“An Enemy, I suppose, that Nature has made”: Charlotte Smith and the natural enemy

Abstract

This essay traces the history of the expression “natural enemy,” and finds the most rigorous, though subtle, investigation of the term in Charlotte Smith's final poem of 1807, Beachy Head. Joining John Thelwall's attempt to critique the popular British epithet for France by questioning its claim about “nature,” Smith begins her final “nature poem” with a figure keeping watch from the historic military site of Beachy Head, a site rife with anxiety about a possible French invasion. What emerges in the poem, however, is not the aggressive arrival of the invading enemy, but the geological history of Britain's prior union with France, a natural history that subverts the idea that the two nations were ever naturally enemies, since it suggests that, according to Smith, “we can trace our origin no farther than to the people we hate and despise.” Resisting the arguments of both a natural antipathy and a natural sympathy with France, Smith's poem focuses instead on the phenomenality of the border and the forms of watchfulness and attention demanded by war, to ask what relations to the foreign the rhetoric of the “natural enemy” might foreclose.