In September 1792, French revolutionaries murdered more than a thousand political prisoners to prevent them from being released and joining enemy forces. After the September massacres, many, including English poet Charlotte Turner Smith, were forced to question their support for the French Revolution and its founding principles. In 1793, Smith published “The Emigrants,” a two-part poem about French refugees settling in Brighthelmstone, a town in southern England. The first part of the poem takes place a month after the September massacres, and the second part takes place the following spring. Smith uses the setting of his poem, a place where civilization and nature meet, to show how the atrocities committed by French radicals put humanity out of harmony with nature. In condemning French atrocities, Smith does not show how revolutionaries literally destroyed natural beauty; instead, she shows how her knowledge of the suffering in France prevents her from connecting with nature, even in England, which was not physically affected by the conflict. While the authors of Sensibility literature view these emotional reactions as admirable, Smith describes them as destructive forces that sever one's connection to the natural beauty around him. Smith therefore uses "The Emigrants" not only to condemn the atrocities of the French Revolution, but also to criticize the effectiveness and validity of Sensibility literature, distancing himself philosophically from Enlightenment thought and anticipating later writers of the movement romantic. to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay Smith begins Book I of “The Emigrants” with descriptions of the natural areas around the city to begin to allude to the way in which the conflict in France causes disagreement between man and nature. Rather than describing the coast in terms of beauty in the opening lines of the poem, she depicts it in a disturbed state: “SLOW in the wintry morning the struggling light / Casts a faint glow on the troubled waves” (1). With these elaborate descriptions of "struggling" light and "troubled" waves, Smith suggests that nature is having difficulty functioning as usual, or that it, at least, is incapable of perceiving nature without the imagine in conflict. Although this part of the poem takes place in November, the weather is "wintry", further suggesting that nature is either not following its usual pattern or failing to perceive it as usual; this unusual description suggests that the weather is worse than expected, which may parallel the fact that the French Revolution, descending into violence, also did not turn out as Smith had predicted. Smith does not yet explicitly allude to the Revolution, but does allude to its effects. : “Alas! how few mornings wake up with joy! she writes, referring to those in France who are directly affected by the conflict (1). She speaks of those who look at “the daystar, but to curse its rays” (2). Victims do not simply lament the start of a new day spent struggling to survive; the sun itself has become a representation of their difficulties, so they "curse" the light of the sun, thereby rejecting a part of the natural world in which they should be able to find "joy", but cannot. Smith continues to develop this connection between joy and nature through his descriptions of the creator of the landscape. It invokes the image of a natural and benevolent god "whose Spirit was called / Thiswonderful world of waters” (2). This is not a distant and impersonal god, but a god linked to “this” specific landscape. Here she finally begins to describe nature as something beautiful and peaceful. She goes on to write that the breath of this god "whispers low, on the gently rising tides, / When the beautiful Moon, in the serene summer night, / Irradiates [the ocean] with long lines of trembling light" ( 2). This calm world of natural beauty she describes inhabits the same physical space as the beginning of the poem, but not at the same time. She specifically places this image in a "serene summer/night", situating it in the past, before nature was thrown into the disarray she describes, further emphasizing the lack of such calm beauty in the current setting of poem. This god commands humanity “Nothing but good: Yet Man, lost Man, / Mars the beautiful work which he was asked to enjoy, / And does to himself the evil which he deplores” (3) . Nature is therefore supposed to be a source of joy or enjoyment, but the “evil” of the revolutionaries cuts humanity off from this joy. Although Smith herself was not directly threatened by the violence of the French Revolution, she too found herself cut off from nature due to the conflict taking place on the other side of this once "wonderful" ocean and now “troubled”. The victims of the Revolution were presumably cut off from nature because of their preoccupation with the threat of violence and the actual destruction of their natural environment, but for Smith, safe in the unscathed south of England, this alienation from nature must have a different source. Faced with her own problems and news of the Revolution, she expresses a desire to leave society and live amid the natural beauty that surrounds her town, in "an isolated cottage, deep buried / In the green woods" (3 -4). . Only here could she appreciate “the beautiful works of God, preserved by man / And [be] less affected then by human misfortunes / [she] had not witnessed them” (4). Here, she begins to connect her relationship with nature to ideas from the literature of Sensitivity; in this genre, readers are given the opportunity to display their virtue through their emotional reactions to the scenes of suffering or hardship they read about; in other words, by responding to "human misfortunes which they have not witnessed" with their eyes, but through literature, or in Smith's case, through current events or through his encounters with the emigrants. While these emotional responses are considered admirable among readers of Sensibility, Smith expresses a desire to escape the need to respond emotionally to suffering she does not witness, suggesting that a connection with nature can prevent herself from being subjected to scenes that require these responses. . However, now that she is aware of the misfortunes of the French, not even nature can allow her to escape these feelings. She says that nothing, neither “the sequestered Cot, where the heathers / And the wild woods embrace the mossy thatch”, nor the “more substantial farm”, nor the “majestic dome / By dark fir trees shaded”, nor “none of the buildings, new and cared for / With windows facing the rough sea”, cannot “extinguish for an hour the specter of care” (6). Here, for the first time, she actually begins to describe the city, but she does so not without commenting on the city's relationship with nature, and only after describing several other dwellings more connected to the natural world. She describes her emotional reactions to the Revolution as "the specter of worry", a ghost, something to fear, and suggests that nothing, neither nature nor civilization, can get rid of this "worry", thisfeeling of sensitivity, once she begins to feel it. Her tendency to describe the natural world as more important than civilization shows that she still somewhat aligns with Enlightenment thinkers, even if the revolution makes her question this alignment. Smith's enduring connection to the Enlightenment is most evident when she says that French émigrés, who "dwelt amid the artificial scenes / Of the populous city…[forgot] all taste / For the authentic beauty of nature" ( 25). Echoing Rousseau, she suggests that emigrants were corrupted by the “second nature” of city life and cut themselves off from the original true nature. She illustrates this trend with a French emigrant sitting on the shore with her children. This woman has become “weary of the task / Of having here, her eyes swollen and painful / Fixed on the gray horizon, since dawn” (22). Contemplating nature is for her a tiring task rather than a source of joy, because "in waking dreams this native land" appears to her again; she sees “Versailles… its painted galleries, / And its rooms of royal splendor, rich with gold,” to open her eyes “to the bleak reality” (23). Smith continues to imitate Rousseau in critiquing the way the artificial replaces nature for the French woman, but here she also begins to anticipate the emerging movement of Romanticism. Twenty-four years after the publication of “The Emigrants,” Romantic writer Samuel Coleridge wrote about the concept of “fantasy” in his Biographia Literaria; “Fantasy,” he asserts, is “none other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space… it is mixed and modified by this empirical phenomenon of the will” (478 ). Coleridge believes that acts of will cut humanity off from the “totality,” a mysterious conception of the world opposed to the rational outlook of Enlightenment thinkers. Predating Coleridge's text by more than two decades, Smith's work applies a similar concept to this French émigré. This woman regards the beautiful natural setting as bleak and finds no joy in it because, exercising her will and seeing only combinations of images from her memory, she can only observe the old life she has lost; she thus fails to participate in the “totality”. She does not "[look] with pleasure on the silver breast of the Ocean, / As it sails lightly above the summer clouds / Reflected in the wave" because, due to its voluntary use of "Fancy", as Coleridge might later put it, the ocean now reflects for her only the lost lands on its opposite coast (25). Smith, despite his security in England, suffered the same alienation from nature as the Frenchwoman because of the Revolution. For Smith, looking out at the ocean, she hears only “the deep groans / Of martyred saints and suffering royalty” in the wind (19). She is still cut off from nature by Sensibility, by her emotional responses to the suffering she imagines in France. However, it is not "Imagination" as Coleridge would say, but "Fantasy", because she too must borrow and recombine images from her memory to imagine these scenes. Engaging in sensibility, to borrow Coleridge's later term, is therefore an act of "fantasy" and will that leads to alienation from nature. Although Smith does not use these terms herself, the language of romanticism is easy to read in her poem. Smith leaves Enlightenment thought behind and moves toward the Romantic movement in the second part of her poem. Book II takes place the following April, meant to be a time of beauty and rebirth. However, just as the ocean became the mirror of suffering in Book I, spring is little more than a reminder that..