Romanticism & Ecology

*   An earlier version of this paper was presented in April, 2000, at the annual meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association (Buffalo, New York). I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous financial support received during the researching and writing of this essay.
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1  See, for example, Nancy Moore Goslee, "Slavery and Sexual Character," page 108; David Punter, "Blake, Trauma and the Female," pages 483-484; Brian Wilkie, Blake's Thel and Oothoon, page 65; Mark Bracher, "Metaphysical Grounds of Oppression," page 167; and Laura Haigwood, "Blake's Visions," page 99.
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2  For additional comments concerning the human right of "dominion" or "empire" over nature, Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (114) and René Descartes' Discourse on Method (119). See also Donald Worster's Nature's Economy, Chapter Two.
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3   All references to Blake's writing are to David V. Erdman's edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. In my parenthetical citations I refer first to plate and line numbers (for example, 1:20-21) and second, where appropriate, to the page number where the citation occurs in the Erdman edition (for example, E46). In my citations I also make use of the following abbreviations, where necessary, to signify individual works: MHH (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell); VDA (Visions of the Daughters of Albion); FZ (The Four Zoas); J (Jerusalem); Anno. (Annotations). All references to Blake's poetic designs for Visions are to Copy J, reproduced both in Erdman's Illuminated Blake and on-line in The William Blake Archive. My plate numbering follows the order established by Erdman.
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4   Here Marx quotes Captain Arthur Barlowe, who uses the "abundant garden" image to describe his first impression of Virginia in 1754. Marx points out that the "ecological image" of America as a bountiful garden was accompanied historically by the less romantic image, embraced by New England's Puritan settlers, of America as a "hideous wilderness" that needed to be conquered and tamed (42-43).
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5  See, for example, Erdman, Prophet, page 239; John Howard, Infernal Poetics, pages 97 and 102; and Steven Vine, "That Mild Beam," page 58.
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6  As early as 1721, one of the possible significations of "rape" was "To rob, strip, plunder (a place)" (Oxford English Dictionary).
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7  For an astute discussion of the sexual politics informing Enlightenment science's effort to assert an all-encompassing human dominion over nature, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, Chapter 7.
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8  For a relevant discussion of the relationship between botany and sexual morality in the 1790s, see Alan Bewell's "Jacobin Plants," especially pages 133-134. See also Erasmus Darwin's "Loves of the Plants" (in The Botanic Garden), which represents a number of plant species as "harlots" (e.g., 1.133, 3.259-264).
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9  In this essay I discuss both the unpublished version and the extensively revised published version of Stedman's Narrative. I differentiate these versions herein by indicating the following dates in my parenthetical citations: 1790 for the unpublished manuscript and 1796 for the final, published text.
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10  Among the names mentioned in the subscription list for Stedman's published text is "BLAKE (Mr. Wm.) London."
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11   The marked opposition between the fiercely appetitive Bromion and the obsessively ascetic Theotormon suggests the pertinence of D. G. Gillham's thesis that these characters represent "two aspects of a single divided being" (195).
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12   In the 1790 manuscript, Stedman does not differentiate the dolphin from the dorado. Rather, he represents these creatures as members of a single dolphin species, a species subject to divergent ancient and modern evaluations only because of historical changes in human perspective and sensibility (1790; 31-32).
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13   I adapt this phrase from the Kenyan revolutionary author Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who argues at length that the cultural emancipation of African peoples must proceed in part via a pedagogical "decolonization" of the mind. See Decolonising the Mind, especially pages 28-29. See also Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World, page viii.
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14   See Raine, Blake and Tradition, Volume 2, pages 127 to 128.
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15   On the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic models of being in Visions, see Mark Bracher's "The Metaphysical Grounds of Oppression," especially page 169.
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16   For Derrida's discussion of animality, I am indebted to David L. Clark, "On Being 'The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany': Dwelling with Animals after Levinas," pages 172-173.
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17   See Joseph Lenz, "Base Trade," page 841. As Lenz points out, Roger Bacon and Vesalius (in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively), composed drawings of the eye that resembled contemporary drawings of female reproductive organs.
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18   On the passage's syntactical ambiguity, see Harriet Kramer Linkin, "Revisioning Blake's Oothoon," page 190. For a convincing discussion of the problems attending a "fixed" interpretation of this passage, see Fred Hoerner, "Prolific Reflections," pages 147-149. And, for the possibility that Oothoon speaks of copulation figuratively rather than literally, see James A. W. Heffernan, "Blake's Oothoon," page 11.
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19   See Laura Haigwood, "Blake's Visions," page 104.
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20   I am indebted here to Steven Vine's suggestion that the figure of the "mild beam" signifies the "ambiguous power of enlightenment." See Vine, "That Mild Beam," page 60.
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