Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism by Janelle A. Schwartz (review)

On June 24, 2013, just in time for the hectic summer-wedding season, the Huffington Post reported that designer Yumi Katsura had created a glow-in-the-dark wedding dress from silk spun by genetically engineered silkworms.¹ Researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences had inserted DNA sequences borrowed from Discosoma corals, Fungia concinna coral, and jellyfish into the silkworm’s fibroin H chain, allowing the worms to spin pastel silk in shades of pink, orange, and green that glows once the lights go down for the first dance. The study and photos of the dress were first published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials in an article that also comments on the silk’s potential medical applications.² Before appearing on the Huffington’s “Weddings” page, the story was picked up by Wired under the title “Mutant Silkworms Spin Fluorescent Silk in 3 Colors”; by physics.org, illustrated with a cartoon version of the worm-to-dress generative process; and by ecouterre.com, a website devoted to “innovations and emerging trends in eco fashion, sustainable style, organic beauty and ethical apparel.”³

With its tincture of fear and fascination, desire and revulsion, this tangle of culture, aesthetics, and science stands as one of many twenty-first-century reincarnations of the issues explored in Janelle Schwartz’s Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism. Schwartz organizes her study around the lowly worm in all its forms to propose an emerging “aesthetic sensibility of the vile” in Romantic-period literature (p. xxi). In her project, she joins a number of critics—including Denise Gigante, David Fairer, Sharon Ruston, and Catherine Packham, among others—engaged in reassessing the role of organicism and vitalism in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century natural philosophy and literature. In line with the worm’s work of breaking down organic matter, Schwartz sees the imagery of growth and generation as intimately tied to processes of decomposition and decay. To ferret out the implications of this conjunction, the book isolates moments of “diplopic,” or double-visioned, representation, examining textual instances where seeming opposites—material and immaterial, empirical and mythic, low and high, man and worm—are held in animated suspension. Her conclusions most directly resemble those of Gigante’s Life (2009): for both, fracturing and separation bespeak an essential wholeness, a version of Coleridge’s unity in multëity. In Schwartz’s account, literary authors actively seek to produce such moments of diplopia by way of the vermicular: the worm, she argues, proves especially open to the diplopic because it exposes fissures in both contemporary taxonomies and conventional aesthetic positions of the sublime and beautiful (pp. xix, xv).

Worms and worminess thus provide the topical glue of Schwartz’s study, and her chapters provide a catalog of “worm sightings” in the work of various writers across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (p. 115). Initially, she shifts between texts that treat worms literally and figuratively, beginning in the first chapter with a brief discussion of hymns and sermons via Isaac Watts and Jonathan Edwards before turning to entries from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and worm studies by Francesco Redi, René Réaumur, and Charles Bonnet that show how worms “figuratively crawl through the very boundaries meant to reify them” (p. 18). Schwartz follows this “extended snapshot” (p. 5) with chapters on Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature (1803) and Abraham Trembly’s research on polyps in the 1740s; she then offers readings of William Blake and Mary Shelley in chapters 4 and 5 respectively. The book concludes by pairing John Keats’s “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” (1818) with Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mold, through the Action of Worms (1881). Moving beyond the worm’s presence to its figurative potential, the chapters underscore the leveling effect of a recurrent “man : worm analogy” (p. xxi). This point is made particularly luminous in Schwartz’s analyses of Blake’s The Book of Thel (1789) and, in...