Marginalised Perspectives on American Rivers in Twentieth

For Who the River Carries: Marginalised Perspectives on American Rivers in Twentieth-Century Literature by Danny Bultitude A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Victoria University of Wellington 2019 1 Table of Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... 6 Introduction................................................................................................................ 8 One: Lives and Rivers Polluted by Economy in Suttree and the Poetry of James Wright ....................................................................................................................... 32 Two: Racial History’s Undertow in Beloved and Selected African American Poetry ........................................................................................................................ 66 Three: The River’s Queer Potential in The Western Lands and the Work of Minnie Bruce Pratt ................................................................................................... 98 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 132 Works Cited............................................................................................................ 142 2 3 Abstract This thesis examines the representation of rivers from marginalised American authors of the twentieth-century. American rivers are notably diverse and variable natural features, and as symbols they offer extensive metaphorical potential. Rivers also hold a rich literary history in America, notably in the work of canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The idealised depictions found in the work of these four authors act as a foundation which the marginalised writers of the following century both develop and subvert. The selected marginalised writers fall into three overlapping categories, to each of which is devoted a chapter. To examine those marginalised by economy and class, I have turned to Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree and the poetry of James Wright. Both concern themselves with poverty, river pollution, theology, suicide, and the desolation of American idealism. In my chapter on African American writing, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and selected poems by Sterling A Brown, Audre Lorde, and Margaret Walker are the central texts. These works look to the river and find racial history within its current, evoking varied responses surrounding memory, trauma, creative expression, and recontextualisation. The final chapter explores William S. Burroughs’s 1987 novel The Western Lands and the work of Minnie Bruce Pratt. By “queering nature,” the river becomes both a bitter reminder of their marginalisation and a hopeful symbol of utopia and unity. Together, these texts and the rivers they represent demonstrate the disjuncture between the privileged and marginalised in America, calling for greater consideration of what we deem “American” and why. 4 5 Acknowledgements I want to give my warmest thanks to my supervisor, Anna Jackson, who always had words of encouragement and praise when I was expecting the opposite. Her guidance and enthusiasm gave me the energy to get through some of the most difficult periods of my academic career. The wonderful Angelina Sbroma and Sarah Ross also went above and beyond in remedying the many issues I faced, and I shall be forever grateful. My mother, undoubtedly the best around, also deserves endless thanks for her undying support, thoughtfulness, and willingness to listen to my emotional outbursts. I am also hugely grateful to the amazing friends, both old and new, who have kept me afloat this year. I would love to thank them by name, but that would surely breach the word-limit. Finally, I would like to thank Victoria University itself, which has allowed me to discover so many avenues of thought previously walled off, develop my own personal philosophies, and become the most pretentious dreamer I can be. 6 7 Introduction If you were to ask every person in the United States of America to describe a river in their own words, the results would be as varied as the people themselves. Rivers can be picturesque or sublime, stagnant or of fast-current, ever-winding or straight, life-sustaining or polluted beyond use. Seemingly simple questions about the colour of water, the sensual experiences felt, of evoked emotions, of spatial normalcy, all complicate themselves inside a sample size as large and diverse. What trends would appear? Would certain depictions be renounced as outliers for not ascribing to some understanding of the national dominant? Could we determine characteristics of the participants based on how they represented their subjective river? Rivers are potent and singular features of the landscape, active and variable, brimming with political, cultural, aesthetic, and geological history. Oberlin College English Professor T. S. McMillin examines the seemingly endless potential offered by representing American rivers in his book The Meaning of Rivers: Flow and Reflection in American Literature. McMillin makes note of: the notorious paradoxical qualities of rivers, their ability to be or do several things at once. Rivers move, flowing over land, through history, and among diverse groups of people, changing considerably from their source to their destination; yet they also stay, permanent blue lines on our maps, constant waypoints and lasting landmarks. Rivers connect . but they also separate (xii) McMillin’s considerations of the difficulty to pin down universal ‘meanings’ upon rivers act as a useful foundation to expand upon, especially regarding this effect on literary analysis. Another of his most interesting propositions regards “the motivity of rivers, their ability to motivate humans” by inspiring thought, desire, and self-reflection (158). He draws from an expansive selection of beloved, canonically-significant American writers and poets to 8 provide credence to this theory and proposes a mutually-beneficial relationship between writer and river. Yet McMillin ascribes to a rather idealised view of the American landscape and its rivers, restricting his discussions to conventionally beautiful or ‘powerful’ rivers and the more patriotic, optimistic writers. In doing this, McMillin not only overlooks the many neglected, unattractive rivers of America, but also the writers who draw insight and inspiration from them. McMillin provides convincing associations between the bucolic, slow-moving Concord River and the transcendentalist idealism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry D. Thoreau who grew up on its banks. The powerful and swift Mississippi informs the exciting, fast-paced adventures of Mark Twain; just as the wide, gentle rivers of pre-industrial New York inspire the thoughtful expansiveness of Walt Whitman. Yet what of those who only know rivers beset by pollution, rivers which evoke the negative, rivers which cannot be romanticised? The most recent United States Environmental Protection Agency assessment of river quality concluded that “55% of the nation’s river and stream miles do not support healthy populations of aquatic life” with “Over 13,000 miles . found to have mercury in fish tissue at levels that exceed thresholds protective of human health” (EPA 841, 0809). Alongside this, it was discovered that “Enterococci exceed thresholds protective of human health in nearly 1 out of every 4 river and stream miles” indicating the “possible presence of disease- causing bacteria” which increase “the likelihood of gastrointestinal illness” (EPA 0809). With more than half of all the river miles in America now polluted beyond the threshold necessary for healthy aquatic life, the observations made by those 9 famed American writers have become defunct. Thoreau’s belief that fish are “essential to the river” must now be disregarded, lest half of the waterways in America lose their status as rivers (Week 176). Although polluted rivers also existed throughout the newly-industrial nineteenth-century they are largely underrepresented in this period, only being widely discussed in the twentieth- century. This century brought forward a new lexicon of American writers, as voices long left unheard found publication and the segregated and classist literary landscape altered. Alongside these new voices, new representations of rivers also surfaced, representations which illustrated the experience of marginalised America through engagement with the landscape itself. As with the writers of the nineteenth-century, there is immediate empathy found with the water passing them by, yet unlike those earlier writers, the empathy comes from shared experiences of neglect, devaluation, or misrepresentation. The central purpose of this thesis is to look at specific marginalised writers and consider how the representation of rivers solidifies their experiences within an America not made for them. I shall link the spheres of literary analysis, socio-political discourse, and eco-criticism to fully consider both the aesthetic and real-world value behind representations such as these. The effect the river has upon rhetoric and symbolism is just as notable as the ecological and political issues it carries

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