Abstract
Alan Bewell’s Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History is a major contribution to the field of ‘global Romanticism’. It also speaks to a wide range of contemporary critical concerns, most notably eco-criticism and our understanding of how ‘nature’ has been conceived and deployed since that time. Bewell’s major point is that what was understood as nature in the Romantic period became a mobile and fluid concept sustained by the emerging and developing process of European colonialism. This work concerns the extraordinary processes of the movement of peoples, plants and animals over the globe in the wake of exploration and colonialism. Bewell argues for a plurality of natures that are always mobile – at variance with a Romantic essentialist understanding of nature as a force, power or spirit. He claims that nature did not function as an escape from modernity but was a modern construction: ‘not an escape from the present, but… the cutting edge of new forms of knowledge… to be mobilized, represented, studied, exploited, traded, and exchanged’ (p. 7). It was at this time that the natural world underwent substantial change, as ‘European colonialism introduced changes within global ecologies on a scale never seen before’ (p. 13). This form of change was multi-faceted: from the erasure of indigenous names to the extermination of indigenous species by foreign plants, insects and animals. Colonialism was not just a human resettlement, but also a biological resettlement of the globe, perhaps even more important for its biological than human consequences. The eighteenth century, with its processes of colonialism and natural history, created a ‘global nature’ which overwrote a series of earlier, alternative natures.
One of the functions of post-colonial criticism must thus be to recover the many forms of nature that were dissolved and obliterated by this process. Central to Bewell’s methodology is the concept of ‘translation’. As part of their colonial project, the British were committed to translation in all its manifestations. It was a translational culture that translated works of natural history into English, but also one which buttressed its power. Bewell prefers ‘translation’ to ‘transfer’ or ‘exchange’ because it stresses the ways in which things were changed as a correlative of their movement. The book begins, appropriately, with Erasmus Darwin’s ambitious project to create a cosmopolitan nature in his popular and controversial poem The Botanic Garden (1791). For Bewell, Darwin’s poetry represents the epitome of the eighteenth-century cosmopolitan and commercial elite. This was a time when foreign flowers and plants – hyacinths, camellias, fuchsias, geraniums and so on – were avidly sought from around the globe, and substantial prices paid for their acquisition. Bewell explores the fascinating tension between a cosmopolitan nature whereby plants are collected, transplanted and put on display in the major botanic gardens around the world, and the tendency of plants to be naturalised and domesticated to the home country.
So too, in his major discussion of colonial history and its literal transplanting of nature, Bewell investigates how colonial landscapes were virtually created in the period, notably in the West Indies. The sheer scale of plant transplantation to the West Indies is powerfully evoked here. Bewell’s discussion of Australian nature is especially original and powerful, with the newly discovered continent becoming the ‘poster child for the capacity of Europeans to build a cosmopolitan nature’ (p. 125). His account of the genesis of John White’s Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales (1790) is a tour de force, illustrating his argument that a hybrid Australian nature was fabricated collectively at both the centre and the periphery. As a counterpoint to this fragmented and hybrid text, Bewell positions Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789), which performs the function of naturalising and establishing an English landscape: ‘a spiritual anchor… despite Britain’s involvement in changing everybody else’s natures’ (p. 161). Yet even White’s English nature was being invaded by colonial Others: the Romani who inhabited the margins of the landscape; the Brown- or Norway Rat that invaded England after 1720; the dreadful Hessian fly that destroyed American grain fields and threatened to move to those of England; and, most troubling and irremediable of all, the Asian cockroach or ‘black-bob’. Britons noted with alarm that plants and animals were capable of travelling across the globe by their own devices.
Bewell’s study charts the movement from an Enlightenment conception of a stable nature expressing a divine purpose to one ‘in which struggle, violence, and change seem to lie at the heart of things’ (p. 210). He situates William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), ‘Michael’ and ‘The Ruined Cottage’ in the context of American natural history writing, especially that of William Bartram and William Cullen Bryant, arguing that Wordsworth was schooled by those authors’ readings of the life of human beings, both in the natures they left behind them and the ruins they brought into being. In particular, Bewell here chides New Historicist criticism for failing to historicise botanical knowledge itself, which is not an evasion of history into the realms of flora, but a form of historicised knowledge. A similarly powerful reading of John Clare’s writing as a poetry of exile within one’s home is deployed to discover a Clare alienated, dislocated and estranged by the process of travel. Clare notably refused Linnaean classifications, the ‘hard nicknaming system of unutterable words’ that immerses the natural world in ‘mystery till it makes its darkness visible’ (p. 275).
The book’s final two chapters grapple with the emerging master trope of nineteenth-century science, Darwinian evolution. Bewell demonstrates how Charles Darwin’s developing awareness of his theory arose from his participation in and experiencing of the colonial process; after witnessing the ecological transformation it created, he was obliged to abandon his earlier preconceptions of an unchanging and stable nature. Colonial nature would thus become the exemplar, demonstrating how nature actually functioned all along. It was the central phenomenon of the mobility of species that explained how nature worked. Bewell’s study concludes with an evolutionary reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816), which imagines not the creation of a human being, but the creation of a new species. In this reading Victor’s creation (in his eyes) threatens to be another ‘invasive species’ as potentially disruptive as that of the ‘black-bobs’ that infested Gilbert White’s kitchen.
Bewell’s splendid book is an important re-conceptualisation of our understandings of nature in the period. It is a substantial work, manifesting an enormous range of learning and scholarship within its truly interdisciplinary purview. Like the natures it describes, it changes the very object of our knowledge itself, revealing the surprising plurality and multi-faceted presence of the natures of Romanticism in a global age.