Shelley and the Revolution in Taste. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1997 by Steven Jones

by Timothy Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii, 298. $57.95.

It was Carl Woodring, in a graduate class on Queen Mab, who first taught me the significance of Shelley's vegetarianism. (He had treated the topic briefly in his 1970 Politics in English Romantic Poetry.) Woodring's historicist approach authorized his taking an interest in even the marginal, "cranky" ideas of Shelley, as long as they were placed in broader socio-political contexts. This approach helped pave the way for new historicism in Romantic studies, which has in turn led to the even more deliberately interdisciplinary and self-consciously theorized cultural studies practiced in Timothy Morton's fine book on Shelley's vegetarianism.

This book is important as much for its method as for its content. Though Morton admits to being inspired by Clifford Geertz, it makes sense to think of his practice not as new historicism but (to use his own preferred terms) as "'green' cultural criticism"--which is to say that, rather than merely providing contexts for ecological themes in Shelley's texts, this book really does use Shelley to explore "how the body and its social and natural environments may be interrelated" (2). In listing his methodological influences, Morton names not only the expected Shelleyans and Romanticists (Dawson, Hogle Leask), but key social scientists (Appadurai, Bourdieu), social historians (Drummond and Wilbraham, Salaman), and cultural theorists (Thomas, Adams, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari). These help provide ways to articulate historical discourses of vegetarianism and ecology. Along the way, various "primary" materials, including graphical satires, prints, and pamphlets, come into focus in useful ways, as Morton weaves theoretical insights among thick descriptions of particular texts and cultural practices. In the end, the book makes good on its claim: it "rescues the theme of natural diet from its marginality in critical discourse and explains how it may be understood in ways which make it hard to dismiss as `cranky'" (11).

The first half of the book outlines historical, political, and discursive contexts for Shelley's nohon that "the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of life" (Queen Mab), and that such depravity could in practice be corrected through what he called the "natural diet." Following the theoretical writings of his friend J. F. Newton and others, Shelley stressed this idea of a fall from natural law as a radical alternative to Malthusian pessimism. Morton shows how much the production and consumption of food figured in public discourse of the period, from Malthus himself to his public opponent Godwin, from Peacock to the revolutionaries, John Oswald and Joseph Ritson. The result is a rich sense of one feature of the coherent ideological milieu in which Shelley's ideas participate: the sect of "Brahmins," radicals who practiced a politicized vegetarianism. Arguments about diet during this period were often framed in the larger, abstract context of debates about the "natural" and the "human." These debates included deadly serious arguments for the "rights of brutes" (as Thomas Taylor's 1792 parody of that name reminds us), part of an emergent construction of the "human" as at once the "humane" and the "natural." Such arguments turn on questions of representation and figuration, which leads Morton to his larger theoretical issue: the body in relation to the environment.

The first chapter includes discussion of Rousseauistic nature and individualism versus society's disease, which leads to a very helpful reading of Mary Shelley's plague novel, The Last Man (1826), which questions the significance of the human in the natural world by imagining the extinction of the human species. This novel deserves more attention than it has received in the past for several reasons, including Morton's successful demonstration of how it represents the "contradichons inherent in the progressive humanism of thought amongst the radical middle and upper classes" at the time (56).

The central chapters re-read, first, Shelley's early biographies to focus on the significance of diet, and food, its production and consumption, in his personal and social life; then, Shelley's poetic writings are placed in these same contexts, and to good effect, focussing on works from Queen Mab to Prometheus Unbound in ways that convince us that what might have once looked like a slant perspective is in fact dead-on. Finally, the discussion is extended to Shelley's vegetarian prose and its sources, again revealing Shelley's participation in a multilayered, allusive "discourse of diet." In the process, Morton invokes formalist, deconstructive readings of Shelley's disfiguration, but always stretches those readings "until they touch the social field" (4). A recurrent touchstone for this portion of the book is a sentimental millenarian moment in Queen Mab--"no longer now / He slays the lamb that looks him in the face, / And horribly devours his mangled flesh"--lines which Morton reveals as having complex cultural as well as linguistic resonances. One valuable historical echo connects Queen Mab to the Della Cruscan Samuel Jackson Pratt's poem, Humanity, or the Rights of Nature (1788); but rather than stopping with this "influence," the argument culminates in theoretical observations on Shelley's figuration of faciality--how the "`in your face' look of the lamb" in the passage quoted above "reconstructs the potentially inhuman mask of faciality, producing a new kind of subject" (99).