Reviewed by Alexis Harley
A couple of years ago, I sat in on a Romanticism lecture. It began with three poems, by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. The lines were unfamiliar, but anarchic and sensuous, as Romantic poetry generally is. We settled down on our benches, waiting for more. And then came the poets’ names, in full. Wordsworth, Dorothy; Coleridge, Sara; Shelley, Mary. The lecturer had chosen those three, of course, because they shared surnames with more famous brothers, fathers, and husbands, but his point was that they wrote stuff worth reading, and that we’d never read that stuff because of the politics (not the aesthetics) of canon-formation. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology doesn’t say much explicitly about canons, but Kenneth Cervelli clearly has a bone to pick with those who helped efface the radically self-effacing Dorothy Wordsworth.
Cervelli's book makes a robust case for treating Dorothy Wordsworth as a writer worthy of serious consideration, not merely as an addendum to brother William. It’s a case that deserves to be made, not least for “the moonshine like herrings in the water” (Grasmere journals 30). Amidst the critical shibboleths (Cervelli’s word) of the Wordsworth machine, the best way of ensuring serious consideration, he contends, is to read her work from an ecological perspective, taking up perhaps the youngest of the activist methodologies – ecocriticism.
Ecocriticism, as Cervelli helpfully explains, is the study of a text’s or author’s “relationship to the phenomenal world” (7), or, as Cheryll Glotfelty has it, in The Ecocriticism Reader, “of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (1), or, in my inaptly anthropocentric terms, of the relationship between human and non-human. Ecocriticism, by that name, emerged only in the 1990s. Nonetheless, it is startling that Cervelli’s book is the first major ecocritical study of Romanticism to pay sustained attention to Dorothy Wordsworth – all the more startling after Cervelli has put her case.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology makes a wide-ranging tour of her writing, focussed throughout on the poetics of her relationship to the places she inhabits or visits. The first chapter, Bringing It All Back Home: The Ecology of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals reads the journals as an ecosystem, “a delicate web of individual entries existing in interrelationship with one another” (9). I discuss this manoeuvre below, but for now note Cervelli’s adroitness as a close reader, and the fitness of such a detailed reading in the case of texts that are themselves obsessed with phenomenal detail. The book is full of incidental observations, observations that offer inessential support to its argument. Amongst these is Cervelli’s reader-response theory of journal, that journals assume the shape of a story (despite their ad hoc composition) because we read that shape into them – we ask, for instance, why they stop when they do, assuming an “end” because that is what we expect of story.
There’s another delightful aside in chapter 2, where Cervelli relates – after James Buzard – the history of the word “tourist” and the circumstances under which it acquired its pejorative sense. In this chapter, The High Road Home: Paths to Ecology in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, Cervelli pre-emptively defends the Recollections as an ecological text. Its retrospective composition, after the tour, relying on memory rather than notes, makes it harder to argue that the Recollections is immersed in the environment it describes. Cervelli goes on to argue that tourism and ecology are interrelated practices.
The Illuminated Earth: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry, delivers highly finessed close readings of “An address to a Child in a high wind”, “Grasmere – A Fragment”, and “Floating Island at Hawkshead”. It is followed by ‘More Allied to Human Life’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Communion with the Dead, a chapter that suggests a connection between Wordsworth’s participation in a culture of death and her daily experiences in the natural world.
“The ecologically oriented reader,” Cervelli writes, “tends to accept on faith that daily interaction with a known landscape necessarily affects the writing experience itself – that that writing experience is more genuine because of its (supposedly) firm empirical foundations” (34-35).
We are supposed to keep this point in mind as we encounter Cervelli’s repeated demonstrations of how Dorothy’s rhetorical strategies and poetic form mimic the natural phenomena she describes. The first of these is in the first chapter, with Cervelli’s reading of the Grasmere journals as ecosystem. Again, in his analyses of individual poems.
Reading “Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the schemes of Nature”, Cervelli suggests that the text’s “capricious poetics” (its mysteriously disappearing pronouns, metrical shifts, tense changes) are justified or brought about by, imitate, mirror – it’s not exactly clear which – the floating island. Jonathan Swift’s Laputa, the flying island of Gulliver’s Travels, is read in poststructuralist cliché as an analogy for the estrangement of sign from signifier. The island, like a stray word, drifts above the material thing it should be rooted in. Laputa is used to point to the caprice of all language, of any word. Should Cervelli have to expend so many of them proving that Dorothy’s poem is capricious?
A poem in praise of combine harvesters could be capricious. A nine-hundred page novel about a day in Dublin could be a “constantly self-transforming continuity” with, nonetheless, a “chaotic, unstable structure”. So caprice and self-transforming continuity are the characteristics of floating islands and ecosystems; they are also the characteristics of helium balloons and globs of petroleum jelly. Cervelli labours the Grasmere journals’ resemblance to (or their actually being?) an ecosystem and the “Floating Island at Hawkshead”’s resemblance to a floating island.
The result is beguiling, as pleasing as pinning down the rhetorical “variation” and “selection” in The Origin of Species, but it’s covered in the critic’s fingerprints. Cervelli is the one who has made the analogy and let it loose. For all his close textual analysis, “journals-as-ecosystem”, “poem-as-island” don’t rise spontaneously from the texts. He betrays himself by invoking similar metaphors to describe his own analytic work, writing, for instance, of “transplanting [a stanza he’s selected for special consideration] back into its natural environment [the poem]” (65).
I’d be less likely to proclaim contrivance if I “accept[ed] on faith that daily interaction with a known landscape necessarily affects the writing experience itself”. (I’d like to accept this – it sounds reasonable – though surely a bit of faith-buttressing evidence wouldn’t go astray.) But still, there’s quite a gap between agreeing that there is an effect on the writing experience and agreeing that the effect takes the mimetic shape Cervelli suggests. He needs to make clearer why it is that Dorothy Wordsworth’s texts take on the characteristics of the landscape and ecosystems she writes in and of, and to explain why they take on these characteristics and not others. “Floating Island” isn’t, for example, rhetorically soggy, though the floating island at Hawkshead must be damp.
For the most part, Cervelli avoids ecofeminist tropes (claims that woman is essentially in nature, with nature, closer to nature), though they would accord neatly with William Wordsworth’s view. Gender is not Cervelli’s business here, except in alluding to the cultural conditions that obscured Dorothy Wordsworth, in her lifetime and beyond. He does at one point describe Dorothy Worsworth’s Highland recollections as “a tour de force of feminine writing” (40). The phrase is ambiguous (does he mean Cixous’s écriture féminine? Whose “feminine?), and vaguely disturbing for that.
This author is vastly erudite, and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology carefully contextualised within relevant critical traditions. Beneath the detailed analysis of Dorothy Wordsworth’s own exquisite detail, Cervelli points to the tectonic rumblings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural change: describing Dorothy as a tourist, he discusses the cultural significance of tourism in the late eighteenth century; describing her as a “picturesque tourist”, he discusses the tradition of Sensibility. For all his emphasis on being within the natural world, Cervelli places his account snugly into an intellectual history.
Dorothy Wordsworth's Ecology
(2007)
By Kenneth R. Cervelli
Routledge
ISBN: 9780415980371
116 pp. US$95