Spinster Ecology

SPINSTER ECOLOGY: RETHINKING RELATION IN THE AMERICAN LITERARY ENVIRONMENT A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sarah Elizabeth Ensor August 2012 © 2012 Sarah Elizabeth Ensor Sarah Elizabeth Ensor, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 Spinster Ecology develops a practice of queer ecocriticism by articulating intersections between nineteenth-century American literature and twentieth-century environmental thought. Focusing on texts by Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry David Thoreau, and Rachel Carson in which attention to the natural world is interwoven with a particularly reticent form of social interaction, the dissertation argues for the relational capacity of interpersonal and environmental forces typically understood to preclude connection: distance and remoteness, absence and silence, backwardness and death. Rethinking these categories as relational helps both to identify and to remedy a theoretical impasse that currently divides queer theory from ecocriticism: namely, the fields’ conflicting stances toward (reproductive) futurity and toward the status of desire, pleasure, and limitation. Early attempts at queering ecocriticism have tended to emphasize non- normative uses of natural spaces or to trouble the conceptions of nature and “the natural” that undergird mainstream environmentalism. My project, by contrast, locates queer theory’s contribution to ecocriticism in questions of temporality, sociality, and tone. More specifically, I identify the spinster as a model for paradigms of relation, transmission, and inheritance that are indirect or askance. Taking heed of spinsterliness not only as a characterological or biographical phenomenon but also in its formal and stylistic instantiations, I argue, can help queer ecocriticism better engage literature. Whereas ecocritics tend to apologize for the way in which their attention to texts distances them from political engagement and the physical environment alike, this project makes a case for literariness in part by making a case for the relational and ethical capacities of distance itself. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sarah Ensor was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1982. She received a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan in 2003 and taught literature at Phillips Academy (Andover), The Loomis Chaffee School, and the University of Michigan’s New England Literature Program before beginning graduate study at Cornell University. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As I prepare to bring this dissertation – and my graduate school experience – to a close, I am humbled by the sheer number of people who have supported me through this process. My deepest gratitude goes to the members of my committee. Shirley Samuels has seen the project through since its very early moments. I am grateful for her wisdom, her warmth, her guidance, and her knowledge of seemingly all things in the American nineteenth century – not to mention her patience in helping me navigate not only the dissertation process but also the job market. I know few people whose time is in such demand as Shirley’s – yet I also know few people who are so generous with that time. As I prepare to begin a new phase in my own teaching career, I can only hope to emulate this aspect (and many others) of her pedagogy. Shirley’s ability to see the big picture and ask the key questions has been especially valuable when I’ve found myself bogged down in the details. Anne-Lise François and I lived in the same place for only one year; her impact, however, is felt in every word I write – and in every word I quietly do not. Anne-Lise once described our exchanges across the miles between Ithaca and Berkeley as “indirectly sustained”; it was only years later, as I neared the end of my own time at Cornell, that I realized the extent to which this project had been about the contours of just such indirect forms of sustaining and being sustained. I cannot thank her enough not only for teaching the class(es) that inspired this project but also for remaining so deeply invested in my work, even as life has taken her elsewhere. Nevertheless, I will continue to try. Shortly after Anne-Lise’s departure, I was fortunate enough to get to know Aaron Sachs, whose generosity of spirit is matched only by the lyricism and insight of his writing, and whose keen readings are matched only by his (inspiringly) engaged, skillful, attentive pedagogy. He has iv been a remarkable model for how to live this academic life with kindness and commitment alike. My gratitude extends, too, to Aaron’s family: to Christine Evans, who has become a cherished friend, and to Sam, Abe, and Oscar, my buddies down the block, whose legos and train sets and vivid imaginations have been both a refuge and a source of great joy over the past several years. For Rick Bogel’s incisive mind, quick wit, and compassionate presence (not to mention his grammatical precision), I am – and will continue to be – deeply grateful. It may seem to make little sense that a specialist in eighteenth-century satire would be on the dissertation committee of someone focusing on American literature and queer ecocriticism; meet Rick, however, and all questions will disappear. Rick has been a wonderful sounding board for all things intellectual, pedagogical, and personal alike. (He also understands the love of sport. Who else would have emailed me during dissertation crunch time to suggest that I turn off the computer and go watch Jeremy Lin?) He is a true mentor. Beyond my committee, I am indebted to the teachers who taught me how to read and write – and how to love the craft required for both. Margaret Guire, Pamela Graff, and Anna McEwen at Ann Arbor Pioneer High School set me on this path; they have no idea how deeply they have informed and inspired the work that has come since. At the University of Michigan, I stumbled into a community of remarkable teachers and scholars; it is a tribute to their commitment to the classroom that I knew little about their considerable achievements in the latter category until after I began graduate school. Although the list is too long to enumerate, among their ranks were Yopie Prins (who advised my first attempt at an academic thesis), John Whittier-Ferguson (who remains, all these years later, the most trusted of mentors and the most valued of friends), Marjorie Levinson, Sara Blair, Adela Pinch, Anne Herrmann, Valerie Traub, and Anne Carson. While it has been nearly a decade since I finished college, it would be no v exaggeration to say that I have felt the impact of my Michigan professors – at both professional and personal levels – at every step of my graduate school career. At Cornell, I feel deeply fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from not only the members of my committee but also (officially and unofficially) Jeremy Braddock, Cynthia Chase, Eric Cheyfitz, Jonathan Culler, Debra Fried, Roger Gilbert, Neil Hertz, Rayna Kalas, and Masha Raskolnikov: inspiring teachers and scholars, all. In my broader professional life, I am grateful to audiences at conferences sponsored by NCSA, ACLA, ASLE, C19, and MLA, and at Portland State University and Williams College, as well as to two anonymous readers from the journal American Literature, for their invaluable feedback on various segments of this project. An earlier version of my third chapter was published in American Literature 84.2 (June 2012); I am grateful to Duke University Press for permission to reprint this work here. I was deeply fortunate to complete this dissertation with the support of a Mellon Foundation fellowship offered through Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. I am grateful to the folks at the Society, including Timothy Murray, Mary Ahl, Megan Dirks, and Emily Parsons, as well as to my fellow Fellows, whose brilliance and generosity and good cheer have been an inspiration. In particular, I wish to thank Jeanette Jouili, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Damien Keane, Tom McEnaney, Jonathan Skinner, Duane Corpis, Nick Knouf, Jamie Nisbet, and Renate Ferro for their friendship and ideas alike. The cohort brought together at the Society was far from the only group of interlocutors I was fortunate enough to find in Ithaca; I am grateful as well to the members of the Nature and Modernity Reading Group sponsored by Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities in the 2008-09 school year, as well as a Dissertation Writing Group sponsored by the Society for the Humanities in 2010-11. On an ongoing basis, I have been enlivened by conversations that have vi taken place under the auspices of Historians are Writers (HAW!), the Nineteenth-Century American Reading Group (ARG), and the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Topics (CREST). Participants in the English Department Roundtable (EDR) and the History Department’s Americas Colloquium read and responded to sections of this work; their influence is felt throughout these pages. Even more importantly, the members of all of these groups have become wonderful collaborators and friends. Speaking of friends: I have known Sarah Weiger since my Ann Arbor days; few things about my time at Cornell were as fortuitous – or as rewarding – as getting the chance to continue this academic journey with her as a dear friend and intellectual interlocutor. (Happier – and less believable – still is the fact that soon we will once again be neighbors, this time in Portland.) When I arrived in Ithaca, my choice of Cornell was quickly affirmed by the wonderful friends whom I found in these halls and gorges. I would not have made it through these six years without Cecily Swanson and Shilo McGiff, both cherished from day one (thanks, too, to Keegan and Liam); Julie Joosten; Jacob Brogan and Celeste Pietrusza; Heather Furnas, Josi Ward, Amy Kohout, and Daegan Miller (and the other lovely folks of HAW!); Melissa Gniadek, Jon Senchyne, Brigitte Fielder, Kamila Janiszewska, Maciej Wojtkowiak, Jill Spivey, Alex Black, and Brant Torres (ARGers, all); Mari Crabtree, Peter Lavelle, Jess Keiser, Ben Glaser, Ryan Dirks, Owen Boynton, and Seth Perlow.

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