Literature of Diminishment: American Regionalism and the Writing of Nature

Literature of Diminishment: American Regionalism and the Writing of Nature By Juliana Hui-xin Chow A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Dorothy Hale, Chair Professor Anne-Lise François Professor Sophie Volpp Spring 2015 Abstract Literature of Diminishment: American Regionalism and the Writing of Nature by Juliana Hui-xin Chow Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Dorothy Hale, Chair Literature of Diminishment redefines regionalism as a philosophical approach that prefers a partial view of oneself and of others, whether human or nonhuman, rather than the comprehensive view pursued by nineteenth-century science. I show how American regionalist writings from the 1820s to 1910s adapt scientific techniques of observation to the aesthetics of the regionalist sketch. Their "sketchy" view of Nature highlights the deficiencies of knowing and nonetheless opens out to a view of biological processes and succession in which life cedes to life through its casualties. Regionalist literature is, then, less a literature of particular cultural or geographical regions as it is a literature whose principles of diminishment might insist on the roughness and limits of a regional setting. The archive of works I draw upon extends from environmental literature—the nature writings of John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, and Celia Thaxter—to less conventionally regionalist texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as works by Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein. In regionalist formulations, diminishment is a mode of seeing that relies on imprecise and partial specifications rather than strict definitions. Understanding art and science as approaches that both connote ways of seeing and being in the world, I show how writers like Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Thaxter, and Sarah Orne Jewett experiment with partial ways of seeing through concomitantly aesthetic and scientific uses of views, optics, and visual technology. Setting the frame with Thoreau's vista from the eroding shores of Cape Cod, I consider how these writers' engagement with natural history's empirical methods attends to their own perceptual diminishment, and also, critically, to the diminishment of their object of study—Nature, or, more generally, life. The final chapters examine the practice and politics of seeing human races as "species," that is, as part of nature, through what I consider "snapshots" of black workers. Du Bois's and Stein's literary-photographic studies view and review the racialist natural history that pictures African-Americans, as Du Bois writes, "somewhere between men and cattle." Regionalism, I argue, instead affords the succession of life through diminishment, rather than a reduction of life to units of data. 1 For my parents Stephen and Grace Chow, my sister Melinda Alankar, & Christopher Patrick Miller i Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Preface 1 Introduction "Missing All": Observation, Sketch, Episteme 9 Chapter 1 Naked Nature: Audubon, Thoreau, and the Deformation of Natural 35 History Chapter 2 Grotesquery: Organized Decays in Melville, Thaxter, and Jewett 58 Chapter 3 "Because I see—New Englandly—": Emily Dickinson's Regional 100 Specificity Chapter 4 Life as Labor: Regional and Racial Subsistency from Frederick 120 Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois Chapter 5 Vitality: Gertrude Stein's Work Again 155 Bibliography 193 ii Acknowledgments This dissertation has been spurred on by those who have reminded me to not diminish myself even as I am writing on literature of diminishment. With their generosity and critical insights, research and writing has been a serious and joyful endeavor. First and foremost, I thank my committee: my advisor Dorothy Hale, and readers Anne-Lise François and Sophie Volpp. For their advice and reading of my work, I thank Mitchell Breitwieser, Samuel Otter, Lyn Hejinian, Donna Jones, Ian Duncan, Charlie Altieri, Mark Goble, and Oliver Arnold. One's writing can never be encouraged enough times, nor asked to be clarified enough. Unfortunately I can't rely upon Thoreau's excuse for obscurities. More broadly, I am grateful to the UC Berkeley Graduate Division and English department for providing the foundation and setting for this work, not only through financial support in the form of numerous grants and scholarships, but also through the more intangible and difficult to quantify support toward well-being: many thanks to Elizabeth Abel, who was Director of Graduate Studies when I first began as a graduate student, my first-year seminar leader, Georgina Kleege, whose valuable support as mentor and teacher far outweighs any I could furnish her as graduate student reader and research assistant, and Kevis Goodman and Scott Saul, for asides in the hallways that have, in the ratio of these things, done so much with so little to keep me going. I am dearly indebted to the friends who have found me in the course of graduate studies and helped me find a path in this bewilderment: to Manya Lempert and Adeline Tran for our dissertation group, to Kate Chandler for our Townsend Humanities Center working group "Mediating Natures," to countless graduate student colleagues, many who have moved on to other places, among them Sunny Xiang, Rasheed Tazudeen, Seulghee Lee, Irene Yoon, Nick Junkerman, Sookyoung Lee, Natalia Cecire, and Tiffany Tsao, and thanks especially to my close companions in reading, thinking, and walking: Maude Emerson, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, and, in getting lost together, Christopher Patrick Miller. Finally, with the deepest gratitude, this dissertation is dedicated to my family. iii Preface Nature has her russet hues as well as green— Indeed our eye splits on every object, and we can as well take one path as the other— If I consider its history it is old—if its destiny it is new— I may see a part of an object or the whole. I will not be imposed on and think Nature is old, because the season is advanced. I will study the botany of the mosses and fungi on the decayed—and remember that decayed wood is not old, but has just begun to be what it is. I need not think of the pine almond or the acorn and sapling when I meet the fallen pine or oak—more than of the generations of pines and oaks which have fed the young tree. The new blade of the corn—the third leaf of the melon—these are not green but gray with time, but sere in respect of time.1 - Thoreau, Journal (March 19, 1842) "Our eye splits on every object": The gaze of natural history, as Thoreau notes, breaks apart upon its object. Nature's hues as red and green brings optics to bear upon the temporal and biological frame of the woods: not only seasonal fluctuations of trees but also the succession of plant species, the individual sapling's green spring and fall red and the generations that have fed it, that will grow from it. What is seen as "hues" of color are also the hues of time's movement, of history and of decay, the way red lingers after green, and green after red. Natural history is not merely observations of nature, but observations of a nature in "respect of time," so that the work of describing the specificities of life is also a problem of describing the succession of life over time. At the same time, the eye that splits into red and green is like the many rays refracted by droplets of water to form a rainbow. A rainbow or an iridescent mist as Thoreau's figural representation of vision may not be apparent until one considers the spectrum of colors proffered in this description—russet, green, gray—and the refracting of rays of light suggested by the eye's divergent paths. The hues offer a clue only to surface more than a decade later in another journal entry from August 7, 1852: We see the rain bow apparently when we are on the edge of the rain, just as the sun is setting If we are too deep in the rain, then it will appear dim. Sometimes it is so near that I see a portion of its arch this side of the woods in the horizon tinging them. Sometimes we are completely within it—enveloped by it—and experience the realization of the childs [sic] wish. The obvious colors are red & green. Why green? It is astonishing how brilliant the red may be. What is the difference between that red & the ordinary red of the evening sky? Who does not feel that here is a phenomenon which Natural philosophy alone is inadequate to explain? The use of the rain-bow, who has described it. (J 5: 287-288) The green and red of the woods at twilight, or of autumnal leaves, are both the hues of a natural phenomenon, that is, of Nature itself, and the hues of a perception or feeling of Nature that breaks into various bands of color. Green and red are the shades of strikingly complementary, that is, opposite, colors in eighteenth and nineteenth-century color theory based on the absorption of light by paint pigments. "Local color" was considered the natural or true color of an object without outside influence and without admixture of other pigments; of course, most colors in 1 Thoreau, Journal 1: 381-382. 1 paintings are not "local" but blended and painted in relation to other colors.2 Thus, the shadow of a green object would be painted with russet tints for a fuller, more luminescent effect. Or the evening red casts green shadows in the woods. For Thoreau, the rainbow's "tinging" of the woods has the complementary optical effect of shadows where red tinging green produces a more "brilliant" red than the "ordinary" or "local" red of dusk.

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