upon a monk's shoulders best knows: but it would have suited a
Bramin, and had I met it upon the plains of Indostan, I had reverenced it. (8)
Yorick’s description of the face of the monk indicates how for Yorick the face can
function as the institution of an ethical mandate: on reading the face of the monk Yorick
intuits an affinity with him. The monk “look’d as if at something beyond this world,” as
if truly gifted with religious transcendence, causing Yorick to admit that he would
reverence him if he had met him in the deserts of Indostan, presumably because if he
were in such a locale such asceticism would appeal to him. The rest of his description of
the monk is similarly complimentary, as, for instance, when he says that there was “so
simple a grace—and such an air of deprecation was there in the whole cast of his look
51
and figure” (8). But Yorick, despite his ability to recognize the pious and humble
character of the monk in his face, still refuses to give him “a single sous.” What Sterne
suggests in this scene, then, is that while the human countenance can be read accurately,
it does not necessarily master the emotions of the viewer and impel her to moral action.
In other words, Yorick can readily read the face of the monk perceptively, and even place
himself in the monk’s position, but it does not mean that Yorick must favor the monk.
The fact that explications of other peoples’ faces do not lead to sympathetic
understanding undermines the Smtithian notion of sympathy and grounds the novel as a
whole. This is why Yorick’s reflections on this episode reframe the ethical quandary of
helping the monk as a case of bad manners rather than sympathetic intervention. He
thinks, “that I have behaved very ill…but I have only set out on my travels and shall learn
better manners as I get along” (11). This synchs with what Yorick writes shortly
thereafter in his preface, namely, that there are several types of travelers and he is of the
sentimental sort, the type that sees his native England as “abounding with more variety of
learning” (17) even as he is compelled to become a “peripatetic philosopher” in order to
satiate his emotional needs (13). If sympathy can allow him to understand the monk
without helping him, Yorick’s journey itself is construed as a travelogue in search of
filling in his emotional knowledge of others so that he can learn to use sympathy, but in
his case understood differently than the Smithian conception of it, for the good of those
he encounters rather than merely to feel new, tender emotions excited by his excess of
sentiment.
Thus the novel distinguishes between sentimental travelers and peripatetic
philosophers because the former are unable to accurately translate the physical human
code in a physiognomical sympathetic fashion whereas the latter take this as the goal of
their wanderings. Moreover, sentimental travelers, in Yorick’s philosophy, have a
predefined destination that precludes physiognomic translation; wandering amidst the
crowd of unknown human beings is essential to the art of the physiognomist. Part of
physiognomy means reading the character of an individual in the double meaning of the
word: the external surface of the person and the internal essence and personality of the
person. This double meaning makes traveling itself divisive. In England, Yorick says,
“there is more wit and variety of character to feed the mind” but he nevertheless is
52
compelled to travel outside of England (14). Yorick’s suggestion here seems to be that he
is not traveling to discover the character of other people, as those who are not English do
not possess character enough to impart new knowledge. This raises the questions, why
then is Yorick traveling and what compels him? The answers to these questions appear at
the end of the real preface which links back up with the prefaced physiognomical
sequence that begins the novel. When the inquisitive and simple travelers (two of
Yorick’s categories) inquire into the oddity of his writing his preface in a desobligeant,
he replies, “twould have been better in a Vis a Vis” (14). A Vis a Vis carriage is one in
which the travelers can face each other. Yorick describes the sentimental traveler in
vague terms because the sentimentalist’s object is simply to feel heightened emotions on
her travels; as a translator of human significations though, and contrary to the
expectations of his readers, Yorick is interested in learning about the character of other
nationalities even if they possess little to learn about. To press this distinction, the preface
on sentimentality ends with a pivot back to physiognomy and sympathy in the claim that
traveling—and, given the twinning of traveling and narrative made clear by the book’s
title, narrative itself—would be better face-to-face, the defining feature of imaginitve
sympathy. As Battestin points out, “the desobligeante provides the emblem of his selfenclosure” which Yorick wishes to avoid because “surely—surely man!...thou wast made
for social intercourse.”90 This scene thus emblematizes how the book stages a tug-of-war
between sentimentality and sympathy, suggesting that “the spontaneous overflow of
emotions” (to borrow from Wordsworth’s later sentimental redefinition of poetry)
associated with sentiment can occur to anyone whereas sympathy—the ability to imagine
what others feel by accurately reading their faces—only works for those open to the
experience of meeting a variety of strangers in unexpected face-to-face encounters,
precisely what each of Yorick’s episodes detail.
One of the major difficulties facing the peripatetic philosopher is the skepticism
that accompanies human discourse: how do you overcome linguistic, cultural, and
ideological barriers to interact meaningfully with others without always harboring
skepticism that communication has gone astray? Yorick’s initial comments in the preface
90
Battestin, 226.
53
indicate that these barriers are innate to the human condition: “It must have been
observed by many a peripatetic philosopher, That nature has set up by her own
unquestionable authority certain boundaries and fences to circumscribe the discontent of
man” (13). According to Yorick these natural boundaries endow humans with “an
imperfect power of spreading our happiness sometimes beyond HER limits”; therefore
“we lie under so many impediments in communicating our sensations out of our own
sphere, as often amount to a total impossibility” (13). Human beings are stuck then in a
kind of sarcophageal state of nature in which they remain presocialized, that is, unable to
form concrete emotional affinities with others, because an accurate reading of emotions is
dubious indeed. Thus human beings remain in a state of perpetually suspended social
animation, attempting to exchange their sentiments truthfully, all the while being
betrayed by the failure of those sentiments to translate accurately. Social spheres are
therefore composed of individuals who are always in the process of sentimental
commerce with no guarantee that the promissory value of human emotion will be met
with by others with sentiments of like value. Since the “impediments” of communication
make truthful emotional exchange nearly impossible, “it will always follow from hence,
that the balance of sentimental commerce is always against the expatriated adventurer: he
must buy what he has little occasion for, at their own price” (13). Given that the account
of the sentimental traveler is always indebted to the others around her, buying what she
doesn’t want at prices she does not wish to pay, Yorick, unsurprisingly, finds the face-toface economy of sympathy preferable to remaining in the wilds of an economy of
proliferating but potentially insolvent emotional debt. He believes, then, that
physiognomy does make it possible to overcome the barriers of nature and to go outside
oneself even if only by enlarging one’s social network of relations. Hence, sympathetic
physiognomy provides him the insight needed to enact all of his emotional transactions,
including his erotic ones.
An early scene of the novel, in which Yorick remains in the street outside his
hotel in Calais because he sees a woman in the street whose figure he finds intriguing,
establishes how Yorick uses sympathetic physiognomy to traffic in emotional goods. The
scene works by means of a pervasive irony that underscores the importance of what it
denounces: “I had not yet seen her face—'twas not material” (22). Seeing her face was
54
not material according to Yorick only because “Fancy” had conjured up the image for
him and “finished the whole head” (23). But Fancy is “a seduced, and a seducing slut”
that “cheatest us seven times a day with thy pictures and images” (22). The inference here
is clear, namely, that Fancy lulls the imagination with her charms, limning powerfully
attractive pictures that obscure reality. In other words, Yorick thinks the imagination is
wholly untrustworthy because its powers are compromised by fictions inspired by Fancy;
the imagination, in this metaphorical association, is itself seduced by itself. If the
imagination cannot be trusted due to its own lascivious nature, all that remains, it follows,
is to turn to the materiality of the actual face if one wants to disprove the imagination’s
fanciful fiction. The irony arises in that once Yorick does make this materialist turn
(“When we had got to the door of the Remise, she withdrew her hand from across her
forehead, and let me see the original” [23]), Fancy still controls his explicatory faculties.
Yorick offers bland descriptive details—“it was a face of about six-and-twenty,—of a
clear transparent brown, simply set off without rouge or powder” (23)—before he begins
to read it: “I fancied it wore the characters of a widow'd look, and in that state of its
declension, which had passed the two first paroxysms of sorrow, and was quietly
beginning to reconcile itself to its loss;—but a thousand other distresses might have
traced the same lines” (23). The word “fancied” emphasizes how physignomy, which
purports to factually read the face, is gainsaid by its own need to imagine the very face it
studies. In this instance, Yorick turns from the legible face presented to him to an
imagined history of experience, the death of the woman’s husband and her subsequent
heartbroken widowhood. Such experiential imaginings just so happen to comport with
Yorick’s intentions as they romanticize his actions and he and the widow, for whom
Yorick feels “benevolence” for (a key Smith word), draw their faces close together (23).
Sympathetic physiognomy allows him to complete their transaction and for Yorick to
fulfill his erotic impulses.
Although Yorick turns physiognomically and physically to face other human
beings throughout the novel—his encounters with the widow above, the grisset, the fille
de chambre in Paris, and the lady and her handmaid in the inn during the novel’s closing
scene—his reactions to non-human life, just like his reactions to human life, are always
clouded by ambiguous interruptions and ironic happenstance. On his journey through
55
Napont, when Yorick encounters the poor man and his dead ass, the narrative the man
offers seems to endorse the possibility that humans can sympathize with animals. The
man says “that he had set out from his cottage with this poor creature, who had been a
patient partner of his journey;—that it had eaten the same bread with him all the way, and
was unto him as a friend” (54). His ability to befriend his ass is at once strange and
sensible in the context of the novel. For, as Yorick’s preface argued, the sentimental
journeyer is often unloved, receiving gifts unequal to those that he gives, that is, his own
unalloyed emotions. When the ass and the poor old man are “separated…from each other
for three days,” they each “sought” each other out and “they had scarce either eaten or
drank till they met”; starvation and deprivation become a significant exhibit of their
mutual concern for the other as the old man had previously shared all of his food with the
ass (54). But whereas the old man seems able to imaginatively sympathize with his dead
ass, Yorick’s initial confusion of the dead ass with the old man’s child speaks to Yorick’s
scrambled thinking when it comes to the non-human. Yorick’s confusion centers on the
man’s accent:
And this, said he, putting the remains of a crust into his wallet—and this,
should have been thy portion, said he, hadst thou been alive to have shared it
with me. I thought by the accent, it had been an apostrophe to his child; but
‘twas to his ass, and to the very ass we had seen in the road, which had
occasioned LaFleur’s misadventure. (53)
Yorick’s misidentification of the ass with the old man’s child is curious. What, for
instance, about the man’s accent makes Yorick think the man is apostrophizing his child?
The suggestion seems to be that the man, who is German, is speaking in so thick an
English accent that the inflection somehow places a human connotation on the word “he.”
Why, in other words, does Yorick’s mind immediately leap to the idea that the man, of
whom Yorick has no previous knowledge, is apostrophizing an absent child? Yorick at
this point in the novel, it seems, has humans on the brain. Subsequent to Yorick’s
confusion the old man discloses that he did in fact have three sons, “the finest lads in all
of Germany,” all of whom but one had died of the smallpox. In gratitude for the survival
of his remaining son the man has undertaken a pilgrimage to Spain. In recounting his
sons’ deaths the old man inadvertently underscores his own sympathy for his dead ass.
56
And, in his own indiscrimatory sympathy for the animal, since he is clearly moved by
this death whereas his account of his sons is rendered in mechanical detail, he announces
his distance from Yorick. Yorick, in contradistinction to the old man, derives from this
anecdote the moral that humans must love each other better: “Shame on the world! said I
to myself.—Did we but love each other as this poor soul loved his ass—'twould be
something” (54).
Yorick’s concluding moral returns us to the incident that opens the dead ass
episode, and suggests, as Arthur Cash claims, that the real “focus of attention is not upon
the dead animal, as most critics would have it, but upon the live one.”91 On the road to
Nampont, before they reach the old man, Yorick and LaFleur encounter the dead ass in
the road. LaFleur’s bidet “would not pass by it—a contention arose betwixt them, and the
poor fellow was kick’d out of his jack boots the very first kick” (50). LaFleur, in response
to this calamity, begins beating his bidet back and forth across the road until it runs off
and Yorick accepts LaFleur into his coach. Just as quickly as the scene occurs it is over
and they continue on with their journey, one horse the less but with no manifestation of
moral improvement or a new sense of justice toward animal life. That Yorick is similarly
distracted from drawing other conclusions from the dead-ass episode (he says he needs to
reflect more on it) by his postillion beating the horses in an effort to make them run faster
casts further doubt on whether, for Yorick, sympathy for animals is possible. On the other
hand, this picture, as always in Sterne, is vastly complicated later in Yorick’s narrative.
As Paul Moore posits, Yorick’s subsequent unwillingness to go on with his journey out
of concern for the horse that has lost two shoes perhaps signals that Yorick has not only
learned better manners but also a more tender feeling toward animals—he is able to feel
for them but perhaps not sympathize with them.92 In typical Sterne fashion, this incident
lends no clarity to how, if at all, Yorick has registered and implemented any growing
ethical awareness in relation to animals. This is maybe why Yorick is rewarded in his
travels by the simple supper with the peasant family that seems to be some kind of
cumulative event—until, that is, it too is undercut by the novel’s final bawdy comedy of
errors and ends.
91
Cash, 43.
Paul Moore, “Sterne, Tristram, Yorick, Birds, and Beasts,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 10:1
(1987): 43-54, 48.
92
57
Nor is the book’s most famous scene with the starling any more elucidatory
when it comes to figuring out how Yorick’s disposition to animals is to be understood.
Sterne writes in his letters that his design in writing about sentimentality was “to teach us
to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do”—a statement that seems to
mirror Yorick’s moral about the dead ass—but, in the case of the starling, it remains
inconclusive whether Sterne means “fellow creatures” as an encompassment of nonhuman life or as a circumscription of human beings only, despite Yorick’s description of
the starling as a “poor creature” (95).93 During his stay in Paris Yorick is confronted by
his own folly in undertaking his journey without his passport, and he recalls how his
former conversation with Eugenius had raised the possibility that he would be arrested
and imprisoned in the Bastille. Yorick’s philosophizing on the matter annuls any fear he
might have in this regard: “and as for the Bastile; the terror is in the word.—Make the
most of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word for a tower;—and a
tower is but another word for a house you can't get out of” (94). Yorick thinks this as he
walks down the stairs of his Parisian hotel in “triumph with the conceit of
…[his]…reasoning,” all of which is controverted when he finds a starling caged in the
stairway (94). Upon hearing it scream, “I can’t get out,” his senses are overwrought and
he tries to free the bird from its captivity (95). As Yorick undertakes this action, the
starling brings them face-to-face: “the bird flew to the place where I was attempting his
deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis pressed his breast against it as if
impatient” (95). Yorick cannot liberate the bird though, and when he tells the starling
this, the scene takes on a pathetic appeal as the bird offers the final lines we will hear
from him in reaction to his continued imprisonment: ‘No,’ said the starling,— ‘I can't get
out—I can't get out.’ (95). Judith Frank argues that the “starling is treated sadistically in
the text” even as “the starling signifies the potentially subversive instability of pathetic
utterance.”94 And there is something terrifying and awful in the starling’s responsive
“No,” as if it foresees the horror of its continued days of imprisonment and can offer only
this one, last appeal. Moreover, the fact that the starling does respond with the word “no”
Laurence Sterne, Collected Letters of Laurence Sterne, quoted in Laurence Sterne: The Complete Critical Heritage, ed.
Alan B. Howes (New York: Routledge, 1996), 187.
93
94
Judith Frank, “‘A Man who Laughs is Never Dangerous’: Character and Class in Sterne’s A Sentimental
Journey, ELH 56: 1 (1989): 97-124, 110.
58
indicates an understanding on the starling’s part that he is being left a prisoner, as if the
bird possesses an autonomous subjectivity on par with that of humans, a subversion of
typical philosophical beliefs that animals can, as Jacques Derrida puts it, “react but nor
respond.”95
The starling can respond to Yorick and comprehend its misery, and this horrible
possibility, although it does not occur to Yorick, retards the discussion in Tristram
Shandy regarding birds’ ability to think rationally. In volume VII, which consists of
Tristram’s satirical version of the travelogue, he, unlike Yorick, specifically singles out
the ass as able to respond by means of sympathetic physiognomy:
Now ‘tis an animal (be in what hurry I am) I cannot bear to strike—there is a
patient endurance of sufferings, wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage,
which pleads so mightily for him, that it always disarms me; and to that degree,
that I do not like to speak unkindly to him: on the contrary, meet him where I
will—whether in town or country—in cart or panniers—whether in liberty or
bondage—I have ever something civil to say to him on my part; and as one word
begets another (if he has as little to do as I)—I generally fall into conversation
with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses
from the etchings of his countenance…(629-631)96
Contrarily, Tristram thinks that birds who can speak react without rationally responding:
“In truth, it is the only creature of all the classes of beings below me, with whom I can do
this: for parrots, jackdaws, &c.—I never exchange a word with them—nor with the apes,
&c. for pretty near the same reason: they act by rote, as the other speak by it” (630).
Yorick, on the other hand, appears to hold inverse beliefs as he ignores the plight of the
dead ass but is moved to at least try to free the starling, whom he initially mistakes, as he
did in the ass episode, for a child, a misidentification that suggests he associates the two
episodes and has perhaps learned from the dead ass’s death.
95
Jaques Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, trans. Marie-Louis Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), 119140.
96
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, The Florida Edition of the Works of
Laurence Sterne, Vol. II, eds. Melvyn New & Joan New (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1978). All references are to
this edition.
59
Then again, maybe not. Even though Yorick fails to release the bird, the
feelings the struggle with the starling’s cage occasions are, he tells us, superlative: “I
never had any affection more tenderly awakened” (95). But Yorick’s attestation that his
feeling in the matter is superlative rings as oddly as it does because he performs a mental
pivot away from that feeling to recanvass his reasoning, an intellectual, rather than
emotional, act. In fact, the episode of the starling recalls him to thoughts of his own
imprisonment that were so handily dealt with earlier. He says the notes of the starling
“overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastille; and I heavily walk’d up stairs,
unsaying every word I had said in going down them” (95-96). “The bird in his cage
pursued me into my room,” leading him “to figure to myself the miseries of confinement”
(97). The effect of the scene gives “scope to [his] imagination” and Yorick conjures a
portrait of a prisoner alone in his cage, suffering to the extent that Yorick claims he “saw
the iron enter into his soul!” (98). This is why Paul Moore argues that “Yorick’s
sympathy for the bird is mechanical and shallow, and has more to do with his own frame
of mind than the appeal of the starling’s voice.”97 From the insistent pleas of the
entrapped starling Yorick has now moved to seeing into the soul of a prisoner who would
be—himself! The starling, therefore, evokes sentimental feeling but not identification
with a different species of animal life, not the sympathy that can induce fellow feeling.
Yorick’s imagination trumps feeling for Yorick and he turns to imagine his own potential
imprisonment, imagining himself in the place of another human prisoner, about to be torn
and dismembered. After the pathos of the starling’s repetitive “let me out,” Yorick’s final
remarks on him are blunt and confusing: “I have nothing farther to add upon him, but that
from that time to this I have borne this poor starling as the crest to my arms” (100). The
novel, in fact, reproduces Yorick’s coat of arms with the starling affixed perched atop it.
Yorick’s bluntness here gels with the idea that sympathy—which depends on human
form—makes it impossible to marshal fellow feeling for non-humans. In other words,
Yorick’s sympathetic imagination is indeed actuated by the starling’s plight, but it turns
him away from the caged bird, to his fellow humans, and inward, toward his own
potential suffering soul.
97
Paul Moore, “Sterne, Tristram, Yorick, Birds, and Beasts,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 10:1
(1987): 43-54, 45.
60
But as the contrasting attitudes about different animals in Tristram Shandy and
A Sentimental Journey underscore, Sterne finally refuses to unambiguously tender his
opinion on animals’ ethical status as objects of human concern. If we consider Yorick’s
late apostrophe—“Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys,
or costly in our sorrows!”—the discourses of sympathy and sentiment become even more
muddied. Having stopped the postillion after the horse has lost its shoes and is
presumably in pain, Yorick launches this apostrophe:
Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in
our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw—and ’tis thou
who lift’st him up to HEAVEN—eternal fountain of our feelings!—’tis here I trace
thee—and this is thy divinity which stirs within me—not that in some sad and
sickening moments, “my soul shrinks back upon herself, and startles at
destruction”—mere pomp of words!—but that I feel some generous joys and
generous cares beyond myself—all comes from thee, great—great SENSORIUM of
the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in the
remotest desert of thy creation.—Touch’d with thee, Eugenius draws my curtain
when I languish—hears my tale of symptoms,. and blames the weather for the
disorder of his nerves. Thou giv’st a portion of it sometimes to the roughest
peasant who traverses the bleakest mountains—he finds the lacerated lamb of
another’s flock.—This moment I beheld him leaning with his head against his
crook, with piteous inclination looking down upon it.—Oh! had I come one
moment sooner!—it bleeds to death—his gentle heart bleeds with it— Peace to
thee, generous swain!—I see thou walkest off with anguish—but thy joys shall
balance it—for happy is thy cottage—and happy is the sharer of it—and happy
are the lambs which sport about you. (155-156)
This apostrophe, in contrast to the old man’s apostrophe to his ass and Yorick’s dealings
with the starling, institutes sympathy in place of sentiment. Yorick does not merely
describe the imagined shepherd as a sign of his nervous condition (sentiment is
manifested as having bodily symptoms here); he explicitly imagines that the “lacerated
lamb” the shepherd finds too late “bleeds to death” just as the heart of the shepherd
bleeds with it. This consanguineous mutual exchange differs from sentiment in that rather
61
than being an intense feeling, it construes the slowly beating heart of the dying lamb
pumping out its final spurts of lifeblood as equal to the gentle heart of the shepherd who
can imagine himself in the lamb’s place, bleeding for and with the dying creature. The
shepherd’s anguish, though, is balanced by the happiness of his other lambs who sport
about him. Yorick closes the scene with the pathos of harmonious co-relation, evocative
not of death but of the continuance of humans and animals living together in tranquil
tenderness for each other. Tellingly, the shepherd is said to have only a portion of the
great feelings derived from the great Sensorium of the world, which indicates then that a
still greater sympathetic exchange of human/non-human feeling is possible in the world
even if Yorick, for instance, can never fully realize this possibility.
With this picture of harmonious human and non-human life, nothing, as ever, is
made clear in Sterne. The only surety is that his novels force us to sympathize with the
characters by placing us in the shoes of Yorick and Tristram and to therefore confront
and better calculate and calibrate our own relations to the non-humans that appear
throughout his fiction. The evasion of a clear-cut ethical position denies to the reader the
easy answers that would construct an ideological imposition on the audience—which
Sterne thinks would be the anti-Shandean equivalent of doing what is unethical. Imposing
an ideological straitjacket consigns the peripatetic philosopher to a world of his own
limited sensate data, unable to connect to the world at large because his destination has
already been rigidly plotted out and his feelings determined for him. Shandeism embraces
what Derrida calls the radical incalculability of ethics. That is to say that Shandeism
denies a transcendental ethical principle as foundational to the natural world in favor of a
pragmatic version of ethics. Ethics, in Derrida’s conception, are radically incalculable,
because if they were knowable a priori to any given situation then this would undercuts
any ethical force a person’s choice may have since that choice is predetermined and
hence no choice at all. Shandeism works the same way, because it takes the sympathetic
imagination and reconfigures it as a vehicle that mandates that readers make choices
rather than having them gifted to them by an alien, cosmographical agent.
But Shandeism is also properly characterized, according to Sterne, by its
divagations into the apparently haphazard and peripheral. In the spirit of this, in the next
section, I follow the discourse of physiognomy in the eighteenth century to show how the
62
work of Lavater helps fill in the blank spaces of Shandeism with its own version of
human and non-human engagements. Lavater, in contrast to Shandeism, reveals how
eighteenth-century discourse remains stuck in the sentimental mud as long as
physiognomy fails to account for the responsive communicative possibilities of animals.
II
In the Beginning was Physiognomy
Looked at from the distance of modernity, eighteenth-century England must have
been a very weird time and place insofar as scientific revolutions encountered the popular
imaginations of the social sphere. The years from 1727 to 1776, for instance, witnessed
the concrete principles of physics established by Newton in his Philosophicae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica coincide with the popularity of the pseudo-science, physiognomy,
reestablished by the poet and mystic Johann Kasper Lavater. Contrary to current myths of
the Enlightenment that foregound a presupposition with reason, the period was also rife
with mythopoetic accounts that contradicted and informed secular humanism. Newton,
for example, was himself a practicing alchemist who wrote more on biblical apocalypses
than on physics. Throughout the eighteenth century, an appetite for the obscure and the
arcane cohabitated with the putative rationality of Enlightenment thought. In that spirit,
by the end of the eighteenth century, in fact, it was Lavater’s Physiognomical Fragments
that dominated the bestseller lists across the European continent. But unlike the stunning
originality of Newton’s accomplishments in the Principia (the laws of motion; an
explanation of gravity), Lavater’s claims about physiognomy were not even wholly his
own, as physiognomy can be traced back to Aristotle, although much remains shrouded
in mystery concerning its origin. It is unknown, for instance, whether Aristotle actually
wrote the “Physiognomics” attributed to him, the first known work on physiognomy
(even though Galen attributes the science to Hippocrates), but the text nevertheless
establishes the basal principles that will define physiognomy studies thereafter:
sympathy.98 “Sympatheia,” as defined by Aristotle, reveals the character of the soul in
98
Aristotle, “Physiognomics,” The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1984), 1237-1250, 1237. A good deal of classicists doubt Aristotle wrote this text and its author is
sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Aristotle. According to Siegfried Frey, though, this is due to the publication
of Georg Gustav Fülleborn’s Abriss einer Geschichte und Litteratur der Physiognomik in 1907 in which Fülleborn
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the human countenance. As he puts it in the “Physiognomics,” “soul and body, as it
seems to me, are affected sympathetically by one another: on the one hand, an alteration
of the state of the soul produces an alteration in the form of the body, and contrariwise an
alteration in bodily form produces an alteration in the state of the soul.”99
While Sterne was writing and publishing A Sentimental Journey, Lavater was
pondering writing the physiognomical works that would make him one of the most
famous men in Europe. This work, the Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der
Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775-1778), known as the Philosophical
Fragments, once completed, became a four-volume bestseller throughout Europe from
the time of its publication until around 1804.100 His work on physiognomy was
encouraged by Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmerman, personal physician to the king of
England. Indeed, Lavater was later visited by the leader of Germany, Joseph II, in 1777,
to discuss physiogonomy.101 During the time of the book’s publication, it was also
asserts that the Physiognomica could not have been the work of Aristotle. “Lavater, Llichtenberg, and the
Suggestive Power of the Human Face,” The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdiscplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater,
ed. Ellis Shookman (Columbia, SC: Camden Books, 1993), 103. For the Galen claim see: George Boys-Stones,
“Physignomy and Ancient Psychological Theory,” Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from
Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, ed. Simon Swain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 19-124, 94.
99
Aristotle, 1242. Later physiognomic texts do not have the same authorial identification challenges but they
do present problems of dating and historical status. Somewhere around 88-144 A.D. a Greek author named
Polemon followed Aristotle in the “science of physiognomy,” calling his book a “paraphrasis” of Aristotle
despite that twenty percent of the book is comprised of his own observations. A later Arabic version of this
text (known as the Istanbul Polemon) dates to somewhere in the late 8th to early 10th century A.D. and was based
on the Greek text. Previous to that translation, a Greek author named Adamntius, in the fourth century A.D.,
wrote a new version of the Physiognomics, based, like Polemon, largely on the Aristotle text, which was still
extant at that time. Rounding out these classical authors was one known only as Anonymus Latinus, who,
unlike the above authors, wrote his work in Latin, entitled Liber physiognomoniae. Simon Swain, “Introduction,”
Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, Ed. Simon Swain,
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 1-18.
From wikipedia: “The fame of this book, which found admirers in France and England as well as Germany,
rests largely upon the handsome style of publication and the accompanying illustrations. The two principal
sources from which Lavater developed his physiognomical studies were the writings of the Italian polymath
Giambattista della Porta, and the observations made by Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici (translated into
German in 1748 and praised by Lavater).” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Kaspar_Lavater
Accessed: 31 August 2009
101
It is during this conversation that Lavater discusses how the visual culture of portraiture influenced his
work: “I had occasionally drawn portraits, and had observed particularly striking resemblances between
corresponding parts and features of the countenances of different persons; as, for example, similar noses
distinguished by particular acuteness. This very naturally led me to inquiries into the resemblance that might be
found in their character, dispositions, and intellecctual powers, how different soever they might in general be,
and I found as evident resemblances in their minds as in the features of their countenances.” Johann Caspar
Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (London: Ward, Lock, &Bowden, Ltd., nd, Lxxxi-lxxxii). Hereafter EP.
100
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bolstered by the growing fame of Lavater’s early and main conspirator in physigonomical
endeavors, a young man named Goethe who had recently published his own The Sorrow
of Young Werther to great acclaim.102 According to Ellis Shookman:
when he [Lavater] died in 1801, The Scots Magazine wrote that he had been ‘for
many years one of the most famous men in Europe,’ and another British journal
noted his passing with equally lavish praise for his work: ‘In Switzerland, in
Germany, in France, even in Britain, all the world became passionate admirers of
the Physignomical Science of Lavater. In the enthusiasm with which they [his
books] were taught, they were thought as necessary in every family as even the
Bible itself.’103
Lavater was also a pastor and no doubt, according to contemporary accounts, his vanity
was gratified by his work being placed alongside the Bible as this was, for him, the most
important source for the morality he hoped to instill through his physiognomical work. In
his physiognomy, Lavater, similar to earlier theorists of moral-sense philosophy like the
Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, adhered to the Neo-Socratic idea of
kalokagathia, the idea that physical beauty corresponded to virtue whereas ugliness
corresponded to vice: “The beauty and deformity of the countenance is in a just and
determinate proportion to the moral beauty and deformity of the man. The morally best,
the most beautiful. The morally worst, the most deformed” (99).104
102
For more on this relationship see the articles by Carsten Zelle and Christoph Siegrist in The Faces of
Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993).
103
Quoted in Ellis Shookman, “Pseudo-Sceince, Social Fad, Literary Wonder: Johann Caspar Lavater and the
Art of Physiognomy,” The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Capar Lavater (Columbia, SC:
Camden House, 1993, 2. Quoting John Graham, Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas
(Bern: Lang, 1979), 61. Shookman also details Lavater’s influence on later scientists: “Nonetheless, more
serious scientists like Franz Joseph Gal with his phrenology, Carl Gustav Carus with his craniology, and
Alexander von Humboldt with his physical anthropology owed a great deal to Lavater, as did Goethe, too, who
openly acknowledged the importance of physiognomy for his own notions of osteology and morphology” (5).
104
Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (London: Ward, Lock, &Bowden, Ltd., n.d). For more on
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson see Carsten Zelle, “Soul Semiology: On Lavater’s Physiognomic Principles,” The
Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), 57.
It is in the Istanbul Polemon that one first finds the story of Zopyrus, an apparent noted physiognomist, who
upon studying the face of Hippocrates, says it is a face linked to a soul full of lust and other vices. Hippocrates
agrees but says everyone is born with such things but they can suppress such things. Moreover Hippocrates
emphasizes that this suppresion should have been apparent in his face too. For the Galen claim see: George
Boys-Stones, “Physignomy and Ancient Psychological Theory,” Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s
Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, ed. Simon Swain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 19-124, 94.
65
Like Aristotle, Lavater begins with the idea that human beings’ humanity can be
accounted for by comparing them to animals, who lack two qualities Lavater claims
humans have, which he calls the “moral life” and the “intellectual life,” even though
humans possess “animal life” in their body (9).105 This tripartite division of life as it
exists in the human body corresponds to classical ideas about the animal spirits that
animate the corporeal frame. However, Lavater’s work, while by no means
programmatic, nevertheless discloses how humans’ conceptions of the human
countenance are overdetermined by reference to an internal principle that corresponds to
the external features of animals. Lavater’s physiognomy, purportedly a study of how
humans can discover the qualities of the soul in the features of the face, displaces the
human face as the site of universal moral reckoning. As we will see, Lavater proves that
animal features render human characteristics as intwined paradoxically undoes the
justification of self-evident bodily form as the baseline for sympathetic interaction
between humans and non-humans. For Lavater, human form is only self-evident precisely
because that which it must demarcate itself from—the non-human—is what delineates
and make apparent human character in the facial features.
To this end, Lavater’s work defies the empiricist and rational grounds of
Enlightenment writers and their predecessors even though empiricism, in its insistence on
the self-evidence of the human subject, drives his physiognomical studies. Lavater
represents the crossroads of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, as he
crosshatches his empiricism with a romantic impulse: he believes that faces speak and
must be interpreted using the imagination as tempered by experience. Human faces
always require personification. To Lavater, in fact, physiognomy becomes a kind of
universal principle that grounds all study:
Is not all nature physiognomy; superficies, and contents; body, and
105
“Only in those parts in which animal strength and properties reside does it resemble animals. But how
much is it exalted above the brute in those parts in which are the powers of superior origin, the powers of
mind, of motion!” “It is beyond contradiction evident that, though physiological or animal life displays itself
through all the body, and especially through all the animal parts, yet does it act most conspicuously in the arm,
from the shoulder to the ends of the fingers” (9). “If we take the countenance as the representative and
epitome of the three divisions, then will the forehead, to the eye-brows, be the mirror, or image, of the
understanding; the nose and cheeks the image of the moral and sensitive life; and the mouth and chin the
image of the animal life; while the eye will be to the whole as its summary and centre” (10).
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spirit; exterior effect, and internal power; invisible beginning, and visible
ending? What knowledge is there, of which, man is capable, that is not
founded on the exterior the realtion that exists between visible and
invisible,
the perceptible and imperceptible? Physiognomy, whether understood in
its
most extensive or confined signification, is the origin of all human
decisions,
efforts, actions, expectations, fears, and hopes: of all pleasing and
unpleasing sensations, which are occasioned by external objects. From the
cradle to the grave, in all conditions and ages, throughout all nations, from
Adam to the last existing man, from the worm we tread on to the most
sublime of philosophers, physiognomy is the origin of all we do and
suffer. (16-17)
Lavater’s conception of physiognomy owes much to the eighteenth-century conception of
the Book of Nature, the idea common to natural philosophers of the period that nature
presented a vast book that must be read accurately so that complete understanding of the
world can be achieved. Lavater presents a crucial difference between the Book-of-Nature
thesis and his physiognomy, though: physiognomy does not encapsulate all of nature;
rather, for Lavater, nature as a whole is physiognomy, encompassing fear and hope, the
internal and the external, the visible and the invisible. Physiognomy accomplishes what
the merely empirical cannot: it literally reaches beyond the exterior, beyond the face
itself. Which raises the question: what exactly is a science of physiognomy if
physiognomy is itself nature? Lavater’s answer to this question is that all science is,
unsurprisingly, also physiognomy. Physiognomy is “as capable as experimental
philosophy, for it is experimental philosophy; as capable as physic, for it is part of the
physical art; as capable as theology, for it is theology; as capable as the belles lettres, for
it appertains to the belles lettres” (37). Physiognomy, in other words, will not become a
science in Lavater’s treatment of it. Indeed, it cannot become a science, because all
science stems from physiognomy. But if physiognomy, as suggested in Lavater’s treatise,
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amounts to all of nature, then physiognomy would also be the genesis of the world itself.
It is for this reasion that for Lavater physiognomy, even more than being a triumphal
approach preferable to natural history, is also the human impulse to become more moral,
which links his ideas to “The Great Chain of Being.”
The ultimate goal of physiognomy according Lavater is to find God in the face of
human beings, to ascend the ladder of “The Great Chain of Being.” Lavater argues that
God did make humans in his own image and to read the faces of others is to establish a
face-to-face encounter with this divine presence: “How does the present, though
concealed Deity speak, in his human countenance, with a thousand tongues! How does he
reveal himself by an eternal variety of impulse, emotion, and action, as in a magical
mirror” (2).106 In the Fragments, when Lavater speaks of God speaking through the face,
he literally means that God speaks by means of the human countenance. Lavater goes
beyond simply positing a theory of physiognomy that compares it to reading; a theory is
developed in these fragments that the face, rather than merely being a kind of book-to-beread, is a speaking object, active in “reading” the other. As a theory, the face-as-book
seems to anticipate Wordsworth’s theory of a new poetic language in his “Preface” to
Lyrical Ballads:
Wit alone creates the physiognomical language; a language, at present,
so unspeakably poor. No one who is not inexhaustibly copious in language
can become a physiognomist; and the highest possible copiousness is poor,
comparatively with the wants of physiognomy. All that language can express,
the physiognomist must be able to express. He must be the creator of a new
language, which must be equally precise and alluring, natural and intelligible.
All the productions of art, taste, and mind; all vocabularies of all nations, all the
kingdoms of nature, must obey his command, must supply his necessities. (66)
106
Rivers provides a good walkthrough of the various linkages between Lavater and 20th-century semiotics.
Christopher Rivers, Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux, Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and
Zola (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994).
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The physiognomist needs to not only create a “physiognomical language” with “wit,” but
to possess all the vocabularies of every nation to merge with this wit, even though, as
Lavater says, all languages are as yet not copious enough to begin to approach the
universal nature of physiognomy. Not only that, but the physiognomist must bend all the
“kingdoms of nature” to her will and create a new language that can handle it.
Nevertheless, despite the apparent omniscience required by a physiognomist, Lavater
frames the face of nature as metonymic: “study all, neglect no part of the countenance.
Each trait contains the whole character of man, as, in the smallest works of God, the
character of the Deity is contained. God can create nothing which is not divine” (145).
Lavater envisions both a totality of the world enblematized in each particle of the world
and at the same time an Esperanto-like language that, when combined with the one who
possesses all the languages of all the nations, can then read all of nature and create a
different, newer language that can trace God in each trait of the face. The reference to
God indicates that Lavater wants to return through the Babel of language to a
prelapsarian language, one where Adam commands not only language, the only language,
the language of God, but commands, too, all of nature. That each trait of the face, as each
of work God, contains the whole of nature additionally suggests the contradictory notion
that the book of nature is contained whole and complete on every page of itself. Reading
one part of nature reads the whole.
But if the physiognomist possesses all the languages of the world and is on her
way to creating a new one that can match the full sweep of its mandate (that is, account
for everything), then why is this new language needed at all, especially if it is the case
that every part of nature contains the whole? The answer is that figurative language, for
Lavater as for Wordsworth, poses a threat to our understanding: “figurative language is
dangerous, when discoursing on the soul,” even as he follows this realization with
another: “yet, how can we discourse on it otherwise?” (214). His realization of this
problematic feature of language extends to his conception of physiognomy as a moral
clearing-house. He says proof of physiognomy “is the number of physiognomical terms
to be found, in all languages, and among all nations” (34). Nor can he specify these
terms, because, as he goes on to say, to do so would require a separate treatise on morals
that would expand on humankind’s knowledge of language. The danger of figurative
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language then is that it leads human beings astray, into the thickets of nonphysiognomical
talk, that is, an amoral wilderness of falsehood and lapsed values. But, as he says, “words
and images are but a still grosser kind of flesh and spirit” (56). Paradoxically, then,
reading the face, where God himself rests, means reading a moral as well: the sagging
flesh of a word, like the sagging flesh of the face that it is reading, can only be read
proleptically, by a language not yet invented, otherwise physiognomy will simply
produce a text of amoral sinfulness. Since words and images are a version of flesh and
spirit—the objects of study for a physiognomist—then physiognomy is also an
explication of verbal language. According to Lavater’s theory, then, the word is made
flesh in the world, in the word itself, but also in flesh, in the book the word is trying to
read. Reading the face is therefore a kind of past perfect, a having-been-written. The
word corresponds to that which it wants to read. The word is the book itself, the face. The
word is the world.
In other words, when Lavater describes the “the thoughtful brow, the penetrating
eye, the spirit-breathing lips, the deep intelligence of the assembled features! How they
all conspiring speak!,” he is not blindly speaking as if the signs of the face actually
provide a readable language that the interpreter, in this case the good physiognomist, can
then relate. As language and physiognomy are ineluctably twined within the fretworks of
figurative language, that is, unable to avoid the pitfalls of, say, metaphor that marks
analogues between dissimilar things (as in Shelley’s Defence), the physigonomist, like
any language-user, cannot accurately translate these readable signs into language using
the language they have (equally, he says no mimesis is possible in painting the human
face). It follows then that if the word is the world then no comment, no word, no world, is
therefore as yet possible. Hence, a new language must somehow be invented, one that is
not the same as the world it is trying to read. In this, physiognomy not only establishes a
form of antiquated philosophical beliefs, it also establishes itself as fundamentally a
progressive belief in a utopian world: not only is it a past perfect but a gerundive (in the
Latin sense), a kind of book-to-be-written. And if this is the case then all of the languages
in the world, in all the kingdoms of the world, cannot adequately express the signs read
on the book of the face, nor can the soul and the basic moral tenets of humankind be
uncovered and fulfilled. Therefore, although he asserts that in every microscopic bit of
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nature the whole can be found, this discovery is something that can happen, one day
sometime soon perhaps, but not in the now of the present because language is too
figurative, too unstable, to read this other language. The face, the mirror of the face of
God, is a closed book. To find the soul, to find God, to find God’s law, morality, and
justice, one needs what is forever inaccessible, the language of God.
As part of this contradictory thesis, Lavater claims that the language of the face is
dissimulative. According to Lavater the goal of the physiognomist’s reading should be to
limn the true face, the one indicative of the character of human beings. At the same time,
in Lavater’s work, a phantasmal-like face surfaces in his physiognomical studies that
presents a challenge to his own theory of physiognomy. Although as seen above, the face
is God, word, and world, the face also resists any comprehensive reading of itself. It does
so not only because language fails, but because there are fixed features of the face and
mobile features. Lavater declares that, “I have employed my attention more on the firm,
defined, and definable parts of the human physiognomy, than on the moveable,
momentary, and accidental. The greater part of physiognomists speak only of the
passions, or rather of the exterior signs of the passions, and the expression of them in the
muscles. But these exterior signs are only transient circumstances which are easily
discoverable” (lxxxiii-lxxxiv). Fortunately, however, “only the moveable features are
within the influence of dissimulation; the real countenance, or the basis of those features,
is beyond its powers” (lxxxv ). Nevertheless, “In the study of physiognomy, it cannot be
too much inculcated...that dispositions...the solid and flexible parts, the prominent and
fugitive traits must be most accurately distinguished, if we would form an accurate
judgment on the human countenance” (113). Lavater seems to want to maintain two
things simultaneously: on one hand, only the firm, stable features, what he calls the true
face, behind any dissimulation or passion, should be studied; on the other, the only way
to be accurate is to study the flexible features of the face. Apparently studying the latter
ensures that your study of the former, in which you avoid studying the latter, is correct.
The tension between these two parts of the face seems to re-mark the above semiotic
problems that knot language and the face into an indistinguishable ball: the flexible parts
of the face must be distinguished from the stable parts, but it is only the stable parts that
are the true face. At the same time these flexible parts, the parts expressing passion, must
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be known in order to be accurate: “be their dissimulation what it may, passion will,
frequently, for a moment, snatch off the mask, and give us a glance, or at least, a side
view, of their true form” (51). In Lavater’s theory, it is as if the stable parts of the face,
the inanimate parts, are not merely human, but Godly, whereas the animate parts, animate
as in the human parts, are both human and inhuman, what obscures the real face, the
human, even as they are the human parts, the parts that are animate and that express life
through passion. The dissimulating parts of the face dissimulate. The face is a mask that
masks the face.
In Lavater’s work it is humans’ ability to dissimulate in this fashion, to hide at
once, language, God, world, and face, that distinguishes humans from animals. Animals,
he is careful to note, do not have the ability to change their faces; they have no passion,
no ability to dissimulate dissimulation. Animals, in contrast to humans, are truthful
creatures, open and frank in their expressions. From his work, it follows, therefore, that in
discovering a universal morality imbued within the natural world, humans must turn to
animals. This is because humans, in their inability to see the soul in the face, to read this
language or to speak of it, to untangle word and world, are incapable of seeing God, of
seeing justice. Any ethical choice is permanently undermined and denied by and to
humans because of this dissimulating dissimulation that masks their face, their shame and
moral choices. It follows therefore that the physiognomical language that must be
created, ironically, is the language of animals, the language associated with the passions,
the animal spirits in the human, the only language that is beyond human language, the
only language that cannot be a vocal human language. Therefore it must be the only
language left that can express, with honesty, the face. Classically, from Descartes to
Locke, distinctions between humans and animals have always claimed this language rift
as a defining difference. But in the work of Lavater, it is animals that provide the key
interpretive tool needed to understand the human. When he begins to read portraits of
humans in his Fragments, he does so by describing which parts of the face exude which
type of animal feature. The absolutely other, the animals who possess no language,
supply the only language that can read the face, the word and the world. This is why, I’d
like to argue, that only fragments can be offered, fragments that cannot take account of
all the kingdoms, even all of the animal kingdoms, in the world. Because, according to
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Lavater, to take account of, to take stock of, to evaluate, to analyze everything, would
mean to offer a version of the infinite, of God, the presence in everything. In this
eighteenth-century account of facial distinctions, physiognomy, and its attendant
speciestist implications, is thus a call of a language not-yet, a call from an infinity so vast
as to be uncontrollable, a call, perhaps, from an other with no voice, a face, as yet,
without a face. As Lavater puts its, “For now we see the glory of man, through a glass,
darkly; soon we shall see face to face” (40). Such a proleptic fantistatical account would
indeed amount to the Book of Nature being written on every page of itself. There is
something very obviously Shandean about this schema—it appears contradictorily
nonsensical.
Shandeism, as defined by Tristram in Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), is a code of
values where the nonsensical, what he calls “the hobbyhorsical,” dictates not only the
terms of life but its continued vitality. “True Shandeism,” Tristram declares, “opens the
heart and lungs, and like all those other affections which partake of its nature, it forces
the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely thro’ its channels, and makes the
wheel of life run long and chearfully round.”107 The opening peroration of the novel
encapsulates how crucial human genealogy is in Shandeism, even as it announces the
guarantee of that genealogy’s contamination by the “animal spirits” pervading it.
Tristram says,
you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused
from father to son, &c. &c.—and a great deal to that purpose:—Well, you may
take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense, his
successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity,
and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once
set a-going, whether right or wrong, 'tis not a half-penny matter,—away they go
cluttering like hey-go mad. (1-2)
These first pages of the novel focus on the transfer of the homunculus (in Latin, “little
man”) that “consists as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves,
107
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, The Florida Edition of the Works of
Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New & Joan New, (Gainesville: Florida UP, 1978), 401.
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cartilages, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals, humours, and articulations” (1). But
the reference to the “animals spirits” above, and throughout this passage, commingles the
little man enclosed in Tristram’s father’s semen with this other, non-human, presence that
“goes hand in hand with the Homunculus” (2). The animal spirits in fact are charged
with the task of escorting the homunculus “safe to the place destined for his reception”
(2). For Tristram, and for his father, Walter Shandy, the deviation of the animal spirits
frames the whole plot of Tristram’s life, and, for this reason, is why Tristram frames his
life’s narrative in this fashion. If Shandeism, though, forces the flow of blood and
continues life, then Shandeism is itself the ebb and flow of animal spirits. Without the
animal spirits managing the homunculus’s passage into the world not only Tristram, but
Shandeism in general, gets waylaid, just like the little man on his way into the womb.
The responsibility of the animal spirits in eighteenth-century discourse are to animate the
passions rather than the imagination. They are, in other words, also distinctively aligned
with the emotions, with the excitation of feelings associated with sentimentality, rather
than with the imaginative province of sympathy’s intellectual calculation to rationalize
fellow feelings between human beings.
Henry Mackenzie, years after writing The Man of Feeling, denounced the
sentimental novel his book had helped popularize, writing that sentimental fiction
manifested a “separation of conscience from feeling,” and thus downplaying the role of
benevolence as a progressive ideology governing ethical conduct among the newly
founded middle-class readership.108 Thomas Keymer, more recently, has argued that A
Sentimental Journey “fails, or refuses, to sustain any clear distinction between
sentimental sincerity and Shandean satire.”109 But as I have shown in my reading of
Lavater and Sterne, the novel does distinguish Shandeism from sentimental sincerity,
replacing it with a sympathetic ethical mode that demands readers pay attention to their
own responses to other creatures in the world just as the Shandean physiognomy of
Lavater invokes the non-human face as the guiding force of ethics. Donald Wehrs, in his
essay on Sterne, spotlights how Emmanual Levinas’s work helps understand this critical
108
Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger 20 June (1785), reprinted in The Man of Feeling, ed. Maureen Harkin (Toronto:
Broadview, 2005), 195.
109
Thomas Keymer, “A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling,” The Cambridge Companion to Laurence
Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, 79-94.
74
dimension of Sterne’s ethics.110 Levinas locates the face as the site of ethical priority, one
that makes as its first demand that thou shalt not kill.111 The face, in other words,
overrides existential insecurity and ontic skepticism about the value of the individual life.
What Levinas fails to account for, though, is the face of the non-human other: he says
explicitly that he does not know if such a creature has a face.112 The upshot of my
Lavaterian explication of Sterne is that it helps fill in the blank spaces of Levinas’s
ethical project with the blank spots of Sterne’s Shandeism. Just as for Lavater, where the
voiceless language of animal faces animate human faces and lives, so it is for the ethics
of Shandeism (which precedes and proceeds Levianas): the non-human claims
responsibility for guiding human life even if humans refuse to face this remarkable and
surprising truth.
110
Donald R. Wehrs, “Levinas and Sterne: From the Ethics of the Face to the Aesthetics of
Unrepresentability,” Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 311-330.
111
Emmaneul Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
UP, 2008).
112
Levinas claims he does not know if an animal has a face in an interview at Cerisy in 1986 with John
Llewelyn. John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmatic Reading of Responsibility in the
Neighborhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 65.
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Chapter 3
Jane Austen’s Frankenstein
The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be
stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of
solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on
writing, a critique of Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparté, or anything that would
form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and
epigrammatism of the general style.
Jane Austen, Letters
Of all the definitively modern contradictions issued forth in the Romantic era, one
of the more conspicuous is the simultaneous realization of the country-house romance in
the hands of Jane Austen and the invention of a genre (or, indeed of a work that seems to
altogether defy genre) that stages the interruption of such neat heteronormative
narratives.113 While Austen’s novels marry realism and romance in their focus on the
manners and mating habits of the rural gentry, the creaturely existentialism of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein would seem to offer a frontal assault on the ideals of pacific
domesticity. Although Shelley’s creature—termed “an abhorred monster” by those who
encounter him—threatens to disrupt the ordered stability of English life guaranteed in the
113
Few crtitics have read Austen and Shelley as in conversation with each other. Mary Poovey does read
Austen and Shelley together, arguing that “Austen did concern herself with many of ths same issues as
Wollstonecraft and Shelley—with the process of a young girl’s maturation, for example, and, more important,
with the complex relationship between a woman’s desires and the imperatives of propriety” (172). The Proper
Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 172-207. Poovey, in fact, reads Lady Susan’s energy as the same as the energy
of Shelley’s “monster” (174). More recently Clara Tuite has written the first study of Austen’s place in
Romantic traditions. Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2002). The classic work of feminist literary criticism by Gilbert and Gubar also finds commonalities between
Austen and Shelley as part of a longer feminist tradition of writing that challenges the typical patriarchical
canon of Romanticism and literature in general. Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic:
The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2d. ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000).
76
marriage plots of Austen, Frankenstein ultimately insists on this same paradigm.114 The
creature, whose non-identity as a pre-socialized being initially opens up a space of
narrative possibility, comes to be regarded as a social pariah, threatening the norms of
human reproduction. However, the novel forecloses this threat when Victor Frankenstein
prevents the creature from attaining connubial bliss and the procreation of a new species.
In this chapter I argue that Shelley’s insistence on these heteronormative
protocols may be understood in the context of biopolitics, the emergence of which
Foucault identifies as the defining legacy of the Enlightenment. Foucault describes
biopower as a “set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the
human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of
power.”115 Classically, power was defined in terms of negation, a right to take life.
Biopower as it appears in the Enlightenment is a form of modern social authority that
regulates, and even supports, the generation of life. An “excess of biopower appears,”
says Foucault, “when it becomes possible . . . to create living matter, to build the monster,
and, ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally
destructive.”116 Shelley’s creature signals this excess of biopolitical creativity, even as,
pace Jacques Derrida, the auto-immune structure—the destruction of life in the pursuit of
its advancement—of this monstrous generation simultaneously closes the possibility of
species difference it opens up.117 By contrast, Austen’s world mobilizes the exclusionary
mechanisms of species preservation, in the process introducing the unlooked-for presence
of the monstrous other into that world’s gene pool. In my reading of these two novels,
published within half a decade of each other, I place species distinction within the
114
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 2012). All
references to this edition.
115
Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978 (New York: Vintage,
2009), 6.
116
Michel Foucault, Society must be Defended (New York: Vintage, 1997), 254.
117
Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,”
Philosophy in a Time of Terror, eds. Giovanni Borradori (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 85-136. “Faith and
Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone’,” Acts of Religion (London:
Routledge, 2002), 40-101.
77
discourses of gendered and sexual identity.118 Such categories, I argue, invoke species
difference as common exclusionary ground. In doing so, I highlight how what Niklas
Luhmann calls a “closed social system” accesses the non-human to maintain control over
conditions of identity and personhood.119 It is precisely through its referential contact
with these non-human species systems external to it that such a closed system can
constantly recuperate its own internal order. Despite surface appearances to the contrary,
on my reading, Frankenstein turns out to be a novel about protecting normative
institutions whereas Pride and Prejudice turns out to disclose the non-human conceptual
origins of human social networks that threaten to, and do, upend the social order.
As I show in my first chapter, concerns about the reproduction of the human
species—biologically, conceptually, figuratively, and politically—structure prevailing
Enlightenment theories of imaginative sympathy. Frankenstein itself is animated by these
same concerns, as the frame story defines “romantic” as a quest for sympathy with
someone like you, someone of the same species. The polar explorer, Captain Walton,
proffers this definition with a specifically homosocial valence.120 “You may deem me
romantic,” he writes to his sister, but “I desire the company of a man who could
sympathize with me” (10). Walton’s statement illustrates how sympathy’s initial
condition is the search for the same. Shelley’s novel rests on the same specular economy
required for sympathy and its production of the dueling speciesist insistence on
homogeneity and heterogeneity.
118
I am adding species to the discourse on monstrosity as well. For Jeffrey Cohen, the monster is primarily a
way of framing difference: “Any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (and constructed through) the
monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic,
sexual” (7). Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Monster Theory: Reading Theory, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 3-25. Mary Poovey reads the monster in the novel as an analogue for
the contrasting imperatives Shelley felt toward defying normative conventionality and adhering to standards of
what Poovey calls the “proper lady.” Poovey, “ ‘My Hideous Progeny’: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of
Romanticism,” PMLA 95 (1980): 332-347. Poovey builds on Ellen Moers, who read Frankenstein as Shelley’s
dramatization of her own autobiographical birthing travails. Her work is credited with initiating feminist
readings of the novel. Moers, “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,” Literary Women (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1976).
119
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996).
120
James Holt McGavran, “Science, Gender and Otherness in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kenneth Branagh’s
Film Adaptaion,” European Romantic Review 9:2 (1998): 253-270. James Holt McGavran, “Insurmountable
Barriers to Our Union: Homosocial Male Bonding, Homosexual Panic, and Death on the Ice in Frankenstein,”
European Romantic Review 11: 1 (2000): 46-67. Michael Eberle-Sinatra, “Readings of Homosexuality in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Four Film Adaptations,” Gothic Studies 7: 2 (2005): 185-202.
78
Upon going to Ingolstadt to study, Victor fearfully reflects that he “had ever been
surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavoring to bestow
mutual pleasure” but, he tells us, “I was now alone” (26). Such seclusion has, he says,
“given me invincible repugnance to new countenances,” leading him to dwell on “‘old
familiar faces’”(26). One can see the divergence in Victor’s reaction to his two new
teachers at Ingolstadt. On the one hand, Victor’s response to M. Krempe signals the
violent prejudice of speciesism: he had “a repulsive countenance” which “therefore, did
not prepossess me in favour of his doctrine” (27). M. Waldman, on the other hand, “was
very unlike his colleague…with an aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence” (27). It
is something of a surprise then to learn that Waldman’s benevolent countenance helps
recuperate Krempe’s “repulsive physiognomy” and establishes Krempe, too, as a member
of the species, until we consider that Waldmen’s face recalls to Victor the essential
humanness of Krempe’s, linking them as similar as members of the human species
beyond the relative aesthetic differences of their faces. But the example shows that
repulsive faces clearly do repulse Victor, making it no less surprising that when he begins
studying the “Science of anatomy” he does so by announcing that “one of the
phenaenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the
human frame, and indeed, any animal endued with life” (30). His aversion to repulsive
frames seems to have ruled out the inclination to undergo this program of study. But
although Krempe’s reconciliation as a member of the species helps lead Victor to his
work, and hence to his eventual project to create a living being, Victor’s study of the
science of anatomy does not prepare him to receive his creature with the same
recognition he grants to Krempe.
This is because Frankenstein discovers sympathy’s limits in dissimilarity, the
deformed physicality of the creature’s form, his disfigured visage and ill-proportioned
frame.121 On that “dreary night in November” when the creature is first animated, Victor
finds himself “unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created” and “rushed out of
the room (35-36).” Later in the novel Victor will describe “the deformity of its aspect” as
121
Thomas Dutoit reads the face as primary to the novel’s ethics. Dutoit, “Re-specting the Face as the Moral
(of) Fiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” MLN 109: 5 (1994): 847-871. Sara Guyer’s reading of the novel
follows Dutoit in seeing prosopopoeia as the key to the ethical dilemmas posed by the creature. Sara Guyer,
“Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein,” Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007).
79
“more hideous than belongs to humanity.” Victor, of course, abandons the creature
shortly thereafter his creation, an action that—taken in tandem with his assertion that he
was interested in the anatomy of all humans, whom he considers animals “endued with
life”—suggests that the creature is neither human nor animal despite being formed from
the scraps of graveyards and butcher’s remains. Victor explicitly outlines his intentions in
speciesist terms, claiming, “a new species would bless me as its creator and source,” a
species that, as Peter Brooks suggests, “cannot be placed in any of the taxonomic
schemes devised by the human mind to understand and to order nature” (32).122 And the
way the specular economy plays out during Victor and the creature’s conversation in the
cave confirms this: “I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but
when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked…I could not
sympathise with him” (99-100). Indeed, prior to hearing the tale, Victor commands the
creature to “relieve me from the sight of your detested form” (67). In response, the
creature “placed his hated hands before his eyes, which I [Victor] flung from me with
violence” (67). The creature will later describe his own “odious and loathsome person” as
“ineffaceable,” which Victor confirms in being unable to look at him, even when the
creature physically tries to efface himself by covering his face. In a moment paradigmatic
of the whole specular facial economy of the novel, M. Krempe, referring to Victor,
claims that “if he is not soon pulled down, we shall all be out of countenance,” signaling
how for humans, effacement is theoretically possible (42). The creature’s form, unlike the
repulsive form of Krempe, cannot be effaced because, not being human, it is selfevidently something else, the other species Victor intended. And the creature knows it,
telling Victor to either “grant me thy compassion…or become the scourge of your fellowcreatures” (67).
It is the creature’s face, then, that marks him as excluded from the face-to-face
economy of imaginative sympathy. The creature had long before discovered what he calls
122
In his reading that contrasts the verbal to the visual in the novel, Peters Brooks writes that the monster is
“that which cannot be placed in any of the taxonomic schemes devised by the human mind to understand and
to order nature. It exceeds the very basis of classification, language itself: it is an excess of signification, a
strange byproduct or leftover of the process of making meaning.” “A monster may also be that which eludes
gender definition.” Brooks, “What is a Monster (According to Frankenstein)?”Body Work: Objects of Desire in
Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 199-220, 218-220.
80
“the fatal effects of this miserable deformity,” which is why he seeks to overcome the
species prejudices that facial form maintains by forging a relationship with the blind old
man, De Lacey. Having learned of “rank, descent, and blood,” and “division of property,”
the creature is “induced to turn towards myself” (one might say he learns the lessons of
Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations) (70). At this point
he begins to wonder “and what was I?” Having closely watched the “angelic
countenances” of cottagers near a hovel where he hides, he contrasts it to his own
“hideously deformed and loathsome” figure which leads him to a very speciesist
conclusion: “I was not even of the same nature as man” (71). “Was I then a monster, a
blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” he asks (71).
As he says, he “had sagacity enough to discover that the unnatural hideousness of my
person was the chief object of horror with those who had formerly beheld me” (89). This
realization of both the physical difference of himself and the speciesist difference that
separates him from human society impel him to a daring plan: to avoid the specular
economy that produces such prejudices in the first place. Hence, he waits until the old
blind man who lives in the cottage is alone and ventures upon a fictionalized version of
his own story, positioning himself as a gentle creature in search of affection which in
effect disguises him. De Lacey, a kindly man, informs him that “when unprejudiced by
any obvious self-interest,” humans are kind beings “full of brotherly love and charity”
(90). In response the creature shrewdly details how this is exactly the problem since “a
fatal prejudice clouds” the eyes of the family he wishes to be a part of that leads them to
“behold only a detestable monster” rather than the true character of the loving friend (90).
Precisely as the creature desires, De Lacey’s blindness does not cloud his judgment since
he cannot “judge of your countenance” and instead judges the sincerity of his words. De
Lacey is able to judge what he perceives to be the creature’s inner character, his
benevolence and worth without looking at his face. But despite the removal of the
speciesist facial prejudice, De Lacey’s final words revert back to this specular prejudice
as he says he is in “any way serviceable to a human creature” (91). “I trust that, by your
aid,” the creature says, “I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your
fellow-creatures” (91). Once De Lacey’s fellow cottagers see the creature, though, their
sight restores the exclusionary mechanism of sympathy (“my protectors had departed,
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and had broken the only link that held me to the world” [93]). The creature finds that his
fundamental difference, written on the surface of his face, is “ineffaceable.”
At this point in the novel the creature ends his tale on Mont Blanc and gives
Frankenstein this choice: sympathize with him and make him a mate or prepare for the
annihilation of the human race. Curiously, the creature, having come to the realization
that he cannot cross the species barrier, remains couched in the humanist mode “of the
only school in which I had studied human nature,” the books he managed to read while in
his hovel beside the cottage (87). It is at this time that he “read of men concerned in
public affairs, governing or massacring their species” (87). His reaction to “finding
myself unsympathised with” is “to spread havoc and destruction around me” and he does
indeed, destroying the cottage and dancing a jig around it (92). Such passions, likewise,
lead him to declare “everlasting war against the species” of humans, particularly his
creator (92). The idea of sympathy, even after he finds himself unsympathized with,
continues to direct him, and his humanistic education propels him, naturally, to similar
thoughts and actions as he read of humans committing atrocities against each other, the
massacring of one’s own species. Thinking in terms of extinction means thinking in terms
of species—otherwise there are no parameters for anything being extinct—to begin with
and in this sense the creature recommits himself to the very doctrines he is at that
moment disavowing. Unless the creature can evade the closure of this frame of reference,
the boundaries of humanist conceptualizations, he will remain bound in this logic, unable
to elide the divisions inscribed in the social sphere by sympathy.
The creature’s failure to achieve interspecies affection simultaneously leads him
to an altogether different route: to avoid the extinction of himself and to perpetuate his
own species. Although the creature wishes to “become linked to the chain of existence
and events, from which I am now excluded," he himself has realized “the human senses
are insurmountable barriers to our union” (100, 98). He demands that Victor fulfill his
newfound desire: "You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the
interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being” (101). But, rather than
breaking with the Enlightenment postulates of speciesist sympathy, the creature actually
remains firmly wedded to the initial quest that Walton announces as the main plot of the
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novel: the search for a similar mate who can sympathize with him. At the same time the
creature ruptures the bonds of this discourse. Although the creature again invokes the
necessity of sympathy and society for his well being, he does so in terms that begin to
understand the contours of sympathy’s exclusionary calculation. In other words, the
creature can now see what he could not see before, his own face and the face of others,
the whole specular economy of the system. Thus, he specifies his needs in similar terms:
“one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion
must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create" (97).
The creature’s desire for a mate anticpates Foucault’s reading concerning the
excess of life reproducing: the proliferation of the monster, or the virus, that exceeds
human control. This reproduction of the excess that has been produced is the autopoietic
function of biopower, when excess life takes on life of its own. During their confrontation
on Mont Blanc, Frankenstein, though unable to sympathize with him, agrees to harness
his creative abilities on the creature’s behalf: “I thought, that as I could not sympathize
with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was
yet in my power to bestow” (103). This second act of creation confronts Frankenstein
with the biopolitical implications of his actions:
I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike
ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate,
and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit
the neighborhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she,
who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might
refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate
each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might
he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the
female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of
man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh
provocation of being deserted by one of his own species. (118)
As the creature finds his own deformity disagreeable, Frankenstein reasons that two
creatures, when confronted by each other, may find the other hideous leading to “the
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fresh provocation of” the creature’s “being deserted by one of his own species.” Even
worse, to his terror, Frankenstein thinks that “one of the first results of those sympathies
for which the daemon thirsted would be children… who might make the very existence of
the species of man a condition precarious” (119). In the creature’s case, his need for
sympathy directs his potential to reproduce. Sympathy therefore impels autopoiesis, that
is, for the creature, who represents the excess of life, to create life. Frankenstein’s
realization of this potentially annihilative effect of the creature’s reproductive power
forces him to destroy the second creature before he completes it.123 At the same time,
Frankenstein’s inability to sympathize with the creature also reveals how sympathy’s
work is to curb, or even destroy, the excess of life made possible by the
instrumentalization of the reproduction of human life. Indeed, this destruction of the
possibility of reproduction renders the creature, this excess created by biopower,
biopolitically inert. This is why, in the novel’s final paragraph, the creature simply
vanishes into darkness, no longer a representation of sympathy’s possible reorientation to
non-human life: “he was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and
distance” (161). But in his penultimate speech before he is swallowed in the dark of the
arctic night, the creature offers a romantic eulogy for the Enlightenment promises implied
for non-humans: “No sympathy may I ever find” (159). In the world of Frankenstein, the
creature threatens the established order of society, but because he cannot find sympathy,
the relational contact with another similar mate, his species cannot create anything,
cannot engage in the act of autopoiesis, the continuance of his own frame of selfreference. Established order is recuperated and the continuance of the human species is
no longer “a condition precarious” as the potential threat represented by the creature gets
nullified. The monster has been built, but in the process, his existence reinforces the
normative procedures of human society.
As in Frankenstein, where the dialectic of normalcy and deformity governs life in
toto, the basic motor of sympathy, the recognition of physical likeness and the exclusion
of dissimilar forms, also powers the courtship rituals of Pride and Prejudice. What
123
Anne K. Mellor reads Victor’s destruction of the female as his support for “a patriarchal denial of the value
of women and sexuality.” Mellor, “”Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein,” Romanticism and Feminism,
ed. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), 220.
84
differentiates Austen from Shelley is Pride and Prejudice’s insistence on enacting the
audacious paradaisical finis proposed by the creature: the novel installs each character in
their proper place at novel’s end, protected from other beings who are unlike them.
Whereas in Frankenstein external features directly control species differentiation, in
Austen species form dictates how internal character is understood. These sympathetic
boundaries have the effect of socially contractualizing humanity as a closed social system
composed of appropriately positioned genetic human pairs.124 In this sense, Pride and
Prejudice implicates its lovesick courters in a proto-eugenic comedy where love depends
on biology rather than station—this is why all the characters, in defiance of conventions,
marry outside their stations. Lady Catherine de Bourgh summarizes this nicely in her
description of Darcy and her daughter’s intended marriage: “ ‘my daughter and my
nephew are formed for each other. They are descended on the maternal side, from the
same noble line; and, on the father’s, from respectable, honourable, and ancient, though
untitled families’” (232).125 If one thinks of each of the characters in the novel as the
creature, looking for sympathetic affiliation, and the subsequent seclusion they achieve
from those unlike them, then the novel’s romance no longer appears to be a matter of
achieving symmetrical alliances based on passionate inclination. These alliances are
based, rather, on invisible traits—discerned by reading the visible countenance—that
emphasize deformity and normalcy and allegorize species. It is in Pride and Prejudice
124
Although is it unknown what Austen read beyond the novels and poetry she mentions, several recent works
have argued for the influence of Enlightenment discourse on her work. Austen, of course, in her famous letter
to J.S. Clarke, librarian to the Prince Regent, who suggested she might write a novel about a clergyman, claimed
she knew little of such things: “of science and philosophy…I know nothing. A classical education, or at any
rate, a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite
indispensible for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be,
with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.”
Although she undoubtedly did not have a classical education, Austen’s facetitousness in this letter precludes
taking it at face value. Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (New York: Oxford UP, 1995),
125. Karen Valihora charts the influence of Hume and Smith in separate chapters. Valihora, Austen’s Oughts:
Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury (Newark: U pf Delaware P, 2010). Knox-Shaw finds echoes of Smith’s A
Theory of Moral Sentiments in both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the
Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). See also: Peter Knox-Shaw, “Philosophy,” Jane Austen in
Context, ed. Janet Todd, The Cambridge Eidition of the Works of Jane Austen, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2005), 346-356. Kenneth Moler finds the same Smithian influence in Austen’s work. Moler, “The Bennet
Girls and Adam Smith on Vanity and Pride,” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 567-569.
125
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray (New York: Norton, 2001). All citations taken from this
edition.
85
where we can hear the creature’s last imploration toward his maker in its full force: “Let
me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing” (99). Just as the creature can
never see anyone sympathizing with him because the specular nature of sympathy
forestalls the non-human form as an excitation to sympathize, so the characters of Jane
Austen’s novel will strive to see that they, too, in an inversion of that paradigm, excite
sympathy with someone whose nature resembles theirs. Austen’s novel performs
differently than Frankenstein, though, in that the exclusionary mechanisms in it also
prove inclusive, as physical form brings together like people, even while it creates
different species of human beings. The operational closure of the social world actually
opens society outward to that which it must constantly recuperate its own borders from:
the presence of the monstrous, only in Pride and Prejudice, unlike in Frankenstein, the
monsters are construed as non-humans in human shape.
The need for sympathetic identification enforces, and is enforced by, species
boundaries, and these boundaries override class confines in Pride and Prejudice. When
the novel first introduces Darcy at a Derbyshire ball, “his fine, tall person, handsome
features, noble mien, and the report, which was in general circulation within five minutes
after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year” draw the attention of the room (7).
Although his moneyed estate would, one might think, define his social standing, his
impassive façade—which we later learn is due to his social awkwardness—lead the
company to mark him as proud with “a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance” (7).
Henceforth, his wealth, though it intimidates, is overpowered by this reading of his face,
in contrast to the character of Wickham who is always described as having an amiable
countenance. Class, in other words, draws lines of social stratification, but, as with
Elizabeth’s initial attraction to the fine features of the impoverished Mr. Wickam,
external form, and its purported relation to character, renders class of secondary
importance (“his appearance was greatly in his favour; he had all the best part of beauty,
a fine countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address” [49]). Darcy, for his part,
when he first sees Elizabeth, describes her as “not handsome enough to tempt me” (9).
His surface reading of her, as he comes to learn, does her no justice, and he eventually
sees in her face a lively wit and sparkling mind, one formed by a good deal of reading,
exactly his main prerequisite for an exemplary mate.
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All of the people in the novel are committed to the study of character, which
informs the face-to-face economies of the novel. According to the OED “character” can
mean “to stamp or engrave”; “the aggregate of distinctive features of any kind of thing”;
“the face or features as betokening moral qualities”; and, in eighteenth-century natural
history, “one of the distinguishing features of a species.” Discovering someone’s
character is at the heart of the country-house romance:
‘Your plan is a good one,’ replied Elizabeth, ‘where nothing is in question but the
desire of being well married; and if I were determined to get a rich husband, or
any husband, I dare say I should adopt it. But these are not Jane's feelings; she is
not acting by design. As yet, she cannot even be certain of the degree of her own
regard, nor of its reasonableness. She has known him only a fortnight. She danced
four dances with him at Meryton; she saw him one morning at his own house, and
has since dined in company with him four times. This is not quite enough to make
her understand his character.’ (16)
According to Elizabeth if the character of the other cannot be accurately understood then
marriage will only be based on social standing, or on wealth, or simply on women’s need
to find a secure position if they have few prospects. However, as Elizabeth reads the
social space around her, coming to grips with character allows for people like her sister,
Jane, who wishes to marry someone like her, to discover a corresponding mate. Charlotte
Lucas, of course, proceeds to disagree with this argument in a declaration contradictory
to the main aim of the book, that is, to show how like species mate with like species:
‘if the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so
similar before-hand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always
continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation;
and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom
you are to pass your life’ (16).
Her statement thus affirms, by inversion, that romance in the novel depends on
discovering likeness in the other person. The novel is at great pains to disprove the
argument Charlotte makes in this passage, as all of the characters who marry are “similar
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before-hand” which, for those whom the novel classes as moral exemplars, does advance
their felicity. For others, like Wickham and Lydia, also similar beforehand, their felicity
is not advanced but precisely because they are alike in the fragility of their domestic
dispositions: mutual regard for one another is only a surface affair for them, a byproduct
of their shallow natures. In this sense, what the characters find out throughout the novel
by marrying and mating are exactly these defects Charlotte believes will surface but
instead become inert by correct pairing. And, indeed, Charlotte does not heed her own
advice as we see when Elizabeth visits her: she knows exactly what Mr. Collins’s defects
are and knew them beforehand.
In one of the liveliest exchanges in the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy conceptualize
defects in character as a form of innate human corruption, even as the scene establishes
how their defects prompt them toward understanding each other without them even
realizing it. On Elizabeth’s part she jestingly (though she appears to actually believe it)
remarks that she is "perfectly convinced by it [that is, her examination of Mr. Darcy] that
Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise" (39). Elizabeth’s use of
the word “disguise” pivots back to the idea of character as it relates to the face, a disguise
being used to shield one’s features. Darcy’s face, though, remains unshielded, allowing
for Elizabeth’s examination of it and her conclusion that he has no defects; if he had worn
a disguise, this implies, his defects may have been hidden from her powers of
penetration. But Darcy rejects this formulation, and claims his share of defects: “I cannot
forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself.
My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would
perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost is lost for ever” (39). Elizabeth is
shocked by this defect, describing “implacable resentment” as “a shade in a character”
(39). What is being suggested here is that every character harbors a defect that cannot be
easily understood as it is but a shade; to echo Shelley in his Defence, the shadow to the
substance. For Darcy these shades dapple "every disposition” as “a tendency to some
particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome" (40).
Every character features an innate tendency toward a moral or normative irregularity that
cannot be regulated, even by education, which, to Darcy, presumably means reading a
great deal of books. For her part Elizabeth does not question Darcy’s assertion but
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accedes to it, demonstrating how alike Elizabeth and Darcy are in their characters. They
are alike because of their understanding of their defects:
Elizabeth: ‘And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.’
Darcy: ‘And yours’…‘is willfully to misunderstand them.’ (40)
But there is a great deal of understanding in their misunderstanding, for what they agree
on is that innate defects in character do exist and should be explicated—just as they try to
do in this discourse, despite the fact that each believes the other has failed. This mutual
failure points again to their similarity in that they even fail in the same way concerning
the same subject: understanding the other. In other words, the scene’s sutble irony resides
in the unspoken conclusion that they do perfectly understand each other to the extent that
they understand their misunderstandings. And, ironically enough, this mutual
understanding will guide them throughout the rest of the novel as they work to alleviate
these misunderstandings by explicating each other’s understanding of their own perfectly
misunderstood character.
The famous letter scene reveals how the circumvolutions of Elizabeth and
Darcy’s reading of countenance and character are tied to the novel’s conception of
romantic misconception.126 Their initial sight of each other, before Darcy gives her his
letter, establishes this: she fears she will meet him and turns into a different walk—only
to be confronted by his shape! As he comes nearer to her he also comes into focus: “but
the person who advanced was now near enough to see her, and stepping forward with
eagerness, pronounced her name” (129). Darcy claims he wrote the letter explicitly
because of character: “the effort which the formation, and perusal of this letter must
occasion, should have been spared, had not my character required it to be written and
read” (129). Here Darcy reveals that his ability to read character has created all of the
problems: “But I shall scruple to assert, that the serenity of your sister’s countenance and
air was such, as might have given the most acute observer, a conviction that, however
amiable her temper, her heart was not likely to be easily touched” (130). Later in the
126
Ashely Tauchert has recently suggested that romance in the novel “resists definitive closure,” remaining a
fluid concept. Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen: Narrative, Realism, and the Possibility of a Happy Ending (New York:
Palgrave Macmillion, 2005), xi.
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novel, Darcy will again observe Jane in Bingley’s presence and take a more accurate
sounding of her face (or so he claims), but his initial interpretation leads him to suspect
her of being indifferent to Bingley which in turn impels him to break off the engagement
by sharing this knowledge with Bingley. But at this point, Darcy is as poor a reader as
Elizabeth herself, who, when reading about Wickham, fails to realize her mistake.
Wickham’s face immediately brokers his social position: “as to his real character, had
information been in her power, she had never felt a wish of enquiring. His countenance,
voice, and manner, had established him at once in the possession of every virtue” (135).
Now, while reading Darcy’s letter, Elizabeth “could see him instantly before her, in every
charm of air and address; but she could remember no more substantial good than the
general approbation of the neighborhood, and the regard which his social powers had
gained him in the mess” (136). In imagining a virtual copy of Wickham before her,
Elizabeth now studies his face with new knowledge, signaling that a turn has occurred in
the novel. That the means of making Elizabeth and Darcy accurate readers should turn on
re-reading Wickham’s countenance is ironic, but indicative of how the novel itself
backgrounds physiognomy as its foundational base—you have to read it accurately to see
it.127 Having now called up Wickham’s form and looked again, the recuperative process
of the novel’s central romance begins for Elizabeth; we learn later, in the cumulative
scene between Elizabeth and Darcy when he returns to Netherfeld, that it had already
begun for Darcy.
After Lady Catherine de Bourgh confronts Elizabeth late in the novel, and
Elizabth rejects her claims—“you have widely mistaken my character, if you think I can
be worked on by such persuasions as these”—Darcy arrives at the Bennetts’ home shortly
thereafter with Mr. Bingley, spurred on by this mistake (233). Elizabeth’s response to
127
My reading thus repudiates Charlotte Bronte’s notorious dismissal of Austen: “No glance of a bright, vivid
physiognomy” can be found in Austen’s work, only “an accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace
face.” Bronte elaborates on this by saying that Austen is only concerned with the superficial outer surface of a
person, not their inner charater: “Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human
eyes, mouth, hands, and feet; what sees deeply, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what
throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the
sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores” (quoted in Wilshite 2). Wiltshire situates the body as the
locus of anxieties about health in Austen’s novels. This anxiety, he argues, obscures social and gender politics.
He does not deal with Pride and Prejudice though. Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: ‘The Picutre of Health’
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992).
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Lady Catherine, he says, “taught me to hope” (239). But in this crucial scene, Elizabeth
and Darcy both understand each other, having learned to read each other from their faceto-face confrontations. Elizabeth says to him, “yes, you know enough of my frankness to
believe me capable of that. After abusing you so abominably to your face, I could have
no scruple in abusing you to all your relations.” Darcy, for his part, remains haunted by
this past conversation, particularly his tone and language:
The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions
during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful
to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘had you behaved in a
more gentleman-like manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can
scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me,—though it was some time, I
confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice. (239)
Yet it is not only Elizabeth’s words that sting Darcy but her facial expression: “You
thought me then devoid of every proper feeling, I am sure you did. The turn of your
countenance I shall never forget, as you said that I could not have addressed you in any
possible way, that would induce you to accept me” (239-240). Darcy here follows the
classical logic of tropology to link together apostrophe and prosopopoeia. Elizabeth, who
he thinks saw him as “devoid of every proper feeling,” is thus, in addressing him,
apostrophizing what she sees as a non-human creature, one with different emotions and
mentality. Nevertheless her words are tantamount to her countenance which impresses
itself upon Darcy’s mind too as his address to Elizabeth might as well be an apostrophe to
a non-human object because he does not, as yet, see her as similar to himself.
Apostrophe, in the study of tropology, has long been linked to prosopopoeia, with
apostrophe defined as the address of prosopopoeia, itself a way of giving voice to nonhuman subjects by ventriloquizing someone other than the speaker. In this sense, Darcy
and Elizabeth here both address the other as if they belong to a different species of
creature and their subsequent facial expressions manifest the differentiation. The turn of
Elizabeth’s countenance thus begins Darcy’s journey of reconsidering his character and
offering new facial expressions to Elizabeth later in the novel that relate his matured
feelings.
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Character is implicitly tied to the face as exemplified in two conversations that
reveal the novel’s physiognomical architecture and the ethical stakes of that architecture.
In the first, Mr. Bingley describes himself as “easily seen through,” to which Elizabeth
responds, “it does not necessarily follow that a deep, intricate character is more or less
estimable than such a one as yours" (29). The reference to seeing through his façade
suggests, in accord with the work of the eighteenth-century physiognomist Johann
Lavater, that external form transparently reflects the inner nature of a person. We learn
from this conversation that, as Bingley says, Elizabeth is “a studier of character” (29).
But more than simply a student, Elizabeth is also a composer of character as, in the novel,
to study character entails a creative act: ascribing meaning to the face of the other. The
metaphorical language on display between Darcy and Elizabeth during their dance at the
Netherfeld ball equates this study with the visual culture of portraiture:
‘I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds,’ [Elizabeth says],
‘We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition…’
‘This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,’ said he.
‘How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say.—You think it a faithful
portrait undoubtedly.’ (63)
Elizabeth proceeds to question Darcy, provoking him to ask, “to what these questions
tend?” “Merely to the illustration of your character,” she says (64). Darcy’s response,
asking her “not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear
that the performance would reflect no credit on either,” indicates the clear creative
impulses crucial to the interpretation of facial economies (64). But Elizabeth discounts
this because she wants to “take his likeness” now (64). The dance allows her this
opportunity because they are, literally, face-to-face. The reference to his “likeness”
emphasizes the similitude between his external and internal form that Elizabeth wishes to
produce in her “sketch.” That her study of his face requires her to perform—she who
never performs to strangers!—amounts to a tacit acknowledgement that reading the face
is an active art, one that imparts characteristics to the object of inquiry in the act of
explicating them. Because studying character is interactive, it thus incorporates the
interpreters into social networks and places ethical obligations on them, for it is the
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accuracy, or inaccuracy, of these interpretations that guide their responses to others in
this network.
But it is the later portrait scene at Pemberly that fully invokes the speciesist aspect
of this facial economy, for it is here that Elizabeth and Darcy understand their
compatibility as a mating couple. When the housekeeper gives Elizabeth and her aunt and
uncle, the Gardiners, a tour of Pemberly, the portrait of Darcy “arrested her—and she
beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she
remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her” (162). Because another
artist created this portrait, Elizabeth’s interpretive abilities are not evident here; rather,
this illustration rouses her imagination and she feels “a more gentle sensation towards the
original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance” (162). The
housekeeper, meanwhile, busily provides them with details of Darcy that are “favourable
to his character” (162). And yet, surprisingly, it isn’t the social generosity of Darcy that
convinces Elizabeth of his goodness and attracts her, but rather his form, as the famously
strange syntax in this scene makes clear (what Susan Fraiman calls “the self-consciously
strange” description): “Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was
favourable to his character, and as she stood before the canvas, on which he was
represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper
sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and
softened its impropriety of expression” (162)128 Suddenly, the syntax twists, and the
image on the canvas attains agency, as the Darcy-representation “fixed his eyes upon
herself,” as if form exceeds “every idea brought forward by the housekeeper.”
Immediately following this virtual encounter, physical reality mirrors it as Darcy and
Elizabeth come face-to-face in the yard: “They were within twenty yards of each other,
and so abrupt was his appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight. Their eyes
128
Fraiman reads this scene as further evidence of Elizabeth’s surrender to the paternal sway of Darcy: “As
with Darcy’s letter, which seizes the female reader and turns her into the object of its force and her own hatred,
here is another striking inversion—one that by flipping the idiom sets up the moment as a problem, making the
reader pause and consider. The result, I would say, is once more to phrase Elizabeth’s humiliating loss of pride
as an awkward disordering, to defmailiarize the clichés of female development.” Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming
Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), 85.
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instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush. He started,
and seemed for a moment immovable from surprise…” (163). Darcy is “immovable,”
like the portrait, but also starts, an involuntary jerk that signals this meeting’s important
disruption of Darcy’s inscrutable façade and signals, too, that true facial recognition of
character is now possible. Previous to this, Elizabeth, in characterizing Darcy, “had
supposed him to be despising his fellow-creatures in general” but then found he was
capable, as she puts it, “of descending to…inhumanity,” a description that suggests she
viewed him as another species entirely (55). But in this scene Elizabeth and Darcy have
sketched each other’s likeness at last, and the two blush in accord, a figural example that
indicates their ardent passion as corresponding mates. Henceforth in the novel, they share
the same unity of understanding, with Elizabeth believing her aunt and uncle to have
“entirely mistaken his character,” by which she means they have failed to accurately read
his face.
Elizabeth is finally able to sympathize with Darcy, to place herself in his place
and outside of her own kinship networks, to which, the novel now makes clear, she does
not belong. As Nina Auerbach argues, there is a prevailing anti-familial strain in the
novel—both Jane and Elizabeth, for instance, are evacuated from their familial life of
folly because they are ill-suited to it whereas Lydia remains wedded to it.129 Indeed, in
the rearrangement of characters into fitting marriages in Pride and Prejudice, traditional
bloodlines and the marriage alliances that sustain them take on new contours because
forging a marriage alliance, as it turns out, requires accurately reading the face of the
other to discover someone of the same species, someone with a similar character. These
are not marriages between strangers then, but marriages based on the intimate familiarity
bred by the likeness of external form and its supposed correspondence to internal form.
This is why, as Tara Ghoshal Wallace has observed, while there is seemingly
independent narrative verification of Darcy’s verisimilitude in his account of events
regarding Wickham in his letter to Elizabeth, this verification is undercut by the
narrative’s contrived sense of closure.130 Evidence given on his behalf comes in the form
of his rhetoric, from his servants, and from his confidants. Darcy’s miraculous-seeming
129
130
Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978), 39-42.
Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 57-58.
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change in manners is made manifest only after the face-to-face identificatory moment in
the yard because the prevailing concerns of species likeness, the similitude of human
form, have been fulfilled. The novel accustoms us, in other words, to view some
characters, like Mr. Collins and Mr. Wickham, as monsters, as deformed in some way,
the former as an unregenerate blatherskite, the latter as an amoral degenerate, while it
meanwhile presents Darcy and Elizabeth as proper human beings. However, because the
novel works by the exclusionary methods of sympathy, every character is, in effect, made
a monster, a different species, once the characters have been satisfactorily established
with their appropriate mates when other dissimilar forms—Wickham’s, for example—
have been established with theirs. The characters are thus able to continue on their
lineage by breeding with those like them.
Darcy and Elizabeth’s removal from the world of their fellow creatures
demonstrates the biopolitical agendas moving on and under the surface of moneyed
country life: what a person is as a biologically legible body, how that body relates to
other bodies in social network spheres, and where, exactly, such a body belongs in a
world where biorhythms unite through processes of exclusion and division. According to
Frankenstein, social networks founded on speciesist sympathy create and reinforce
exclusionary methods. This same epistemic speciesism is the crucial axiomatic at work in
the country-gentry systems of social life in Pride and Prejudice as Darcy and Elizabeth’s
secluded paradise mirrors the never-never land envisioned by the creature and his
fantasized female mate. Darcy and Elizabeth’s seclusion illustrates the autoimmune
structure of society, the ways in which the most routine matters of life, like courtship,
implement divisionary partitions that enact the continuance of life by buffering human
subjects from differences that exceed societal parameters, thereby defending the social
order from monstrous others who operate within society from outside of those normative
social structures. For it is the exclusion of these monstrous others from a given social
circle that provide the boundaries that must be maintained.
In Niklas Luhmann’s terms this is a closed social system, a system that runs only
according to its own internal protocols and filters out dangerous malware that can disrupt
it. But for Luhmann a closed system also requires this filtration process—an openness to
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what is outside the system and can potentially corrupt it—as necessary for the system to
maintain its closure. Since a system always runs up against its boundaries, it is always,
therefore, exposed to what lies outside of it and this exposure saturates that system with
other systems outside of it. In essence, a closed system needs Michel Serres’s “parasite”
to constantly retrofit its protective boundaries from the penetration of the very other that
allows for this retrofit.131 Contrary to Foucault, then, an excess of biopower has always
been in evidence in the sense that defining “the human” has always entailed an
operational speciesist closure—a process that defines who and what counts as a social
subject—involving non-human life and those humans regarded as non-human monsters.
Indeed, the Austen-Shelley imaginary identifies how the frictional speciesist limits of
sympathy both conserves the concept of the human from radical otherness—as in
Frankenstein—even while its margins situate the non-human at the heart of this
concept—as in Pride and Prejudice.
Defamiliarizing gender relations as a form of operational closure in Pride and
Prejudice also helps make sense of the great conundrum of Austen’s novels: whether her
matchless irony has a concrete ethical and political texture or is merely Austen’s way of
gently satirizing her own contemporary gentry social circle. For Marvin Mudrick, who set
the tone for much of the scholarship that would follow him, Austen’s irony allowed her to
distance herself from the sociopolitical entanglements of her time and evade taking a
stand on any issue.132 More recently, however, Austen has been read by Marilyn Butler
and Alistair Duckworth as a conservative who uses the happy resolution of the marriage
plot in her novels to reinforce the Tory patriarchical Anti-Jacobin ideology of her time.
Contrastingly, Mary Poovey and Claudia Johnson see her as an ironist so subtle and
superb as to be paradoxically using the marriage plot to undermine the resolutions of her
own novels as a political protest to gender inequality.133 Austen’s novel does, in fact,
131
Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007).
Mudrick’s work owes much to D. W. Harding’s influential evaluation of Austen as hating the society she
lived in and satirizing it to distance herself from it. Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1952). D. W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” Scrutiny 8
(March 1940), 346-362.
132
133
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Alistair Duckworth, The
Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971). Claudia L.
Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and, the Novel (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1988). Poovey, The Proper Lady and the
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react to the authoritarian patriarchical and class divisions that have long been under
assault since the revolutions in society in the late eighteenth century. Mary Poovey is
right then that the novel exposes the tensions between patriarchical hierarchy and
individual liberty but wrong in that it does not resolve them.134 It does—by nullifying
patriarchal hierarchy. Although the entail—that which confers the property on the oldest
living male descendent to perpetuate a patrilineal line—on the Bennet estate remains at
novel’s end, Austen’s novel, in its refusal to abide by traditional patriarchal alliances, in
effect, breaks the entail. Thus the novel dramatizes how species likeness, when yoked to
genomics, can override social convetions that fail to contain this biohazardous material.
By allowing her characters to find their identical other within and outside of the bounds
of propriety and convention, Austen envisions a society structured by the inclusion of
contaminating pollutants.
Austen’s arrangement of the future foregrounds this feature of her work. As
Bharat Tandon has pointed out, Austen appears, unlike other novelists, to offer little in
the way of foretelling about what will happen to her characters once her novels end, but
in actuality Austen’s artistry lies in precisely her ambiguous evasion of proleptic
foretelling that closes her novels.135 This ambiguity opens the closed circuit of the novel
to future contingency—we don’t know what will happen because the characters lead lives
of such conviction and liveliness that it is certain things will happen, things that cannot be
neatly predicted. Elizabeth and Darcy’s tranquil life at Pemberly is, after all, an exploding
of the conservative myth of marriage: Elizabeth’s teasing of Darcy, the “liberties” she
takes with him, prove shocking to Darcy’s sister, Miss Darcy, because they are, in fact,
shocking in that time and place, and this diruptiveness signals the unknowable future of
Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1984).
134
135
Poovey, 205.
Bharat Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 171.
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their marriage as it fails to conform to normative versions of conservative married, gentry
life.136 Elizabeth has much still to teach.
But so does the Elizabeth (Victor’s fiancée) of Frankenstein. “Men,” she says,
“appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood” (61). Elizabeth’s comment
reflects how men, and by extension the women they involve in their marriage plots, take
on monstrous dimensions in their pursuit of not only knowledge but also the happiness of
domesticity. For in the marriage plots of Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice, at the
biological and conceptual level, species organizations inscribe violence within any
human relation. Species distinctions, in other words, make monsters of all humankind as
it engages us in vampiric acts that expose the limits of our humanity to ourselves. Indeed,
Austen’s incorporation of the discourse of species distinctions as vital to marriage
alliances, and Shelley’s vision of non-human species alliances, suggest a crisis in the
Romantic period concerning the vitality of the concept of “the human.” What Elizabeth’s
comment in Frankenstein, and the entrenchment of the non-human within human social
systems in Elizabeth’s circumscribed world in Pride and Prejudice, both illuminate is
that humans are not, in fact, wholly human, a distinct species. Even more importantly,
when juxtaposed to Mary Shelley’s redirection of sympathy towards the creature, these
novels teach us that what is ontologically non-human is not necessarily inhuman whereas
what is human can be. Taking seriously Austen’s famous comment in her letters, that
Pride and Prejudice “is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling” and needs “a
contrast,” by placing it as the monstrous other to Frankenstein ultimately reveals that we
can be a species if we want, but only at the cost of being the monsters we think we
aren’t.137
136
Donald Greene first pointed out that their marriage was bound to betray conventional conservative notions
of the marriage plot. Greene, “The Myth of Limitation,” A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on
Why We Read Jane Austen, ed. Susannah Carson (New York: Random, 2009), 213-223.
137
Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (New York: Oxford UP, 1995).
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Chapter 4
Lord Byron’s Chains: Species and Being in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
“What are men compared to skies and mountains?”
Elizabeth Bennet
Pride and Prejudice
“I wish I could leave off eating altogether,” Byron memorably complains in his
journal of 1813.138 Throughout his life Byron obsessed over his weight, often following a
coarse diet of biscuits and soda water, an attempt to maintain the trim figure of his youth.
Unlike his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron’s dalliances with vegetarianism—the
Pythagorean diet, as it was known—appear to stem from his well-known fear of
corpulence rather than sympathy with animal life. Yet, Byron’s feelings toward animals
were clearly vexed. Writing on Sunday, March 20th, 1814, he recounts a visit from the
one-time Lord Chancellor, Thomas Erskine, who had introduced animal welfare
legislation in the House of Lords.139 While the subject of the conversation turned on
Erskine’s war writing, the visit, as Byron reports, dislodged a memory of an altogether
different sort:
The last bird I ever fired at was an eaglet, on the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto,
near Vostitza. It was only wounded, and I tried to save it, the eye was so bright;
but it pined, and died in a few days; and I never did since, and never will, attempt
the death of another bird. I wonder what put these two things into my head just
now?140
138
Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol. 3, Ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973), 237.
Erskine introduced the first bill for the prevention of the cruelty to animals in 1809, with the help of fellow
anti-slavery advocate, William Wilberforce. Over the next 30 years more bills were introduced to prevent
cruelty to cattle, bulls, cats, and dogs. Sentiment on the issue reached some kind of summit in 1824 with the
founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
140
Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol 3. ed. Leslie A. Marchand, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973), 253.
139
99
As this journal entry indicates, and as G. Wilson Knight demonstrated long ago, on a
personal level, Byron loved animals and in some way his guilt-ridden ruminations on the
killing of the eaglet can simply be read as an experiential outgrowth of these associative
affections.141 His love for his dog Boatswain, for instance, is now famous,
commemorated in his poem, “Inscription on a Newfoundland Dog,” where Byron
describes him as the only friend he ever knew and who was later buried, at Byron’s
express command, in the family vault at Newstead where Byron himself wished to be
buried.142 An incredulous Percy Bysshe Shelley later completes this picture of Byron’s
love of animals, detailing the astonishing menagerie Byron had accumulated at his villa
in Ravenna. Shelley counted “two monkeys, five cats, eight dogs, and ten horses,” and
later amended this recital with greater astonishment upon meeting “on the grand staircase
five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.”143 Years after this staircase
encounter, and after Shelley’s tragic death, Byron’s relationship to his menagerie is
complicated still further, during his move from Pisa to Genoa in 1822, as he takes
particular care to bring three caged geese, which he planned to eat on Michaelmas Day,
only to later refuse to order their slaughter “‘to test the theory of their longevity.’”144
But compared to Shelley, whose radical politics did extend to non-human life,
Byron appears to be a poor candidate as an animal advocate. As Timothy Morton has
shown, Shelley’s love for animals subtended his vegetarianism, which he viewed as an
expression of, and means to, the inculcation of radical political action.145 Byron’s own
diet, as mentioned above, owes more to his fear of corpulence and hatred of food in
general. In a letter to his friend Hobhouse, following his tour of Europe in 1811, Byron
reveals he has “left off animal food,” and on the boat home orders a vegetarian larder be
prepared for him by his mother at Newstead: he later conflates his loathing of society
141
G. Wilson Knight, Lord Byron: Christian Virtues (London: Routledge, 1953).
Christine Kenyon-Jones also focuses on Byron’s relationship to animals, noting the influence of Lord
Rochester’s “Satire on Reason and Mankind”—wherein the speaker claims he’d rather be an animal—on
Byron, as well as offering a reading of Byron’s poem on the Newfoundland. Kindred Brutes: Animals in RomanticPeriod Writing (New York: Ashgate, 2001).
143
Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, (New York: New York Review of Books, 1994), 684-685.
142
144
145
Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography, vol. 3 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 1034.
Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994).
100
with his diet in several letters to Lady Milbanke, his closest confidant.146 Eventually,
though, Byron returned to eating animals only to occasionally go back to a vegetable diet,
remaining typically indeterminate about it throughout his life and never fully acceding to
Shelley’s view on this (or any other) matter.147
I’ve detailed Byron’s vacillations on animals and eating them to emphasize how
his puzzlement in his journal about why he suddenly recalls the dead eaglet after meeting
Erskine—who seems to have functioned as an unconscious symbol for animal welfare—
beyond displaying certain biographical ambiguities in Byron’s character, also illustrates
the confusion that feelings for animals can generate. On the one hand, Byron, identifying
with the bright eye of the bird, resolves to never undertake this sport again. On the other
hand, Erskine’s visit seems to induce him to unconsciously suppress the far more
uncomfortable subject of animal welfare legislation. Byron’s conflicted attitude reminds
us not only that sympathizing with animals remains an affective problem during the
Romantic era but that non-human subjectivity and autonomy also became topics of
prolonged debate and often-censorious derision and moral outrage.148 As in Coleridge’s
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” where ambivalence trumps ethical certainty, Byron’s
146
For the letter to Hobhouse see: Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol 2. ed. Leslie A. Marchand
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973), 42. To his mother he writes on June 11th of that year: “I must inform you that
for a long time I have been restricted to an entire vegetable diet neither fish or flesh coming within my regime,
so I expect a powerful stock of potatoes, greens, & biscuit, I drink no wine” (51). For Milbanke, see his letter
on page 131 of the same volume.
147
In a letter to William Barnes on February 9th 1820, written while Byron was living at Ravenna and had just
completed Cantos IV and V of Don Juan, he says, “Ay! And you will find us eating flesh too, like yourself or any
other cannibcal, except it be upon Fridays.” Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol 7., ed. Leslie A.
Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977), 39.
148
Emily A. Bernhard Jackson’s new comprehensive study argues that Byron had a deep familiarity with
Scottish Enlightenment thought (already evident in his letters) and that he develops his own skeptical
philosophy. The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty (New York: Palgrave, 2010). I
am not suggesting, however, that Byron knew and was influenced by Smith’s thinking on sympathy, as he
almost certainly had not read Smith. But, as Jackson is quick to note, if we follow Hobhouse’s reaction to
Byron’s list of Enlightenment thinkers he had read, then it is equally possible he never read any of them either:
“Certainly he did not read these books.” He qualified this statement later: “As Lord Byron says he read these
volumes I am inclined to believe the fact, but it is certain he never gave any sign of this knowledge afterward.”
Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, vol. I (New York: Knopf, 1957), 85. Jackson, following Gavin Budge,
convincingly shows that Byron, as well as other Romantic writers, were cognizant of the writings and ideas of
these authors independent of any actual deep reading experience. Budge. “Introduction: Empiricism,
Romanticism, and the Politics of Common Sense,” Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense,
1780-1830, ed. Gavin Budge (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2007), 11-39.
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real-life bewilderment reflects a deep uncertainty about the status of the non-human in
the late Romantic period.
In fact, since Jerome McGann reignited critical interest in Byron, his work has
most often been read as decidedly humanist, as a poetic attempt to figure out what it
means to be an emotionally complex human full of contradictory and paradoxical
passions, impulses, and desires.149 This account captures the character of the Byronic
hero as initially presented by Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), the
Oriental tales (1812-1818), and Manfred (1817).150 In these works the Byronic hero is
established as a brooding misanthrope, guilt-stricken about some non-specific act (though
it’s more than hinted in Manfred that incest with his half-sister Augustsa is one of these
acts) but who nevertheless possesses a noble and valiant, though bleeding, heart.151 All of
these heroes are usually represented as doomed, with Manfred’s suicide the pinnacle, and
paradoxical nadir, of the hero’s potential. For all his personal concern with animals, then,
his poetry would appear to be oriented around the conceptual emotional strains that
animate the human heart. Similarly, the scholarly tradition has long read Byron as “antiromantic” in that Byron, unlike Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, does not seem to
concern himself at all with the restorative epiphanies made possible by a communal
relationship with, and love for, the non-human natural world. Byron simply seems to be
obsessed with Byron, either in the form of his own thinly-veiled heroes or, later, in the
149
Byron writes in another letter that he has a “love of contradiction and paradox” (173). Lord Byron, Byron’s
Letters and Journals, vol 3., ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974), 194. Jerome J. McGann,
Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968), 36. Prior to, and even after, McGann’s
book, the influential dominant readings of 60’s-era Romantic scholars like M.H. Abrams and Harold Bloom
often neglected Byron altogether, or read him as irrelevant to the stories they were telling about the formation
of the Romantic imagination, the Romantic individual, and the Romantic genius. Abrams does not mention
Byron at all in his book Natural Supernaturalism. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). See the famous essays in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in
Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970).
150
Peter L. Thorslev long ago charted out the many ways in which the Byronic hero differed from other heroes
and villains before and after: the reading public always felt sympathy for Byron’s characters no matter how
morally bankrupt they appeared. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1962). In
Byron’s own time, William Hazlitt, writing in the May 2, 1818 edition of Yellow Dwarf, also noted that Byron,
through his heroes, “calls upon us to sympathize with his grief and despair” (132). Byron: The Critical Heritage,
ed. Andrew Rutherford (New York: Barnes &Noble, 1970).
151
I take the phrasing from Matthew Arnold’s now-famous description of Byron in his awkward lines from
“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”: “What helps it now/ that Byron bore/ with haughty scorn which
mocked the smart/ through Europe to the Aetolian shore/ the pageant of his bleeding heart?” (133-136).
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seriocomic voice of the speaker of Don Juan condemning the cant of contemporary
morals, society, and political factions. In contradistinction to this tradition, in this chapter
I read Byron’s Childe Harold to show how this Byronic concern for the self
counterintuitively presents an ethical prioritization of the non-human because the primary
goal of the Byronic hero is to revise the human as non-human.
In arguing this, my reading of Childe Harold intervenes in idealist-materialist
ecocritical debates concerning Romantic poetry. Onno Oerlemans and Noah Heringman
have shown how materialist thinking stemming from Epicurus and his disciple Lucretius
have colored strains of Enlightenment and Romantic thought.152 Earlier Romantic
ecocritics, such as Jonathan Bate and James McKusick, stressed, in contrast, the idealistic
aspects of Romantic writing that they saw as envisioning a transcendent, fundamentally
objective, Nature, influential in modern environmentalism’s preoccupations with
preserving the natural world.153 Byron, no stranger to the work of Epicurus and Lucretius,
conceives a “fleshly chain” (III, 72, 685) of creatures in Childe Harold that echoes the
materialism of the above critical stances, but differs dramatically from the then-prevalent
belief in the Medieval hierarchical scala naturae, or “Great Chain of Being.”154
Materialists such as Lucretius, in his de rerum natura, saw the universe as essentially
atomistic, composed of millions of random atoms that “swerved” in space and time (what
he called clinamen).155 Lucretius took this “swerve” to be indicative of human free will,
152
Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2005). Noah Heringman,
Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010).
153
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). James McKusick, Green Writing:
Romanticism and Ecology (New York: Palgrave, 2000).
154
As Arthur O. Lovejoy says, this concept of the world, fraught with frissions as it is, takes hold more
strongly in the eighteeth century than in the classical thought of Plato from which it originated. Lovejoy, The
Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper, 1936.) Throughout his letters Byron
speaks of his admiration for Epicurus and Lucretius (the former known, of course, through the work of the
latter), often quoting passages from memory. See Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. I, ed. Leslie A. Marchand
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973), 216; Vol. 3, 188, 210; Vol. 6, 67; Vol. 7, 192, 200; Vol. 11, 126.
155
Lucretius, de rerum natura, trans. William Ellery Leonard (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2008). Harold’s love is
even characterized by an allusion to Lucretius in Canto I:
Oh! Many a time, and oft, had Harold lov’d,
Or dream’d he lov’d, since Rapture is a dream;
But now his wayward bosom was unmov’d,
For not yet had he drunk of Lethe’s stream;
And lately had he learn’d with truth to deem
Love has no gift so grateful as his wings:
How fair, how young, how soft soe’er he seem,
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even as he understood the material world to influence human beings.156 As Timothy
Morton puts it, Nature was not something “over there,” as it is in Bate and McKusick’s
formulation of Romantic writing, but rather right here, up close, quite messily covering
and covered by everything.157 Byron, in tune with this Lucretian perspective, sees Nature
as delocalized and not fundamentally transcendent or sublime. In contrast to the scala
naturae view, then, in Childe Harold, humans and animals are not placed in a top-down
hierarchy that enforces classical humanist ideas or classic interpretations of Romantic
writers as interested in Nature as the means of transcending the circumscribed limitations
of human life. Although he crosses “Earth’s central line” to escape the “earthly things” he
could find no delight in, Byron’s journey ends with his realization that he is “a link” in
this chain of earthly things (I, 2, 16; I, 11, 99).158 The fleshly chain, for Byron, is
horizontal rather than vertical. Byron, in short, offers a rethinking of “life” itself. What
I’m arguing then, in the poem’s terms, is that if the reader is left to divine “the moral of
his strain,” while Harold bears “the pain,” then this non-speciesist redefinition of life is
the moral to Childe Harold (IV, 86, 1673-4).159
As I mention above, although it may seem strange to read Byron’s Childe Harold
as a poem interested in non-human life given the speaker’s obsessive interest in himself
and his use of the ravaged battlegrounds of Europe and Asia Minor as the reflective
mirror of his soul, the text itself sets this orientation up from the outset. Nevertheless, in
spite of Timothy Morton’s recent reading of Byron as an eco-poet of sorts, it remains
uncommon in Romantic criticism to see Byron holding a compelling interest in the
natural world, with traditional criticism reading him simply as the suffering misanthrope
Full from the fount of Joy’s delicions springs
Some bitter o’er the flowers its bubbling venom flings. (I, 82, 810-818).
The final lines are an allusion to de rerum natura, IV, 1133-1134: “medio de fonte leporum/ surgit amari aliquid quod in
ipsis floribus angat.” These lines are among Byron’s favorite to quote in his letters. Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol.
6, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976), 67.
156
Although Lucretius based his system on the work of Epicurus, very little of Epicurus’s work remains extant.
John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
157
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007) and The Ecological Thought
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009).
158
Although Cantos I and II are ostensibly about Harold, I follow Byron in dropping this distinction. As Byron
explains in the introduction to Canto IV: “…it was in vain that I asserted, and imagined, that I had drawn, a
distinction between the author and the pilgrim…I determined to abandon it altogether.” (122)
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in The Complete Poetical Works, vol. II, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1980). All subsequent references are to this edition.
159
104
of Childe Harold and his post-divorce scandal, or the satirical speaker of his picaresque
Don Juan.160 Childe Harold, of course, invites such readings with the mournful,
disconsolate Byron spelling out his feelings of contempt for humankind very clearly early
on in the poem, seeming to mark this contempt, and Byron’s broken heart, as the
prevailing themes of the poem rather than any direct concern for nature. We are famously
told as the poem opens that “None did love him…the heartless parasites,” a line signaling
Byron’s rejection from society, which he characterizes as a type of virus seeking to
invade his host body (I, 9, 76). Later in the first Canto, in his song, “To Inez,” Byron
sings of a lover: “I’ve known the worst” but says “do not ask” what that worst is “nor
venture to unmask/ Man’s heart, and view the Hell that’s there” (I, 8-9, 868-872). A
bleak picture, yet one complicated, surprisingly, by the poem’s attentions to non-human
life. Byron also thinks, rather more favorably than he does about humans, about animals
in the initial stanzas of the poem: “perchance my dog will whine in vain/ till fed by
stranger hands/ but long ere I come back again/ he’d tear me where he stands” (I, 9, 186189). Although pitched in ironic tones, the speaker clearly also regrets that his absence
will sever ties between him and his faithful dog (all of which echoes Byron’s own
fondness for Boatswain). Nevertheless, the poem still looks as if its primary concern is
Byron’s own trip across the continent and his emotional responses to what he sees.
But this preoccupation with the self largely seems evident because of the poem’s
thematic preoccupations. Childe Harold, the poem that, upon its publication in 1812, as
Byron says, made him famous overnight, is written as a travelogue, charting Byron’s
actual journey across Spain, Portugal, Albania, and Greece against the backdrop of the
Peninsular War and the Napoleonic Wars. According to Jerome McGann, Byron’s
Nor, indeed, is such a view wholly new, since it comports with certain historical views that read his work as
anti-humanist in orientation. Byron’s fellow poets Southey, Lamb, and Wordsworth had all righteously attacked
him from humanist positions for the misanthropy they claimed manifested an anti-humanist position: they
argued, in short, that he was a base and wicked individual who wished to devalue human morals. Even Goethe,
one of Byron’s biggest fans, partially agreed with this position, judging the later Don Juan “a work of boundless
genius, manifesting the bitterest and most savage hatred of humanity, and then again penetrated with the
deepest and the tenderest love for mankind.” Andrew Rutherford supplies the relevant letters from all of them
in his Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (New York: Barnes &Noble, 1970), 266-267. Morton’s
reading appears in the important collection, Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies. Morton suggests that Byron can be
read as an ecological writer whose ambivalent attitudes toward nature are expressive of an ecological thought
prepared to deal with the problems of environmental thinking rather than a simpler picture of an ideal Nature.
Morton, “Byron’s Manfred and Ecocritism” in Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies, ed. Jane Stabler (New York:
Palgrave, 2007), 155-170.
160
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originality in his revision of the travelogue form, besides his choice of geographical areas
to write about, is that “he finds, when he flees to other lands and in particular to the
fabulous Levantine seat of western culture, that his own personal anomie, experienced in
the tight little island of Britain, mirrors the condition of Europe (or, in Byron’s startling
and important variation on this ancient topos, that Europe and the entire world mirrors his
personal condition).”161 Byron’s “startling” revision of this topos thus makes negotiating
the poem difficult since at every point at least two layers of meaning are present, each of
which requires an understanding of the other layer to make sense. Therefore Byron’s
many critiques of war throughout the first two cantos not only mount an attack on the
meaninglessness of the last decade of British and European history, but also suggest that,
in some way, the pointlessness that has guided these countries in war has subsumed souls
like Byron to the point that disentangling the threads of a single life from the threads of
the telos of history proves contradictory. In other words, Byron pits the individual human
life against the stirring, incomprehensible contingencies of history to reveal how social
life in the Regency era has been transformed such that even the very land, sky, and sea
that Byron traverses no longer rests apart from the social sphere of humans but is rather
inescapably entwined with it. The poem is not simply a travelogue nor is it simply a
poetic account of Byron’s own lovelorn, melancholic emotional state during his 18101811 voyage (when he wrote the poem); rather, the poem serves as an intricate
investigation of the problems of being human at the ontological level as unseen historical
forces disrupt daily life at the bodily level of sensation and affect.162 This is why
throughout the poem human agency becomes blurred with non-human natural formations.
The disruption of the prevailing mores of human life is most clearly seen at the
end of Canto I during the famous bullfight scene in Cadiz, in which the speaker of the
161
McGann, “The Book of Byron and the Book of a World,” Byron’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Alice Levine (New
York: Norton, 2010), 828-854, 818.
162
This is not to say that Byron is consciously revising eighteenth-century tropes of sensibility and sentiment.
As he himself argues, “The word ‘sensibility,’ is “always my aversion.” Later on, in a burst of bitterness toward
what he perceived to be predominant English and European attitudes, he will even say that he wrote Don Juan
partially as an antidote to the sentimentality suffusing cultural mores and transcontinental literature. Byron’s
Letters and Journals, vol. II, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973), 217. For the latter claim,
see Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography, vol.II (New York: Knopf, 1957), 913.
106
poem identifies not with the cheering crowd watching the spectacle, but with the
wounded bull. In this scene, Byron depicts the human observers as barely-there
presences, invisible for the most part, while the very visible bull centers the action and
attention. The speaker appears to share a good deal of sympathy with the “lord of lowing
herds” (I, 74, 741). The use of the word “herds” here contrasts the milling herds of
humankind who are cheering wildly as the bull is being cut and chased by the matadors:
“Slowly he falls, amidst triumphant cries” (I, 79, 784). This set piece is the longest in the
whole poem, amounting to 10 full stanzas, and is given this much space because it is one
of the most important moments in the development of Byron’s burgeoning ethical
awareness during this pilgrimage. The crowds around the bullring are packed as “the
lists are oped,” while “thousands on thousands piled are seated round” and “no vacant
space for lated wight is found” (I, 72, 720-724).
Byron’s language here is noticeably different than in the rest of the poem, taking
on an urgency that matches the speed of the bullfight. He incorporate colons and
semicolons frequently to pause and restart the action, paralleling the stops and starts of
the bull as he runs forward and retrenches:
Sudden he stops; his eye is fixed: away,
Away, thou heedless boy! prepare the spear;
Now is thy time to perish, or display
The skill that yet may check his mad career.
With well-timed croupe the nimble coursers veer;
On foams the bull, but not unscathed he goes;
Streams from his flank the crimson torrent clear:
He flies, he wheels, distracted with his throes:
Dart follows dart; lance, lance; loud bellowings speak his woes.
(I, 76, 756-764)
Amidst this scene of death, the headlong adjectives attempt to mimic the throbs, screams
and adrenaline of a full-throated crowd: “foiled, bleeding, breathless, furious to the last/
Full in the centre stands the bull at bay/ Mid wounds, and clinging darts, and lances
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brast” (I, 78, 774-775). The detailed, heart-rending description of the wounded bull
signifies a desire on Byron’s part to compel sympathy for the animal, as does the
description of the crowd’s eyes as “vulgar” in viewing the “corse” of the bull as a “sweet
sight.” From Latin, “vulgus” simply means “common,” and here Byron cashes in on this
meaning, demarcating the faceless human crowd from the noble, specific bull. But this
very demarcation prohibits any sympathizing as it makes the animal different from and
unknowable by the crowd—a difference that leads Byron to reflect, not on the bull, but
on how “the ungentle sport…oft invites/ The Spanish maid,” leading in turn to a
reflection on his lost and unfortunate love affairs of the past. The sounds and sights of the
bullring invoke thoughts of human love rather than affection between beings of a
different kind. However, this scene also returns Byron to his human love affairs because
it serves as a reminder of the impossibility of human affection due to the essentially
barbaric nature of humankind: why do these maids come to watch such a heinous sight
and what does this say about human beings? Just as the lament about his dog introduces
non-human life as a main topic of the poem, this scene arrests our gaze on the dying bull
to emphasize the continuance of that topic as well as the new emphasis on preferring nonhumans to humans. Better to be the dying bull, bleeding profusely as others look on
gleefully, than to be those savage onlookers joyfully reveling in the bull’s pain and
suffering. The bull, it is no stretch to imagine, stands for Byron himself here as he
continues his self-imposed exile from the human world. The scene also helps contradict
the popular critical stance that Byron was uninterested in the non-human world until he
made his Wordsworthian turn when he resumed writing the poem in 1817.
Thus, although it is commonly assumed that the third Canto, with its paeans to
nature, was unduly influenced by Shelley’s having “doused” Byron with Wordsworth
“unto nausea” during their embarkations on Lake Leman in 1816, the second Canto,
written 7 years earlier, evinces this same yearning for the tranquility of the natural
world.163 The poem began with Byron having been rejected by society, but the
melancholic atmosphere this circumstance creates does not pervade the whole poem.
Having imagined himself as the torn and bleeding bull at the end of Canto II, Byron, lost
163
Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography, Vol. 3 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 624.
108
in his own sorrow, nevertheless finds sympathy in Nature by socializing it: Nature, unlike
human beings who are really parasites, can accept someone like Byron who feels no
longer human. This is why Nature does not equal solitude despite the absence of human
life: “where things that own not man’s dominion dwell…with the wild flock that never
needs a fold…this is not solitude” (II, 25, 217-224). Being with this wild flock does not
constitute solitude; rather, this mode of mutual existence means simply to “converse with
Nature’s charms” (II, 25, 225). “Midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,” on the
other hand, “is to be alone...[and] this is solitude” (II, 26, 226, 234). Among humans, he
finds “none who bless us, none whom we can bless.” Human society comprises real
solitude whereas non-human society does not. Unlike the herd of humans rejected by
Byron, he finds in nature a language that can speak and soothe him. These wild flocks are
one of “Nature’s charms,” which signifies Byron’s awareness of, and belief in, a Nature
that encompasses all life forms even while it distinguishes individual autonomy and
agency. Nature, for Byron, does not discriminate between life forms. Thus being alone in
nature with animals is not solitude because solitude does not entail marked divisions
between human and non-human life. Indeed, it is human beings who, when grouped
together in cities, create solitude out of their indifference to others who share their social
sphere (Wordworth’s own stance toward crowds in The Prelude). What is needed, in
order to find mutual affection and community, is the non-human—precisely what Byron
is interested in becoming.
Early in the third Canto, Byron explicitly develops these distinctions, claiming
that he “knew himself the most unfit/ Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held/
Little in common” (III, 12, 100-102). He has at last learned how to “breathe without
mankind” (III, 12, 108). The shepherding metaphor of herding with mankind, as if the
human species were a type of livestock in need of guidance, points to the similarity
between humans and non-humans evinced by the poem while it foreshadows the speciesleveling “fleshly chain” idea the poem subsequently spells out. Looking across the
bloodstained, desolate battlefield of Waterloo a few stanzas later, Byron embodies this
chain, as it has been forged by the Napoleonic wars: “he wears the shattered links of the
world’s broken chain” (III, 18, 162). Apparently weighed down by wearing these links,
Byron has removed himself from human social life to reflect, much like Wordsworth and
109
Coleridge during their mutual habitation at the Lake District, on the serenity of “nature’s
pages glassed by sunbeams on the lake” (III, 13, 117). It is revealed, in language that
indexes the materiality of the world while linguistically anthropomorphizing it, that the
“mountains…were his friends,” “the ocean…his home,” both of which “spake a mutual
language” (III, 13, 109-115). In reading Nature’s pages, Byron is able to see the links that
weigh him down—the links that make his psychological and affective state the mirror of
the battlefields of European history—and seek in nature’s serenity an escape from the
world of humankind that has enchained itself rather than continue to progress to the
universal liberty promised by the revolutions that triggered the Napoleonic Wars.
For Byron the only way to adequately address the challenges wrought by these
cataclysmic historical and cultural changes is to empirically observe them while engaging
in what he calls “poetic scribbling” to fully reclaim the living soul as formidable enough
to capture the vagaries of this newfound existence. Therefore, for him, poetry becomes a
form of creation in the third Canto: “ ‘Tis to create, and in creating live/ A being more
intense, that we endow/ With form our fancy, gaining as we give/ The life we image,
even as I do now” (III, 6, 46-49). This view of poetry as creative leads to the existential
question and answer, “”What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou/ Soul of my thought!”
(III, 6, 50-51). Byron offers a Cartesian distinction between the soul and the body in this
passage. The question “what am I?” echoes Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. Byron’s answer
seems to suggest that, in saying “nothing,” he wants to comport “nothing” with the body
since the soul is quickly distinguished as, not nothing, but rather a primordial something
that belongs to thought. At the level of earthly existence, at the level of dasein—being
there in the world, to borrow from Heidegger—a given human life is nothing, especially,
Byron seems to argue, when arrayed against the warring fortunes of rival nations and the
sudden death these clashes introduce into the lives of otherwise unobtrusive individuals.
Childe Harold’s “rapid shifts between different categories of existence,” as Jane Stabler
puts it, are indicative of Byron’s desire, at once autobiographical and historical, to use
poetry as an investigatory method of explicating his modern condition, which he sees as
reflective of all life at the time. The destruction and carnage of war has cracked open the
very social foundations it meant to protect, and in turn, echoing later postmodernist
tropes as, Stabler points out, Byron subverts lyric poetry to reflect the fragmented self left
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over by the vicissitudes of this revolutionary era.164 In other words, he wants to say that
life, as a temporal immanence in the here-and-now, is paradoxically constantly slipping
away and being reshaped, and in response to this one must react by constantly creating
life—even if that life takes on heretofore unimaginable new forms.
Part of this poetic act of creation means blurring the boundaries between the
human and the non-human, which is why Byron treats the scarred battlegrounds of
Europe and the scarred soul of Byron as literal reenactments of each other. In the famous
lightning storm sequence on Jura near Lake Leman that takes place in Canto III, Byron
gives full-throated voice to this wish no longer to exist in his present human state. Nature,
in the form of the storm, gains a voiced presence:
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud
But every mountain now hath found a tongue
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud! (III, 92, 864-869)
Byron wishes to become part of Nature, “a sharer in thy fierce and far delight,—A
portion of the tempest and of thee!” (III, 93, 871-872). If he could “embody and unbosom
now” and
Wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak
All that I would have sought, and all I seek
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe—into one word
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak. (III, 97, 905911)
If Byron could “embody” his thought and passions in physical form, it would be the form
of lightning, a part of the natural world. In his aspiration to speak as if part of this world,
164
Jane Stabler, “Byron, Postmodernism, and Intertextuality,” The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond
Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 265-285.
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he admits to a strict division between them as to wish, as he does, to express oneself as
lightning indicates one’s inability to do so. The confines of his human body lead him to
“live and die unheard, with a most voiceless thought” (III, 97, 912-913). At the close of
Canto II Byron had compared himself to the bleeding, dying bull, jeered by all the
spectators who were autobiographical metaphors for English indifference to his broken
heart. When Byron returns to the poem in 1817, some 5 year later, he explicitly privileges
the non-human over the human: only the natural world in the form of lightning is
cogently powerful enough to contain and voice the sentiments of his mind and passions.
But given that he cannot speak this one word, “lightning,” Byron thus creates a lacuna in
his poem—the one word is missing, unspoken, “a…voiceless thought.” Byron fills the
pages of his poem with a flurry of topographical detail and personal despair but this
passage reveals that all of this is empty sturm und drang; the real topic of the poem—
Byron’s need to not only abandon human society but overcome the need for it
altogether—is voiced only through its ephemeral non-presence, its voicelessness. The
non-human other, which Byron cannot voice, becomes the guiding star of Byron’s
pilgrimage and exists, as such, unreachable on the other side of the human speaking
voice.
The illusory nature of the non-human other, the essence that imbues sky,
mountain, and sea with life, centers the remainder of the poem as Byron attempts to come
to terms with the impossibility of his pilgrimage ever arriving at a satisfactory absolution.
The lacuna opened up by Byron’s meditations on Mount Jura helps make conspicuous the
invisible nature of non-human presence referenced earlier in the canto. Having been
wooed by the crystal face of Lake Leman, Byron ruminates on life’s teleological futurity:
69.
To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind;
All are not fit with them to stir and toil,
Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil
In one hot throng, where we become the spoil
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Of our infection, till too late and long
We may deplore and struggle with the coil,
In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong
Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.
70.
There, in a moment, we may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,
And colour things to come with hues of Night;
The race of life becomes a hopeless flight
To those that walk in darkness: on the sea,
The boldest steer but where their ports invite,
But there are wanderers o’er Eternity
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchored ne’er shall be.
71.
Is it not better, then, to be alone,
And love Earth only for its earthly sake?
By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone,
Or the pure bosom of its nursing lake,
Which feeds it as a mother who doth make
A fair but froward infant her own care,
Kissing its cries away as these awake; Is it not better thus our lives to wear,
Than join the crushing crowd, doomed to inflict or bear?
72.
113
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me,
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture: I can see
Nothing to loathe in Nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
73.
And thus I am absorbed, and this is life:
I look upon the peopled desert Past,
As on a place of agony and strife,
Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I was cast,
To act and suffer, but remount at last
With a fresh pinion; which I felt to spring,
Though young, yet waxing vigorous as the blast
Which it would cope with, on delighted wing,
Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling.
74.
And when, at length, the mind shall be all free
From what it hates in this degraded form,
Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm, When elements to elements conform,
And dust is as it should be, shall I not
Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm?
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The bodiless thought? the Spirit of each spot?
Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot?
75.
Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these? and stem
A tide of suffering, rather than forego
Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm
Of those whose eyes are only turned below,
Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not glow?
(III, 653-715)
In saying that “there are wanderers o’er Eternity/ Whose bark drives on and on, and
anchored ne’er shall be,” Byron comes to the realization that immortality is just as
transient a phase, perhaps more so, than life on earth and thus it is better to “love Earth
only for its earthly sake.” Committing to this love means relinquishing any hope of a
teleological berth at the mortal frame’s end. Hence, “I can see/ Nothing to loathe in
Nature,” Byron says, “save to be/ A link reluctant in a fleshly chain/ Classed among
creatures, when the soul can flee/ And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain/ Of
ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.” The soul, in other words, the primary
concern of the shaping forces of poetry, can outlast, and even outreach, the frail and
doomed human body (“spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling”), but it
does so not through a transcendental move to Christian immortality; instead Byron’s
vision of the soul’s everlasting nature is more pagan, and non-Lucretian, in its entail. It is
only when this dehiscence of soul/mind and body occurs that “the mind shall be all free/
From what it hates in this degraded form/ Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be/
Existent happier in the fly and worm.” Life continues but only as Byron’s edible
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conversion as biomass in the stomach of the fly and the worm, a type of reincarnation
that achieves, after a fashion, the non-human perspective Byron wishes for. Therefore
when Byron asks “are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part/ Of me and of my soul,
as I of them?,” his point is that the fleshly chain of which he is a reluctant part
encompasses more than simply flesh. Instead, this chain of existence extends to all nonhuman life even in the form of mountains, waves, and skies. Byron’s vision of life,
crucially, is both atomistic and creaturely. His vision revises Lucretius’s doctrine that the
body encases the soul as, for Byron, the human body becomes unnecessary whereas the
soul and “the human” take on non-human significance.
Late in this canto, then, when Byron claims “we are not what we have been…we
are not what we should be,” this claim, beyond merely applying to the contemporary
condition of malaise and hatred engendered by years of nationalist upheavals, also signals
a desire to rethink life at the biopolitical level as well. (III, 111, 1033-1034). Indeed, he
calls this realization the theme of the work (III, 111, 1031). Byron commingles
temporality here by upsetting distinctions between present, past perfect and future tenses,
forcing the verb “to be” to lose its signification as an existential indicator. Ontologically
speaking, the passage suggests that no language can adequately capture the contemporary
strangeness of being; although put forward as declarative assertions, the shifting tenses of
these lines unravel as each line contradicts the temporal meaning of the previous line.
These lines concisely summarize what Cary Wolfe refers to as posthumanism: humans
are not human because they have never fully understood this concept nor have they
successfully lived up to the concept as they have envisioned it.165 Byron takes this a step
further by arguing that if humans are not human, and never were, then they will never be
human in the future unless, ironically, they move past this concept of “the human”
altogether. The bodies of humans, so to speak, are blurred by the self-assuredness of their
own assumed legibility. Although the Napoleonic wars have scrambled life into
165
Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2009), 120-122. The term “posthuman” has
engendered a great deal of debate, much of it contentious. N. Katherine Hayles and Neal Badmington both
offer versions of posthumanism very different from Wolfe. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999). Neil Badmington, Alien Chic:
Posthumanism and the Other Within (New York: Routledge, 2004). A recent special issue of Eighteenth Century Theory
and Interpretation guest-edited by Lucinda Cole culminates in a roundtable discussion involving the contributors
in the volume and Erica Fudge and Cary Wolfe, entitled “Speciesism, Identity Politics, and Ecocriticism: A
Conversation with Humanists and Posthumanists” Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation 52:1 (2011), 87-106.
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unrecognizable remnants, the only way to counter this is by embracing the non-human
surroundings that compose the entire strata of ecological networks of life forms.
In Canto IV, Byron equates himself to the environment he describes and thereby
completes the flattening of ontological life introduced as desirable in Canto III. Standing
“a ruin amidst ruins; there to track/ Fall’n states and buried greatness” in Rome, “the
master-mould of Nature’s heavenly hand,” he personifies Nature as a monolithic thing
possessed of hands and intentions (IV, 25, 219-220, 223). However, the poem attempts to
assuage this existential despair in the stanzas leading up to the “ruin” passage: “existence
may be borne, and the deep root/ Of life and sufferance make its firm abode/ In bare and
desolate bosoms: mute/ The camel labours with the heaviest load/ And the wolf dies in
silence” (IV, 21, 181-185). The camel and the wolf, described as “things of ignoble and
savage mood,” comport with “The Great Chain of Being” vision of the world, supporting
the hierarchy of human/non-human (IV, 21, 187). “All suffering doth destroy, or is
destroyed…and, in each event, ends,” the narrator says, an idea that captures the
teleological vision of human life as inherently progressive in its march toward some type
of ideal fulfillment (IV, 22, 190-192). It appears that life tends toward a telos, one
ordained by some type of numinous essence imbuing all life, the noble human and the
ignoble animal. The consolation of the inevitable end of suffering gets pierced by “a
token like a scorpion’s sting,” though, and “slight withal may be the things which bring
back on the heart the weight which it would fling aside for ever” (IV, 23, 200-204). The
poem cites sound, music, summer’s eve, spring, a flower, the wind and the ocean as
effectuations of disconsolate thoughts that strike “the electric chain wherewith we are
darkly bound” (IV, 23, 207). Rome and its inhabitants represent “the commonwealth of
kings,” what Byron calls “the garden of the world” (IV, 26, 226-227). It is “the home/ Of
all Art” and “Nature can decree” its “immaculate charm” as the epicenter of Nature that
“cannot be defaced” (IV, 26, 229-234). The electric charge sparking, similarly, is
ineffable. “How and why” the striking occurs, “we know not, nor can trace/ Home to its
cloud this lightning of the mind/But feel the shock renewed, nor can efface/ The blight
and blackening which it leaves behind” (IV, 24, 208-211). Nature, infusing the ruins of
Rome with immense beauty, presents an implacable façade, a face that cannot be defaced.
The lightning spark in Byron’s mind, tossing his memories to and fro, as it were, remains
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pulsing, yet vital, in the sense of being necessary to life’s maintenance. “Efface” means
“to make inconspicuous,” which implies that the spark of “this lightning of the mind”
cannot be made invisible or erased. The charge is paradoxical, though, something with no
specific causal co-efficient (“how and why we know not”) and cannot be traced (“nor can
trace”) by sight and the human mind. This metaphor of an “electric chain” binding
humans to earth is an apt one (and one Byron uses it in Canto I as well), since the
elements of the air and particles of the sea that resound in Byron’s ears and fleck his skin
“strike” this electric chain and in doing so grant to this chain its electrical nature, for it is
the conversion of matter and energy from outside of him that serves to electrify him and
recall to him these disconsolate feelings. The electric chain electrifies and serves to chain
together a continuum of elements and matter that affect other elements with chemical
feeling. In other words, chemical reactions assume a similar importance to human
subjectivity and it is the impulses of natural phenomena that ground humans on earth.
Electricity crackles through Byron and through the landscape he is peering at, a vast array
of dynamic energy flows ranging from the sounds of animals to the drops of ocean that
splash on Byron to the lightning strikes on Jura that pierce the night with an unknowable
language.
But Byron criticism, despite Jerome McGann’s admonitions to historicize it, is
largely still dominated by the powerful hold Byron’s mythic personality exerts on readers
and this has led to a failure to attend properly to the context provided by the powerful
closing apostrophe of the poem. Because of the five-year gap between the composition of
the first two cantos and the last, the political shifts that took place in Europe during this
time, the switch to more classical Roman locales, and Byron’s own growing maturity as a
poet, Childe Harold does indeed resist easy classification or understanding. However,
this famous closing scene exercises the historical demons that plague the poem even
while it resists the escapist transcendentalism of earlier Romantic poets. It completes
Byron’s picture of the non-human ontological problems he has wrestled with throughout
the poem by defining the world as an expansive ecology of interactive being and beings.
This apostrophe (“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!”), and Byron’s own
Greek allusion in the final lines (“sandal-shoon and scallop shell”), recalls the poem back
to a more typical lyrical mode than has been evident in the preceding cantos (especially
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canto I with its mock heroic conventions of the opening stanzas). The escalation to the
apostrophe finds Byron returning to the theme of solitude that began the poem: “Oh! that
the Desert were my dwelling-place/ With one fair Spirit for my minister/ That I might all
forget the human race” (IV, 177, 1585-1587). The poem’s denouement, then, continues
the autobiographical strain of anti-humanism by seeking an abode free from the ills
created by human communities and collectives. Indeed, Byron shuns all such human
connections:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal. (IV, 178, 15941602)
Byron returns here to the voiceless word of “lightning” that he found himself unable to
give expression and articulation to in the third canto. The unutterable—“what I can ne’er
express”—thus returns to control the closing ocean motif of the poem, but it does so as
something nameless and unidentifiable outside the “roar” of the Sea. Although this word
cannot be expressed it is nevertheless not something that can be concealed; in mingling
with the Universe Byron, no longer a body with a voice to articulate his feelings, finally
succeeds in revealing this unconcealable feeling.
This revelation is evident in the beating of the waves and the eternal continuance
of imbricated ecological life forms of all varieties. When he apostrophizes the waves,
Byron is therefore calling out to the very life forces that guide and sustain the Earth for
its earthly sake: transcendence is no longer a concern; embracing the chain of
interdependent life-objects takes priority.
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Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean - roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin - his control
Stops with the shore; - upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
(IV, 179, 1602-1611)
The figure of the Ocean draws together all of the various issues Byron has been
discussing—the pan-European context of empire and war, the nature of infinity and
human mortality, the everlasting cycle of nature, and the destruction of human
presumptions of dominance and superiority. In fact, Byron’s charge to “roll on” is
misleading and can more accurately be read as his realization that the Ocean will roll on
despite any human encouragement or intervention; the tides have a rhythm that cannot be
disrupted by the toils and plights of human civilizations and societies.
Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free
And many a tyrant since: their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.
(IV, 182, 1630-1638)
All of the great civilizations Byron has visited throughout his travels amount to nothing
more than the wrecks of stone and mortar, swept away by the indefatigable and
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inexorable waterways that, with the land and the sky, found the earth in a reciprocal
interchange of sustainable phenomena. The things of humankind are transient just like
human bodies, but this does not mean that life is meaningless, only that human lives
require a more nuanced context for meaning to be discerned.
The Ocean thus becomes a metonym and synonym for the eternal endurance of all
earthly things, the human and the non-human:
Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed - in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving; - boundless, endless, and sublime The image of Eternity - the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee: thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.
(IV, 183, 1639-1647)
Closing on the image of the Ocean’s eternality contains an unexpected surprise and
emphasizes the essential non-human orientation of the poem—beyond merely his own
sorrow’s end, as Byron places his hand on the “mane” of the Ocean, what emerges from
the rolling depths are monstrous forms. Though the Ocean continues to roll, “dread,
fathomless, and alone,” the monstrous denizens the poem stages as emerging from the
deep, dark blue ocean realize the capacity of earth’s power to support even the most
startling of life forms, the creatures who continue the fleshly chain of which Byron is a
part far below the sight of human eyes and even cognition. These monsters help complete
the poem’s reorientation to a poetic consciousness that traverses the boundaries of the
Romantic lyric’s investment in the expressivist autonomy offered by the human
imagination. Byron is no longer concerned simply with Byron because he has come to
understand that the Ocean, and indeed the strange, mutating forces of the earth in general,
are a broader composition than can be encapsulated by his own poetic abilities. Monsters
are unspeakable, unquantifiable things, just as the word “lightning” cannot be spoken.
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The suggestion here is ultimately that this unspeakable aspect of the world informs the
verbal locutions of the poem by making them possible in the first place.
This final reflection on monsters as essential life forms in the fleshly chain
substitutes a flattened ontological picture of life in place of the hierarchical “Great Chain
of Being” that continued to dominate Enlightenment thought. Byron anticipates what
critics like Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant, and Jane Bennett have recently began to
articulate: a theory of human and non-human interactive collectives, called ObjectOriented Ontology.166 They argue that human beings, animals, fountain pens, lava sludge,
standing armies, quarks, the color red, the concept passion, and mountain ranges are all
connected, and ontologically equivalent, objects. Each object is withdrawn from others
but derives its coherence from its relationality—that is the point where objects come into
contact with each other in the world, much like Luhmann’s notion of operational
closure.167 In this vision of the interconnectedness of all things, subjectivity is involuted
to become objectivity, with a twist. Object-Oriented Ontology does not objectify human
beings, or non-human beings, but rather theorizes that each entity in the world manifests
itself by the terms of its relationality and is, as such, never fully present as an autonomous
subject. Hence, the word “object” takes on new contours, meaning that every entity is
vital rather than alive, and therefore not necessarily a subject in the modern connotation
of this word that endows humans, and not non-humans, with agency. “Object” marks
everything with agency.
Byron’s view of the internetworked fleshly chain works in a similar fashion:
Byron, the flocks of wild animals, the mountains, skies, oceans, and monsters all derive
meaning from their connection as links on a chain that does not discriminate their
existential and ecological importance. It is in this sense that Byron returns us to the
irreducible mortal nature of human life by contrasting it to the eternal flow of the roaring
ocean and the firmament that it governs. Being part of this fleshly chain, for Byron,
means being embraced and rejected, as he is; means being wounded and bled, as the bull
166
Timothy Morton, “Here comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19: 2
(2011): 163-190. Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Sydney: Open Humanities P, 2011). Jane Bennett, Vibrant
Matter (Durham: Duke UP, 2010).
167
Byron claims withdrawal is the whole purpose of poetry: “To withdraw myself from myself (oh that cursed
selfishness!) has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.” Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters
and Journals, vol III, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974), 225.
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is; means being “reft of carnal life,” as humans are in the stomach of the flies and the
worms; means being caught in the ocean’s undertow and brushing up against
incomprehensible monsters; and it means, finally, enduring as a sublunar object amongst
other objects. Byron theorizes this disorientation—literally becoming confused about
one’s position in relation to the sun—as a “fleshly chain” of disruptive being as a better,
more fruitful disorientation than classical humanism. This disorientation is Copernican in
nature: just as the earth became reoriented as a sublunary planet orbiting the sun, the
figure of the human as the center of the universe gets reoriented. Creaturely interaction
on the fleshly chain is therefore fraught with peril because at base it depends on mortal
difference, and difference, in any relation, always perturbs (to use Niklas Luhmann’s
word) that relation. What all creatures share, Byron argues, is this perturbing difference, a
continual haunting reminder of our own isolation and finitude that binds us in a chain of
vulnerable, bare flesh, flesh that unsettles the sociopolitical imaginary. Byron, the
infamous carnal libertine disdainful of human society, finds as his moral that thinking
sympathetically means thinking in posthuman terms, as a fleshly chain rather than as a
species. It is this moral, in which, as Byron becomes something more than human, an
object among others in the great cosmos that the sea connects him to, that the poem
discloses the pageant of its bleeding non-human heart.
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Chapter 5
John Clare’s Autopoiesis
I.
John Clare is one of the great poets to chronicle the daily lives of animals, their
joy and wonder, their sounds and shapes, their habits and habitats. But for all his keen
attention to the pleasant and enchanting minutiae of their daily lives, Clare is also
attentive to the sorrows and sufferings animals experience at the hands of human beings.
During the years 1818-1820, for instance, he wrote hundreds of idyllic poems about birds
and animals native to his Helpstone parish, even while he charts, in other poems, how the
national enclosure process in the English countryside instituted forms of violence
between humans and animals.168 For Clare enclosure enacted literal divides between
humans, animals, as well as the land he loved, the rocks, streams, trees, and fields of
168
The classic work on enclosure in Helpstone, and Clare’s relation to it, is John Barrell’s. Barrell, The Idea of
Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 1972. As Barrell points out, “almost
every critic who has written about John Clare has seen the importance of relating the enclosure of Helpstone to
Clare’s development as a writer and to the content of his work” (189). However, Clare scholars tend to focus
on the economic impact of enclosure on the laboring class of Clare’s village and of England in general rather
than on how enclosure affects human-animal relations. Influenced by J.L and Barbara Hammond’s book, The
Village Labourer 1760-1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill, one group of scholars argues
that enclosure induced economic catastrophe for the laboring classes by impoverishing an already strained
group of fragile familial units that, as often as not, already subsisted on the generosity of the local parish. More
recently, beginning with the work of Raymond Williams, scholars who study Clare’s enclosure elegies argue that
the effects of enclosure are largely enigmatic, with actual records of village life too scant to reach justifiable
historical conclusions (in some sense everything is a conjectural history). Indubitably, they say, enclosure did, in
fact, affect the laboring classes, but such effects appear to refuse easy classification in terms of evaluating their
positive or negative impacts. For one thing, scholars argue, that with enclosure came an increase in local
populations, making it easier for less-represented areas to achieve attention, and this increase allowed for the
further dissemination of democratic-rights agitation beyond the more cosmopolitan environs of the city.
Scholars like Williams and M.J. Daunton suggest that this spread of democratic rights (the right to vote, to run
for office, to own land, etc.) represents one way in which enclosure introduced progressive reforms to those
citizens who had been denied them and therefore, although it may have had disastrous economic effects on
laborers, nevertheless was also instrumental in the spread of positive national changes. John Barrell and Rachel
Crawford agree that the Hammond’s book has fostered inexact claims about enclosure. Crawford remarks,
somewhat sarcastically, that “parliamentary enclosures have been blamed, among other things, for the rising
poor rate, increased cost of living, vagrancy, wage labor, loss of a ‘natural’ system of social welfare, and
emergence of picturesque aesthetic.” Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700-1830
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 43. Hammond, The Village Labourer 1760-1832: A Study in the Government of
England before the Reform Bill (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912). Crawford points to J.M Neeson and
Ann Bermingham as being two who have built on this work wrongly. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right,
Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). Bermingham, Landscape and
Ideology: the English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986). Raymond Williams, The
Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), 104. M.J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social
History of Britain 1700-1850 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995).
124
Helpstone.169 He encapsulates these divisions in an early poem, “The Lamentations of
Round-Oak Waters (1818),” that features the Round-Oak stream apostrophizing a swain
seated on the riverbank, detailing how enclosure—represented in the poem as “lawless
foes/ and Laws themselves they hold/ which clipt-wing Justice can’t oppose” (l. 181183)—has destroyed his natural habitat: “look backward on the days of yore/ upon my
injur’d brook/ in fancy con its Beauties o’er/ how it had us’d to look/ O then what trees
my banks did crown/ what willows flourished here/ hard as the ax that Cut them down”
(l. 157-164).170 Clare’s emphatic capitalization of “Cut” drives home the harsh brutality
of enclosure, characterizing it as a woodsman who severs the connection between the
trees and the stream thus ending their environmentally rich sympathetic
interdependence.171 In several other enclosure poems, Clare expands this focus on the
169
The Act of Enclosure specifically disallowed certain former practices: “And be it further Enacted, That no
Horses, beasts, Asses, Sheep, Lambs, or other Cattle, shall at any Time within the first Ten Years after the said
Allotments shall be directed to be entered upon by the respective Proprieters thereof, be kept in any of the
public Carriage Roads or Ways to be set out and fenced off on both Sides, or Laned out in pursuance of this
Act.” John Clare, Selected Poetry and Prose of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1985), 169, qtd. in Eric Miller, “Enclosure and Taxonomy in John Clare,” Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900 40:4 (2000), 635-657, 638.
170
John Clare, “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters,” Major Works, eds. Eric Robinson & David Powell
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 18-23.
171
John Goodridge notes the poem’s use of the language of sensibility and sympathy. John Goodridge,
“Pastoral and Popular Modes in Clare’s ‘enclosure elegies,’” The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught
Tradition, ed. John Goodridge (Helpston: John Clare Society and the Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994),
143-144. Clare describes the woodsman similarly in “May,” from The Shepherd’s Calendar:
But woodmen still on spring intrude;
and thin the shadow’s solitude;
with sharpen’d axes felling down
the oak-trees budding into brown,
which, as they crash upon the ground,
a crowd of labourers gather round.
these, mizing ‘mong the shadows dark,
rip off the crackling,s staining bark;
depriving yearly, when they come,
the green woodpecker of his home,
who early in the Spring began,
far from the sight of troubling man,
To bore his round holes in each tree
in fancy’s sweet security;
now, startled by the woodman’s noise,
he wakes from all his dreary joys.
The blue-bells too, that thickly bloom
Where man was never known to come;
And stooping lilies of the valley,
That love with shades and dews to dally,
125
barbarity of enclosure, and laments, for instance, “how enclosure came and trampled on
the grave/ of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave” and penned in “sheep and cows,”
formerly “free to range” without “the bonds of men” (l. 19-24).172 Another poetic lament,
“The Fallen Elm (1820),” notes that enclosure drives animals out of their natural habitat,
out of their normal mode of existence, and ultimately transforms the world completely,
with the laws of morality reversed: “wrong was right and right was wrong” (l 63).173
Contrastingly, the poems Clare will write years later while in the asylum (around 18351837) are filled with a more volatile anger. These poems stage violent encounters of
abusive practices directed towards animals. Several of these sonnet sequences, the “The
Badger” and “The Vixen” for instance, assume a dramatically different attitude than the
hundreds of empirical and non-violent bird’s nest poems he wrote. In these poems
humans view animals as creatures to be idly abused, punished, or used rather than cared
for and sympathized with. By the same token, the animals in these sonnet sequences also
bite back with an urgency, and ferocity, that at once speaks to their agency and the
dissipation of creaturely sympathy.174
In this chapter I argue that Clare’s literary snapshot of the violence of enclosure
translates into a rethinking of his poetics, and poeisis itself, in “The Badger” sonnets as
distinct from the bird’s nest poetry of his earlier period. Clare discovers, in this transition,
that while the poetic trope of prosopopoeia (prosopon means “face” or “person” and
poiein means “to make”) links animals to faces, voices, and personalities, it also reveals
how the non-human is fundamentally necessary for poiesis to figure the human. Clare’s
work thus offers a version of what social systems theorist Niklas Luhmann calls
And bending droop on slender threads,
With broad hood-leaves above their heads,
Like white-robed maids, in summer hours,
Beneath umbrellas shunning showers;-These, from the bark-men’s crushing treads,
Oft perish in their blooming beds. (l. 73-98)
John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar, ed. Tim Chilcott (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006).
172
John Clare, “The Moors,” The Middle Poems of John Clare, Vol I., ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1989), 347.
173
John Clare, “The Fallen Elm,” Selected Poems, ed. Geoffrey Summerfield (New York: Penguin, 2000), 167.
174
My essay complements recent environmental and animal studies works on the Romantic period. James
McKucisk, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Christine Kenyon-Jones,
Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (New York: Ashgate, 2001). David Perkins, Romanticism and
Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007).
126
“autopoiesis,” the way a self-referential system distinguishes itself from the larger
environment in which it is embedded to create and perpetuate its own life. According to
Luhmann, “a human being may appear to himself or to an observer as a unity, but he is
not a system.”175 In other words, the human is not a system differentiated from an
environment but an element in a vast social system of other individual elements, a lesson
similar to the one Byron teaches in Childe Harold. Clare’s prosopopoeia demonstrates
how the human and non-human are always co-implicated in autopoiesis, that is, the act of
self-referential creation, not as separate unities, but as individualities defined by their
mutual relations in a larger ecological system. It is precisely this ontological priority of
the individuated subject that Clare problematizes in his most famous poem, also written
during the asylum years, “I am” (date unknown): “I am—yet what I am, none cares or
knows” (1).176 Like Descartes, Clare believes one can be certain of existence, but the
exact contours of life (“what I am”), as his animal poems show, are brought into focus
only by understanding the world of networked life forms of which one is a part.177
II.
While the social and economic effects of enclosure on the people of England have
been much debated, the instrumentality of the process itself has been well documented.
Throughout England enclosure involved over 6,000,000 acres. Although enclosure as a
process stretches back to the Middle Ages, most of the work occurred in the 1760s and
1770s, and during the Napoleonic Wars, from 1793-1815, when 2000 acts of enclosure
were instituted. To achieve this, government officials surveyed and partitioned common
land, staked, hedged, and fenced land, built new roads to promote greater commerce
between rural and urban areas, drained fens, diverted streams, and, in general,
accomplished the conversion of arable land to pastoral land.178 Plotting larger pastures
175
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. & Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 40.
176
John Clare, “I am,” The Later Poems of John Clare, vol. I, eds. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1984), 396-397.
177
Timothy Morton offers similar observations about this poem’s Cartesian overtones. Morton, “John Clare’s
Dark Ecology,” Studies in Romanticism 47 (2008): 179-193, esp. 192-193. See also, Morton, Ecology without Nature
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 197-201.
178
Maurice Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954). Karl Polanyi, The
Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). E. P. Thompson,
127
was designed to increase the number of animals available, key to the goal of optimizing
national livestock production. After enclosure peasant laborers could no longer plan and
plot their farms according to shared land covenants and local crop rotation practices; and
no longer could village inhabitants interact with so-called “tame and wild” animals as
they pleased. Daily interaction became the subject of restriction, confinement, and
control. For Arthur Young, the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, publisher of the 45volume Annals of Agriculture, and one of the biggest supporters of enclosure, a definitive
result of enclosing land was to separate human beings from “brutes.” Young thought that
enclosure, because it led to an increase in laboring productivity, an increase in national
stock, and better use of land, constituted a progressive achievement that historically
marked his contemporary society as victors in a battle with the English of times past.
Like David Hume, whose History of England casts the Enlightenment as having won a
pitched battle with the barbarians of England’s genesis (a civilized English culture
apparently won out over a lingering barbarism), Young saw enclosure as finalizing that
victory.179
In contrast, for Clare, enclosure actually instituted a form of barbarity he
associated with the destruction of human and non-human life. Parliament had passed the
Act of Enclosure for Helpstone in 1809 but the final awarding of land did not take place
until 1820, the year Clare published his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and
Scenery, which made him famous as a peasant poet. Despite this long gap between the
passage of the Act and the final award, by 1820 Helpstone had already been partitioned
and the lives of the villagers, and the animals they cared for, markedly changed. Whereas
once Clare, like the other villagers, could tend to shared village animals like horses and
sheep, climb various trees and put himself face-to-face with birds in their nests and foxes
in their dens, he found himself, after enclosure, often bodily sidelined from this type of
intimate relation as land became privatized and guarded.
The Makings of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966). J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right,
Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). M.J. Daunton, Progress and
Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain 1700-1850 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), hereafter PP. Mark
Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500-1850 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1996), hereafter AR.
179
David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688 Vol. I
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund), 1983.
128
The transformation of everyday intimate human-animal relationships has been
neatly tracked by the conjectural histories that underwrite eighteenth-century moral
philosophy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau notes in the opening of his second section of the
Discourse on Inequality (1755) that the first time someone enclosed a square of property
instituted an era of civil society in which inequality, war, strife, and death are logical
consequences of this new property-based society.180 Humans forget, he argues, that the
fruits of the earth are common and belong to everyone and that claiming ownership over
these common elements violates the natural order. For Rousseau the difference between
human and animals is only one of degree, and both are made “degenerate,” as he says,
“by domestication”: “The creation of tame animals, and domesticated humans, brought
on by the enclosure of property, has been so many steps in appearance towards the
improvement of the individual, but so many steps in reality towards the decrepitude of
the species.”181 As I’ve shown in chapter 1, Adam Smith enlarges on this point in his
Wealth of Nations. Section V of Book II of this influential work summarizes Smith’s
version of the changing relationships between human and animals in the progression to
the Age of Commerce as laid out in his Lectures on Jurisprudence. Like Rousseau, Smith
takes human sovereignty of animals for granted, but also charts how wild animals became
tame.182 Smith distinguishes four concrete ages of modern society: “there are four distinct
states which mankind pass thro: 1st, the Age of Hunters, 2nd the Age of Shepherds, 3rd the
Age of Agriculture, and 4th the Age of Commerce.”183 Human-animal relationships
undergo a change, the most dramatic of which occurs in the Age of Agriculture, as wild
animals, such as oxen, cows, bulls, and sheep, are made tame when they are either
subordinated to work the fields or for domestic breeding purposes.184 Eventually, in
180
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality (New York: Penguin, 1986), 109. Hereafter DI.
DI, 115.
182
Anne Barton charts Clare’s biography of the carthorse Dobbin across many of his poems. She does not deal
with his badger sonnets, other than to say “Clare did later, during the Northborough period, write about badger
baiting in one of his darkest and most powerful poems, but that sonnet sequence feels like something forced
out of him at that particular point by the extremity of his own situation” (17). Barton, “Clare’s Animals: The
Wild and the Tame,” John Clare Society Journal (1999): 5-21.
181
183
Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R. L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1982), 5.
129
Smith’s four-stages theory, wild animals become tame, that is, they are no longer found
in the wilds of nature at all but are rather completely subjugated as docile tools for human
use.
The conceptual and material conversion of wild animals to tame animals mirrors
the material shifts that took place during the enclosure of the villages and parishes that
began in 1793 and continued until mid-century. This is not to say that animals were not
already used in farming (obviously they were); however, the enclosure of the commons
assisted in removing animals from public sight, a crucial step in the movement to the Age
of Commerce in which animals became, according to Smith, mass-produced meat, cheap
enough to be affordable by laborers. What the enclosure comes to represent, looked at
from this angle, is a conversion of animals into biomass, a form of circulating, stabilizing
capital key to instituting the equilibrium between members of society that Smith saw as
the ideal of commercial society. Clare’s line in his early poem, “Helpstone” (1809-1813),
that the great forces of wealth lead to “our loss of labour and of bread” acts as an
unconscious predictor of what is to come: bread, so long the staple, along with potatoes,
of the laboring class, will come to be replaced with affordable meat once life is
rearranged on a scale that subverts intimacy with a national production imperative (l.
132).185
At first glance, such conjectural schemas do not appear to have a connection with
Clare’s locodescriptive poetry, especially as it is unlikely Clare knew the work of Smith
or Rousseau, or even much about moral philosophy or political economy, even though he
certainly did follow some of the learned debates of the time.186 But Clare’s reflections on
184
As Richard Twine shows, capitalist breeding practices have always involved breeding for docility. Modern
agribusinesses continue to adhere to this model, using the newest developments in animal biotechnology to
breed new genetic types of animals. Both points are germane to the discussion of biopolitics below. Twine,
Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability and Animal Studies (London: Earthscan, 2010), 87.
185
John Clare, “Helpstone,” The Early Poems of John Clare, Vol I, ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1989), 156-163. Tristram Stuart also charts how the introduction of meat as England’s national
food source. Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism From 1800 to Modern Times
(New York: Norton, 2008).
186
Clare apparently held strong opinions on issues of political economy relating to some of the radical notions
in public ciruclation at the time. Most scholars agree, though, that Clare did not grasp political issues with any
real depth and was, in most important respects, truly a political neophyte. Clare specifically states, in his Sketches
in the Life of John Clare, Written by Himself and Addressed to his Friend John Taylor ESQR, March 1821, that “in politics
I never dabbled to understand them thoroughly with the old dish that was served to my forefathers I am
130
enclosure testify to his local awareness of the transformational nature of macroeconomic
policies on particular ecologies.187 Several poems of Clare’s have even been given the
name “the enclosure elegies.”188 Just as importantly, beyond the economic effects
enclosure had on Clare, his poetry also reflects what Michel Foucault has recently
identified as endemic to the eighteenth century: a radical break in how the State deals
with what he calls the biopolitical, that is, the management of the bodies of citizens who
inhabit that State. According to Foucault the monarch’s sovereign power derived from his
right to “take life or let live,” whereas the formation of democratically represented
legislatures ensured that new modes of managing the citizenry were needed in which
“making live or letting die” becomes the mainframe that structures the material effects of
biopolitical discourse and allows for the emergence of “species” as a category used to
control citizens at the bodily level.189 Conceptualizing humans as one homogenous group
allows States to exclude those who did not fit this schema. Concurrently, this
categorization granted to the state radical new ways to measure, experiment on, classify,
produce, discipline, understand, and manage human life at the bodily level, at the
biological level of species.190 As I discussed in the introduction, for Foucault this
epistemic shift places his attention on “peripheral bodies” but he overlooks the bodies of
content.” He goes on to say that after reading accounts of the French Revolution and reading pamphlets in
support of it, especially as they related to Robespierre, the very words “revolution and reform” horrified him.
John Clare, John Clare by Himself, eds. Eric Robinson & David Powell (New York: Routledge, 2002). In contrast,
Alan Vardy argues that Clare’s poetry is explicitly political. Alan D. Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (New
York: Palgrave, 2003.)
187
For example, in his proposed Natural History Letters, he says he used to go to “Eastwell” and drink the
“water for good luck & a preventive of disease” but that this practice “has been abolished ever since the
inclosure.” John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1983), 73.
188
Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstances (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1987), 18.
Michel Foucault, “Society must be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey
(New York: Picador, 2003), 247, hereafter SD. Foucault first discusses biopolitics in the final chapter of The
History of Sexuality. The History of Sexuality, Vol I: An Introduction, trans. Richard Hurley (New York: Vintage,
1990), 138.
189
190
“By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of
mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political
strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern
Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I
have called biopower." Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978 (New
York: Vintage, 2009), 6. See also: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage,
1994). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995).
131
animals as a category affected by biopolitics. Foucault’s ideas here, when applied to
enclosure, help fill in earlier critics’ work on enclosure and its effects on income
distribution, by viewing enclosure as part of a discourse that reshapes the human subject
as a species derivative of State biopower, as biological material to be repurposed
according to effects that are virtual as well as material.
Already in 1786, before such processes had reached their conclusion, John
Howlett, a contemporary ally of Arthur Young, had written that “the most valuable
productions of improved agriculture are not wheat and barley, sheep and oxen; but human
creatures” because the stabilization in meat prices (which Howlett notes), as tied to
enclosed pastures, led to a national population surge.191 What I wish to emphasize in my
discussion of enclosure as it relates to Clare’s animal poetry, then, is the biological nature
of enclosure and its literal and figurative disassociation of human and non-human life that
helps create speciesism. In fact, the biological is enclosure’s central preoccupation, as
what takes place, as Rousseau and Smith noted, is an entire reorganization of the
conditions of life. National endeavors like enclosure therefore contributed to a
redefinition of life in general. Within this framework it is possible to see Clare’s poetry as
chronicling these biopolitical changes, but also shaping a critical mode of poiesis that
resists this reorganization of life and offers a starkly different vision of biological
relationships.
Indeed, one of the most startling features of Clare’s poetry, and one much
remarked upon and admired, is its unparalleled vitality and almost intuitive sense, and
191
Howlett, along with Young, were the biggest champions of enclosure. Howlett’s patron was Alexander
Wedderburn, pupil and friend to Adam Smith. Wedderburn became Chief Justice in 1788 and ruled against
shared land use (AR 25-26). John Howlett, Enclosure and Population: An Enquiry into the Influence which Enclosures
have had upon the Population of England, 1786 & Enclosures, A Cause of Improved Agriculture of Plenty and Cheapness
Provisions (rpt. London: Gregg International Publishers, 1973), 74. Howlett frames his conclusion in terms of a
rebuttal to certain pamphlets decrying enclosure: “Is it not evident that the inhabitants of this kingdom are
greatly increased? Is it not equally manifest that the consumption of all kinds of provisions is increased still
more than our people? Are not beef and mutton now eaten almost daily in villages where formerly the use of
them was hardly known, or more than once a week?” (98). That enclosure did not produce the gigantic increase
in agricultural vegetable yield Young, Howlett, and the English Parliament anticipated is beside the point.
England undoubtedly became a meat-eating society at this time because meat did, partially due to processes like
enclosure, become more affordable as more animals were raised for slaughter on lands that were no longer
allowed to lie fallow. According to Mark Overton, who looks at records on sheep increases, the number of
sheep rose by 33 percent and their value by 590 percent because they were now slaughtered for wool and
mutton (AR 165).
132
realization of, a local ecological sphere.192 Since James McKusick’s essay on the subject
of Clare’s environmental vision, critics have gravitated to this aspect of his work, paying
careful attention to how Clare frames the landscape of Helpstone as an object of
environmental concern.193 In this sense, Clare is, indubitably, an ecological poet of a type
that dramatically differs from other Romantic writers (with the exception of Dorothy
Wordsworth in her Grasmere Journal), downplaying, as he does, the sublime and
picturesque elements of nature in favor of the messier actualities and minutiae of plant
and animal biospheres.194 Clare takes great pains to chronicle how animals eat, how they
build their nests, how they sound, how they affect other animals and plants. However,
Clare’s vision is not just about noting the interrelatedness of life in this particular
ecological sphere. His ecological vision mandates not simply an attendance to the
marginal and peripheral bodies Foucault talks about, but demonstrates how humans are
not, contrary to the tradition that follows in the wake of Renaissance thinkers and the
triumph of Cartesian subjectivity, the masters and centers of the universe. The vision on
display here goes further still: an individual consciousness is not simply interrelated, but
fractured and dependent on the othering function induced by one’s spatial placement in
an ecology of indeterminate, inexplicable, creatures.
Hence, his desire, in his animal poems, to submerge the poetic speaking voice, as
if to say the violence the poems capture overmasters any sense of self that poems
192
More recently, Paul Chirico has argued something much different: “that Clare, resentful of the constraint on
his physical and artistic freedom, conceives his interest in the past as a form of trespass, a symbolic
transgression of the structures regulating his own time and labour. Thus his concern to describe—or define—
his own place might be seen, contrary to the conventional reading of him as firmly rooted, as a desire to roam,
a steadfast refusal to be put in his place.” John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (New York: Palgrave, 2007),
81. Alan Bewell has more recently argued that Clare can best be understood as a poet of dislocation, uprooted
from his particular place and offering a powerful vision of existential displacement. See Bewell, “John Clare and
the Ghosts of Natures Past,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65:4 (2011), 548-578.
193
James C. McKusick, “ ‘A language that is ever green’: The Ecological Vision of John Clare,” University of
Toronto Quarterly 61: 2 (1991), 226-249.
194
Sarah Houghton shows how Clare’s theory of the sublime in his poetics differs from other Romantics.
Houghton, “ ‘Enkindling Ecstacy’: The Sublime Vision of John Clare,” Romanticism 9 (2003): 176-195. Many
scholars have written on Clare’s rejection of eighteenth-century modes of the picturesque beginning with
Barrell. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972). See
also: Scott Hess, “John Clare, William Wordswroth, and the (Un)Framing of Nature,” John Clare Society Journal
27 (2008): 27-44. Adam White disagrees that Clare disregards the picturesque, arguing that he uses the
technique throughout his later poetry. White, “John Clare: ‘The Man of Taste,’” John Clare Society Journal 28
(2009): 38-54. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2002).
133
normally manifest. Clare’s animal poems can be helpfully understood in contrast to
Aesop’s fables, which presented animals in vexatious situations to expose human folly,
pride, avarice, and general moral waywardness. Clare’s poems rarely offer similar moral
instruction.195 Aesop and later fabulists excluded a properly biological animal presence
from their work, using animals merely as stand-ins for human characters they resembled.
Clare’s poetry, on the other hand, does just the opposite, namely, it features obscured
humans so vaguely defined in either form or feature (see my reading of the bird’s nests
poems and the badger sonnets below will show) that his poetry eschews the poetic voice
so often reserved for humanist didacticism and fabulist moralizing. Unlike these
traditions that all, in different ways, present the human as a pastor morally guiding the
flocks of the animals around him, Clare’s poetry does not locate moral exemplarity in the
human. Perhaps, at a personal level, because enclosure converted arable land to pastoral
land, Clare associates enclosure with a perversion of the pastoral in general. The
reorganization of the village changed shepherding practices as well, and this enforced the
relocation and manipulation of animal bodies. Ultimately, such associations lead Clare to
refuse the classical tropes of pastoral poetry: “…I think an able Essay on objects in nature
that woud beautfye descriptive poetry might be entertaining & useful to form a right taste
in pastoral poems that are full of nothing but the old thread….. everything else is
reckoned low & vulgar…in fact they are too rustic for the fashionable or prevailing
system of rhyme till some bold innovating genius rises with a real love for nature & then
they will no doubt be considerd as great beautys which they really are.”196 If pastoral
conditions come to mean the control of bodies by governmental power, then, for Clare,
the only way to fight these conditions is to write poetry that individuates history at the
level of particular life forms rather than historicizing human and non-human individuals
as members of a species.
195
Alan Vardy, writing on Clare’s poem “The Vixen,” argues that this poem, like Clare’s other poetry, insists
on the intrinsic value of the foxes, not on their potential as a moral lesson.” Vardy contrasts this to
Wordsworth and Coleridge who see a difference in ethics and aesthetics whereas Clare, according to Vardy,
does not. My argument diverges from Vardy’s below. There is a moral in Clare’s work, just not of the Aesopian
kind. Alan D. Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 21.
196
John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1983), 51.
134
III.
Clare’s resistane to the species-creation of the biopolitics of enclosure is manifest
in his rejection of contemporary taxonomy and botany, both of which are activities he
undertakes, but without distinguishing animal life as subordinate to human life. Written
during his life in Helpstone, the letters Clare completed for his proposed natural history,
and his notes and manuscripts on indigenous plant-life and birds, demonstrate a thorough
awareness of species distinctions being made by these popular sciences.197 Despite
Clare’s dislike for the new botanical and taxonomic scientific discourses that appeared in
tandem with the enclosure movements he likewise despised, his poetry often shares
surface similarities with natural history.198 But for Clare the point of going out “to
botanize,” as he says, was not a scientific pursuit in the sense meant by his botanist friend
Henderson, but an opportunity to simply observe and lyrically transcribe the natural
world.199 One of his later poems, “The Botanist’s Walk,” written in the asylum in 1841,
displays what he meant by “botanizing”:
The Forest meets the blessings of the Spring;
The chestnut throws her sticky buds away,
And shows her pleasant leaves and snow-white flowers;
The nightingale is loud, and often heard
The notes of every song, and hardly known,
She hides and sings, a stranger all the day;
197
“I don’t know much of the new christning system of modern botany,” Clare says. Nor does he want to,
explicitly rejecting Linnaeus’s classification system. John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed.
Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 61. As Alan Bewell argues, to accept such a system would
have cut against the grain of Clare’s project of preserving local knowledge and ultimately would have
exacerbated Clare’s personal sense of dislocation and loss. Bewell, “John Clare and the Ghosts of Natures
Past,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65:4 (2011), 548-578. According to Sarah Weiger, for Clare, “writing natural
history was a way of accounting for and celebrating the peculiarities of taste among birds, flowers, insects, and
men” (59). Weiger, ‘Shadows of Taste’: John Clare’s Tasteful Natural History,” John Clare Society Journal 27
(2008): 59-71.
198
Anne Barton finds the same awareness in his poetry: “It was the life of a species, whether winged or rooted
in the earth, that he was concerned to set before the reader from his own meticulous observation.” Barton,
“Clare’s Animals: The Wild and the Tame,” John Clare Society Journal (1999): 5-21, 10.
199
John Clare, John Clare by Himself, eds. Eric Robinson & David Powell (New York: Routledge, 2002), 59.
135
The spurge, with caper-flowers of yellow green—
And called ‘wild capers,’ when I went in woods
To look for nests and hear the nightingale;
Dog-mercury shoots; the sloe is full of flowers;
A willow flowers, and just above the ground,
The furze, like myrtle, scarce a finger long,
Is every where, and full of golden flowers;
And butterflies, the colour of the flowers—
As if the winds had blown them from their stalks—
Are all about, and every where is Spring! (ll. 1-16)200
Clare represents the botanist as an unknown narrator and unseen presence. Moreover,
Clare refuses to acknowledge that the speaker of this poem is even meant to be the
botanist taking a walk. It is possible that the sights and sounds described in the poem are
meant to be a simple recounting of the path a botanist took on a countryside ramble. In
any event, though, the speaker of this poem has no interest in scientific botany, making
general observations about birds (“the nightingale is loud”) and flowers (they are “snowwhite” and “golden”) but never bothering to attend to any of the specific taxonomic
characteristics, of anything, before reaching a fairly typical poetic conclusion that spring
has arrived. In other words, Clare is happy to observe things, and, as we will see, is even
happy to greatly detail the empirical reality he sees, but he has no interest in classifying
those things and contributing to the broader scientific work he was well aware was
ongoing at the time.201 He did plan, with his publisher John Taylor, to write a natural
history that he called a “Biography of Birds and Flowers with an Appendix on Animals
and Insects.” His discussion of the book in the fragments of his Natural History Letters
200
John Clare, The Later Poems of John Clare, Vol I, d. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1984), 35.
201
Indeed, Alan Vardy evidences Clare’s writing on the flyleaf of a book where he has jotted down 22 different
flowers without bothering to take notice of the 14 different species or arrange them accordingly. For him, as
Vardy says, “their primary value lay in their individual beauty, not in their status as specimens.” Alan D. Vardy,
John Clare, Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 154.
136
indicate that what he had in mind was far different than popular kinds of natural history,
though:
I love to see the nightingale in its hazel retreat & the cuckoo hiding in its solitudes
of oaken foliage & not to examine their carcasses in glass cases yet naturalists &
botanists seem to have no taste for this poetical feeling they merely make
collections of dryd specimens classing them after Leanius into tribes & family’s
& there they delight to show them as a sort of ambitious fame….I have none of
this curiosity about me tho I feel as happy as they can in finding a new species of
field flower or butterflye.202
Clare was simply not interested in replicating professional botanical discourse or any
kind of scientific systematicity.203 To Clare, natural history meant “local, particular
natural history” that could only happen up close, face-to-face. This is why he called his
natural history project a “biography” rather than a “taxonomy”: he wants, as he says here,
to capture this “poetical feeling” that arouses his “love” for what he sees.
Therefore Clare’s poems on specific animals, which include over 100 poems
devoted to birds and birds’ nests, depict human-animal relations as consciously and
conscientiously respectful and gentle, true idylls of rural country life. According to James
Fisher, Clare’s knowledge of birds was prodigious: “he knew from personal observation
about 145 wild birds, of which 119 can be identified with reasonable certainty.”204
Clare’s approach in his bird poems is always empirical, a methodology evidenced in this
exhortation from “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” (1825-1826): “Let us stoop/ And seek its
202
John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1983), 38.
203
Eric Miller reads (among other poems) Clare’s badger sonnets as a reflection Clare’s resistance to the
Linnaean taxonomic categorization of the natural world. “Enclosure and Taxonomy in John Clare,” Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900 40:4 (2000), 635-657.
204
James Fisher, “The Birds of John Clare,” The First Fifty Years: A history of the Kettering and District Naturalists’
Society and Field Club (Kettering: 1956), quoted in John Clare’s Birds, ed. Eric Robinson & Richard Fitter (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1982), xii.
137
nest” (ll. 3-4).205 In this poem, Clare marvels at the natural rudiments of the nest and
documents the various idiosyncrasies he finds there:
Aye, here it is! stuck close beside the bank,
Beneath the bunch of grass, that spindles rank
Its husk-seeds tall and high:—’tis rudely planned
Of bleached stubbles, and the withered fare
That last year’s harvest left upon the land,—
Lined thinly with the horse’s sable hair.
Five eggs, pen-scribbled o’er with ink their shells,
Resembling writer-scrawls, which Fancy reads
As Nature’s poesy, and pastoral spells—
They are the Yellowhammer’s; and she dwells,
Most poet-like, where brooks and flower weeds
As sweet as Castaly her fancy deems;
And that old mole-hill is Parnassus’ hill,
On which her partner haply sits, and dreams
O’er all his joys of song. Let’s leave it still
A happy home of sunshine, flowers, and streams.
Yet is the sweetest place exposed to ill,
A noisome weed, that burthens every soil;
For snakes are known, with chill and deadly coil,
To watch such nests, and seize the helpless young;
And like as if the plague became a guest,
To leave a houseless home, a ruined nest:
Aye! mournful hath the little warbler sung
When such like woes have rent his gentle breast (ll. 7-30 ).
As in his other bird poems, Clare is here attuned to the eccentricities of nests, the “horse’s
sable hair” that cross-stitches the thatch along with the leavings of “the withered fare”
205
John Clare, “The Yellowhammer’s Nest,” Selected Poems, ed. Geoffrey Summerfield (New York: Penguin,
2000), 104-105. The poem was originally written for the proposed collection The Midsummer Cushion some time
in the years 1825-1826.
138
from last year’s harvest. To Clare the yellowhammer’s nest is not simply one nest
amongst others; it is instead a unique composition, expertly crafted by this individual
bird.206 On the whole, the poem presents a sweetly gentle picture, but Clare is
nevertheless always aware that even “the sweetest place” is “exposed to ill” as the baleful
snake preys on the eggs the yellowhammer has so carefully and peacefully built a nest to
shield. When the egg is destroyed, however, Clare does not view this as a matter of
ecological necessity (that living mandates predator-and-prey relationships): it is a
moment of unqualified mourning for him and for the yellowhammer who warbles
melancholically at the poem’s end. Clare’s interests amount to more than the empirical
description for which he is often praised; the point, rather, is to try and show the affective
life of animals in their natural state, to truly represent the otherness of beings whose lives
differ so dramatically from human lives.207
In observing these sheltered nests, Clare captures not only the animal oikos but
also questions the ethical ambiguity of human sovereignty. In questioning human-animal
sociality, Clare perpetually tries to decenter the human subject as the universe’s
perceived primary actor and, by implication, poetry’s primary actor as well. So even
though empirical observation motors his poetry, and the poetry features frequent
anthropomorphisms, Clare’s purpose is to override the language of his poems by crafting
images that are more than mere poetic words. As he writes in “Pastoral Poesy”: “true
poesy is not in words/ but images that thoughts express” (ll. 1-2).208 What Clare sets out
here is almost anti-poetical: to paradoxically evacuate mimesis at the moment it captures
an image. Rather than imagine animals, Clare paradoxically seeks to observe animals
without betraying them to a language that he sees as inextricably structured by codes
indebted to notions of anthropocentric sovereignty.
206
In a refutation of John Barrell, Timothy Brownlow argues that Clare was not a picturesque poet who looked
for unlimited horizons to depict; rather, he was interested in local contiguous life. Brownlow’s idea that Clare
focuses on “micropanoramas” is similar in some ways to what I am saying here. Clare and Picturesque Landscape
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 66.
207
Clare in fact expresses incredulity that London people and poets do not know about nightingales. As
Margaret Grainger notes, he seems to be specifically objecting to Coleridge’s “The Nightingale: A Conversation
Poem,” which is, apparently, wrong in its details about the nightingale. John Clare, The Natural History Prose
Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 42.
208
John Clare, “Pastoral Poesy,” Selected Poems, ed. Geoffrey Summerfield (New York: Penguin, 2000), 163.
139
To this end, as many of the bird poems close, Clare tries to dissipate the authorial
voice that he figures as co-implicated in human intrusion. The speaker, accordingly,
becomes more disembodied, and reflects on his intrusive presence before a departure that
restores an unseen, but hoped-for, natural peace. “The Nightingale’s Nest” (1832) begins
with an exhortation by this speaker to the reader: “Up this green woodland-ride let’s
softly rove/And list the nightingale—she dwelleth just here” (ll. 1-2).209 Like the earlier
poem this one takes dwelling as its focus:
No other bird
Uses such loose materials, or weaves
Its dwelling in such spots: dead oaken leaves
Are placed without, and velvet moss within
And little scraps of grass, and, scant and spare
What scarcely seem materials, down and hair
For from men’s haunts she nothing seems to win (ll. 76-82).
Although watching birds may seem a relatively passive activity compared to the
predation Clare will write about in his poems on fox lairs and badger-baiting, the speaker
nonetheless characterizes it as hunting: “Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails/
There have I hunted like a very boy/ Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorn/
To find her nest, and see her feed her young” (ll. 11-14). The line “laughing and
creeping” at once suggests the insouciant irreverence humans’ hold for nonhuman life
even while it evokes the deadly earnestness with which they sneak into their habitats.
Clare’s use of the simile “like a very boy” references his own retrospective chagrin when
he snatched eggs out of birds’ nests as a boy, a practice he discontinued as his ecological,
209
John Clare, “The Nightingale’s Nest,” Selected Poems, ed. Geoffrey Summerfield, (New York: Penguin, 2000),
108-111.
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and ethical, consciousness matured.210 But despite the growing disquiet shadowed in
these later lines, the poem begins with the speaker face-to-face with the nightingale:
“And where those crimping fern-leaves ramp among/ The hazel’s under boughs, I’ve
nestled down/ And watched her while she sung” (ll. 18-19). In this observant posture, the
speaker describes the nightingale anthropomorphically, granting to the bird alien qualities
that pervert the nestedness of what Jacob von Uexkull calls umwelt, the biological
foundations that are particular to each life form and that engender that life form’s unique
signifying capacity.211 The bird is certainly not singing since singing implies human
notions of vocal signification (obviously bird noises share rhythm, tone, and pitch with
human song; the key difference is that we do not know if birds’ conceive their noise this
way); the description of the bird as a being who would “would tremble in her ecstasy”
and with “mouth wide open…release her heart/ Of its out-sobbing songs” indicates not
empirical observation, then, but metaphoric anthropocentric intrusion on the bird’s abode
and the bird itself (ll. 23-25). This signification is paradoxical as the face-to-face
relationship on display in this poem leads the speaker to suddenly notice the
disruptiveness of his presence: “But if I touched a bush, or scarcely stirred/ All in a
moment stopt. I watched in vain/The timid bird had left the hazel bush/And at a distance
hid to sing again” (ll. 28-31). Clare’s speaker watches in vain, and this attitude is
indicative of the steep learning curve for human beings that his poetry characterizes.
Coming face-to-face with birds in their nest does not lead to greater understanding but
simply equals another perversion of the natural world to Clare (that is why the
nightingale escapes “to sing again”). Observation itself is in vain, a form of human
vanity. The difference between robbing the poor bird’s nest and observing these nests
ultimately amounts to the same thing. While the former destroys the materiality of life,
the latter refashions that life according to human perception and understanding. Both
strategies, to Clare, are destructive.
210
“I usd also to be very fond of poking about the hedges in spring to hunt pootys and I was no less fond of
robbing the poor birds nests.” Autobiographical Fragments,” John Clare by Himself, ed. Eric Robinson & David
Powell (New York: Routledge, 2002), 43.
211
Jacob von Uexkull, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph O’
Neil (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010).
141
Yet, precisely because of his awareness of how description can become involved
as an aid to a kind of pre-verbalized a priori violence already installed in language,
Clare’s poems continually push back against the divisiveness promoted by enclosure and
its contribution to the exclusion of animals from sight and sympathy by revealing this
violent linguistic aporia. The poems therefore also work to create an alternate face-toface economy, one in which the value of animal life is not circumnavigated. For instance,
in “The Nightingale’s Nest,” abruptly, the inclusive attitude of the opening lines returns,
and “We will have another search today” (l. 47). No sooner are we pulled back into the
collective “we” than we are thrust out of the bird’s nest because we begin to sympathize
with its “choking fear” when it notices our approach (l. 60). Therefore, “even now/ we’ll
leave it as we found it” because “our presence doth retard her joys” (ll. 65-66). The poem
ends on a scene of ecological understanding and peace reminiscent of Clare’s other bird
poems, and we are told, again, that we will not do the bird harm: “We will not plunder
music of its dower/ Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall” (ll. 69-70). The use of the
word “thrall” here is significant because it is the same harsh word Clare employs in “The
Moors” to indicate the destruction of enclosure (“the rude philistine’s thrall/ Is laid upon
them and destroyed them all” [ll. 64-65]).212 In leaving the nightingale and her eggs “still
unknown to wrong” “we”—the addressee of the poem—enact the argument the poem
puts forward, which is that humans must enter into an empirical face-to-face economy
with animals precisely because this engenders the knowledge that such relational contact
can both nurture and destroy. Such an attitude is, of course, paradoxical since it
necessitates that to avoid disrupting animal life humans must, in fact, disrupt animal life
in order to engender this awareness. Otherwise we run the risk of committing the
atrocities of enclosure. Clare notes this at the end of “The Moors”: “A board sticks up to
notice ‘no road here’/ And on the tree with ivy overhung/ The hated sign by vulgar taste
is hung/As tho’ the very birds should learn to know” (ll. 69-71). This partitioning induces
a prelapsarian reversal that unmakes paradise: “And birds and trees and flowers without a
name/ have found too truly that they were but dreams” (ll 76-79). The loss of animal and
plant names mirrors the state of innocence before Adam’s nomination of them in the
212
John Clare, “The Moors,” The Middle Poems of John Clare, Vol I, ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1989), 347.
142
Biblical myth of paradise. But the allusion is suddenly perverted, as the very real
parceling and rerouting of land that occurred throughout the counties of England, Clare
wants to say, changed cognitive awareness of animal life by making those names seem
like insubstantial vapors, the fleeting vestiges of human memory during the dream state.
Animal life, as well as trees and flowers, are no longer alive, since enclosure has
foreclosed the paradoxical social relations between animal and human life that the bird’s
nest poems observe.
Ultimately, Clare’s emotionally-charged poems depicting this violence function
as critiques against human dominance by means of a subtle rethinking of poiesis itself:
they attempt to decouple prosopopoeia from the idea of poiesis and to link it instead to
autopoiesis. Paul de Man writes that prosopopoeia—to give voice and face to the dead or
absent by personifying and reifying them in the present—is the master trope of not only
autobiography, but also poetry itself, since all writing is essentially autobiographical.213
For de Man prosopopoeia is restorative and privative in that it depends on a fundamental
paradox: the constitutive effacement of the subject in the act of personifying it. A
fundamental paradox of prosopopoeia then is its constitutive effacement of the
personified subject since literary personification fails to capture that voice as fully
present. Prosopopeia therefore also marks the profound difference that divides a poetic
voice from the voice of the other it tries to invoke. But for Clare the paradox of
prosopopoeia is that it replicates the intrusiveness of humans’ sovereignty over animals
and their habitats, which he abhors. He wants, instead, to let animals have voice rather
than give them voice, to figure prosopopoeia as a trope of intimacy and not one of
imposition.
This desire is why “The Badger,” a sequence of sonnets written some time
between 1835 and 1837, elides developed human characters and places in their stead
thinly sketched, ephemeral shapes in the background of the poem and assumes a speaking
213
Paul de Man, “Autobiography and De-facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1984), 70-76. de Man: “Prosopopoeia is the master trope of poetic discourse.” “Hypogram and Inscription,”
The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 48.
143
voice radically emptied of human content.214 This strategy is a familiar one for Clare but
it finds its most powerful deployment here as the pathos of the poem rests entirely on the
badger as it reacts to the horrifying circumstances of then-popular badger baiting. While
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner is quite right to note that parataxis is “Clare’s central syntactic
strategy during these years,” in this poem, Clare eschews parataxis for continuous
narrative, adding an urgency to the baiting of the badger not present in the earlier birds’
nest poems.215 An unknown omniscient narrator recounts how the townspeople, at
midnight, track a badger to his lair, apprehend him, and bring him to the main village
thoroughfare for sport: “when midnight comes a host of dogs and men/ Go out and track
the badger to his den/ And put a sack within the hole, and lie/ Till the old grunting badger
passes by” (l. 1-4). Although the poem paints a grim picture, as the townspeople shout at,
set dogs on, and hurl rocks at the badger, the sympathies of the speaker are never
revealed.216 Instead, the poem is offered in a neutral tone, as if, perhaps, the moral ought
to be obvious enough from mere empirical description alone.217 Moreover, the speaker
does not mimic the voice of the badger, who, though central to the poem, has no vocal
214
John Clare, “The Badger,” Major Works, eds. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004),
246. The poem is transcribed from the Peterborough manuscript collection but no concrete date as to its
composition is available. John Barrell also remarks on Clare’s lack of robust description when it comes to
human beings in Clare’s poetry: “This philosophy has nothing to do with the society Clare describes, which he
presents as in some sense still feudal, a society in which ‘character’, if it exists at all, is primarily a function of
what people do. Thus, shepherds in Clare’s poems are remote and lonely, because it is the nature of what they
do to make them so….” “The people Clare writes about are what they do: if they were anything else—if they
had, somehow, more character—then the sense of place they help create in Clare’s poems would change, and
would have engaged in some compromise with what it is designed to exclude—the spirit and values of agrarian
capitalism.” John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972),
172-173
215
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, “Listening with John Clare,” Studies in Romanticism 48 (2009): 380.
David Perkins sees the poem differently: “In the ‘Badger’ sonnets Clare viewed the baited animal with a
somewhat affectionate realism and the villagers with a somewhat humorous distance. His strongest desire, it
seems, was to keep both at an emotional distance” (405). For my part I can find nothing humorous in the
poem or in Clare’s attitude to the villagers. Perkins, “Sweet Helpston! John Clare on Badger Baiting,” Studies in
Romanticism 38 (1999): 387-408.
216
217
“The Hedgehog” ends with a similar note of ambiguity content-wise but its tonal bleakness suggests that
someone should in fact care: “but still they hunt the hedges all about/ and shepherd dogs are trained to hunt
them out/ they hurl with savage force the stick and stone/ and no one cares and still the strife goes on” (l. 2528). John Clare, “The Hedgehog,” Major Works, eds. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2004), 248.
144
expressions of any kind, even onomatopoetic ones, which, again, is not standard for a
Clare poem featuring animals.218
The poem’s innovation lies not only in its ruthless depiction of the scene; it also,
by refusing to explicitly moralize, evacuates privileged human authority. While the
shadowy human characters remain largely inert, the badger claims nearly all of the
strongest verbs in the poem: he “passes,” “runs,” “bites,” “turns,” “drives,” “starts,” and
“grins” (similar action occurs in “The Vixen”: “If any stands she runs among the poles/
And barks and snaps and drive them in the holes” [l. 7-8].).219 Significantly, the badger
continues to turn and drive throughout the poem:
He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled where'er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone's a foe.
The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold,
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
218
Weiner demonstrates this in her essay. “Listening,” 384-390.
John Clare, “The Vixen,” Major Works, eds. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004),
249.
219
145
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through - the drunkard swears and reels (ll. 42-56)
In turning to “face the loud uproar,” the badger comes face-to-face with his attackers, or
would, except for the curious fact that none of them have faces. The evacuation of human
presence suggests that more than a pivot from a defensive position to an offensive stance
on the badger’s part, the volte to face insubstantial humans is actually a turning of a trope,
that of prosopopoeia. As the central motor driving the poem’s action, the badger’s turning
to face the attackers is also a turn to face outward from the poem, to manifest that nonhuman life can occupy the subject position of lyric poetry. The more he turns, grins, and
drives, the more the humans retreat from the poem, as if the badger is also driving off the
voice and face humans try to force on him. According to the OED, “grin,” as a verb, can
mean “to pull back the lips into a smile,” or, as a noun, it can mean “a snare for catching
birds or animals.” Etymologically, the word codes for violence in the poem and
demonstrates how prosopopoeia cannot escape its own figural violence.
Anthropomorphic traits like the badger’s grin seem to suggest that human traits will
always pervade, if not dominate, any portrayal of non-human life by human poets, even
while the turning of the badger outward, literally and figuratively, seeks to evade that
common assumption. The poem, therefore, rethinks prosopopoeia in order to propose
questions about the literal violence associated with figural tropes that attempt to
humanize animality.
Reading “The Badger” as an attempt to disavow the human sovereignty in the
trope of prosopopoeia also actualizes how the poem provides a persuasively powerful
account of autopoiesis. As outlined in my introduction, autopoiesis is the process by
which a given system distinguishes itself from the larger environment it is embedded
within.220 Systems work by way of operational closure, that is, they are paradoxically
closed and open to the environment of which they are part and this defines their identity:
“the concept of a self-referentially closed system does not contradict the system’s
openness to the environment. Instead, in the self-referential mode of operation, closure is
220
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996). Hereafter SS.
146
a form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure increases, by constituting
elements more capable of being determined, the complexity of the environment that is
possible for the system.”221 This openness to closure is what Luhmann calls
differentiation: “Differentiation provides the system with systematicity; besides its mere
identity (difference from something else), it also acquires a second version of unity
(difference from itself).”222 Differentiation allows a system to contrast itself from its
environment.
Prosopopoeia can also be understood as a Luhmannian system, in that it
differentiates the human speaking voice from the non-human: it differentiates from them
in order to work even as it announces its difference from itself: it needs the non-human
for self-actualization. Clare’s prosopopoeia works the same way because it signals how
the trope differentiates the human speaking voice from the non-human even as it notes
their essential relationality, or operational closure. “The Badger” foregrounds this very
process of prosopopoeia’s operational closure—its concurrent effacement of the subject it
represents—and therefore scrambles our understanding of how poetics seek to instantiate
a human speaking voice by differentiating it from the non-human. In this poem,
prosopopoeia functions by means of its irreducible dialectic between the human and the
non-human, which means that it requires the non-human to figure forth a human voice, to
remain operationally closed to what it opens toward. Therefore prosopopoeia undercuts
its own generative anthropomorphism in the act of inscription and this human-nonhuman
contamination is both the condition and uncondition of poetry’s figurative possibility.
Prosopopoeia both limns—makes the human face visible—and attenuates form—
the invisible non-human origin of the trope dereifies the human face in “The Badger.”
Sara Guyer has read prosopopoeia as deconstructive in its implication for the decentering
of the human subject. She argues that the figurative use of prosopopoeia in romanticism
“assumes a life beyond life,” a poetry animated by rhetorical maneuvers that
paradoxically affirms the voice and face of humanity in poetry even as it “reflects a
radical displacement of the human subject” as prosopopoeia, in giving life to what is not
221
222
SS, 37.
SS, 18.
147
alive, “is determined by non-self-identity.”223 Similarly, prosopopoeia in “The Badger”
disavows the human subject. This movement beyond the human figures both the human
and the animal in relation to what they do not identify with, the dual figural heart of
prosopopoeia that forces the faces of humans and animals to face each other. It is this
final facing, this two-facedness of the human and the non-human, that is the trope of
prosopopoeia. However, this does not mean the poem merely points to poetics as
inherently and unshakably violent in its figurative capacities. If, as Clare’s autopoiesis
shows, the relationship with animal life contributes to the operational closure of the
human speaking voice in poetry—that is to say the distinction of a legible individual from
the ecological niche it is nested within—then Clare’s example also helps us to see that the
divide between humans and animals is itself figurative. Indeed, figurative and structural
violence is always already inscribed within the relationship and this structuration itself, as
a condition of poetry and life, of auto- and poeisis, and of autopoeisis, invokes the
possibility of forestalling the physical violence of humans toward animals that is the
poem’s surface theme. This instance of prosopopoeia in Clare reorients us to the full
post-human implications of the non-human figural displacement of the human and it
recalls, in prosopopoeia’s inability to figure forth either the uncontaminated, fully present
human or the non-human, the real animals whose status as the referent for poetry’s
signification forestall ethical reciprocity by this poetic subjugation.
Hence, just as Jacques Derrida has recently reminded us, with his reflection on his
face-to-face encounter with his cat, there are figures of animals and there are real animals
(and animals in all their diversity are collapsed by “the animal”). “The Badger” wishes to
remind us that we should see and hear animals outside of poetry. For Clare a turn to face
animals requires that humans actually look at real animals again.224 Indeed, one can argue
that the argument of “The Badger” is that it paradoxically wants the reader to stop
223
Sara Guyer, Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 26, 223, 218. But for all that, in
Guyer’s reading of prosopopoeia, the non-human and the non-living, the othering function of “non-selfidentity,” are dead humans, figures for whom the poet ventriloquizes a life beyond life. Although there are
posthuman implications one can derive from Guyer’s work, the focus remains determinedly on the human
(even her chapter on Frankenstein looks at the novel in terms of “how lyric figures effect human life,” 72).
224
“I must immediately make it clear, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t
the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines
that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables.” Jacques Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, trans.
Marie-Louis Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), 6.
148
reading and go outside because the paradoxical nature of autopoiesis impels us to look
beyond the figurality of animals to real animals.
Clare’s work reminds us of this to the end. During one of the last years of his life,
alone in the asylum, Clare writes, in a shaky hand, one final poem called simply “Birds
Nests” (1864). It totals seven lines:
Tis Spring warm glows the South
Chaffinchs carry the moss in his mouth
To the filbert hedges all day long
& charms the poet with his beautiful song
The wind blows blea oer the sedgey fen
But warm the sunshines by the little wood
Where the old Cow at her leisure chews her cud225
The chaffinch is in the act of carrying moss to the “filbert hedge,” presumably to
construct a nest, but either it takes the chaffinch all day to build its nest, or the poem
keeps the nest perpetually suspended from completion, as if to emphasize that the point is
the impossibility of capturing a nest in poetic form. In the end, Clare sees birds as being
able only to charm poets, not offer them an internal understanding of avian life.
Empiricism fails (and succeeds) and the poet literally becomes charmed, unable to focus
on the purported subject of the poem—no birds’ nests actually appear—and closes
transfixed on an image of another animal, the cow, chewing her cud. It is as if this poem,
evincing no trace of an actual bird’s nest, is the finest representation of a bird’s nest in
Clare’s output, a nice derangement of faces. What if the final lesson is that prosopopoeia
can only ever charm the poet, can only ever limn birds’ nests according to the
225
John Clare, The Later Poems of John Clare, Vol II, ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1984), 1106. Written in 1862, two years before Clare’s death.
149
anthropocentric codes that entrap, and run, human life? What if the lesson of this final
poem’s evasion of its own subject is that instead of trying to figure a bird’s nest you
should go out and look at a cow grazing in the field or watch a chaffinch all day long as it
builds its nest? Is not this a call to rethink how we face animals, how we construe their
faces and our own, how we face ourselves? And is not this, ultimately, posing that we
must rethink prosopopoeia, writing itself, as paradoxically constitutive of an invocation
of real-life ethical affect, in the violence of its very figural heart?
Clare does not argue that humans should embrace this violence; rather, they
should disencumber themselves of the illusion of a possible affective and ontological
position available to them outside of it. This position is at the heart of the ethical
ambiguity that “The Badger” challenges us to confront. In his work’s overall response to
this ambiguity, Clare revises Enlightenment notions of sympathy. Erica McAlpine argues
that “For Clare, who defensively prefers alterity to identification, [Geoffrey] Hartman’s
paradox of sympathy is in full effect: most of his poems, for all of their concrete
description and attentive vernacular wordplay, lack the amount of identification that
would allow empathy, and therefore, knowledge, to occur.”226 But this lack of
identification with, say, the badgers, vixens, hedgehogs, and birds of his poems is
precisely what structurally illuminates the boundaries between human and non-human
life. Clare’s work insists that this closure of the human from the literal affective
experiences of the other mandates a rethinking of affective affiliation in general. Like
Percy Bysshe Shelley, who thought the point of poetry was love, “a going outward of
one’s self,” Clare’s oeuvre emphasizes love above all else, as seen in the phrases “I love
to see” and “I love to hear” that continuously repeat throughout all of his poems.227 But
unlike Shelley, or even Keats, for Clare this does not mean inhabiting the place of others,
in a model like Adam Smith’s sympathy, but requires instead a complete relinquishing of
the self and a surrender to the pains and pleasures of other life forms.228 Love does not
226
Erica McAlpine, “Keeping Nature at Bay: John Clare’s Poetry of Wonder,” Studies in Romanticism 50 (2011):
79-104.
227
James McKusick first pointed out this emphasis in Clare. “‘A language that is ever green’: The Ecological
Vision of John Clare,” University of Toronto Quarterly 61: 2 (1991), 226-249.
228
Shelley writes of poetry: “The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an
identification or ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to
150
consist of the acceptance of human stewardship, quite the opposite: human beings must
relinquish the idea of dominance over the earth and its creatures by accepting their
essential differences from non-human others. In Clare’s poetry seeing and hearing birds
and badgers, even inaccurately, is the beginning of coming to terms with the world
around us.229 Love, for Clare, does not depend on gaining an accurate knowledge of the
other’s internal processes, of going outside oneself, or on fully knowing and
understanding the other, on seeing through the differences presented by the non-human
face.230 It is enough to see others in whatever fashion they present themselves—that is
love.
be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the pace of another and
of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” (517). Percy Bysshe Shelley, A
Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 509539.
229
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner offers a marvelous reading of Clare’s use of onomatopoeia. “Listening with John
Clare,” Studies in Romanticism 48 (2009): 371-390.
230
Clare’s work is thus an attempted refutation of Keats’ negative capability as well. Keats, writing on October
27th 1818, to Richard Woodhouse: “A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no
identity—he is continually in for-and filling 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.” John Keats, Selected Letters,
eds. Robert Gittings & John Mee (New York: Penguin, 2002), 148.
151
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