Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1850 9780773576810

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romantic ecologies and colonial cultures in the british atlantic world, 1770–1850

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Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770–1850 kevin hutchings

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009 isbn 978-0-7735-3579-4 Legal deposit third quarter 2009 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hutchings, Kevin D. (Kevin Douglas), 1960– Romantic ecologies and colonial cultures in the British Atlantic world, 1770–1850/Kevin Hutchings. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3579-4 1. Romanticism. 2. Human ecology in literature. 3. Imperialism in literature. 4. Nature in literature. 5. Race in literature. 6. Slavery in literature. 7. Environmentalism – Great Britain – History. 8. English literature – Minority authors – History and criticism. 9. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 10. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 11. Great Britain – Colonies – America – Administration. I. Title. pr146.h88 2009

820.9'007

c2009-900775-4

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

For Tim Fulford

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Politics and Poetics of Green Romanticism 3 1 Naturalizing Colonial Relations in the British Atlantic World: Slavery as Fact and Figure 33 2 Race and Animality in the British Atlantic World 50 3 Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion 70 4 Enslaved Brutes and Brutalized Slaves: Animal Rights and Abolition in Coleridge and the Black Atlantic 92 5 Environmental Determinism and the Politics of Nature: William Richardson’s The Indians, A Tragedy 113 6 Thomas Campbell’s American Idyll: Colonial Ideology in Gertrude of Wyoming 134 7 Romanticism, Colonialism, and the “Natural Man” in the Writings of Sir Francis Bond Head and George Copway 154 Afterword: Colonialism and Ecology Notes 187 Bibliography 201 Index 219

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this book first came to me in early 2000 while I was working to complete a two-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrcc) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Western Ontario; but it was at the University of Northern British Columbia (unbc) that I began to work on the project in earnest, thanks at first to a generous seed grant received from the unbc Office of Research in 2001. Further research was financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada via funding associated with the Standard Research Grant and Canada Research Chair programs (with additional funding provided by the unbc Office of Research). I am deeply grateful for this support, without which this project might never have been completed. An early version of Chapter Three was previously published under the title “Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (Romantic Circles Praxis, Special Issue on Romanticism and Ecology. Ed. James C. McKusick. 2001. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html). I am thankful to James McKusick and his anonymous peer-reviewers for critical advice that helped me to hone my ideas for publication; and I thank Orrin N.C. Wang, the editor of Romantic Circles Praxis, for permission to reprint the essay here in revised form. The argument presented in the first section of Chapter Seven was originally derived from a paper entitled “Landscape Aesthetics and the Ideology of Improvement: Sir Francis Bond Head, Green Romanticism, and Canadian Indian Policy,” which I authored for presentation at a conference on “Culture and the State” (University of Alberta, Edmonton, 3 May 2003). Subsequently, a revised version

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of this conference paper comprised my personal contribution to a larger essay entitled “The Emigrant and the Noble Savage: Sir Francis Bond Head’s Romantic Approach to Aboriginal Policy in Upper Canada, 1836–38” (Journal of Canadian Studies 39, no.1 [2005]: 115–38), which I co-authored with my colleague Ted Binnema. Thanks are due to the anonymous readers at the Journal of Canadian Studies for helping us to strengthen our essay’s argument in advance of publication. I am also thankful to Professor Binnema for agreeing to let me rework my personal contributions to our collaborative publication for inclusion in the present monograph – and for teaching me much about Sir Francis Bond Head and the history of Canadian aboriginal governance policy. I am also grateful to the editors of the Journal of Canadian Studies for allowing me to reprint previously published material herein. Versions and portions of the arguments contained in this book were presented at numerous academic conferences, including meetings of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, the British Association for Romantic Studies, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, the International Conference on Romanticism, the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, the Wordsworth Summer Conference, the Native Studies Research Network (UK), and the Northeast Modern Language Association. I would like to thank those scholars who, as fellow panelists or audience members at each of these meetings, offered me advice for the clarification, expansion, and polishing of my ideas. I would also like to thank the students who enrolled in my unbc seminars on “Romanticism and Ecology” and “Romantic Activism” for their dialogue and enthusiasm, which I found both informative and inspiring. Of these students, I am particularly grateful to my graduate research assistants – David Drysdale, Charity Matthews, Alanda McLean, and Kelly Wintemute – without whose valuable assistance I would have taken much longer to complete this book. Many thanks are due to the librarians and staff who assisted me during the course of my research at the following institutions: The Geoffrey Weller Library (unbc); The British Library in London, England; the Robarts Library, Thomas Fisher Library, and United Church Archives (University of Toronto); the University of Glasgow Department of Special Collections; the University of Edinburgh Special Collections; and the Koerner Library and Rare Books and

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Special Collections (University of British Columbia). Thanks are also due to Max Blouw, Toni Fletcher, and Kelly Giesbrecht in the unbc Office of Research for offering invaluable assistance and advice during the grant application process, and to Gwen Lew, Administrative Assistant to the unbc English Program, for many years of professional and cordial day-to-day assistance. For reading and commenting on early portions and drafts of Chapters Five, Six, and Seven, I am grateful to Tim Fulford, whose scholarly work and engaging dialogue have been crucial sources of help and inspiration. This is the second book I have published with McGill-Queen’s University Press. My sincere thanks are due to Philip J. Cercone, Joan McGilvray, and Brenda Prince, whose professional and cordial attention to this project have made its publication a pleasurable experience. Many thanks are also due to Susan Glickman for her expert copy editing of the manuscript. As always, I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to Lisa Dickson, whose love, care, and intellectual companionship are my daily blessings.

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romantic ecologies and colonial cultures in the british atlantic world, 1770–1850

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i n t ro du c t i o n

The Politics and Poetics of Green Romanticism

i. ecocriticism and language The man who first distinguished a particular object by the epithet of green, must have observed other objects that were not green, from which he meant to separate it by this appellation. The institution of this name, therefore, supposes comparison. It likewise supposes some degree of abstraction. The person who first invented this appellation, must have distinguished the quality from the object to which it belonged, and must have conceived the object as capable of subsisting without the quality. The invention, therefore, even of the simplest noun’s adjective, must have required more metaphysics than we are apt to be aware of. (Adam Smith 1781, 443) The eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith offers this analysis of the word “green” as part of a speculative treatise on the origins of language. Although he merely intends to illustrate the proposition that nouns entered the human lexicon prior to the formulation of their modifying adjectives, Smith’s choice of “green” as his exemplary modifier is highly suggestive. With his lexical insights in mind, Romanticists might well contemplate the claims of “Green Romanticism,” a mode of analysis involving the application of ecological criticism (or “ecocriticism”) to the study of Romantic texts and contexts. Granting Smith’s argument that the adjective “green” indeed “supposes comparison,”1 we may begin by noting the implicitly diagnostic character of “Green Romantic” criticism, where “green” functions as a foundational or

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normative term against which critical practices deemed “non-green” or “anti-green” might be compared. Thus, for example, the recent call for Romanticists to turn “From ‘Red’ to ‘Green’”2 – to reject Marxist modes of criticism in favour of ecological ones – is based on the diagnostic proposition that “red” critical practices have had adverse effects upon the “green” world that itself preceded, and provides the literal ground for, all human praxis. If “green” itself signifies the ecological processes upon which all living things depend, then shouldn’t “green” criticism be embraced as the most “natural” mode of critical practice? Invoking the reality of modern-day global ecological crisis to make a case for the fundamental importance and ultimate necessity of ecocriticism, some founding texts of Green Romantic scholarship have answered this question very much in the affirmative: “Human survival and the survival of nature are co-ordinate with one another” (Bate 1991, 34), because “it is on the health of the natural world that all ideologies, all societies, and all cultures ultimately depend” (Kroeber 1994, 66). As I have noted elsewhere (Hutchings 2002, 13), these are rhetorically forceful and to some extent logically coherent claims; nevertheless, by grounding criticism in an urgent sense of concern for the health of the natural world that sustains us, such claims implicitly “naturalize” ecocriticism, yoking its theoretical and practical imperatives to the material world itself and, in the process, subtly downplaying its own status as a human discursive practice. Apparently, this implicit outcome can be justified by a consideration of the material origins of human discourse, for although the British Romantics “would not wish to contradict the current critical banality that ‘nature’ is a social construct,” they “would regard the assertion as question-begging … because they believed that human consciousness (and the social constructs made possible by it) is a result of natural processes” (Kroeber 1994, 17). While human consciousness and its discursive productions are here touted as natural by virtue of their grounding in “natural processes,” ecocritical discourse – and Green Romanticism in particular – might nevertheless be seen, from this standpoint, as occupying a privileged position in the discursive hierarchy due to its insistent awareness of such seemingly palpable truths. But can Romantic ecocriticism indeed bring literary scholarship back to “the real,” back, as it were, to nature itself? If we embrace the conclusions informing Adam Smith’s analysis of the word

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“green,” the answer to this question would be decidedly negative. For, as Smith soberly asserts, the identification of anything as “green” – indeed, the modification of any word by any adjective – presupposes not only “some degree of abstraction,” but carries with it “more metaphysics than we are apt to be aware of” (1781, 443). A related acknowledgement of ecocriticism’s relationship to cognitive abstraction and metaphysical speculation underpins Dana Phillips’s rather harsh criticism of America’s foremost ecocritic, Lawrence Buell, whom Phillips takes to task in The Truth of Ecology (2003) for implicitly asserting a species of direct correspondence between organisms like trees and textual representations of such organisms (Phillips 2003, 5–11). Invoking Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist model of the linguistic sign, which posits a sharp disjunction between words and things or linguistic signs and their material referents (9–10), Phillips chastises Buell for conflating actual biological organisms with their literary representations. Personally, I see much to value in Buell’s criticism. For example, I would not deny the validity of his foundational claim that literary texts function as “acts of environmental imagination” that may “affect one’s caring for the physical world,” making that world “feel more or less precious or endangered or disposable” (Buell 2001, 2); nor would I deny the corollary position that literary representations can have the power to affect our environmental practices for better or worse. Nevertheless, I believe that Phillips’s point about the relationship between words and things is an important one. Drawing on insights as diverse as Adam Smith’s and Saussure’s, we must acknowledge that Green Romanticism – or any other form of “green” criticism – is patently not a non-abstract, non-metaphysical mode of analysis, notwithstanding its admirable insistence upon the importance of material reality. In the realm of literary scholarship, ecocriticism examines not physical nature itself, but verbal representations of nature, replete with all of the metaphysical and discursive baggage that accompanies acts of literary signification. Although Phillips tends to represent modern ecocriticism as a field of study naïvely unaware of linguistic complexities, his concern to highlight the status of language and its relationship to the material realm is in fact shared by many ecocritics, who have in recent years articulated increasingly subtle and nuanced theoretical perspectives concerning what Kate Rigby calls a “more-thanhuman world that forever exceeds the human capacity to respond

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to it in words” (Rigby 2004, 122). In this book, my primary concern is to consider ecocritical perspectives in relation to the poetics and politics of European and Euro-American Romanticism. Before proceeding further, therefore, some general discussion of the history and methodology of Romantic ecocriticism – including its critical strengths and weaknesses – is warranted.

i i . g r e e n ro m a n t i c i s m Although Karl Kroeber was the first literary critic to introduce an ecological perspective into the study of British Romantic literature,3 Jonathan Bate’s work in Romantic Ecology (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000) has set the tone for much subsequent work in the field of British Romantic ecocriticism. In the latter text, which I shall focus on here,4 Bate asserts that “our survival as a species” might in fact depend on our ability to formulate “thought-experiments and language-experiments which imagine a return to nature, a reintegration of the human and the Other” (37). For Bate, such experimentation lies at the very core of a Romantic literary practice that “regards poetic language as a special kind of expression which may effect an imaginative reunification of mind and nature” – a reunification that, in his view, will help to generate a new attitude of respect and sympathy for the non-human world, thereby encouraging us to transform our destructive environmental practices in favour of ethical and sustainable ones. Although he repeatedly concedes the ultimate “illusoriness” of this “utopian vision” (245), Bate nevertheless devotes the bulk of his critical attention to an elucidation of the ways in which a broadly conceived Romantic “ecopoetic” strives, in a process bracketing all political considerations, to reunite subject and object worlds by helping readers “to engage imaginatively with the non-human” (199). A key explanatory passage is worth quoting at some length: The poet’s way of articulating the relationship between humankind and environment, person and place, is peculiar because it is experiential, not descriptive. Whereas the biologist, the geographer and the Green activist have narratives of dwelling, a poem may be a revelation of dwelling. Such a claim is phenomenological before it is political, and for this reason ecopoetics may properly be regarded as pre-political. Politics, let us remember,

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means “of the polis,” of the city. For this reason, the controlling myth of ecopoetics is a myth of the pre-political, the prehistoric: it is a Rousseauesque story about imagining a state of nature prior to the fall into property, into inequality and into the city. (Bate 2000b, 266) Given the manifold ways in which humans have exploited and degraded the material environment and its non-human productions, one might sympathize with Bate’s desire to formulate an “ecopoetics” based on an imaginative escape from, or transcendence of, politics and history. While he repeatedly admits that such a “thought experiment” cannot ultimately provide us with unmediated access to the “pre-political” and the “prehistoric” realm toward which he continually gestures, ecopoetics might nevertheless offer an imaginative avenue for critical reflection. And yet, in an academic milieu that has tended, in the wake of postmodern feminism, to regard even the most private experiences and perceptions as fully politicized (as indicated by the well-known feminist axiom that “the personal is political”), such an appeal to a “pre-political” mode of experience, despite Bate’s qualifying references to its status as a “story” or “myth”, cannot help but raise some important suspicions. This Green Romantic desire to bracket political and historical realities, including the politics of environmental activism itself, is not out of step with the radical claims of “deep ecology,” a mode of ecological philosophy that “foregrounds the value of nature in and of itself” (Heise 2006, 507), rejecting any and all anthropocentric (or “shallow”) motivations for environmental activism.5 A similar split between nature and culture lies at the heart of Bate’s distinction between “‘ecopoetic’ consciousness” and “‘ecopolitical’ commitment,” the former of which, he aptly notes, is not necessarily conducive to the latter (Bate 2000b, 42). Interestingly, Bate’s attitude towards political activism is reminiscent of the post-revolutionary thought associated with Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, each of whom explicitly disavowed their youthful radicalism in the violent aftermath of the French Revolution. In his imaginative conceptualization of an ecopoetical discourse removed from the realities of the socio-political world, Bate implies that a widespread transformation of our environmental practices – which would necessarily involve a radical alteration of human political, economic, and legal systems – must begin with

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a Romantic transformation of our individual subjective responses to the natural world. By working to effect this subtle but earthchanging transformation in the private and introspective space of reading, ecological poetry in Bate’s idealistic scheme reveals the ostensible “capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home” (vii). More recently, Bate’s ecopoetical claims have found some rough parallels in Onno Oerlemans’s compelling and provocative Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (2002). Although Oerlemans acknowledges that “all acts of perception leave a trace of the perceiver,” he nevertheless privileges a quasi-Arnoldian attitude that attempts “to see the object as clearly as possible” (Oerlemans 2002, 11, 204).6 Like Bate’s impossible embrace of the “pre-political,” Oerlemans champions a radical mode of somatic empirical perception that, he claims, “begins prior to representation” (21), existing “as an end in itself, pre-empting theory and ideology” (200). It is through this mode of perception that the perceiving subject is opened to “the presence of the actual” (208), the experience of which imparts “a shock of horror” that aggravates rather than reconciles the subject/object divide, but which potentially offer humans a mentally and ethically invigorating glimpse of wildness: “The tonic of wildness is that it allows us to see genuine otherness of the material, beyond individual or cultural identities” (210; emphasis added). Although my chosen quotations admittedly elide some of the finer nuances informing Oerlemans’s argument – including the compelling idea that radical empiricism “allows writers and readers … to approach the limits of language, so that one might recognize that language itself distorts and reproduces what it represents” (148)7 – they demonstrate the extent to which his theory of perception is underpinned by a mode of ecological universalism asserting that all people, regardless of their personal and cultural backgrounds, can find common ground in an unmediated experience of the non-human world. This universalism is attractive, offering an antidote to social models that overemphasize the importance of cultural difference, for to deny the existence of a common ground upon which diverse peoples and civilizations can negotiate their differences and resolve conflicts is, arguably, to affirm the inevitability of violence and war. And yet, such universalism should also give one pause for concern, since – as much postcolonial criticism has demonstrated – universalizing gestures are often coercive products of ideological and political hegemony.

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Certainly the earliest forms of scientific empiricism were not immune to political considerations, despite the fact that their practitioners strove to attain a disinterested understanding of natural objects and processes, an understanding that successfully challenged contemporary anthropomorphic paradigms that distorted physical reality. And yet, unlike Oerlemans’s radical mode of empiricism, which aims to inculcate a sense of respect for nature’s otherness by exposing the shortcomings of human knowledge and representation, early scientific practice often explicitly promoted a full-fledged human conquest of the non-human realm, or what Val Plumwood has called a “culture of mastery” (2001, 11). At the dawn of the Enlightenment, indeed, England’s prominent natural philosophers commonly invoked the rhetoric of human “dominion” or “empire” to describe our relationship to the non-human world. By undertaking a rigorously systematic and comprehensive analysis of natural objects and their uses, early modern scientists promised nothing less than to extend and consolidate what Joseph Glanville, echoing Bacon and Descartes, called “the Empire of Man over inferior Creatures” (Glanville 1668, 188). In the Eurocentric context of Glanville’s vision, however, this “Empire” would not take the form of a universalized human utopia in which all people benefited equally. On the domestic front, for example, early scientists aimed deliberately to exploit the practical knowledge associated with contemporary arts and trades, effectively turning artisans and tradesmen themselves into objects of the empirical gaze, and using their methods to inaugurate a Baconian ideal of specialized labour that would come to fruition in capitalist practices later associated with the industrial revolution (Hutchings 2002, 22–3). As Carolyn Merchant and Ludmilla Jordanova have convincingly demonstrated, moreover, the ostensibly objective methods of empirical science were in fact belied by a persistent androcentric tendency to sexualize the natural world, such that the interrogation of nature came to resemble the contemporary inquisition of witches, a process suggesting the parallel subjugation of nature and women.8 And more generally, in the larger international arena, the near-global dissemination of Enlightenment scientific practices ultimately helped to produce what Mary Louise Pratt has called “a new kind of Eurocentred planetary consciousness” (1992, 38) too often informed by racist assumptions disguised as universal scientific truths.9 As a result, empirical science – despite its effort to attain a

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disinterested view of things – helped to enable European colonial hegemony, the pursuit of which forcibly harnessed the knowledge and labour of colonized peoples to the exploitation of natural resources on a global scale. England’s Romantic authors were often critically aware of the political problems I have briefly sketched here. Outspokenly opposed to political tyranny, and celebrating a holistic model of nature that, as Donald Worster and James C. McKusick have shown,10 anticipated the advent of modern ecological science, they became the conceptual progenitors of much present-day cultural and environmental activism. To be sure, the Romantics often viewed the realm of nature in opposition to that of culture, seeing it in the very terms that ecocritics like Bate, Kroeber, and Oerlemans prescribe, as pre-ideological, untouched in its materiality by the realm of human ideology and practice. But, as I argue throughout this book, a politically informed examination of Romantic-era concepts of nature demonstrates at least an underlying awareness on the part of Romantic authors that the privileging of nature can be a double-edged sword: that in its conceptual, rhetorical, and scientific usage, “nature” can function as a normative or “anti-liberatory” principle (Plumwood 2001, 18) promoting the political regulation of human behaviour and social practice. This is not to suggest that nature itself embodies, in its sheer materiality, human cultural concerns. For although, to quote Charles Johnson, the primacy of empiricism “shortchanges the enormous role played by imagination and language and cultural conditioning in our perception and assumes that meaning is given directly to us with little or no shaping necessary from our side” (Johnson 1988, 30), the primacy of an opposing view that gives too much weight to linguistic and cultural considerations can be equally problematic. We would thus do well, I think, to heed animal studies scholar Cary Wolfe’s words of caution regarding recent tendencies in academic criticism to overestimate the importance of social constructionist forms of criticism: More and more, it seems, the social constructionist critique of transcendence and the metaphysics of presence (which was supposed to return meaning and interpretation to the social, historical, and material processes of their production) has turned

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instead into its own form of idealism, one that often behaves as if what used to be called the “referent” or “object” of knowledge … is nothing but what a particular discourse makes of it. What has happened, in other words, is that what started out as a liberating postmodern heterodoxy has stiffened into its own form of orthodoxy. (Wolfe 2003, xiv-xv) With both Johnson’s and Wolfe’s insights in mind, we can, I think, cautiously strive, following the examples of Bate and Oerlemans, to imagine non-human creatures and natural environments as they exist apart from their relationship to culture. Nevertheless, I am convinced that ecocritical discourse must never lose sight of the fact that these imaginings are themselves products of human consciousness, representational artifacts reflecting the discursive or ideological practices that shape our subjectivity. For to quote Ursula K. Heise, “What we always see when we look at nature is our own eyes looking back at us, filtering and altering what we choose to perceive, what we emphasize or ignore, what questions we ask and pursue” (qtd. in Phillips 2003, 4). A similar insight into the workings of human perception informs David Mazel’s ecocritical assertion that the environment can never be “some securely grounded reality.” Thus, for Mazel, our concern for the welfare of particular natural environments must be informed by the following self-reflexive questions, questions that lead directly to the realm of politics: “‘What has counted as the environment, and what may count? Who marks off the conceptual boundaries, and under what authority, and for what reasons? Have those boundaries and that authority been contested, and if so, by whom? With what success, and by virtue of what strategies of resistance?’” (Mazel 1996, 138, 143). In its concern to understand the materiality of nature, on the one hand, and the politics of nature’s representation, on the other, modern ecocriticism has begun to develop a sort of critical double-vision. This is an important development, not only because it mitigates against the still common (and stereotypically reductive) charge that ecocriticism is “more an amateur enthusiasm than a legitimate new ‘field’” (Buell 2005, 6),11 but because an insistent awareness of the history of nature’s conceptual politics promotes a necessary critical vigilance that can help to prevent an unwitting reinscription of various modes of tyranny. As Jonathan Dollimore remarks,

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If, in the process of “recovering” nature … any … political movement ignores the violence and ideological complexity of nature as a cultural concept, it will only recover a nature imbued with those ideologies which have helped provoke present crises. In short there is a danger that much reactionary thought will return on the backs of nature and of those who rightly recognize ecological politics as of the utmost urgency. Of course there are obvious and fundamental distinctions which can help prevent that – between human nature and the nature that is destroyed by human culture; between the ecological and ideological conceptions of nature. But … they are distinctions which the concept itself traditionally slides across and between. (1991, 115) What sorts of violent reactionary thought might the “recovery” of nature entail if it were conducted without due intellectual rigour? To answer this question, one need only remember that various concepts of nature have been invoked historically to “naturalize” the institution of such things as patriarchy, capitalism and class-based power structures, racism and slavery, hetero-normative social relations, and other forms of political authority. By calling certain dissident modes of behaviour “unnatural,” in other words, supporters of particular orthodoxies can stigmatize individuals and groups who work to redress social inequity and oppression. This is why critics who value the natural world must always maintain an awareness of the ways in which concepts of nature can function to encode and disseminate ideologies and the modes of authority they inform. By holding what Dollimore calls the “ecological and ideological conceptions of nature” in dynamic tension – by attempting to attain “a balanced view that recognizes that nature has a solid biophysical dimension, while it is [also] culturally and discursively constructed” (Parajuli 2001, 571–2)12 – ecocritics can strive to avoid the dangerous pitfalls that Dollimore identifies. This is why I take issue with the particular emphasis informing Bate’s assertion that “[t]he dilemma of Green reading is that it must, yet it cannot, separate ecopoetics from ecopolitics” (2000b, 266). If there is a potential dilemma associated with “Green reading,” it is that the imaginative idealisms associated with ecopoetics might – despite the best intentions of, and important insights offered by, their advocates – blind us to the social realities that inevitably impinge upon the human experience of the other-than-human world,

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realities that also inform our environmental practices and the ethical assumptions underpinning them.

i i i . to w a r d s a th e o ry of (post)colonial ecocriticism During the past dozen years or so, an increasing number of Romanticists have invoked postcolonial and Marxist theories to illuminate Romantic responses to contemporary colonialism. Noting that “[m]any of the rhetorical strategies, literary motifs, and cultural myths of modern colonialism and racism took characteristic form” during the Romantic period, Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh helped to inaugurate this critical movement in their co-edited collection Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture (1996, 4), which illuminated the often-neglected colonial contexts motivating post-colonial literatures and counter-discursive practices. Soon afterwards, Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson expanded this line of inquiry in Romanticism and Colonialism (1998), a collection whose contributing authors engaged the insights of postcolonial theory to shed further light on the ways in which Romantic-era poetry, travel and exploration literatures, anti-slavery narratives, and scientific writings responded to the colonial politics of race and racial science. In the same year, Saree Makdisi published Romantic Imperialism (1998), a critical monograph deploying Marxist and postcolonial theories to examine the ways in which writers like Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley engaged with concepts of “universal empire” in their work. By promoting scholarly awareness of the important ways in which the politics of empire informed Romanticera writing, these ground-breaking books helped to open a field of inquiry that continues to thrive in Romantic Studies today.13 At roughly the same time that this body of (post)colonial Romantic criticism was being produced in the 1990s, Green Romanticists like Bate and Kroeber were marshalling ecological insights in order to clarify Romantic literary responses to the non-human world and contemporary environmental degradation. As already noted, this pioneering work in Romantic ecocriticism set the terms for much subsequent debate regarding the relationship between critical models that emphasized nature’s material reality, on the one hand, and nature’s ideological construction, on the other. Unfortunately, because Bate and Kroeber established Green Romanticism largely

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upon an overtly polemical rejection of Marxist and poststructuralist theories (theories that have contributed in important ways to the eclectic methods and insights of postcolonial criticism), socially and environmentally engaged modes of Romantic criticism tended to remain artificially polarized – despite Timothy Morton’s convincing politicization of ecocritical insights in Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (1994), which contains a passing critique of Bate’s “‘conservative’” approach to ecological criticism (219–20). Increasingly, however, Green Romanticism’s anti-ideological (some might say, anti-theoretical) bias has been brought into question, challenged even by ecocritics who wish, like Bate and Oerlemans, to catch a glimpse of nature’s otherness in their readings of Romantic texts. Building partly on Morton’s politicized ecocritical insights, for example, Kate Rigby’s Topographies of the Sacred (2004) investigates moments in Romantic representations of the natural world during which, she claims, “the initiative lies with the phenomenon not with the gaze, repositioning the poet as recipient rather than as producer” of meaning; but while exploring the ways that objects and organisms might themselves be said to function as independent agents in Romantic literature (a topic I consider in some detail, below), Rigby nevertheless maintains an insistent focus on the ways in which the Romantic poet’s experiences of them are always “inflected by cultural memory and social ideology” (Rigby 2004, 13). Arguably, one of the best ways to come to terms with the inflections of cultural memory and social ideology that inform Romantic representations of the “more than human world” (ibid., 122) is to open a dialogue between (post)colonial and ecocritical approaches to Romantic scholarship. Such a dialogue would be useful, because it would shed light on two different but related aspects of the “culture of mastery.” As Val Plumwood observes, “a well-established pattern for Western culture in the case of nature involves colonizing relationships justified by anthropocentrism, just as the intra-human relationships in which Europeans colonized the lands of those they believed to be lesser were justified and supported by Eurocentrism” (2001, 11–12). Thus far, however, “little attention has been paid to the representation of nature within the colonial context” (Tobin 2005, 10). In the field of Romantic Studies, Alan Bewell has addressed this omission by combining (post)colonial and ecologicalmaterialist insights in his remarkable study Romanticism and

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Colonial Disease (1999), which considers, among other things, how the widespread transmission of pathogens transformed global ecologies as a result of Romantic-era colonial encounters. And more recently, in Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (2005), Beth Fowkes Tobin has examined the role played by agriculture in the establishment of British global empire, investigating the economics of land, labour, and natural resources in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century representations of Britain’s tropical colonies. But because Bewell’s and Tobin’s books eschew the vocabulary of ecocriticism, their arguments’ consequences for Green Romantic scholarship remain largely implicit. By bringing (post)colonial and ecological Romanticisms into sustained dialogue, the present book expands Bewell’s and Tobin’s pioneering lines of inquiry, attempting in the process to clarify the related colonial and ecological aspects of Romantic literary history and poetics. Outside the field of Romantic Studies, Susie O’Brien has recently made a convincing case for “bridg[ing] the gap” between ecological and postcolonial modes of reading. In “Articulating a World of Difference: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism and Globalization” (2001), O’Brien invokes Edward Said’s comments concerning “the essential worldliness of texts,” proposing a contextual mode of reading that takes into account not only the historical and social realities that have preoccupied postcolonial theoreticians and literary scholars, but also the important role that place plays in the production and reception of postcolonial literary texts (140). Building on O’Brien’s work (which is focused primarily on twentieth-century texts and contexts), I would like to consider some of the ways in which Said’s materialist insights might be used to inform Romantic Studies, outlining in particular how Romanticists might combine the political insights derived from (post)colonial theory with the materialist concerns informing Green Romantic inquiry. Because of its focus on nineteenth-century colonial contexts, Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) is of immense value to scholars wishing to explore the relationship between Romantic literature and imperialist ideology, for it demonstrates the extent to which “allusions to the facts of empire” constituted “a structure of attitude and reference” in even the most seemingly apolitical texts of the period (62). Although modern historians tend to locate the “age of empire” in the latter part of the Victorian era, when European nations began their so-called “scramble for Africa,” Said notes that

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“a coherent, fully mobilized system of [imperialist] ideas” had been established before the end of the eighteenth century (58). Significantly for ecocritics, Said’s criticism of colonial and postcolonial literatures occasionally draws attention to the importance of geographical contexts. It is necessary, he argues, to “set art in the global, earthly context. Territory and possessions are at stake, geography and power. Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think about habitation, but it has also meant that people have planned to have more territory and therefore must do something about its indigenous residents. At some very basic level imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others” (7). Here we see something resembling the sort of critical doublevision I mentioned earlier, a mode of criticism that acknowledges an inextricable relationship between earthly “habitation” and the politics of power. Although Said never fully develops the ecological implications of this model, scholars might nevertheless use it as the basis for an ecocritical project acknowledging the fundamental importance of geographical contexts while at the same time highlighting the inevitability of ideological struggle. The production of art – even and especially art that takes nature as its primary subject matter – is not some rarefied activity that transcends the political realm. Just as it cannot escape the physical contexts of its production, art cannot rise above the realm of politics either. If we look closely enough, indeed, art has much to teach us about the ways in which its earthly “rootedness” (to recall Said’s naturalist metaphor) connects it to the social realm, to the ideological and practical exercise of power. “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.” And although this struggle occurs in and involves the physical world of bodies, weapons, and contested terrain, it is also a struggle over “ideas … forms … images and imaginings” (7), the very stuff of ideology. Said’s understanding of the connections between the politics of imperialism and the realities of habitation lends credence to the compelling claim that the “social and ecological impacts of conquest can be analysed together as one process” (Rose 2004, 4). In an essay on “William Jones and Cosmopolitan Natural History” (2005), Bewell makes a case for the sort of two-pronged or dialectical critical approach that I have been attempting to sketch

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here. “If we are to understand what nature was during the Romantic period,” he argues, “we need criticism that combines history and nature, one that can examine how cosmopolitan culture emerged from and affected global natures” (167). Although Bewell is primarily concerned to document the ways in which the widespread collection and transplantation of biological organisms during the Romantic period participated in a process of “invasion ecology” that transformed local ecosystems and the people who relied upon them,14 we might also consider his insight in relation to social and environmental changes historically associated with the Industrial Revolution. Among other things, industrialization caused severe environmental problems both at home and abroad. It is common knowledge that the rise of Britain’s industrial economy transformed the country beyond recognition, as highly capitalized farms, factories, and urban economic centres began to dominate England’s landscapes. On the home front, as Timothy Morton has noted, Percy Bysshe Shelley was appalled by the contaminated water and “the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities,” attributing these problems to urban filth and “the exhalations of chemical processes” (qtd. in Morton 1994, 133).15 Even William Blake, otherwise a great champion of English urban life, articulated a sense of disgust for the “cities turrets & towers & domes / Whose smoke destroyd the pleasant gardens & whose running Kennels / Chokd the bright rivers.”16 And although the environmental problems that Blake and Shelley lamented were primarily to be found in Britain’s metropolitan centres, they were also very much connected to overseas realities and the politics of global empire. To appreciate this fact, one need only consider the role that African slaves and Native Americans played in the great economic and industrial scheme of empire. It is well known that the transatlantic slave trade garnered massive profits for England, providing the monetary fuel necessary to energize the nation’s industrial development in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. One contemporary economist was so convinced of slavery’s central economic importance that he called the slave trade “the first principle and foundation” of England’s industrial economy, the very “mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion” (qtd. in Bordewich 2005, 17). As Fergus M. Bordewich reminds us, profits derived from the slave trade were “reinvested in mills, foundries, coal mines, quarries, canals, and other innovations, including James

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Watt’s first steam engine” (17) – all of which developments, while generating a great deal of economic activity, created environmental problems unprecedented in scope and severity. Less well known is the role that trade with Native Americans played in the same processes of domestic industrial development and environmental transformation.17 Because of the fur trade, aboriginal lifeways changed dramatically between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: Indians’ relationships to their own landscapes and ecosystems were radically transformed as their hunting grounds “became a resource to be exploited in exchange for British manufactures” such as hatchets, pots, pans, knives, guns, blankets, and alcohol. To meet the Native American demand for these products, which became increasingly necessary for the Indians’ very survival, British industries sprang up or stepped up their production, “changing the British landscape and helping to create an urban working-class” in the process. “Thus indigenous people were at one end of a capitalised transatlantic commerce, British peasants at the other. North American landscapes were exploited – whole areas were hunted out – and so were British ones, as the Black Country of iron forges and workshops spread over the English Midlands.”18 Because transatlantic colonial transactions played a central role in the transformation not only of global landscapes but of British domestic ecosystems as well, a Green Romanticism that ignores these political realities will be ill-equipped to understand some of the central causes that gave rise to “Romantic ecology,” and its concern for environmental welfare, in the first place. In Barry Commoner’s now-classic formulation, the “first law of ecology” is that “everything is connected to everything else” (1971, 33) – that all objects and organisms are holistically interrelated and interdependent. While critics like Oerlemans are justifiably suspicious of Green Romantic idealisms that attempt, in the name of such holism, to reconcile human subjectivity and non-human nature in a comfortable dialectical synthesis (Oerlemans 2002, 204–7), the effort to remove human politics and ideology from the study of nature – and the related effort to posit a firm opposition between ecopoetics and ecopolitics – is bound to fail, not only because ecopoetics and ecopolitics are both modes of representation, but because an ecological paradigm itself insists upon their complex interconnection, if not upon their harmonious co-existence.

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i v. tr a n s a t l a n t i c e c o l o g i e s One of the most helpful analyses of the complex ecological and social interconnections informing Green Romantic studies is James C. McKusick’s Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (2000). On the ecological side of the equation, McKusick’s work clarifies the eighteenth-century paradigm of “nature’s economy,” an important conceptual forerunner of post-Darwinian ecological science. According to this paradigm, which can be traced back to the work of Linnaeus and his disciple Isaac J. Biberg,19 the natural world should not be understood as an aggregation of discrete particulars but as a complex system of interdependent objects, organisms, and processes that function together to form “an interacting whole” (Worster 1995, x). Demonstrating among other things that this holistic model informed Romantic understandings of nature and natural process, McKusick asserts that the English Romantics were not “proto-ecological” thinkers (the term Kroeber ascribes to them in Ecological Literary Criticism [5]); they were, rather, “the first full-fledged ecological writers in the Western literary tradition” (McKusick 2000, 19). Instead of bracketing the human social world from its purview of Romantic ecological writings as advocates of ecopoetical reading paradigms have tended to do, McKusick’s work often emphasizes human political and epistemological concerns, examining philosophical perspectives associated not only with deep ecology but with the more socially engaged fields of human ecology, ecofeminism, and ecolinguistics. Central to these discussions are comparative analyses of British and American modes of literary environmentalism, analyses that make Green Writing the first full-length transatlantic study in the field of Romantic ecocriticism. The book’s early chapters on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Clare, Blake, and Mary Shelley provide important contexts for a consideration of ecological writings by such American authors as Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, and Austin, opening a productive dialogue between British and American literary traditions. Questioning the “dismissive appraisal of English literature” (3) that all too often informs nineteenth-century American writing, McKusick’s book affirms the existence of a transatlantic intellectual milieu in which British and American authors shared common understandings of nature and a common desire to change “the historical trajectory of human culture” (227), a trajectory that seemed destined

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to despoil the world’s ecosystems. Concerned to explore not only representations of nature and natural processes but also the social, economic, and linguistic contexts that informed and enabled such representations, McKusick’s book demonstrates some of the ways in which ecocriticism can help readers to account for “the total material context of literary production” (15). In the following pages, I build upon McKusick’s transatlantic insights in order to consider intercultural contexts beyond the scope of his book’s ground-breaking discussions. Rather than contextualizing the relationship between British and Anglo-American representations of nature against the background of a largely Eurocentric Romantic tradition, the present book incorporates chapters that attempt to place such writings into dialogue with contemporary perspectives articulated by African and Native American writers. By considering Romantic literature in relation to colonial histories and their intercultural relations, I follow a trail previously blazed by Alan Bewell, whose work draws productive and provocative parallels between postcolonial and ecocritical concepts of culture and colonial space. Early in Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Bewell invokes Mary Louise Pratt’s influential idea of the “contact zone,” which Pratt defines as the “space of colonial encounters … [wherein] peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (M.L. Pratt 1992, 6). But in adapting Pratt’s concept of contact zones for use in an avowedly ecological-materialist critical context, Bewell goes beyond the cultural parameters that Pratt and her followers have generally emphasized: although he concedes that such zones “were undoubtedly spaces of political, linguistic, and economic transformation,” Bewell notes that “they were also regions undergoing rapid biological transformation” (Bewell 1999, 3). Focusing on biomedical environments and the global circulation of pathogens during the Romantic period, Bewell’s work demonstrates that Romantic representations of colonial disease are “not simply the product of the ethnocentric inscription of pathologies onto blank spaces. They also constitute complex negotiations between biology and culture, articulated over a long history of colonial encounters” (29). Aside from demonstrating the interpenetration of biological and cultural realities in Romantic representations, one of Bewell’s greatest

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contributions is his focus on the diversity of global ecosystems during an era in which the widespread collection, transplantation, and circulation of plants and animals “changed entire landscapes and biota systems” (2005, 168–9). Bewell’s attention to global diversity necessitates some lexically simple but conceptually profound adjustments to the standard ecocritical vocabulary. Speaking of the Romantic period’s unprecedented traffic in biological organisms, for example, he asserts that “We need to think … of natures and knowledges circulating across the world at this time, flooding into England from the peripheral regions of the globe” (ibid., 168; emphasis added). What is significant here and elsewhere in Bewell’s recent scholarship is his terminological eschewal of the singular terms “nature” and “knowledge” in favour of their plural forms. This is an important critical move, for if “‘Nature’ as an abstracted category” is very much a “Western … concept” (Fulford 2006, 286–7), then to speak of nature in the singular is to privilege a distinctly Western perspective. Affirming the existence of plural “natures” in the Romantic colonial world – and of plural cultural “knowledges” associated with these diverse ecologies – Bewell’s “multi-naturalism” complements modern concepts of multiculturalism, thereby mitigating against the subtle forms of Eurocentrism that often unwittingly find their way into ecocritical practice.20 My own use of the plural “ecologies” in the title of this book is a reflection of my intellectual indebtedness to Bewell’s work, and part of a critical effort to acknowledge the diverse ecological and cultural realities of the British Atlantic world. In order to understand these realities, and to appreciate the complex relationships that exist among them, it is necessary to address questions of transatlantic intertextual influence. In the context of literary scholarship, such influence has often been understood as unidirectional, moving from Europe westward across the Atlantic and into the New World. According to this model, Anglo-America’s various literatures derive from the Old-World literatures that preceded them. Thus, for example, European religious writings are understood as the discursive progenitors of devotional or evangelical writings produced by African and Native American converts; and European Romantic writings – understood as distinctive products of European culture – are said to have played an influential role in the creation, for example, of American and Canadian Romanticisms. Postdating European literatures, colonial literatures are regarded as largely derivative and imitative (though, in the process of

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adapting inherited perspectives to different contexts, colonial literary discourses are generally said to mutate and change with the passing of time). Modern transatlantic theory complicates this temporal and spatial dynamic by questioning the priority of European discourses themselves, thereby reconceptualizing the nature of intertextual influence. In the colonial transatlantic world, human bodies moved back and forth across the Atlantic following patterns of trade, exploration, military activity, emigration, and tourism. And where human bodies traveled so did ideas, which were communicated orally, or in private letters and journals, or more publicly, in published writings. Thus, as Susan Manning and Frank Cogliano have recently noted, “the transatlantic traffic in ideas moved from west to east as well as east to west, and in circulatory patterns that complicate vectors of transmission” (Manning and Cogliano 2008, 6). Accordingly, one cannot speak merely of the ways in which British literature influenced the development of Canadian or American Anglophone literatures, or of the ways in which British culture and letters influenced AfricanAmerican or Native American cultures and writings (though such influences remained important due to the asymmetry of colonial power relations). On the contrary, despite the existence of a coercive colonial hierarchy, one must consider transatlantic influences in terms of a more complicated structure of relations, according to which marginalized peoples exerted subtle influences upon the dominant power, affecting its notions of cultural identity and its concepts of nature and human-nature relations, in what Joseph Roach has aptly termed a “world continuously reinvented by intercultural propinquity” (Roach 1996, 122). Questioning “the generative importance of priority,” this idea of influence is in some ways distinctly modern, owing a critical debt to postmodern concepts of language and intertextuality (Manning 2005, 23). But it is also grounded in historical circumstance: During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European explorers, travelers, and natural historians produced narratives of their experiences among foreign peoples and treatises on the botanical and zoological productions of distant landscapes for a domestic reading public eager to devour such writings. Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Campbell were among those who enthusiastically consumed such works, citing them in their poetry and correspondence, and borrowing and modifying their ideas.

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And colonized subjects, including African activist writers lobbying for abolition of the slave trade as well as Native Americans lobbying for the protection of their peoples and territories, themselves increasingly visited or moved to Britain, bringing their own stories into the heart of the empire and sometimes meeting British writers face to face. Notwithstanding the existence of a political hierarchy that privileged British cultural forms, thereby enforcing colonial mimicry, these instances of contact were among the “fruits of empire” that “were pervasive in shaping European domestic society, culture, and history” (M.L. Pratt 1992, 6; emphasis added). As a result, to quote Pratt, “Europe’s constructions of subordinated others” were to some degree “shaped by those others, by the constructions of themselves and their habitats that they presented to the Europeans.” Thus, “the entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out” (6). This decentralized model of colonial history is very much in tune with concepts of subjectivity derived from postcolonial theory, according to which cultural experience and identity are “radically, quintessentially hybrid” (Said 1993, 58; see also Bhabha 1994). If “the troubling consequences of imperial practice, in returning to penetrate the borders of the imperial nation, necessarily penetrate the boundaries of the self that inhabits that nation” (Hickey 1996, 286), then writings produced within the colonial centre, even writings produced by authors who had never ventured beyond the borders of their homelands, will carry at least a hint of distant influence, a trace of otherness that might be detected via a carefully contextualized reading practice. While traditional models of colonial history often regard “transculturation” as a one-way process, wherein the identities of non-European people are transformed via the selective adoption and adaptation of colonial vocabularies and practices (Pratt 1992, 6), hybridity theory encourages us to deconstruct this monolithic model in order to account for what Michael H. Fisher has termed “counterflows to colonialism.”21 As we shall see, a crucial implication of this deconstruction is that colonized peoples, rather than always being regarded as powerless victims of colonial aggression, are also acknowledged as active agents, and their appropriations of European discourses may be seen not merely as instances of colonial cooptation but as potential manifestations of counter-discursive or anti-colonial resistance.

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The revisionist history that informs this complex model of transatlantic relations has recently begun to challenge long-held assumptions concerning Romanticism itself. To quote Helen Thomas’s transatlantic study Romanticism and Slave Narratives (2000), “Romanticism is no longer perceived as simply a ‘European phenomenon’, informed solely by the political and philosophical legacy of the French Revolution and the German Empire” (82). In order to acquire a more subtle and critically nuanced understanding of Romanticism, including its central concepts of nature and culture, we must take into account larger comparative contexts. Thus Fulford, Lee, and Kitson argue that “what scholars have called ‘Romanticism’ arose partly as a response in writing (travel writing, scientific writing, literary writing) to encounters with foreign people and places. These encounters were seminal: they shaped not only the discourses that explicitly addressed distant cultures, but also those that concerned themselves with matters closer to home” (2004, 6). In the burgeoning new field of Transatlantic Studies, to grapple with the fact that British Romanticism was constituted not only by European cultural and geographic contexts but also by contact with Euro-American, African, and Native American people and territories (among others) is to heed William Keach’s call for a “transatlantic imperative” in Romantic Studies (Keach 2000, 31). Ultimately, if we study even the most domestically oriented Romantic representations of nature and culture without also heeding these larger constitutive contexts, we will “see only a partial picture” (Pace and Scott 2005, 4). By helping scholars to address questions of “international intertextuality” (ibid., 2), transatlantic scholarship can contribute to a productive recontextualization of Green Romantic thought, thereby clarifying the interesting ways in which Romantic concepts of nature, culture, and non-human being are informed by, and contribute to, the politics of colonial encounter in the Atlantic world. A transatlantic focus can also help to expand the field of ecocritical literary inquiry, which as Buell notes in The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005) has in the past “generally concentrated on individual nations’ literary histories and is only now starting to think intensively in comparatist terms” (16). Ecological and transatlantic modes of criticism are both relative newcomers to academic scholarship. While the former mode is currently “in the tense but enviable position of being a wide-open movement still sorting out its

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premises and its powers” (28), the latter is still striving to formulate a “canon of problems, events, or processes” and a “common method or practice” (Armitage 2002, 26). Perhaps by bringing these two schools of criticism into a productive dialogue informed by concepts and practices derived from postcolonial theory, scholars can help each school to hone its methods and broaden its horizons.

v. a t l a n t i c i s t p e r s p e c t i v e s “Atlantic history,” David Armitage observes, “has recently become much more multicolored. The white Atlantic has itself become a self-conscious field of study rather than the defining model for all other Atlantic histories” (2002, 14). This racial shift in historical perception owes much to the work of Paul Gilroy, whose groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic (1993) challenged absolutist models of ethnic and cultural identity, emphasizing instead the ways in which modern America’s Aboriginal, European, African, and Asian cultures were historically involved together in “processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity.” These dynamic processes created new forms of identity exceeding the classic categories of racial philosophy and science, forms of identity that can only be understood through “the theorization of creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity” (Gilroy 1993, 2). Although Gilroy’s work focuses on the crucial constitutive role that African people have played in the shaping of Atlantic history, his highly suggestive scholarship on the “black Atlantic” has provided scholars with a theoretical framework that can be adapted and modified to illuminate the study of other American intercultural contexts as well. In the context of Native American Studies, a growing body of scholarship is currently shedding new light on the intercultural implications of European-Native American contact. Some of this work can be traced to historian Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991). In White’s analysis, “the middle ground” refers to the contested and shrinking cultural and geographic environments in which the worlds of European and Indian peoples overlapped, creating in their “mixture … new systems of meaning and of exchange.” The middle ground is thus “the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages” (x).22 The kinds of intercultural

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encounter that White describes were well-documented by white explorers, travelers, traders, and journalists, providing fodder for an eager reading public whose members included influential British and North American poets and authors. In Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830 (2006), Tim Fulford builds on White’s concept of the middle ground, arguing that transatlantic economic and military activity “Indianized parts of British culture even as it anglicized aspects of Native American society” in a “two-way process” of hybridization (6) that affected Romantic literature and literary philosophy in important ways: “The Lake poets … wrote of American lakes and Indian rustics as well as English ones and would not have been able to express their visions of rural community without having absorbed Native American culture as pictured by travellers. Native Americans, in short, were vital figures in the formation of early Romanticism: their bodies, their customs, their society, and, above all, their oral poetry influenced Romanticism’s content and form” (155). In a discussion of American literary history, Joshua David Bellin sees a similar process of hybridization at play: “it is because American literature emerges from contexts of encounter, from the interaction and intersection of peoples, that the presence of Indians is central to the literature” (2001, 3). The insights provided by scholars like White, Fulford, and Bellin suggest the existence of an “Indian Atlantic”23 that is as complex and interesting as Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic.” An appreciation of these cultural formations, and of the ways in which they interacted with Anglophone societies, is key to a properly informed apprehension of British and American social and literary histories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Informed by concepts and concerns drawn from postcolonial theory, a transatlantic approach to the study of Romantic literary texts and contexts has much to offer Green Romantic scholarship. As we have seen, transatlantic history tells the story of how disparate peoples “reinvented themselves” in encounters with others (Armitage and Braddick 2002, 1). This process of reinvention must be understood not as a purely cultural phenomenon but as a product of environmental influences as well. At the most basic level, for example, wind and ocean currents helped to determine patterns of trade and settlement during the colonial period (ibid., 1), as did topography and climate; and the experience of unfamiliar environments, and of

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the people who lived and worked within them, led to revised understandings of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Thus Kate Rigby writes that “much romantic literature is turned not toward home but toward the place of the other: it is ghosted by the spirit of another place, a genius loci alterius” (2004, 54).

v i . th e c h a p t e r s i n t h i s vo l u m e Attempts by Europeans “to transpose their own biosocial ecologies to other regions of the globe” created “hybrid” colonial landscapes (Bewell 1999, 48) that presupposed or entailed the dispossession of aboriginal people, and often involved the enslavement of others to clear and work the land – circumstances whose legacies we are still dealing with today. In the process, whole ecosystems were transformed, as were the lifeways that these ecosystems had supported for thousands of years. To justify these changes, as I demonstrate in Chapters One and Two, colonial governments and their representatives commonly invoked contemporary ideologies of racial and cultural hierarchy, which conveniently granted Caucasians the right to subordinate what they conceptualized as “lower,” “uncivilized” races. Sometimes these races were feminized, associated like contemporary British women with the body and its unruly passions, and denied the capacity for reason – which ostensibly necessitated their “protection” by “enlightened,” paternalistic colonizers. Often, as I show in chapter 1, African and North American indigenous peoples were considered thralls to the exigencies of climate, slaves of a natural world that they (unlike their technologically gifted white counterparts) were unable to control. Sometimes, as chapter 2 demonstrates, Africans and Native Americans were animalized, regarded more as brutes than as fully human beings, and so considered unworthy of full ethical consideration. Indians were compared to the animals they hunted, African slaves to wild beasts and to the domesticated work animals that sometimes received better treatment than they did. Theories of cultural development, which claimed to measure a society’s progress on the basis of its modes of subsistence, went hand in hand with ideologies of so-called “improvement” that justified the clear-cutting of forested hunting grounds to make way for more “civilized” practices of agriculture and commerce, which would supposedly lead to the progressive development of “savage” societies. When aboriginal societies were decimated or destroyed by

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these processes, their disappearance was often considered a “natural” phenomenon akin to the extinction of mammoths, the gentle setting of the evening sun, or the falling of leaves in an autumn forest. In short, concepts of nature were constantly invoked to naturalize colonial regimes that simultaneously exploited people and landscapes, leading to forms of genocide and ecocide, inseparable sides of the same imperialist coin (Gonzales and Nelson 2001, 504; Rose 2004, 34–5). The contemporary invocation of nature to explain the character and culture of indigenous Africans and Native Americans tended to deny these people access to agency and self-determination, locating these attributes in the natural world instead. Like the plants and animals that inhabited local ecosystems, indigenous societies were sometimes understood as veritable products of nature, “primitives” whose tempers and practices had been shaped by the intemperate and chaotic forces of climate and weather, the gloomy aesthetics of the untamed jungle or forest, and the practical realities of survival in these “uncivilized” environments. Such environmental-determinist concepts of indigenous cultural identity surely complicate recent ecocritical claims regarding the need to rethink traditional concepts of agency. According to Val Plumwood, for example, “the modern anthropocentric tradition of denying nature’s agency, placing the human on the active side and the nonhuman on the passive,” has been a central underlying cause of today’s global ecological crisis, for it has led to a “‘profound forgetting’ of nature” (2001, 23, 15). A closer look at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses of environmental determinism, however, indicates that nature has in fact sometimes been constructed as a very powerful force (a force that European cultures had ostensibly brought under control through the application of superior arts and technologies, and the concomitant taming of European environments). If such a model of environmental determinism acknowledges the active role that physical environments play in the historical constitution of “primitive” cultures – thereby affirming an originary connection between habitat and the formation of human identities – it was also used sometimes during the colonial period to deny the agency of aboriginal people. Such a denial often served the interests of colonial ideology, for where human beings were seen as passive thralls to the active influences of nature, mere animal-like products of the wild physical environments that had shaped them, their colonization – and the

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attendant agrarian transformation of their traditional hunting grounds – could be justified as a sort of emancipation from nature’s prison-house, and thus as a bestowal of agency understood to characterize a fully developed (i.e., Eurocentric) humanity. After investigating contemporary discourses of animality and environmental determinism in Chapters One and Two, I devote a series of subsequent chapters to the close reading of particular literary texts. Focusing on William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) and its intertextual debt to John Gabriel Stedman’s bestselling Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790, 1796), Chapter Three explores the relationship between natural philosophy, colonialism, and gender. Blake’s poem, which is largely set in an unspecified American location, provides a tripartite allegory of sexual oppression, slavery, and environmental exploitation, drawing productive parallels between patriarchal and colonial systems of power. In an analysis of the poem’s male antagonists, the ascetic Theotormon and his doppelgänger, the gluttonous Bromion, Chapter Three also considers problems associated with Western dualistic thought, which posits a radical – and ultimately violent – separation of body and spirit, earth and heaven, mind and matter. Such dualisms, I argue, play an enabling role in the conquest and exploitation of colonized peoples and the ecosystems they inhabit; and the deconstructive efforts of Blake’s female protagonist, Oothoon, to dismantle them are integral parts of her effort to resist colonial authority. Moving to a consideration of animality and animal rights, Chapter Four focuses on Coleridge’s relatively neglected poem “To a Young Ass, Its Mother Being Tethered Near It” (1794), an allegorical work originally published one year after Blake engraved Visions. In this rather strange, non-canonical poem, Coleridge invokes the republican ideals of the French Revolution to argue that humans have an ethical obligation to treat animals humanely. In order to illuminate the wider social contexts informing contemporary concerns for “the rights of brutes,” I consider the poem’s argument in light of perspectives offered by contemporary British animal-rights activists like John Oswald, Humphry Primatt, and John Lamb. This discussion is informed by the scholarship of modern critics like David Perkins, Christine Kenyon-Jones, and Kurt Fosso, whose recent pioneering work on Romanticism and animal rights has illuminated the Romantic sense of animals as “kindred brutes.”24 Aside

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from demonstrating the ways in which Coleridge’s poem participates in the contemporary animal rights movement, these critics have noted in passing that “To a Young Ass” encodes an allegorical critique of social ills like the institution of slavery. My discussion of the poem expands upon this insight to clarify Coleridge’s understanding of the ways in which the concerns of animal-rights and anti-slavery discourses intersected during the Romantic period, investigating, in particular, conceptual parallels that Coleridge draws between the categories of race and species. To clarify the complex implications of the poem’s anti-slavery allegory, I also consider its politics in light of writings published by contemporary African authors of the Black Atlantic, including Ignatius Sancho (who was himself an ardent advocate for the legislated prevention of cruelty to animals), Mary Prince, and Ottobah Cugoano. Chapters Five and Six examine the representation of Native American people and North American natures in the work of two Romantic-era Scottish poets, William Richardson and Thomas Campbell, whose representations are largely shaped by the conventional generic requirements of romance and pastoral. The elder poet Richardson was a minor figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, and one of Campbell’s professors at the University of Glasgow. Best known during his lifetime for his Shakespearean literary criticism and his spirited scholarly defence of Ossian, Richardson provides a fascinating case study primarily because of the ways in which his dramatic romance The Indians: A Tragedy (1790) overtly embodies Scottish Enlightenment theories of environmental determinism, noble savagery, and developmental cultural history. Set on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron at the end of the Seven Years’ War, The Indians presents its titular characters as members of an entirely “artless and uncultur’d race” (1790, ii) whose ways of life are direct products of an active, wild nature sometimes conceived as chaotic and malevolent, and sometimes as the source of positive ethical values. Dramatizing a debate between primitivist and progressivist models of culture rooted in diametrically opposed concepts of nature, Richardson’s dramatic romance provides much fodder for a politicized evaluation of Enlightenment and Romantic modes of environmental philosophy. Conducting an analysis of Thomas Campbell’s celebrated pastoral romance Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), which is set during the American Revolutionary War, Chapter Six demonstrates the ways

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in which Campbell engaged, like Richardson before him, with Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic concepts of nature and culture. Informed by Thomas Jefferson’s deterministic theory of the relationship between “climate and the American character” (Jefferson 1984, 826), Campbell’s poem represents its Pennsylvanian setting, the Susquehanna Valley (wherein Coleridge and Southey had dreamed of establishing their radical Pantisocracy commune), as an idyllic space of natural and social harmony. As I demonstrate, however, Gertrude’s harmonious portrait of colonial life is entirely contingent upon the prior agrarian transformation of the Pennsylvanian landscape and the displacement of its aboriginal inhabitants for, according to Campbell’s environmental theory, “unimproved” wilderness landscapes tended to promote an animalistic violence in their human denizens. This violence is embodied in “the monster Brandt,” the bloodthirsty warrior whose character is based on that of Chief Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) of the Mohawk nation. In Campbell’s poem, Brandt’s animalistic depredations lead, suggestively, to the environmental “desolation of Wyoming”25 and the destruction of its harmonious human community. Investigating both the cultural and environmental implications of this representation of savage violence, I conclude my analysis of Gertrude by considering the results of Campbell’s unexpected encounter with Chief John Brant (Ahyonwaeghs) of the Mohawk nation, who, during a visit to Great Britain in 1822, sought a meeting with the popular poet in order to defend his father’s reputation and set the historical record straight. In my final chapter, I build on the insights offered in Chapters Five and Six in order to examine some of the ways in which British Romantic concepts of nature and culture informed the naturalism and ethnography of the nineteenth-century Anishinaabe or Ojibwa author George Copway (also known by his traditional name Kahgegagahbowh, or Standing Firm), whose celebrated writings evinced a meaningful fascination for the works and ideas of such British writers as Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey, and Lord Byron. Calling himself “one of Nature’s children,” and idealizing his childhood days “in Nature’s wide domain!” (1850b, 10–11), Copway deliberately attempts to manipulate his American and British audiences’ fascination for the Romantic myth of the “noble savage,” while at the same time emphasizing his people’s ability to become cultured Christians and

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farmers. In order to illuminate the strategic aspect of Copway’s conflicted narrative project, I first contextualize its engagement with European ideology by examining the role that Romantic concepts of nature and culture played in the proposed aboriginal governance policies of Sir Francis Bond Head, the Romantic man of letters who governed Upper Canada from 1836 until 1838. Having arrived in Copway’s homeland with a head full of Rousseauvian and Wordsworthian notions of nature and aboriginal culture, and eschewing contemporary Christian imperatives commonly associated with Europe’s “civilizing mission,” Head celebrated Ojibwa people as moral exemplars that British citizens and Canadian settlers would do well to emulate for the sake of their own improvement. Significantly, however, Head’s Romanticism came to play a key role in his effort to remove Indian people from their traditional hunting grounds in order to prepare the way for British settlement involving the widespread deforestation and cultivation of the land. Arguing that Copway had likely learned of this proposed policy and its underlying naturalist philosophy from Head’s vocal Ojibwa opponents, including Chief Joseph Sawyer and the Anglo-Ojibwa evangelist and chief Peter Jones, I argue for the presence of a counter-discursive Green Romanticism in Copway’s writing, a deliberate (albeit perilous) appropriation of Romanticism that attempts to resist colonial theories of Indian culture and, most important, white expropriations of Indian territory. Before turning to my primary texts, however, it is necessary to analyze in more detail the philosophies of nature and culture to which these texts responded and contributed. It is thus to a broader contextualization of European theories of cultural development and their associated concepts of nature, environmental determinism, and civilization that I now turn.

chapter one

Naturalizing Colonial Relations in the British Atlantic World: Slavery as Fact and Figure [T]he colonial period of [American] history is the story of a minority of Englishmen interacting with a majority of Iroquois, Delawares, Narragansetts, Pequots, Mahicans, Catawbas, Tuscaroras, Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Ibos, Mandingos, Fulas, Yorubas, Ashantis, Germans, French, Spaniards, Swedes, and Scotch-Irish, to mention only some of the cultural strains present on the continent. (Gary B. Nash 1974, 2) Let me repeat my contention that we will never comprehend American civilization or culture (not to say American society) until we comprehend the European component of it in historical relation to the Afro-American and the Indian, and, increasingly, in relation to those cultural others whose Otherness is nonetheless deeply American. (Arnold Krupat 1989, 235)

i . s t a d i a l th e o ry In 1725, a group of French missionaries met with a council of Native Americans at Mobile, Alabama, hoping to find potential converts. When asked whether or not the Indians wished to abandon their own beliefs and become Christians, a Taensas chief responded with an enigmatic story of human racial origins: Long ago … there were three men in a cave, one white, one red and one black. The white man went out first and he took the good road that led him into a fine hunting ground … The red man who is the Indian, for they call themselves in their language “Red Men,” went out of the cave second. He went astray from the good road and took another which led him into a country

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where the hunting was less abundant. The black man, who is the negro, having been the third to go out, got entirely lost in a very bad country in which he did not find anything on which to live. Since that time the red man and the black man have been looking for the white man to restore them to the good road. (Qtd. in Shoemaker 2004, 130–1)1 Recorded by Father Raphael, one of the missionaries in attendance, this story’s ranking of white, red, and black seems to support Eurocentric assumptions concerning racial hierarchy, highlighting the white man’s privileged position in relation to the red and black men, and implicitly supporting the idea, central to the paternalistic ideology of the “civilizing mission,” that the white man alone could help the less fortunate races to rise above their straitened circumstances. Given that the white man leaves the cave first, the story also seems to support the notion – later sanctioned by the stadial theories of the Scottish Enlightenment – that the white race had entered the realm of history before other races had done so. And yet, as Nancy Shoemaker has cautioned, the Taensas chief’s narrative should not be taken at face value, for among themselves the southeastern Indians tended to hold whites in contempt. It was likely, then, that the storyteller’s apparent “deference to white superiority was a diplomatic pose” (Shoemaker 2004, 134). Indeed, when examined closely, the story does not represent the priority it grants to its white addressees as the product of or reward for any inherent superiority on their part; rather, it emphasizes as the main distinction between races their comparative access to natural resources and means of subsistence. And though it does not accuse the white man of having gained his good fortune through the appropriation of others’ land and labour, the notion that the Indians and blacks now looked to the “white man to restore them to the good road” (emphasis added) does suggest that the white man’s “good road” had once belonged to those seeking its restoration. Thus, while the story as a whole seems to appeal to the Christians’ vaunted sense of their own virtue, diplomatically encouraging them to prove their charitable intentions by sharing the earth’s abundance with others, it also subtly indicts them for monopolizing these resources in the first place. Despite its seeming affirmation of white superiority, then, the Taensas chief’s story might be seen as an early example of a counter-discourse whose strategic aim is to question the authority of America’s white colonial interlopers.

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Given that hunting provided an important part of the southeastern Indians’ diet, it is not surprising that the Taensas creation story represents all of its players, regardless of race, as hunters. By the end of the eighteenth century, the idea that hunting was the original human occupation was well established throughout the European world: Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and James Burnett (Lord Monboddo) argued influentially that all societies moved through developmental “stages” beginning with hunting and gathering, and generally followed by herding, then agriculture, and finally commerce.2 According to this “four-stages theory” of cultural development,3 the “primitive” societies of Arabia, Africa, and especially America were valuable objects of modernday study, not necessarily because of what might be learned about these cultures themselves, but because their “primitive” condition enabled Europeans to speculate about their own pre-history. As Adam Ferguson argued of such societies, “It is in their present condition that we are to behold, as in a mirrour, the features of our own progenitors; and from thence we are to draw conclusions with respect to the influence of situations, in which we have reason to believe that our fathers were placed” (1793, 133–4). To some extent, stadial theory’s model of cultural development issued a philosophical challenge to essentialist paradigms of racial identity. In direct response to David Hume’s contentious claim that “the negroes, and in general all the other species of men” are “naturally inferior to the whites,” for example, James Beattie asserted: “The Inhabitants of Great Britain and France were as savage two thousand years ago, as those of Africa and America are at this day” (1771, 507–8).4 Contrary to the idea that races are marked by inherent differences in genius, morality, and physicality, Beattie and many other stadial philosophers saw all societies as inherently equal by nature but subject to differences associated with the “stage” they currently occupied in their historical development. And while this theory took European society as the teleological model toward which all human societies inevitably evolved, thereby supporting a potentially insidious form of ethnocentric hierarchy, it sometimes associated Europe with unsavory modes of artifice and moral decadence. A full analysis of the various complexities and contradictions informing stadial theory is beyond the scope of the current discussion. But it is important to note the

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extent to which such theories, by correlating cultural development with modes of subsistence, at once grounded racial and cultural identity in nature (since subsistence depends upon the presence of edible animals and plants, the fertility of soils, the fecundity of climates, etc.) and in history (since societies and the environments that supported them were subject to change). Neither fully naturalist nor completely constructivist in its philosophical underpinnings, stadial theory could be appropriated to support a diverse array of arguments about the relationship between ecologies and cultures. Anti-slavery activists occasionally highlighted aspects of stadial theory in order to criticize colonial practices in the New World. In his bestselling autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), the emancipated Igbo slave Equiano used the theory’s leveling logic to indict the hubris associated with the European “civilizing mission”: “Let the polished and haughty European recollect that his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized, and even barbarous” (2002, 60). By reminding his British readers that “the Aborigines of Britain” (250) were essentially no different from modern-day Africans, Equiano attempts to encourage a process of sympathetic identification with non-white subalterns, thereby combating colonial strategies of racial othering used to justify the enslavement of his fellow Africans. Contradictions between the ideology of the “civilizing mission” and the inhumane labour practices supporting West Indian and American plantation economies could also be exploited counterdiscursively in the service of anti-colonial cultural critiques. Consider, for example, the following lines from Amelia Opie’s abolitionist poem “The Black Man’s Lament, or, How to Make Sugar” (1826), a poem written from the imagined perspective of a plantation slave: Poor Negroes hold a hoe in hand, But they the wicked cart-whip bear. Then we, in gangs, like beasts in droves, Swift to the cane-fields driven are… (Qtd. in Mellor and Matlak 1996, 82 lines 39–42) In this passage, Opie’s italicization of “hoe” places a deliberate emphasis upon the agricultural activities in which the “Poor Negroes”

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are involved, drawing the reader’s attention to the Africans’ participation in the agricultural third stage of social development, in which the “savagery” and “barbarism” associated respectively with “earlier” practices of hunting and herding are largely left behind. In the next line, however, the antithetical conjunction “But” highlights an important incommensurability: although the empire’s slaves are participating in the ostensibly civilizing processes of agriculture, they are treated not like civilized humans but “like beasts in droves.” For these oppressed workers, progression up the ladder of cultural refinement involves a contradictory regression toward the animal kingdom (which, according to another venerable tradition, was located beneath the human realm on the Great Chain of Being). Since the agricultural state was supposed to make humans more peaceful by removing them from the lifeways associated with hunting and herding, the violence signified by “the wicked cart-whip” points toward another contradiction, demonstrating the philosophical poverty of European theory as well as the moral impoverishment of the white slave drivers whose actions Opie’s speaker criticizes. African people were not the only victims of the transatlantic slave system during the colonial period. Indeed, from the time that Britain established its first permanent American settlement at Jamestown in 1607, coastal Native Americans had been enslaved to work the tobacco plantations, the first African slaves having arrived to shore up their dwindling numbers little more than a decade later (Bordewich 2005, 15). Even in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was not uncommon for aboriginal and Métis people to be enslaved by unscrupulous whites. In his autobiography A Son of the Forest (1831), for example, the Anglo-Pequot writer William Apess angrily complained that “to be sold to, and treated unkindly, by those who had got our father’s lands for nothing, was too much to bear” (35). And from the mid-nineteenth century until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, as many as ten thousand Indian men, women, and children were sold into slavery in California in order to satisfy the gold rush era’s demand for labourers and prostitutes (Bordewich 1997, 50–1). During this period, the word “Digger” was “the pejorative of choice for Indians on the Far Western frontier; it was no coincidence that it sounded much like ‘nigger,’ and it carried the same freight of contempt” (ibid., 31). In contexts where Indians were not themselves enslaved

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by whites, adverse political developments could impinge almost simultaneously upon both Indian and African interests, as in cases where whites appropriated Indian territories in order to “enlarge the area available for the [African] slave system” (Kerber 1975, 276). Although powerful whites often paid lip service to the “benevolent” idea that Indians and Africans should be assimilated into European society, “the most effective way to exploit the land of one and the labor of the other was to follow a nonassimilationist policy” (G. Nash 1974, 310–11). It is thus no wonder that conscientious activists drew strong correlations between the mistreatment of blacks and Indians. After the British Parliament passed the Emancipation Act in 1833, a group of British abolitionists founded the Aborigines Protection Society out of a fervent belief that it was “incumbent on them to befriend those other victims of colonising enterprise who, though not actually slaves, were exposed to treatment as bad as the state of slavery involved” (Bourne 1899, 3). And on the other side of the Atlantic, American abolitionists often expressed concern for aboriginal people because they saw their plight as in many ways analogous to that of African slaves. As the editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, John Greenleaf Whittier, noted in 1838, “The same despotic, cruel, and diabolical spirit that oppresses the African race … acts in all its unearthly force and virulence against the poor Indians” (qtd. in Kerber 1975, 274).5 Where colonial civilizing ideology was so much at odds with actual practice, philanthropists found opportunity to mock a nation that had, in the bitterly satirical words of Nathaniel P. Rogers, “protected the Indians nearly all out of the country” while “gradually abolish[ing] slavery from about 500,000 [African people] up to two million and a half” (qtd. in ibid., 279–80).6 R.S. White has recently noted the extent to which slavery was linked during the Romantic period to a wide range of libertarian causes promoting the concept of natural rights (2005, 180). Slavery was invoked metaphorically to characterize the oppressed condition of peasants, labourers, children, women, and even domestic animals. Amelia Opie was among those writers who were uncomfortable with this widespread usage; thus, in “The Black Man’s Lament” (1826), her speaker rhetorically questions the contemporary notion that Britain’s underclasses were effectively enslaved – a notion that slave-trade apologists sometimes invoked to argue that

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abolitionists should attend not to the welfare of distant African slaves but to the alleviation of British domestic suffering: “Who dares an English peasant flog, Or buy, or sell, or steal away? Who sheds his blood? treats him like dog, Or fetters him like beasts of prey? (Qtd. in Mellor and Matlak 1996, 83 lines 113–16) Here, the titular “Black Man” who is the represented speaker in Opie’s poem asserts a signal difference between class- and racebased forms of servitude – a difference that in many cases would also have served to distinguish women oppressed by the “yoke of patriarchy” from plantation slaves who could be forced to wear actual neck-yokes: that, in contrast to the treatment of Africans under the institution of slavery, some form of legal protection is generally afforded to non-African people. Nevertheless, British feminists, many of whom became leading figures in the abolitionist movement, often invoked slavery as a trope to decry women’s treatment in Western society, asserting, with Mary Wollstonecraft, a contemporary “parallel between wives and slaves” (Mellor 1996, 311). On the American side of the Atlantic, a similar perspective made the abolitionist movement “a seedbed of American feminism” (Bordewich 2005, 6): echoing her British feminist counterparts, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an early leader of the American women’s movement, asserted that “Woman [is] more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be. For while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the Negro there is no such privilege” (qtd. in Bordewich 2005, 6). In William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), as we shall see in Chapter Three, the female protagonist Oothoon allegorically represents both oppressed British women and enslaved African women, functioning as a mouthpiece for Blake’s polemical exploration of intersections between sexism and racism in the contemporary transatlantic world. The fact that women from “civilized” Western societies identified so insistently with the condition of African slaves offers another ironic commentary on stadial theory, whose leading proponents believed, as Anna Jameson wryly observed in 1838, that “[t]he first step from the hunting to the agricultural state is the first step in the emancipation of the female” (1990, 515). This notion

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encouraged among male writers both a self-congratulatory view of gender politics in their own “advanced” societies and a highly critical view of such politics in Native American hunting societies. In the latter, women were thought to be “drudges, slaves” (ibid., 513) who toiled perpetually in the domestic sphere while their male partners were off enjoying the hunt.7 Hampered by inequalities that “naturally” attended hunting societies, marriage in Indian society reflected, as William Robertson put it, “the unnatural conjunction of a master with his slave” (1777, 2.73). Even Adam Ferguson, who preferred not to conflate the circumstances of marriage and slavery, perceived the condition of aboriginal women as a mode of servitude that prevented the need for the institution of slavery itself in hunter-gatherer societies (1793, 138–9) – for where women already performed most of the labour, who needed slaves? According to another related perspective, however, it was to the advent of an agricultural mode of living and not to the practice of hunting that the etiology of slavery should be traced. In JeanJacques Rousseau’s version of stadial philosophy, to which this perspective might be partly traced, it was precisely because of agriculture (and associated arts like metallurgy) that “equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops” (1952b, 352; emphasis added). Understood as the origin of private property, agriculture introduced oppression as the strongest members of society appropriated land, forcing others to work upon it while reserving for themselves the fruits of this labour. Robertson concurs with this Rousseauvian perspective when he writes that “savage” hunters “retain a high sense of equality and independence. Wherever the idea of property is not established, there can be no distinction among men, but what rises from personal qualities … No distinctions can arise from the inequality of possessions” (Robertson 1777, 2.92–3). Embracing no concepts of property, the hunter’s mind, in its “uncultivated state” (Robertson’s agrarian metaphor, like Rousseau’s reference to germination, is surely deliberate in this context) mitigates against all forms of subjection and slavery: “Incapable of controul, and disdaining to acknowledge any superior, [the Indian hunter’s] mind, though limited in its powers, and erring in

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many of its pursuits, acquires such elevation by the consciousness of its own freedom, that he acts on some occasions with astonishing force, and perseverance, and dignity” (ibid., 2.164). In their sweeping generalizations, such portraits of hunters and hunting societies undoubtedly misrepresented the realities of Indian life, which often relied upon a combination of hunting and agriculture, and in which various forms of slavery were sometimes practiced (as they were in some indigenous African societies). It was well known, for example, that the Cherokee and Seminole people were slaveholders (see Kerber 1975, 282) and that, farther north, Mohawk chiefs like Joseph Brant also kept African slaves.8 Some British commentators associated Indian attitudes toward African slavery with the nomadic hunting lifestyle, which, as we have seen, was thought to promote freedom and independence, but which also seemed to produce strong negative reactions toward subjugated peoples. Thus, Isaac Weld generalized that “The Indians have the most sovereign contempt for any set of people that have tamely relinquished their liberty … [T]o this cause … is to be attributed, I conceive, the rooted aversion which the Indians universally have for negroes. You could not possibly affront an Indian more readily, than by telling him that you think he bears some resemblance to a negro; or that he has negro blood in his veins: they look upon them as animals inferior to the human species, and will kill them with as much unconcern as a dog or a cat” (1799, 403). Not unlike Rousseau’s and Robertson’s respective references to germination and cultivation, Weld’s metaphorical reference to a “rooted aversion” seems to ground his musings on cultural difference at least partly in the natural world. In this view, the Indian’s relationship to the land produces an ingrained sense of freedom that associates slavery with degradation, producing, via a confusion of cause and effect, a “sovereign contempt” for the victims of this institution. Conveniently, this perspective lets the white man off the hook, for it fails to acknowledge the ways in which colonial policies and practices contributed to a widespread culture of racism in the Americas. In contexts where even free blacks could be harshly mistreated and deprived of the most basic human rights, is it any wonder that some Native Americans wanted to distance themselves from any form of identification with African people, sometimes going so far as to adopt racist attitudes and practices?9

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ii. environmental determinism During the colonial era, racial differences were often explained not only as the consequences of particular subsistence practices, but also as the results of associated differences in environmental circumstances such as climate. On the one hand, thinkers who subscribed to a polygenetic view (which regarded different human races as separate biological species) argued, with Lord Kames, that God or providential “Nature” had created various human species to exist in distinct geographical locations, fitting “different species of men” to “different climates” (Home 1778, 1.20). Among monogeneticists (people who believed that all humans belong to the same species), however, it was thought that humans descended from common ancestors inhabiting a single geographical region, and that the subsequent dispersal of their progeny across the globe had gradually led to distinctions in appearance and custom. According to this view, differences in skin colour were largely determined by climatic variables, with darker-skinned people inhabiting the equatorial zones and lighter-skinned people living at more temperate latitudes. Sometimes diet was brought into the equation, as monogeneticists speculated that the foods available at different latitudes and in different kinds of habitat might also lighten or darken human complexion. Thus, the Comte de Buffon argued that skin colour was contingent to a great extent on environmental factors and could thus lighten or darken over time: “Many ages might perhaps elapse before a white race would become altogether black; but there is a probability that in time a white people, transported from the north to the equator, would experience that change, especially if they were to change their manners, and to feed solely on the productions of the warm climate” (Buffon 1797, 4.306). Because it generally did not regard dark pigmentation as an outward sign of internal or inherent racial deficiencies (even where, as in Buffon, “Nature, in her full perfection,” was thought to have “made men white” [4.324–5]), this understanding of the natural origins of skin colour was embraced by many African and Native American activist writers, including Ottobah Cugoano (1787, 31–2) and the Anglo-Ojibwa chief Peter Jones (D. Smith 1987, 92), who sought to assert the dignity and equality of their people in the face of racist onslaughts. It is interesting to note that present-day concepts of biological speciation confirm certain aspects of late eighteenth- and early

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nineteenth-century theories of environmental determinism (if not the racist applications that attended them). As the authors of Invasion Ecology (2007) point out, “One of the principal ways in which speciation occurs is through geographic isolation … Physical features such as oceans, mountains, ice sheets, and river valleys represent boundaries to the movement of individuals between populations of the same species. Over time these separated populations diverge via drift and selection, with each population eventually forming a unique species” (Lockwood et. al. 2007, 2). When Romantic-era scientists and philosophers invoked differences in habitat to account for supposed processes of human “speciation,” however, a long tradition of stereotyping could also be put into play, for climatological and environmental theories of cultural difference were developed to account not only for variations in the physical appearance of different ethnic groups but also for apparent distinctions in the morals and temperaments of these groups. In medieval times, the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville asserted that “the Romans are serious, the Greeks light, the Africans crafty … the Gauls proud and fierce” (qtd. in Hudson 1996, 248), attributing “these variations of character to differences in the weather and land in each region” (Hudson 1996, 248). In the late eighteenth century, Adam Ferguson connected a region’s climate and natural productions to the presence or absence of human genius, arguing that “[g]reat extremities, either of heat or cold, are perhaps, in a moral view, equally unfavourable to the active genius of mankind,” and asserting, with typical environmental ethnocentrism, that “the shade of the barren oak and the pine are more favourable to the genius of mankind, than that of the palm or the tamarind” (1793, 198–9; see also A. Wilson 1780, 237–8). Predictably, this negative correlation between tropical climates and intellectual development inversely supported the “naturalization” of European genius: the idea that “man” had “uniformly attained the greatest perfection of which his nature is capable, in the temperate regions of the globe. There his constitution is most vigorous, his organs most acute, and his form most beautiful” (Robertson 1777, 2.168–9). Widespread agreement with these arguments led some English critics to doubt the authenticity of the talents displayed in the writings of non-European authors like Phyllis Wheatley, the American slave turned poet: mentally impoverished by over-exposure to the sun, African people, British skeptics believed, could not possibly be

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writers of genius. Such a view understandably enraged members of London’s African literati. Speaking to a British reading audience about his fellow Africans, for example, the Igbo author Olaudah Equiano voiced his indignation in the strongest terms: “[Y]ou assert that they are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them; and that they come from a climate, where nature, though prodigal of her bounties in a degree unknown to yourselves, has left man alone scant and unfinished, and incapable of enjoying the treasures she has poured out for him! – An assertion at once impious and absurd. Why do you use those instruments of torture?” (2002, 128). As indicated by his invocation of climate theory and his reference to the African mind as “a barren soil,” Equiano was well aware of the ways in which contemporary Europeans often justified racial hierarchy – and, by extension, the institution of slavery – by grounding it in natural causes. This imperialist discursive strategy is “impious,” in his view, because it implicitly indicts God who, according to Biblical orthodoxy, created humans in his own image. And it is “absurd” not only because the opposite argument – that a “bountiful” external reality encourages, or corresponds to, a similarly endowed internal or subjective reality – is just as plausible, but because writers like Wheatley and Equiano himself embodied living proof that African people were indeed capable of acquiring “learning” and “culture.” Although the question that closes Equiano’s moral diatribe might seem at first glance to be a non-sequitur, it is in fact entirely continuous with the paragraph’s preceding subject matter: as far as Equiano was concerned, theories that invoke concepts of nature to “naturalize” racism and slavery were “instruments of torture” every bit as threatening to African life and wellbeing as the whips, iron muzzles, neck-yokes and chains that were the slave-driver’s stock in trade. In addition to indicting African “genius” or intelligence, European theories of environmental determinism were also invoked to support negative stereotypes concerning African morality. Correlating temperate climates with moral temperance and intemperate climates with a tendency toward debauchery, for example, Buffon noted matter-of-factly that the inhabitants of “cold countries” were “far more chaste” than people living in “warm” countries (4.266). Of course it was hard to reconcile this naturalistic ideal of European chastity with the fact that Europeans often consorted

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with their female slaves outside of wedlock, and that these slaves were not uncommonly subject to their white masters’ sexual abuse. Conveniently, however, whites could always blame such realities on the weather. Speaking of the white slaver’s sexual behaviour, for example, the Abbé Raynal remarked: “Those who have inquired into the causes of this taste for black women, which appears to be so depraved in the Europeans, have found it to arise from the nature of the climate, which under the torrid zone irresistibly excites men to the pleasures of love” (1776, 3.164; emphasis added). By representing European men’s “depraved” sexual behaviour as an “irresistible” function of climate and thus of nature, Raynal implicitly absolves them of personal responsibility for their conduct, thereby upholding a moral order based on self-serving stereotypes and outright lies. In this case, nature robs the European colonizer of his own agency, causing him to resemble the “savage” whose ways of life were thought to have been shaped not primarily by the agency of cultural practice but by adverse environmental realities. Beyond drawing correlations between natural environments and the absence of genius and morality in non-Caucasian races, contemporary theories could also function to naturalize the institution of slavery and its attendant oppressions in more overt ways. Claiming that “cold or temperate countries appear to be the favourite seat of freedom and independence,” William Robertson lauded the spirit of the North American Indians who dwelt in such relatively blessed climes: “There the mind, like the body, is firm and vigorous. Conscious of their own dignity, and capable of the greatest efforts in asserting it, men aspire to independence, and the stubborn spirits stoop with reluctance to the yoke of servitude. In warmer climates, by whose influence the whole frame is so much enervated, that present pleasure is the supreme felicity, and mere repose is enjoyment, men acquiesce, almost without a struggle, in the dominion of a superior” (Robertson 1777, 2.97). Yoking the moral aspects of environmental determinism discussed above to the question of political agency, Robertson suggests that influences deriving from nature itself (and not from cultural practices) make some people temperamentally suited to freedom and others to enslavement – a view that Rousseau succinctly encapsulated in the eighth chapter of The Social Contract (1762) when he asserted that freedom is “not … a fruit of every climate” (1994, 181). The American climate theorist Alexander

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Wilson would undoubtedly have agreed with this proposition. Wilson notes that when the Dutch left the West Indian island of Tobago, the native inhabitants did nothing to maintain “the improvements” that their former colonial masters had “left behind,” and that similarly, on the island of St Vincent, the aboriginal and African inhabitants had “never attempted the smallest improvement, in imitation of … the French.” On the basis of this historical evidence, Wilson asserts that “[s]lavery, and the authority resulting from it, seem therefore in a certain degree necessary to counteract the natural causes of inactivity in the hot latitudes.” Using the language of science, he therefore concludes pseudo-scientifically that “it seems demonstrable from the action of natural causes, that slavery is in a certain degree as necessary to the improvement of some countries, as liberty is to that of others” (Wilson 1780, 278–82; emphasis added). Of course, due to the same “natural causes,” temperate England was itself regarded (at least by Englishmen) as the very cradle of liberty. It is thus no coincidence that in his precedent-setting 1772 ruling on the case of James Somerset (the famous American slave who sued for his freedom after arriving in England) Lord Mansfield argued that England was by nature “a soil whose air is deemed too pure for slaves to breathe in” (qtd. in Mellor 1996, 311). To allow slavery to exist in such a context would be to sully the natural “purity” of what Blake memorably called “Englands green & pleasant Land” (1988, 96) and to pervert the designs of nature itself. And yet, according to many climate theorists, the ability to intervene in nature’s design was a natural aspect of Caucasian identity, because temperate climates themselves promoted human progress, including the development of arts and sciences capable of emancipating humans from nature’s determining effects. Robertson thus argued, for example, that the powerful operation of climate is felt most sensibly by rude nations, and produces greater effects than in societies more highly polished. The talents of civilized men are continually exerted in rendering their condition more comfortable; and by their ingenuity and inventions, they can, in a great measure, supply the defects, and guard against the inconveniencies, of any climate. But the improvident savage is affected by every circumstance peculiar to his situation. He takes no precaution either to mitigate

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or to improve it. Like a plant, or an animal, he is formed by the climate under which he is placed, and feels the full force of its influence. (1777, 2.169) An “improvident” creature of nature’s merely physical design rather than of God’s providential one, the black or red “savage” here is not fully human, behaving more like “a plant, or an animal,” than like “man.” Generalizing about the “civilized” Caucasian, Ferguson (whose climatic theories influenced Robertson’s thinking) noted that “his talent for arts” enabled him to counteract “defects” associated with his “animal capacity,” adding that the human “animal has always attained to the principal honours of his species within the temperate zone. The arts, which he has on this scene repeatedly invented” contribute to his “distinguished advantage of situation” in the natural order of things (Ferguson 1793, 182). Ferguson’s argument is of course circular: while a “talent for arts” enables humans to emancipate themselves from environmental determinants, only temperate climates are favourable to the invention of arts in the first place. And although in theory any human society inhabiting a temperate environment would eventually develop such arts, only Caucasians had done so thus far in history, thereby providing evidence of their exemplary racial status. Endowed by nature itself with the ability to transcend nature’s physical and moral constraints, whites could ostensibly cope with any hostile climate in the world without experiencing any of the degenerative effects associated with it; thus (and in apparent contradiction to Buffon’s comments, cited above, regarding the moral degeneracy of white slavers living in “torrid” climates), they considered themselves well-equipped to transform the world by “improving” all of its diverse natures and affiliated cultures. Such a grand imperial design undoubtedly informs Coleridge’s claim that Caucasians are, by dint of superior “scientific powers & resources,” able “to reside unharmed on any part of their Estate.” This verbal appropriation of the planet – implicit in Coleridge’s claim that the whole Earth constitutes the white man’s “Estate” – is here connected to the whites’ ostensible adaptability, which makes them perfectly fitted for the role of planetary colonizers, or what Coleridge hubristically refers to as “Masters of the world” (qtd. in Fulford, Lee, and Kitson 2004, 146). As the above-cited examples clearly indicate, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of environmental determinism had grave

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implications for human agency, conveniently granting “civilized” whites the right to control others while representing those others as thralls to the climates they inhabited and supposedly embodied. By conceptualizing colonial relationships according to this ideological formulation, whites could see themselves as virtuous emancipators of subject peoples, who, via benevolently imposed cultural “improvements,” would gradually be freed from natural constraints. While such theories acknowledged important connections between human beings and the ecosystems they inhabited, thereby anticipating modern-day paradigms that deconstruct the nature/culture opposition by rooting human identity in natural process, their application in praxis helped to justify social tyranny and environmental exploitation. As Brian W. Dippie succinctly explains, “[t]he issue was simple. To establish civilization, the forests that sustained savagery had to be cleared away” (1982, 30). Here, once again, we see the politics of assimilation or cultural genocide walking hand-in-hand with the practice of ecocide. It is important to note that not all European thinkers were comfortable with the idea that climates and related environmental factors were the primary determinants of human character. Even William Robertson, who (as we have seen) wrote extensively about the climatic determinants of national or racial identity, ultimately conceded that “[m]oral and political causes … affect the disposition and character of individuals as well as nations, still more powerfully than the influence of climate” (1777, 2.171). Although debates between proponents of what we would nowadays refer to as “essentialist” versus “constructivist” models of cultural identity were common,10 some thinkers sought a middle ground between these two extremes. In 1789, for example, Samuel Stanhope Smith represented human complexional and cultural differences not merely as “effects of … climate” but also as products of such things as “diet, clothing, lodging, manners, habits, face of the country, objects of science, religion, interests, passions, and ideas of all kinds, infinite in number and variety” (qtd. in Fulford 2006, 86–7).11 Without denying the importance of environmental factors, such a complex model of cultural identity challenged narrowly racist stereotypes (Fulford 2006, 87), which, as we have seen, were all too often grounded in simplistic and essentialist correlations of different global ecologies and the cultures that inhabited them.

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In recent years, the most sophisticated models of environmental determinism have tended to assume a dialectical relationship between humans and habitat. William Cronon summarizes this model as follows: “Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given moment, but then culture reshapes environment in responding to those choices. The reshaped environment [in turn] presents a new set of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination” (1983, 13). While recognizing the important role that environment plays in the constitution of cultural practices (thereby preempting a dualistic relegation of nature and culture into separate conceptual spheres), Cronon’s model of “ecological history” posits “a complex system of environmental and cultural relationships” (14) that recognizes (albeit in a qualified way) the reality of human agency, thus mitigating against rigidly determinist models of nature’s influence on human individuals and populations. It also provides a way to conceptualize colonial encounters between formerly distinct peoples as encounters between different kinds of ecological practice, as “a distant world and its inhabitants gradually become part of another people’s ecosystem, so that it is increasingly difficult to know which ecosystem is interacting with which culture” (14). In such a scenario, hybridity, generally understood in postcolonial theory as a purely cultural or psychological process, may be understood in relation to both cultural and environmental realities, thereby enabling scholars to account for the widest possible range of material contexts in the analysis of colonial histories and literatures – and affirming in the process what Tirso A. Gonzales and Melissa K. Nelson have called “the critical ecological context of cultural identity” (2001, 501) without denying the reality of human agency.

chapter two

Race and Animality in the British Atlantic World I felt myself called upon by all the awakened emotions of humanity, to consider slavery; but not only that species of it which consists in buying and selling our Fellow-Creatures in Africa – but every other kind, in every other place. (Samuel Jackson Pratt 1788, i)

i . s l av e r y a n d a n i m a l r i g h t s Quoted from the Preface to Samuel Jackson Pratt’s popular poem Humanity, or, the Rights of Nature (1788), my epigraph for this chapter affirms its author’s belief that slavery could take numerous forms, all of which needed to be resisted by people of humane conscience no matter where they dwelt. Although Pratt’s book is primarily concerned to combat the problem of human slavery, its subtitle, as R.S. White notes, suggests that it is not only humans whose rights must be zealously guarded and upheld, but “all natural creatures” as well (2005, 227–8). The book thus articulates an ethic comprehending both race and species, attacking any notion that these forms of difference could be invoked to justify cruel and oppressive practices. But Pratt is also aware that, in the minds of many white slave-trade apologists, race and species, as categories of difference, were conflated, that the various racial groups were deemed separate and distinct species rather than members of the same human family. Hence, like many of his abolitionist contemporaries, he makes a point of emphasizing the common humanity of all people, no matter what their complexion: Why has not brown, black, copper, equal claim, Their nature, origin, and end, the same?

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All of one species, all of equal birth, Tho’ shifting colours like their parent earth. (37) Although he asserts the humanity of diverse peoples by referring to them matter-of-factly as equal members of “one species,” the fact that Pratt feels the need to make this assertion indicates an underlying awareness that not all people would agree with his point of view. Indeed, as this chapter makes plain, the notion that nonwhites were somehow sub-human informed much colonial discourse in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, causing activist writers of all colours and stripes to argue for and emphasize the full humanity of colonized peoples. But Pratt was aware that even advocates of monogenesis (the theory that all humans, regardless of race, belonged to the same biological species) commonly supported and perpetuated racist assumptions and practices.1 Such racism, he knew, was implicit in theories of climatic determinism and human stadial progress, which, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, effectively hierarchized human races by depicting non-whites as morally and intellectually inferior to, because less culturally evolved than, their Caucasian counterparts. In order to combat this subtle and insidious form of racism, Pratt constructed a primitivist portrait of human origins, according to which inequalities are acquired rather than innate: from Nature’s hand all equal came, Thro’ ev’ry clime an helpless babe’s the same, The same frail emblem of our state appears, A weak and helpless being born in tears! If cultur’d climes refine on nature’s plan, They change the mode, but never change the man. (37) As discussed in the previous chapter, the notion that temperate climates, unlike tropical ones, favoured the development of morality, freedom, genius, and the related refinements of art and technology provided white commentators with numerous ways to “naturalize” the existing social order, helping them to justify white colonial dominion – and in some cases even slavery – as rooted in nature itself. Pratt is not content to accept the notion that European cultural refinement is always a good thing. Following a strain of thought

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that Rousseau and other cultural primitivists had bequeathed to the Scottish Enlightenment, he conceded that “Our polish’d arts, refinement may bestow,” but he also warned that the same refining arts “oft enfeeble nature’s genuine glow” (38; emphasis added), leading sometimes to vice and cruelty: In polish’d arts unnumber’d virtues lie, But ah! unnumber’d vices they supply; Here, if they bloom with ev’ry gentler good, There are they steep’d with more than savage blood; Here, with Refinement, if sweet Pity stands, There luxury round them musters all her bands; ’Tis not enough that daily slaughter feeds, That first the fish leaves its stream, the lamb its meads, That the reluctant ox is dragg’d along, And the bird ravish’d from its tender song, That in reward of all her music giv’n, The lark is murder’d as she soars to Heav’n. (38) What is perhaps most interesting about this passage, which follows closely on the heels of Pratt’s anti-racist exclamations, is the way its questioning of stadial theory – which originates from an explicitly stated concern to address the problem of human rights – shades into a concern for the rights of animals. For Pratt, the abuse of both springs from forms of vice and luxury that are themselves byproducts of civilized society. Like no small number of his abolitionist contemporaries, Pratt justifies his moral outrage concerning the cruel treatment of animals by linking such cruelty to the development of misanthropic impulses, arguing that “Tyrants o’er brutes with ease extend the plan, / And rise in cruelty from beast to man” (44). Since the middle- and upper-class exemplars of “polish’d” life sustain themselves via the “daily slaughter” and mistreatment of animals, carnivorous society, according to Pratt’s logic, becomes desensitized to violence, and its violent impulses, seeking new objects, are inevitably extended “from beast to man.” According to this common view, the cruelties of human slavery arise from, and are inextricably connected to, the widespread abuse of animals in British society. Although his correlation of animal abuse and slavery was not unusual for the time, Pratt was well aware that his condemnation of meat-eating placed him outside of the mainstream. Hence, although

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he goes on to praise the “blameless life” of vegetarian Brahmins (since “No murder feeds them, and no blood they spill”), he concludes by invoking a philosophical moral that would have been acceptable to the meat-eating members of his reading public: “for hunger kill, but never sport with life” (40). The message here is a pragmatic one: if you must kill in order to survive, Pratt tells his readers, then do so humanely.2 This ethical dictum might be traced to the philosophical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, like Pratt, also considered the rights of animals in his meditations on human moral behaviour. In his Preface to the famous “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” (1755), Rousseau reduces “natural law” – that which must come not from books but “directly from the voice of nature” – to “two principles prior to reason, one of them deeply interesting us in our own welfare and preservation, and the other exciting a natural repugnance at seeing any other sensible being, and particularly any of our own species, suffer pain and death” (1952b, 330–1). It is in a dialectic that negotiates between these principles – one of selfinterest and the other of compassion for others – that all ethical behaviour arises: so long as he [man] does not resist the internal impulse of compassion, he will never hurt any other man, nor even any sentient being, except on those lawful occasions on which his own preservation is concerned and he is obliged to give himself the preference. By this method also we put an end to the time-honoured disputes concerning the participation of animals in natural law: for it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, they cannot recognize that law; as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes. It appears, in fact, that if I am bound to do no injury to my fellow-creatures, this is less because they are rational than because they are sentient beings: and this quality, being common both to men and beasts, ought to entitle the latter at least to the privilege of not being wantonly ill-treated by the former. (Ibid., 331) Rousseau’s simultaneous concern for the rights of humans and of animals anticipated Jeremy Bentham’s similarly inclusive discourse.

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Like Rousseau, Bentham saw no reason that our ethical obligations should be extended only to beings capable of exercising reason (i.e., humans, or at least those humans deemed capable of rational thought, a criterion that, in some racist circles, did not include black people). To determine which living creatures are worthy of moral or ethical consideration, Bentham argued, the question we should ask “is not, can they reason? nor, can they talk, but, Can they suffer?” (qtd. in Kenyon-Jones 2001, 89). Like Rousseau, who sees “the sensibility with which [animals] are endowed” (1952b, 331) as sufficient grounds for protecting them from ill-treatment, Bentham posits animals’ related ability to “suffer” as the basis for an ethic that extends beyond the human realm.3 Given this ethical concern to prevent suffering in all its manifestations, Bentham, like Rousseau, believed that abolitionism and the prevention of cruelty to animals were not only compatible but related modes of activist practice: “We have begun by attending to the condition of slaves; we shall finish by softening that of all the animals which assist our labours and supply our wants” (qtd. in Kenyon-Jones 2001, 25).4 Writing in 1789, Bentham was prescient: in the 1790s and early 1800s, many anti-slavery activists would follow the trajectory he sketches, including the celebrated abolitionist William Wilberforce, who in 1824 was among the founding members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Bate 2000b, 177). I examine the relationship between abolition and animal rights in detail in Chapter Four, taking into account views articulated by both white and black writers. For the moment, it is worth noting that Rousseau’s fundamental principles of ethical consideration were not immune to cooptation. As we have seen, Rousseau argued that all human actions should be guided by a compassionate concern for the welfare of other living beings, except on “those lawful occasions on which [“man’s”] own preservation is concerned and he is obliged to give himself the preference” (331). In Book VI of his popular poem The Task (1785), William Cowper explicitly invokes this ethical logic to account for the human treatment of animals: if man’s convenience, health, Or safety interfere, his rights and claims Are paramount, and must extinguish theirs. Else they are all – the meanest things that are, As free to live and enjoy that life,

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As God was free to form them at the first, Who in his sov’reign wisdom made them all. (1785, 260–1) In his discussion of the ways in which “man’s” “rights and claims” trump the rights of animals without violating fundamental principles of ethical conduct, Cowper’s privileging of human “health, / Or safety” is fully in line with the code of behaviour set forth by Rousseau. But by adding “man’s convenience” to the list of privileged human rights, Cowper muddies the ethical waters; for although it may be comparatively easy to determine the objective requirements necessary to guarantee the physical health and safety of human beings, the requirements necessary to ensure human “convenience” are very much open to dispute. By including human “convenience” among the “rights” of self-preservation, Cowper dilutes Rousseau’s more austere ethical criteria, thereby providing a host of opportunities for his opponents to neutralize or co-opt his concern for animal welfare. In the realm of human rights, it was also possible for proponents of slavery to abuse Rousseau’s principled notion that one could justifiably put one’s own self-interest above the rights of others in circumstances where self-preservation lies in the balance. Consider, for example, the following anecdote related by the French-American farmer J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1784). While walking to join a dinner party in the suburbs of Charleston one evening in 1783, Crèvecoeur witnessed the dying agonies of an unidentified slave, whom he discovered encaged and suspended from the branch of a tree, in full public view, along the side of the road. According to Crèvecoeur’s account, the unfortunate man had been blinded and lacerated by birds of prey, tortured by stinging insects, and left slowly to perish (as the dying slave himself had related) in punishment for killing his master two days earlier. Later that evening, when the dismayed farmer asked his dinner hosts about this horrifying incident, they gravely replied that such public executions – intended to dissuade other slaves from engaging in rebellious behavior – “were rendered necessary by the ‘laws of self-preservation’” (Bordewich 2005, 24–5). Of course, it was entirely possible that the slave, tired of turning the other cheek, had killed his master in obedience to the same ethical “laws” that Crèvecoeur’s hosts had invoked, in which case the ethical rationale upholding his execution would have to be seen as a

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convenient form of “victor’s justice.” Whatever the case may be, Crèvecoeur’s gruesome anecdote demonstrates the extent to which the institution of slavery perverted even the most basic principles of ethical conduct, disguising atrocities as righteous acts. During the Romantic period, British and African abolitionists often – and quite justifiably – compared the treatment of slaves to that of working animals: bought and sold together in the same marketplaces, forced to endure the harshest circumstances of labour and the cruelest forms of abuse, slaves and domestic brutes indeed shared much in common. Some opponents of abolition justified the cruelties of slavery by arguing that Africans – like the animals they ostensibly resembled – were insensible to pain (or at least that they did “not feel the miseries inflicted on them as Europeans would do”5). Others, tacitly acknowledging African people’s susceptibility to pain, looked for a solution to the evils of slavery not in the abolition of the institution itself, but “in the abolition of cruelty” toward slaves6 (thus echoing the positions of animal-rights activists who wished to legislate the prevention of cruelty to animals). It is interesting to note that many nineteenth-century animal-rights societies used the word “abolition” in their official titles,7 and that members and sympathizers of animal-rights societies were sometimes outspoken champions of anti-slavery.8 It has sometimes been said that the participation of abolitionists in the animal-rights movement “is premissed on the idea of an increasingly extended circle of rights: first the emancipation of the unpropertied and the poor, then that of women and children, next of slaves, and so to animals” (Bate 2000b, 177);9 but this neat teleology might be brought into question when one considers that the British Parliament outlawed the cruel treatment of cattle in 1822, eleven years before it formally abolished slavery as an institution, so that, “at least in the institutional sense, some success for rights of animals preceded rights of man” (R. S. White 2005, 225; see also Kete 2002, 26). Lord Kames drew a parallel between the harsh treatment of African slaves and that of animals when he compared the moral status of slave owners to that of poor British workers who relied upon animal labour for their livelihoods. “Whence the rough and harsh manners of our West-Indian planters,” he asked, “but from the unrestrained license of venting ill humour upon the negro slaves? Why are carters a rugged set of men? Plainly because horses, their slaves, submit without resistance?” (Home 1778, 1.367–8). In Chapter Four

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I consider the brutalizing effects that the mistreatment of slaves and animals was thought to have on the hearts and minds of slave-drivers and animal abusers, whom activists counter-discursively represented as subhuman brutes. For the moment I wish merely to emphasize the parallels that were frequently drawn between the mistreatment of slaves and of animals, and to note that not everyone was comfortable with the tendency to make such correlations. Perhaps the ex-slave Ottobah Cugoano was responding to such comparisons when he reminded his British readers that their animals often received better treatment than enslaved people did (Cugoano 1787, 17). Perhaps when Anna Maria Mackenzie wrote that Britain’s “beasts of burthen … are considered in a light more humane than the captured negro” (qtd. in R.S. White 2005, 179),10 she was doing the same. Undoubtedly (and unlike Kames in the above-cited quotation), many abolitionists would have been wary of using slavery as metaphor for, or signifier of, animal abuse, feeling that such usage significantly weakened the force of the term, thereby drawing attention away from the plight of the actual people whose bodies were bought and sold like livestock.

ii. animalizing the huma n other Derived from the Latin brutus, meaning “heavy” or “irrational,” the word “brute” gestured, during the Enlightenment, towards an absolute distinction between humans – nature’s reasoning animals – and all other animals (in whom the reasoning faculty was considered absent). But a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers challenged this distinction, arguing that humans share certain attributes with other animals, including, as we have seen, the abilities to feel and to suffer. In his “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” Rousseau speculated, for example, that prehistoric humans had learned to survive and flourish by copying the habits of creatures with whom they shared the earth’s “immense forests”: “Men, dispersed up and down among the rest [of the animals], would observe and imitate their industry, and thus attain even to the instinct of the beasts, with the advantage that, whereas every species of brutes was confined to one particular instinct, man, who perhaps has not any one peculiar to himself, would appropriate them all, and live upon most of those different foods which other animals shared among themselves; and thus would find his

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subsistence much more easily than any of the rest” (1952b, 334–5). For Rousseau, in other words, it was through the emulation of nonhuman creatures that we developed the diverse instincts and resourcefulness that came to distinguish us from the animal objects of our imitation. One might go so far as to say that our copying of the brutes made us human. A few years after Rousseau’s commentary appeared, Adam Smith took the idea of shared instincts even further, describing in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) an affective connection between human and non-human animals. Although he dismisses the expression of bodily appetites as “beneath [human] dignity,” arguing that such appetites are themselves brutish, having “no connexion with the characteristical qualities of human nature,” Smith concedes that “there are many other passions which we share in common with the brutes, such as resentment, natural affection, even gratitude, which do not, upon that account, appear to be so brutal” (1781, 40). Like man, like animal – at least to some extent. But according to another more influential school of thought, the idea that humans shared common traits with animals was anathema. For example, in mainstream Christianity, with a few notable exceptions,11 the priority given to the soul over the body often served to distance, or even to sever, humans from their biological makeup, encouraging a pious aversion to the animal aspects of our being. And in Cartesian scientific philosophy, the dualism of mind over body served a similar function: unlike animals, which were considered mere physical machines, humans were, by virtue of their cognitive abilities, thought to transcend the world of physicality. Religious and philosophical modes of thought devalued animality to the extent that comparisons of humans to animals became insulting. Undoubtedly, it is from these dualistic concepts that theriomorphism – the attribution of animal characteristics to human beings – derives its potent philosophical and rhetorical force. Often deployed “in contexts of national or racial stereotyping” (Garrard 2004, 141), and commonly used in the Romantic period to characterize African and Native American people, theriomorphism was a powerful weapon in the arsenal of colonial ideology, serving to justify the domination of non-European people by denying their humanity.12 European travelers and emigrants to America very often compared aboriginal people to the animals they hunted and trapped. Although Jonathan Carver conceded in his widely read Travels through the Interior Parts of North America (1778) that Indians

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“are possessed of virtues which do honour to human nature,” he also claimed that the same people “are at once guided by passions and appetites, which they hold in common with the fiercest beasts that inhabit their woods” (1781, 408). One of these purported “passions and appetites” involved Native Americans’ supposedly all-consuming desire to seek violent revenge against their enemies. Commenting on “the ferociousness” of this tendency, the Abbé Raynal exclaimed that it “is dreadful to think that man may become the most cruel of all animals” (1776, 4.36). William Robertson, widely regarded as the Romantic period’s foremost European authority on aboriginal “savagery,” similarly claimed that the “desire of vengeance, which takes possession of the hearts of savages, resembles the instinctive rage of an animal, rather than the passion of a man.” Once “under the dominion” of this animalistic instinct, he added using a verbal formula identical to Raynal’s, Indians became “the most cruel of all animals” (1777, 2.105–6). Here Indians are not only animal-like, but also more dangerous than the fiercest of wild beasts. What is perhaps most disturbing about Robertson’s and Raynal’s observations is the way they implicitly deny the existence of aboriginal self-determination: as if under the control of some demonic agency, the hearts of savages are (to revisit Robertson’s phrasing) “possessed,” subject to an irresistible “dominion,” and thus beyond all self-control. Even when not overwhelmed by an irresistible desire for vengeance, Native Americans were ostensibly such a backward people that they could have learned some valuable lessons in civility by emulating, like good Rousseauvians, some of the animals they hunted or trapped. “If we compare the manners, the police and the industry of the beavers, with the wandering life of the savages of Canada,” Raynal claimed, “we shall be inclined to admit … that the beaver was much further advanced in the arts of social life than his pursuer, when the Europeans first brought their talents and improvements to North-America” (1776, 4.61). Predictably, the notion that Indians were lacking in civility and “the arts of social life” also appeared in European discussions of women’s social roles, including sexual congress and childbearing. As noted in Chapter One, aboriginal women were often said to be the “drudges” and “slaves” of their men (Jameson 1990, 513); and since, according to stadial theory, the condition of women was considered a primary index of a society’s cultural development, such

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observations alone constituted a severe critique of aboriginal life (while also, of course, indicating a self-congratulatory aggrandizement of white society that ignored women’s marginalization and oppression under the constraints of European patriarchy). Associated with this critique was the stereotype that Indian marriage was loveless, an arrangement based not on an ideal of mutual affection but on mere biological necessity. This stereotype was related to theriomorphic perspectives on childbirth, including the notion that Indian women “bring forth their Children with as much Ease as other Animals, and without the Help of a Midwife” (Colden 1747, 1.xxii). Admittedly, this comment, offered by American surveyor-general Cadwallader Colden in his History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (1747), is double-edged: on one hand, the comparison of women with animals seems an indictment of Indian humanity, while on the other it suggests a prelapsarian ideal according to which Indian women remained innocent and unfallen, not subject to “Eve’s curse” (i.e., the Judeo-Christian notion that the pains of childbirth derived from humanity’s “original sin” of disobedience to God’s will while resident in the Garden of Eden).13 But no such ambivalence informs the view, articulated by the former captive Henry Grace, that aboriginal men and women were “Strangers to all the Rules of Decency and Modesty, and seem almost void of natural Affection; being more careless of their Offspring than Brutes” (Grace 1765, 22). Once again, the equation of Indians and animals functions here to undermine any notion of savage nobility. And in the minds of a reading public that was becoming increasingly sensitive to the abuse and neglect of animals, Robertson’s claim that Native Americans’ “harshness of temper” was even “more conspicuous in their treatment of the animal creation” than in their treatment of family members (1777, 2.161) offered further evidence for their supposed inhumanity; for, to quote animal studies scholar Kathleen Kete, “[k]indness to animals came to stand high in the index of civilization. It formed part of the project of civilization” (2002, 26). All of these criticisms surely contributed to a broader perspective that caused the Methodist minister and Ojibwa chief Peter Jones to complain that in London’s polite society he was “gazed upon as if I were some strange animal” (qtd. in D. Smith 1987, 125). Even worse, they provided at least some philosophical support for racist characterizations of the sort articulated by Henry William Dwight

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during the American Revolutionary War, who, in the worst theriomorphic spirit, called Native Americans “copper Colour’d Vermine” (qtd. in Fulford 2006, 50). In some instances, as Tim Fulford observes, such animalizing stereotypes served to sanction contemporary Anglo-American military efforts to eradicate Indian people – genocidal efforts, one might note with sad passing irony, that were carried out in a spirit of cruelty unsurpassed anywhere in the animal world (Fulford 2006, 50–1). Many white commentators agreed that the “cure” for Indian “brutishness” lay in the civilizing effects of Christianity. As the Reverend Benjamin Slight (who spent four years ministering to the Ojibwa people at Upper Canada’s Credit River) declared in his Indian Researches (1844), “civilization has followed evangelization; and [the Indians] have been exalted to the proper rank of man” (Slight 1844, viii). Though not all whites shared Slight’s optimism concerning the Indians’ potential for Christian humanization, some of the Ojibwa converts of his acquaintance seem to have done so. For example, George Copway (also known by his Ojibwa name Kahgegagahbowh, or ‘Standing Firm’), observed that “Unchristianised Indians are often like greedy lions after their prey; yes, at times, they are indeed cruel and blood-thirsty. I have met with warriors who, when they had killed their enemies, cut open their breasts, took out their hearts, and drank their blood; and all this was out of mere revenge” (Copway 1850b, 36). An avid selfpromoter with a strong desire to achieve literary fame and fortune, Copway aimed his autobiographical and ethnographic writings expressly at a white Christian reading audience; it is thus possible that he offered such descriptions of “Unchristianized Indians” to his readers because he knew they would be favourably received. Whether or not Copway believed such descriptions to be true – and there is much evidence to suggest otherwise14 – the lip service he pays to them would certainly have helped to validate and perpetuate theriomorphic stereotypes in the minds of his white readers. Given the ubiquity of accounts that compared Indians to wild beasts, it is not surprising that their conversion to “civilized” ways was represented as a kind of “taming” of their ostensibly animal natures. In his Travels in North America (1829), for example, Basil Hall remarked that the Ojibwa people residing at Credit River had in the recent past appeared “irreclaimable,” “living more like hogs than men.” But subsequently, the efforts of philanthropists like

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Peter Jones and Sir Peregrine Maitland had in Hall’s view led to the “domesticating [of] these Indians,” who now lived in neat, properly furnished homes, were “tolerably well dressed,” and had become “industrious, orderly, and, above all, sober” (Hall 1829, 1.257–9; emphasis added). But other contemporary white observers were not convinced that the “domestication” of “wild” Indians was ultimately possible or sustainable. One of Maitland’s successors as Upper Canada’s lieutenant governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, argued that “one might as well endeavour to persuade the eagle to descend from the lofty region in which he has existed to live with the fowls in our court-yards, as to prevail upon the red men of North America to become what we call civilized; in short, it is against their nature, and they cannot do it” (Head 1846, 124). Invoking a similar naturalistic analogue, Anna Jameson voiced her opinion that North American Indians were “an untamable race. I can no more conceive a city filled with industrious Mohawks and Chippewas, than I can imagine a flock of panthers browsing in a penfold” (1990, 322) – this despite the fact that Jameson had already advocated the “domestication” of Indians when she argued that the Indian hunter would “perish” if he did not “learn to take the bit between his teeth, and set his hand to the ploughshare” (305). Both Head’s and Jameson’s comments on the ultimate impossibility of “civilizing” Indian people are, of course, thoroughly essentialist: wild and unruly by nature, Indians were, in their view, incapable of adopting “civilized” habits and practices. Understandably, many Indians and Indian-identified Métis people who had adopted white ways challenged this argument,15 finding it highly offensive. William Apess, a Pequot of mixed white and Indian descent, reviled the “degrading titles” placed upon Indians, complaining that his people “were not known [among whites], as human beings, – but as beasts of prey. We were represented as having no souls to save, or to lose; but as partridges upon the mountains” (1833, 3). Like many of his Indian contemporaries, Apess turned the terms of such racist insults back upon their perpetrators, exclaiming that whites “had not the sense and wisdom of the brute creation” (1831, 76–7). One should note that it was not unheard of for sympathetic whites to represent their own people in highly critical theriomorphic terms. In his History of the American Indians (1775), for example, James Adair complained of the adverse effect that a vast “swarm” of whites – the “dregs and off-scourings of our

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colonies” – was having upon Indians of the American interior: “crowds of disorderly [white] people infest the Indian countries, corrupt their morals, and put their civilization out of the power of common means” (1775, 413–14; emphasis added). As Adair’s chosen metaphors indicate, he believed that people of his own race, and not the Indians, had earned the epithet of “vermin.” Sometimes, however, Native American people deliberately identified with the wild animals to which whites so often compared them. During a visit in 1850 to London’s Zoological Gardens, where he found a few moments of peace in the midst of a demanding lecture tour of Great Britain and continental Europe, George Copway identified closely with a caged eagle: “Among the birds is the Eagle, with his sage-looking head which he seldom turns either to the right or to the left – I seated myself in a chair to contemplate him. There he sat – the monarch of the skies, – how humble now his habitation. The air has been his kingdom, and the sun the goal of his flights. But here you are – what sad reverses of fortune you have experienced! These pale faces are unmerciful to you – never mind, here is one that sympathizes with you” (1851, 123–4). Copway’s sympathetic identification with the caged eagle suggests that he sees in its situation an analogue of his own transformed reality. As a Native American who had been “born in Nature’s wide domain” (Copway 1850b, 10–11) and raised in a relatively traditional Ojibwa cultural context prior to his Christian conversion, Copway – who in his travels and lectures generally performed in the semi-exotic role of the “Noble Christian Indian” (D. Smith 1998, 28) – must occasionally have felt as though he were imprisoned in a figurative zoological garden, a mere object of curiosity for the diversion of “unmerciful” whites, and thus himself the hapless victim of a “sad reverse of fortune.” Although he was a champion of Indian religious conversion and cultural assimilation, and clearly gloried in his short-lived literary fame, Copway sometimes pined for freedom from the constraints imposed by white civilization: constraints signified, for example, by the plethora of dinner invitations he found at his lodgings upon returning from the zoo. “I find abundance of cards on my table. O fie, fie: these English will spoil me. I have engaged myself for dinner every day this week” (1851, 125). If Copway was somewhat uncomfortable with the constraints associated with British life, there were other Native Americans before him who had turned the rejection of European domesticity into a

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full-fledged program of political resistance. In the early years of the nineteenth century, for example, influential Algonquian native prophets like Tenskwatawa, brother to the famous Shawnee chief Tecumseh, counseled their people to reject the “tame” ways of white practices in favour of an authentic Indian “wildness.” Historian Richard White explains the logic informing such counsel: “In rejecting [Christian] conversion, Indians spoke of not being ‘tamed.’ In this discourse, conversion made Indians ‘tame,’ and once ‘tamed,’ Indians could be slaughtered by whites in the same way domestic livestock was. This had, as Buckongahelas reminded the Moravians, actually happened at Gnaddenhutten” (R. White 1991, 507). According to the nativist prophets, an uncompromising rejection of white ways would not only lead to the restoration of an authentic, pre-colonial Indian identity, but would also bring back the animals and ecosystems that were decimated as a result of European contact. “Thus the unnamed [Algonquinian] woman visionary of 1803 identified the loss of wild animals with the inappropriate adoption of tame animals. To restore the wild, Indians had to break connections with the tame. To restore deer, cattle must be killed. Warriors expressed their hostility to the Moravians by shooting ‘our best hog before our eyes.’ Tenskwatawa ordered Indians to kill their cattle” (R. White 1991, 507). As previously noted, European commentators often characterized Indians as “wild,” comparing them to predatory beasts of the forest, in order to justify the necessity of their own “civilizing mission” in the New World. But in the context of the nativist resistance movements discussed by White and other historians,16 Indians who had been stereotyped as wild savages living beyond the pale of civilization themselves willfully amplified “analogies between Christian and tame and Indian and wild into codes of conduct” (R. White 1991, 507) designed to resist white systems of value and the practices they upheld. This tradition of anti-colonial resistance continues to this day in the discourse of indigenous writers like Onkwehonwe (Mohawk) scholar Taiaiake Alfred, who refers to assimilated native peoples as “tamed aboriginals” (2005, 25). In the context of African anti-slavery activism, an analogous overturning of the wild/tame (or nature/culture) dichotomy was not undertaken, perhaps because, whereas many Indians rejected assimilation into white culture, African slaves generally “wanted the same civic freedom the white man enjoyed” (Kerber 1975, 295).17

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But this does not mean that the wild/tame distinction was absent in European concepts of African identity. On the contrary, the distinction was part of an ancient tradition. In classical Greece, for example, Aristotle invoked it to justify the institution of slavery itself: “Those men … whose powers are chiefly confined to the body, and whose principal excellence consists in affording bodily service; those, I say, are naturally slaves, because it is in their interest to be so. They can obey reason, though they are unable to exercise it; and though different from tame animals, who are disciplined by means merely of their own sensations and appetites, they perform nearly the same tasks, and become the property of other men, because their safety requires it” (qtd. in H. Thomas 2000, 21).18 Although slaves “perform nearly the same tasks” as “tame animals” – a fact that surely accounts for the ubiquity of comparisons made between such animals and African people during the Romantic period – Aristotle is careful to differentiate them from such animals on the basis that slaves have the relatively passive ability to “obey reason.” Nevertheless, it is in their inability actively “to exercise” reason – the faculty associated with order and self-government – that one might locate in Aristotle’s slave a “wildness” in need of the master’s wise restraint. Aristotle underscores this notion by aligning slaves with “powers” associated with the unruly bodily realm, powers potentially having adverse implications for human “safety.” Unable to transcend this realm through the exercise of reason – that which for Aristotle makes us fully human – such people are slaves to their own natures; their slavery is grounded in nature itself. That the slave’s supposedly inherent wildness came to be racialized is implicit in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century usage of terms like “nigger,” “hybrid,” and “mulatto,” which, to quote Helen Thomas, marked “the ‘unknown’ territory between man and animals, Africa and the west” (2000, 159). The word “maroon” is particularly suggestive in this regard; derived from the Spanish Cimarrón, meaning “wild” or “untamed,” it was originally used in reference to runaway animals, but later came to signify runaway or fugitive African slaves, who sometimes sought their freedom by fleeing to the forested interior of the Americas, beyond the cultivated plantations where they were forced to labour for their white masters. Implements of torture like the “neck-yokes, collars, chains, hand-cuffs, leg-bolts, drags,” and “iron muzzles” so reviled by Olaudah Equiano (2002, 251) were used to “tame” unruly slaves,

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forcing them to submit to the authority of their supposedly “civilized” owners. And the common argument that the emancipation of black slaves would be “dangerous, if not pernicious” (Stedman 1796, 1.v) because it would involve the “letting loose [of] an irritated race of beings” (Clarkson 1808, 286) also smacked of an insidious theriomorphism equating blacks with unruly wild beasts. According to the Fanti abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano, whites sometimes adopted tactics associated with the hunting of wild animals in order to entrap African people into slavery in the first place. Speaking of the slave trade in Africa, Cugoano claimed that “the Europeans, at their factories, in some various manner, have always kept some [Africans] as servants to them, and with gaudy cloaths, in a gay manner, as decoy ducks to deceive others, and to tell them that they want many more to go over the sea, and be as they are. So in that respect, wherein it may be said that they [i.e., Africans] will sell one another, they are only ensnared” (1787, 26–7). Sometimes, however, there was no need for slavers to attract and “ensnare” African people like so much wild game, for it was not uncommon for slaves to be bred, like commoditized animals, “specifically for export by coastal traders” (Bordewich 2005, 17). And when they were transported across the Middle Passage, slaves were “essentially stowed like any other commodity … In the ‘best regulated’ ships, a grown person was allowed sixteen inches in width, thirtytwo inches in height, and five feet eleven inches in length.” (ibid., 19). It is no wonder that the Middle Passage witnessed the death of so many. When those who were lucky enough (or unfortunate enough, as the case might have been) to survive the transatlantic journey were taken to market in the New World, they were, as Thomas Clarkson put it, “examined, handled, selected, separated, and sold” like so many cattle (1808, 15). Under such horribly oppressive circumstances, the “animalization” of slaves can hardly be understood as a mere trope. Certainly, when Equiano expressed his fervent abolitionist wish that African people might be “raised from the condition of brutes” (2002, 248), he was not speaking figuratively.19 As Scottish poet Thomas Campbell succinctly remarked in The Pleasures of Hope (1799), emancipation was a humanizing process: “as the slave departs, the man returns” (Campbell 1854, 348).20 In response to discourses that relegated African slaves to the status of brutes, abolitionists often strategically turned the tables, representing white planters, slave traders, and slave-trade apologists

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themselves as beasts in dire need of humanization. Directing theriomorphic rhetoric against those whites who wielded it in support of colonial ideology, this tactic was counter-discursive. A good example may be found in William Cowper’s short poem “The Negro’s Complaint” (1778), where the poem’s African narrator levels the following admonishment at racist whites: Deem our nation brutes no longer, Till some reason ye shall find Worthier of regard, and stronger Than the colour of our kind. Slaves of gold, whose sordid dealings Tarnish all your boasted pow’rs, Prove that you have human feelings, Ere you proudly question ours! (Qtd. in Mellor and Matlak 1996, 63 lines 49–56) This passage turns a number of common racist assumptions upon their heads. First, in response to the stereotypical charge that African people were akin to “brutes” due to their supposed inability to exercise reason, the speaker indicts the colonizer’s patently unreasonable assumption that skin colour and cognitive capacity are correlated, thereby suggesting that mental deficiency is a characteristic of the white racist, not the black slave. Conducting a logical critique of the white man’s illogic, in other words, Cowper’s subjugated black speaker offers a persuasive demonstration of his own intellectual superiority; and since, as we have seen, the capacity for reason was considered a hallmark of fully human identity, the speaker’s assertion that his captor has yet to find “some reason” is a potent criticism indeed. A similar reversal marks the passage’s discourse on sensibility, another defining attribute of “civilized” human identity in the late eighteenth century. In drawing attention to the marked lack of compassionate feeling that underscores the colonizer’s “sordid dealings,” Cowper’s poem demonstrates that it is the European – and not the African – who lacks properly “human feelings.” (Cowper also articulates a similar critique of colonial sensibility in his poem “Pity for Poor Africans” [1788], where, he declares, the agonized suffering of slaves is “almost enough to draw pity from stones”

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[qtd. in Mellor and Matlak 1996, 63 line 4] – but not enough to draw pity from hard-hearted advocates of the slave trade.) Finally, by referring to Europeans as “slaves of gold,” Cowper’s speaker draws attention to the economic basis of colonial slavery, exposing the ideology of the “civilizing mission” – and its insistence on the “natural” inferiority of black people – as convenient lies, thereby effecting another reversal according to which the unfeeling master himself is revealed as an abject slave to avarice. Responding to the theriomorphic representations that so commonly informed European and Euro-American stereotypes of African people, writers of the Black Atlantic often constructed similar representations of whites themselves. In characteristically forceful language, Cugoano asserted, for example, that “slave-holders are meaner and baser than the African slaves, for while they subject and reduce them to a degree with brutes, they reduce themselves to a degree with devils” (1787, 21). Ultimately, Cugoano questions the humanity not just of actual slave-holders (whose identification as “devils” places them even lower on the chain of being than the brutes to which Africans were too commonly compared) but of all whites who support or otherwise countenance the practice of slavery: “slavery, can no where, or in any degree, be admitted, but among those who must eventually resign their own claim to any degree of sensibility and humanity” (ibid., 3). In his bestselling autobiography, Cugoano’s friend Olaudah Equiano also questions the humanity of Europeans by comparing them to senseless animals. Recounting the story of a shipwreck wherein he and other African sailors saved the lives of white crewmembers, for example, Equiano remarks that “not one of the white men did anything to preserve their lives; and indeed they soon got so drunk that they were not able, but lay about the deck like swine, so that we were at last obliged to lift them into the boat and carry them on shore by force” (Equiano 2002, 168–9). Comparing the whites to “swine,” and lamenting, for good measure, that they were “not possessed of the least spark of reason” (169), Equiano certainly brings their humanity into question, thereby encouraging his readers to reassess white racial superiority; but his assertion that the whites did not do “anything to preserve their lives” is, like Cugoano’s reference to European “devils,” an even greater indictment of the white sailors, since it points toward spiritual culpability (because suicidal behaviour was among the gravest of Christian sins). By endangering

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themselves to spare white men the damning consequences of their own immorality, Equiano and his fellow Africans invert the hegemonic moral order, exhibiting a heroic mode of selfless compassion that demonstrates their superiority. As I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, both Africans and Native Americans were subject to various forms of colonial abuse justified by the notion that they were, at best, not fully human and, at worst, akin to animals. Although scholars like Roxann Wheeler argue that such racism turned, in the eighteenth century, on the conviction that most non-whites were inferior simply “because they had not become commercial people as quickly or as easily as Europeans” (2000, 301), it is difficult to reconcile this claim with the ubiquity of references in contemporary discourse to the supposed animality of non-whites. Indeed, although stadial theory was based on the idea that all people shared a common humanity, so that cultural differences were understood primarily as the results of a society’s relative location on the ladder of progressive development, even these arguments were contingent upon such related factors as geographical location, climate, soil, and the food available for consumption. In other words, the idea that non-whites were somehow fundamentally different from Caucasians – not simply less culturally developed or socially evolved, but different because of the biosocial ecologies in which they and their ancestors had lived – informed stadial theory in subtle ways. Moreover this idea provided at least some ideological support for theriomorphic representations that were more overtly based on notions of biological difference: notions that the emerging pseudo-sciences of phrenology and craniometry would exploit to ground essentialist forms of racism even more solidly in the realm of nature.21 In this book’s remaining chapters, I continue my discussion of the ways in which racial politics were tied to concepts of nature during the Romantic era by focusing on literary works in which the representation of African and/or Native American peoples play an important role. In doing so, I hope to clarify some of the key ways in which contemporary concepts of nature functioned both to support, and sometimes counter-discursively to challenge, the racist ideologies informing late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic colonialisms.

chapter three

Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion Last, and what greater proofs can now remain, Touch we the border of surinam’s plain, Lo, there the purchas’d negroes may’st thou see, Bursting their bonds and daring to be free, In daring bands from caves and rocks they come, And wrought to blood like trooping Panthers roam; The swart Mulattoes to the forests fly, Resolv’d to live in freedom, or to die. (Samuel Jackson Pratt 1788, 103) [T]o establish slavery, it was necessary to do violence to nature, so, in order to perpetuate such a right, nature would have to be changed. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1952b, 358)

i . p r e f a c e : s l a v e r y, s e x u a l vi o l e n c e , and nature When William Blake engraved Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793, he deliberately stepped into the contentious contemporary debate regarding the role and rights of women in British society. Only a year earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft had published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a manifesto that sparked much outrage in polite British society due to its outspoken critique of the institution of marriage; a critique in which she compared European wives to such things as spaniels, prostitutes, and slaves. One of Wollstonecraft’s central strategies involved questioning the notion that women were sentimental creatures, naturally relying on the

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men in their lives for rational and spiritual guidance and protection. Exposing this model of sexual difference as a product of social custom (which conditioned men and women to accept the respective masculine and feminine roles assigned to them under patriarchy), Wollstonecraft offered an early and remarkably potent critique of gender essentialism (the idea that gender distinctions are not socially conditioned but are manifestations of inherent and unchanging male and female essences).1 Although Blake’s sexual politics were not entirely free from the masculinist assumptions informing contemporary society, his representation in Visions of England’s women – the daughters of Albion – as slaves subject to sexual oppression, and his understanding of the conceptual role that nature was made to play in the perpetuation of women’s oppression, indicates some fundamental agreements with Wollstonecraft. Blake’s allegorical mode of representation makes Visions a particularly rich and wide-ranging artistic critique of contemporary society and social practices; in depicting the plight of his heroine Oothoon, he addresses not only the injustices informing gender politics but also the oppressive treatment of New World slaves. R.S. White’s observation that Blake saw “slavery as a paradigm for all injustice” (2005, 169) helps to explain this allegorical association of British domestic gender politics and the politics of the Middle Passage. But what makes Blake’s use of the paradigm particularly interesting for the purposes of the current discussion is that he extends it beyond the social world and into the physical environment as well. As a number of critics have noted in passing, Visions explicitly correlates the villainous Bromion’s brutal appropriation and rape of Oothoon’s body with a figurative but nonetheless violent “rape” of the natural world.2 It is this correlation and some of its philosophical implications that I will examine in detail in this chapter, for, somewhat like Albion in Blake’s late prophecies, Oothoon represents both a person and a landscape in Visions, and nothing can happen to her human portion that does not also affect the environmental aspect of her identity. Hence, while Blake’s poem deals primarily with the related issues of women’s subjugation and human slavery, it is also concerned with the figurative enslavement of nature, the methodical extension of what the Baconian philosopher Joseph Glanville called “the Empire of Man over inferior Creatures” (1668, 188).3 At the opening of Visions, we abruptly learn that the “enslav’d ... Daughters of Albion” send “sighs toward America,” and that the

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woeful Oothoon similarly longs for America’s “soft soul” (1:1–3).4 Clearly, what these enslaved characters long for is political emancipation, the opportunity to live according to the libertarian ideals commonly associated with the American Revolution. What is less apparent is the combined geographic and generic aspect of Visions’ references to America: the characters’ implicit understanding of America as an idyllic pastoral retreat. Historically, as Leo Marx has noted, the age of discovery introduced into the Arcadian myth “a note of topographical realism,” and, from the Elizabethan era until the late nineteenth century, Europeans tended to view America in Arcadian terms as a vast and unspoiled garden of “‘incredible abundance’” (Marx 1967, 47, 37–40).5 From such an idealizing standpoint, the New World becomes a truly green and pleasant land, a pristine space wherein political freedom is supported in part by Edenic plenitude. At the time that Blake wrote and engraved Visions, of course, America was hardly as free and gentle as such idealism would have it. Indeed, as the poem emphatically demonstrates, America’s pastoral image helped to disguise the fact that much of its colonial prosperity depended upon slavery and the relentless expropriation of indigenous lands. If, as numerous critics have argued, Oothoon’s plight in Visions allegorizes not only the condition of British women under the yoke of patriarchy but also the plight of the New World’s enslaved Africans and oppressed Native Americans,6 Oothoon is also at one level of Blake’s allegory the indivisible body and “soul of America” itself, a vital “continent longing ... to be cultivated by free men, not slaves or slave drivers” (Erdman 1969, 227). Hence, when Bromion rapes Oothoon, he violates both her human and environmental aspects. Such violence is implicit in Bromion’s arrogant post-rape address to Oothoon: Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun: They are obedient, they resist not[.] (1:20–2) Since the eighteenth century, the word “rape” has often been used to describe human acts of environmental plunder and destruction,7 a terminological employment that suggests, as ecofeminist writer Susan Griffin observes, “a profound connection between the social construction of nature and the social construction of woman” (1997, 225). While Blake never directly employs the word “rape” in

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Visions, he could not have been oblivious to the Enlightenment rhetoric that described scientific inquiry – which Bacon believed would restore humanity to its originary position of “empire” over nature – as a “penetration” of nature’s “womb” (Bacon 1860, 114, 50, 100).8 In Visions, however, Blake further complicates this equation of sexual and environmental violence by considering it in light of a colonialist racism that enslaves non-Europeans, forcing them to become the very instruments of environmental subjugation in the New World. Thus, when Bromion boasts of his slaves that “They are obedient, they resist not,” his ambiguous plural pronouns can be seen to gesture not only toward the antecedent “swarthy children of the sun” but also toward the “soft” or pliable landscapes he expropriates in the previous line. Clearly, Bromion sees his mastery of humans and landscapes as roughly equivalent: both, he suggests, offer themselves willingly to his authority. Given the overt violence of his imperialist rapacity, however, we must see in Bromion’s selfaggrandizing myth of total mastery an underlying element of fear for, to quote a question Griffin poses: “why does one have to conquer what is not challenging, fearsome, and in some way, wild, falling as it does outside the idea of mastery and control?” (1997, 225). Undoubtedly, Bromion’s rape of Oothoon represents a complex and multifaceted act of sexual, cultural, and environmental conquest. In order to stabilize his authority over Oothoon, Bromion resorts to the age-old practice of stereotyping, accusing her of “harlot[ry]” (1:18, 2:1). As an exercise of power, this stereotyping has complex and ambivalent implications, but its immediate consequences are dire. First of all, we must recall that, traditionally, “women called whores or who are prostitutes are not ‘protected’ by other men from rape” (Griffin 1997, 224); hence, by depicting Oothoon as a harlot, Bromion, her rapist, effectively robs her of recourse to protective justice. Second, Bromion’s stereotyping encourages Theotormon to reject Oothoon’s freely proffered love as a manifestation of harlotry and “defilement,” a rejection that drives her almost to despair. Subsequently, Oothoon proceeds to defend herself from the accusation of “impurity” by marshalling numerous rhetorically powerful arguments from nature; but as readers have often noted, this strategy is decidedly perilous. In attempting to prove her moral and sexual purity by way of reference to the world of nature, Oothoon seems unaware that contemporary thinkers often accused Dame Nature herself of harlotry.9

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While Bromion’s deployment of the harlot stereotype helps him consolidate his authority over Oothoon’s body (in both its human and terrestrial modes), it also demonstrates the discursive ambivalence of his position as an agent of patriarchy and imperialism in Visions. As Homi K. Bhabha has argued, the stereotype, as a structure of predication, is fraught with contradiction: on the one hand, it is supposed to articulate a self-evident truth, something that “goes without saying”; on the other, the fact that the stereotype depends upon continual reiteration suggests that its authority is always less than comfortably stable. Hence, in a discussion relevant to the sexual and colonial allegories informing Visions, Bhabha remarks that “the stereotype ... is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated,” as if the ostensibly self-evident truths it attests to “can never really, in discourse, be proved” (1994, 66). An illuminating contemporary instance of the ambivalence of colonialist stereotyping can be found in what critics widely acknowledge as one of the major textual sources for Visions, Captain John Gabriel Stedman’s bestselling Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796),10 for which Blake engraved approximately sixteen illustrations just prior to composing Visions (R.S. White 2005, 182–3).11 In a discussion of New World sexual practice in Surinam, Stedman touches upon many of the issues Blake addresses in Visions: false modesty, chastity, adultery, harlotry, and the uninhibited gratification of sexual desire. Although in the unpublished version of his Narrative Stedman privately fears that his observations “will be highly censured by the Sedate European Matrons” (1790, 47), he nevertheless candidly remarks, in a published passage worth quoting at length, that in colonial Surinam most European men do in fact acquire female slavemistresses. These women, Stedman claims, all exult in the circumstance of living with an European, whom in general they serve with the utmost tenderness and fidelity, and tacitly reprove those numerous fair-ones who break through ties more sacred and solemn. Young women of this depiction cannot indeed be married ... as most of them are born or trained up in a state of slavery; and so little is this practice condemned, that while they continue faithful and constant to the partner by whom

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they are chosen, they are countenanced and encouraged by their nearest relations and friends, who call this a lawful marriage, nay, even the clergy avail themselves of this custom without restraint ... Many of the sable-coloured beauties will however follow their own penchant without any restraint whatever, refusing with contempt the golden bribes of some, while on others they bestow their favours for a dram or a broken tobacco-pipe, if not for nothing. (Stedman 1796, 1.25–6) Based on the evidence offered in Visions, one might speculate that Blake would have perused this passage (assuming that he had in fact read Stedman’s text while engraving it12) with a certain amount of admiration and approval. Just as the enslaved Oothoon roundly condemns the “subtil modesty” of the “modest virgin knowing to dissemble / With nets found under thy night pillow, to catch virgin joy, / And brand it with the name of whore” (6:7, 10–12), Stedman subtly condemns the hypocrisy of the many “fair-ones” of Europe whose pretended feminine modesty, as his italics more than hint, is at odds with their actual sexual desires and practices. Indeed, by “follow[ing] their own [sexual] penchant without any restraint whatever,” the “sable-coloured beauties” of Stedman’s narrative behave very much like Blake’s Oothoon, who actively and unashamedly seeks sexual gratification with Theotormon, one of her colonialist oppressors. A glance at the unpublished version of Stedman’s text is even more revealing. Here, just as Oothoon indicts “hypocrite modesty” (6:16) – and not the active pursuit of sexual desire – as the true model of “selfish” harlotry (6:16–20), Stedman’s slave-women do “not hesitate ... to pronounce as Harlots” those who refuse to follow the “laudable Example” of a sexuality that seeks unrestrained gratification (1790; 48). But when Stedman concludes the unpublished version of his panegyric to the sexuality of Surinamese slave-mistresses by calling these women “the disinterested Daughters of pure Nature” (1790; 48), he reveals the philosophical subtext supporting his heavily revised published argument, invoking in the process the kind of idealistic primitivism that greatly troubled and often offended Blake. For one thing, such idealism effaces the historical actuality of the female slaves’ parentage (since these women are “mostly ... creole” [1790; 47], they are primarily the daughters not of nature but of female African slaves and male European slave-masters like

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Bromion). Moreover, by invoking the concept of “pure Nature” (and thus the various nature/culture dualisms that the concept tended to carry in the late eighteenth century), Stedman’s ethnographic discourse on sexuality implicitly supports age-old stereotypes associating women and black people with corporeality rather than spirit, emotion rather than reason, licentiousness rather than license. Finally, it is important to note the generic influences on Stedman’s sexual ethnography, for in its implicit tendency to locate corruption in the colonial metropolis and “purity” or freedom in the green world of Surinam, Stedman’s discussion partakes of the dichotomy of the pastoral idyll, which, by distinguishing country from city (and, by extension, nature from culture), tends to efface the ideological practices constituting our views of the more-thanhuman world.

ii. asceticism, sex, physicality Certainly Oothoon finds it impossible in Visions to convince her beloved Theotormon that the physical body – or the natural world of which it is a material part – can be “pure.” In stark contrast to Bromion (who represents the overtly sensual, gluttonously appetitive, and perversely self-gratifying aspect of European colonialism), Theotormon is grimly ascetic,13 his moralizings aligning him with a self-righteous and hypocritical imperialist evangelism. His distance from all things deemed natural and his obsession with a distant, disengaged, and otherworldly sky-God are implicit in his very name (whose roots, theos and thereos, mean “God” and “spectator” respectively [Hoerner 1996, 132]). A devoted follower of the via negativa, the “negative way” of ascetic consciousness, Theotormon believes he must deny all things earthly, including especially the “natural” impulses comprising his sensual aspect, in order to achieve his ultimate goal of union with a wholly other God. Theotormon’s ascetic disavowal of corporeality causes him to prefer solitude to socially engaged action (7:10), a preference culminating in a narcissistic obsession with his own thought processes (3:23; 4:3–11). It is appropriate, then, that Blake’s design to plate i (the frontispiece in most copies of Visions) depicts Theotormon in a crouching position, arms covering his eyes, ears, and mouth, completely closed to the life of the senses (Gillham 1973, 195).

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But Theotormon’s pious asceticism is fraught with contradictions. Crucially, for example, Blake figures Theotormon’s original response to Oothoon’s ostensible harlotry in terms of earthly phenomena: “Then storms rent Theotormons limbs; he rolld his waves around. / And folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair” (2:3–4). While Theotormon is clearly subject in these lines to “natural” passions (figured by the violent “storms” that rend his limbs), his subsequent ability to manipulate the waves and waters raised by these internal storms evinces a significant degree of control over this aspect of his identity. But he achieves this self-mastery at a significant price. Because his God is entirely transcendent, Theotormon must deny the redemptive possibilities of material existence, possibilities suggested among other things by Oothoon’s proposition that “every thing that lives is holy” (8:10). According to Theotormon’s theology all of nature’s attractions can only be distractions, and since he has learned to see his passions as aspects of natural rather than spiritual being, he must constantly attempt to “cleanse” himself via obsessive acts of self-expurgation and penance. Hence, in the design to plate six, Theotormon flagellates his body with a three-thonged whip, whose knots, as Erdman has noted, “look uncannily like the heads of the Marygold flowers” in the design to plate iii (1974, 134) – iconographic evidence that the natural forms inspiring multiplicitous vision in Oothoon (see 1:6–7) can only be vehicles of self-torment for Theotormon. Significantly, after binding Oothoon and Bromion “back to back in Bromions caves,” Theotormon assumes a position at the cave’s entrance, where he sits “wearing the threshold hard / With secret tears” (2:5–7). Theotormon’s tears are “secret” for, as a practitioner of asceticism, he must deny his emotions, which he attributes to the sensual or embodied portion of human being. Such denial thus becomes another form of selfmortification as Theotormon “wear[s] the threshold hard,” figuratively clothing himself in a penitential garment of stone – a version of the ascetic’s hair shirt – whose impenetrable surface signifies Theotormon’s self-enclosure, his unwillingness to encounter earthly otherness. There can be no doubt that Oothoon is traumatized by the violation and stereotyping she undergoes at the hands of Bromion, as well as by Theotormon’s treatment of her. Consider, for example, her subsequent invocation of Theotormon’s eagles:

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I call with holy voice! kings of the sounding air, Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect. The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast. The Eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey. (2:14–17) In this passage, Oothoon’s rhetoric of purity and defilement reveals her unwitting capitulation to Theotormon’s ascetic dualism (which opposes chastity to harlotry), while her use of the verb “rend” in her instruction to Theotormon’s eagles seems, most appallingly, to imply an invited repetition of Bromion’s act of rape. Indeed, since Bromion’s earlier rending of Oothoon with his clamorous “thunders” (1:16) implies a regal exercise of elemental control, we may align him directly with Theotormon’s eagles, the “kings of the sounding air.” Hence, while highlighting the mutual implication of Theotormon’s theology and Bromion’s colonial praxis, Oothoon’s invocation of and encounter with the eagles demonstrates the extent to which her own pursuit of “purity” presupposes and perpetuates the most profound violence. Such violence recalls the eagle’s traditional association with imperialist politics. During the course of Western history, the image of this predatory bird has been appropriated to serve emblematic functions in such countries as Rome, Austria, France, Germany, and Russia; and, in 1782, only eleven years prior to the production of Visions, the United States adopted the eagle as emblem for its official seal (Vogler 1985, 30–1n13). Since at one level of Visions’ political allegory Oothoon is America, and since Bromion rapaciously expropriates her “soft American plains” and the regions comprising her “north & south” to his material empire, we would do well to consider the eagle in Visions as a figure for empire, the political and geographical entity before which colonized individuals must “open their hearts” or be forcefully “rent” in opposition. Hence, in both the text and in the design to plate 3, the eagles’ rending of Oothoon’s breast emphasizes the latter’s political subjection. In this context, “the soft soul of America” – America’s liberatory idealism – is devoured by the brutal reality of an America built upon the backs, and written in the blood, of slaves. It is most appropriate, then, that Oothoon’s account of her rending by the predatory eagles is directly preceded on plate 2 by an illustration of a black slave-labourer, whom Blake depicts nearly

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prostrate upon the ground, lying beside an almost horizontal, grotesquely blighted tree. In the approximate symmetry of their spatial design, these juxtaposed human and arboreal figures evince an iconographic equivalence. On the one hand, the oppressed slave, valued primarily as an instrument of enforced labour, is reduced to the status of a natural object (the tree), becoming, from the master’s standpoint, simply another aspect of the exploitable physical environment. (Blake further emphasizes this process of othering by depicting the slave’s arms in such a manner that they appear to be rooted, like inverted tree limbs, to the ground.) On the other hand, the tree can be seen to represent a natural world that has, like the African slave forced to labour upon it, been destructively enslaved. The message seems straightforward enough. As competing imperial powers rush to exploit new resource-bases, importing to the New World the mercantilist practice of human slavery, the environmental problems Blake associates with the metropolitan centre – a place of “cities turrets & towers & domes / Whose smoke destroy[s] the pleasant gardens & whose running Kennels / Chok[e] the bright rivers” (fz 9:167–9; E390) – are extended to the New World’s colonized landscapes. In a context where the eagle of imperialist politics emblematizes the violation of enslaved peoples and their earthly territories, all creatures are potentially affected. Consider, for example, the significance of Visions’ “jealous dolphins,” the creatures Bromion invites to “sport around” Oothoon directly after he rapes her (1:19). How, one might ask, do dolphins – traditional symbols of philanthropy, love, and salvation (Baine 1981, 206) – come to be so negatively anthropomorphized in Blake’s allegory of colonialism? To answer this question, it is helpful to return to Stedman’s Narrative. In recounting the events of his voyage from Europe to Dutch Guiana, Stedman writes that the interval was rendered “exceedingly pleasant ... by the many dolphins or dorados ... beautiful fish [which] seem to take peculiar delight in sporting around the vessels” (1796; 1.9). (Notice that Blake’s dolphins also “sport around” in Visions.) In a more philosophical mode, Stedman goes on to remark that The real dolphin, which is of the cetaceous kind, was anciently celebrated in poetic story on account of its philanthropy and other supposed virtues: but to the dorado or dolphin of the moderns, this character is far from being applicable, this fish

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being extremely voracious and destructive, and is known to follow the ships, and exhibit his sports and gambols, not from attachment to mankind, but from the more selfish motive of procuring food ... The circumstance which chiefly entitles the dorado to our attention is, the unrivalled and dazzling brilliancy of its colours in the water, the whole of its back ... appear[ing] as bespangled all over with jewels. (Stedman 1796, 1.9–10)14 Stedman’s alignment of the “real dolphin” with poetic sensibility offers a helpful clue concerning the way Oothoon would likely view the dorado. Since Oothoon is “Open,” in Visions, “to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears” (6:22), we can speculate that she would not debase this “dolphin of the moderns” as Stedman does when he attributes selfishness to it, but would praise its “unrivalled and dazzling” beauty. Indeed, such an aesthetic tendency would help to explain how poetic sensibility comes to anthropomorphize beautiful animals as “philanthropists”; for in contexts where non-human creatures inspire “joy and ... delight,” they may be regarded quite logically as agents of human well-being. Unlike Oothoon, however, the empire-obsessed Bromion is driven to denounce and destroy “virgin joy” (6:11), and the “delights” he is capable of understanding are only those “of the merchant” (5:12). Because Bromion is a stranger to beauty and its attendant philanthropic impulses, his “modern” anthropomorphisms (to borrow Stedman’s term) reflect the paranoia of empire, so that even such creatures as dolphins become representatives of a misanthropic “jealous[y].” As we have seen, however, not all of Oothoon’s encounters with non-human creatures are positive ones. Since Oothoon has been colonized by Bromion, and since, to a certain extent, colonialism proceeds via a pedagogical “colonizing of the mind,”15 we might expect Oothoon’s worldview – including her discourse on nonhuman nature – to be adversely affected by her situation. Such influence, at any rate, would help to explain why Oothoon becomes obsessed with conceptual categories like “purity” and “defilement” in Visions, and why her own view of animals comes to reflect these categories (a reflection I noted above, for example, when considering her sadomasochistic view of predatory eagles as agents of her own ostensible purification). But Oothoon is no mere colonized automaton, and she is by no means unaware that her physical enslavement has harmful ideological ramifications. Thus she attacks her cultural conditioning on the most fundamental of levels.

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They told me that the night & day were all that I could see; They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up. And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle. And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. (2:30–4) Here, in a nutshell, is Oothoon’s critique of the epistemology of empire, the Baconian empiricism that attempts to consolidate an “empire of man” over all other creatures. Her reference to “night & day” underscores the divisiveness of Western categorical thought, which conceptualizes existence according to binary oppositions (night/day, black/white, slave/master, defilement/purity, animal/ human, etc.) and which can tolerate no liminal or “grey” areas. Hence, while Oothoon’s reference to “five senses” has been read as a metaphysical indictment of “the body as prison of the soul” (Moss 14), the grammar of the passage suggests a more overtly political interpretation. Foregrounding the pedagogical aspect of colonial discourse, Oothoon speaks of what “They told me ... to inclose me up,” thus gesturing toward a political intention, a methodical denial of other (non-empirical, non-European) modes of knowledge carried out in order to imprison (“to inclose ... up”) enslaved peoples. Crucially, the result of this process is a distinctively narrative denial, in which Oothoon’s cultural “life” is “ob-literated and erased.” For his own part, however, Bromion attempts to deny this violence by representing both his naturalist theory and colonial praxis as modes of visionary endeavour: Then Bromion said: and shook the cavern with his lamentation Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit; But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth To gratify senses unknown? trees beasts and birds unknown: Unknown, not unpercievd, spread in the infinite microscope, In places yet unvisited by the voyager. and in worlds Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown. (4:12–18) By declaring that this lamentation “shook the cavern,” Blake’s narrator acknowledges Bromion’s prophetic potential, raising the possibility that even this degenerate imperialist has the power to level the walls of the “caves” in which he and Oothoon have been

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“Bound back to back” since the second plate of the poem (2:5). Bromion’s reference to “senses unknown” reinforces the passage’s visionary quality, implying as it does the epistemological necessity of sensory expansion or cleansing. Moreover, as Mark Bracher observes, Bromion’s figurative gesture toward “another kind of seas” seems “on the verge of escaping the empiricist bias for the manifest and tangible” (173). The potential to accomplish this escape is subtly undermined, however, by Bromion’s reference to “the infinite microscope,” which highlights the empirical basis of his vision. As John Locke remarks in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), if one’s visual perception were “1000, or 1000000 [times] more acute than it is now by the best Microscope,” one “would be in a quite different World from other People: Nothing would appear the same ... the visible Ideas of everything would be different” (qtd. in Raine 1968, 2.125). Engaging in this sort of speculation, Bromion’s discourse of discovery – his optimistic belief in a revelatory correlation between “unknown” aspects of the human sensorium and “unknown” elements in the objective world – represents what Blake would likely have decried as an empirical cooptation of revelatory vision. Ultimately, Bromion’s optimism is based on his confidence in Enlightenment progress, which, by perfecting the instruments and methods of empirical inquiry, would give humanity (that is, Europeans) unprecedented access to things and places beyond current apprehension. More revealing, perhaps, than any other aspect of his speech are Bromion’s claims that “trees and fruits flourish upon the earth / To gratify senses unknown,” and that such gratification brings the ultimate reward, “the joys of riches and ease” (4:14–15, 21). Here, we might pause to consider Blake’s nearly contemporary poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), wherein the prophet Ezekiel asks “is he honest who resists his genius or conscience. only for the sake of present ease or gratification?” (MHH 13; E39; emphasis added). The opposition Ezekiel establishes between “honest[y]” and “ease or gratification” in this rhetorical question is crucially important, for Blake claimed that “Every honest man is a Prophet” (Anno. Watson E617) and that “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God” (MHH 12; E38). Clearly, from a Blakean perspective, Bromion’s selfishness perverts and thus disqualifies the prophetic aspect of his utterance. A utilitarian, Bromion considers existence hedonistically, believing that one comes to know a

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thing by divining the many “senses unknown” in which it may be harnessed to the ends of an all-encompassing self-gratification. Embracing such an ideology, one responds to otherness, in short, by subsuming it to the self. Bromion’s instrumental evaluation of “trees beasts and birds unknown ... In places yet unvisited by the voyager” highlights the issue of European transatlantic expansion, revealing, once again, illuminating parallels to Stedman’s Narrative. Stedman characterizes Dutch Guiana as a territory “enriched with a great variety of mineral substances,” a land where “in general the soil is abundantly fruitful, the earth during the whole of the year [being] adorned with continual verdure, the trees loaded at the same time with blossoms and ripe fruit” (1796; 1.34, 33). While such pastoral evocations tend to confirm the popular image of the New World as an Edenic garden, thus enticing European readers with the promise of unlimited prosperity in an idyllic New World landscape, they are ultimately qualified by Stedman’s tendency to celebrate only geographical areas considered instrumentally valuable. Hence, those areas “inhabited by Europeans, and cultivated with sugar, cocoa, cotton, and indigo plantations ... form the most delightful prospects that can be imagined” (1796, 1.36–7), while places unsuited for slave-based, plantation-style agriculture are praiseworthy only for the value of their timber and minerals. Affirming that exploitable resources and natural beauty go hand in hand, Stedman’s Narrative reveals “the cultural power of the aesthetic to legitimize [a] region’s colonial plantation culture” (Fulford 1998b, 47n36). As for locations inaccessible to European navigation, they are quite simply “of little consequence to Europeans” (Stedman 1796, 1.35) – or downright harmful to colonial interests (as in the case of heavily forested areas, which provided both real and potential sanctuary for escaped slaves [1796, 1.3–4]). Like Blake’s Bromion, Stedman implicitly values “newly discovered” lands only for their potential to increase the personal wealth, and to gratify the material desires, of their European masters. As a major illustrator of Stedman’s Narrative, Blake would likely have been struck not only by the work’s manifold discussions of human slavery (which Blake’s commentators have examined in detail) but also by its impressive pictorial and textual catalogues of “trees and fruits ... beasts and birds unknown” (vda 4:14–15). Like many contemporary writers of “exploration literature” and New World

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ethnography, Stedman takes care extensively to catalogue the plant, insect, and animal life he encounters in his travels, and more than half of Narrative’s eighty-one engraved illustrations deal with botanical and zoological subject matter (Blake himself having depicted, in at least four engravings, four species of monkey, a giant Aboma snake, some Limes, the Capsicum Mamee Apple, and various nuts). In its careful taxonomy of nature, the text participates in the expansion of European empire by extending knowledge of, and thus a certain mastery over, the terrains and topographies of the New World. Moreover, the text’s intermixing of naturalist and ethnographic subject matter – highlighted most explicitly in Stedman’s figurative description of the celebrated slave-girl Joanna as a “forsaken plant” (1796; 1.90) – draws an implicit parallel between the European objectification of plants and animals, on the one hand, and the objectification of human beings, on the other, each of which are valuable to the empire primarily in an instrumental capacity. It is hardly surprising, then, that Blake’s Bromion, who wishes to subject all things to the taxonomizing scrutiny of his phallic “infinite microscope,” ultimately finishes his lecture on the marvels of nature by celebrating “the joys of riches and ease” in a world that is monolithically governed by “one law for both the lion and the ox” (4:21–2).

iii. resistance By examining parallels between the subjugation of humans and natural environments as portrayed in Visions, I do not mean to efface crucial differences, nor do I wish to suggest that slavery is merely an aspect of our treatment of nature (especially given that colonial discourses have often aligned non-European peoples with a “degenerate” nature in order to justify their subjugation as part of an ostensibly benevolent “civilizing mission”). However, because Oothoon herself fights for human liberty by marshalling a series of arguments based on non-human exempla, Visions demands a sustained focus on the relationship between colonial and anti-colonial treatments of humanity and nature. Consider, for example, the following passage, in which Oothoon attempts to combat Bromion’s homogenizing imperialism by invoking the multiplicitous realm of animality:

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With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk? With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse? With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse & frog Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations. And their pursuits, as different as their forms and as their joys: Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens: and the meek camel Why he loves man: is it because of eye ear mouth or skin Or breathing nostrils? No. for these the wolf and tyger have. Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav’nous snake Where she gets poison: & the wing’d eagle why he loves the sun And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old. (3:2–13) In this remarkable passage, Oothoon strategically invokes what Blake’s friend Henry Fuseli referred to as animals’ “allegoric Utility” (qtd. in Bentley 1969, 170). The logic informing her argument is as follows: If the heterogeneous behaviours and pursuits of nonhuman creatures cannot be entirely accounted for by way of reference to “eye ear mouth ... skin” and “breathing nostrils,” then neither should human behaviours be understood simply as sensual responses to empirical data – especially if it is true, as Ooothon claims, that human actions, like the human brain, are potentially “infinite” (2:32) in scope. But while she exploits the “allegoric utility” of animals to support her arguments for human emancipation, Oothoon does not do so in an anthropocentric way. Indeed, according to the rhetorical structure of her argument, an open-minded inquiry into the nature of non-human being is a prerequisite for human self-reflection: first we are to consider the otherness and difference of animals, “And then,” Oothoon declares, we may “tell [her] the thoughts of man.” At the very least, she suggests, “man” must be understood contextually, not as an abstract, conceptually pure category of being. Kathleen Raine has argued convincingly that Oothoon’s discourse on animals and sensory perception owes a philosophical debt to Emanuel Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences,16 which posits a correlation between an entity’s “Internal” makeup and the actions it undertakes in the “External” world. Here is an excerpt from Swedenborg’s summary of the matter:

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[T]here is in every Thing an Internal and an External, and ... the External dependeth on the Internal, as the Body does on its Soul ... For the Illustration of this Truth it may suffice to consider a few Particulars respecting a Silkworm, [and] a Bee ... The Internal of the Silkworm is that, by Virtue whereof its External is impelled to spin its silken Web, and afterwards to assume Wings like a Butterfly and fly abroad. The Internal of a Bee is that, by Virtue whereof its External is impelled to suck Honey out of Flowers, and to construct waxen Cells after a wonderful Form. (Swedenborg 2.417) By arguing that every creature’s “External dependeth on the Internal,” Swedenborg, like Oothoon, grants priority to an intrinsic rather than extrinsic makeup of being,17 implying possibilities of perception that Bromion’s doctrine of the “five senses” refuses to sanction. Accordingly, individuals are centres of dynamic activity, not mere passive receptors of externally imposed sensations. But where Swedenborg uses a vaguely deterministic vocabulary to speak of creaturely activity (stating that bees and silkworms are “impelled” to behave in certain ways), Blake’s Oothoon chooses to speak of such activity in terms of multiplicitous “joys” and “loves” (3:6, 8, 11–12), terms carrying connotations of freedom rather than coercion or enslavement. By attributing the delights of joy and love to non-human creatures, Oothoon not only avoids the determinism implicit in Swedenborg but also problematizes the Cartesian hypothesis that animals are soulless automata incapable of experiencing either pleasure or pain. Moreover, by relentlessly particularizing animals – by emphasizing that “their habitations” and “pursuits” are “as different as their forms and as their joys” (3:5–6) – Oothoon’s counter-discourse strives to deconstruct the homogenizing concept of animality itself, thus challenging Bromion’s philosophical claim that there is “one law for both the lion and the ox” (4:22). Rigorously undertaken, such a deconstruction would have the most profound social and environmental implications for, as Jacques Derrida observes, the concept of animality presupposes the drawing of an oppositional limit which “itself blurs the differences, the différance and the differences, not only between man and animal, but among animal societies, and, within the animal societies and within human society itself, so many differences” (1987, 183).18 In Visions, Blake’s Oothoon combats the all-encompassing violence

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of colonialism via a conceptual multiplication of difference in its manifold cultural and ecological manifestations. She aims, in short, to convince her listeners to respect and celebrate what E.O. Wilson calls “the diversity of life.”19 As if to combat the violent rapacity of Bromion’s imperialism, Oothoon deploys a sexual metaphor to represent her experience of life in the multiplicitous world she envisions. She is, she declares, Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix’d In happy copulation; if in evening mild, wearied with work; Sit on a bank and draw the pleasures of this free born joy. (6:22–7:2) Oothoon’s “openness” and her use of the term “copulation” to characterize her encounter with beauty recall early modern concepts of the eye as a sexual organ, a kind of optic vagina through which the mind was thought to be “impregnated” by visual stimuli.20 In Blake’s poetics, however, these figures of openness and copulation also carry spiritual connotations, since they anticipate Jerusalem’s sexualized concept of Eternal emanational encounter, wherein discrete individuals meet in a process of mutual interchange, “comingl[ing]” ecstatically “from the Head even to the Feet” (see j 88:3–11, E246; 69:43, E223). Such profound interchange is implicit in Oothoon’s rhetorical synaesthesia. By figuring her visual perception of beauty in terms of touch, she articulates an imaginative alternative to the subject/object dynamic so often associated with the economy of the gaze. When vision is understood as a mode of touch, the distance separating perceiver and perceived is minimized, bringing subjects and objects into the most proximate, mutually affective relationship. What is more, Oothoon’s metaphor of visual or visionary copulation resists the dualism of an Enlightenment philosophy that represents mentality rather than biology as “characteristic of the human and ... what is ‘fully and authentically’ human” (Plumwood 1996, 169) for, by conceptualizing aesthetic apprehension in terms of sexual communion, her metaphor strives to bring human biology and mentality into reconciliatory unison. And yet, Oothoon’s subsequent cry, “Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!” (7:16), suggests in its repetitions and multiple exclamation points a degree of hyperbole that,

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rather than conveying confidence in her vision of consummation with otherness, suggests trauma and hysteria. It is difficult, in other words, not to see Oothoon’s overly emphatic cry as the compensatory reaction of a brutalized, insulted, and enslaved character trying desperately to regain the optimism of an earlier innocence. Such a reading would, at any rate, help to account for the disconcertingly problematic scenario Oothoon imagines as a viable alternative to Theotormon’s “hypocrite modesty,” the “self-love that envies all” (6:16; 7:21). Addressing Theotormon, she exclaims: But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread, And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold; I’ll lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon: Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first born beam, Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e’er with jealous cloud Come in the heaven of generous love; nor selfish blightings bring. (7:23–9) While this passage is syntactically ambivalent and therefore difficult to interpret,21 it nevertheless seems very much at odds with the emancipatory politics Oothoon articulates earlier in the poem. As Leopold Damrosch, Jr., observes (1980, 198), Oothoon’s “silken nets and traps of adamant” troublingly recall the religious “nets & gins & traps” (5:18) she so emphatically denounces earlier in the poem, mechanisms used “to catch virgin joy, / And brand it with the name of whore” (6:11–12). Furthermore, the voyeuristic aspect of her fantasy not only defers or denies the gratification of her own sexual desire, but by foregoing her own participation in the encounter, Oothoon also contradicts her earlier ideal of visual-tactile copulation. Far from liberating herself from the tyranny of sexual oppression, Oothoon seems unwittingly willing to perpetuate it and, as procuress, to extend it (and the stereotype of harlotry) to other innocent “girls,”22 whose associations with “silver” and “gold” suggest something of their commoditization in Oothoon’s sexual fantasy. In the subsequent lines of the poem, however, Blake’s heroine invokes precious metals in order to indict, and to remark the dire consequences of, a culture that reduces all things – whether human or otherwise – to the instrumental status of commodity, and

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it is here that the revolutionary tones of her earlier environmental and sociopolitical critique reassert themselves. Does the sun walk in glorious raiment. on the secret floor Where the cold miser spreads his gold? or does the bright cloud drop On his stone threshold? does his eye behold the beam that brings Expansion to the eye of pity? or will he bind himself Beside the ox to thy hard furrow? does that mild beam blot The bat, the owl, the glowing tyger, and the king of night. (7:30–8:5) Oothoon’s miser is something of an alchemist: although his “cold[ness]” suggests that he has lost all sense of alchemical creative wonder, he nevertheless wishes to convert all things to gold. Insofar as the pursuit of this homogeneous substance provides the binding “one law” of his existence, he resembles the Urizenic Bromion; but to the extent that his fetishistic hoarding of gold necessitates a renunciation of all self-expenditure and a paranoid withdrawal from society (which must be seen as a source of expense or potential thievery), he resembles the withdrawn and virtue-hoarding Theotormon (who, like the miser, is also associated with a “threshold” of stone [2:6]). One would hardly expect such antisocial behaviour in an era of so-called enlightenment, whose “mild beam” promises to bring “Expansion to the eye of pity.”23 But, as the sun’s “glorious raiment” is replaced by the merely reflective light of a “bright cloud,” the “mild beam” of human sympathy gives way before the questionable lustre of the miser’s gold (which signifies, in Visions’ imperialist context, the stolen wealth comprising the so-called commonwealth). Under such conditions, humanity’s “mild beam” is darkened to opacity, becoming that biblical mote of motes, the obstructing “beam” in the eye of self-righteous and hypocritical avarice (Matt. 7.3–5). Writing on the relationship between enlightenment and imperialism in his 1796 treatise Illustrations of Prophecy, Joseph Lomas Towers posed a question that can help us to appreciate the urgency of this dilemma: “Are we not apprized,” he asked, “that the guilt of nations, as well as of individuals, is enhanced in proportion to the degree of light and knowledge which heaven has vouchsafed them?” (1796, 1.xv). Living in an era of unprecedented “light and knowledge,” but failing to behold “the beam that brings / Expansion to the eye of pity,” Oothoon’s miser becomes a figure for the

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culpability of an empire whose practices of cultural exploitation and slavery are decidedly at odds with its professed morality. Not only does the miser’s avarice disable identification with other humans, but his ironically named “mild beam” also disables any sympathetic concern for the natural environment and its non-human inhabitants, “blot[ting],” as it does, “The bat, the owl, the glowing tyger, and the king of night.” According to Oothoon, for whom “every thing that lives is holy” (8:10), even these creatures – indeed, even the symbolically decried “wild snake,” whose presence in the Garden augured the loss of Judeo-Christian paradise (8:7) – are worthy of respect. Unfortunately, Oothoon’s revolutionary vision is easily co-opted. After all, has not Bromion’s empirical science, in surveying its domain, already laid claim to the globe and, indeed, to the entire universe? And does not this science subject “every thing that lives” to the authority of its scrutinizing gaze? Moreover, has not Theotormon’s institutionalized religion long denied the holiness of nature in order to claim an exclusive right to define the nature of “holiness”? In asserting the holiness of every living thing, Oothoon articulates a pluralism that has no recourse to exclusionary tactics, no effective strategy for separating the goats of tyranny from the lambs of righteousness. Hence, by Oothoon’s own standards, even Bromion and Theotormon are holy and, therefore, worthy of respect. While Oothoon’s philosophy is thus generously free of ressentiment, it runs the risk of political self-sabotage, for to respect representatives of tyranny is to remain potentially subject to their authority. Such a state of affairs might, perhaps, account for the grim scenario Blake depicts in Visions’ concluding lines: Thus every morning wails Oothoon. but Theotormon sits Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire. The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs. (8:11–13) Ending with its all-too-familiar refrain of echoed sighs (cf. 2:20, 5:2), Visions seems ultimately to have resolved none of its political and colonial conflicts. Hence the tendency of some readers to regard Oothoon as a “failed prophet” (Anderson 1984, passim). One must note, however, that Oothoon utters at the poem’s conclusion

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more than just despairingly impotent sighs. She also emphatically “wails” – expressing the profundity of her sorrow – each and “every morning” (8:11), demonstrating in the process her unflagging “determination to awaken those around her” (Linkin 1990, 192). Alongside her inability to achieve timely emancipation for herself and the Daughters, Oothoon’s failure to convert or reform her oppressors in fact typifies the prophetic condition. To quote Robert Gray’s contemporary discussion of biblical prophecy, “the prophets evinced the integrity of their characters, by zealously encountering oppression, hatred, and death ... Then it was, that they firmly supported trial[s] of cruel mockings and scourgings; yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment. They were ... destitute, afflicted, tormented” (qtd. in Towers 1796, 2.325). Refusing a premature and facile apocalypticism, Visions soberly acknowledges the complex difficulties attending its social and environmental crises. Ending the poem without resolution, in other words, Blake places ultimate responsibility for political transformation upon his readers, forcing us not only to confront Oothoon’s woes but also to dwell upon them, hoping, it seems, that we will do more than merely “eccho back her sighs.”

chapter four

Enslaved Brutes and Brutalized Slaves: Animal Rights and Abolition in Coleridge and the Black Atlantic From the practice of slaughtering an innocent animal, to the murder of man himself, the steps are neither many nor remote. (John Oswald 1791, 27) For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast. (Ecclesiastes 3:19)

i. prelude From the Romantic period to postmodern times, animal rights advocacy has provoked strong responses on both sides of the Atlantic. Not uncommonly, skeptics have regarded concerns for animal rights as irresponsible at best and misanthropic at worst. Such views may occasionally be justified, as in instances when the prevention of cruelty to animals is accomplished at the cost of human welfare or life.1 But the notion that concern for animal well-being is part of a zero-sum game that necessarily entails a disregard for social justice is highly problematic, for the histories of human and animal rights are closely intertwined. When William Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence that “A dog starvd at his Masters gate / Predicts the ruin of the State” (1988, 490; lines 9–10), for example, he was suggesting in no uncertain terms that animal abuse has dire consequences for society. Numerous anti-slavery activists, both black and white, accepted this correlation. The fact that many Romantic-era abolitionists were also proponents of the prevention

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of cruelty to animals supports Timothy Morton’s claim that “[t]o re-conceive relationships between humans and the natural (animal) world is … to decode the relation between despot and slave” (Morton 1994, 31). Among the Romantic poets who best understood the relationship between animal abuse and slavery was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose 1794 poem “To a Young Ass, Its Mother Being Tethered Near It” offers much more than a defense of animal welfare. The poem was inspired at Jesus College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1794, when the young scholar-poet chanced to make the acquaintance of an “Innocent foal” (line 25) who seemed destined, like its tightly tethered mother, for an existence of hard labour and neglect at the hands of a merciless master. To quote David Perkins, Coleridge “would pet [the foal] and feed it bread, and when he appeared the little creature would move toward him ‘askingly’” (2003, 108).2 Since Coleridge “was writing and lecturing against the slave trade” at this time (ibid., 109), it is hardly surprising that his musings on the young animal led him to compare its treatment to that of African people who were forced to work and live like animals in the transatlantic slave trade. Although Coleridge’s poem has received relatively little critical attention, its status as an allegory of human oppression is fairly well documented.3 Addressing a “poor little Foal of an oppressed race,” and referring to its human owner as “master” (lines 1, 19), Coleridge establishes the young ass as an emblem of human race relations. During the course of the poem, moreover, he explicitly invokes the republican ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, and fraternity – thus situating the poem’s concerns in the context of 1790s social radicalism. While earlier English animal rights advocates like John Oswald were able openly to avow Jacobin sympathies, by the mid-1790s English authors expressed such sympathies at their peril, due to political changes wrought in the wake of the Reign of Terror. Thus, as David Perkins has noted, the allegorical framework of Coleridge’s poem enabled the poet to disguise his radical social message by veiling it in the garb of an apparently eccentric – and therefore harmless – concern (1998, 939–40). However, as the poet develops his complementary literal and allegorical critiques, both of which were dear to his heart, he raises some troubling questions. Glancing at the human allegory, on the one hand, animal rights advocates might suspect the presence of

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an anthropocentric agenda, asking: Is there an animal in this poem? Or is the poem’s apparent concern for animal rights merely an excuse to revisit well-worn questions about human relationships? On the other hand, human rights advocates might reasonably object: Is it not dangerous – indeed, is it not implicitly racist – to allegorize the horrors of African slavery in terms of animal abuse? By deploying a discourse on animals to illuminate the problem of human slavery, is not Coleridge to some extent partaking of the very logic that dehumanizes the slave? In this chapter I examine Coleridge’s “To a Young Ass” in an effort to illuminate the troubling relationship it outlines between the discourses of human and animal rights. Moreover, in order to situate Coleridge’s poem in the transatlantic contexts informing contemporary anti-slavery activism, I consider it in relation to concerns articulated in works produced by a number of former slaves, including Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and Ignatius Sancho.

i i . th e q u e s t i o n o f r a c e a n d t h e s t a t u s of the human animal During the Romantic period the association of slavery and animality was by no means uncommon. While few Romantic-era thinkers went so far as to believe, like the Renaissance author Thomas Herbert, that African people might in fact be the progeny of “beastly copulation or conjuncture” (Herbert 1677, 18), slavetrade apologists often questioned the humanity of Africans. As the great abolitionist William Wilberforce observed in 1807, “The advocates for the Slave trade originally took very high ground; contending, that the Negroes were an inferior race of beings. It is obvious, that, if this were once acknowledged, [Africans] might be supposed, no less than their fellow brutes, to have been comprised within the original grant of all inferior creatures to the use and service of man” (Wilberforce 1811, 54; emphasis added). The “very high ground” to which Wilberforce refers is of course the primordial ground of biblical creation: in the Book of Genesis God grants humans “dominion” over “every living thing that moveth upon the earth,” including “every beast of the earth” (Gen. 1:26–30). Thus divinely enfranchised, humans could consider themselves the veritable masters of creation (though in doing so they would ignore contradictory Biblical passages such as the

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one quoted above in my second epigraph). While modern-day ecological critics like Lynn White Jr. indict this biblical anthropocentrism as a root cause of today’s environmental crisis (1996, 8–12), the socially minded Wilberforce emphasized the human crisis that obtains when biblical anthropocentrism is invoked to justify racist ideology and practice. By relegating Africans to the status of “brutes,” anti-abolitionists could represent slavery in terms of a pious obedience to God’s original imperative and providential plan. When this faith-based strategy of dehumanization came under rational attack, however, slave-trade apologists often appealed to supposedly scientific theories of human polygenesis, arguing that the various human “races” had separate and distinct historical origins. Using concepts drawn from natural history and such pseudosciences as phrenology, champions of polygenesis constructed a hierarchy of human species, predictably granting priority to their own Caucasian race in order to justify African slavery. But other thinkers fought back. Criticizing the polygenetic model, for example, the French natural historian Buffon defended a theory of monogenesis, arguing that all human beings arose from a common ancestry. By affirming the primordial ties that bind all humans together as members of a single biological family, Buffon’s theory denied the existence of an essentialist racial hierarchy, thereby challenging the generally pro-slavery, polygenetic model. It is interesting to note that Buffon supported his monogenetic theory in part by contrasting the merely complexional differences between Caucasians and Africans to the species distinctions separating horses from asses: “If the Negro and the White could not procreate together, or if their offspring remained unfruitful, they would be two distinct species; the negro would be to man what the ass is to the horse; or rather, if the white man was the man, the negro would be a distinct animal like the monkey, and we might with reason think, that the white and the negro had not the same common origin. But this supposition is denied by the fact” (Buffon 1797, 5.191; emphasis added). As a man of science, Buffon is concerned here to debunk unreasonable assumptions on the basis of irrefutable scientific “fact.” Indeed, even if Caucasians and Africans were unable to procreate together, Buffon would not necessarily have considered such evidence as scientific proof demonstrating the subhuman status of the latter group; hence his carefully italicized qualifier: “if the white man was the man.” Buffon and like-minded philosophers

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did not entirely escape the era’s racism, but they would not allow the politically motivated assumptions informing polygenetic theory to pass unexamined. While Buffon’s scientific logic helped to undermine a number of pro-slavery arguments, liberal theologians like Humphry Primatt saw the whole debate as moot. An outspoken pioneer of human and animal rights, Primatt reasoned in 1776 that since no creature had any choice concerning its earthly form, judgments of moral value simply could not be based upon biological distinctions. And like Buffon and Coleridge after him, Primatt also saw the ass as a convenient emblem for the illustration of his moral argument: “It is solely owing to the good pleasure of God, that we are created men, or animals in the shape of men … [W]hether we walk upon two legs or four, whether our heads are prone or erect … whether we have tails or no tails … long ears or round ears; or whether we bray like an ass, [or] speak like a man … nature never intended these distinctions as foundations for right of tyranny and oppression” (Primatt 1992, 22–3). In this passage, Primatt advocates a remarkable process of leveling, invoking the humble ass in order to criticize an unjustifiable human hubris. Although his reference to Biblical creation risks inviting the anthropocentric rejoinder that human dominion over animals is a God-given imperative, Primatt’s assertion that humans are merely “animals in the shape of men” challenges the binary logic that supported the notion of human supremacy over the “brute creation.”

i i i . o n t h e b r u ta l i z a t i o n o f s l av e s As the foregoing argument demonstrates, Coleridge’s politically minded comparison of humans and animals – and, in particular, of human slaves and asses – was by no means unusual in his time. But it was not only white people who saw important analogues between human and animal abuse during the Romantic period. Virtually every former slave who narrated his or her story – including Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and Ignatius Sancho – compared the treatment of slaves to that of domestic brutes. Unlike Coleridge and many of his European contemporaries, however, these African authors rarely represented this comparison allegorically, for animals and human slaves were often sold in the same markets and slaves were commonly compelled to work as beasts of

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burden. In describing her own experience in a West Indian slave market, for example, Mary Prince remarks that she was “surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words – as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts” (Prince 1831, 4). Moreover, Prince later notes that she and her fellow slaves were sometimes fed like cattle on “Indian corn,”4 and that their accommodation was “a long shed, divided into narrow slips, like the stalls used for cattle” (10). In keeping with such dehumanizing treatment, punishment for misbehaviour included being struck with a “cart-whip” and “put in the Cage” (6, 15). Carrying horrific memories of “the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back” (22–3), many emancipated African slaves bore the marks of their brutalization on their bodies; in addition, they suffered the conscious indignity that attends the commoditization of human subjects who know full well that they are being treated like “dumb beasts” (4). This negation of human dignity outraged the emancipated Fanti slave Ottobah Cugoano, author of Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787). Two decades before Wilberforce criticized the use of creationist concepts of hierarchy and dominion to justify slavery, Cugoano indicted in the harshest terms the ideological notion “‘That an African is not entitled to any competent degree of knowledge, or capable of imbibing any sentiments of probity; and that nature designed him for some inferior link in the chain, fitted only to be a slave’” (Cugoano 1787, 5). Cugoano goes on to argue that such dehumanizing “aspersions are insidious and false” and that those who cast them are “brutish … wicked and base” (5; emphasis added). Cugoano’s rhetoric suggests that one’s position on the Great Chain of Being, rather than being preordained and fixed, should in fact be determined by the degree of “humanity” one exercises in relation to others. In short, those who proclaim the bestial status of other humans are themselves “base,” or rather debased, in the hierarchy of created beings. For Cugoano, as we shall see, to charge another human with “brutish[ness]” (5) merely because of complexion or attributed racial status is to be brutish oneself; for when it comes to assessing human beings, one can make only moral distinctions: “A good man will neither speak nor do as a

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bad man will; but if a man is bad, it makes no difference whether he be a black or a white devil” (5). Cugoano’s reference to black and white devils is part of his response to an accusation commonly leveled at African societies by white slave-trade apologists – that Africans themselves willingly sold their countrymen and countrywomen into bondage. Although Cugoano acknowledges that this accusation has some basis in truth, he is outraged by its ideological implications, not only because of the fundamental immorality of human trade (no matter who practices it) but because the accusation, when generalized, supports a harmful stereotype of African inhumanity used to justify and perpetuate the slave trade: as to Africans selling their own wives and children, nothing can be more opposite to every thing they hold dear and valuable; and nothing can distress them more, than to part with any of their relations and friends … For any man to think that it should be otherwise, when he may see a thousand instances of a natural instinct, even in the brute creation, where they have a sympathetic feeling for their offspring; it must be great want of consideration not to think, that much more than meerly what is natural to animals, should in a higher degree be implanted in the breast of every part of the rational creation of man. (Cugoano 1787, 27–8) For Cugoano, the ideology of slavery not only promoted the brutalization of African people; by denying Africans the “natural instinct” of “sympathetic feeling for their offspring” – a trait Cugoano attributed even to the “lowliest” of animals – it represented them as subbestial or morally worse than brutes. In other words, his outrage here is aimed at an insidious mode of stereotyping that would not only exclude African people from the human realm but would also deny them the best characteristics associated with what he calls “the brute creation.” While Cugoano’s argument concerning “the rational creation of man” depends to a great extent upon a binaryoppositional distinction between humanity and animality, his emphasis upon a shared capacity for familial sympathy suggests that the distinction is not necessarily absolute. Five years after Cugoano presented his abolitionist arguments to the British public, white philanthropists published the collected

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letters of another member of London’s late eighteenth-century Black literati, Ignatius Sancho, offering them to the public as irrefutable proof that Africans not only belonged to Cugoano’s “rational creation of man” but that they possessed moral and intellectual “abilities equal to an European” (Anonymous 1782, ii). Born in 1729 on a slave ship en route from the coast of Guinea to the Spanish West Indies, Sancho lost both of his parents to the ravages of the Middle Passage, and at the age of two years he was brought to England where he eventually served as butler to the Duke and Duchess of Montagu (ibid., iii–vii, ix). Despite having had the good fortune to obtain his freedom and a degree of financial independence, he continued to identify closely with enslaved fellow Africans: he wrote bitterly of “the contempt of those very wretches [i.e., slave holders] who roll in affluence from our labours” (Sancho 1782, 1.42; emphasis added), lamenting the untold cruelties daily faced in the West Indies by “thousands of my brother Moors” who were regularly brutalized under the dehumanizing “yoke” of slavery (1.97). Sancho also spoke with vehemence against those who cruelly exploited domestic animals, articulating an especial abhorrence for the common abuse of asses (which he singled out in part due to their association with Jesus in the New Testament). In a remarkable letter dated 25 August 1777, he expressed his concerns in the most forthright terms. The letter, addressed to an unnamed journalist at the Morning Post – and tellingly entitled “jack-asses” – is well worth quoting at length: My gall has been plentifully stirred – by the barbarity of a set of gentry, who every morning offend my feelings – in their cruel parade through Charles Street to and from market – they vend potatoes in the day – and thieve in the night season. – A tall lazy villain was bestriding his poor beast (although loaded with two panniers of potatoes at the same time) and another of his companions, was good-naturedly employed in whipping the poor sinking animal – that the gentleman-rider might enjoy the twofold pleasure of blasphemy and cruelty – this is a too common evil – and, for the honor of rationality, calls loudly for redress. – I do believe it might be in some measure amended – either by a hint in the papers, of the utility of impressing such vagrants for the king’s service – or by laying a heavy tax upon the poor Jack-asses – I prefer the former, both for thy sake and mine; –

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and, as I am convinced we feel instinctively the injuries of our fellow creatures, I do insist upon your exercising your talents in behalf of the honest sufferers. – I ever had a kind of sympathetic (call it what you please) for that animal – and do I not love you? (1782, 1.133–4; Sancho’s italics) If we consider the ass’s overall status in this passage, we must note at least some ambivalence: Although he considers such animals his “fellow creatures,” Sancho defends them from human acts of cruelty by calling their abusers by their own name – “Jack-asses.”5 Moreover, he arguably demonstrates some degree of compassion for the human villains of his narrative by calling them “poor Jackasses” (emphasis added), thereby suggesting a possible causal basis for their cruel behaviour in the economic inequities of the day. Aside from these sorts of social concern (which I will consider in detail later in this chapter), the rhetorical aim of Sancho’s letter is not in doubt. Considering animal abuse an affront to humanity, Sancho asserts that this “too common evil” must be halted both “for the honor of rationality” and because “we feel instinctively the injuries of our fellow creatures.” In an era that located human morality in both rationality and feeling, Sancho’s critique is a thoroughgoing one indeed. Remarkably, Sancho finishes his letter by making a figurative ass of himself: When he asks his correspondent at the Morning Post to write “a bitter Phillipick against the misusers of Jack-asses,” he promises upon its publication to “bray – bray my thanks to you” (1.135). Although he offers this remark in a spirit of good humour, Sancho’s ultimate message is serious. As far as he is concerned, animal abusers – and, implicitly, anyone who abuses a “fellow creature” – should be punished for their crimes by being forcibly “impress[ed] … for the king’s service” (1.134), that is, by being compelled to experience the abuse and degradation that they so freely mete out to others. Sancho’s willingness to “bray” on behalf of abused asses suggests that he identifies almost as closely with these creatures as he does with his “brother Moors,” who also experience the “yoke” of enforced labour (1.97). Though seemingly eccentric, Sancho’s proposed braying in fact recalls an oddly venerable practice associated with the medieval Feast of the Ass. Part of “the rebellious counter tradition” of “the

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encomium asini” (Marcus 1975, 224), this widely celebrated feast involved a ritualistic inversion of the established ecclesiastical hierarchy, temporarily deposing bishops and priests and replacing them in the pulpit with lowly choirboys and lesser members of the clergy (225). Leah Sinanoglou Marcus notes that as part of this seriocomic festivity a “mass was sung in which Introit, Kyrie, Gloria and Credo each ended with a bray. The rubrics direct that instead of closing with ‘Ite missa est,’ the celebrant was to bray thrice, and the congregation of self-appointed asses to reply in kind” (226). Ultimately, the Feast of the Ass paid ritual homage to humility and meekness, its braying celebrants identifying closely with the animal thought to symbolize these important Christian virtues. Although the Feast of the Ass died out with the advent of the Renaissance, its symbolism survived intact into the eighteenth century and beyond, subtly informing Sancho’s discussion. Like his medieval precursors, Sancho humbles himself as he promises to bray, momentarily trading his lofty human identity for that of a “lowly” ass. Undoubtedly, Sancho pokes fun at himself; however, this carnivalesque inversion of the established human/animal dichotomy also poses a serious challenge to an anthropocentric social order that takes pride in its authority. In this way, Sancho challenges the system of hierarchy that provided a structural basis for the oppression of slaves and other groups deemed to occupy the “lower” echelons of the cosmic social order. What marks Sancho’s discourse as distinctively modern, however, is his championing not only of the human virtues that the ass conventionally signifies but also his overt concern for the welfare of the animal itself. More than merely an anthropomorphic figure for human virtue, Sancho’s ass is entitled to respectful treatment on its own account. Although he opposes the slave trade and occasionally signs his name “Africanus” – a term Linnaeus used to designate one of the four major classifications of the species “Homo” – Sancho had not himself experienced the actual “yoke” of West Indian slavery except as a very young child who would likely have retained little if any memory of the experience. Perhaps this is why he is able to correlate the mistreatment of slaves and asses in a manner not devoid of humour. Other London blacks understandably adopted a far different tone when considering this topic. Cugoano, for example, saw nothing at all humorous about the common mistreatment of slaves

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and domestic animals. For while both are “dealt with as their capricious owners may think fit, even in torturing them and tearing them to pieces, and wearing them out with hard labour, hunger and oppression,” there are a couple of crucial differences that he would have his readers bear in mind. In an era that witnessed simultaneous movements to end the cruel practices of human slavery and animal abuse, Cugoano would, I believe, have attributed a far greater urgency to anti-slavery activism. Noting indeed that the world’s domestic and wild animals often “fare better than man, and [that] some dogs … refuse the crumbs that the distressed poor would be glad of” (Cugoano 1787, 17; emphasis added), he offers a critique of Western sensibility that still resonates today.

i v. c o n c e p t s o f c o m m u n i t y a n d e x c l u s i o n By emphasizing that abused animals were often better treated than human slaves, Cugoano’s narrative might well have shamed middleclass sentimentalists and advocates of animal welfare into sympathizing more urgently with the abolitionist cause. And yet, some of his subsequent remarks suggest that ultimately, at least, he would not necessarily have seen anti-slavery activism and animal rights activism as mutually exclusive. For although he believed that “the nature and situation of man is far superior to that of beasts” (1787, 17–18), Cugoano also asserted that “every thing should be so managed, as to be conducive to the moral, temporal and eternal welfare of every individual from the lowest degree to the highest; and the consequence of this would be, the harmony, happiness and good prosperity of the whole community” (18; emphasis added). While his most urgent concern is to address inequities existing in the whole human community, his subsequent use of the term “degree,” only three pages later, to characterize the hierarchal distinction between brutes and humans on the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being suggests that the “whole community” to which he refers will, in the final analysis, include all of God’s creatures. For Cugoano, it would seem, the rectification of injustices in the human world should take priority over, and be a necessary prerequisite to, the pursuit of a more inclusive rights agenda embracing animals as well. In Coleridge’s “To a Young Ass,” the idea of a community of earthly beings finds its equivalent when the speaker says:

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Innocent foal! thou poor despis’d forlorn! I hail thee Brother – spite of the fool’s scorn! And fain would take thee with me, in the Dell Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell. (lines 25–8) Knowing full well that he will be ridiculed for calling the young ass “Brother,” Coleridge nevertheless draws our attention to this assertion not only by italicizing the word but also by ending the sentence in which it appears with an exclamation point. As Kurt Fosso has suggested, such rhetorical tactics serve to emphasize the “revolutionary significance” of Coleridge’s deployment of the republican ideal of fraternité or social inclusion (1999, 5). Undoubtedly, Coleridge was aware of the frequency with which abolitionists “based their arguments on appeals to brotherhood” (Oldfield 2002, 133). It makes sense, moreover, that the poet who would go on to advocate a holistic concept of “the one Life within us and abroad” (“The Eolian Harp” line 26) would wish to include an ass – and every other living being – in his extended family. By acknowledging the familial bond we share with all living creatures, we would, according to Coleridge’s idealistic vision, come to reject the hierarchical logic informing the age-old ideology of “dominion,” thus putting an end to the oppressive practices such ideology supports. The result would be momentous, transforming a world of violence and inequity into one of “Peace and mild Equality” and thereby ushering in a Pantisocratic golden age. Given his expansive ideal of social inclusion – an ideal recalling Sancho’s emphatic characterization of animals as “our fellow creatures” [1782, 1.134]) – it is perhaps not surprising that Coleridge extends his familial sympathy not just to oppressed beings of all kinds but also, in a qualified sense, to their oppressors. The following passage provides a case in point: Poor Ass! thy master should have learnt to show Pity – best taught by fellowship of Woe! For much I fear me that He lives like thee, Half famish’d in a land of Luxury! (lines 19–22) To appreciate the significance of these lines, one should note that most advocates for the prevention of cruelty to animals claimed

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that animal abuse, like slavery, “brutalized” the abuser by hardening the heart. Among those who shared this sentiment was Robert Southey. In his 1799 poem “The Dancing Bear,” which his subtitle “Recommended to the Advocates for the Slave Trade,” Southey indicts the practice of bear baiting, claiming among other things that the bear and the “mob” for which it performs share some common characteristics. Southey writes: [T]he mob With noisy merriment mock his heavy pace, And laugh to see him led by the nose! ... themselves Led by the nose, embruted, and in the eye Of Reason from their Nature’s purposes As miserably perverted. (Southey 1815, 2.101; lines 11–16) In “To a Young Ass,” Coleridge’s stated “fear” that the abusive master “lives like” his abused brute suggests that the poet shares Southey’s view that animal abuse “embrutes” the human abuser;6 however, the sympathy that Coleridge subsequently expresses for the master’s own “Half famish’d” condition indicates a conviction that the cruel master has himself been “brutalized” by poverty, that the cause of his violent behaviour is first and foremost social, having its roots in severe economic inequity (Fosso 1999, 5). As Coleridge asked in a relevant lecture, “can we wonder that men should want humanity, who want all the circumstances of life that humanize? Can we wonder that with the ignorance of Brutes they should unite their ferocity?” (qtd. in Kenyon-Jones 2001, 69–70). As noted previously, Sancho anticipated Coleridge’s class critique by referring to otherwise detested animal abusers as “poor Jackasses,” indicting their lack of humanity while simultaneously expressing a degree of sympathetic concern for the relative poverty in which these lower-class merchants lived. In “To a Young Ass,” Coleridge proposes a characteristically idealistic resolution to this state of affairs. By striving to enact the liberal ideal of “Equality” and thus bridge the gulf separating famine from “Luxury” (lines 28, 22), he argues, a reformed society would ensure every person a dignified place in the larger human family (or what French republicans, using the era’s gendered language, called the social “fraternité”). If abject poverty functions to “brutalize” its victims by denying them access to “the circumstances of life that humanize,” in other words, the

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master’s ameliorated condition would rehumanize him, thus rendering his treatment of others – including his working animals – more humane. While Coleridge’s rhetoric reinscribes the human/animal binary opposition that his use of the word “Brother” implicitly seeks to dismantle, it nevertheless suggests that the limit separating humans from animals is permeable rather than absolute. One is reminded here of Primatt’s assertion that humans are “animals in the shape of men” (Primatt 1992, 22–3). Such logic tends to blur the human/ animal binary opposition as part of a strategy aimed at promoting the conceptual elevation of animals (thereby granting them a measure of respect usually reserved only for humans). Because the theriomorphic representation of slave owners as inhumane brutes provided writers of the Black Atlantic with a highly effective response to the rhetorical and literal brutalization of slaves, however, one rarely encounters the use of such deconstructive logic in abolitionist discourse. To quote Mary Prince’s editor Thomas Pringle, “Slavery is a curse to the oppressor scarcely less than to the oppressed: its natural tendency is to brutalize both” (Pringle 1831, 37). Concerned to combat “the dehumanizing effects of slavery” (39), Pringle and his fellow abolitionists needed to maintain a hard and fast human/animal distinction. Arguably, in its use of deconstructive tactics, romantic-era animal rights discourse rested upon a presupposition unavailable to the abolitionist: that humans are generally accorded rights and dignities denied to animals. (In the age of slavery, of course, only those who already enjoyed full human rights and their attendant dignities could afford to question the human/ animal distinction.) The grim conditions under which enslaved people lived and laboured certainly brought this assumption into question. For this reason alone one might better appreciate the argument (implicit, as I’ve argued, in Cugoano’s writing) that the abolition of slavery was a necessary prerequisite to the abolition of cruelty to animals. Despite this signal difference between late eighteenth-century abolitionist and animal rights discourses, their spokespersons certainly agreed that the polemical representation of abusive humans as “brutes” was a potent rhetorical strategy. But in considering the master’s status in Coleridge’s poem as “Half-famish’d,” we must make a crucial distinction when we move from the literal to the allegorical levels of reading; for if we focus on the poem’s allegorical abolitionist concerns rather than on

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its literal animal rights agenda, Coleridge’s discourse on the “master” undergoes an important critical shift. Since West Indian and American plantation owners tended to amass substantial wealth from the labour of their human slaves, the slave master’s “Halffamish’d” status must be understood to signify not literal or economic poverty but a figuratively impoverished moral condition that afflicts all those who enjoy the economic benefits of an inequitable “land of Luxury.” Deliberately withholding life’s bare necessities – proper food, shelter, and dignity – from those whom he has enslaved, the slave driver can only be seen as morally and spiritually “famish’d.” Since he fails, in other words, “to show / Pity” (lines 19–20) for his fellow human beings, he creates a world in which the bonds of familial sympathy are rent asunder. Violating the “golden rule” of reciprocal care so often invoked by both abolitionists and animal rights activists, the slaver’s behaviour bars him from the expansive community Coleridge idealized in his use of the word “Brother” (line 26); for there can be no room for unreformed agents of violence and oppression in the Pantisocratic “Dell / Of Peace and mild Equality” (lines 27–8). Cugoano would certainly have agreed with this aspect of Coleridge’s allegorical argument (if not with his allegorical method). As he states near the beginning of Thoughts and Sentiments, “when I meet with those who make no scruple to deal with the human species, as with the beasts of the earth, I must think them not only brutish, but wicked and base” (Cugoano 1787, 5). Like Coleridge, who bars agents of oppression from entry to his imagined earthly paradise, Cugoano expresses confidence that the “wicked and base” slaver will ultimately find the gates of heaven barred against his entry. The social inequities that Coleridge considers in his poem – emphasized by the appalling existence of famine “in a land of Luxury” – were commonly decried in contemporary discourses on both animal rights and anti-slavery activism. Once again, Coleridge’s poem is best understood in light of each of these modes of discourse. Consider the following lines, in which the poet writes of the young foal’s mother: And truly, very piteous is her lot – Chain’d to a log within a narrow spot, Where the close-eaten grass is scarcely seen, While sweet around her waves the tempting green! (lines 15–18)

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The most likely intertext for these lines is a Biblical imperative from Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn” (Deut. 25.4). According to contemporary animal rights activist William Drummond, this Biblical passage calls for a literal interpretation: “It would be cruel,” he remarks, “to tantalize the patient steer with the sight of a favourite food, which he was hindered by an unnatural species of prevention from tasting, in the very midst of the plenty which he was preparing for the use of his master” (Drummond 1838, 11–12). Thomas Young, another outspoken advocate for the prevention of cruelty to animals, concurred with this literalist approach to the passage’s exegesis, but he expanded the referent for Deuteronomy’s ox to encompass labouring animals in general. As Young would have it, the passage serves to remind “the husbandman that he ought to permit his horse, his ox, and his ass, to share with him, in a reasonable proportion, those blessings which their honest and patient service contributes to procure him in such abundant plenty” (Young 1798, 22; emphasis added). Clearly, the “Half famish’d” ass of Coleridge’s poem, tied as it is just beyond reach of the “tempting green” and thus receiving only a “starving meal,” has been cruelly denied a share in the sustenance that Coleridge sees as the just reward of its “patient Merit” (lines 22, 18, 11, 12). If this scenario of animal abuse is not appalling enough, how much more disturbing might it be to consider it as an allegory of human oppression? The question merits asking, not least because the intertext from Deuteronomy lends itself to more than a literalist mode of interpretation. Consider, for example, a related discussion of early nineteenth-century German forest laws written by Francis Bond Head (a minor Romantic author-cum-colonial official whose writings will loom large in Chapter Seven). According to his account, members of the local peasantry in Germany’s Duchy of Nassau could be severely fined for procuring any productions of the woods for their own comfort or sustenance. Invoking Deuteronomy for the purposes of social critique, Head – whose writings Coleridge is said to have admired (Fairford 1836, 17) – wrote that the more he considered the region’s natural beauty and bounty, “the more difficult did I find it to forget the abject poverty of two or three poor families which were inhabiting this smiling valley; and (on the principle of not muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn) it certainly did seem to me [to be a] hard [circumstance]” (Head 1834,

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246). Cruel as it is, the treatment of these German peasants paled in comparison to the hardships suffered by African plantation slaves who harvested the abundant sugar cane that enriched their West Indian masters and the larger colonial economy. As Cugoano pointed out, when slaves were caught eating even a single “piece of sugarcane, some were cruelly lashed, or struck over the face to knock their teeth out,” an assault perpetrated “to deter others, and to prevent them from eating any cane in future” (Cugoano 1787, 11). With their teeth knocked out, these slaves would have had difficulty consuming even the “starving meal” to which Coleridge’s poem refers (line 11). Considered in light of Cugoano’s narrative, the human allegory informing “To a Young Ass” is troubling indeed. At the very least, a sense of dissonance between the poem’s literal and allegorical levels of reading becomes increasingly apparent, for while the story of animal abuse may inspire the reader’s “Pity,” the allegory of slavery elicits rather a sense of horror.

v. c o n t e m p o r a r y r e s p o n s e s and conclusions Despite its moral seriousness, Coleridge’s poem inspired among many of its readers what it refers to as “the fool’s scorn” (line 26). For example, the political cartoonist James Gillray satirized Coleridge by depicting him as a human-donkey hybrid. Even more devastating was Byron’s response in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809): Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass The bard who soars to elegize an ass: So well the subject suits his noble mind, He brays the Laureat of the long-ear’d kind! (1980, lines 261–4) If one were to have asked Coleridge’s detractors one of the questions I posed at the outset – Is there an animal in Coleridge’s poem? – they would likely have responded in the affirmative, gleefully exclaiming “Yes, it is the poet himself – and he is an ass!” Such a response would of course draw upon the secular epithetical usage of “ass,” in which the word signifies not Christian virtue but “the type of clumsiness, ignorance, and stupidity” (oed). Semantics aside, what is perhaps most interesting about Gillray’s and Byron’s satirical

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responses is that they don’t seem to notice – or perhaps they deliberately ignore – Coleridge’s allegorical method of social critique. To be sure, the poet’s effort to combat the brutalization of slaves by allegorizing them as animals does seem contradictory at best and demeaning at worst. But perhaps this is precisely Coleridge’s point: by linking in a single poem issues of human and animal abuse, he directs our attention to human brutality, not the inherent animality that slave-trade apologists attributed to African peoples, but the inhumanity of ostensibly civilized Europeans who profited from a mercantile system that brutalized an entire “race” of fellow human beings. For better or worse, any effort to disconnect the poem’s literal concern for animal rights from its allegorical concern for the rights of slaves, to suggest that animal rights activism and questions of human social justice have no business being conjoined, would presuppose associating animal welfare activism with misanthropy and human rights activism with philanthropy. Although detractors of “To a Young Ass” might have argued otherwise, many of Coleridge’s contemporaries saw such logic as ultimately untenable, if only because of the commonalities informing all modes of oppression based on self-serving concepts of “dominion” and related models of hierarchy. This is why socially engaged and politically minded writers as diverse as Cowper, Blake, Wordsworth, and Southey could and did express concerns for animal welfare. Perhaps the contemporary thinker who most clearly appreciated the connections between racist and anthropocentric forms of violence was the liberal Christian philosopher Humphry Primatt. Almost two decades before Coleridge published “To a Young Ass,” Primatt argued that to justify the mistreatment of our fellow humans on the basis of skin colour indicated the presence not of reason but of misguided “custom and prejudice” (Primatt 1992, 22). Since our complexions are givens and not, in Western belief, the result of any previous merit, we simply cannot claim special priority over others on the basis of race; nor can we use this notion of priority to justify “tyranny and oppression” (ibid., 23). By the same logic, he claimed that it was unreasonable for humans to mistreat non-human creatures on the basis of mere differences in physical form. Indeed, as far as Primatt was concerned, to decry the inhumane treatment of marginalized humans without also opposing that of animals was rationally untenable and contradictory,

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for despite their important differences these modes of cruelty were products of the same arrogance. But many contemporary thinkers disapproved of such an expansive concept of ethical concern. As we have seen, for example, Ottobah Cugoano’s writing helps us to understand and appreciate an argument for the priority of anti-slavery over animal-rights activism, especially during an era in which at least one prominent advocate for the prevention of cruelty to animals – Thomas Lord Erskine – was said to have turned a blind eye to at least some of the horrors of West-Indian slavery (Hamilton 1885–1900, 436, 442).7 One should note, however, that during the same era some professed philanthropists criticized devoted abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson for indulging in a transcultural philanthropic practice – that is, for directing their attentions beyond England and focusing on the plight of West Indian slaves at a time when so many underclass British Caucasians lived in horrible conditions (see Oldfield 2002, 135). As this example suggests, the question of how to define the proper limits of ethical concern was relevant to activists working on behalf of human constituencies as well as on behalf of brutes. As Wilberforce noted, moreover, English activism, at least among those people of means who cared enough to practice it, had a peculiar way of finding new and wider constituencies. Commenting on “the general character of the people of this country” and “the unparalleled benevolence and liberality which are found among us,” Wilberforce observed “that not a new species of distress can be pointed out, but that almost immediately some meeting takes place, some society is formed, for preventing it” (Wilberforce 1811, 345). Although Wilberforce devoted the bulk of his early activist energy to the cause of anti-slavery – suggesting by example that English philanthropy needed to set proper priorities – his remarks concerning the expansion of English liberality indicate that, like Cugoano, he would not ultimately have set inviolable limits to the benevolent impulse. And why should the abolition of cruelty towards our fellow humans not ultimately lead to the abolition of cruelty in general? Is such an evolution in ethics implied by the fact that numerous Victorian animal rights societies (including the Society for the Abolition of Vivisection) adopted the term “abolition” to characterize their efforts to end cruelty to animals? Can we be surprised that in 1824 Wilberforce included himself among

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the founding members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals? (Bate 2000b, 177). Perhaps Wilberforce was aware that the setting of limits to English benevolence could ultimately harm the anti-slavery cause. After all, advocates for the slave trade engaged in precisely such an exercise, setting limits on ethical obligations in an attempt to refute principled anti-slavery arguments. Contemporary animal rights activist John Lamb (brother of Coleridge’s friend Charles Lamb) notes with some bitterness that naturalistic categories could function to constrain notions of morality by constructing boundaries beyond which concern could not “properly” venture. In speaking of our moral obligations to non-human creatures, Lamb writes: “It is a curious fancy of man, that moral duties are confinable to the classification of the naturalist. Buffon has done the negro the honour of introducing him into our section of the circle of justice, or he might be skinned alive like an eel … no wonder then [that] the idea of duty towards those decidedly not of our class [i.e., non-human animals] is ridiculed” (Lamb 1810, 13; emphasis added). Lamb was well aware of the ways in which arbitrarily limited concepts of human identity could function to oppress not only our fellow human beings but non-human creatures as well by placing strict boundaries on “the circle of justice,” or what John Oswald had earlier called the “circle of benevolence” (Oswald 1791, ii). Perhaps in attempting to resolve this problem one need not go quite as far as William Blake, who argued in Jerusalem that “every thing is Human” (1988, 180; 34.48), and in so doing expanded the ratio of this ethical circle outward towards an imaginative Infinity.8 One might instead embrace the more earthbound (and less anthropocentric) liberalism of Ignatius Sancho, who respected animals as “our fellow creatures”, or one might adopt the liberalism of Coleridge, whose republican idealism, like Sancho’s Christianity, included in its circle of fellowship even a humble ass. As Cugoano’s overall argument demonstrates, moreover, one may reasonably give strategic priority to anti-slavery activism without denying one’s ethical obligations toward the non-human world. Speaking of attitudes that characterize western postmodernity, environmental ethicist Peter Singer remarks in The Expanding Circle that in today’s world “[t]he idea of equal consideration for animals strikes many as bizarre, but perhaps [it is] no more bizarre than the idea of equal consideration for

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blacks seemed [to many white people] three hundred years ago” (Singer 1981, 121). This observation concerning the historical expansion of ethical concern is undoubtedly significant; but Singer’s accompanying notion that we are only now “witnessing the first stirrings of a momentous new stage in our moral thinking” (121) might be reconsidered in light of the fact that Romantic-era thinkers had already begun to pioneer such ethics over two centuries ago. The fact that Coleridge reprinted “To a Young Ass” in subsequent editions of his poetry suggests that his concern for animal welfare remained constant, despite the ridicule the poem had incited from unsympathetic readers like Byron and Gillray. In light of the poem’s anti-slavery allegory, however, it is important to note that Coleridge’s philosophy of race did undergo a disturbing change as time marched on. To be sure, as Nicholas Hudson and others have noted, it was not uncommon for late eighteenth-century abolitionists to adopt “a ‘racial’ outlook on non-Europeans” (Hudson 1996, 251),9 decrying slavery in the most vigorous terms while nevertheless upholding a taxonomical hierarchy of race in which African people were regarded as inferior to Caucasians. Coleridge’s assertion of “Black peoples’ human equality in the 1790s” is thus a testament to the radical nature of his early political thought; but as he responded to developments in so-called racial science in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he began to assert “the ‘fact’ of [African] inferiority” (Fulford, Lee, and Kitson 128). If he continued to conceive of animals as “Brothers,” or equal members, in nature’s gendered fraternité or family, by the 1820s his attitude toward non-white races had become decidedly condescending, causing him to advocate “a colonialist mission to ‘civilise’” the nonEuropean world (ibid.). Perhaps this shift in Coleridge’s attitude toward race was subtly anticipated in the allegorical argument informing “To a Young Ass,” where, as I have attempted to demonstrate, he paradoxically combats the brutalization of African people under the institution of slavery by allegorizing them in the figure of the humble “Foal of an oppressed race” (line 1) that cannot speak on its own behalf.

chapter five

Environmental Determinism and the Politics of Nature: William Richardson’s The Indians, A Tragedy We are fond of searching into remote Antiquity, to know the Manners of our earliest Progenitors; and, if I am not mistaken, the Indians are living Images of them. (Cadwallader Colden 1747, 1.liii)

i. prelude In the previous two chapters, I focused primarily upon the relationship between Romantic concepts of nature (including animality) and human slavery in order to consider some of the ways in which Green Romantic concerns are complicated by an engagement with transatlantic cultural politics. In this chapter, I shift my focus from the politics of the Middle Passage to the politics of Native America, for the colonial contexts of the latter, as noted in Chapters One and Two, share numerous similarities with those of the former. It is worth reminding readers that, in the wake of abolition, many anti-slavery activists redirected their philanthropic attentions towards the plight of Native Americans, forming groups like the Aborigines Protection Society (see Bourne 1899) as vehicles for intervention. But before considering such activism, and the role that indigenous people played in it, I will consider some key texts in order to gauge European literary-ethnographic responses to North American aboriginal culture. Because the Scottish Enlightenment played a major role in shaping these responses, I focus this chapter and the next one on works by two Scottish writers, William Richardson and Thomas Campbell, whose poetical representations of North American nature and Native American

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culture have much to teach us about the transatlantic contexts of modern ecological criticism. Although Thomas Campbell is sometimes thought to have “pioneered the application of poetic romance to Indian subjects” in his celebrated 1809 poem Gertrude of Wyoming (Fulford 1998a, 213), a highly fanciful “Indian romance” had in fact been penned decades earlier by the Scottish poet William Richardson, who called his subject matter “a novel Theme.”1 Set in “Ontario’s woody margin” at the end of the Seven Years’ War (II, 22), Richardson’s play The Indians, A Tragedy (1790) reflects its author’s abiding interest in Shakespearean romance, depicting an interracial love affair reminiscent of the one in Othello. As the author of some notable criticism on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, Richardson was well qualified to adapt tragic conventions to aboriginal subject matter. In the process of doing so, he offered an interesting perspective on late eighteenthcentury colonial and racial ideology. Unfortunately for Richardson, The Indians was not popular enough to sustain the attention of contemporary British audiences. After performances in Richmond and Dublin it was forgotten, and it has been consigned to obscurity ever since. Nowadays The Indians is worth investigating for a number of reasons. First of all, it is possible that Richardson’s writing exercised an early influence upon a better-known poet, Thomas Campbell, who was a student at the University of Glasgow during Richardson’s tenure there as Chair of Humanity (an appointment Richardson held from 1772 until 1814). It is not unlikely that Professor Richardson was an important figure in Campbell’s intellectual development. A man “of elegant accomplishments” (Hamilton 1827, 1.92), he presented Campbell with a coveted bursary for “construing and writing Latin,” and he wrote a “flattering inscription” on the prize volume that accompanied this award (W. Beattie 1849, 1.55–6). For a young man with Campbell’s prodigious talents and ambitions, this sort of attention from one of Glasgow’s most respected scholar-poets must have been gratifying, if not altogether head-turning. Given Campbell’s aspiration to pursue careers in both poetry and scholarship, one can assume that he had read his professor’s published works. Although Campbell does not directly cite Richardson’s poetry or criticism in Gertrude of Wyoming, his memoirs inform us that he was familiar with The Indians (Hill 1851, xvii), and his approach to the representation of indigenous subject matter suggests that Richardson

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exercised a subtle influence over his thinking. In addition to their use of the romance genre, both The Indians and Gertrude represent familial relationships between Indians and whites, both portray internecine conflicts between noble and ignoble “savages,” and both highlight sensational Indian “massacres” of supposedly virtuous white North American settlers. Richardson’s work is also worth studying for its own sake: bearing “plainly the marks of scholarship and criticism” (Hamilton 1827, 1.93), it offers numerous insights concerning Scottish Enlightenment concepts of aboriginal identity examined in Chapter One, including the determinist notion that Indians were veritable products of, and thralls to, an unruly wilderness environment – that they were, in other words, slaves of nature. The Indians also merits critical attention due to its detailed representation of the related belief that an impassable gulf separated “civilized” whites from their “savage” Indian counterparts. Because The Indians is all but unknown to modern readers, I will provide a brief history of its production and a sketch of its plot before analyzing the philosophical contexts informing its representations of North American nature and culture. Almost a decade before he wrote The Indians, A Tragedy, Richardson published a brief prose version of the work entitled “The Indians, a Tale,” which he added to the fourth edition of his Poems Chiefly Rural (1781). Evidence suggests that public response to this short story was promising: Richardson reprinted it in subsequent editions of his collected Poems, and he revised it extensively for stage performances in Richmond and Dublin in 1790. Set in “a forest and Indian village on the side of Lake Huron, in North America” (Richardson 1790, vi), The Indians, A Tragedy depicts the story of a troubled marriage between a young Huron sachem named Onaiyo and his English wife, Maraino, who had been adopted into the Huron nation as a young orphan and raised to adulthood as an Indian. During the course of the play, Richardson’s audience learns that Onaiyo and his warriors had allied themselves with the French in the Seven Years’ War and that, in a profound twist of fate, Maraino’s brother Sidney had vanquished Onaiyo in the British victory at Quebec only to spare his life in a humane act of cross-cultural sympathy. Mistakenly believing that Sidney had killed their sachem, however, the defeated Huron warriors take the valiant British soldier and several of his comrades captive, carrying

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them to their distant village to be tortured and sacrificed. It is here that Sidney and Maraino discover their shared familial history and resume their relationship as devoted siblings. Unfortunately, when Onaiyo returns to his village he comes under the manipulative influence of the duplicitous Yerdal, an Iago figure perversely bent on destroying his rival’s marital harmony. Advising Onaiyo to delay his marital reunion with the mourning Maraino (who would expire, Yerdal insists, from the sudden shock of joy at seeing him alive), the “venom’d reptile” (V.77) conceals the familial relationship between Maraino and Sidney, duping Onaiyo into believing that Sidney is in fact an amorous rival who has replaced him in his wife’s affections. A gullible Othello figure (whose name, with its opening and closing “O” syllables, chimes with that of Shakespeare’s Moor), the young warrior plans to exact vengeance on his Desdemona-like wife and her purported lover, but at the end of the play Yerdal’s deception is revealed and – contrary to The Indians’ titular designation as a tragedy – the play’s conflict is resolved in a peaceful denouement. Despite its obvious dramatic borrowings, Richardson’s play is more than merely a late eighteenth-century adaptation of Shakespearean forms, conventions, and interracial dynamics. As he works to resolve the play’s various conflicts, Richardson explores important questions of European and Native American identity, using the play as a vehicle for the philosophical analysis of transatlantic intercultural relations.

ii. environmental determinism In both versions of Richardson’s Indian romance, nature plays an important role in the delineation of aboriginal character. This correlation of nature and character is partly the product of Richardson’s dramaturgy, for in a work of literary criticism published in 1774, he advocated the view that in dramatic art “every passion [must] be naturally expressed” (1774, 26).2 Anticipating the British Romantic critique of neoclassical aesthetics, Richardson was to some extent merely emphasizing the need for playwrights to avoid artifice in the representation of character. But in The Indians, A Tragedy he naturalizes indigenous identity by linking the passions of his Indian characters directly to the wilderness setting itself. According to Richardson’s poetics, in short, Indian passions are expressions of the natural world, the changeable products of a changeable nature.

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Thus Indian peace and serenity coincide in the play with a “calm and placid … scene”; the “untroubled breast” corresponds with “the smooth bosom of th’ unruffled lake” (V.67); and rage and the lust for revenge are associated with the “Northern tempest” (IV.62). Introducing this poetic correlation of human passions and environmental conditions at the play’s outset, Richardson’s Prologue links the temperament of The Indians’ Huron characters directly to nature’s realm: “as [the Indians] range / The dreary wilderness, their passions change / Various and rapid as the gales that sweep / The bending forest, and convulse the deep” (iii). As indicated by the deployment of simile, these lines suggest that Indian passions are the unruly products of chaotic environmental influences. Since the Huron wilderness is a “dreary” one – not the soulelevating wilderness of the Burkean sublime – Richardson’s portrait here seems very much an indictment of Huron culture, conforming to William Robertson’s claim that the “powerful operation of climate is felt most sensibly by rude nations,” and that the Indian, “Like a plant, or an animal … is formed by the climate under which he is placed, and feels the full force of its influence (1777, 2.169). Interestingly, the play’s aboriginal characters don’t consistently support the environmental-determinist philosophy articulated in the Prologue. Indeed the only Indian whose speech and character lends credence to such determinism is the villainous Yerdal. When the Hurons come to punish Sidney (whom Yerdal has falsely accused of Onaiyo’s murder), Maraino begs Yerdal to inform them of their error. But Yerdal responds: It were in vain: you might as soon command The Northern tempest, when he plows our lake Down to its nethermost abyss, to rein His fury and be calm: as quell their rage Rous’d even to frenzy. (IV.62) Comparing his countrymen’s behaviour to the most ungovernable aspects of nature, Yerdal’s words clearly suggest the futility of intervention on Sidney’s behalf. And yet his assertion cannot be trusted; in the duplicitous discourse of this Iago-like character words and reality rarely coincide. One should note also that Yerdal’s scheming accomplice, the medicine man Neidan, also associates his fellow Indians with an unruly natural world, calling them “Shifting and

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changful [sic], as the flitting breeze” (IV.52), the North American wind whose unpredictable changes Robertson characterized as “no less violent than sudden” (1777, 2.8; Robertson’s emphasis). Not all of the play’s Indian characters associate Indian behaviour with an ungovernable natural world. For an alternative perspective on the relationship between the wilderness and aboriginal identity, one must look to Richardson’s earlier prose rendition of the same scene. Explaining his people’s desire for violent retribution against Sidney for the supposed slaying of Onaiyo, the Huron elder Ononthio deploys the language of nature, but his correlation of natural and cultural impulses is subject to rational limits: “‘Judge not unfavourably of my nation,’ said he, ‘from this instance of impetuosity. They follow the immediate impulse of nature, and are often extravagant. But the vehemence of passion will soon abate, and reason will resume her authority. You see nature unrestrained, but not perverted; luxuriant, but not corrupt. My brethren are wrathful; but to latent or lasting enmity they are utter strangers’” (Richardson 1781, 200; emphasis added). As in the Romantic formula that Wordsworth would later articulate, Ononthio’s Indians, like poets, are subject to powerful and spontaneous emotions during a provocative situation, but such emotions give way to a spirit of relative tranquility as experience becomes subject to thoughtful reflection. According to Ononthio, in other words, the Indians are influenced by the “immediate impulse” of an unruly nature, but they are in the final analysis subject – like their European counterparts – to the governance or “authority” of reason, which functions to restrain natural passions. Ononthio’s explanation of the Huron sensibility offers an antidote to the rigid determinism articulated in the play’s Prologue and by the duplicitous Yerdal. In revising his romance for the stage, however, Richardson maintained the poetics of environmental determinism while placing far less emphasis upon the “reasonable,” self-governing aspect of Huron character. In The Indians: A Tragedy we are simply told that the Indians’ “wrath / Is like the rushing of a mountain blast, / Sudden but soon appeas’d” (III.39–40). Here Richardson’s passive use of the verb “appeas’d” suggests a mere “weather change” in human attitudes: just as storms come and go, so do human passions arise and vanish. Despite important differences between the prose and dramatic versions of his story, the environmental determinism informing

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Richardson’s writing is generally consistent with the Scottish Enlightenment notion that a people’s degree of “civilization” is determined by its mode of subsistence. According to this model of human natural history (discussed in detail in Chapter One), all societies practice the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence in the early stages of their history but gain an increasing degree of civilization and refinement as they evolve through the respective stages of herding, farming, and, finally, commerce. This stadial theory of cultural development (sometimes known as the “four-stages theory”) informed John Locke’s assertion that “In the beginning all the world was America” (qtd. in Meek 1976, 37), while also providing the basis for Robertson’s claim that Native Americans lived in a “state of primeval simplicity” belonging to “the infancy of social life” (1777, 2.36). Since the “primitiveness” of indigenous Americans was understood as an attribute of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, it is no wonder that efforts to “civilize” First Peoples commonly emphasized the need to convert them to an agricultural way of life. In The Indians Richardson effaced the historical reality of Huron agrarian practice in order to emphasize a stereotype of aboriginal savagery correlating Indian “wildness” with the North American wilderness. In other words, Richardson represents the “wildness” of his Native American characters as a causal attribute of the wilderness environment and the modes of subsistence such an environmental context necessitated. Consider once again the telling differences between the two versions of Richardson’s tale. In the prose version Richardson represented the “young men of the [Huron] nation” as hunters “usually engaged in the chace,” but he also noted with historical accuracy that the women and elder men “improved some adjacent fields for the culture of maize and other salutary plants” (1781, 182). In the dramatic adaptation, however, he chose to remove all references to Huron cultivation, representing their subsistence as follows: Their drink, the stream that from the fountain flows: Their food, the wild-fruit that in autumn glows No other viands load their simple board Than what the chace, or what their lakes afford. (1790, iii) By revising his original representation of Huron practices, Richardson makes his drama conform to the claim that Native Americans

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generally “enjoy[ed] in common the blessings which flowed spontaneously from the bounty of nature” (Robertson 1777, 2.37); in doing so, he bars his Indian characters from entrance to the “improved” state of agriculture. As a result, he can refer to them simply and stereotypically as “children of the wild, the froward brood / Of nature” – “an artless and uncultur’d race” (1790, ii) – without contradicting the stadial theory of cultural development advocated by many of his Scottish Enlightenment peers. This deliberate misrepresentation of the Hurons, whose agricultural practices were well known to Europeans,3 serves to heighten the contrast between his British and Huron characters, and so is likely a product of the playwright’s desire for increased dramatic effect. Thus Richardson could construct the Huron people’s interaction with the British soldier Sidney as a clash between nature and culture. But the effacement of Huron cultivation is also the product of a desired ethnological generalization: although Richardson sets his drama “on the side of Lake Huron” (vi) and identifies his aboriginal characters late in the play as Hurons, he refers to them at the outset as “Indians of North America” (i), thereby specifying their function as representatives of a generic “savagery.” In a play entitled The Indians, Richardson clearly did not want his audience to consider subtle distinctions between agricultural and non-agricultural indigenous societies. As suggested by the distinction drawn between aboriginal villainy and virtue, however, Richardson did not necessarily equate the hunter-gatherer “stage” with any identifiable moral failing. Indeed, the antagonistic malice and treachery we witness in Yerdal’s and Neidan’s characters are exceptional in The Indians, being very much at odds with the virtuous traits associated with Huron protagonists like Onaiyo and Ononthio. Predictably, Richardson’s Indian antagonists are degenerate savages bent on murder and mayhem, while his protagonists are noble in character, exhibiting values and behaviors not at odds with the ideals of Christian morality or Enlightenment ethics. Between these opposed groups of politically influential Huron characters lie the remaining members of the tribe, an anonymous and nondescript aggregation of warriors and hunter-gatherers whose constituent members oscillate in their loyalties, thereby lending credence to Neidan’s assertion that the Indians are “Shifting and changful [sic], as the flitting breeze” (IV.52). Since Sidney’s fate hangs in the balance, much of the play’s dramatic tension hinges on the final outcome of this shifting and changeful positioning. Which side, the

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audience is led to wonder, will the mob embrace: the noble savagery associated with its established leaders or the ignoble savagery of the play’s would-be usurpers? The final outcome – seemingly predetermined by Richardson’s designation of the play as a tragedy – would certainly reveal the playwright’s position on the Indians’ overall moral status.

iii. dramatic conflict: n o b l e v e r s u s i g n o b l e s av a g e ry In the prose version of his narrative Richardson’s position on aboriginal morality is clear: he devotes much ink to the celebration of Indian virtue, offering an early and detailed articulation of the noble savage paradigm. As is the case in many Romantic representations of Native American peoples, however, there is evidence that Richardson’s primitivism was not motivated by a desire to represent the Indians for their own sakes, but to criticize social conditions in the European world. The Indians, he writes, “lived innocent and happy. As they had no particular property, they were untainted with the love of wealth, that bane of social felicity, that poison of the heart. As they possessed every thing in common, they knew not the pangs of avarice, nor the torment of apprehended poverty. No sort of consequence was conferred by riches, and they were innocent of guile, perfidy and oppression” (Richardson 1781, 184).4 This rejection of “particular property” and its avaricious consequences in favour of a communal mode of social organization serves as an indictment of European moral values and social practices. But although Richardson’s critique concomitantly functions as an encomium to Native Americans and their way of life, it carries more ominous implications as well, for the notion that Indians embraced no concept of private property was often invoked to justify European expropriation of aboriginal territories. For this reason, the Ojibwa author Kahgegagahbowh or George Copway (whose writings I address in detail in Chapter Seven) would insist that Ontario’s native peoples did indeed acknowledge individual ownership both of the land and of its natural productions (Copway 1850b, 17–18).5 In “The Indians, A Tale” Richardson’s critique of private or “particular property” finds its champion in Onaiyo’s wife Maraino, whose blue eyes and “snowy” arms reveal her racial background in the narrative’s opening paragraph (1781, 175). Maraino vividly

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remembers the violent events of her childhood abduction when “the Outagami ravaged our land, and carried terror to the gates of Albany” (177). But despite these painful memories, she is not only reconciled to her adopted Indian lifestyle; as a mature adult she manifests no desire whatsoever to re-embrace her European identity and its associated values. Thus she declares: “I have heard of European refinements, of costly raiment and lofty palaces; yet to me the simplicity of these rocks and forests seems far more delightful” (179). Her brother Sidney however – despite his awareness of European shortcomings – remains unconvinced. When Ononthio generously offers to adopt him into the Huron nation, Sidney demurs, imperiously asserting that he “cannot allow that the uncivilized life of an Indian is preferable to the culture and refinement of Europe” (194; emphasis added). At this point in his narrative, Richardson puts his Romantic critique of European culture into the mouth of the venerable Huron elder, Ononthio, who responds to Sidney’s assertion with a series of hard-hitting rhetorical questions: “Away with your culture and refinement,” said Ononthio, “Do they invigorate the soul, and render you intrepid? Do they enable you to despise pain and acquiesce in the will of heaven? Do they inspire you with patience, resignation and fortitude? No! They unnerve the soul. They render you feeble, plaintive, and unhappy. Do they give health and firmness? Do they enable you to restrain and subdue your appetites? No! they promote intemperance and mental anarchy. They give loose reins to disorder. The parents of discontent and disease! Away with your culture and refinement! Do they better the heart or improve the affections? The heart despises them. Her affections arise spontaneous. They require no culture. […] Away with your refinement! enjoy the freedom and simplicity of nature. Be guiltless – Be an Indian.” (194–5) Clearly, for Ononthio, the Huron warrior’s courage and stoicism are expressions of the loftiest human virtue. From the primitivist perspective he articulates, “culture and refinement” are to be shunned, because they unman the warrior, destroying his ability to “despise pain,” “restrain and subdue [his] appetites,” and face his fate in a stoical spirit of “patience, resignation and fortitude.” As far as Ononthio is concerned, the “mental anarchy” attendant

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upon European cultural refinement is problematic as well, for it promotes “disorder”, the antithesis of military discipline. As a man of war who scorns his would-be Huron torturers, taking pride in his own ability to endure and even despise pain, Sidney would have reason to appreciate the Huron elder’s discourse on military virtue. And yet, since Richardson’s narrative also links native warfare with the most outrageous forms of human cruelty – including the massacre of peaceful settlers and the ruthless torture of virtuous Britons like Sidney himself – Ononthio’s discourse remains open to contestation. In an effort, perhaps, to address this problem, Richardson makes the Huron elder a spokesman not only for explicitly martial values but for Romantic concepts of virtue and savage nobility as well. Indeed, as a counterpoint to the progressivism that informs other aspects of the tale, Ononthio’s critique of European “culture and refinement” carries many of the hallmarks of Romantic primitivism: an implicit privileging of affections over rational activity and spontaneity over prudential forethought, and an abhorrence of artificiality in manners and demeanour: in general, a preference for “nature” over “culture.” Indeed, Ononthio’s closing imperative – “Be guiltless – Be an Indian” (195)6 – implies without subtlety that the Europeans are the ones who have much to atone for, that their cultural “refinements” have been acquired at the expense of innocence and virtue. To Ononthio, cultural refinement and moral “guilt” are of a piece. But this critique of British colonial morality is often unsettled by events that occur as the narrative’s plot unfolds, reinforcing the idea, already implicit in the above-mentioned correlation of military and moral values, that Richardson’s Indians do not comfortably conform to the idealized stereotype of the noble savage. For example, after providing a full page of commentary concerning the virtuous innocence of his Indians (184) – who are immune, it seems, to such European faults as avarice, vanity, ambition, envy, superciliousness, and pedantry – Richardson quite suddenly introduces into his narrative a scene in which Ononthio’s people prepare to execute their British prisoners: “[T]he boiling caldron into which the victims, after suffering every species of torment, were to be precipitated, was suspended over a raging fire; the knives, tomahauks, and other implements of cruelty, were exhibited in dreadful array; and the prisoners, loaded with heavy fetters, were conducted to the place of sacrifice” (185). Although the comedic trajectory of plot in

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both the “Tale” and the misnamed Tragedy ultimately functions to spare Sidney and his men from experiencing the horrors foreshadowed in this passage, the narrative’s dramatic adaptation nonetheless offers its audience a verbal description of intended violence that is graphic in its immediacy, for here a minor character introduced only as the “Second Indian” sings of the fate that ostensibly awaits Sidney and his military comrades: By your melancholy groans Mangled carcases and bones, That besmear’d with recent gore, Lie on Hoshelega’s shore, Disembodied spirits come And enjoy the victim’s doom. (1790, III.36) Undoubtedly, Richardson hoped in such passages to exploit the British public’s fascination for representations of Native American torture rituals, which “were shocking enough to be saleable” (Fulford 2006, 52). But one should note right away that the above-quoted passage is as much an indictment of colonial military violence as it is of alleged Huron practices; for, as a result of Richardson’s ambiguous syntax, the “Mangled carcases and bones” can refer not only to British victims of Indian torture but also to Huron warriors who were cruelly slain by British soldiers during the Seven Years’ War: warriors whose “Disembodied spirits” now seek justice in a spectacle of violent revenge, where the price is an eye for an eye. While Richardson’s grammatical ambiguity does not absolve his Huron characters of the guilt associated with the practice of torture, it does not let the British off the hook either. Ultimately, Richardson’s play makes it difficult to differentiate protagonists from antagonists on the basis of race or nationality. To be sure, the play occasionally aligns its “noble” Huron savages with European cultural practices, suggesting in the process that European ways are better than Native American ways. The most blatant example of this tendency occurs in the characterization of the virtuous Maraino, Sidney’s sister, whose name, echoing “Mary,” carries rather obvious connotations of moral purity. But even the full-blooded Huron elder Ononthio, whose “deeds of kindness” are the outward expressions of a “spotless heart / Harbour[ing] no

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impious, nor inhuman wish” (I.8–9), seems to some extent a natural European. The culturally doubled aspect of his characterization is implied by his very name, which though signifying “Chieftain” in early French renderings of the Nez Percé language, had been appropriated (as Richardson no doubt knew from his readings of Jesuit narratives) by early French colonists to name, and indigenize the authority of, Québec’s royal governor Pierre le Voyer (see Castillo 2006, 168–70). Ononthio’s alignment with European moral ideals is implied in the prose version of the story, where Richardson associates the elder’s wisdom, temperance, and humanity with his belief in the existence of one god, the singular “father and governor of all things” (1781, 176), a representation consistent with Richardson’s claim in an essay on Ossian that “Mankind, in the earliest periods of human society, were acquainted with the doctrines of true religion” (1807, 411). In the final act of the dramatic version, Richardson chooses to Christianize Ononthio explicitly, representing his piety not in terms of cultural primitivism and natural religion but as a direct consequence of prior contact with “strangers, both from Britain and from Gaul,” and, for good measure, having Sidney declare the sachem’s outright familiarity with “the belief / Profes’d in Christendom” (1790, V.70). According to the ignoble shaman Neidan and his supporters, however, Ononthio’s Christian values and behaviours are modes of cultural treachery, providing a clear indication that the old sachem “Prefers the modes of Europe; [and] would establish / Strange artificial customs, and annul / The laws of our forefathers” (III.45). Although Neidan is a villain whose motives, like Yerdal’s, are highly questionable, there is undoubtedly a grain of truth in his accusation; for it is Ononthio who strives to prevent Sidney’s torture – one of the “rites of [Huron] religion” (ibid.) – on what are basically Christian grounds. Because he is subject to conflicting emotions, Onaiyo has a more complex makeup than his virtuous father Ononthio or his villainous rivals Neidan and Yerdal. Like his father, Onaiyo is a noble savage who tends to prefer “the modes of Europe” to the established customs of his own people. According to Maraino, indeed, Onaiyo’s virtue is evident in the fact that he resembles her brother Sidney rather than an Indian savage (III.43). Responding to the racist alarm that Sidney articulates upon first learning of her marriage to “An Indian!” (III.43), Maraino defends her Huron husband’s character thus:

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Would you think it? I’ve seen him weep for me, and his cheek glow With indignation of the grievous wrongs My infancy had suffer’d. O he is A gallant youth; valiant, but very gentle – If you but knew him! knew his nature! Indeed, my brother, he resembles thee! (III.43) In this passage, Maraino paints her Huron husband as a contemporary “man of feeling” whose military courage and gallantry are balanced by his sympathetic ability to feel deeply, indeed even to weep for the suffering of others. Despite these highly refined characteristics, however, the sheer intensity of Onaiyo’s jealousy over Sidney’s supposed love affair with Maraino suggests that a certain barbarism lurks at the heart of his otherwise virtuous being. Indeed, when Yerdal and Neidan deceive him with tales of his wife’s infidelity and elopement, he becomes uncontrollably angry and vengeful – not unlike the hapless Othello under the influence of Iago’s machinations. Taking advantage of Onaiyo’s unchecked passion, Yerdal advises him to pursue and punish his wife and her supposed lover: Onaiyo! If you would o’ertake Maraino’s flight You lose th’ occasion. Through the boundless wild By unfrequented paths, she and her lover Elude your tardy chace. (IV.50; emphasis added) Acting like his fellow Hurons on the immediate “impulse of nature,” Onaiyo strikes off into the forest in pursuit of Maraino and Sidney, vowing to leave “no glade no[r] cavern unexplor’d” in his search (IV.51). In making Maraino and Sidney his intended prey – the objects of his “chace” or hunt – Onaiyo reveals a predatory nature, demonstrating his distance from the more consistently virtuous Ononthio, whose Europeanized morality Onaiyo otherwise strives to emulate. Seeking retribution, Onaiyo threatens to repeat the violence the British siblings experienced so many years earlier when their parents were “Most barbarously massacred” by “savage fiends / That yell’d with horrid howling” (III.41). This atavistic violence in a seemingly civilized Huron supports the common contemporary

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position that aboriginal people were, ultimately, incapable of refinement or “improvement,” incapable, in short, of civilization.

i v. c u l t u r a l e n c o u n t e r Onaiyo’s ambivalent morality suggests the apparent impossibility of the “civilizing mission” in North America. As previously noted, the play’s primitivism grants the Hurons an elevated moral status visà-vis European civilization by subjecting decadent European notions of “culture and refinement” to pointed criticism. At the same time, Ononthio and Onaiyo reveal in their own speech and behaviour the best attributes of European morality, thereby qualifying the play’s critique by highlighting the colonizing culture’s redeeming qualities. And, as we shall see, the play attributes Maraino’s irreproachable virtue not to any white essence but to her exemplary Huron upbringing subsequent to the massacre of her British parents, an upbringing informed by Christian belief and practice. And yet, despite the play’s primitivist philosophizing, on the one hand, and its affirmation of the Indians’ potential to embrace Christian values and virtues on the other hand, Richardson seems ultimately to maintain the position that Indian and European cultures could share no moral common ground. In Act II, Maraino’s troubled vision of her husband Onaiyo offers an early illustration of the moral chasm that yawns between the two cultures, suggesting the impossibility of productive intercultural exchange in the play. In narrating the circumstances of this dream, Maraino exclaims: I beheld My husband blazing with effulgent beams. I rush’d to meet him: but behold! a wide Voracious gulf flaming with waves of fire, Gap’d, and between us roll’d a furious tide. (1790, II.34) The Christian imagery in this passage is rather heavy-handed: the “effulgent beams” illuminating Onaiyo’s form suggest an aura of holiness, while the “Voracious gulf” with its “waves of fire” – imagery recalling the hellish landscapes of Dante or Milton – suggests the impossibility of approaching such saintly purity. While

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Maraino’s dream functions most obviously to foreshadow the treachery perpetrated by Yerdal and Neidan, the flaming gulf that separates the white woman from her red husband also brings into question the moral propriety of their union in the first place. This subtle questioning of intercultural relations continues in a more emphatic manner later in the play as Maraino, Ononthio, and Sidney discuss Neidan’s proposal that the Hurons should adopt Sidney as one of their own. In response to this proposal, Maraino addresses Ononthio, exclaiming: Alas! it may not be! Bars of eternal hind’rance intervene; The limits never can be cross’d; and Sidney Can never be adopted, nor become The brother of Onaiyo, and thy son. (IV.54) Maraino’s discourse on the impossibility of bridging the cultural gap is emphatic and non-compromising: the boundaries separating European and aboriginal cultures “never can be cross’d.” The elder chieftain Ononthio agrees wholeheartedly with this proposition, arguing that it were unjust To bid him [Sidney] forfeit Europaean culture, The high attainments of instructed reason And the embellishments of polish’d life, To sojourn in the wilderness. (IV.54) Given Ononthio’s emphatic denunciation of European “culture and refinement” (examined above), this assertion seems contradictory at best, suggesting that Ononthio’s Romantic primitivism – or, to be more precise, Richardson’s – is ultimately inconsistent and unstable. As he continues, however, Ononthio reveals the historical (rather than essentialist) logic of his position. Although he and his fellow Hurons Boast of our freedom; and enjoy our share Of happiness; for none of nature’s children Are doom’d to misery; and tho’ in the hour Of docile infancy, the pliant fibres

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And shoots of human structure, may be bent To any form; yet by the lapse of time Even minds contract rigid unyielding habits, And like the body will not quit their bias. (IV.54) At the outset of this speech, Ononthio reasserts the primitivist position that he had articulated earlier in his critique of European culture; but in this instance his criticisms are qualified rather than absolute: Only Indians or, more precisely, only people raised from infancy as Indians, can appreciate the “freedom” and “happiness” of Indian life in the wilderness. By emphasizing the cultural constructedness of human experience – the importance of nurture over nature – Ononthio resists the common colonial logic that would attribute significant cultural differences between whites and Indians to racial distinctions understood in terms of human biology. Arguing that “the pliant fibres / And shoots of human structure, may be bent / To any form” (emphasis added), in other words, Ononthio uses a biological metaphor to refute a dangerously racist determinism. Directly following Ononthio’s speech concerning the impossibility of Sidney’s adoption into the Huron nation, Sidney articulates a similar position on the question of cultural crossing. He focuses, however, not on his own situation as a potential adoptee but on his sister’s status as a white woman raised primarily in an Indian context: Though I feel many a sharp pang For thee, Maraino; yet I see thee fashion’d To they condition: I perceive the chords That string thy heart, tun’d to the sweetest strain Of tenderness and love: and would not therefore Endanger thy pure innocent enjoyment With change of situation. (IV.55) As a woman who has spent her life among the Hurons since “docile infancy” (IV, 54) Maraino is, according to Richardson’s logic, a veritable Indian. Thus, like her brother, who has been raised as a European, she cannot cross the divide that separates the two cultural groups. Although they are siblings, their biological bonds are not nearly as strong as the social ties that bind them to their respective cultures and nations. Hence, at the end of the play the two must go their separate ways.

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This philosophical dictum against cultural crossing suggests Richardson’s agreement with the notion, common in stadial theory, that “in every stage of society, the faculties, the sentiments and desires of men [sic] are so accommodated to their own state, that they become standards of excellence to themselves” (Robertson 1777, 2.38), so that European and Native American peoples will each prefer “their own condition as the standard of human felicity” (Ferguson 1793, 158). In colonial contexts, such a view of cultural difference involves a number of important political implications. First, it suggests the futility of colonialist “civilizing” programs that would increasingly attempt to convert Indian people to European ways of life. Needless to say, contemporary missionaries and the societies they represented would have found this position particularly repugnant, for such logic undermined evangelical efforts to convert Indians to a Christian and agrarian lifestyle. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, even Native Americans like the Ojibwa activists Joseph Sawyer and George Copway – both of whom advocated the necessity of conversion – would be highly offended by such a restrictive concept of intercultural relations. At the same time, however, the notion that only the youngest children could successfully cross the cultural divide would support the logic that Native children should be raised in white residential schools, where they would be immersed in European ways from “docile infancy” (Richardson 1790, IV.54), a practice that would in later years prove to be devastating for many aboriginal parents and their children. Finally, one needs to bear in mind the question of cultural hegemony and the unidirectional character of cultural crossing according to colonialist ideology; for white people rarely entertained the idea that children of their own race might be profitably raised among Indian nations. In positing a rough equality between whites and Indians (at least with regard to the constructed nature of cultural identity and the qualified potential for whites like Maraino to become Indians and vice-versa), Richardson escapes the essentialist constraints that are the hallmarks of biological determinism, but the discourse of “cultural construction” he adopts instead is not itself immune to co-optation by colonial ideology and practice. Ultimately, however, it seems that Richardson was uncomfortable asserting the basic equality of Indians and Europeans. And so, in the play’s final act, he opens the primitivist debate yet again, this time by

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orchestrating an argument between Sidney and Maraino concerning the relative merits of Indian versus European lifestyles. The argument focuses on Sidney’s Enlightenment-influenced perception that the wilderness environment provides a limited field for the development and exercise of moral virtue. Speaking of Ononthio’s moral excellence, Sidney concedes that the revered elder “indeed deserves / Every requital of unfeign’d affection” (V, 69) but he is unwilling to regard the wilderness as an ideal source and site of moral rectitude. Hence, after praising Ononthio, he qualifies his discourse: Yet pity it is such merit should be lost Amid this savage wild; nor have the aid Of Europaean culture; those improvements That mend the heart, and dignify our nature. (1790, V.69) As these lines make abundantly clear, Sidney remains unconvinced by Ononthio’s earlier Romantic critique of European “culture and refinement.” Where Ononthio had condemned European civilization as anathema to the cultivation of true and spontaneous affections, Sidney sees it as the source of “improvements” that “mend the heart” (emphasis added), as though implying that the otherwise meritorious elder’s affections are in need of repair. Indeed, by asserting that Eurocentric concepts of culture “dignify our nature,” Sidney goes so far as to imply that Ononthio – Richardson’s paragon of aboriginal virtue – lacks true dignity, or that his dignity, like his other “merits,” has been “lost” in the wilderness environment. It is no wonder, then, that Maraino finds Sidney’s Eurocentric discourse so objectionable. Her immediate rejoinder takes the form of an emphatic reprimand: In truth my brother, I cannot but marvel At your regret. Think you that in the wild Amid the shades and silence of retirement Virtue may not be prov’d and have a field For exercise? I marvel much your schools Have not inform’d you, that true piety, From proud philosophy needs little aid, But may in ev’ry place be known and practis’d: And what should mend or dignify your nature But virtue and true piety, I know not. (V.69)

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Here an indignant Maraino chastises her brother for locating “true piety” in the colonial metropole while denying that this cardinal virtue may be “known and practis’d” in “ev’ry [other] place” as well. Representing Sidney’s argument as the product of a faulty education, she criticizes the rational basis of Western epistemology, the very system of “proud philosophy” that strove to organize all knowledge under the banner of reason. In sharp contrast to Sidney’s Enlightenment argument (according to which a base human “nature” stands in need of correction or refinement through exposure to “civilizing” arts and sciences), Maraino’s position is of course highly Romantic. If “wild” nature is a source of “virtue and true piety,” as she insists, then one must shed the trappings of civilization in order to live a truly moral existence. Hence, where Sidney criticizes the Indians’ lack of exposure to European civilization as a fundamental shortcoming, Maraino praises it as a highly fortunate circumstance. Despite their significant disagreements, the siblings nevertheless share in common a deterministic philosophy according to which one’s environment, whether deemed “natural” or “cultural,” plays a key role in shaping one’s identity and, in particular, one’s moral constitution. This determinism carries important political ramifications, for if identity is constituted by environmental factors, then at the most fundamental level, people of all races must be understood as equal at least by birth. While much remains at stake in the debate concerning the relative merits of European versus aboriginal natural and social environments (since Sidney’s critique of the wilderness lifestyle provides a rational justification for European colonialism’s civilizing mission in the North American wilderness), the overall argument resists attributing identity to racial or cultural essences that could be subject to categorization and hierarchical organization. Since all social and natural environments can be transformed by historical circumstances, the assumption that identity and morality are determined by environmental factors presupposes the possibility of human transformation, leaving identities themselves fluid and subject to change. It is telling that in his dramatization of the debate concerning the relative merits of indigenous and white cultures Richardson focuses so insistently upon the role that affections play in the development of moral virtue. By entitling his play The Indians, A Tragedy, the playwright leads his audience to expect a catastrophic outcome for his characters. But the plot itself ends happily, as the Huron Onaiyo

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and the Euroamerican-born Maraino resolve their misunderstandings and reaffirm their marital bond, thereby suggesting that Indians and whites can live together in harmony. And yet, by calling his play a tragedy rather than a comedy, Richardson arguably gestures towards the tragic circumstances of European-Indian relations that were unfolding on the stage of history – circumstances that would soon give rise to the popular myth of the “vanishing Indian” (which will be considered in some detail in the next chapter). Hence, although the play’s happy ending foreclosed the experience of Aristotelian catharsis that his audience would likely have expected, it also denied them the opportunity to purge themselves of the guilt that so many Britons experienced with regard to their country’s treatment of Native Americans in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. In a selfproclaimed “tragedy” that so insistently associates the cultivation of affections with moral uprightness, the omission of any opportunity for the audience to experience tragic cathartic release is significant indeed. One might consider it in light of assertions made in the play’s otherwise conventional Prologue, wherein the actor Mr Cubit (who played Sidney at the Richmond performance of The Indians) enjoins the audience to sympathize with the playwright’s aboriginal characters, since “by you his Indians live or die” (iii). Given that the fictitious Maraino and Onaiyo presumably live happily ever after, this conventional appeal to the audience’s sympathy seems to point beyond the level of dramatic representation toward the world of historical circumstance, where such happy endings were rare, and where the fate of real indigenous people was at least partly determined by the degree of sympathy with which they were received by the colonizing power and its people.

chapter six

Thomas Campbell’s American Idyll: Colonial Ideology in Gertrude of Wyoming Our Fire burns in your Houses, and your Fire burns with us. We desire it be so always. But we will not [allow] that any of the great Penn’s people settle upon the Susquehana River, for we have no other Land to leave to our Children. (Anonymous Iroquois, 1684)1

i . ca m p b e l l a n d r i c h a r d s o n As noted in the previous chapter, Thomas Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) shares much in common with Richardson’s The Indians: A Tragedy (1790). Not only do both works apply the conventions of romance to colonial subject matter but, in their representations of contact between European and aboriginal peoples, they each explore a variety of encounters ranging from harmonious interchange to violent confrontation. On the topic of violence, in particular, Richardson’s drama anticipates the concerns of Campbell’s poem by invoking an Indian “massacre” of peaceful white settlers, whose only (though not insignificant) crime, it seems, is the desire to escape Europe’s oppressive system of class relations and establish a utopian paradise in the New World. In The Indians, however, the massacre, though informing the plot, belongs to the play’s exposition rather than to its immediate action. The audience learns about this event through the retrospective musings of Sidney and Maraino, the white siblings whose idyllic childhood had been disrupted by what Richardson represents as a brutal outbreak of Indian violence. Recalling his family’s history, Sidney declares: My parents Were born in Britain. In their early days Fortune had smiled on them, but soon alas!

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With sad reverse she frown’d. Gen’rous disdain To be the constant objects of compassion, Determin’d them to leave their native land; And strive by honest industry, elsewhere To earn a peaceful livelihood. They cross’d The wide Atlantic: in a woody vale Lav’d by the Delaware for many a year Bless’d with success in their unenvied toil They liv’d, and rear’d their progeny, myself And my poor helpless sister. But even here Their fate was adverse. – Cruel fate! (III.40–1)2 In these lines, Sidney represents his parents’ Atlantic crossing as a journey of hope motivated by a “Gen’rous disdain” for a class system that responds to poverty with mere charity, thereby treating the symptoms of social inequity rather than addressing its root causes. Although their toil in America is “unenvied,” it is a labour of “honest industry” offering a “peaceful livelihood” unavailable to them in Europe. In Gertrude, Campbell (who, as noted in Chapter Five, had been Richardson’s prize-winning student at the University of Glasgow) also represents the North American setting as an antidote to a Europe too often characterized by inequity and strife. Thus, for his poem’s white protagonists, emigration offers “glad relief” from “feudal grief” (1.6):3 And scarce had Wyoming of war or crime Heard, but in transatlantic story rung, For here the exile met from every clime, And spoke in friendship every distant tongue: Men from the blood of warring Europe sprung Were but divided by the running brook. (1.4) Like Richardson’s “woody vale / Lav’d by the Delaware” (III.41), Campbell’s Wyoming – a Pennsylvanian vale laved by the Susquehanna, the very river upon whose banks Coleridge and Southey dreamed of establishing their Pantisocratic paradise – is for a brief time the site of social harmony, a place wherein ethnic strife and nationalist enmity exist only “in transatlantic story.” Indeed, by constructing Wyoming as a place in which European homesteaders are

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divided only “by the running brook” and not by boundaries like fences (those private analogues of the guarded nationalist border) or class distinctions, Campbell creates a New World setting that is even more Edenic than the one described by his former professor in The Indians. In both The Indians and Gertrude, the peacefulness of setting lends heightened drama to the subsequent outbreak of aboriginal violence. In the course of one “disastrous night,” the paradise briefly described in Richardson’s drama becomes a hellish landscape as the colonial patriarch, starting from his sleep, beheld, By the hideous light of his own roof in flames The scouling visages of savage fiends That yell’d with horrid howling. (III.41) Here, the settler’s worst nightmare becomes reality as a band of Outagami Indians imposes martyrdom upon the parents of Sidney and Maraino, leaving the two children to their separate fates. In sharp contrast to his depiction of European settlers as paragons of virtue and fellowship, Richardson both animalizes and demonizes his Indians, representing them as “howling” “fiends.” In Gertrude, Campbell’s Euroamerican idyll suffers a similarly disastrous fate, as the poem’s Advertisement makes clear. In this introductory paragraph, the poet concurs with the “testimonies of historians and travellers” in representing Wyoming’s “infant colony as one of the happiest spots of human existence, for the hospitable and innocent manners of the inhabitants, the beauty of the country, and the luxuriant fertility of the soil and climate.” At first, as in Richardson’s The Indians, Campbell’s Advertisement seems to attribute the destruction of this vulnerable utopia solely to the Indians. Invoking seemingly objective historical precedents for his poem’s plot, it states: “Most of the popular histories of England, as well as of the American war, give an authentic account of the desolation of Wyoming, in Pennsylvania, which took place in 1778, by an incursion of Indians.” Subsequently, however, Campbell complicates the simple Manichean economy that would otherwise pit “savage fiends” against civilized martyrs, admitting later in his Advertisement that “In an evil hour, the junction of European with Indian

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arms converted this terrestrial paradise into a frightful waste” (1851, 162). Although Campbell’s reference here to “the junction of European with Indian arms” correctly implicates Europe in the famous Wyoming massacre, the poem itself plays down and almost entirely effaces any European complicity in the destruction associated with this episode. Indeed, like Richardson’s play, which attributes violence to the agency of “savage fiends,” Campbell’s poem lays most of the blame for Wyoming’s “desolation” upon its Indian antagonists, whose primary representative is the bloodthirsty “Monster Brandt” (3.16) – the celebrated Chief Joseph Brant of the Mohawk nation. It is only by reading against the grain of Campbell’s idyll that one can reconcile the Advertisement with the poem proper, demonstrating the extent to which the idyll is in fact informed and enabled by the subtle, self-serving ideology that represents colonial practice in terms of a benevolent righteousness.

i i . th e a m e r i c a n i d e a l There can be no doubt that Campbell was predisposed to represent Gertrude’s American setting in idealized terms. The motivation for this representation was partly political and partly personal: sharing the republican ideals of the American Revolution, Campbell had, like his contemporaries Southey and Coleridge, considered emigrating to America, which was “the adopted country of so many members of his own family” (W. Beattie 1849, 1.223–4). In a letter to his friend James Thompson in January of 1798, Campbell wrote of the exhilarating prospect of emigration: “I shall be crossing the Ecliptic, or mooring in the mouth of the Ohio! I have engaged to go to America; and in all human probability, must sail in six weeks!” (qtd. in ibid., 1.222). As another letter to Thompson makes clear, we may attribute the palpable excitement of this passage at least partly to Campbell’s political sympathies: “Ever since I knew what America was, I have loved and respected her government and state of society” (March 1798; qtd. in ibid., 1.225). This is not to suggest that Campbell was incapable of viewing the new American republic in a critical light. Indeed, when it came to the issue of slavery, the Scottish poet saw much to criticize. His short poetical address “To the United States of North America,” for example, offers a highly equivocal perspective on American nationalism:

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united states, your banner wears Two emblems – one of fame; Alas, the other that it bears Reminds us of your shame. Your standard’s constellation types White freedom by its stars; But what’s the meaning of the stripes? They mean your negroes’ scars. (Campbell 1854, 364) In this clever reading of the US flag’s symbolism, Campbell suggests that the American republic’s famed freedom is not only contradicted by, but is indeed founded upon, the “shame” of slavery. Subtended by black bondage and the bloody red “stripes” of the slaver’s lash, “White freedom” is in reality a highly exclusive privilege and a mode of racist tyranny. Interestingly enough, in his rendering of the flag’s symbolism Campbell disregards another possible reading, one that would, like his racialized reference to the colour “White,” represent the red of the American flag in terms of the so-called “red man” or Indian. Clearly, the problem of African slavery was, in Campbell’s view, much more pressing than that of Native American dispossession, which did not seem worthy of poetical critique. When his American emigration fell through, Campbell was forced to experience America not as a new citizen but vicariously through the works of travelers like Isaac Weld, whose Travels through the States of North America (1799) provided an acknowledged source for Gertrude. In his description of the Susquehanna River in the Wyoming Valley, Weld deploys the well-worn language of picturesque aesthetics: I think there is no river in America that abounds with such a variety and number of picturesque views. At every bend the prospect varies, and there is scarcely a spot between Lochartzburg and Wilkesbarré where the painter would not find a subject well worthy of his pencil. The mountains, covered with bold rocks and woods, afford the finest foreground imaginable; the plains, adorned with cultivated fields and patches of wood, and watered by the noble river, of which you catch a glimpse here and there, fill up the middle part of the landscape; and

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the blue hills, peeping up at a distance, terminate the view in the most pleasing manner. (Weld 1799, 447–8) This passage, with its overt references to picturesque theory and the aesthetic jargon of foregrounds, middle grounds and distances, was among the “testimonies of historians and travellers” that Campbell received as “authentic” representations of Wyoming (Campbell 1851, 162). Other contemporary accounts suggest the moral and spiritual benefits of human interaction with Wyoming’s aesthetically pleasing environment. In his Travels in America (1808), for example, Thomas Ashe described his experience of “the rapid Susquehanna” thus: “The breadth and beauty of the river, the height and grandeur of its banks, the variation of scenery, the verdure of the forests, the murmur of the water, and the melody of birds, all conspired to fill my mind with vast and elevated conceptions” (13). Ashe’s use of the word “conspired” is particularly interesting, suggesting the presence of an external agent deliberately working in this exemplary setting to “elevate” or spiritualize thought, thus helping to shape character. Thomas Jefferson’s theory of the relationship between “Climate and the American character” does not contradict this notion. According to Jefferson (whose writings, like Weld’s, were familiar to Campbell), people living in America’s northern climates tended to be cool, sober, laborious, persevering, self-interested, and deceitful; while the denizens of America’s southern climates were fiery, voluptuous, indolent, unsteady, generous, and candid. Because of its location at a midpoint between northern and southern latitudes, however, Pennsylvania was for Jefferson a place wherein “the two characters seem to meet and blend, and form a people free from the extremes both of vice and virtue” (Jefferson 1984, 827). Given contemporary theories that regarded human traits as products of interaction with the natural world, associating climate with character and aesthetic sensibility with virtue, it is hardly surprising that Campbell would consider Wyoming’s inhabitants to be exemplars of morality. In his own portrait, indeed, Campbell depicts a relationship of perfect harmony between the human and natural worlds, portraying the “merry mock-bird’s song” and the happy “hum of men” as mutually complementary. He reinforces this sense of harmony by representing the region’s “wild deer” as “Unhunted” (1.3), a fanciful circumstance recalling the idealized

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life of prelapsarian Eden, where meat-eating was not yet practiced. His heroine, Gertrude (who significantly eschews the practice of hunting), is in Campbell’s poem the recipient par excellence of paradisiacal natural influence: Wyoming’s scenes sweet influence had On Gertrude’s soul, and kindness like their own Inspired those eyes affectionate and glad, That seem’d to love whate’er they look’d upon. (2.4) In this representation of Gertrude’s interaction with nature, Campbell flirts with a Wordsworthian Romanticism that glorifies the natural world as a sage teacher of humane values. Although his depictions of nature’s benevolent influence upon human subjectivity seem far removed from “the Wyoming of prosaic reality” (Stone 1841, 58),4 Campbell’s representations of human-nature contact certainly suit the conventional demands of the pastoral idyll, which criticizes the decadence of the “civilized” metropole by constructing an idealized natural life. According to Campbell’s environmental-determinist poetics, Wyoming can lose its innocence only as a result of outside intervention, since its own inhabitants, as daily recipients of nature’s “sweet influence,” would be incapable of immoral action. As we shall see, Campbell assigns this outside intervention to “the Monster Brandt” and his marauding Indian warriors, whom he represents in Gertrude of Wyoming as non-resident agents of a foreign violence that desolates both human society and the natural environment. And yet, a close reading of key passages reveals the extent to which Wyoming’s lost innocence is in fact part of an ideological representation functioning to efface a much harsher colonial reality. Consider, first of all, Gertrude’s opening stanza, where Campbell’s narrator reflects nostalgically upon the difference between Wyoming’s ostensible prelapsarian and postlapsarian realities: On Susquehanna’s side, fair Wyoming! Although the wild-flower on thy ruin’d wall, And roofless homes, a sad remembrance bring Of what thy gentle people did befal; Yet thou wert once the loveliest land of all That see the Atlantic wave their morn restore.

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Sweet land! may I thy lost delights recal, And paint thy Gertrude in her bowers of yore, Whose beauty was the love of Pennsylvania’s shore! (1.1) In a poem that often correlates human and non-human contexts, the grammatical ambiguity of the passage’s closing lines seems deliberate and most appropriate: the “beauty” to which the narrator refers may be attributed either to the innocent Gertrude herself or to “her bowers of yore” – both of which are ultimately desolated as a result of the Wyoming massacre. And yet, the speaker’s sense that the massacre represented a sudden and unprecedented irruption of violence, destroying Wyoming’s harmoniously interrelated social and natural milieus, is belied by a consideration of the stanza’s opening lines, where Campbell introduces the image of Wyoming’s “ruin’d wall.” By referring to this wall in the singular (rather than making a plural reference to Wyoming’s “ruin’d walls”), Campbell makes it clear that he is not speaking of the walls of desolated homesteads – the habitations of Wyoming’s European settlers – but to the fortified wall of a garrison, a barrier built to protect Wyoming’s settlers from outside interference, thereby enabling and guaranteeing their existence as “gentle people.” Behind Campbell’s idyll lies a military infrastructure poised, if necessary, to exert violent force in defense of “the loveliest land of all.” Wyoming’s gentleness, in short, is a product of colonial military authority, and is aligned with the politics of warfare. It is interesting, moreover, to consider the “wild-flower” that grows amidst the desolation revealed by Wyoming’s “ruin’d wall.” Given the poem’s correlation of human and natural beauties, this flower might be seen as an emblem of hope for Wyoming’s social and environmental future. Indeed, the lovely Gertrude’s subsequent association with “the rose of England” (1.10) suggests that Campbell’s heroine shares some poetic affinity with the opening stanza’s wildflower. And yet, a contrary reading of the poem’s floral symbolism and its implications is also possible. As England’s rose, Gertrude is on the one hand a highly cultivated exemplar of civilized femininity; growing spontaneously amidst Wyoming’s carnage, on the other hand, the wildflower is a symbol of unreclaimed nature, the wildness that remains beyond the reach of human mastery. Understood in these terms, the poem’s floral symbolism suggests a binary opposition, in which nature and culture are to some extent at odds with

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each other. Associated with ruination rather than cultivation, the wildflower itself becomes a symbol of a savage violence that must – like the “Monster Brandt” and his Indian warriors – be tamed or eradicated. This colonial imperative becomes evident at the beginning of Canto 3, where Campbell brings his American idyll to perfection in his description of Gertrude’s loving relationship with the young Henry Waldegrave: o love! in such a wilderness as this, Where transport and security entwine, Here is the empire of thy perfect bliss, And here thou art a god indeed divine. (3.1) Campbell’s reference to love’s “empire” is part of an ancient and venerable poetic theme: amor vincit omnia, love conquers all. According to the seemingly paradoxical logic of this formulation, love’s empire signals the end of coercive imperialism: it is the conquest to end all conquests. In order to achieve the combination of “transport and security” necessary for the continued maintenance of love’s benevolent empire, however, all outside threats to “perfect bliss” must be eradicated. Given that Gertrude is set on land formerly claimed by the Iroquois nation, the possibility of aboriginal military resistance or intrusion becomes a potential threat to the lovers’ blissful “security.” Thus Gertrude’s peaceful empire of love might be seen as an ideological construct serving to justify violent imperial conquest, or at least the military occupation of Native American territory.

iii. naturalizing american colonialism Superficially, Gertrude’s and Henry’s “empire of … perfect bliss” is devoid of all forms of violence. Indeed, as if to incorporate indigenous culture and neutralize its implicit threat, Campbell “indigenizes” the lovers themselves. Ensconced in their blissful bower, their European conception of time is altered: their love lasts not for three months but for “Three little moons” (3.2). Inspired, moreover, by “Love’s own presence” (3.3), they acquire a kind of aboriginal prowess in their navigation of Love’s domain: like the noble Oneida Indian Outalissi (of whom more later), who easily “scan[s] / His

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path” through the trackless “wilderness” (1.27), the young lovers effortlessly “pierce” the “labyrinth[ine]” forest. But Campbell goes even further in his indigenization of Gertrude and Henry, clothing them “fancifully” in “wild costume” or “hunter-seeming vest[ure]” replete with “Indian plume” and marking them thus as nature’s children (3.1–4). Given that early councils between Indians and Europeans in America “often led to the ritual exchange of clothing, a symbolic act illustrating how two nations could become ‘one people’” in a transformation of identity (Shoemaker 2004, 136), the young lovers’ transformation suggests interesting possibilities for intercultural relations; unfortunately, however, the lack of sartorial exchange between cultures here indicates a merely one-sided Euroamerican appropriation of cultural symbols rather than a coming-together of nations. Moreover, Gertrude’s and Henry’s appropriation or imitation of Indian custom is very much a qualified one; for, although they dress as aboriginal hunters, the lovers eschew the hunt – a behavioural characteristic Campbell, anticipating Shelley’s championing of vegetarianism, explicitly associates with elevated virtue: What though the sportive dog oft round them note, Or fawn, or wild bird bursting on the wing; Yet who, in Love’s own presence, would devote To death those gentle throats that wake the spring, Or writhing from the brook its victim bring? (3.3) The rhetorical question that closes this passage encodes an implicit critique not only of Indian subsistence practices but also of aboriginal culture in general, for, according to the question’s polemical logic, if Indians practice hunting, they must reside beyond the influence of “Love’s own presence.” As mentioned earlier, Campbell’s anti-hunting stance is implicitly Edenic, since the violence and bloodshed of the hunt have no place in prelapsarian paradise. It also conforms to the Scottish Enlightenment proposition that “man” is “by nature, and in his original state … a frugivorous animal” (Burnett 1786, 1.224)5 – a proposition implying that Native American hunting societies were unnatural or at least not entirely natural. Appropriating and modifying Indian custom as children of nature and devotees of divine Love, the innocent lovers offer a corrective to traditional aboriginal practice, suggesting that they are themselves

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nobler than the Native American “noble savages” that their society had displaced and dispossessed. It is important to note that the poetic “indigenization” of white settlers in Gertrude is not limited solely to the young lovers but extends subtly to the entire community of Euroamerican settlers. Consider, for example, these lines from the poem’s second stanza, which combine European and aboriginal imagery: Delightful Wyoming! beneath thy skies, The happy shepherd swains had nought to do But feed their flocks on green declivities, Or skim perchance thy lake with light canoe. (1.2) Wyoming’s “happy shepherd swains” are obviously transplanted from Europe and grafted onto the American landscape; but Campbell’s reference to the “light canoe” indigenizes them by associating them with an Indian mode of transportation often deemed non-technological and therefore natural (despite the fact that Europeans “well acquainted with all the improvements in the science of navigation” were said to have been “astonished” by the canoe’s exemplary functionality; Robertson 1777, 2.130).6 Campbell’s swains may be the first shepherds in the history of pastoral poetry to travel by canoe, and the fact that they “skim” the lake’s surface suggests that they have developed an impressive level of expertise in the art of navigating such a vessel. Although Indians themselves are not represented in Gertrude until Outalissi’s entry in stanza 13, the appropriations of their practices by white settlers indicates that they haunt the poem’s narrative nonetheless. Another example of such haunting occurs in the opening lines of the poem’s third stanza, where Campbell describes the landscape and the setting sun: “Then, where of Indian hills the daylight takes / His leave, how might you the flamingo see / Disporting like a meteor on the lakes” (1.3; emphasis added). More interesting than the faulty naturalism informing Campbell’s reference to the flamingo – an error often noticed by the poem’s contemporary reviewers and modern critics – is the fact that this passage offers Gertrude’s first direct reference to Pennsylvania’s indigenous peoples. Although they are not yet present as characters in the poem, the early stanzas of which, as we have seen, the poet devotes to the development of his colonial idyll, the reference to “Indian hills”

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implies aboriginal ownership of the landscape. As “the daylight takes / His leave,” however, this sense of ownership is subtly undermined, for the image of the setting sun is commonly associated with the figure of the “vanishing Indian.”7 This figure is a convenient one, for if Campbell’s Euroamerican utopia is to remain untroubled by political strife, the problem of colonial expropriation of the land must be effaced. If the local Indian people have vanished like the setting sun, then, presumably, no one remains to question the existence of Wyoming’s settler colony or to consider the ethics of its establishment amidst the “Indian hills.” Campbell develops the theme implicit in this reference to the setting sun when he finally introduces his poem’s main aboriginal character, Outalissi, the virtuous Oneida, and his young European charge, the orphaned Henry Waldegrave: And summer was the tide, and sweet the hour, When sire and daughter saw, with fleet descent, An Indian from his bark approach their bower, Of buskin’d limb, and swarthy lineament; The red wild feathers on his brow were blent, And bracelets bound the arm that help’d to light A boy, who seem’d, as he beside him went, Of Christian vesture, and complexion bright, Led by his dusky guide, like morning brought by night. (1.13) In this stanza, Campbell’s imagery functions explicitly to emphasize important distinctions between Outalissi and Henry. The child of “complexion bright”, also called the “sweet scion of the rising sun” (1.26), is associated with the morning. Later in the poem, Campbell further underlines the poetic association of light with European culture in a passing reference to the “sunrise,” which draws Gertrude’s “thoughts to Europe forth” (2.6). In contrast to the imagery that surrounds and sanctifies the young Henry, Outalissi – the Indian of “dusky” complexion and “swarthy lineament” – is identified with the nighttime and thus with the absence of light. Campbell’s conceit points once again toward the figure of the vanishing Indian (since, logically speaking, the dawn vanquishes the “dusky” darkness). Ironically, moreover, Outalissi seems to assist in his own demise: as he “help[s] to light” the white boy on his journey to Gertrude’s home, he provides fuel, as it were, for the waxing European light

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that will ultimately cause him and his fellow Indians to vanish from the scene. Since Outalissi is the poem’s “noble savage” – the antithesis of “Brandt” and his bloodthirsty Seneca warriors – his complicity with his own destruction is all the more disturbing. One is tempted to conclude that Outalissi’s virtue consists, in part, in his willingness to aid and abet the colonizing power. For the most part, however, Outalissi’s charitable behaviour toward Henry functions to challenge contemporary views of colonial benevolence, which was often represented as flowing from the colonizer to the colonized and not vice-versa. In Gertrude, this economy is subject to reversal, as Outalissi risks his life to rescue and protect the orphaned Henry from bloodthirsty Hurons, vowing to adopt him if necessary: “should affliction’s storms thy blossom mock,” Outalissi promises the young boy, “Then come again – my own adopted one! / And I will graft thee on a noble stock” (1.26). Indeed, as Tim Fulford has observed, Campbell’s poem ends by gesturing toward the possibility that a genuine father/son relationship between Outalissi and Henry might be fulfilled. This familial potential is significant, for, “whereas it was conventional to portray colonists in the father’s position, with the colonized natives their children, here Campbell makes the Indian the patriarch” (Fulford 2006, 189). In order, perhaps, to emphasize the familial relationship between Outalissi and Henry, Campbell transforms some of the latter’s characteristics during the course of the poem. When Henry returns to Wyoming in Part II after a long absence at sea, he seems to have taken on some of Outalissi’s physical traits, for during his nautical travels “th’ equator suns his cheek had tann’d” (2.12), darkening his formerly “bright” complexion (which, as noted above, had contrasted so sharply with Outalissi’s “swarthy” and “dusky” appearance). This recalls the Abbé Raynal’s claim that North American Indians had themselves acquired their “copper-colour[ed]” complexion “from nature, which tans all men who are constantly exposed to the open air” (1776, 4.12),8 a claim suggesting that the difference between light- and dark-skinned races is purely superficial. Henry’s darkened complexion thus suggests that he might indeed be “graft[ed]” onto the “noble stock” of Outalissi’s family (1.26). But although the effect of “equator suns” seems more closely to have equated the two men, their familial similarity remains superficial at best; for although Outalissi is proud to call Henry his “own adopted one” (1.26), Henry never reciprocates by

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calling the Indian “father.” Rather, like the poem’s narrator, who calls Outalissi Henry’s “woodland guide” (3.34), Henry keeps his distance from the Indian, referring to him condescendingly as “my poor guide” (2.21). Hence, although Fulford is undoubtedly correct to emphasize Outalissi’s paternal relationship to Henry (2006, 187– 90), the familial relationship seems at least somewhat one-sided, the “father’s” generosity unrequited by the “son.” In stark contrast to the noble Outalissi (who, like William Richardson’s venerable Huron chieftain Ononthio, goes out of his way to protect innocent white settlers from aboriginal violence) is the fierce and warlike “Brandt,” the poem’s degenerate Indian villain. As if to emphasize Brandt’s status as Outalissi’s opposite in Gertrude’s colonial romance, Campbell allows the good Indian – himself an eyewitness to and forlorn victim of Brandt’s execrable deeds – to describe him thus: The Mammoth comes, – the foe, – the Monster Brandt, – With all his howling desolating band; – These eyes have seen their blade and burning pine Awake at once, and silence half your land. Red is the cup they drink; but not with wine: Awake, and watch to-night, or see no morning shine! (3.16) If, as we have seen, the poem’s Indians are generally associated with imagery of darkness, Brandt is the representative of deepest midnight: his proximity threatens to eclipse and extinguish the “shin[ing]” light of America’s colonial “morning”, the light associated earlier in the poem with Henry in particular and European culture in general. The placement of numerous dashes in the passage’s opening lines indicates a sense of urgency by speeding up the poem’s pace, suggesting that even the stoical and courageous Outalissi finds Brandt fearsome and intimidating. Not only are Brandt and his men inhumane, they are downright inhuman; like Richardson’s “howling” Outagami warriors (Richardson 1790, III.41), Brandt and his “howling desolating band” are nothing less than predatory beasts. Indeed, like the fearful “Mammoth” itself, Campbell seems to imply, such “Monster[s]” as Brandt and his men represent a regressive violence that would be best consigned to the oblivion of extinction (the very fate that was thought to await the so-called “vanishing Indian,” whom Henry Clay, as US

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Speaker of the House, would indeed later compare to “the mammoth of the New World!” (qtd. in Dippie 1982, 8).9 In the peaceful precincts of Campbell’s Wyoming, where even wild animals remain unhunted, the Indians’ predation upon European settlers is, to say the least, unsettling. As if Campbell’s indictment of aboriginal hunting practices were not already apparent in Gertrude’s and Henry’s qualified indigenization, where the “hunter-seeming” lovers eschew the hunt, Campbell makes Brandt’s hunters veritable cannibals: “Red is the cup they drink; but not with wine.” This unholy parody of communion underscores the status of Brandt and his “howling” band as “unearthly fiends” (3.19), recalling the “fiend[ish]” Outagami warriors who orphan Sidney and Maraino in Richardson’s The Indians (III.41). It is significant, of course, that Campbell places his critique of Brandt in the mouth of another Indian. According to the “noble savage” paradigm, Outalissi is by definition incapable of duplicity. Hence, his accusations against Brandt must be seen as trustworthy, carrying the force of truth and moral conviction. And as we discover in the subsequent lines of his narrative, moreover, Outalissi’s assessment of Brandt also has an empirical foundation, for it is based not on rumour and hearsay but on direct personal experience: Scorning to wield the hatchet for his bribe, ’Gainst Brandt himself I went to battle forth: Accursed Brandt! he left of all my tribe Nor man, nor child, nor thing of living birth: No! not the dog that watch’d my household hearth Escaped that night of blood, upon our plains! All perish’d! – I alone am left on earth! To whom nor relative nor blood remains, No! – not a kindred drop that runs in human veins! (3.17) As the sole survivor of his tribe, Outalissi is of course Campbell’s exemplary representative of the vanishing American, a literary progenitor of such figures as James Fenimore Cooper’s popular Indian hero Uncas, the “Last of the Mohicans.” And yet, contrary to contemporary deployments of the vanishing Indian stereotype, which attributed the gradual annihilation of aboriginal peoples primarily to white interference, Outalissi’s narrative paints tribal warfare as a major cause of Indian genocide, thus to some extent exculpating the

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presence of European settlers and a colonial system that would impose peace via the humanizing processes of civilization. Interestingly, Outalissi’s lament for his murdered tribe and family includes a pathetic reference to the loss of “the dog that watch’d my household hearth,” a detail that would certainly have struck a chord with a British reading public aware of animal rights discourses which, as noted in Chapter Four, often represented cruelty to animals as a sign of the most base human brutality.10 By depicting Outalissi’s dog as a “household” pet (rather than as a semi-feral hunting dog), and by including it among the “thing[s] of living birth” that “perish’d” in Brandt’s genocidal attack on the noble Indian’s “tribe,” Campbell lends additional pathos to Outalissi’s already unbearably tragic narrative, adding further justification to the text’s inflammatory denunciation of the “Accursed Brandt.” Outalissi’s notion that the orphaned Henry Waldegrave might, through adoption, fill the gap left by the loss of his family, ironically suggests that the remedy for his nation’s decline might in fact lie with the whites, if not exactly via their assimilation into Oneida society then possibly via the “adoption” of their ways. But perhaps the most significant thing about Outalissi’s discussion of Brandt is its reference to the territory upon which the poem’s central event, the massacre of the white settlers, takes place. When the noble Oneida warns the poem’s European protagonists that Brandt intends to “silence half your land” (3.16; emphasis added), he acknowledges European ownership of the local territory, effectively making Brandt and his warriors – and not the white colonists – the interlopers, thereby silencing questions concerning the ethics of European settlement in North America. It is as if Outalissi, the “vanishing American” himself, has implicitly bequeathed Wyoming’s “Indian hills” to the poem’s non-Indian characters.

i v. a n a t i v e a m e r i c a n ta l k s b a c k : c h i e f jo h n b r a n t ( a h yo n wa e g h s ) in britain In the decades following the publication of Gertrude, Campbell’s representation of “Brandt” – whose character he modeled on the supposed life and exploits of the Mohawk chieftain Thayendanegea, better known among the English as Joseph Brant – became famous in the nineteenth century as an example of literary defamation.

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Although the historical Brant did side with the British during the American revolutionary war, he was nowhere near Wyoming at the time of the massacre, which was perpetrated not by Mohawks but by Seneca Indians and British “painted tories” (Stone 1841, 203) enlisted to fight on behalf of the Crown under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Butler (a man the Canadian government has recently honoured as a national war hero through the commissioning of a life-sized bust now on display beside the National War Memorial in Ottawa).11 In the early days of British-American hostilities, indeed, Brant had attempted to negotiate a position of neutrality for himself and his people, only choosing to side with the British in the wake of a failed American attempt to assassinate him (Chalmers et. al. 1955, 7). Contrary to his representation as a “fiend” in Campbell’s poem, Brant was known as much for his piety as for his military prowess. As Isaac Weld wrote in his Travels, Brant “professed himself to be a warm admirer of the principles of christianity, and in hopes of being able to convert his nation … he absolutely translated the gospel of St. Matthew into the Mohawk language” (1799, 406). In something of a narrative about-face, Weld nevertheless went on to criticize Brant for indulging in acts of savage vengefulness in battle (406). As his use of both praise and criticism demonstrates, Weld painted a complex portrait of the Mohawk Chief, thereby suggesting the extent to which Brant’s actions unsettled colonial stereotyping that represented Indians as either “noble” or “degenerate” “savages.” The fact that Campbell ignored the positive aspects of Weld’s depiction of Brant is troubling, as is his effacement of British military responsibility for the attack upon the Wyoming settlement. As Fulford argues, Campbell “divides Indians into good and bad because he will not explore white ‘savagery’ and because he cannot reconcile what he perceives to be contradictory Indian characteristics” (2006, 192). Campbell’s defamatory portrait of “Brandt” was challenged by none other than the Mohawk warrior’s son, John Brant, who visited the poet in Britain in order to set the record straight. Recalling this meeting, Campbell wrote of John Brant: “He appealed to my sense of honor and justice, on his own part and that of his sister, to retract the unfair aspersions, which, unconscious of their unfairness, I had cast on his father’s memory. He then referred me to documents which completely satisfied me that the common accounts of Brant’s cruelties at Wyoming … were gross errors, and

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that in point of fact, Brant was not even present at that scene of desolation” (qtd. in Ketchum 1872, 26). What is perhaps most interesting about Campbell’s account of his meeting with John Brant is the fact that the latter – the direct descendent of the Mohawk chieftain whom Campbell had represented as the most bloodthirsty of Indian savages – appeals to the civilized values of “honor and justice” in his request for the poet’s retraction, implying that the poet had himself acted in an uncivilized manner in representing Joseph Brant as he did. Given that literacy was also considered a hallmark of civilized existence, the young chieftain’s use of written “documents” rather than oral accounts to defend his father’s honour must have struck a chord with Campbell as well, further unsettling his notions of Mohawk savagery. As a result of this remarkable meeting, Campbell contributed an article to the New Monthly Magazine in 1822 under the title “Letter to the Mohawk Chief Ahyonwaeghs, Commonly called John Brant, Esq. of the Grand River, Upper Canada, from Thomas Campbell.”12 In this letter, Campbell expresses the surprise he felt upon meeting with the younger Brant: “‘I really knew not, when I wrote my poem, that the son and daughter of an Indian chief were ever likely to peruse it, or be affected by its contents’” (qtd. in Miller 1978, 61). If (to quote the most famous line of Campbell’s most famous poem, The Pleasures of Hope [1799]), “’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view” (1851, Part 1, line 7), distance had also lent a sense of poetical license, enabling the British poet to take liberties with the names and reputations of non-British people living in the North American interior. Campbell notes in his “Letter” to the New Monthly Magazine that his intended audience was British, and he is clearly surprised when his cultural monologue is disrupted by outsiders like John Brant. Not having considered the possibility that Indian readers “were ever likely to peruse” his poem, he incorrectly assumed that they – the central objects of Gertrude’s narrative – would remain ignorant of its contents and beyond the reach of its influence. Although Campbell’s meeting with John Brant clearly affected him, it did not inspire him to make substantive changes to his poem. Aside from his public retraction in the New Monthly Magazine, he merely added an apologetic footnote in subsequent editions of the poem, blaming his misrepresentation on inaccuracies published in contemporary travel books and “common Histories of

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England,” and adding that “The name of brandt, therefore, remains in my poem a pure and declared character of fiction.”13 But the fact that Campbell refused to change the name of Gertrude’s Indian villain troubled numerous nineteenth-century readers of his work, including Anna Jameson, who, in reference to Campbell’s merely footnoted retraction, complained that Brant’s “name stands in the text as heretofore, apostrophised as the ‘accursed Brandt,’ the ‘monster Brandt;’ and is not this most unfair, to be hitched into elegant and popular rhyme as an assassin by wholesale, and justice done in a little fag-end of prose?” (1990, 233). In this criticism of Campbell, which she included in the memoir of her travels in Upper Canada, Jameson acknowledges the power of poetry to shape public opinion and the popular understanding of historical events and their actors. Even the nineteenth-century historian William L. Stone, himself a declared admirer of Campbell’s Gertrude, complained that “thousands, in every generation to come, will receive [Gertude’s] beautiful fiction for truth” (1838, 319); thus in writing his Life of Joseph Brant and his Poetry and History of Wyoming, Stone was motivated in part by a desire “to contribute something toward the rescue of the Indian warrior’s fame” (Stone 1841, 60). Why did Campbell decide not to change the name of Gertrude’s monstrous villain after his meeting with John Brant? In a discussion of the poet’s poetic insertion into the “Pennsylvanian landscape [of] various animal and vegetable productions peculiar to the Old World” (e.g. flamingoes and tigers, which Campbell later learned were not native to the Wyoming Valley), William Beattie suggests that Campbell decided against revision because he “had an almost superstitious dread of retouching anything after it was printed” (1849, 2.183; unnumbered footnote), an idiosyncrasy that might also account for his decision not to change his poem’s libelous account of “the Monster Brandt.”14 Perhaps Campbell considered his erroneous representation of Brant to be of the same order as one of his poem’s naturalistic errors. Or perhaps the real reason was more aesthetic than historical: of Campbell’s decision to retain the name “Brandt” in his narrative, Beattie remarks that “its suppression would have involved him in the necessity of reconstructing several stanzas; and if the [poem’s] reason was but indifferent, the rhyme was good” (1849, 2.186). In questions of poetical representation, Campbell clearly allowed aesthetic concerns to trump historical ones. In the previous chapter I noted a similar manipulation of truth

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in William Richardson’s The Indians: A Tragedy, where the dramatist deliberately chose to efface Huron agricultural practice. By doing so, Richardson was able to represent his play’s titular Indians as a completely “artless and uncultur’d race” (1790, ii), thereby constructing an aesthetically effective dramatic – if historically inaccurate – contrast between his play’s “wild” Indians and their supposedly “civilized” and “cultured” British counterparts. In his representation of “the Monster Brandt,” Campbell’s decision to retain polished rhyme and poetic structure at the expense of historical accuracy involves a similar privileging of formal literary concerns. In a contemporary evaluation of Gertrude, an anonymous reviewer for the Scots Magazine argued that the poem’s greatest strength was its “descript[ion] of Indian character, and Indian warfare” (qtd. in Miller 1978, 63). While one might argue that Campbell’s portrait of the noble Outalissi helps to balance the depiction of his diametric opposite, the fiendish “Brandt,” the plain fact is that both of these portraits are highly questionable, reducing First Peoples to stereotypical caricatures. Given literature’s power to shape popular opinion during the nineteenth century, one is left to assume that Campbell’s highly celebrated poem did little to promote intercultural understanding. As the century progressed, stereotypes of noble and ignoble savagery continued to influence representations of nature and colonial culture in the British Atlantic world, as well as Native American responses to these representations. In the next chapter, I explore two significant and related moments in this aspect of Romanticism’s legacy by focusing on the writings of two remarkable authors whose works have only rarely been examined by scholars of Romantic literature: the British colonial politician Sir Francis Bond Head and the Ojibwa autobiographer, historian, and panIndian activist George Copway.

chapter seven

Romanticism, Colonialism, and the “Natural Man” in the Writings of Sir Francis Bond Head and George Copway [W]hether we come in contact with our Red brethren as enemies or as friends, they everywhere melt before us like snow before the sun. Indeed it is difficult to say whether our friendship or our enmity has been most fatal. (Sir Francis Bond Head)1 The thought of perishing! how insufferable! O how intolerable! (George Copway)2

i . th e e m i g r a n t a n d t h e n o b l e s a v a g e When Sir Francis Bond Head (1793–1875) arrived in the colonial backwater of Toronto in 1836,3 his mind was filled with Romantic notions of savagery, civility, and the “natural man.” In and of itself, this Romanticism was hardly surprising. Although he had risen up through the ranks of the British military prior to his brief Canadian emigration, Sir Francis had also established himself as a reputable man of letters, having published several popular books on travel and social commentary with the renowned publisher John Murray.4 According to one contemporary biographer, Coleridge had praised “‘the Anglo-gentlemanly, sensible, and kindly mind breaking forth everywhere” in the pages of Head’s published writings (qtd. in Fairford 1836, 17). But what makes Head’s literary Romanticism a particularly interesting and fruitful topic of study is its relationship to his colonial politics, for Sir Francis was no ordinary emigrant: he arrived on the northern shores of Lake Ontario to assume Upper Canada’s lieutenant governorship – an appointment that at least

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one colonial contemporary attributed largely “to his literary reputation” (Roswell 1836, 6). Ultimately, Head’s Romanticism came to be reflected in his indigenous governance policies, policies that his acquaintance Anna Jameson – a writer who rarely pulled her punches – saw as rooted in a sincere interest to promote the welfare of Upper Canada’s aboriginal people (Jameson 1990, 351; unnumbered footnote). An examination of Head’s writings can thus offer modern-day scholars a unique opportunity to see how European Romantic theories of nature and the “noble savage” functioned when put into political practice in a colonial context. Like his literary contemporaries, Head was deeply fascinated by the Native American people he called the “Red Lords of creation” (Head 1846, 136); but unlike most European Romantics, his views were based partly on first-hand experience rather than wholly derived from ethnographic representations. Over a decade before he came to North America, Head had encountered Native Americans during his journey on horseback across the Pampas and among the Andes in South America, and these meetings had encouraged him to question stereotypes of ignoble savagery that, he lamented, had become accepted in European society as factual “statement[s] which historians have now recorded” (Head 1826, 112). Although he had traveled to South America believing that “the great cause of civilisation … is the duty of every rational being to promote” (ibid., 23), Head’s experiences in the New World seemed to have undermined this belief, making him increasingly critical of Europe’s so-called civilizing mission. In an essay on “The Red Man” that he later contributed to The Quarterly Review, for example, Head indicted European colonialism in the harshest terms, bluntly calling America’s aboriginal people the “real proprietors of the New World” and white settlers “usurpers of their soil.” But it was not only “the flagrant immorality” of the white man’s usurpation that offended Sir Francis (1857, 307–8, 309); as far as he was concerned, even the “proffered friendship” of European humanitarians was highly suspect, playing an unwitting role in the larger “work of [colonial] destruction” that was contributing to the impending “annihilation” of America’s first peoples (ibid., 308, 307) by destroying their association with nature, and by introducing them to the colonial evils of disease, dissipation, and intemperance.5 Although Head’s views of colonialism and its oppressive effects on Native Americans may seem radical, they were in fact conventional

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aspects of a Romantic discourse that often invoked the plight of Indians to criticize European society. According to the philosophy of cultural primitivism that informed Head’s literary inheritance, Native Americans were morally pure as a result of their close connection to the natural world, a connection that overly cultured Europeans had lost. Hence, he argued that contact between Europeans and Indians, far from promoting the moral refinement of the latter, was causing them to become “contaminated by the vices of the Old World” (1857, 337). This argument accords with the similarly Romantic sentiment articulated by Jameson, who also criticized “the contagious example of the whites” in Anglo-Indian relations (Jameson 1990, 307). Thus, in a discussion of the lieutenant governor’s opposition to the assimilationist thrust of the European civilizing mission (307–8), Jameson offered a patently Romantic critique of white colonial society, a critique sharing much in common with the views of Sir Francis himself: “[W]hat should the red man see in the civilisation of the white man which should move him to envy or emulation, or raise in his mind a wish to exchange his ‘own unshackled life and his innate capacities of soul,’ for our artificial social habits, our morals, which are contradicted by our opinions, and our religion, which is violated both in our laws and our lives?” (309–10). What is perhaps most interesting about this succinct yet thoroughgoing questioning of European “civilisation” is Jameson’s inclusion of an imbedded quotation from Wordsworth’s long philosophical poem The Excursion (1814). By citing Wordsworth in the context of a larger discussion of Head’s views concerning Anglo-Indian relations, Jameson draws an explicit parallel between the thought of Upper Canada’s lieutenant governor and that of Britain’s preeminent Romantic poet, implying that the Canadian statesman shared with his elder literary contemporary a common understanding of aboriginal culture. It is worth examining the larger passage in The Excursion from which Jameson quotes before investigating Head’s discourse on Indian culture in greater detail, as doing so will help to illuminate Head’s Romanticism and its political and environmental implications. In the passage in question, Wordsworth’s speaker, the Solitary, is highly critical of European “social art” or artifice. He strives to imagine an alternative mode of being located in, and drawing mental and spiritual sustenance from, a pristine American wilderness whose

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“shades have never felt the encroaching axe, / Or soil endured a transfer in the mart / Of dire rapacity.” In the Solitary’s idealizing view, it is only in this wilderness setting, far beyond the agrarian and commercial depredations of colonial society, that one can hope to encounter genuine, uncorrupted “Man,” a being whose status stems from an unalienated connection to the world of nature that is the source of his strength and dignity. But this marvelous “creature” – whom Wordsworth also calls “Primeval Nature’s child” – is to some extent a victim of his own moral superiority, for his lack of guile enables unscrupulous white men to “depriv[e]” him of “his old inheritance” either through outright deceit or through a more subtle process of colonial assimilation that will ultimately “sweep the remnant of his line away.” For the Wordsworthian Solitary, then, the best way for the noble Indian to maintain his dignity, and thus his proper humanity, is to flee the “encroaching axe” of civilization and eschew, for as long as possible, all contact with white colonial society, since contemplations, worthier, nobler far Than her destructive energies, attend His independence, when along the side Of Mississippi, or that northern stream That spreads into successive seas, he walks; Pleased to perceive his own unshackled life, And his innate capacities of soul, There imaged ... (Wordsworth 1884, 3.920–41) Just as Wordsworth himself famously eschewed the capitalist world of getting and spending in favour of a more “natural” existence in the relatively unspoiled environs of England’s Lake District, his poem’s speaker also imagines the unacculturated North American Indian – the very epitome of Romanticism’s “natural man” – as fleeing to a “vast / Expanse of unappropriated earth” far removed from the corrupting influences of Euroamerican civilization, where he will remain free to cultivate a “mind that sheds a light on what it sees” (3.943–5). By maintaining his pre-contact condition and continuing to live in a state of nature, the Solitary’s Indian also maintains his “innate capacities of soul,” becoming an American version of the domestic “introspective rustic” that Wordsworth himself idealized “and aspired to be” (Fulford 2006, 206).6

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Sharing a concept of indigenous identity remarkably similar to that informing The Excursion, Sir Francis Bond Head believed that “genuine” North American Indians resided not in the vicinity of white settlements but much farther afield “in the vast interminable plains, – in the lofty and almost inaccessible mountains, or in the lonely interior of the immense wilderness” (Head 1857, 313). Removed from colonial contact, and enjoying the physical and moral benefits of a natural existence, such people were, in Head’s view, vastly superior to their European counterparts. Having journeyed via canoe to the remote setting of Georgian Bay’s Manitoulin Island in the summer of 1836, where he met with, and witnessed the inter-tribal councils of, large groups of relatively unacculturated Anishinaabeg (also known as Ojibwa or Mississauga) people, Head speaks with seeming authority about the qualities that constitute what he calls “the real character of the Red Man” (1857, 312; emphasis added). In a discussion of diplomatic relations, for example, he praises both the “scientific manner” of Indian argumentation and the “beautiful wild flowers of eloquence” that adorn their speech (Head 1846, 147), arguing that “the civilized world” could benefit by emulating such dignified conduct in its own comparatively corrupt and degraded political arenas (147). Such praise is accompanied by an encomium to the physical and moral power the Indians derived from their embrace of what Head saw as a simpler (or what we might nowadays call an environmentally sustainable) lifestyle: “They hear more distinctly – see farther – smell clearer – can bear more fatigue – can subsist on less food – and have altogether fewer wants than their white brethren; and yet, while from morning till night we stand gazing at ourselves in the looking-glass of self-admiration, we consider the red Indian[s] of America as ‘outside barbarians’” (Head 1846, 148). As if to ensure that nature itself receives due credit for helping to shape such an exemplary culture, Head posits a link between Indian dignity and the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence amongst the sublime landscapes of the Upper Canadian interior. Having praised in rather conventional terms the oratorical skills of the chiefs gathered on Manitoulin Island, he asks: [I]s it not astonishing to reflect that the orators in these Councils are men whose lips and gums are – while they are speaking – black from the wild berries on which they have been subsisting

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– who have never heard of education – never seen a town – but who, born in the secluded recesses of an almost interminable forest, have spent their lives in either following zigzaggedly the game on which they subsist through a labyrinth of trees, or in paddling their canoes across lakes, and among a congregation of [innumerable] islands such as I have described!” (Head 1846, 147–8) At first glance, Head’s reference to the nonexistence of Indian education might seem to suggest an ethnocentric privileging of European forms of knowledge transmission. But if we bear in mind his earlier praise, mentioned above, for the simultaneously “scientific” and poetical character of Indian oratory (147),7 we might conclude that he is implicitly praising the Anishinaabeg for practicing a more natural mode of learning than was found in white society, the sort of non-institutionalized schooling that Coleridge idealizes in “Frost at Midnight” as a positive alternative to oppressive systems of urban education. Certainly, Head’s description of the eloquence issuing from the councilors’ berry-stained lips implies a connection between their oral discourse and the nature that sustains them; and his references to the “interminable forests” in which the Indians were born, and the countless islands through which they deftly paddle their canoes, suggests Head’s subscription to a Burkean concept of the “infinite” sublime (Burke 1990, 67–8) that functions to annihilate the ego and elevate the soul (Binnema et. al. 2005, 128). Ultimately, Sir Francis is so effusive in his celebration of the unassimilated Indian’s nobility that his argument, though grounded in a Wordsworthian model, sometimes diverges from that of Wordsworth himself, whose primitivist representations were occasionally troubled, and sometimes even negated, by doubt and uncertainty.8 It is important to note, however, that Head’s praise for indigenous culture is reserved only for those Indians who have never been influenced by extended contact with white society. Thus, for Head, the contact zone in which Europeans and Indians meet, mingle, and engage in trade and military activity is best identified as “the contaminated barrier” (1857, 314), a cross-cultural space in which Indian nobility is inevitably lost despite any appearance that white travel writers may have recorded to the contrary: When the barrier [between European and Native American cultures] has apparently been crossed, the evidence [for the existence

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of savage nobility] which first presents itself bears false witness in the case; – for just as the richest lodes are covered at their surface with a glittering substance (termed by miners “mundic”) resembling metal, but which on being smelted flies away in poisonous fumes of arsenic, so is that portion of the uncivilized world which borders upon civilization always found to be contaminated, or, in other words, to have lost its own good qualities, without having received in return anything but the vices of the neighbouring race. (1857, 312) Although Sir Francis overtly presents his discussion of the “contaminated barrier” as a criticism of his own race (which he holds responsible for the moral “contamination” or “poison[ing]” of an otherwise pure and “good” Indian culture), this analysis nevertheless has implications for Indians living in close proximity to white settlements, for in such a context of cross-cultural “contamination,” the post-contact Indians’ ostensible immorality – no matter what its source – makes them unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, when he tells his readers that “a fair view” of Indians can only be attained by imagining them (as Wordsworth’s Solitary does) in their pre-contact condition, he effectively turns his gaze away from the people who have been most adversely affected by the very colonial “act[s] of barbarism” (313) that he so scathingly denounces elsewhere. More ominously, by defining “the contaminated barrier” as “the region of land occupied by half-castes” (314), Sir Francis demonstrates the extent to which his discourse on European-Indian contact is predicated on a privileging of racial (as opposed to simply moral) purity. The racialist aspect of Head’s critique of white immorality and its effects on Indian people becomes clearly apparent when, in The Emigrant, he recounts the story of his visit to Rice Lake, the birthplace of Ojibwa authors Maungwudaus and Kahgegagahbowh (also known respectively as George Henry and George Copway), the latter of whose writings will be considered in the second section of this chapter. At the Rice Lake Indian village, which was located amidst an immense tract of land that had been appropriated by the British government for the settlement of Irish emigrants in 1818, Sir Francis noticed “something unusual in the complexion of most of the children.” His explanation is as follows: “Whether eating rice had made all their faces white – what could have made so many

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of their eyes blue, or have caused their hair to curl, I felt it might be unneighbourly and ungrateful to inquire; and yet these little alterations … created in my mind considerable disappointment; indeed, I felt it useless to bother myself by considering whether or not civilization is a blessing to the red Indian, if the process practically ends – as I regret to say it invariably does – by turning him white!” (1846, 111). The apparent generosity of this passage, implied by Sir Francis’s stated concern not to be “unneighbourly and ungrateful” to his Rice Lake hosts (who received him, as he notes, with much social grace), is belied by its racist logic: in the lieutenant governor’s view, the very existence of métissage or racial mixing – and not the apparent absence of the Métis children’s white fathers (whom he does not mention) – is itself quite simply cause for “regret.” If, when faced with the reality of métissage, the whole question of “whether or not civilization is a blessing” becomes, for Sir Francis, a moot point, why does one get the distinct feeling that it is in fact, for him, a curse? Complaining that the children’s white complexion “completely divested the picture of the sentiment with which I was desirous to adorn it,” he makes it clear that miscegenation is anathematic to the sentimentally inflected Romantic desire informing his vision of the noble savage. If racial purity is necessary to the maintenance of such a vision, it is no wonder that his experience at Rice Lake was cause for “considerable disappointment” (111). But Sir Francis is ultimately unwilling to let his experiences at Rice Lake, and in other colonial contact zones, divest him of his cherished Romanticism. If intercultural contact portends, as he argues, the moral and racial death-knell of the noble savage, then the best thing to do is to keep the races separate for their mutual good: “In short, between the civilized and uncivilized world a barrier exists, which neither party is very desirous to cross; for the wild man is as much oppressed by the warm houses, by the short tether, and by the minute suffocating regulations of civilized men, as they [civilized men] suffer from sleeping with him under the great canopy of heaven, or from following him over the surface of his trackless and townless territory” (1857, 311). Although Head argues that it would be best to keep the European and indigenous “world[s]” apart to prevent the “oppress[ion]” of both, his references to the white man’s “short tether” and the “minute suffocating regulations” that define European existence arguably

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implies a much more strident criticism of the “civilized” world than of the “uncivilized” one. Indeed, when one takes into account the spiritualized notion of freedom implicit in Head’s reference to “the great canopy of heaven” under which the Indian resides, the white man’s world seems all the more constricted. Contrasting the suffocating atmosphere and “impure air” of English domestic dwellings to “the clean rocks and pure air of Lake Huron,” and mocking the English gentleman’s “whole system of living, house-fed, in gaiters, and drinking port wine,” Sir Francis argues that the Indian could only regard the civilized man’s existence as “an inferior state of happiness [compared] to that which it had pleased ‘the Great Spirit’ to allow him to enjoy” in a state of nature (1846, 143–4). In order to protect his aboriginal subjects from European moral and racial contamination, Lieutenant Governor Head personally issued a proposal to the Ojibwa councilors he met on Manitoulin Island in the summer of 1836, “recommend[ing] some of them to sell their lands to the Provincial Government, and to remove to the innumerable islands in the waters before us” (1846, 148). Here, in the midst of Lake Huron’s soul-elevating sublimity, the Ojibwa people would presumably subsist, as they had traditionally done, on the abundant productions of the forests and the waters, free to practice their own religion and to enjoy the liberty that “the Great Spirit” in its wisdom and benevolence had bestowed upon them. Having himself witnessed on Manitoulin Island “a homely picture of what is called ‘savage life’” (137), Head seemed assured that this policy would not incur the outrageous cruelties that accompanied similar practices in the United States, which had rolled over Indian territories “like the car of Juggernaut” (122); for “the distinguishing characteristic” of the native people gathered on Manitoulin “was robust, ruddy, healthy. More happy or more honest countenances,” he claimed, “could not exist” (138). Contemplating the “joyous-looking children,” whose “ruddy” complexion guaranteed their racial purity, and whose smiling faces evidently exclaimed “Haven’t I had a good breakfast this morning?” (138–9), Sir Francis seemed assured that the Ojibwa people gathered there would not only survive but thrive in such a paradisiacal wilderness setting. Unfortunately for the lieutenant governor, some of the most respected Ojibwa leaders would not accept his logic. Peter Jones or

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Sacred Feathers, a prominent Anglo-Ojibwa Methodist leader and chief, pointed out, for example, that the “great and little Manitoulin Islands” – contrary to Head’s representations of them as plenitudinous happy hunting grounds – were “in general barren, and destitute of game” (1861, 43). And the respected Mississauga elder Chief Joseph Sawyer (also known by his traditional name Sloping Sky) offered a detailed rejoinder demonstrating the extent to which Head’s primitivist depiction of Manitoulin Island denied the very realities of colonial history: “Now … we raise our own corn, potatoes, wheat, &c.; we have cattle, and many comforts, and conveniences. But if we go to Maneetoolin, we could not live; soon we should be extinct as a people; we could raise no potatoes, corn, pork, or beef; nothing would grow by putting the seed on the smooth rock. We could get very few of the birds the Governor speaks of, and there are no deer to be had. We have been bred among the white people, and our children cannot live without bread, and other things, to which they are now accustomed” (qtd. in Slight 1844, 111).9 Not only does Chief Sawyer’s response to Head’s scheme deny the idyllic representation of Manitoulin as a place perfectly fitted to a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence, but it also gives the lie to Head’s representation of the Ojibwa people assembled on Manitoulin in the summer of 1836 as the “wild” cultural antithesis to the racially mixed denizens of the “contaminated barrier.” But most disturbing in light of the lieutenant governor’s apparently benevolent intentions is Chief Sawyer’s blunt assertion that this policy would invariably lead to the starvation and ultimate extinction of the Anishinaabeg “as a people.” For Sawyer, in other words, Head’s fetishization of the noble savage, far from functioning to guarantee the continuing diversity of race and culture in Upper Canada, would result in genocide pure and simple. One is reminded of the Creek Indian Speckled Snake’s ironic commentary on America’s colonial administrators, who, like Sir Francis, represented themselves in paternalistic fashion as the Indians’ “Great Father”: “He loved his red children, and he said, ‘Get a little further, lest I tread on thee.’” Addressing his own people, Speckled Snake did not mince his words: “Brothers!” he exclaimed, “I have listened to a great many talks from our great father. But they always began and ended in this – ‘Get a little further; you are too near me’” (qtd. in Bruchac 1999, 25).

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i i . th e ro m a n t i c i n d i a n : k a h g e g a g a h b ow h / g e o r g e c o p way An examination of Sir Francis Bond Head’s writings demonstrates the extent to which benevolent colonial intentions could lead to adverse outcomes – even in one who had expressed a vague hope that “the hour of retribution” would one day arrive, in which Native Americans, acting with moral righteousness and “irresistible fury,” would avenge themselves and reclaim their stolen lands from “the descendants of Europeans” (Head 1826, 125). It is important to note, however, that Anishinaabeg ways of life had been imperiled in Upper Canada well before Sir Francis invoked Romantic philosophy to justify his Indian removal scheme. In 1825, for example, two thousand Irish emigrants had settled in the area of Rice Lake, clearing its forests in the name of economic and aesthetic improvement and thus making it increasingly difficult for the local Ojibwa people – who had transferred their land to the provincial government seven years earlier – to practice traditional modes of subsistence in southeastern Ontario (Smith 1998, 6–8; Peyer 1997, 231). One of the people who experienced and deeply resented the effects of this territorial expropriation was an Ojibwa named Kahgegagahbowh or “Standing Firm,” more commonly known as George Copway. Born near Rice Lake in the autumn of 1818, Kahgegagahbowh had spent his early years learning woodland lifeways from his mother, who belonged to the Eagle clan, and from his father, a member of the Crane clan who had become “a medicine man in the early part of his life, and always had by him the implements of war, which generally distinguish our head men” (Copway 1850b, 6–7). Among the highlights of Copway’s childhood as recounted in his autobiography were his successful vision quest (undertaken at the age of twelve) and his ritual induction into the Grand Medicine Lodge, or Medewiwin Society. Having been born “precisely at that critical period in which the Southeastern Ojibwas’ hunting-trapping-fishing-gathering days of plenty were coming to an end” (Peyer 1997, 231), however, Kahgegagahbowh seemed destined to live a life of cultural transition. At the age of twelve he converted to Methodism, and in subsequent years, as George Copway, he pursued religious training in Upper Canada and Illinois, learning in the process to read and write the English language. As a young missionary, Copway married Elizabeth Howell, the devout daughter

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of an emigrant farmer from Yorkshire. Predictably, their union scandalized members of colonial society, who, like Sir Francis, could not abide the idea of a cross-racial marriage. After a scandal involving his alleged embezzlement of funds from the Rice Lake band and the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1845, Copway and his Canadian wife emigrated to the United States, where they lost no time transforming Kahgegagahbowh into an international literary celebrity. Most commentators assume that Elizabeth Copway, “an educated gentlewoman of literary inclinations with a knowledge of English poetry” (Fulford 2006, 282), helped her husband to write his popular works, which included a bestselling autobiography, a “traditional history” of the Ojibwa people, and a European travelogue (all originally published between 1846 and 1851). Elizabeth’s input would certainly help to explain her husband’s occasional penchant for quoting and citing such authors as Burns, Byron, Scott, and Southey. Capitalizing on the American vogue for representations of the “noble savage” while simultaneously promoting the necessity of aboriginal religious conversion, the Copways constructed Kahgegagahbowh’s narrative persona as that of a “Noble Christian Indian” (D. Smith 1998, 28). Insofar as this persona affirmed both “the Indian’s ‘natural’ moral nobility and the evangelical project that would nevertheless work to ‘improve’ such an exemplary life,”10 it seems impossibly contradictory.11 But as I hope to demonstrate in the following pages, such a philosophically complex persona could have been part of a deliberate – albeit risky – strategy of counter-discourse designed to resist the associated doctrines of segregation and removal advocated implicitly or explicitly, as we have seen, by the likes of Wordsworth and Sir Francis Bond Head. Although Copway was absent from Upper Canada during Sir Francis’s brief tenure, he would likely have learned about the lieutenant governor’s proposed removal scheme from such prominent Ojibwa chiefs as Peter Jones and Joseph Sawyer, with whom he was closely associated prior to his emigration to the United States.12 A few years after Sir Francis returned to Britain, Copway briefly served on an Ojibwa council that had attempted, ultimately without success, to establish “a small Indian territory” at the northern end of the Saugeen country (Smith 1998, 19), part of the larger tract of land that Sir Francis had tried to persuade local Ojibwa people to sell to the provincial government. Since, at the former lieutenant governor’s prompting, at least one Ojibwa band had moved to

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Manitoulin only to suffer and starve there during the subsequent winter, it is likely that Sir Francis’s name had become a byword among Upper Canada’s Ojibwa people, including Copway himself. If, as seems likely, the young Christian convert had learned to appreciate the role that Romantic primitivism had played in Sir Francis’s removal scheme, he might very well have hoped that by Christianizing the noble savage paradigm he would evade the logic of segregation and removal. That is, by affirming his status as a “Noble Christian Indian,” he himself would provide living testimony of his people’s potential to adapt to the white man’s ways while still demonstrating an aspect of Romantic primitivism that he valued highly: its view of the “natural” moral uprightness of aboriginal culture. This aspect of Copway’s complex primitivism is perhaps most readily apparent in his discussions of Ojibwa tradition, which, while affirming the nobility of his ancestors, nevertheless distorted their history. Gerald Vizenor, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, remarks of Copway that the “memories and personal experiences he reveals in his letters, lectures, and books, are romantic, idealized, closer to the benevolent descriptions of the tribes offered by white writers, then and now, rather than a landscape of mythic tribal events.” By romanticizing his personal and cultural history while at the same time basing his “ken on conversion,” Copway “cast strange shadows on familiar woodland trails” (Vizenor 1993, 61). Citing scholarship by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat in a related critique, Donald Smith notes that the young Ojibwa writer’s foray into autobiography was itself something of an anomaly from the standpoint of Native tradition, as it offered an individualist construction of identity that was foreign to aboriginal concepts of collective experience (Smith 1998, 17). Copway’s narrative obviously owes something to the influence of his adopted Protestantism and its conventions of spiritual autobiography and confession, which emphasized and explored the convert’s inner life and personal relationship to God. But given Copway’s familiarity with and attraction to Western literature, his emphasis upon personal experience likely also owes a debt to the subjectivist ethos that is a hallmark of Romantic thought. One of the most patently Romantic passages in Copway’s writing occurs in the early pages of his autobiography when, as if responding to a Wordsworthian notion of the noble Indian as “Primeval Nature’s child,” he exclaims:

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I was born in Nature’s wide domain! The trees were all that sheltered my infant limbs – the blue heavens all that covered me. I am one of Nature’s children; I have always admired her; she shall be my glory; her features – her robes, and the wreath about her brow – the seasons – her stately oaks, and the evergreen – her hair, ringlets over the earth – all contribute to my enduring love of her; and wherever I see her, emotions of pleasure roll in my breast, and swell and burst like waves on the shores of the ocean, in prayer and praise to him who has placed me in her hand. It is thought great to be born in palaces, surrounded with wealth – but to be born in Nature’s wide domain is greater still! (1850b, 10–11) Copway’s depiction of himself as “one of Nature’s children” and his reference to the “emotions of pleasure” he experiences in nature’s presence give this passage a Romantic tone. But given Copway’s Christian conversion, the terms of his encomium seem significant indeed, exhibiting tensions and contradictions that result from his effort to synthesize Romantic and Christian concepts of indigenous identity. Although he ultimately seems to acknowledge God’s precedence, he refers to Nature – not to God – as his parent. Moreover, his characterization of the open skies as “blue heaven” and his sacral reference to Nature’s “glory” function rhetorically to spiritualize the wilderness in which he was raised prior to his conversion, thereby affirming the “indigenous and traditional” view that “[a]ll creation is sacred, and [that] the sacred and secular are inseparable” (Posey 2001, 3). Indeed, when Copway informs us subsequently that “Nature will be Nature still, while palaces shall decay and fall in ruins” (1850b, 12), he attributes divine permanence to a creation conventionally figured in Western writing as mutable and evanescent. In the same passage, Copway’s interesting choice of verb tenses and related temporal references also underscores the heterodox profundity of his devotion to “Nature’s wide domain.” Although he expresses gratitude later in his autobiography for having traded wilderness life for the comforts of a “civilized” Christian existence, Copway nevertheless articulates a continuing love for and loyalty to Nature. Declaring in the past tense that he “was born” in Nature’s realm, he nevertheless proudly asserts in the present tense “I am one of Nature’s children.” For added emphasis he also declares “I have always admired [Nature],” and he speaks of his “enduring love of

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her.” Indeed, in a subtly prophetic reference to transcendental futurity, Copway goes so far as to declare that Nature “shall be my glory” (10; emphasis added). Critics have often commented on the “overwhelmingly romantic and nostalgic tone” of Copway’s musings (Ruoff 1997, 45), but here his nostalgia gives way to a forward-looking confidence in Nature’s redemptive potential. Granted, Copway’s identification of himself, and of his people, as “Nature’s children,” is highly problematic. As Tim Fulford has recently noted, such rhetoric risks affirming a view of Indians as simple, childlike primitives rather than as psychologically complex adults (2006, 280–91). The infantilizing aspect of this discourse is particularly evident in a section of The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1850), wherein Copway prefaces his discussion of Ojibwa beliefs with a quotation from Robert Southey’s epic poem Thalaba (1801): ’Tis a story, Handed from ages down; a nurse’s tale, Which children open-eyed and mouthed devour, And thus as garrulous ignorance relates, We learn it and believe. (Copway 1850c, 95) In the context of Copway’s History, as Fulford remarks, this quotation reduces sacred stories to the status of mere juvenile tales “suitable only for entertaining children” (2006, 281). By representing Indians as children and their cultural knowledge as a form of “garrulous ignorance,” the quotation might be said to provide some justification for the intervention of a paternalistic colonial order claiming to know what is best for indigenous people. It is important to note, however, that Copway was himself highly critical of such condescension, taking offence when colonial administrators treated his people like children. This becomes apparent in a later section of his Traditional History, where Copway remarks: “In former years, the American governors were more kindly disposed to us than they have been of late, yet the name of ‘children’ is applied to us. The government and its agents style us ‘My children.’ The Indians are of age – and believe they can think and act for themselves. The term ‘My children’ comes with an ill grace from those who seem bent on driving them from their fathers’ house” (Copway 1850c, 201).

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The fact that Copway can refer to himself as “one of Nature’s children” while at the same time decrying the use of similar rhetoric by colonial officials need not be regarded as a fundamental contradiction in his discourse. When considering the significance of a term or an utterance, as Edward Said has noted, one must bear in mind “not only … what is said but also … how it is said, by whom, where, and for whom” (1993, 21). One is reminded here of Gloria Naylor’s analysis of the word “nigger,” a term that is generally insulting when used by whites to identity African-American people, but which can convey a rich spectrum of potential meaning when used by black people speaking among themselves in the context of family or community. As Naylor concludes, “Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power” (Naylor 2001, 460). In Copway’s critique of colonial paternalism, the fact that the term “children” “comes … from those” who use it in a demeaning and self-interested way is the main problem. When speaking of his fellow Native Americans, Copway’s reference to “their fathers’ house” makes it clear who truly occupies the parental role: elder Indians, not paternalistic white men. In a discussion of the removal scheme that Sir Francis Bond Head devised for the ostensible good of his Ojibwa subjects, Anna Jameson offered a critique of colonial governance that Copway would surely have supported. Although she believed that Head was “sincerely interested in the welfare” of Upper Canada’s Ojibwa people, she was convinced that his paternalistic mode of governance undermined his good intentions: “seeing that the Indians are not virtually British subjects,” she boldly asserted, “no measure should be adopted, even for their supposed benefit, without their acquiescence. They are quite capable of judging for themselves in every case in which their interests are concerned. The fault of our executive is, that we acknowledge the Indians our allies yet treat them, as well as call them, our children” (Jameson 1990, 351 unnumbered note). The infantilization of Indian people that Copway and Jameson lamented is consistent with the logic of stadial theory, which, to quote an early article from the Edinburgh Review, conceptualized human history as a process of gradual development from “a state of early youth” (characterized by a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence) to a “more mature” state (characterized by a commercial mode of subsistence). According to this paradigm, a primitive society will evolve or “improve” more quickly if it is “guided and

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supported by the more mature strength” of an advanced society like that of England (qtd. in Buchan 2004, 97).13 Given the tensions (discussed above) informing the cultural amalgam of the “Noble Christian Indian,” it is perhaps understandable that Copway’s response to stadial theory is less than consistent. When he refers to himself in his autobiography’s prefatory remarks as “one, who has but recently been brought out of a wild and savage state” (Copway 1850b, xi; emphasis added), he seems very much to sanction the ideological assumptions informing stadial theory; not only does he invoke the well-worn concept of savagery, but his use of the passive voice implies that some unnamed colonial agency has been responsible for his more refined state. Building on this argument a few pages later, Copway directly identifies both the cause of his former savagery and the colonial process that helped to free him from it: “I loved the woods and the chase. I had the nature for it, and gloried in nothing else. The mind for letters was in me, but was asleep, till the dawn of Christianity arose, and awoke the slumbers of the soul into energy and action” (1850b, 3; Copway’s emphasis). While insisting that the capacity for literacy inheres in all Indian people, this passage directly correlates Copway’s “wild and savage state” with his former hunting lifestyle while attributing the process of his civilization – of which his newfound literacy is a sure and potent sign – to his Christian conversion. This affirmation of stadial theory is further underscored in the autobiography’s second chapter, wherein Copway denounces the Indian hunter’s life as one of abject “ignorance” and superstitious “darkness” (26), insisting on the moral necessity of Christian conversion and, implicitly, on the need for aboriginal people to embrace “the arts of agriculture” rather than those of hunting (qtd. in Peyer 1997, 259).14 And yet, although Copway’s Christianity encourages him to reject hunting on moral grounds, his Romantic primitivism will not allow him to sanction an important tenet of stadial ideology: the proposition that hunting promotes a culture of violence and bloodlust. One of the Scottish Enlightenment’s most prominent philosophers, Lord Kames (Henry Home), explained the hunter’s ostensible propensity towards violent behaviour in terms reminiscent of Romantic-era animal-rights discourse (whose proponents, as I noted in Chapter Four, frequently asserted that cruelty towards animals leads inevitably toward the mistreatment of other human

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beings): “In the hunter-state, the daily practice of slaughtering innocent animals for food, hardens men in cruelty: more savage than bears or wolves, they are cruel even to their own kind.” According to Kames, this tendency to violence disappears as a change in subsistence practices causes people to ascend to the second and third rungs on the ladder of civilization: “The calm and sedentary life of the shepherd, tends to soften the harsh manners of hunters; and agriculture, requiring the union of many hands in one operation, improves benevolence” (Home 1778, 1.341–2).15 Statements like this are part and parcel of what Deborah Bird Rose terms “progress ideology.” If an agricultural way of life softens “harsh manners” and “improves benevolence,” as Kames claimed, then any distress that indigenous people experienced as their hunting grounds were appropriated for agricultural development could “be claimed to be leading towards, and thus be justified by, a more perfect future” (Rose 2004, 19, 17). Given the widespread existence in North America and elsewhere of “effort[s] to subvert indigenous lifeways by development agendas” (Grim 2001, xl) – and given the fact that such agendas commonly involved an agricultural transformation of traditional hunting territories – one can easily appreciate Beth Fowkes Tobin’s insistence that an understanding of colonial agricultural history “is crucial to understanding the British empire” (2005, 10). Bitter at the way indigenous people were often forced off their land to make way for white settlers, Copway would likely have taken issue with Kames’s claim that an agricultural lifestyle “improves benevolence.” Indeed, in a rare moment of irony, he indicts “British generosity” for having tricked the Rice Lake Ojibwa people into selling “1,800,000 acres of good hunting land” in 1818 at well below its actual value (1850b, 14), much of which land was subsequently clear-cut to make way for the ploughs of Irish settlers. Although, as noted above, Copway ultimately rejects hunting in favour of more ostensibly civilized pursuits, he refuses to affirm the Eurocentric thesis that hunting societies are morally inferior to agrarian and commercial ones. On the contrary, in the very chapter in which he piously renounces hunting and its associated traditions, he spends a full paragraph praising what he calls “the nobleness of the hunter’s deeds” (1850b, 19). Here, Copway recounts the moral imperatives that his father had taught him as a child, including the hunter’s obligation to practice charity by sharing his game with

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poor and elderly people, as well as the hunter’s duty to avoid killing animals needlessly.16 Far from representing hunting as antithetical to civilized Christian and agrarian values, Copway calls his father’s teachings “lessons directed from heaven” (20) itself, thereby implying that his people had always practiced “the essential teachings of Christianity” (Walker 1997, 99), while also denying one of the central ideological justifications for a European “civilizing mission” involving the conversion of Indian people and the appropriation of their lands. As a form of what Fikret Berkes calls “situated knowledge,” moreover, Copway’s discourse on Ojibwa hunting and its attendant environmental ethics implicitly “embodies claims to authority over land and resources, especially in the face of counterclaims from outsiders” (Berkes 2008, 13). This claim to authority is particularly apparent in Recollections of a Forest Life when, in discussing the inter-tribal ethics of Ojibwa hunting, Copway quotes his father as saying that “this river, and all that is in it are mine” (1850b, 17). In celebrating the Indian hunter’s moral “nobleness” (1850b, 19), however, Copway courts a Romantic idealism not unlike that which informed the writings of Sir Francis Bond Head, who, as we have seen, proposed that Ontario’s noble Indians needed to be segregated from all contact with whites in order to avoid “contamination” by their corrupting influences. It is important to note that Copway himself came to advocate the removal of America’s Indian peoples to a remote territory located “on the eastern banks of the Missouri River,” safely distant from white settlements and “the course of [Euroamerican] emigration.” The remoteness of this panIndian reservation, which he proposed to call Kahgega, would, in Copway’s view, prevent “the races [from] coming in contact with one another,” thereby ensuring that Indians would not adopt the “foolish ways and … vices” of white settlers, who tended to represent “the worst classes of pale-faces” (Copway 1850a, 13–14, 4). And yet, although Copway’s logic for the creation of Kahgega is reminiscent of that which informed Head’s Manitoulin Island removal scheme, Copway’s plan differed from Head’s in important ways. For one thing, Sir Francis subscribed to the notion that aboriginal people were an endangered species destined, like the continent’s dwindling stands of old-growth forest and disappearing herds of buffalo, to vanish from the face of the earth; his removal scheme was intended merely to ensure that Indians “would disappear

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more slowly than they would in colonized areas” (Binnema et. al. 2005, 125). Understandably, as this chapter’s second epigraph makes clear, Copway could not accept the idea of the vanishing Indian; on the contrary, he conceived his pan-Indian territory as “the only means which can be used to save the Indians from extinction” (Copway 1850a, 4). Realizing, moreover, that there would likely be “no limit to the sea of [white emigrant] population” in North America (3), he did not advocate a permanent segregation of Indians from whites. Since it was only a matter of time before Euroamericans would arrive in the vicinity of Kahgega, he saw the proposed territory as a way to prepare for the inevitable: “by the time the whites should reach there, the Indians would be so far improved as to be enabled to live as neighbors, and could compete with the whites in point of intelligence, and mechanical and agricultural skill” (14). As this aspect of Copway’s plan indicates, Indian survival would require not a primitivist rejection of white ways but a determined embrace of them. By learning to “compete with the whites” on their own conceptual and practical terrain, the Native American residents of Kahgega would acquire the means to govern their own lives and lands in a sustainable manner. In many ways, Copway’s plan to establish a “new Indian territory” was deeply flawed. Most troubling was the fact that it was to be located on 30,000 square kilometres of land situated, as Donald Smith has noted, “right in the remaining hunting grounds of the Sioux!” (Smith 1998, 20); thus, Copway’s proposal, like Head’s, presupposed the expropriation of previously unceded Indian land (though unlike the case with Head’s proposal, the aboriginal people who were expected to relinquish ownership of the land were not consulted). Moreover, the fact that Copway proposed to call his proposed reservation “Kahgega,” after his own Ojibwa name Kahgegagahbowh, suggests that the scheme was at least partly driven by his own “growing vanity” (ibid., 19). Given Copway’s proposal to replace “hereditary chiefship” at Kahgega with a democratic mode of governance in which the “meritorious only” would rule (Copway 1850a, 15), it is also likely that Copway envisioned himself as a logical leader of this pan-Indian state. One might thus be forgiven for asking whether, in presuming to know what was best for all Native Americans, Copway was himself cultivating the sort of paternalistic attitude that he himself found so distasteful in white colonial administrators. In

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the end, at any rate, Copway’s plan to establish Kahgega, like Head’s removal scheme, came to naught. Finally, given Copway’s eagerness to embrace European modes of subsistence, religion, and governance, one must consider the question of cultural assimilation. Since the concept of the “Noble Christian Indian” that I have been examining here seems patently European, one might wonder whether or not Copway managed to retain any aspect of his Ojibwa identity or of an “Anishinabeg point of view.”17 Speaking of modern-day indigenous people, Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred has recently argued that the acceptance of “European thought has polluted the minds of Native Americans,” turning them into “cultural blanks,” i.e., people having “no cultural code or set of norms to guide [their] behaviour” (Alfred 2005, 11). Is Copway a cultural blank? An affirmative answer might very well account for Copway’s various complicities and culpabilities, including the alleged embezzlement that led to his self-imposed exile from Upper Canada, his disturbing offer to help the United States government remove Seminole people from their lands in southern Florida, and his passing association with the openly racist and anti-abolitionist “American” movement in U. S. politics.18 But to regard Copway as a “cultural blank” with a “polluted” mind would also give credence to Sir Francis Bond Head’s notion that post-contact indigenous people were “contaminated” and thus not “real” Indians (Head 1857, 312), thereby tacitly condoning Head’s segregationist perspective on issues of cultural purity (which, as I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, had potentially genocidal implications when translated into political practice). As Joshua David Bellin remarks, moreover, “to dismiss Copway as a ‘spurious’ Indian based on his apparent distance from ‘traditional’ standards is to assume that stories, cultures, traditions exist in pure, atemporal, unadulterated form rather than as local acts in contexts of encounter” (Bellin 2001, 191–2). Like Ojibwa chiefs Peter Jones and Joseph Sawyer, Copway believed, rightly or wrongly, that Indian survival was contingent not upon cultural segregation but upon some degree of acculturation. In particular, he was convinced of the need to embrace agriculture as a response to the loss of hunting territories, and of the need to cultivate a counterdiscursive Christianity that exposed the white man’s inability to live up to his own system of values. Then again, there is some evidence

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to suggest that Copway was himself ultimately unhappy with his hybrid “Noble Christian Indian” identity. Late in his life, after his literary star had faded, he apparently became a practitioner of the “healing art,” advertising himself as one who could concoct “remarkable cures with herbs, leaves, flowers, bark, and roots”; and although he converted to Catholicism only days before he passed away, he had previously claimed on at least one occasion to have become a “pagan” (Smith 1998, 27–8). Perhaps on close and sustained acquaintance, Copway lost his enthusiasm for Western culture. If so, it seems likely that Wordsworth and Head would have approved.

a f t e rw o r d

Colonialism and Ecology [W]here are human feet for Lo our eyes are in the heavens … (William Blake, The Four Zoas)1 [A]wareness of the ruptured alienation of settler societies is becoming ever more apparent. Our generations alive today may be the first wave of settlers to try to grasp the enormity of conquest, and to understand it as a continuous process. In consequence, many of us really search to understand how we may inscribe back into the world a moral presence for ourselves. (Deborah Bird Rose 2004, 6)

i. environmental determinism a n d t h e q u e s t i o n o f ag e n cy Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theories of environmental determinism often had profoundly negative implications for the colonial world, in part because they tended to deny the reality of indigenous agency and self-determination. As noted in Chapter One, William Robertson’s claim that “the improvident savage,” “[l]ike a plant or animal … is formed by the climate under which he is placed” (1777, 2.169), provides a classic example of such thinking, according to which indigenous people become, like the flora and fauna of the ecosystems they inhabit, mere passive productions of an active, forming nature. As Val Plumwood observes, “we cannot come to terms with another we do not recognize as presenting to us any independent form of agency” (2001, 21). And yet, Plumwood is speaking here mainly of “the modern anthropocentric tradition” in which “nature’s agency as such is denied” (23, 7). Although I find her argument for nature’s agency compelling, and although she explicitly links it to crucial questions of human social justice, I am ultimately less than comfortable with it, if only because

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the discourses of environmental determinism that circulated during the Romantic period often seemed to affirm a rather insidious concept of natural agency: one that supported colonial ideology and practice at the expense of indigenous societies. Having spent numerous years researching and writing this book, I have had much time to reflect on the ways in which colonial concepts of natural savagery, and associated governance practices, have tended to deny indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination, and I have tried to learn about the ways in which writers and activists of non-European or mixed heritage have worked to reclaim a voice that asserts cultural agency by speaking truth to power. Perhaps this aspect of my research itself explains my discomfort with an ecocritical project that attempts, in part, to sever agency from its traditional grounding in human subjectivity by asserting the existence of an other-than-human realm of nature that itself presents an “independent form of agency” (Plumwood 2001, 21; emphasis added). Then again, perhaps a privileged Westerner like me should not find it difficult to celebrate the end of an anthropocentric discourse tied to traditional notions of subjectivity and intention, for lack of agency has never been a major problem for me personally: for the most part, I have had the means to make my way in life, and my sense of self-determination has rarely been challenged by anything more materially consequential than poststructuralist philosophy’s radical commentary on the fragmented and contingent nature of human subjectivity. But given the sheer number of people in this world who remain disenfranchised, and who are daily denied the means or the very right to determine their political, material, and spiritual destinies, I continue to value a concept of agency tied to human rights, social activism, and cultural lifeways. Granted, a number of indigenous peoples themselves have traditionally embraced the idea of an active nature, including, in my own country of Canada, some subarctic Dene, who hold that “rivers, mountains, and glaciers are alive,” Tlingit and Tagish storytellers who consider “glaciers to be sentient and responsive” (Berkes 2008, 11), and Cree hunters of James Bay, who see phenomena like clouds and snow as embodying “person-like qualities or capabilities of action” (Feit 2001, 421). But such views are markedly different from European environmental-determinist perspectives, for Eurocentric philosophies tended not to attribute intention or subjectivity to the environmental processes that nevertheless functioned, in their

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proponents’ view, to shape “primitive” societies and individuals. In contrast, indigenous conceptions of nature, rather than denying or downplaying human cultural agency, tend explicitly to embrace something resembling what Plumwood calls “ecological dependency relations,” according to which nature is understood to enable and inform human praxis “in agentic terms as a co-actor and co-participant in the world” (2001, 19, 16). Such a model of human-nature relations is implicit in Pramod Parajuli’s concept of “ecological ethnicities,” which “communicate with nature” through the process of “search[ing] for food, nutrition, and medicine” (2001, 560), a process in which agency may be located in “the overlapping connection between ecology and ethnicity” (582) rather than in nature or culture alone. Although I have a difficult time accepting Plumwood’s argument for nature’s agency as such, I am enthusiastic about her idea that we should consider “crediting mixed forms of agency” (22), according to which human actions are understood to be supported and enabled by the “co-agency” (23) of earthly objects, organisms, and processes. I also find attractive the related suggestion that an understanding of nature’s “co-agency” would help us to appreciate “the constraints imposed by ecological relationships” (21). That we need to recognize and respect the limits that the physical world imposes on our actions is surely true if we are to turn the tide of our planet’s despoliation. But to conceptualize this “imposition” of limits as a product of nature’s independent agency seems questionable, for if we reconceptualize agency in such a way that all things are understood to “have” it, then the concept itself becomes so capacious that it risks losing all specificity, in which case the struggle for agency by colonized and disenfranchised peoples would lose an important conceptual underpinning.

ii. whose ecology? In the Introduction to this book, I quoted Edward Said’s assertion that colonial “history is rooted in the earth” (1993, 7). While one might object that the biological metaphor of rootedness risks naturalizing a history that is ideological and political, there can be little doubt that Enlightenment and Romantic concepts of nature and natural process played an important role in colonial ideology and practice in the British Atlantic world of the late eighteenth and early

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nineteenth centuries. By associating non-European people with environmental phenomena like climate, weather, and habitat, and by linking their cultural practices to modes of subsistence largely determined by local ecosystems, many Europeans perceived African and Native American people as thralls to nature while representing their own societies as having transcended environmental constraints through rational thought and technological innovation. To be sure, as I have noted in a number of this book’s discussions, the idea that indigenous peoples lived in a “state of nature” was a double-edged sword: depending on the writer, who might embrace either primitivist or progressivist notions of social development (or sometimes a vexed combination of both), the “state of nature” could be invoked to represent non-Europeans as morally superior or as morally inferior to Europeans. What is important to remember, however, is that in both the primitivist and progressivist paradigms nature was understood as a major determining factor in the formation of indigenous cultural identity, and that such an understanding enabled modes of Western ethnography that could downplay or even ignore the role played by various social determinants. Both paradigms effaced the fact that non-European cultures were dynamic and changing, not static productions of the natural environment. As James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson has argued, the “theory of the state of nature created an interpretive monopoly of human nature” (2000, 30; emphasis added), a monopoly that served to portray Western contact as the advent of history proper. In this view, colonization marked the inevitable moment in which non-European peoples finally left the realm of natural history – the state of animality, appetite, and instinct – and, for better or worse, entered that of a properly social and thus more fully human history. But as I noted in the Introduction, Said’s contention that colonial “history is rooted in the earth” is based as much on an understanding of material praxis as on the kinds of ideological and representational concerns I have been discussing here. At “some very basic level,” he observes, “imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess” (1993, 7). Certainly in the West Indies and the Americas, the need to expropriate other people’s territories in order to derive wealth and power via settlement was integral to imperial expansion. One must note, however, that colonial designs in the British Atlantic world were not always motivated by a desire to expropriate and settle indigenous lands. On the

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contrary, it was sometimes more convenient to develop and exploit distant commercial markets, and to control them and their inhabitants, without resorting to widespread settlement. Such was the case with British India of course, and for some thinkers a similar strategy seemed appropriate for the African part of the British Atlantic world (if not for the Americas). Consider once again the case of Francis Bond Head, whose discourse on colonialism I examined in the previous chapter. A half-dozen years before he came to Upper Canada to assume the duties of lieutenant governor, Head proposed a plan for the commercial transformation of the African continent that would, he argued, be justified by its positive moral consequences for African people. Invoking theories of climatic and environmental determinism similar to those examined in Chapter One and elsewhere in this book, he advocated a transformation of Africa’s varied landscapes as a cure for the supposed moral intemperance of its inhabitants. In The Life of Bruce, the African Traveller (1830), Head confidently asserted that “the pestilential climate of Africa, and the dreadful moral state of the country, are all effects of one and the same cause – namely, the unequal distribution of water” (127). His proposed solution to the problem is worth quoting at length: No one will deny that the deserts of Africa would cease to be desert if they were watered – that the stagnant waters of central Africa, which now pollute the climate, would cease to be stagnant if they were drained; and, consequently, that the one country has a superabundance of an element necessary for vegetation, of which the other is greatly in need. With respect to the moral state of the country, it must surely, also, be evident that Africa is uncivilized, because its desert and pestilential regions encourage narrow prejudices, narrow interests, and evil passions, which would at once be softened and removed, if the inhabitants could be enabled to live in constant communication with each other; – in other words, if the one country were to be irrigated and the other drained. (Head 1830, 127–8) This remarkably ambitious proposal demonstrates the extent to which Europe’s “civilizing mission” was in Head’s view predicated upon the transformation of non-European habitats. Like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, he saw the physical

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“improvement” of landscapes and the moral “improvement” of indigenous peoples as parts of the self-same project. Jonathan Bate notes that “the word ‘pollution’ took on its modern sense” during the Romantic period (2000, 137), but in the above-quoted passage Head’s correlation of a “pollute[d] … climate” with human moral depravity suggests that he understood pollution both in modern terms as environmental toxicity (albeit a toxicity that is not human-caused but naturally occurring) and in pre-modern terms as moral impurity. To borrow a relevant observation from Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Head, like many of his contemporaries, clearly believed that “the physical characteristics of the world’s environments express the capacities of the people who inhabit them.” According to this viewpoint, natural history and ethnography, far from involving separate spheres of knowledge, are mutually implicated: “[p]eople are read through the landscapes they inhabit, while landscapes are seen as the physical expression – the topographical indexes – of the moral discipline and technological power of those who inhabit them” (Bewell 1999, 44).2 I considered the question of technological power in Chapter One in my discussion of thinkers like William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, each of whom believed that whites had already transcended problems associated with hostile environments via the development of arts and technologies that had largely emancipated them from processes of environmental determinism. At this point, therefore (and with Head’s African scheme in mind), it is sufficient to reiterate the premise underlined throughout this book: that natural habitats – and the cultures that reside in them – were not considered separately but very much in terms of their interconnection. If “the first law of ecology” is that “everything is connected to everything else” (Commoner 1971, 33), then Head’s causal correlation of external and internal, or environmental and moral, realities is more modern – indeed, more “green” – than it might otherwise appear. It is only by considering questions of ecology in relation to colonial ideology and practice that we can fully appreciate the ways in which both Enlightenment and Romantic naturalisms could be invoked to serve political functions in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic worlds, despite their very real concern for what Onno Oerlemans has called “the materiality of nature.”3

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Of course, lurking behind Head’s grand “civilizing” designs for Africa is a significant element of material self-interest; for with the redistribution of water that he envisions, Africa would “become the garden and granary of Europe, and, with its water, wealth would circulate and civilization flourish” (Head 1830, 129). Before too swiftly dismissing Head for the Eurocentric underpinnings of this vision, we should remember that similar schemes had also been entertained by late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century abolitionists, who argued that the end of the slave trade, rather than diminishing Europe’s wealth, would enlarge it immensely so long as abolition proceeded hand in hand with the development and exploitation of African markets. Even the Igbo writer Olaudah Equiano – who was understandably outraged by naturalistic stereotypes of African immorality – asserted that abolition would not ultimately hurt European commerce if it were accompanied by the expansion of “commercial intercourse with Africa,” which would open “an inexhaustible source of wealth to the manufacturing interests of Great Britain” – including most of those interests that currently relied upon the slave trade (Equiano 2002, 250). In this proposed scenario, rather than exporting slaves, African nations would export their countries’ manifold “vegetable and mineral productions” and use the wealth gained to purchase British manufactures, the gradual acquisition of which would function as a register of their increasing civilization. For in Equiano’s view, if such “a system of commerce was established in Africa,” not only would the continent’s landscapes be transformed by the commercial exploitation of their natural resources, but its human societies would be changed as well: “the demand for manufactures would most rapidly augment, as the native inhabitants will insensibly adopt the British fashions, manners, customs, &c. In proportion to the civilization [of African people], so will be the consumption of British manufactures” (ibid.). The Scottish Romantic poet Thomas Campbell was one of the greatest poetical advocates for this sort of simultaneous transformation or “civilization” of landscapes and indigenous people during the period studied in this book. In The Pleasures of Hope (1799), an exuberant long poem that made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic, Campbell displayed his colours as an ardent champion of colonial “improvement,” arguing that British forms of agricultural and commercial practice should be exported worldwide, where they

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would function both to tame wild landscapes and to assimilate the unruly aboriginal people who inhabited them: Come, bright Improvement! On the car of Time, And rule the spacious world from clime to clime; Thy handmaid arts shall every wild explore, Trace every wave, and culture every shore. (Campbell 1851, 12) In his choice of the word “rule,” Campbell makes it plain that “Improvement” entails not simply the transformation of the “spacious world” – including literally “every wild” spot on the planet, no matter what its “clime” – but the transformation of all the world’s inhabitants as well, who in the process of embracing Europe’s “handmaid arts” would receive nothing less than the gift of “culture” (something they presumably lack in their pre-colonial condition). In the lines immediately following these, Campbell’s speaker turns his attention to North America, providing a concrete illustration of the imagined effects of such an all-inclusive process of change: On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along, And the dread Indian chants a dismal song, Where human fiends on midnight errands walk, And bathe in brains the murderous tomahawk, There shall the flocks of thymy pasture stray, And shepherds dance at Summer’s opening day. (Campbell 1851, 12) In this passage, Campbell implicitly posits the sort of deterministic correlation between wilderness and uncouth human “savagery” that I examined in Chapters Five and Six: as products of the same environment that created the fearsome (and of course misidentified) tiger, North America’s indigenous people are in Campbell’s view equally predatory and violent – sub-human “fiends” rather than fully human subjects. But through a massive process of “bright Improvement” involving widespread deforestation and an intensive application of agrarian industriousness, this uncouth North American wilderness would be transformed into a patently British “thymy pasture,” ushering in a new golden age. Granted, Campbell may

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well have imagined this colonial scenario as leading to the ultimate extirpation of “the dread Indian,” thereby fulfilling a process that Kate Rigby has called “the displacement of colonized people through the attempted Europeanization of their land” (2004, 75). But given his optimistic emphasis upon “bright Improvement,” another possibility seems equally likely: that Campbell at this early stage in his career imagined North American colonialism not in terms of the extirpation of aboriginal people (as he clearly did a decade later in Gertrude of Wyoming), but as an agent of their acculturation. A managed change in the human habitat would leave the Indian hunter no choice but to ascend to the next rung of the stadial ladder, where he would become a happy and productive shepherd swain, not to mention a readily governable colonial subject. Of course, by offering philosophical support for ancient stereotypes that figured non-Europeans as less than fully human, the same environmental-determinist paradigm that informs Campbell’s notso-subtle animalization of the “dread Indian” helped to legitimize the sorts of theriomorphic representation that, as noted in Chapters Three and Four, helped to justify colonial practices of slavery and settlement in the Americas. But when considered in light of the downright brutality with which self-righteous slave owners and settlers often treated non-European people, such theriomorphism revealed itself as decidedly hypocritical. It is no wonder, then, that enslaved and colonized people fought back through the construction of counter-discursive representations that questioned the humanity of Europeans by representing them as the real brutes in the colonial system, if not as devils incarnate (Cugoano 1787, 21). In a period during which authors like Ignatius Sancho and Coleridge were questioning the human/animal binary opposition in order to challenge anthropocentric practices of animal abuse, the accusation that the white colonist was himself a brute remained rhetorically forceful.

i i i . c o d a : th e p o l i t i c s o f ro m a n t i c e c o c r i t i c i s m Throughout this book I have focused on the political implications of Romantic-era concepts of environment, ecology, and non-human being in order to query a mode of Green Romanticism that encourages scholars to bracket ideological concerns so that we might explore an “ecopoetical” perspective: that is, an imaginative view of

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non-human being and material nature as they exist beyond, or independently of, our conceptions (Bate 2000b, 199). For a number of reasons, notwithstanding the reservations articulated in this book, I remain convinced that this “ecopoesis” has an important role to play in ecological literary criticism. For one thing, the imaginative effort to understand non-human being on its own terms might, in the best of circumstances, help us to temper our anthropocentric tendencies so that we can begin to appreciate the consequences of our environmental practices for the myriad organisms with whom we share the Earth. And perhaps as well, the ecopoetical emphasis upon the sheer otherness of such organisms can help us more fully to appreciate that language, the primary medium and vehicle of human knowledge, “itself distorts and reproduces what it represents” (Oerlemans 2002, 148), thereby encouraging humility in the face of nature while also helping us to glimpse a “more-than-human world that forever exceeds the human capacity to respond to it in words” (Rigby 2004, 122). Hopefully this book can contribute something to this understanding, despite the fact that it everywhere encourages an awareness of how thoroughly discursive and ideological our models of nature tend to be, and how caught up they are in the political and cultural complexities of Romanticism’s transatlantic history. Admittedly, in my effort to understand Romantic-era representations of nature and the role they have played in the development of Western thought, I have been more preoccupied with questions of human social justice than I have been with related questions of environmental ethical practice. This concern to understand the human implications of environmental thought is important to me on a personal level, for as a descendent of British emigrants to North America, I remain uncomfortably aware of the injustices perpetrated by my ancestors in the name of nature and of the various complicities that I have inherited as a result of this legacy. I am determined not hide from this knowledge behind the veil of a depoliticized ecocriticism, despite my concern for environmental ethics and bioregional integrity. Nevertheless, I hope that in attempting to advance a productive dialogue between ecocriticism, on the one hand, and (post)colonial and transatlantic modes of literary theory and historiography on the other, I have shed some light on the naturalistic concerns of the primary texts under study while also clarifying some of the ways in which the histories of Romanticism, ecology, and colonialism are mutually intertwined.

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Notes

introduction 1 As Smith explains at an earlier point in the same treatise, the “words green tree … might serve to distinguish a particular tree from others that were withered or blasted” (1781, 441). 2 This phrase provides the title for an extract from Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology as it is republished in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (Bate 2000a, 167–72). 3 See Kroeber’s essay “‘Home at Grasmere’: Ecological Holiness.” pmla 89 (1974): 132–41. 4 For critical responses to Bate’s pioneering work in the earlier Romantic Ecology, see, for example, Timothy Morton (1994, 219–20), Hutchings (2002, 9–13), and Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (2004, 42–3). 5 For a concise discussion of deep ecology and its relationship to Romantic ecocriticism, see Hutchings (2007, 180–3). 6 One should note that Oerlemans, like Matthew Arnold in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864), advocates the importance of attempting “to see the object as in itself it really is” (Arnold 1961, 237) but unlike Arnold, he acknowledges the impossibility of doing this while at the same time asserting the ethical necessity of the attempt. 7 Cf. Thomas Birch’s Foucauldian essay “The Incarceration of Wildness: Wilderness Areas as Prisons,” a politicized work of ecological criticism proposing that “the risk of the real is that in seeing the glance of the other … in attending to wilderness, one sees, or is likely to see, that the other is more than, other than, independent of, the definitions, models, and simulations that the imperium [Birch’s catch-all term for the discursive realm of ideology and politics] proposes as exhaustive of it” (1995, 151). Whereas

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15 16

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Oerlemans explicitly brackets all forms of politics and ideology in his theory of perception, Birch continually emphasizes their ubiquity. And yet, despite this signal difference, both writers arrive at markedly similar conclusions regarding nature’s power to unsettle human discursive assumptions. For ecofeminist insights concerning the status of gender in scientific discourses on nature, see, for example, Carolyn Merchant (1980, Chapter 7), Ludmilla Jordanova (1989, 18–19), and Mark Lussier (2000, 169). See also Fulford, Lee, and Kitson (2004, 11–17, 127–48). See Worster (1994, 26–55) and McKusick (2000, 38–41). For a detailed examination of the notion that ecocriticism is critically “soft,” see Hutchings, “Don’t Call Me a Tree-Hugger” (2005, passim). On the recent effort in ecocriticism to balance an understanding of nature’s cultural construction with an appreciation of its materiality and otherness, see also Garrard (2004, 10) and Heise (2006, 511). One of the best examples of recent scholarship on Romanticism’s colonial contexts is Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era (2004), which I occasionally cite in the pages ahead. For discussions of the ways in which colonial encounters transformed local ecosystems via the intentional or unintentional transplantation of invasive flora and fauna, see Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (1996), and Lockwood et. al., Invasion Ecology (2007). Morton quotes here from note 17 to Shelley’s Queen Mab. William Blake, The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth, lines 167–9, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (1988, 390). All subsequent references to Blake’s writing are to Erdman’s edition. Virtually all of the English-language terms used to identify Native American people (including “Native American” itself) have been subject to criticism. In this book, I employ a variety of nouns and modifiers – including Native American, Indian, indigenous, aboriginal, and First Nations – in my discussions in order to indicate my own awareness that none of the terms is without problems. Although “Indian” has been particularly contentious, I retain its usage here because it was the most common word employed by European and aboriginal writers during the Romantic period and remains so even today. For relevant discussions of terminology and its implications, see Bordewich (1996, 19–20) and Alfred (1999, xxv–xxvi). Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings, Introduction to Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750–1850: The Indian Atlantic (quotations are from the manuscript currently in production at Cambridge University

Notes to pages 19–35

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Press). See also James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (1992). See the 1749 essay “The Oeconomy of Nature,” which was attributed to Biberg but likely authored by Linnaeus. I derive Bewell’s coinage “multi-naturalism” from a seminar paper entitled “Traveling Natures,” which he presented at the joint meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the North American Victorian Studies Association, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, 2 September, 2006. I am grateful to the author for giving me permission to cite this unpublished paper. This quotation is derived from the title of Fisher’s ground-breaking 2004 book Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857, a study of colonial relations between India and Britain. Far from signifying some harmonious utopia created out of a benevolent desire on the part of whites and Indians for mutual peace and prosperity, the “middle ground” was the result of expediency: it “depended on the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force” (White 1991, 52), and it eroded after The War of 1812, by which time Britain and the United States, having settled terms of peace and consolidated political control of their respective colonial territories, no longer required Indians as military allies. On the “Indian Atlantic,” see the Introduction to Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings, eds., Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture 1750– 1850: The Indian Atlantic (due to be published in 2009). I take this phrase from the title of Kenyon-Jones’s highly informative book Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic Period Writing (2001). This phrase occurs in the prefatory “Advertisement” to Gertrude of Wyoming (Campbell 1851a, 162).

chapter one 1 Shoemaker quotes from a letter from Father Raphael to Abbé Raguet, 15 May 1725. Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion, 1729– 1740. Vols. 1–3. Eds. Dunbar Rowland and A.G. Sanders. Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1927–32, 2: 486. 2 See, for example, Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1793); Robertson’s History of America (1777, especially Book 4); Home’s (Lord Kames’s) Sketches of the History of Man (1778); and Burnett’s (Lord Monboddo’s) Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1786).

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3 For a detailed discussion of stadial (or “four stages”) theory, see Ronald Meek (1976, passim). See also Hutchings (1997, especially 53–4). 4 Hume’s claim for white superiority occurs in his essay “Of National Characters” (originally published in 1748, but issued in revised form in 1753). Except for the addition of my own italics, I quote the passage in question as it appears in Beattie’s text. 5 Kerber quotes Whittier’s comments from the Pennsylvania Freeman, May 10, 1838. 6 Kerber quotes Rogers’s comments from the Herald of Freedom (published in Concord, New Hampshire), October 27, 1838. 7 See Jameson’s critique of this perspective in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (1990, 512–20). 8 For a contemporary European account highlighting the supposed brutality of Brant’s slave-keeping practices, see Weld (1799, 407). For an alternative first-hand account asserting Brant’s humane treatment of his African slaves, see Sophia Pooley’s narrative in Benjamin Drew’s A North Side View of Slavery; The Refugee, or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (1856), which is republished in Newman, Pace, and KoenigWoodyard, eds., Transatlantic Romanticism (2006, 258–60). 9 For an illuminating example of the way in which white policies regarding the status and rights of Africans contributed to Indian racism against African people, see Fergus Bordewich’s discussion of North Carolina’s Lumbee people in Killing the White Man’s Indian (1997, 75–6). 10 See, for example, Buchan (2004, 96) and Alexander Wilson (1780, 232–40). 11 Fulford cites Smith’s An Essay on the Causes and the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (London: n.p., 1789), pages 64–7.

c h a p t e r tw o 1 On the contemporary debate between advocates of monogenesis and polygenesis, and for a trenchant discussion of how both of these paradigms “were capable from their inception of extreme racist application” (Kitson 2007, 21), see Peter J. Kitson’s Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (15–25). 2 For a discussion of Pratt’s discourse on vegetarianism, see Morton (1994, 94–6). 3 Cf. John Lamb (brother of the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb), who argued in a treatise on animal rights that “[t]he sphere of Justice necessarily includes all nature, that has feeling” (1810, 6).

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4 Kenyon-Jones cites the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: University of London and Athlone Press, 1970), 238. 5 I quote here from a footnote Hannah More inserted into her abolitionist poem Slavery, A Poem (1788), as reprinted in Mellor and Matlak (1996, 208n7). 6 I take this phrase from the anonymously authored “hoax” slave narrative Joanna, or the Female Slave. A West Indian Tale. Founded on Stedmans’ Narrative of an Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (London: S. and B. Bentley, 1824), viii, as quoted in Helen Thomas (2000, 179). 7 Such titles included those of the Society for the Total Abolition and Utter Suppression of Vivisection, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and the Society for the Abolition of Vivisection. 8 The best examples of such concerned citizens include the famous abolitionist William Wilberforce (whose role in the creation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is mentioned above) and John Lawrence, “a farmer who also campaigned for abolitionism and for universal suffrage” (R.S. White 2005, 225). Lawrence was the author of A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses, and on the Moral Duties of Man towards the Brute Creation (London, n.p., 1796). 9 See also Kenyon-Jones, who argues that “the continuum of better treatment and rights” was applied to animals during the Romantic period because animals “could be seen to be metonymically or synecdochically linked to … oppressed human groups” (2001, 40). The implication is that a concern for human rights led to, or helped to engender, a concern for the rights of animals. 10 White quotes Mackenzie’s novel Slavery: or, the Times (London: 1792), 8. 11 One such exception may be found in the theology of John Wesley, who believed that animals, like humans, were imbued with souls and capable, albeit in a qualified way, of spiritual improvement and redemption. See Robert Southey’s Life of Wesley (1820, 2. 190–1). 12 See also Wolfe (2003, xx) and Plumwood (2001, 4). 13 For a discussion of Colden and the role he played in Romantic constructions of the “noble savage,” see Fulford (2006, 41–2). 14 See, for example, Kevin Hutchings, “‘The Nobleness of the Hunter’s Deeds’: British Romanticism, Christianity, and Ojibwa Culture in George Copway’s Recollections of a Forest Life.” In Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings eds. Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture 1750–1850: The Indian Atlantic.

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15 For a detailed discussion of Sir Francis Bond Head’s claims regarding the impossibility of assimilating Ojibwa people into British society, as well as the challenges to this view that were offered by Jones and Sawyer, see Binnema and Hutchings (2005, passim). 16 Among the most informative analyses of nativist resistance in North America are Gregory Evans Dowd’s A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity 1745–1815 (1992), Joel W. Martin’s Sacred Revolt: The Muskogee’s Struggle for a New World (1991), and Alfred A. Cave’s Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America (2006). 17 In an interview with Onkwehonwe (Mohawk) scholar Taiaiake Alfred, the Mi’kaq activist Sakej Ward also differentiates Native American from African American resistance movements by noting that the latter movement has historically sought civil liberties or “reform, not revolution” (qtd. in Alfred 2005, 69). 18 Thomas cites Aristotle, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics Comprising His Practical Philosophy. 2 vols. Ed. John Gillies (London 1797), vol. 2, 29. 19 Cf. the emancipated slave William Grose, who, in a narrative related to the American abolitionist Benjamin Drew in the mid-nineteenth century, stated: “I served twenty-five years in slavery, and about five I have been free. I feel now like a man, while before I felt more as though I were but a brute” (qtd. in Newman et. al. 2006, 258). 20 In one of the Middle Passage’s horrible ironies, wild animals living in the vicinity of Africa’s slave-trading forts sometimes received more respectful treatment than human slaves destined for the Americas. In Ghana, for instance, the land upon which European slave traders constructed their forts (or “factories,” as Cugoano called them) was rented from local chiefs, who expected the traders to abide by strictly regulated customs and codes of conduct. At a fort called Cape Coast Castle, it was permissible for Europeans to take slaves, but it was a crime for them to kill wild animals for sport. Hence, when British officer James Swanzy shot a crocodile, he caused a remarkable stir and, as a result, the chief demanded and received compensation (see the unsigned article “Slavery: Breaking the Chains,” The Economist vol. 382, no. 8517 [February 24–March 2, 2007, 71–3]: 73). When one takes into account incidents such as these, Cugoano’s claim that human slaves often received worse treatment than animals can hardly be seen as a mere rhetorical tactic. 21 For a comprehensive study of phrenology and craniometry and their increasingly insidious implications for understandings of racial difference during the Romantic period, see Fulford, Lee, and Kitson (2004, 127–48).

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c h a p t e r th r e e 1 For a discussion of the ecocritical implications of Wollstonecraft’s feminism, see Hutchings (2007, 183–4). 2 See, for example, Goslee (1990, 108); Punter (1984, 483–4); Wilkie (1990, 65); Bracher (1984, 167); and Haigwood (1996, 99). 3 For additional comments concerning the human right of “dominion” or “empire” over nature, see Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1860, 114) and Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1955, 119). See also Worster (1995, chapter 2). 4 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, 1:20–1) 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. 5 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 another image, embraced by New England’s Puritan settlers, of America as a “hideous wilderness” that needed to be conquered and tamed (1967, 42–3). 6 See, for example, Erdman, Prophet (1969, 239); Howard (1984, 97, 102); and Vine (1994, 58). 7 As early as 1721, one of the possible significations of “rape” was “To rob, strip, plunder (a place)” (Oxford English Dictionary). 8 For an incisive discussion of the sexual politics informing Enlightenment science’s effort to assert an all-encompassing human dominion over nature, see Merchant (1980, Chapter 7). 9 For a relevant discussion of the relationship between botany and sexual morality in the 1790s, see Bewell (1989, especially 133–4). See also Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (in The Botanic Garden), which represents a number of plant species as “harlots” (1973, e.g., 1.133, 3.259–64). 10 For a discussion of Stedman’s biography and the “enthusiastic international reception” of his Narrative, “which captured imaginations all across

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12 13

14

15

16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23

Notes to pages 74–89

Europe for thirty years after its appearance in 1796,” see Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 90–1). For remarks concerning Blake’s relationship with Stedman, see Helen Thomas (2000, 121). In this essay I discuss both the unpublished version and the extensively revised published version of Stedman’s Narrative. I differentiate them by indicating the following dates in my parenthetical citations: 1790 for the unpublished manuscript and 1796 for the published text. Among the names mentioned in the subscription list for Stedman’s published text is “blake (Mr. Wm.) London.” 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” (Gillham 1973, 195). 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– 2). I adapt this phrase from the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who argues that the cultural emancipation of African peoples must proceed in part via a pedagogical “decolonization” of the mind. See Ngugi (1986, 28–9). See also Wole Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World (1990, viii). See Raine (1968, 2.127–8). On the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic models of being in Visions, see Bracher (1984, 169). For Derrida’s discussion of animality, I am indebted to David L. Clark (1997, 172–3). I derive this phrase from the title of Wilson’s The Diversity of Life (1992). See Lenz (1993, 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. On the passage’s syntactical ambiguity, see Linkin (1990, 190). For a convincing discussion of the problems attending a “fixed” interpretation of this passage, see Hoerner (1996, 147–9). For the possibility that Oothoon speaks of copulation figuratively rather than literally, see Heffernan (1991, 11). See Haigwood (1996, 104). I am indebted here to Steven Vine’s suggestion that the figure of the “mild beam” signifies the “ambiguous power of enlightenment” (1994, 60).

Notes to pages 92–114

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chapter four 1 For a discussion of misanthropy in environmentalist and animal rights activism, see Hutchings (2005, 7–9). 2 Perkins quotes the word “askingly” from line 23 in Coleridge’s poem. 3 See, for example, Fosso (1999, 5); Kenyon-Jones (2001, 68); and Perkins (2003, 109). 4 For a discussion of the typical diet of West Indian slaves, and its tendency to result in malnourishment leading to disease and even death, see Tobin (2005, 60). 5 Over three decades later, the prominent animal rights advocate Thomas Lord Erskine would employ a similar strategy, arguing of the maligned ass that “as far as this poor animal is unjustly considered an emblem of stupidity, the owners who thus oppress him are the greater asses of the two” (1809, 16). 6 Kathleen Kete offers a trenchant critique of the ways in which early nineteenth-century animal-rights advocacy was often informed as much by bourgeois attitudes to “the recreations as well as the livelihoods of the London poor” (2002, 27) as by an actual concern for the well-being of animals. 7 Early in his career, Erskine spent four years (1764–68) cruising the West Indies as a midshipman aboard the Tartar. During this period, as J.A. Hamilton notes, Erskine “formed a favourable opinion of the condition of West Indian slaves, which determined his course on the emancipation question till near the end of his life” (1885–1900, 436). In 1809, Erskine introduced a bill for the prevention of cruelty to animals, which was supported by the House of Lords but failed to gain approval in the Commons. Although Hamilton claims that animal rights was “the only question in which [Erskine] interested himself” during the course of his political career (442), Erskine did in fact develop a belated sympathy for the cause of anti-slavery prior to his death. 8 For a discussion of Blake’s anthropomorphic environmental ethic, see Hutchings (2002, 76–84, 162–8, 207–9). 9 See also Kitson (1998, 18).

chapter five 1 William Richardson, The Indians, A Tragedy. Performed at the Theatre Royal, Richmond (1790), Second Prologue, iv. References to Richardson’s drama are to this edition and are inserted into the body of the text

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3

4

5

6

Notes to pages 116–35

parenthetically using both Act and page numbers (so that, for example, III. 40–1 signifies Act III, pages 40–1). In a subsequent essay entitled “The Origin of Superstition, Illustrated in the Mythology of the Poems of Ossian” (1807) Richardson also declared – in patently Romantic fashion – “true poets speak the language of nature” (420). Cf. Raynal (1776, 4.10) and Home (1778, 3.154–5). Home (Lord Kames) goes so far as to admit that many Indian nations grew “great quantities of corn, not only for their own use, but for commerce” (3.155), an observation that introduces interesting complications into an historical model that correlated civilization with agricultural and commercial modes of subsistence. To differentiate the prose and dramatic versions of Richardson’s romance I refer in my parenthetical citations to the respective dates of their publication (1781 for the former and 1790 for the latter). In Recollections of a Forest Life (1850), Copway recounts an incident that took place during his childhood, when his father discovered a group of Mohawk hunters and trappers trespassing on his familial hunting grounds. Announcing his ownership of these grounds in no uncertain terms, Copway’s father declares that “this river, and all that is in it are mine” (1850b, 17), and he asserts his “well known” right to reclaim the various animals skins that the Mohawks had attempted to appropriate, as well as the weapons the Mohawks had used to obtain them. The fact that the trespassers docilely accept Copway’s father’s verdict and its attendant penalty, notwithstanding their greater numbers (ibid., 17–18), suggests that aboriginal title to land – despite the white man’s assertions to the contrary – was an acknowledged practice not only among the Ojibwa but among neighboring Indian nations as well. As suggested by Ononthio’s offer in Act IV to adopt Sidney into the Huron nation, the elder chieftain’s imperative “Be an Indian” indicates a conviction that people are free to choose their cultural identity. The imperative seems to echo a similar moment in the Baron of Lahontan’s Dialogue with Adario (published in English translation in 1703), in which the fictitious Huron Adario, like Richardson’s Ononthio, indicts the degradation of European culture, informing his French interlocutor that his salvation in “the Good Country of Souls” will not occur “unless thou turn’st Huron” (qtd. in Castillo 2006, 175).

chapter six 1 Quoted in Bruchac (1999, 11). 2 William Richardson, The Indians, A Tragedy. Performed at the Theatre Royal, Richmond. London: C. Dilly (1790), Second Prologue, iv. Subsequent

Notes to pages 135–52

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4

5 6

7 8

9 10

11 12

13

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references to Richardson’s drama are to this edition and are inserted into the body of the text parenthetically using both Act and page numbers (so that, for example, III.40–1 signifies Act III, pages 40–1). In my parenthetical citations for this chapter, I cite Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming by canto and stanza number (since individual line numbers for this long poem are not provided in the text). Thus, for example, 1.6 refers to canto 1, stanza 6. All references to Gertrude of Wyoming are to the version of the poem published in the 1851 edition of The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell. As Fulford notes, Campbell’s Wyoming Valley bears very little resemblance to the actual historical setting, which had “in fact been wracked by strife between Pennsylvania and Connecticut colonists competing for the same land since it was first sold by the Indians in 1755” (2006, 186). Moreover, in contrast to Campbell’s depiction of Wyoming’s superlatively healthy environment, the physician Benjamin Rush noted that Pennsylvania’s environment was both a source of good health and of a wide variety of acute diseases (Rush 1794, 1.114). I am indebted to Timothy Morton (1994, 154) for bringing Burnett’s discussion of vegetarianism to my attention. See also Adam Ferguson (1793, 148). On European representations of the canoe as a non-technological mode of navigation, see Goldie (1989, 21) and Wall (2005, 533). For a detailed study of this figure, see Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American (1982). On the relationship between suntans and “playing Indian” in white society, see S. Wall (2005, 528), who cites Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, ct.: Yale up, 1998), 106. Dippie quotes Clay in Annals of Congress, 15th Congress, 2nd session, January 20, 1819, page 639. Campbell published Gertrude in the same year that Thomas Erskine presented his proposed bill for the abolition of cruelty to domestic animals to the British Parliament. See Erskine, Cruelty to Animals (1809). See John Ward, “Reviled in U.S., Loyalist raider saluted as hero in Canada.” The Globe and Mail (Friday, Nov. 3, 2006): A5. In a footnote to his article in the New Monthly Magazine, Campbell explained that the correct spelling of “Brandt’s” name is “Brant.” In this chapter I differentiate Campbell’s poetic character “Brandt” from the historical Joseph Brant by retaining Campbell’s misspelling when referring to the former. Quoted in W. Beattie (1849, 2.186, unnumbered footnote).

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14 One should note that William Beattie, whose Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell (1849) remains authoritative, seems to confuse John Brant with Joseph Brant’s protégé John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen), mistakenly assuming that the latter, who was introduced to Campbell by the Canadian jurist John Beverley Robinson, was Brant’s son, and that the resultant meeting led to Campbell’s letter to John Brant in the New Monthly Magazine, and to the footnoted retraction in subsequent editions of Gertrude of Wyoming (see Beattie 1849, 2.325 unnumbered footnote).

chapter seven 1 Head (1857, 343). 2 Qtd. in Konkle (2004, 196). 3 According to Anna Jameson, “Toronto” was a local “Indian appellation” signifying “trees growing out of water,” an appropriate name given that the fledgling capital was situated “in a low swamp not yet wholly drained” (Jameson 1990, 22). 4 Included among the books that Head published with Murray are Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journies Across the Pampas and Among the Andes (1826); The Life of Bruce, The African Traveller (1830); Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau by an Old Man (3rd edition 1835); English Charity (1835); The Emigrant (1846); and Descriptive Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review (1857). 5 For a detailed analysis of Head’s Romantic approach to Canadian aboriginal policy, see Binnema and Hutchings (2005, passim). 6 See also Binnema and Hutchings (2005, 119–21). 7 The poetical character of Ojibwa speech is implied by Head’s reference to the “beautiful wild flowers of eloquence” that elevate their oratory (Head 1846, 147). 8 For discussions of less than positive views of indigenous people in The Excursion, see Gravil (2005, 48) and Coleman (2005, 102–3). For related discussions regarding Wordsworth’s poem “Ruth,” see Fulford (2006, 179–82) and McLane (2000, 69–78). 9 I am indebted to Donald Smith (1987, 162–3) for bringing Chief Sawyer’s words to my attention. See also Anthony Hall (1984, 158–9). 10 Kevin Hutchings, “‘The Nobleness of the Hunter’s Deeds’: British Romanticism, Christianity and Ojibwa Culture in George Copway’s Recollections of a Forest Life.” Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750–1850: The Indian Atlantic. Eds. Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings. (forthcoming).

Notes to pages 165–74

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11 It is worth noting that this portrait has a precedent in the poetry of Lord Byron, whom Copway cites on numerous occasions, and to whose home he made a pilgrimage during his 1850 tour of England. In Byron’s metaphysical drama Manfred, the Chamois hunter – arguably a Byronic response to Wordsworth’s representations of the rustic natural man – combines in his character the moral nobility and physical strength of the noble savage, on the one had, with the faith and piety of the benevolent Christian humanitarian on the other. See Manfred Act 1, Scene 2 and Act 2, Scene 1 (especially 2.1.63–71). 12 As Donald Smith notes, Copway traveled with chiefs Jones and Sawyer to Montreal in 1844 to ask Governor-General Sir Charles Metcalfe to establish a Manual Labour School for Indian students (1998, 16). 13 Buchan quotes the Edinburgh Review 1 (January-July, 1755): ii–iii. The trope of youth and maturity that informs stadial theory is complicated, of course, by the genealogical assumption that generally accompanies it, according to which the ancestors (or distant parents) of Britons are compared to Native Americans and other “primitive” societies, in whose “present condition … we … behold, as in a mirrour, the features of our own progenitors” (Ferguson 1793, 133). 14 Peyer quotes this phrase from a “Letter from George Copway,” New York Times, 8 September 1856, 3. 15 Cf. Thomas Taylor, who argues in A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792) that “the barbarous exercise of the chase” is the “means [by which] the brutal energies of our nature grow strong, and savage desires encrease” (1792, 29). 16 Copway’s discourse on the ethical imperative to avoid the needless killing of animals conforms to indigenous “Natural law, as outlined in the creation stories and original instructions of most Native nations,” which, according to Gonzales and Nelson, “states that one should never take more than one needs when harvesting or collecting something from the earth” (2001, 529). For an expanded discussion of environmental ethics in Copway’s discourse on Ojibwa hunting practices, see Hutchings, “‘The Nobleness of the Hunter’s Deeds’: British Romanticism, Christianity and Ojibwa Culture in George Copway’s Recollections of a Forest Life.” 17 I borrow this phrase from the title of D. Peter MacLeod’s remarkable essay “The Anishinabeg Point of View: The History of the Great Lakes Region to 1800 in Nineteenth-Century Mississauga, Odawa, and Ojibwa Historiography.” See MacLeod (1992). 18 On these and other “scandals” in Copway’s life, see Smith (1998, 16–17, 21, 26–7). For a detailed discussion of Copway’s association with the

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“American” movement (also called the “Know-Nothing Order”) in eastern United States politics, see Dale T. Knobel (1984, passim).

afterword 1 William Blake, The Four Zoas, Night 9, 122.25 (in Blake 1988, 391). 2 For similar insights pertaining to Enlightenment concepts of the relationship between people and the landscapes they inhabit, see William Cronon (1983, 5–6). 3 I take this phrase from the title of Oerlemans’s book Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (2002).

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Index

aboriginal people. See Native Americans Aborigines Protection Society, 38, 113 Adair, James, 62–3 aesthetics, 83, 116, 117; picturesque, 138–9; sublime, 159, 162 agency, 23; and “savagery,” 59; and environmental determinism, 28–9, 45, 47–9, 139, 176–8; nature’s agency, 28, 139, 176–8 agriculture, 40–1, 119–20, 163, 171 Alfred, Taiaiake, 64, 174, 188n17 America, 71–2 animality, 57–8; and animal abusers, 103–5, 149; human/animal binary opposition, 86–7, 105, 184; and Native Americans, 58– 64, 183–4; and race, 27, 64–6, 94–6, 109 animal rights, 52–5; bear-baiting, 104; and Christianity, 107–8, 109; and class, 100, 103–8; legislation, 195n7; and misanthropy, 92, 109; and slavery, 52–7, 92–112

animals: allegorical usage of, 85 animal welfare. See animal rights Anishinaabeg. See Ojibwa Indians anthropocentrism, 14, 28, 85, 93– 4, 176–7; in the Bible, 94–6; and ecopoetics, 185 anthropomorphism, 80 Apess, William, 37, 62 Aristotle, 65, 13 Armitage, David, 25 Arnold, Matthew, 187n6 Ashe, Thomas, 139 assimilation, 174 Bacon, Roger, 194n20 Bacon, Sir Francis, 73, 193n3 Barlowe, Captain Arthur, 193n5 Bate, Jonathan, 6–8, 13–14, 181 Beattie, James, 35 Beattie, William, 152, 198n14 Bellin, Joshua David, 26, 174 Bentham, Jeremy, 53–4 Berkes, Fikret, 172 Bewell, Alan, 14–15, 16–17, 20–1, 181, 193n9 Bhabha, Homi K., 74 Biberg, Isaac, J., 19

220

Index

Binnema, Ted, 192n15 Birch, Thomas, 187–8n7 Black Atlantic, 25 Blake, William: on asceticism, 76– 8; Auguries of Innocence, 92; Jerusalem, 87, 111; Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 82; on sensory perception, 81–3, 85–6; on sexuality, 87–8; on slavery, 71; on urban pollution, 17, 79; Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 29, 70– 91; on women’s rights, 70–1 Bordewich, Fergus M., 17–18, 188n17, 190n9 Bracher, Mark, 82 Brant, Chief John (Ahyonwaeghs), 31, 150–2 Brant, Chief Joseph (Thayendanegea), 31, 41, 137; as represented by Thomas Campbell, 147–53 Buell, Lawrence, 5, 24–5 Buffon, Count George Louis de, 42, 95–6, 111 Burke, Edmund, 117 Butler, Colonel John, 150 Byron, George Gordon, 108–9, 199n11 Campbell, Thomas: and Chief John Brant, 150–2; Chief Joseph Brant defamed by, 149–53; environmental determinism in, 139–40; Gertrude of Wyoming, 30–1, 114, 134–53; his idealization of America, 135–42; his ideology of “improvement,” 182– 3; indigenization of colonial culture in, 142–4; paternalism in, 146–7; Pleasures of Hope, 66, 114, 151, 182–3; on “savagery,”

136–7, 146–9, 151; on slavery, 137–8; “vanishing Indian” trope in, 144–6, 147–9; and William Richardson, 114–15, 134–7, 148, 152–3 canoe, 144 Cape Coast Castle, 192n20 Carver, Jonathan, 58–9 Cave, Alfred A., 192n16 Christianity: and animal rights, 107–8, 109; asceticism, 76–8; and Chief Joseph Brant, 150; colonial evangelism, 61, 64, 130; “dominion” in, 94–6, 103; and George Copway, 165–8, 170, 172; in William Richardson’s The Indians, 124–5 Clarkson, Thomas, 66, 110 class, 38–9, 100, 103–8, 110, 134–5 Clay, Henry, 147–8 climate: and arts and sciences, 46– 7; and Huron culture, 117; and morality, 44–5, 139; and race, 27, 42, 47, 51, 146; and slavery, 45–6; William Robertson’s theory of, 45, 46–8, 117–18, 176 Cogliano, Frank, 22 Colden, Cadwallader, 60 Coleman, Deirdre, 198n8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “The Eolian Harp,” 103; “Frost at Midnight,” 159; on race and colonialism, 47, 112; on Sir Francis Bond Head, 154; “To a Young Ass,” 29–30, 92–112; use of allegory, 93–4, 105–6, 108, 109, 112 Commoner, Barry, 18 contact zone, 20, 159–61. See also “middle ground”

Index Copway, George (Kahgegagahbowh), 164–75; on Christianity, 61, 130, 165–8, 170, 172, 175; on hunting, 170–2; his marriage to Elizabeth Howell, 164–5; his Ojibwa background, 164–5, 171–2, 175; on paternalist governance, 168–70, 173; on removal policy, 171–3; and Romanticism, 31–2, 165– 8, 170; and stadial theory, 169–70 correspondences, doctrine of, 85–6 Cowper, William, 54–5, 67–8 craniometry, 69 Cree Indians, 177 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St John de, 55–6 Cronon, William, 49, 200n2 Cugoano, Ottobah: on animals, 57, 101–2; on dehumanization of Africans, 97–8, 101–2, 106; on enslavement tactics, 66; on racial difference, 42; on torture of slaves, 108; on whites’ inhumanity, 68 Damrosch, Leopold, Jr., 88 Darwin, Erasmus, 193n9 deep ecology, 7 Dene Indians, 177 Derrida, Jacques, 86 Descartes, René, 193n3 Dippie, Brian W., 48 diversity, 86–7 Dollimore, Jonathan, 11–12 Dowd, Gregory Evans, 192n16 Drew, Benjamin, 190n8, 192n19 Drummond, William, 107 dualism, 29, 58, 76–8, 87

221

Dwight, Henry William, 60–1 ecocide, 28, 48 ecocriticism, 11–13, 14–16, 19–20, 177–8. See also Green Romanticism ecofeminism, 72–3 ecology, 7, 18, 181; and ethnicity, 178. See also environmental determinism, invasion ecology ecopoetics, 6–8, 12–13, 18, 184–5 ecopolitics, 7–8, 12–13, 18, 184–5 empiricism, 9–10; and sensory perception, 81–3 environmental degradation, 18. See also pollution environmental determinism: and agency, 28–9, 45, 47–9, 139, 176–8; in Campbell’s Gertrude, 139–40, 183; and cultural practice, 49, 183–4; and genius, 43– 4; and morality, 44–5, 131–2, 180–1; and racial difference, 42– 9, 132; in Richardson’s The Indians, 116–21, 132 environmental ethics, 171–2, 199n16 Erskine, Thomas, 110, 195n5, 195n7, 197n10 ethics, 53–6, 89–90, 110–12. See also environmental ethics Equiano, Olaudah, 36, 44, 66, 68– 9, 182 Eurocentrism, 14, 23, 182 Feast of the Ass, 100–1 feminism, 7, 39–40, 70–1. See also ecofeminism, gender Ferguson, Adam, 40, 43, 47 Fisher, Michael H., 23

222

Index

French Revolution, 93 Fulford, Tim, 13, 24, 26, 61; on Campbell’s Gertrude, 146–7, 150, 197n4; on George Copway, 168; on Wordsworth’s “Ruth,” 198n8 fur trade, 18 Fuseli, Henry, 85 gender: in Blake, 70–6; and prostitution, 73–5, 88; and race, 27; and rape, 72–3; and science, 9, 73; and sexuality, 87; and slavery, 74–6; and stadial theory, 39–40, 59–60. See also ecofeminism, feminism genocide, 27–8, 61, 148–9, 163. See also “vanishing Indian” trope Gillham, D.G., 194n13 Gillray, James, 108–9 Gilroy, Paul, 25 Glanville, Joseph, 9, 71 Gonzales, Tirso A., 49, 199n16 Grace, Henry, 60 Gravil, Richard, 198n8 Gray, Robert, 91 Great Chain of Being, 97–8, 102 Green Romanticism, 3–14, 24–5, 184–5 Griffin, Susan, 72–3 Grose, William, 192n19 Hall, Basil, 61–2 Hamilton, J.A., 195n7 Head, Sir Francis Bond, 154–64; on African economic development, 180–2; on “civilization” of Indians, 62; on colonial contact as “contamination,”

159–62, 174; his critique of colonialism, 155–6; on German forest laws, 107–8; his Indian removal policy, 162–4, 165–6, 169, 172–3; The Life of Bruce, 180–2; his primitivist philosophy, 158–61; on racial “purity,” 160–2; “The Red Man,” 155; his Romanticism, 32, 154–9 Heffernan, James A.W., 194n21 Heise, Ursula K., 11 Henderson, James (Sákéj) Youngblood, 179 Henry, George (Maungwudaus), 160 Herbert, Thomas, 94 Hoerner, Fred, 194n21 Hofkosh, Sonia, 13 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 42, 56, 170–1 Howell, Elizabeth, 164–5 Hudson, Nicholas, 112 Hume, David, 35 hunting: and Christianity, 170–2; and environmental ethics, 171– 2; morality, 143–4; and private property, 40; and slavery, 66; in stadial theory, 35, 40, 119 Huron Indians, 119–20 hybridity theory, 23, 24, 26, 27, 49 imperialism, 15–16 improvement: ideology of, 180–1 Indians. See Native Americans Industrial Revolution, 17–18 invasion ecology, 17 Jameson, Anna Brownell: on Chief Joseph Brant, 152; on hunting and gender politics, 39–40; on

Index Indian “domestication,” 62; on paternalistic governance, 169; on Sir Francis Bond Head, 155– 6; on Toronto, 198n3 Jefferson, Thomas, 31, 139 Johnson, Charles, 10 Jones, Peter (Kahkewaquonaby), 32, 42, 60, 62, 162–3; association with George Copway, 165; on Indian acculturation, 174 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 9, 188n8 Kames, Lord. See Home, Henry Keach, William, 24 Kenyon-Jones, Christine, 191n9 Kete, Kathleen, 60, 195n6 Kitson, Peter J., 13, 24, 190n1 Kroeber, Karl, 6, 13–14, 19 Lahontan, Lom D’Arce de, 196n6 Lamb, John, 111, 190n3 Lawrence, John, 191n8 Lee, Debbie, 24 Linkin, Harriet Kramer, 194n21 Linnaeus, Carl, 19, 101 Locke, John, 82, 119 Lumbee Indians, 190 Lussier, Mark, 188n8 Mackenzie, Anna Maria, 57 Maitland, Sir Peregrine, 62 Makdisi, Saree, 13 Manning, Susan, 22 Mansfield, William Murray, 1st Earl: Mansfield Decision, 46 Marcus, Leah Sinanoglou, 101 Martin, Joel W., 192n16 Marx, Leo, 72 Marxist criticism, 4, 13–14 Mazel, David, 11

223

McKusick, James C., 10, 19–20 Medewiwin Society, 164 Merchant, Carolyn, 9, 188n8, 193n8 Metcalfe, Sir Charles, 199n12 Métis people, 62, 161; métissage, 25 “middle ground,” 25–6 Middle Passage, 66, 71 misanthropy, 92, 109 monogenesis. See race More, Hannah, 191n5 Morton, Timothy, 14, 17, 93, 197n5 Native Americans: animality of in European representations, 58– 64, 183–4; assimilation of, 174; and Christianity, 61, 64, 130, 165–8, 170; and environmental ethics, 199n16; fur trade, 18; gender and marriage, 40, 59–60; “middle ground,” 25–6; nativist resistance movements, 64; and private property, 40; and removal policy, 162–4, 165–6, 169, 171–3; and Romanticism, 26; and slavery, 37–8, 41; Taensas creation story, 33–5; “vanishing Indian” trope, 144– 6, 147–9, 172–3. See also entries for Cree, Dene, Huron, Lumbee, Ojibwa, Sioux, Taensas, Tagish, and Tlingit Indians. nature: as abstract category, 21; “economy” of, 19; as normative principle, 10; as social construct, 10–13; “state of nature,” 179. See also ecology Naylor, Gloria, 169

224

Index

Nelson, Melissa K., 49, 199n16 noble savage. See primitivism Norton, John (Teyoninhokarawen), 198n14 O’Brien, Susie, 15 Oerlemans, Onno, 8–9, 181 Ojibwa Indians, 61, 158–9, 164, 165–6, 196n5 Opie, Amelia, 36–7, 38 Ossian, 125, 196n2 Oswald, John, 93, 111 Parajuli, Pramod, 178 pastoral, 72, 76, 136–7, 140 paternalism, 34, 146–7, 163, 168– 70, 173 Perkins, David, 93 Phillips, Dana, 5 phrenology, 69 Plumwood, Val, 9, 14, 28, 176–8 pluralism, 90 pollution, 17, 79, 181. See also environmental degradation polygenesis. See race Pooley, Sophia, 190n8 postcolonial criticism, 13–16 Pratt, Mary Louise, 9, 20, 193–4n10 Pratt, Samuel Jackson, 50–3 Primatt, Humphry, 96, 105, 109–10 primitivism, 51–2, 75–6, 121–3, 156–60, 165–6, 179 Prince, Mary, 97 Pringle, Thomas, 105 progress, 82, 171, 179 property, 40, 121, 196n5 prophecy, 90–1 race: and animality, 27, 64–6, 94– 6, 109; and climate, 27, 42, 47,

51, 146; and environmental determinism, 42–9, 132; and gender, 27; and genius, 43–4; and genocide, 27–8; monogenesis, 42, 50–1, 95–6; polygenesis, 42, 95–6; “purity” of, 160–2, 164– 5; racial hierarchy, 27, 34, 35, 109, 112; and species, 50–1, 111 Raine, Kathleen, 85 Raynal, Abbé, 45, 59, 146 residential schools, 130 Richardson, Alan, 13 Richardson, William: on acculturation, 127–33; on Christian Indians, 124–5, 127–8; connection to Thomas Campbell, 114–15, 134–7, 148; critique of European culture, 121–3, 131–2, 134–5; “The Indians, a Tale,” 115, 118–24; The Indians, A Tragedy, 113–33, 134–7, 152–3; on Ossian, 125, 196n2; “savagery” in, 121–7, 136–7; and the Scottish Enlightenment, 30, 118–20; his Shakespearean criticism and dramaturgy, 114, 116, 126 Rigby, Kate, 5–6, 14, 27, 184 Roach, Joseph, 22 Robertson, William: on climate, 45, 46–8, 117–18, 176; on hunting, 40–1, 119; on Indians and animality, 59–60; on indigenous marriage, 40 Robinson, Sir John Beverley, 198n14 Rogers, Nathaniel P., 38 romance, 114–15 Romanticism: and colonial contact, 24; and George Copway,

Index 31–2, 165–8, 170; and Native Americans, 26; and Sir Francis Bond Head, 32, 154–9. See also Green Romanticism Rose, Deborah Bird, 171 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 40, 45, 52–5, 57–8 Rush, Benjamin, 197n14 Said, Edward, 15–16, 169, 178, 179 Sancho, Ignatius, 98–101, 104, 111 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5 “savagery.” See stadial theory Sawyer, Chief Joseph, 32, 130, 163; association with George Copway 165, 174 scala naturae. See Great Chain of Being science. See empiricism Scottish Enlightenment, 35, 115, 118–20. See also stadial theory sensibility, 67–8, 126 Shakespeare, William, 114, 116 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 17 Shoemaker, Nancy, 34 Singer, Peter, 111–12 Sioux Indians, 173 slavery: adverse effect on whites, 105–6; and animality, 64–6, 94– 6, 105; and animal rights, 52–7, 92–112; and class, 38–9; and climate, 45–6; and economics, 17– 18; and feminism, 39–40; and gender, 74–6; and landscape aesthetics, 83; as metaphor, 38–9, 71; Middle Passage, 66, 71; and Native Americans, 37–8, 41; practiced by indigenous Africans,

225

98; and sexual abuse, 44–5; and torture, 65–6, 97, 108, 138 Slight, Rev. Benjamin, 61 Smith, Adam, 3–5, 58 Smith, Donald, 166, 173 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 48 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (spca), 54, 110–11 Somerset, James, 46 Southey, Robert, 104, 168 Soyinka, Wole, 194n15 speciation, 43 species, 50–1, 111. See also speciation Speckled Snake, 163 stadial theory, 33–41, 51–2; and cultural difference, 69; and gender, 39–40, 59–60; and hunting, 35, 40, 119; and indigenous acculturation, 183–4; and paternalism, 169–70; in William Richardson, 118–120, 130 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 39 Stedman, John Gabriel, 29, 74–6, 79–80, 83–4 stereotyping, 73–4 Stone, William L., 152 structuralism, 5 sublime. See aesthetics Swanzy, James, 192n20 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 85–6 Taensas Indians: creation story, 33–5 Tagish Indians, 177 Taylor, Thomas, 199n15 Tecumseh, 64 Tenskwatawa, 64

226

Index

theriomorphism, 58–63, 66–9, 94– 5, 98, 105, 184 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 194n15 Thomas, Helen, 24, 65, 193–4n10 Thompson, James, 137 Tlingit Indians, 177 Tobin, Beth Fowkes, 15, 171, 195n4 Towers, Joseph Lomas, 89 transatlantic studies, 19–27; the Black Atlantic, 25–6; and Green Romanticism, 24–5; the Indian Atlantic, 26; and race, 25 transculturation, 23 travel writing, 22–4 “vanishing Indian” trope, 144–6, 147–9, 172–3 vegetarianism, 52–3, 139–40, 143–4 Vesalius, Andreas, 194n20 Vine, Steven, 194n23 Vizenor, Gerald, 166 Voyer, Pierre le, 125

Ward, Sakej, 192n17 Weld, Isaac, 41, 138–9, 150 Wesley, John, 191n11 Wesleyan Methodist Church, 165 Wheatley, Phyllis, 43–4 Wheeler, Roxann, 69 White, Lynn, Jr., 95 White, R.S., 38, 50, 71 White, Richard, 25–6, 64 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 38 Wilberforce, William, 54, 94–5, 110–11, 191n8 wildness, 8, 63–6 Wilson, Alexander, 45–6 Wilson, E.O., 87 Wolfe, Cary, 10–11 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 39, 70–1 Wordsworth, William: The Excursion, 156–8; primitivism in, 159; “Ruth,” 198n8 Worster, Donald, 10 Wyoming massacre, 136–7, 150–1 Young, Thomas, 107