The Environmental Ethics of Alienation: The Beautiful and Sublime in Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well”

The progressive industrialisation and urbanisation of eighteenth-century British society brought about new moral and epistemological perspectives on the human-animal relationship. The urbanite's estrangement from nature, it appears, nourished a kind of scientific objectivity that gave short shrift to the rustic's first-hand yet still folkloric or biblical views. New, disinterested research methods empirically undergirded the claims of the Romantic animal rights supporter that the animal was not merely created to serve man's dietary or divinatory needs, but that it had a moral relevance or what Coleridge simply called "a Life of it's own." In this way, alienation and the insight into the animal's (in)difference paradoxically led to a moral identification with it. Interestingly, this socio-ethical dialectic of alienation and identification found its aesthetic parallel in the Romantic discourse of the sublime, which stages a very similar dynamic of attraction and repulsion between the self and some excessive otherness. My paper, then, will evaluate the ecological significance of this discourse by focussing on William Wordsworth's "Hart-Leap Well," a poem in which the phallocentric and domesticating politics of the traditional picturesque hunting scene are radically subverted by what appears to be a sublime holocaust. Underlining the poem's evolution from a rigidly anthropocentric to a more biocentric worldview, I will demonstrate how the eighteenth-century identification with the animal world sprang from an urban estrangement from nature and, more importantly, how sublime alienation, perhaps counterintuitively, plays a crucial role in environmental thinking.

Publication year:2008

Keywords:British Romanticism, The Sublime and Beautiful, Ecocriticism, William Wordsworth