Studies in Romanticism

We would like to start by setting out the two main premises that ground the reflections and suggestions developed in the following pages. The first is that Romantic-era writings are a mine of representations of the environment seen as an intersection of human and nonhuman agents and forces; the second is that these representations are richly problematic, that is, riven with figurative and ideological tensions repeatedly inviting us to explore the fraught fault line between the human and nonhuman. We approach this field through what Timothy Clark sees as a crucial problem in ecocritical studies, when he notes that "an arguable weakness in much ecocriticism, [is] that of projecting the view that environmental destruction rests entirely on false values and intellectual mistakes," a weakness reinforced by what he calls the limitations of literary ecocriticism when it comes to understanding the interconnections between the human and the more-than-human, or, in John Bellamy Foster's words "the evolving material interrelations … between human beings and nature."¹

There is a widespread tendency among ecocritical practitioners to conceive of their own work as a form of intellectual and political activism grounded in the conviction that a change in cultural assumptions might diminish the destructive impact of human behavior on the natural environment. Greg Garrard compares ecocritics to left-wing social ecologists and environmental justice advocates, since they "seek a synthesis of environmental and social concerns," thus entrusting humanity with a reparative duty toward the ecosystem.² Accordingly, a significant portion of ecocritical studies promotes a redirecting of cultural values and purposes to confront the environmental crisis, and this is where the contribution of the humanities becomes especially relevant. [End Page 19]

This noble objective, however, might pose an anthropocentric risk of overestimating the human role in determining the life of the planet, while at the same time overlooking nonhuman "quasi agency," as Jane Bennett defines the liveliness of things. In her words, matter is "vibrant," and "things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only [can] impede or block the will and designs of humans but also [act] as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own."³ In point of fact, ecocritical studies and the environmental humanities more generally have increasingly proved how a genuine ecological perspective cannot avoid addressing the aforementioned "evolving material interrelations" between human beings and nature—that is, how human and nonhuman entities share in the material, cultural, and political deterioration or improvement of the environment.⁴ Within this frame, Hubert Zapf's focus on literature as a form of "cultural ecology" is particularly pertinent, since it "looks at the interaction and living interrelationship between culture and nature, without reducing one to the other," and therefore positions itself in the middle ground between an "anthropocentric cultural studies perspective, in which nature is dematerialized into a discursive human construct, and a radical ecocentrism."⁵

It is our contention that Romantic-period cultural geographies provide a testing ground for some of these crucial questions of literary ecocriticism, while offering ways of dealing with, and possibly correcting, the "weakness" and limitations identified by Clark. One possible avenue for this is exploring further the potentialities offered by interweaving geocritical and ecocritical methodologies. This intersection has been outlined by Robert Tally and Christine M. Battista in their edited collection, Ecocriticism and Geocriticism (2016), which makes a strong case for how "the two approaches can be brought into productive relation, offering new ways of seeing literature, ecology, and geography, as well as the world that necessarily subsumes and contains them."⁶ Both approaches share a "concern for the manner in which [End Page 20] spaces and places are perceived, represented, and ultimately used"; and since geocriticism presents an "abiding concern for the environment, however narrowly or broadly conceived," so "the social or political impetus behind much of the ecocritical tradition is also effective in motivating geocritical approaches" (2). This makes their convergence "especially timely" (3), affording new insights into how "abstract and lived spaces" are "preserved, mapped, understood, and experienced" (9).

As with Tally and Battista, Bertrand Westphal constitutes our point of reference for geocritical theorizations. Since the early 1990s, Westphal has been investigating ways of "articulating literature around its relations to space" and examining the "interactions between human space and literature."⁷ In the introduction to Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2007, English translation 2011), he specifies that a geocritical approach aims at "prob[ing] the human spaces that the mimetic arts arrange through, and in, texts, the image, and cultural interactions related to them" by exploring three interconnected categories—spatiotemporality, transgressivity, and referentiality.⁸ In respect of the last, in particular, Westphal's method endorses a geo-centered literary interpretation that insists, among other things, on "geographic referentiality" and a "multiple focalization of gazes on a given referential space."⁹ Our investigation draws on his approach to examine a cultural geography combining literal locality with literary topicality, the experience of space with historical memory. In this sense, our outlook resonates with Eric Gidal's geo-critical study of the Ossianic corpus from the perspective of its readers in the age of the early Anthropocene, when British industrialization and capitalism began to have an irreversible impact on Scottish and Irish lands. Then, Gidal writes, "Ossianic poetry displayed on every page the sedimentations of place and the erosions of time," and its descriptions of landscape become palimpsestic moments in which the mythic past encounters the contemporary context.¹⁰

Given the inseparability of the environment from history and locality, these theoretical premises point us toward at least two specific targets. On the one hand, the focus of our suggested geo/ecocritical intersection must be on place as location and locus, where physical space intersects with a human spatial apprehension dependent upon specific cultural determinants. On the other, in line with Westphal's endorsement of a multiple "focalization of gazes," we need to address textual networks, texts in conversation, or textual ensembles, if we are successfully to chart an uneven terrain of spatial, local, [End Page 21] and environmental engagements. Our central suggestion in this contribution is that these perspectives can help us refocus Romantic-period cultural geographies and recover them as meaningful components of that period's environmental reflections and constructions.

As one of the most complex of such geographies, the Italy imagined and represented by the Romantics has been consistently investigated as a reservoir of cultural–literary precedents, stories and histories, and cultural mythologies, a landscape filled with reminiscences (a classic ground), a geo-cultural category associated with otherness, or a location of identity-making processes. To take up Clark's challenge and recover the materialities of Romantic Italy, we need to reconsider it through a jointly geo- and eco-attuned approach, interrogating it from a sited perspective that, in turn, may constitute a blueprint for reading other Romantic-period cultural geographies.

Romantic-period literary inscriptions of Italy are threaded through with geographical references pointing toward deeply stratified places where topos, place, and environment intersect. By way of example, Byron's description of the Marmore Falls or "Cascata delle Marmore" in Umbria (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV.69–72) provides a useful introduction to the challenges and potentialities of a geo/eco-attuned reading.¹¹

Highly popular in its time and well-known to Byron scholars, this is a loco-descriptive tour de force capitalizing on sublime effects and epic-style panoramic perspectives reminiscent of Dante's and Milton's infernal vistas. Exclamations punctuate the opening stanza—"The roar of waters!," "The fall of waters!," "The hell of waters!"—and culminate in an infernal view of "Phlegethon" and "pitiless horror."¹² The "[h]orribly beautiful" scene is an irresistible spectacle: "Lo! where it comes like an eternity, / As if to sweep down all things in its track, / Charming the eye with dread,—a matchless cataract" (lines 638–40, CPW, 2:148). Eventually, in the climax, the view is tempered by a rainbow: "An Iris sits, amidst the infernal surge, / Like Hope upon a death-bed," its colors signifying constancy ("Its steady dyes") and brightness ("Its brilliant hues"), and "Resembling, 'mid the torture of the scene, / Love watching Madness with unalterable mien" (lines 642–48, CPW 2:148).¹³ [End Page 22]

These lines bear out Byron's ability to weave evocative images into a sinuous and mobile ensemble, here aided by the capacious flexibility of the Spenserian stanzas and a skillful deployment of run-on lines. The poet creates vision in motion, modulated through an incremental use of the language of the sublime that qualifies nature—and especially water—as an uncontrollable power. In contrast, human traces are conspicuously sidelined. The human is reduced to the act of gazing ("Lo!," "charming the eye"). Only the final comparison between the cataract and the rainbow (personified through the Greek goddess Iris), on one hand, and madness and love's constancy, on the other, partly (and problematically) reinstates the presence of the human in the environment.

The image of the rainbow, which Byron also employs in "Manfred" II.2.1–6, reinforces the oxymoronic nature of the "[h]orribly beautiful" falls and their immediate surroundings. The rainbow is another component of an environment where the human is marginal, one whose frightening implications often resonated in nineteenth-century depictions of waterfalls.¹⁴ To be sure, the human permeates the passage: the descriptive point of view is that of a human observer; the narrative voice is human, too; and the language of the sublime it deploys is enmeshed with Dante's and Milton's epic visions of a cosmic and transcendental totality that bestows meaning on human life and destiny. Yet, the human mostly remains in the wings until the final vignette, where it re-emerges indirectly and allusively through the capitalized abstractions of Love and Madness. That said, both here and in the references to the human eye, the text points to the waterfall as a place of human/nonhuman intersections available for a cumulatively environmental and geo-critical reading. But, before we proceed, a caveat is in order. Our exploration of these intersections does not aim at recovering the ecological value of Byron's lines or reinforcing his credentials as a green Romantic. In the former case, the focus would be limited to assessing how his relentless aestheticizing occludes a more valuable, environmentally conscious engagement with the falls. And Byron's green credentials have already been amply discussed by Timothy Morton and J. Andrew Hubbell, among others.¹⁵ Instead, our suggested reading zooms in on the human/nonhuman interconnection in Byron's stanzas to place them in conversation with other texts and show how we can disclose the environmental import of a Romantic Italy more usually seen as a tangle of cultural-historical resonances and literary topoi. [End Page 23]

Before giving free rein to sublimity and abstraction, Byron places the falls with geographical precision: their roaring water belongs to a named river ("Velino," IV.614, CPW 2:147), and, in Harold's southward journey from Perugia to Rome, he locates them between Clitumnus (stanzas 66–67) and the mountain range where Mount Soracte rises (stanza 74). These pointers stress the sited nature of Byron's waterfall—in the vicinity of Terni, in the central Italian region of Umbria, which was then part of the Papal States, on a route that Byron traveled in the spring of 1817. The falls were a celebrated sight both because of the impressive spectacle of the water (they are among the highest in Europe) and as a grandiose site of human intervention in the environment—a feat of Roman engineering, a man-made feature of the landscape. As such, they materially exemplify a human/nonhuman entanglement that parallels the one allusively presented in Byron's lines, and becomes fully visible in a different type of text such as John Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1843), which reproduces Byron's stanzas in the pages about the Marmore (Route 27, "Florence to Rome by Arezzo and Perugia").¹⁶

This section describes nearby Terni with references to a local economy based on "woollen and silk manufactures" (HB, 238), and details about the town's "rich valley" that leads to "fertile and varied countryside" in the direction of Narni (HB, 241). The description of the falls themselves is left to Byron's by then well-known lines. Instead, the guidebook expatiates on the history of their creation and modifications—from the third century BCE to the end of the eighteenth century—in a specific economic-natural context. Information is provided on the need, in Roman times, to control the river Velinus, stem its inundations, drain "stagnant waters" (HB, 240), and mitigate their effects both locally and on the plains of adjacent Rieti. The waterfall is a huge drain to divert the Velinus into the river Nar (Nera, in Italian). A few dense paragraphs offer a round-up of the varying fortunes of water- and land-management in the area in medieval and early modern times until the more recent solutions devised by late eighteenth-century engineers.¹⁷

The author references the interventions of "the celebrated architects [Antonio da] Sangallo and [Giovanni] Fontana" in the Renaissance, and more recent improvements, such as that in 1785 to "adopt some further [End Page 24] measures to protect the landholders of Terni" from flooding and secure "the effectual drainage of the plains of Rieti" (HB, 240). The reader is also referred to a recent publication providing historical information and data on the waterfall, its local impact, and environmental context: the "great work on the Papal States" by "Calindri, the engineer" (HB, 240), that is, Gabriele Calindri's Saggio statistico-storico del Pontificio Stato (Historical-Statistical Essay on the Pontifical State, 1829). Throughout, the text emphasizes the benefits to agriculture in the area over the centuries, as well as to human occupancy and health, since the draining of the marshes was also intended to eradicate malaria, a ubiquitous problem in Italy, and one often discussed by nineteenth-century travelers and writers.¹⁸

Through its conversation with Byron's poem, the account in Murray's Handbook casts the falls as an aesthetically refracted object (through the visibility and authority accorded to Byron's lines) and, simultaneously, as the pivot of a fraught, palimpsestic environment produced by an extended human/nonhuman entanglement. What in Byron's stanzas remains implicit in the human traces—the eye and the abstract pairing Love/Madness—here becomes fully visible and active; and the falls constitute the hub of a multilayered human/nonhuman imbrication of historical, cultural, geographical, weather-related, engineering, and economic components. Swirling invisibly in Byron's "Phlegethon," this nexus is made explicit in Murray's Handbook and, nowadays, in the many official and unofficial websites where the poet's lines regularly feature as part of the multilayered palimpsest of the falls.¹⁹

To return to our main argument, this example is not intended to reinforce Byron's green status, to offer a contextualized reading of Childe Harold IV.69–72, or to produce an ideological critique of Byron's omissions or occlusions. Rather, it aims to indicate how placing texts in conversation from jointly eco- and geo-critical perspectives can help us reappraise the environmental problematics implicit in such literary-cultural objects as Romantic Italy. The lines on the Marmore are a locus of Romantic Italy—both as a key location in this cultural geography and as a highly evocative textual site (like the lines on Venice or the Coliseum in the same poem). Placing them in conversation with other textual inscriptions of the falls not only contextualizes them, but also recovers them as a valuable locus for "understanding [End Page 25] the evolving material interrelations … between human beings and nature," to return to Foster's apt formulation.

Our approach to a cultural geography in environmentally-attuned terms relies on a combination and a convergence of texts meant to explore a precise location as an intricate human/nonhuman ecosystem with its longue-durée intersection of climate and geology, economy and technology, power structures, and discourse. A geo/ecocritical reading requires a sited perspective on environments as geoculturally, geopolitically, and geoeconomically located realities. Envisaged as part of extended textual networks, Romantic-period literary works can offer insights into Romantic landscapes as both constructs shaped by human interventions and locations of nonhuman forces shaping the human dimension (and blurring any clear-cut lines between them).

Can we say that such human-nonhuman conversations are intrinsically Romantic or peculiar to the Romantic period? Here, our argument would be twofold. On the one hand, Romantic attention to nature and the environment simultaneously concerns their material and immaterial features (in his 1803 Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, Friedrich Schelling maintains that Nature is visible mind, and mind invisible Nature). On the other, Romantic-period culture introduces a newly intensified attention to local dimensions, and particularly to the local specificities of landscape as a geographical/natural manifestation of national identity.

In conclusion, our suggestion is that re-considering Romantic geo-cultural constructs such as Romantic Italy through an ecocritical lens breaks up familiar interpretative patterns and indicates new ways of asserting the relevance of Romantic-period environmental engagements. Examining the specific cultural geography of Italy in British Romantic writing means working with textual networks and ensembles that provide access to meshes of localized environmental, geographic, and anthropic issues characterizing multilayered, culture-specific formations. Ultimately, this kind of analysis may help us recover new facets of the Romantics' attunement to human/nonhuman interrelations in all their complexity. [End Page 26]