“Nature never disappoints”: Conversations between the Human and the Other-than-Human in Lady Morgan’s "Italy"

The article intends to propose a reading of the composite travel book Italy (1821) by Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson), from a theoretical perspective which intersects the methods of environmental studies, ecocriticism and geocriticism. First, referring to the genre hybridity of Morgan’s travelogue, intermixing literature, history, fact, fiction, journalism, personal diary, political and philosophical meditation, I will present Italy as a text characterised by a place-oriented aesthetics prefiguring modern geocritical and ecocritical approaches. In this context, Morgan’s work exemplifies the ways in which, in Romantic-period literature, the geography of Italy is everywhere enmeshed with its magmatic, multi-layered, but also fragmented cultural and political context. Secondly, I will show that, throughout Italy, the author’s interiority relates to exteriority in a way which suggests her full awareness, as well as lived experience, of the world out there independently from her imagination – be it the natural, the urban or an interweaving of the two. Through examples, I will highlight Morgan’s diversified representation of the mesh of the human and more-than-human in the period just before the breaking out of the 1820-21 uprisings of the early Risorgimento: a mesh that emerges either as a well-functioning ecosystem based on a dialectics of nature and culture, or as a clash that usually becomes a vehicle of the author’s social and political critique. Despite these differences, Morgan’s “assemblage” of the human and nonhuman displays a vital materiality running across everything, which could be read through the lenses of contemporary ecocritical investigations, such as that by Jane Bennett in Ecology of Things. Thirdly, by resorting to this as well as other recent theories of ecological thought by, inter alia, Timothy Morton and Arne Naess, the article will aim at highlighting the ways in which Italy challenges anthropocentrism and the Cartesian mind-matter essentialist dualism by depicting the material world as an agent in its own right, capricious, dark, capable of destruction and outside human control or calculation. Thus, Morgan encourages a re-scaling of man’s self-aggrandizement and centrality in the universe, as well as a reconsideration of the nonhuman elements of the world. At the same time, though, by representing an Italian natural environment as a geocultural ecosystem inscribed by signs of human national and transnational history, Morgan acknowledges the multiple impact that culture can have on nature without seeing the useful and beautiful, or the artificial and natural, as necessarily in opposition, especially when the interests of a community are involved. Ultimately, one might regard Morgan as a moderate ecologist, as it were, since, without denying mankind’s exploitative, often ruinous, action on the environment, she believed in the possibility of a pact between man and nature – what nowadays we would call eco-sustainable compromises between the laws of nature and mankind’s economic interests and inexorable progress. Select Bibliography Abbate Badin Donatella, “Lady Morgan’s Italy: Travel Book or Political Tract?”, in Back to the present, forward to the past, ed. Lynch; Coates; Fischer (Brill 2006) Bate Jonathan, Romantic Ecology (Routledge 1991) Bennett Jane, Vibrant Matter. A Poetic Ecology of Things (Duke University Press 2010) Bohls Elizabeth, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716-1818 (Cambridge UP 1995) Clark Timothy, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge UP 2011) Dewey W. Hall, ed., Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies (Lexington Books 2016) Morgan (Lady), Italy, 3 vols. (Henry Colburn & Co. 1821) Pfister Manfred, The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers (Rodopi 1996) Smethurst Paul, Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840 (Palgrave Macmillan 2012) Walchester Kathryn, Our Own Fair Italy: Nineteenth Century Women’s Travel Writing and Italy 1800-1844 (Peter Lang 2007) Westphal Bertrand Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (Palgrave Macmillan 2007) Wrestling, Louise ed., Literature and the Environment, CUO 2014 Rigby Kate, Reclaiming Romanticism: towards an ecopoetics of decolonization (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020