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

Janelle A. Schwartz’s study of literal and metaphorical worms in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries contributes compellingly to the fields of Romanticera aesthetics and animal studies. Schwartz effectively argues that natural-history explorations of the biological properties of worms, combined with literary authors’ interest in their symbolic presence, evoked discourses of decay and generation in the period. This “organic aesthetic” encourages us to expand definitions of the Romantic aesthetic beyond the beautiful and sublime into the biological and earthy. Schwartz’s study joins other explorations of Romantic-era literary representations of animals by scholars such as Laura Brown, Christine Kenyon-Jones, and David Perkins. However, Worm Work redirects attention away from the higher-order animals (dogs, apes, or horses) that populate these studies, confronting critical preoccupations with animals whose features and behaviors are readily anthropomorphized. Characterized by a deft synthesis of natural history and literary texts, Worm Work underscores the inherent interdisciplinarity of eighteenth-century concerns about the nature of life and death and the complicated relationships between humans and “lower animals.”

The eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of interest in taxonomy and a desire to impose order on the world. The worm—a label applied to creatures as varied as earthworms, maggots, caterpillars, and polyps—demonstrated perplexing biological qualities inconsistent with established knowledge about higher-order animals, thus frequently thwarting taxonomical efforts. Due to this quality of conceptual “worminess” or “VermiCulture” (p. xx), Schwartz claims, natural-history accounts of the worm provide a useful vocabulary for Romantic writers’ fascination with “the instability of classification” and their resultant construction of the “largely hidden aesthetic sensibility of the vile” (p. xxi). Schwartz describes the worm’s “diplopic” (i.e., double-visioned) tendency to recall “organic wholeness” through pairings of “decay and (re)generation, decomposition and (re)composition” (p. xvii) throughout her readings of a variety of Romantic texts.

Analyzing natural history manifestations of worms, the first chapter comprehensively articulates Schwartz’s larger arguments. The second chapter demonstrates how discourses of scientific and literary “worm work” unite in Erasmus Darwin’s heavily annotated poem The Temple of Nature (1803). Chapter 3 examines naturalist Abraham Trembley’s mid-century discovery of the freshwater polyp, which Schwartz depicts as a crucial moment in developing the “vile aesthetic” that merged typical revulsion toward worms’ dealings in decay with an appreciation of their mutability.

Readers interested in Schwartz’s attempt to “recast Romanticism” should especially turn their attention to her final chapters, in which claims about “VermiCulture” inform convincing close readings of some of the period’s canonical texts. William Blake’s The Book of Thel (1789) and “The Sick Rose” (1794) dominate Schwartz’s analysis of how the poet imagines death and degeneration as always followed by renewal, and vice versa. Schwartz’s reconceptualization of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) claims the novel is deeply indebted to natural history, as evidenced by its preoccupation with a “reliance on worms and worminess” (p. 153). Schwartz’s focus on worms diverges from previous analyses of the history of science in Shelley’s novel by scholars such as Marilyn Butler, Anne K. Mellor, and Samuel Vasbinder, revealing the ways in which decay and regeneration exist simultaneously in the text. Schwartz claims that this aesthetic of “vile Romanticism” (p. 149) demonstrates how Victor and the monster both challenge and reinforce the natural order, further complicating the era’s efforts to sustain hierarchal and taxonomic order.

Schwartz’s conclusion exemplifies her determination to draw the focus of current animal studies inquiry to the level of the worm, smartly extending its outlook to Charles Darwin’s final publication: a lengthy treatise on earthworms. Here, Schwartz creates a through-line between her own work and critically prominent conversations in literary animal studies about the immediate and lasting impacts of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. Schwartz challenges her readers to understand how deeply that culture’s aesthetic identity was enmeshed in and indebted to discourses of “worminess.”

Especially in light of its theorization about...