Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (review)

Jonathan Bate's foundational Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) opened the door to a number of studies that draw connections between the romantic age and environmentalist thought. Onno Oerlmans opens his significant contribution, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, by acknowledging his debt to Bate, as well as to Alan Bewell, Lawrence Buell, Karl Kroeber, and others. He aligns himself with romantic ecocriticism in his desire to rescue nature from the legacy of 1980s romantic studies, a culture that, he argues, threatened to erase any authentic experience of nature from romanticism, subsuming "nature" entirely into ideology, culture, or philosophical abstraction. Alan Liu's declaration that "there is no nature" (Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989], p. 38.)—an assertion of the impossibility of experiencing the natural world in any way that is not thoroughly mediated by culture—is exactly what Oerlemans pits himself against. His second major goal, parallel to rescuing "nature" from the romanticists, is to rescue "romanticism" from the environmentalists. He surveys twentieth-century environmentalist thought from Arne Naess through Carolyn Merchant and Patrick Murphy to Greg Easterbrook, finding a common aspiration to root value in the objective, physical world. "It is not surprising," he muses, "that romanticism is so frequently (and vaguely) cast as an impediment to serious thinking about our physical environment" (p. 9). The term "romantic" has become a slur to serious environmentalists, he contends, connoting fuzzy thinking, relentless egotism, idealism, and the naïve projection of human consciousness onto the landscape. To rescue both "nature" from the romanticists and "romanticism" from the naturalists, Oerlemans seeks a "protoenvironmentalist" impulse in the romantic period toward an experience of the material world that cannot be assimilated into discourse, taxonomy, or other holistic systems of human understanding, an antianthropocentric "green particularity" that runs counter to idealism, abstraction, and the egotistical sublime. He writes: "I see an important and mutually beneficial overlap between romanticism and environmentalism in the desire in both that the moment of perception may be more important than the forms of representation. . . . This desire is an openness to the materiality of the world, to its otherness. It is in part a sense of wonder" (p. 13).

One might wonder if this places Oerlemans close to well-worn debates about the relative "openness" of the romantic aesthetic, about the value of particularity, incompleteness, and the "other" in a world of Hegelian wholes. Indeed, as much as he touches on aesthetics, his argument does harmonize with (for example) Thomas McFarland's Heideggerian Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Modalities of Fragmentation (1981). What makes Oerlemans's book fresh is his ability to interpret an impressively wide range of romantic-era texts through an unwaveringly specific lens: the empirical impulse toward humility in the face of a resistant, untranslatable, nonhuman nature that he calls (after Keats) the "material sublime." In the process we are awakened to aspects of familiar texts that might otherwise escape us—that Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem about hunting, for example, or that much of Wordsworth's poetry also functions significantly as travel writing. We are also introduced to unexpected connections between canonical works and a vast range of other romantic-era writing.

Oerlemans provides chapters on William Wordsworth and elegy, on romantic anthropomorphizing of animals, on Percy Shelley's vegetarianism, on romantic taxonomy, and on William and Dorothy Wordsworth and travel writing. The Wordsworth-and-elegy chapter establishes his theoretical framework: he finds "an awareness of the indifference, hostility, and inimicalness of material reality to an idea of the 'one life'" (p. 35) in the lines of the most entrenched romantic nature poet. His most convincing reading here is of The Ruined Cottage, where he aptly demonstrates "what is literally the monumental indifference of the surrounding environment [for Margaret's tragedy]" (p. 60). His chapter on anthropomorphizing is intricate, but well handled, arguing that romantic writers were interested in "extending consciousness and being to...