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Chapter 2: Rural Rambles and Rustic Adornments: Early British Aquarium Writing
- University of Michigan Press
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chapter 2 rural rambles and rustic adornments: early british aquarium writing Each culture generates its rhetoric, ‹nding it consistent, convincing, and, of course, useful. This rhetorical screen is particularly durable in those cultures with an imperial bent since it justi‹es practices that without it would reveal their self-interest. Such rhetoric has a synthetic and unifying role in cultural life. It removes the need to examine disturbing issues, giving each subscriber a sense of comforting identity and ‹rm destiny. It de‹nes the common good and will not tolerate its rede‹nition. It maintains itself through both its own energy and the rewards it offers. —barbara novak, Nature and Culture, preface to the previous edition The home aquarium functions rhetorically as landscape painting does in Barbara Novak’s landmark study Nature and Culture, the source of the preceding epigraph. The aquarium contains and harmonizes a wide range of issues and anxieties associated with imperial modernity. But whereas Novak describes a genre of painting with rhetorical strategies that did not tolerate rede‹nitions, the aquarium accommodates them, proving that its visual elasticity—its ability to draw on multiple media to normalize its pleasures—is second only to its discursive elasticity. The aquarium is a useful and unifying vessel for cultural work precisely because of this capacity to adapt a wide range of sometimes-contradictory discourses to characterize its appeal. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sarah Ahmed describes a metonymic slide in which, through a series of substitutions , terms slip from one to another to form an implicit argument with emotional force, if not cognitive coherence.1 Discourses surrounding the aquarium operated to the same effect using this strategy and its mirror opposite : both sliding/substitution and accretion. In addition to rhetorically 50 productive slippages as, for example, between the tank and the sea, diverse tropes, imagery, and textual tactics stick together like polyps, one to another, accumulating over time, resulting in a deceptively simple, putatively organic discursive construction of seemingly obvious social and personal virtue. Thus, the aquarium was an element of decor, a teaching tool, and a testament to the manly virtues of handiness in its construction and hardiness in collecting residents. It was scienti‹c, an invitation to observe and chronicle specimens of national patrimony; and it was spiritual, a chance to behold and marvel at the genius of the Creator. It was therapeutic in its invitation to repose, morally demanding in its inculcation of responsibilities for lower beings , and intellectually bracing in establishing norms of rigorous, systematic study. Most of all, it offered a comforting reminder, reassuring its viewers that modernity could generate its own technologies of respite and renewal by bringing them aesthetically close to nature even as it kept them conveniently apart from it. This chapter is the ‹rst of two to examine the remarkable rhetorical inclusivity of the home aquarium. As chapter 3 indicates, American popularizers certainly included uniquely nationalist elements in their advocacy of the hobby, but from its earliest inception, rhetoric surrounding the home tank was a transatlantic affair. It was inconceivable without the profoundly romantic prose of its English enthusiasts. This chapter discusses the British textual templates that guided the hobby through its formative stages; in some cases, these are easily discernible in American aquarium publications over one hundred years later. Key narrative and rhetorical precursors were established by British natural historians in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of these ‹gures were also foundational to the aquarium hobby. The most important of these was Philip Henry Gosse, whose volume The Aquarium : An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea is examined in detail. This book’s genre conventions, narrative strategies, and rhetorical tropes set a framework for the hobby and were enriched by other naturalist aquarists, including H. Noel Humphreys, Shirley Hibberd, and J. E. Taylor. Domestic landscapes and urban visual culture provided perceptual templates for viewing the aquarium. These media also offered general narrative contours within which the tank and its residents could be understood: as allegorical actors, souvenirs from a vanishing wilderness or vanished childhood, distant relatives, or distant peoples with exotic manners and customs. If these landscapes set the stage for the hobby’s cultural work, its remarkable persistence , and seemingly endless capacity to harmonize a wide range of modern discourses and anxieties, then British aquarium writers provided the scripts. Rural Rambles and Rustic Adornments 51 [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:32 GMT) natural history as textual template British aquarium writing...