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Approaches to Nine Teenth Century American Nature

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Approaches to Nine Teenth Century American Nature MOTHER NATURE OR HAUNTED HOUSE: APPROACHES TO NINE­ TEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN NATURE WRITING A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University A 5 In partial fulfillment of The Requirements for 3G The Degree .^6-3 Master of Arts In English: Literature By Keith Raymond Roche San Francisco, California May 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Mother Nature or Haunted House: Approaches to Nineteenth Century American Nature Writing by Keith Raymond Roche, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University. Lynn waraiey Professor of English Wai-Leung Kwok Professor of English MOTHER NATURE OR HAUNTED HOUSE: APPROACHES TO NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN NATURE WRITING Keith Raymond Roche San Francisco, California 2016 In this study I have shown the ways in which Susan Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman all succeed in writing about nature from an ecocentric standpoint, denoting a nature centered, rather than human-centered, system of values. These writers share a similar perspective that places intrinsic value on all living organisms and their natural environment, writing in new and imaginary ways about nature. These authors give us images and figures that broaden our perspective of nature, and tell us who and what we are, and where and how we inhabit our space. Their move towards a nature-centered global vision that does not subject the earth to human schemes is a vision that helps further develop the ecocritical canon. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the contents of this thesis. Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank Lynn Wardley for the generous amount of time she had allocated for this study, and the valuable advice that helped this thesis along. Thank you Wai- Leung Kwok as advisor during my studies in the graduate program. I also would like to extend thanks to the Professors of Literature and Composition Studies at San Francisco State University. Finally, thank you mom for cultivating the discipline of study and also to brother Jim and sister-in-law Alethea, for their inspiring example as Literary elites here at San Francisco State. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction:..............................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Natural Knowledge, Observation, and Humility: Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and the Birth of American Bioregionalism.............................8 Chapter Two: “A Route of Evanescence: Emily Dickinson’s Elusive Grammar and Nature’s Magic” ............................................................................................ 35 Chapter Three: “I Am Large...I Contain Multitudes”: Whitman’s Vision of Cosmic Dwelling..........................................................................................................63 Conclusion:..............................................................................................................................83 References:....................................................................... 87 v 1 INTRODUCTION When I use the term "approaches” in the title of this work, I do not just mean the word as taken as a noun, as a way of dealing with something, but also as a verb, to come near or nearer to something in distance. Nature writers have always dealt with the challenge of accurately describing natural phenomena in either non-fiction prose, for example, the nature essay, or through fictional realities, like environmental poems. Yet complete definiteness of replication of the environment in textual representation is itself a fiction; nature writers continuously grapple with the dream of accuracy. The best these writers can hope to realize in their representations of the environment is to come nearer to a sense of insight to his or her specifications. In addition to the problems of accuracy is the controversy of what best constitutes an environmental text. Lawrence Buell, the well-respected literary critic and a pioneer of ecocriticism, (the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view), sets up a criterion of points for this assessment. Buell states in The Environmental Imagination? that by this criteria "few works fail to qualify at least marginally, few qualify unequivocally and consistently" (8). Buell contends that in order for a work to best exemplify an environmental text, it needs 2 to be represented from an ecocentric point of view by taking human centrality out of the text. For Buell, most of the clearest cases for an environmental text are from nonfictional works. Buell contends that these writings are unparalleled for depicting nature as autonomous, and writing from nature's position for its own sake. Proponents for environmental poetry, on the other hand, feel that if a poet can transfigure the facts and not lose the perceived quality of the natural phenomena they seek to depict, the poetry will retain a measure of value in an environmental sense. Angus Fletcher, in A New Theory for American Poetry, avers that environmental poetry is a dynamic technique that, while grounded in nature and science, can supersede environmental prose. Yet Fletcher defines environmental poetry as one that is not about natural environments but as something that environs the reader. As such, the reader enters the poem as an environment. Fletcher insists that although prose naturalism is extremely rich and culturally influential, nature poetry "takes environmental concerns to a higher level, at least in one respect. Unlike most prose discourse, poetry expresses close personal involvements, and hence pertains to the way we humans respond, on our own, to environmental matters" (3). Fletcher is telling his audience that an art like poetry that enhances the presence of the individual is bound to be central in showing how we should understand our environment. 3 The nineteenth-century "American Renaissance" is commonly viewed as the beginning of an essentially ecological vision of nature in American culture. Nonfiction authors such as Emerson and Thoreau are seen as writers who advocate for greater attention to the details of nature and for its preservation. Buell constructs the entire text of The Environmental Imagination around Thoreau, giving the reader an understanding of the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and a new understanding of Thoreau's achievement through these other environmental texts. As noted above, Buell champions the nonfiction text for the best ecocentric nature writing. As such, Buell tends to use examples of fictional reality to show how it does not measure up to nonfictional accounts of the environment as nature centered. In this thesis I argue how Thoreau's contemporaries, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe, use fictional description to make an imaginary leap in rethinking humanity's relationship towards nature, each writing from an ecocentric standpoint, and that their unique forms of descriptive technique elicit environmental understanding in ways that enhance environmental nonfiction. As a springboard for this study 1 begin with Susan Fenimore Cooper, a nonfiction nature writer who I believe exemplifies a greater calibrated environmental sense than 4 Thoreau, writes from a more ecocentered perspective, and is integral in bringing about bioregionalism to American nature literature. The purpose of this stratagem is to complicate Buell's assertion of nonfictional dominance in environmental writing. Even though Cooper has such a strong sense of viewing nature as having a value in itself, and calls for the preservation of forests, she could not entirely avoid the dominant American attitudes towards nature. Cooper occasional drifts into abstract metaphor in her attitude for nature: confidence in American progress, and the use of nature to refine human behavior and taste. I use Cooper to show how difficult it can be in any genre to depict nature without a certain disjunction between world and text, how our reconstructions of the environment cannot be other than skewed and partial. Cooper nonetheless gives a superb rendition of the nature she observes, and I further argue that Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe achieve similar success in depicting actual phenomena through aesthetic language. Unlike Fletcher's perspective, I argue poets like Whitman and Dickinson draw towards description as a mode that imaginatively connects their speakers to actual natural places, which elicits in the reader a close personal involvement to their natural world. In a chapter devoted to a sense of environmental place in literature, Buell laments how sparse a representation of place we find in even so-called realistic 5 fiction. He then uses a segment from an Emily Dickinson poem to accentuate his point about how poetry expresses less of a place orientation. As Dickinson's poem has it, to make a prairie requires only a clover, a bee, and reverie—and "reverie alone will do, / If bees are few” (254). It is as if Buell is implying that poets are too busy lost in their thoughts to write detailed accounts of a specific place. Of course Buell cherry-picked this verse to serve a greater argument, so I do not fault him for this excerpt. Yet Buell, later discussing what makes an author's texts canonical, explains that only some of a successful writer's works usually serve to canonize that writer.
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