„Fellowship of sense with all that breathes‟: Eighteenth-Century British Women Poets, War, and the Environment by Amie Christine Seidman A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama May 9, 2011 Copyright 2011 by Amie Christine Seidman Approved by Paula R. Backscheider, Chair, Professor of English Jonathan Bolton, Professor of English Christopher Keirstead, Associate Professor of English Donna Bohanan, Professor of History Abstract In ―The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,‖ environmental historian William Cronon writes that in order to live responsibly with nature, we must learn to recognize nature in our own backyards. The poems I include in my dissertation are written by important eighteenth-century women writers, who did recognize the nature in their own backyards and understood the role that nature played in the development of their nation and the world. This dissertation employs Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies to poems published between 1780 and 1812 by various women poets, including Anna Seward, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Anne Bannerman, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Throughout the century, women‘s poetry offers insight into civilian responses to war and testifies to the fact that women did write about public and political affairs, and in my dissertation, I argue that eighteenth-century women writers understood war through the damage it did to the environment. Their poetry reveals an eighteenth-century environmental consciousness, which reminds us that the environment has always been, as Lawrence Buell states, ―a pressing problem.‖ It is not a coincidence that oftentimes their poems use the environment to discuss the impact of war because they understood that military glory is only the result of both human and non- human destruction. In exploring the role nature plays in eighteenth-century women‘s war poetry, I prove that an environmental awareness existed in the eighteenth century. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my committee, Paula R. Backscheider, Jonathan Bolton, and Christopher Keirstead, who believed in my project and provided useful feedback. Thank you also to my family—my parents, Gerald and Christine Fletcher; my brother, Brian; and my husband, Brian Seidman, who always knew I could accomplish this goal. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Defining Nature ...........................................................................................................10 War on Nature ..............................................................................................................13 Ecocriticism .................................................................................................................14 Eighteenth-Century Environmental Crises ..................................................................18 War, Poetry and Ecology: Two Examples ...................................................................30 The Chapters ................................................................................................................33 Chapter One: ―Fruitless conquest‖ and the ―Suff‘ring World‖: Anna Seward‘s Monody on Major André (1781) and Helen Maria Williams‘s Peru (1784) ..................................36 Humans and Nature: ―Those good green people‖ ........................................................53 War on Nature: ―Field of Death‖ .................................................................................63 The Futility of War: ―An absurd and ruinous attempt‖ ...............................................73 Worthless Products: ―glitt‘ring bane‖ .........................................................................80 Peace: The ―Benignant Power‖ of Nature ...................................................................87 Inter-relatedness ...........................................................................................................92 Chapter Two: ―Brothers in Science‖ and ―a softer form‖: Knowledge, Women, and Harmony in Anna Seward‘s Elegy on Captain Cook (1780) and Anne Bannerman‘s Verses on an Illumination for a Naval Victory (1794) ................................................98 Illuminating ―a Nation‘s woe‖ ...................................................................................107 Voyages of Exploration and Conquest: ―Mark the full tide of Desolation spread‖ ...117 iv Domestic Consequences: ―Ill-fated matron[s]‖ .........................................................129 Imagining Home and Harmony: ―for a lodge, where Peace might love to dwell‖ ....132 Chapter Three: The ―tribes fuliginous invade‖ ―the green earth‖: War on Nature in Anna Seward‘s To Colebrook Dale (1787) and Colebrook Dale (1791) and Anne Bannerman‘s The Genii (1800) ..................................................................................137 Spirit(s) of the Natural World: ―Genius of thy shades‖ .............................................145 Pre-industrialized Landscapes: ―the green earth‖ ......................................................149 Nature Under Attack: ―tribes fuliginous invade‖.......................................................152 Global Imperial Economies: ―Conquests yet to come‖ .............................................166 The Power of the Natural World: ―the mountain-waves returning force‖ .................172 A Lesson in Conservation: ―Time shall be no more‖ ................................................174 Chapter Four: ―Time can ne‘er restore‖: Improvement Questioned in Anna Seward‘s The Lake; or, Modern Improvement in Landscape (1790) and Charlotte Smith‘s Beachy Head (1807) ...............................................................................................................179 Nature‘s History: ―mock[ing] the ravages of relentless time‖ ...................................190 War on the Land: ―the oppressed earth‖ ....................................................................196 Destroying to Improve: ―The foe of beauty, and the bane of sense‖ .........................203 The End of a Way of Life: ―To some better region fled forever‖..............................210 Epilogue: ―Shrink from the future, and regret the past‖: Charlotte Smith‘s The Emigrants (1793) and Anna Laetitia Barbauld‘s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) ............214 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................225 v Introduction ―The Earth will not function in the future in the same manner that it has functioned in the past. A decisive transformation has taken place. The human had nothing to say in the emergent period of the universe before the present. In the future, however, the human will be involved in almost everything that happens. We have passed over the threshold. We cannot make a blade of grass. Yet there is liable not to be a blade of grass in the future unless it is accepted, protected, and fostered by the human. Sometimes, too, there is a healing that can be brought about by human assistance.‖ — Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as a Sacred Community1 First published posthumously in 1748, Mary Leapor‘s poem The Beauties of the Spring reveals her own interest in the natural world, but also gives voice to a national concern regarding the consequences—environmental and otherwise—of Britain‘s constant warfare.2 She opens the poem by describing a time of renewal and rebirth as ―smiling Nature decks the Infant Year.‖ Murmuring rivers, humming bees, ―dewy buds [with] their blushing Bosoms‖ and ―new Liv‘ries [in] the green Woods‖ signify spring. Leapor also draws upon pastoral images, and, unlike in her pastoral poems, this time she idealizes Phillis and Cymon; their descriptions are reminiscent of the stereotypical milk- maid and shepherd: 1 The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006), 21. The same quotation is used as an epigraph to ―God‘s Green Earth: Creation, Faith, Crisis,‖ Reflections 94, no. 1 (Spring 2007), copyright page. 2 Mary Leapor, ―The Beauties of the Spring,‖ in Poems upon several occasions. By Mrs. Leapor (London: printed and sold by J. Roberts, 1748), 15–18. The first, second and fourth paragraphs include quotations from this poem. 1 Then Phillis hastens to her darling Cow, Whose shining Tresses wanton on her Brow, While to her Cheek enliv‘ning Colours fly And Health and Pleasure sparkle in her Eye. Unspoil‘d by Riches, nor with Knowledge vain, Contented Cymon whistles o‘er the Plain. In this description, Leapor romanticizes the rural countryside as it mirrors spring. It is not a place of work; instead, it is a place of pleasure and relaxation. It is neither a place of poverty nor plenty; instead, it is a place where individuals have what they need in order to live simply. Yet, the positive and purposeful work of ―sagacious‖ bees, which ―their Labours now renew,‖ serves to remind the reader of the labor of war that occurs later in the