ABSTRACT
To defend Richard Payne Knigh's cherished European landscapes against unfavourable transatlantic comparisons, Knight attacked the debased aesthetic sensibility of silly travellers who celebrated the grandeur of Ontario's endless coast and sublimity of Niagara. One of the best accounts of Niagara's overwhelming affect on those who beheld it was offered by Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, who wrote in her 1851 travel narrative. Indeed, utterly Niagarized, as the great cataract goes sounding through all one's soul, and heart, and mind, commingling with all one's ideas and impressions, and uniting itself with all one's inner most feelings and fancies. As Susan Manning has noted, the violence that haunts Fuller's mind is understood as an uncanny image of collective cultural guilt. It is concerning the colonial expropriation of Niagara and displacement of its indigenous inhabitants, a sense of culpability powerful enough to disrupt the fiction of presence that she, like other contemporary Romantic travellers, seeks to realize in her experience of fall.
