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20Th-Century Women Writers and Hydro-Logical Thought City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2016 Ceasing to Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers and Hydro-Logical Thought Annie M. Cranstoun Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/752 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] CEASING TO RUN UNDERGROUND: 20TH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS AND HYDRO- LOGICAL THOUGHT by ANNIE M. CRANSTOUN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 ANNIE M. CRANSTOUN All Rights Reserved ii CEASING TO RUN UNDERGROUND: 20TH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS AND HYDRO- LOGICAL THOUGHT by ANNIE M. CRANSTOUN This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Nancy K. Miller ________ ________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi ________ ________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Nancy K. Miller Rachel M. Brownstein Wayne Koestenbaum THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract CEASING TO RUN UNDERGROUND: 20TH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS AND HYDRO- LOGICAL THOUGHT by Annie M. Cranstoun Advisor: Nancy K. Miller Starting from two central ecopoetic convictions—the constitutive role of environment in human experience (and vice versa), and text’s ability to connect with the world—this dissertation then moves in a different direction from most ecocritical projects. Instead of looking at the ways literary representation flows back into nature in the forms of attitude, praxis, and policy, this study focuses on the earlier part of the loop: the emergence of text from environment, particularly its aquatic parts, via the faculty of the imagination. In its scrutiny of images that spring directly from matter and its faith in the concept of a personal element that governs the reveries, beliefs, passions, ideals, and philosophies of an entire life, it recalls Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard’s 1942 phenomenological study of the “material imagination.” Only, whereas Bachelard’s main investments are poetry, the masculine point of view, isolated waters (particularly small, smooth, mirror-like bodies of water that call up, through the myth of narcissus, the individual self), and limpid waters that serve the material imagination as a pure matter par excellence, “an example of the kind of natural morality learned through meditation on a fundamental substance,” my own are: prose (the novel in particular); the female (feminist) point of view; waters that are indivisibly, manifestly systemic; and a hydrosphere that is decidedly degraded, a “tragic commons” (à la Garrett Hardin) calling for the very different sort of “natural morality” that is rigorous stewardship. I approach these through the writings of iv seven 20th-century woman writers who have written so relentlessly and richly about water that they must be called “hydro-logical”: Britons Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald; Anglo- Caribbean Jean Rhys; North Americans Rachel Carson and Joan Didion; Native American (Chickasaw) Linda Hogan; and East Indian Arundhati Roy. While most broadly “hydro-logic” denotes a general thinking-through-water, it entails several specific habits of mind: 1) a privileging of the water element in one’s imaginative landscapes, and an attraction to thalassic and/or riparian settings, as well as the smaller or more hidden parts of the hydrosphere (springs, ponds, groundwater, etc.); 2) a particular susceptibility to the metaphoric/symbolic potential of planetary waters, and an especial faculty for transubstantiating conventional associations (e.g. river = flow; sea = masculine adventure) into more private equivalences (the river = androgyny, moral imagination, oral tradition; groundwater = untold stories); and 3) a deep allegiance to the intuited fact that the hydrologic cycle is a cycle, and one whose central dynamic is also that of creative and particularly literary endeavor (with the inflow of reading and the outflow or writing), human relationship (give and take), and ecology itself, with its “endless cyclic transfer of materials from life to life” (Carson, Silent Spring). These authors’ appreciation of water’s universal seaward movement and its ultimate indivisibility manifests socially and spiritually as a longing for the state of mind Freud called “oceanic”—“a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”— and literarily as a tact for Unanimism (from the French Unanimisme), with its emphasis on group consciousness, collective emotion, and the writer’s need to merge with the larger cycles of life, nature, and art. This essentially ethical view of life explains the natural instinct that all my authors, even those working before or outside of mainstream environmentalism (Woolf, Rhys, and Fitzgerald) have for conservation. How, they ask, can we ravage the element that makes up over two-thirds of our very selves? How does environmental despoliation affect the stories we tell? And if, as Joan Didion has famously asserted, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” can v we not tell stories in order to protect the life that began, in our planet’s waters, over 3 billion years ago? vi Acknowledgements Thanks must go first to the English Department of the CUNY Graduate Center for welcoming me all those years ago with a Robert E. Gilleece Fellowship, and for putting me in the way of so many smart, thought-provoking people, students and professors both. The specialest of special thanks to my dissertation committee: to Wayne Koestenbaum for his sheer (and contagious) love of language, and for showing me that when forced to choose between Going For It and Not Going For It, the writer should always Go For It. To Rachel M. Brownstein, for being such a smart, articulate ally, and for introducing me—for real—to that most improving and thrilling of genres, the essay. And finally, to my advisor, the one and only Nancy K. Miller, for her intelligence, insight, counsel, and patience; for showing me, in short, how it’s done; and for applying just the right amount of stick at those times when I’d totally forgotten about the carrot. Gratitude also to Jay Barksdale for arranging study space at NYPL, Cara Murray for turning me on to the works of Linda Hogan, and Yolanda Koumidou-Vlesmas for listening and giving a darn. This path would’ve been lonelier, steeper, and probably longer without the friendship of fellow CUNYites Erin Heiser and Allen Durgin, and fellow planetary citizens Christine Doempke and Scott Ansell. May the road rise up to meet them. A prismatic “much obliged” to my fellow 3-Texters for reminding me that a life without art (even crap art) is no life at all. A warm group hug and merry toast to my “dissisters” T Meyerhoff, Kate Moss, and Stephanie St. Pierre. Ladies—thanks for the sympathy, the wisdom, the laughs, and the wine, and for showing me that one should always occupy the student lounge as though one owns it. vii Much appreciation to my extended tribe: Alex and Jen, Auntie J and Marianne, Lloyd and Jeannette, and my super nephews James and Will, for being my skin in the game of “Taking the (ecological) Longview.” A penultimate, from-the-heart Thank You to Jack Paolillo, my tall Scotch Pine, my brightness, my co-Harbor Master—for your love and patience, and for being the sane to my crazy, the Rodnëé to my Wendy. Finally, to my parents Alexander and Margaret “Peg” Cranstoun: Let it here be said that whatever is good in me is directly your fault. If this dissertation were five times as long (heaven forbid), it still wouldn’t contain words enough for me to thank you for your example and for the 1000 ways you’ve believed in and supported me, always and from the very start. I love you more than I can say, and am so grateful that you had the foresight, despite not being water people yourselves, to raise me near both ocean and lake—a lake that read to my young mind as a mighty sea, and taught me to think big. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Towards a Female Hydro-logic 1 Chapter 1: The Waves, A River of One’s Own, and the Fascination of the Pool: Virginia Woolf’s Hydro-Logic 15 Chapter 2: Jean Rhys, Penelope Fitzgerald, Houseboats and Eels: The Hydro-Logic of Homing 57 Chapter 3: River Stories, Dam Lies, and Thinking Back Through Our Mothers: Joan Didion, Arundhati Roy, and Linda Hogan 105 “Conclusion”: Coming Full Circle/Rachel Carson 165 Endnotes 194 Works Cited 206 ix Introduction: Towards a Female Hydro-logic ee um fah um so foo swee too eem oo— So goes the immemorial song that issues from the street singer in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a song of love that arcs from the age of swamp, mammoth, and tusk, to the moment when the sun dims and the earth “becomes[s] a mere cinder of ice” (81). It makes sense that this woman should croon in terms of geological time, as she herself is the voice of water, “the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth” (80), whose “old bubbling burbling song…stream[s] away in rivulets over the pavement… fertilizing, leaving a damp stain” (81). Water as spoken— written—by women is the subject of this dissertation. Not water as an isolated element so much as planetary water, the substance that circulates through this planet’s rivers, lakes, and oceans through the great round of the hydrologic cycle.
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