Hopeless Romantics: The Poetics of Unredeeming Nature

As an alternative to the modern myth of “Nature” as a factory of redemption or a well of hope, this dissertation considers a Romantic literary (counter-)tradition that reflects on the unredeeming qualities of nonhuman nature. I show how European and American writers of the Romantic era—broadly construed from 1789 to the 1860s—theorized an epistemology of hopelessness that aimed to liberate nature from a pre-established conceptual burden of dispelling alienation and recuperating modernity’s losses. In analyses of nineteenth-century poetry, fiction, and literary theory, and in conversation with contemporary reflections in critical theory and the environmental humanities, I uncover an environmental ethics of critical hopelessness in Romantic-era poetics. Even as the authors of my study often posit a return to nature as a cure for historical disappointment and enlightenment “disenchantment,” their writings nonetheless suspend or interrupt the hope of finding redemption in nature. These hopeless Romantics reflect on nonhuman nature in its inability to promise futurity, to provide consolation, to meet endless demands, and to act as either the catalyst or the stage for humanity’s self-fulfillment in history. In doing so, they do not sanctify “Nature” as a unitary entity wholly set apart from human aspirations, but rather make a case for the simple ecological awareness that nonhuman nature exists beyond the psychic economy of hope and fulfillment./nThe first chapter, “Nature Ruined in Nerval and Chateaubriand,” puts Gérard de Nerval’s novella Sylvie (1853) into conversation with François René de Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity (1802), showing how Nerval critically reformulates Chateaubriand’s fantasy of restoring the receptivity to nature that allegedly preceded the disenchanting violence of the Enlightenment. Nerval transforms Chateaubriand’s figure of ruin into the sign of the permanent refusal of restorative fantasies, thus inscribing human hopelessness in nature. The second chapter, “Dickinson’s Companions,” shows how the writings of Emily Dickinson resist the Transcendentalist ideal of redemptive unification with nature. Rather than grasping toward an ever-expanding and all-encompassing poetic vision—one in which nature, God, and humanity blend into systematic harmony—Dickinson’s poems stage the impasses of integration and communion. Dickinson’s companionship thus offers the basis for an ecological mode of consciousness that, like Nerval’s ruined pastoral, refuses to find in nature the promise of a return to original integrity./nAgainst a common understanding of Walt Whitman as a redemptive prophet of pleasure, the third chapter, “Limp Whitman,” explores an iteration of the poet who dilates or surrenders the self not to take in or to amplify pleasure, nor to masochistically dissolve the self, but rather to attenuate the demands he places on the earth and on his own body. The fourth and final chapter, “Hell on Earth with Baudelaire (and Poe),” considers contemporary environmentalist reflections on how one might register and respond to the massive loss engendered by ongoing damage to the planet. I show how, very presciently, a century and a half before these environmental thinkers, Charles Baudelaire and his greatest literary influence, Edgar Allan Poe, theorized a poetics of transience, believing that the value of poetry was fundamentally tied to an acknowledgement of mortality and human limits. Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory and (a)theological thinking provide us with a worldview fit for inhabiting a planet that is permeated by loss, as they exhibit a commitment to thinking and living without redemption, of inhabiting a world that is at once alien and familiar, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, alive and dead.

Advisor: Lucey, Michael