Janelle Schwartz’s Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism Response

 

Response to “Introduction: VermiCulture” of Schwartz’s Worm Work:

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Schwartz begins her book with a statement from 2010 that a “Human-like

brain [was] found in [a] worm” (xiii). Unsurprisingly, people were

outraged at this possibility. Their outrage goes back to the age-old ego of

human supremacy over the natural world (xiv). Schwartz then explains

that the preceding vignette, or chapters of her book, will explore this

historical dynamic of the human notion that we are better than the rest of

the natural world (xiv). This is the first instance in which my study diverges

from Swartz’s; while Swartz takes a traditional literary approach to her

study of worm imagery in Romantic literature by consulting a few texts in

close readings, this current study endeavors to analyze rather than

read, to look at a large body of Romantic works as data through Digital

Humanities. Swartz argues that studying every instance of the word

‘worm’ in literature is “too broad and too tightly packed of a terrain,” (xv)

but this study argues that Swartz’s claim is false – through the help of

software, studying an inhumanly large body of texts is possible. The

irony of Swartz’s claim is that she sets out to describe that “Worms were

a taxonomic terror” (xv) for Romantics when the thought of analyzing

worms in a large dataset of texts is a similar terror of classification and

organization for Swartz. While Swartz sets out to disprove the Romantic

notion, so I set out to disprove Swartz’s notion.

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There is a limitation to my study, however, that Swartz is able to explore, i.e. worms in there many forms. Swartz cites the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to explain that Romantics had many conceptions of worms; for Romantics, worms were earthworms, maggots, caterpillars, butterflies, and even serpents and dragons (xvii). Since text analysis is so specific to exact words, my study only concerns itself with “worm” in its strictest sense. But Swartz classifies her study of worms as concerned with “vermiform invertebrate animals” (xviii; original emphasis). Swartz sets out to help explain through her interchangeable use of the words ‘worm’ and ‘insect’ the scientific concern of the invertebrates during the Romantic period (xviii).

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Though Swartz is more concerned with the scientific inquiry of worm during the Romantic period than the current study is, both Swartz’s work and my own try to engage worms and the human body. Swartz’s vignette is an appropriate foundation for this current study because she is concerned with how worms were studied in the Romantic period because of the notion that they are the animal that resembles humanity the least (xix). My own work is similarly troubled by this notion of the contrast between humans and worms.

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My work asks: Can the contrast between humans and worms help explain a fascination with worms in Romantic literature? And, is Swartz right, is the vile (or material) aesthetic of worms what drives Romantic natural philosophers and natural historians to pursue the study of the vermicular (xxii)? On a psychoanalytic level, is there something temptingly perverse about the phallic engagement of worms and bodies? What bodies are worms engaging with? Is this engagement of worms with bodies gendered? Any of these questions that my work can draw conclusions on will be building on and adding to the findings Swartz has already begun, but my belief is that the addition of Digital Humanities software allows for more definitive answers because of the amount of texts that are consulted.

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In her Introduction, Swartz concludes that “the worm was deployed as a figure to complicate, disrupt, and reimagine ideas of totality” (xxv). If Swartz’s claim is to be believed, this study also embraces this notion of complicatedness and disruption by literally disrupting a traditional reading of texts while analyzing the Romantic vehicle of disruption, i.e. worms. Because of the mutability of worms, the form this project has taken – the messiness and reimagination of what doing English means – seems all the more appropriate. I have set out to unearth worms from large data-beds of Romantic texts, visit my process posts to see what I have found so far.