Faces of Nature
Personification in Women’s Romantic-age Poetry
by
Emma Curran
Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
University of Surrey
School of English and Languages
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor:
Dr Adeline Johns-Putra
©Emma Curran June 2017
294
294
Declaration
This thesis and the work to which it refers are the results of my own efforts. Any ideas, data, images or text resulting from the work of others (whether published or unpublished) are fully identified as such within the work and attributed to their originator in the text, bibliography or in footnotes. This thesis has not been submitted in whole or in part for any other academic degree or professional qualification. I agree that the University has the right to submit my work to the plagiarism detection service TurnitinUK for originality checks. Whether or not drafts have been so-assessed, the University reserves the right to require an electronic version of the final document (as submitted) for assessment as above.
Signature: Emma Curran
Date: 9 June 2017
Abstract
This thesis seeks to re-evaluate the role of personification in Romantic-period poetics by examining how women writers used the device to address a reductive alignment of the female with the natural. Women poets employ personification to tell different narratives about human and non-human interrelationship. Personifications that feminise nature appear prolifically throughout Romantic poetry. Women writers take up the technique and its tropes in order to critique the cultural equation of women with nature and offer alternative presentations that recognise greater complexity both in their own experience and in the non-human environment. Traditional ideas of a feminised, other “Nature” come under reconsideration. Each chapter focuses on how women poets re-appraised and appropriated feminine personifications of nature in the context of aesthetic, scientific, philosophical and political discourses. I examine how six writers, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, Ann Batten Cristall, Helen Maria Williams and Anna Letitia Barbauld, tackle the gendered dynamics and cultural assumptions surrounding personification in each of these differing discourses. I investigate how they personify nature in innovative ways to present a richer understanding of their relationship to nature.
Table of Contents
Introduction Page 1
Chapter One
“To View . . . the Whole Face of Nature”:
Personification and Picturesque Composition in Ann Radcliffe’s Poetry
Page 61
Chapter Two
From Botanic Garden to New Horizons: Revising Darwinian Personification
in Charlotte Smith and Anna Seward’s Poetry of Place
Page 115
Chapter Three
Personification and the Pupil of Nature in Ann Batten Cristall’s
Poetical Sketches
Page 178
Chapter Four
The Personified National Landscape: Helen Maria Williams’ Albion
and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Britannia
Page 221
Conclusion Page 262
Bibliography Page 264
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1: Illustration by Thomas Stothard to accompany Charlotte Smith’s Sonnet XXXVI, plate 4. Elegiac Sonnets. Vol. 1. 8th ed. London, T. Cadell, 1797. Page 127
Fig. 2: Henry Fuseli’s frontispiece to Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden. London: J Johnson, 1791 Page 127
Fig. 3: Mary Parker’s painting of Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler, known as the Ladies of Llangollen, outside with a dog,1828. Page 175
Fig. 4: Joshua Cristall’s frontispiece engraving for Poetical Sketches, 1795. Page 184
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I send a world of thanks to my wise supervisor, Adeline Johns-Putra. For being always in my corner and in the corner of this project, I am immeasurably grateful. I will truly miss your mentorship.
I extend my thanks to the University of Surrey’s School of English and Languages, especially my Second Supervisor, Beth Palmer (and before her, Greg Tate and Sarah Moss), and to Justin Edwards and Marion Wynne-Davies for confirmation-process feedback. Thanks, too, to support staff, particularly Karen Short, for friendly help and advice along the way.
I would also like to others who have contributed in various ways: David Wheeler for sending me his paper on Anna Seward’s Colebrookdale poems, Melissa Hardie for sharing biographical details about the Cristall family, and Jeffrey Barclay Mertz for giving me permission to cite his thesis on William Blake and the Joseph Johnson circle. I am very grateful to Morwenna Roche and Peter Forsaith for reading through a final draft and helping with proofreading.
It has been a privilege to access rare wonderful texts in the course of conducting my research. I am thankful for the opportunity to consult a first edition of Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches, facilitated by a BARS Stephen Copley bursary (2014) and the assistance of Chawton House Librarian, Darren Bevin. In the earliest days of my research, former Chawton Librarian, Jacqui Grainger, offered generous help with navigating the invaluable collections. I am also thankful to Bruce Barker-Benfield at the Bodleian Library for allowing me to read through the manuscript collection of Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters, justly “treasures of the Bodleian”.
For the duration of my PhD journeying I have deeply appreciated support from my circle of excellent souls. I am happy to owe debts of gratitude to Kiren Bhomra and Lorraine McLoughlin, friends of more years than we’d care to count. For kind encouragement over Thursday dinners, I am grateful to Nim Cohen and Iris Barton. For keeping up collective morale, I thank the inaugural “coffee club”: Thi Nang Si Noon, Rosemarie Lee and Andrea & Piero Borelli. To Morwenna Roche, my heartfelt thanks for skyping weekly with messages of unfaltering belief and issuing sound advice when needed with an ominous lowering of spectacles. A final word for Ann and Michael Curran - for so much practical help over the years and for nurturing and sharing my life-long love of stories and words - thank you, dears.
294
Introduction
This thesis will argue that women writers of the Romantic age adapt personification in order to resist reductive presentations of both themselves and the environment. Personifications were familiar features of contemporary literature, and conventions around personifying “Nature” tended heavily towards feminising the non-human environment. I shall explore the ways in which women writers respond to conventional personifications that, I argue, rendered both the natural and the female passive to male cultural interpretation. Why do women Romantic poets so frequently engage with a device that seems based on a narrow understanding of women’s and nature’s agency? This thesis contends that they employ personification to critique and challenge a limiting alignment of the female and the natural. This study seeks to establish whether their innovative use of the technique implies the poet re-envisions interrelationship between human and non-human in ways that deny traditional hierarchies and are instead based on a sense of equality and ecological awareness.
The premise of this thesis is that the Romantic period inherits pre-existing ideas of the affinity of women and nature which women poets negotiated, particularly by deploying personification. I will posit that traditional personification objectifies femininity and nature and makes both seem available to be shaped by privileged cultural agents. Carolyn Merchant has identified “constructions of nature and women as culturally passive and subordinate” (xvi) from the modern period onward. I will investigate the extent to which these ideas, present in aesthetic theories and in the conventions of eighteenth-century poetry, influence personification in the Romantic age. The chapters in this thesis explore how women poets might play with notions of their closeness to nature by appropriating various feminine personifications, and thus create space to present a more complicated picture of their connection with the non-human environment.
This thesis seeks to contribute answers, through its focus on personification in women’s Romantic poetry, to questions raised by critics exploring the cultural equation of women with nature in the period, questions such as those Sylvia Bowerbank poses in her study of women and ecologies in early-modern England. Bowerbank investigates cultural notions of femininity’s alignment with nature rather than with civilisation. She argues this preconception can be examined in “a historical context by studying the diversity of choices women made in negotiating their places within the shifting sands of early modern discourses of nature, whether it was to reproduce, resist, or reinvent ‘nature’” (Speaking for Nature 4). This perspective is important, as it reminds us that gender is a complicating factor in the use of personification. Jennifer Keith argues, in her study of eighteenth-century poetry and the feminine, that in the poetry of the period nature, as a “half-personified power was always feminine” (14). Keith explains that, in response, women writers of the eighteenth century needed to explore alternative dynamics between the traditionally male poetic subject and the conventionally feminised natural object (12-13). In the later Romantic period, women poets specifically use personifying figures to explore and challenge the persisting conventional poetic pattern of male poet drawing on feminised nature for inspiration.
My analyses show that women Romantic poets often initially invest in personifying figures as an example of what can be termed “strategic essentialism”, to borrow Catriona Sandilands’ use of Gayatri Spivak’s phrasing. The term has been transposed from a global-political context in which it referred to a people’s deliberate and strategic emphasis of stereotypical traits in order to promote unity and positive identity (Landry and MacLean 203-205). “Strategic essentialism” has come to be a helpful concept in discussions of gender and nature, referring to women writers’ performance of an assumed affinity with the environment (Sandilands 113-115). I argue that in women Romantic poets’ adoption of feminine personifications the writer plays on cultural assumptions of the alignment of femininity and nature, before proceeding to complicate the device and the assumptions it represents about the alignment of the female and the natural.
Despite personification’s potential to reduce and objectify women and nature, female poets of the Romantic period use the technique to re-appropriate and re-envision feminine figures of nature. They variously present shifting, complex, flexible relationships to personified, feminised nature. When women writers personify they confront assumptions both of their own supposed cultural inferiority and of nature’s lesser role as a provider for male genius. Conventionally, figurised nature features as a source of poetic inspiration, spiritual guidance, or emotional solace to support the supposedly higher work of the inquiring human mind (stereotypically masculine). In women Romantics’ re-evaluations of personification, the environment is not required to submit to conventional expectations of feminised nature. Therefore, greater openness to nature’s agency and multiplicity can often be found in their alternative use of the device. Their work shows the different ways in which they complicate the gender-coded conventions that frame personification in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature. They explore the stereotypically-male role of the poet and the role that feminine personifications of nature have to play. They investigate and identify with both subject positions (poet and personification) and, as they do so, they find ways to reconfigure the traditional dynamics associated with the device. They come to consider a more fluid interaction and a mutual shaping of both the cultural figure of the poet and personified nature. Because their use of the device is self-reflexive and critically aware, the artifice involved in personification-led nature poetry is frequently brought to the fore. They reflect on the constructedness of poetry’s presentation of the natural world. The connection of culture and nature is shown to be tangled in women Romantic poets’ engagement with personification. In this way, a more nuanced understanding of the connection between human and non-human can be reached than what has come to be considered a traditional Romantic notion of a “Nature” that is a separate entity from human culture.
Deploying a re-forged personification in order to critique the alignment of women and nature and to re-imagine the relationship between the human and non-human beyond convention could be a successful strategy because of personification’s place in Romantic-period poetics. The technique is an important part of Romantic poetry, and was much commented upon in contemporary criticism for its controversial role in exploring nature in literature. As interest in the non-human environment intensified in the Romantic period, personification and debates about the technique’s viability as a means to investigate the non-human environment becomes a key feature of poetics of the age. Responding to major changes to the environment brought about by industrialisation, and influenced by the accompanying shifts in ways of thinking about nature, Romantic poets continually return to consider the tenor of their relationship to the natural world. Personification was frequently drawn upon to aid Romantic poets’ examination of their relationship to nature, as critics begin now to recognise, but the device has been ostensibly unpopular from the early nineteenth century onwards. Critics who value personification point to the helpful ways in which imagining nature as a person encourages a heightened sense of empathy and equality between the poet and the environment. It affords an opportunity to recognise the environment’s agency by presenting nature as active and able to interact with the human. Bryan Moore coined the term “ecocentric personification” (ix) to illustrate its potential and to divest it of its anthropocentric connotations. However, negative associations between personification and anthropomorphism’s imposition of human characteristics onto non-human others have made personification unpopular in criticism since the Romantic period. I refer to anthropomorphism by name in my readings of poems in order to establish a distinction between anthropomorphism and personification, but it does make an appearance in my analyses because it is so close to personification in what it does and how. Anthropomorphism alerts the reader to the danger of denying nature’s agency by expecting it to conform to recognisable patterns of human behaviour. This draws attention to the similarly complicated character of personification. The technique has the potential to both radically level the relationship between human and non-human while running the risk of oversimplifying nature as an abstracted external entity, symbolised and utilised for human purposes. Broadening an examination of “ecocentric” personification to thoroughly investigate women’s use of the technique can introduce a new layer of complexity to our critical account of Romantic-period personification.
Personification’s prevalence in literature of the period meant that women writers needed to decide how to respond to an inevitable encounter with the device as they compose poetry about nature. They needed to deal with the device’s difficult contemporary context and its legacy. Rather than resolutely ignore this prominent feature of Romantic poetics, the women poets of the period instead play with personification. Women poets adopt the device with knowingness about the ways in which it traditionally and contemporaneously constructed femininity and nature in potentially reductive ways. The technique is then repurposed by them to aid a fuller consideration of the interconnections between poet and place, people and the environment, culture and nature. It is the project of this thesis to thoroughly explore the different ways in which women Romantic poets employ personification within the context of historical pressures. I examine the device in the context of four key discourses which impacted both on the device itself and on cultural understanding of the relationship between the human and the non-human. Close analysis of personification in the work of six writers, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, Ann Batten Cristall, Helen Maria Williams and Anna Letitia Barbauld, supports this thesis’ investigation of how women writers used the technique to reframe poetry’s portrayal of human relationship to nature.