Science, Politics, and Soul-Making: the Romantic Encounter with Climate Change
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SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND SOUL-MAKING: THE ROMANTIC ENCOUNTER WITH CLIMATE CHANGE BY MICHAEL VERDERAME DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Gillen Wood, Chair Professor Robert Markley Professor Ted Underwood Associate Professor Julia Saville ii Abstract The Romantic movement in British literature coincided with new breakthroughs in meteorology and climatology, allowing scientists for the first time to understand the earth’s weather as a global, interactive system, as well as to begin to trace the possible influence of human civilization upon it. The end of the Little Ice Age, the acceleration of anthropogenic global warming resulting from the Industrial Revolution, and a series of volcanic eruptions causing major shocks to the global climate system all provided reference points for Romantic writers to challenge and rethink the relationship between humans and their climate. Focusing on several major writers from 1780 to 1880 (William Cowper, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats and John Ruskin), I argue that an epistemic shift occurred in the way Britons understood their own climate’s history and its relationship to the earth’s climate. Using an ecohistorical method that combines close historical inquiry and insights from meteorology, climatology, geology, and volcanology with theoretical frameworks derived from environmental criticism, I argue this period, in no small part due to the influence of creative writers, saw a new sense of the earth’s climate as contingent, dynamic, globally interconnected, and shaped by human actors, rather than stable and fixed. Finally, I apply some of the insights of these writers to the challenge of climate change in the present day, suggesting that their interrogation of the age-old binary between humanity and “Nature” can help us to chart a livable and sustainable future. iii Acknowledgments and Dedication Over the years, this dissertation has accumulated many debts, intellectual and personal. My director, Gillen Wood, has been a sensitive, critical, and supportive mentor for me throughout my graduate career. In his research, he has been a leading pioneer in the fields of ecohistoricism and humanistic climate change studies, as well as a role model in his relentless and wide-ranging curiosity and his commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry. His Tambora research also unearthed a number of the important primary sources discussed in the Shelley and Keats chapters. Ted Underwood, Julia Saville, and Robert Markley have likewise been vital sources of support and encouragement, and I have profited immensely both from their seminars and from many conversations with them. Responsibility for the project’s shortcomings are, of course, mine alone. Completing this dissertation would not have been possible without the moral support of my parents, who have always supported me in all my educational endeavors. My wife, Dena, provided encouragement and moral support through some of the most difficult periods of the dissertation. I am grateful as well to my mother-in-law and father-in-law for providing food and nighttime child care during the final leg of this project, enabling me to close it out. The years that I spent in Champaign-Urbana nourished my intellectual interests in a remarkably interdisciplinary and supportive environment. I am grateful to the faculty and graduate students of the Department of English at the University of Illinois, as well as the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the Gender and Women’s Study Program, the Unit for Critical and Interpretive Theory, the Illinois Program for Research iv in the Humanities, the Sustainability Studies Initiative, and the interdisciplinary British Studies/British Modernities Group. For emotional and spiritual support I am also grateful to the Graduate Employees Organization, the Education Justice Project, the English Graduate Student Association, the Margie and Louis Cohen Center for Jewish Life/Hillel, and the Chabad Center for Jewish Life at the University of Illinois. Only since leaving Champaign-Urbana have I realized how indispensible, vast, and excellent its unique University Library is. And for enlivening all those dark nights in the prairie and cornfields, I am profoundly grateful to the wonderful Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. The project also would not have been possible without fellowship support from the Department of English and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate College. Conference travel grants from the Department of English and the Unit for Criticism enabled me to present work in a variety of different forums. This work benefited from supportive and critical audiences at conferences of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism; the Modern Language Association; the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; and the International Conference on Romanticism. I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my son, Nathan Verderame, whom I did not even imagine when I began this project and who was born a few months before its completion. He and his generation will grapple with the challenges posed by the poor decisions that we and our forbears have made in failing to address anthropogenic climate change. He was born shortly after a U.S. presidential election in which scientific denialism and climate change skepticism have been validated, and even the very small movements of the previous administration towards addressing this global challenge seem in jeopardy. My v hope and prayer for Nathan and his generation is that we will find the strength of character to see this civilizational test as our own “vale of soul-making,” and that we will rise to the challenge. vi Table of Contents Chapter One…………………………………………………………………………………………………………...1 Climate and Culture in the Romantic Century Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………………………………………….27 The Metropolitan Volcano: Climatology, Politics, and Prophecy in The Task Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………………………………………..65 “We Are As Clouds”: Climate and Social Transformation in Shelley Chapter Four………………………………………………………………………………………………………..106 Towards a Dark Green Romanticism: Keats, Climate, and the Soul Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………………………………………………154 “One Vast Eye”: Ruskin, Meteorology, and the Victorian Imperial Imagination Chapter Six…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..195 Green Romanticism and the Art of Living in the Anthropocene Age Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………220 1 Chapter One: Climate and Culture in the Romantic Century “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous”—Gwendolen, in The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde) Weather lurks constantly in the background of our lives, from the idle chatter of two strangers meeting at a bus stop to the morning television forecast that advises us what to wear and how to safely go about our daily lives. Even in a wealthy post-industrial society, where we spend most of our lives insulated by climate-controlled structures from the weather’s vagaries and have come to expect a diverse and uninterrupted food supply year- round, the weather is an ever-present reminder of humans’ embodiment and of our dependence on the physical environment. People who might violently disagree in their political values, religious affiliations, and even favorite films and sports teams, find themselves equitably commiserating about a heat wave, a foggy or rainy day, or a midwestern winter that seems as though it will never end. We are all, as the meteorologist John Frederick Daniell observed in 1823, “meteorologist[s] by nature.”1 Today, of course, discussions of the weather have a renewed urgency because of the scientific consensus that we are in, and have been for quite a while, a prolonged and accelerating period of warming that will have profound effects on our earth, atmosphere, and oceans, and on every living thing that inhabits them. Yet our daily talk about the weather remains curiously separate from this reality. For the most part, an individual human lifespan is too brief compared to the geological time-scale for climate change to be 1 Principles of Meteorology 1. 2 perceptible experientially. Unless we happen to be directly affected by drought, rising sea levels, crop failures, or major storm systems, our embodied sense of the weather gives us a very different message from the dark warnings of climate scientists: winter is still winter, summer is still summer, rain and snow fall as they always did. This disconnect, indeed, helps to explain why the public policy conversation about anthropogenic climate change has been so apathetic to date, with huge swaths of the public denying that change is occurring at all. The climate change now occurring promises a series of more rapid and drastic effects in the years, decades, and centuries to come, so that we will be able to comprehend climate change not merely as abstract knowledge but as lived experience. The promise of triumphing over the weather through centralized heating and cooling, draining, irrigation, and the agricultural revolution, will be revealed as illusory in the end. We, no less than subsistence farmers from centuries past, are bound to “live with the weather,” in Jonathan