Material Agency and the “Cluttered” Environment in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Travel Narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent critical studies have explored the cultural significance of walking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the connection between bodily activity and creative energies: in its rhythmic, repetitive motion, walking can bring the subject into a semi-hypnotic state that invites mental wandering. This essay traces the experience of walking through Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel narratives, but I shift focus from moving unhindered through open spaces to physically navigating more challenging environments. Drawing on James J. Gibson’s theory of environmental affordances and Andrew Pickering’s concept of nonhuman agency, I consider how “cluttered” landscapes persistently conduct our attention to the material continuity between human traveler and nonhuman environment. My suggestion is that this heightened awareness inspires a mode of ecological thinking that alters the individual’s ethical sensibility toward the nonhuman world. This conclusion demonstrates the often overlooked value of those less accommodating natural spaces. Moreover, reading Wordsworth’s narratives with an eye toward her presentation of material agency may help us to recover a sense of Wordsworth’s own authorial agency.