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Infectious Agents: Race and Environment in Nineteenth-Century America

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Infectious Agents: Race and Environment in Nineteenth-Century America Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2009 Infectious Agents: Race and Environment in Nineteenth-Century America Kristen Renee Egan Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Egan, Kristen Renee, "Infectious Agents: Race and Environment in Nineteenth-Century America" (2009). Dissertations. 171. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/171 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2009 Kristen Renee Egan LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO INFECTIOUS AGENTS: RACE AND ENVIRONMENT IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY AMERICA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY KRISTEN R. EGAN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2009 Copyright by Kristen Egan, 2009 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee for their guidance and encouragement over the course of this project. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Chris Castiglia; his innovative critical thinking has always inspired me to follow my heart and do original work, even when it is not popular. Dr. Jack Kerkering helped me develop important connections between literary formalism and environmental representation. Dr. Steve Jones influenced my theoretical framework, helping me find intersections between environmental issues and cultural studies. Most of all, I am thankful to all members of my committee for their willingness to go on this unconventional journey with me into the environmental imagination. Several institutions have assisted me in this process. Loyola University Chicago enabled me to reach my goals by admitting a student with a background in science into a doctoral program in English. SUNY Cortland helped me make the transition between the sciences and the study of literature. Most importantly, my liberal arts education at Le Moyne College exposed me to a variety of fields, including literature, and I firmly believe that if I had not been exposed to such wonderful literature professors as an undergraduate, Dr. Ann Ryan and Dr. Julie Grossman in particular, I never would have found this path. iii I would also like to thank my family and friends. My parents have never wavered in their support of my goals. I would also like to thank my dear friend and colleague Ann Mattis for her emotional support; I would not have gotten through this process without her. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Reuben, for his unyielding support; he never questioned my ambitions or doubted my ability to achieve them, and I am truly grateful. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT v INTRODUCTION: Infectious Agents 1 I. Discipline and Theory 6 II. Nature and Culture 7 III. Body and Space 8 IV. National Identity and Nature 9 V. The Intersecting History of Sanitarianism, Race Theory, and Environmentalism 10 CHAPTER ONE: The Peculiar Associations of Melville’s ‘Encantadas’: Nature and National Allegory 20 I. Making and Discovering the Nation: a Dialectic between Nature and Culture 27 II. Dislocating Location 32 III. Are “The Encantadas” an Allegory? 38 IV. Tarnmoor’s Peculiar Associations 43 V. Uncivilizing the Civilized 48 CHAPTER TWO: ‘The Very Oak Trees Will Not Know Them Apart’: Race and and Environment in Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau 58 I. Fuller’s Nature 62 II. Thoreau’s Nature - Belonging to Walden Pond 72 III. Fuller and Native Americans 77 IV. Thoreau and Native Americans 84 V. Fuller and Immigration 85 VI. The Commodification of Nature 87 VII. Thoreau, Immigrants, and Nature 89 VIII. Conclusions 93 CHAPTER THREE: Conservation and Cleanliness: Racial and Environmental Purity in Ellen Richards and Charlotte Perkins Gilman 98 I. “The Yellow Wallpaper” - Space, Containment, and Infection 109 II. Sanitarianism in Herland 118 III. Herland : Where Sanitarianism Meets Conservationism 125 CHAPTER FOUR: ‘How Can I Grow Pure?’: Domestic Preservationism in Muir, Cather, and Du Bois 133 I. ‘Going to the mountains is going home’: John Muir’s Domestic Preservationism 138 II. Bath Tubs and ‘symmetrical pasture ponds’: Sanitarianism and Preservationism in Cather’s O Pioneers! 143 III. ‘Now a Swamp in Name Only’: W.E.B. Du Bois and Preservationism 152 v BIBLIOGRAPHY 166 VITA 175 vi ABSTRACT This dissertation critically examines the relationship between race and nature in nineteenth-century America by analyzing texts that attempt to discover, create, or preserve a pure national identity. Historical events in the nineteenth-century U.S. – such as mass immigration, Native American displacement, industrialization, westward expansion, and the rise of science – frustrated the quest for a unified American identity. While these events seem various, each one exacerbated a nation already bewildered by one central question. What is the traffic between body and space? Nineteenth-century American literature frequently portrays the American environment as an ideal space in need of preservation and at risk of contamination. While racial oppression is often analyzed through the discrete parameters of the body, with skin color or blood indicating the mark of the “other,” my literary study concerning both race and environment reveals that bodies and places are not necessarily contained or stable entities. Rather, I argue that race and nature function as infectious agents, each evoking a figurative “diffusion” between body and environment in which space becomes racialized and race spatialized. This study combines analyses of literary texts by Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Willa Cather, non-fiction works by Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir, as well as a scientific treatise by Ellen H. Richards to argue that nationalism inflects the American environmental imagination with a twofold vii desire for racial and spatial purity, an ideology that pervades not only fiction, but non- fiction and science, spanning the long Nineteenth Century. viii INTRODUCTION INFECTIOUS AGENTS When Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc across the Gulf Coast in 2005, it resulted in the physical destruction of the coast and its people and revealed an ongoing cultural heritage that spatializes race and racializes space. The storm exposed a seemingly contained dirty secret, disclosing some of the most unappealing conditions of American life: racism and poverty. As Judith Jackson Fossett comments, “dual remnants of slavery emerged from Katrina’s toxic soup. The whole cloth of racial, socioeconomic, and color caste, as well as post-1945 geographic segregation…could be seen. It was juxtaposed with the idea of New Orleans as a condition of possibility for the good life that white elites (particularly men) might experience” (327). The confluence of African Americans and spaces marked as valueless, dirty, and morally degenerate precedes, coincides with, and follows in Katrina’s wake. Unfortunately, the American imaginary associates whiteness and a pure, clean environment while blackness and filth also seem yoked. This contemporary issue has deep historical roots. This dissertation critically examines the relationship between race and environment in nineteenth-century America by analyzing texts that attempt to discover, create, or preserve a pure national identity by purifying, preserving, and inhabiting the physical environment. Historical events in the nineteenth-century U.S. – such as mass 1 2 immigration, Native American displacement, industrialization, westward expansion, and the rise of science – frustrated the quest for a unified American identity. While these events seem various, each one exacerbated a nation already bewildered by one central question: what is the traffic between body and space? In working out the answers to that question, nineteenth-century American literature frequently portrays the American environment as an ideal space in need of preservation and at risk of contamination. While racial oppression is often analyzed through the discrete parameters of the body, with skin color or blood indicating the mark of the “other,” my literary study concerning both race and environment reveals that bodies and places are not necessarily contained or stable entities. Rather, race and nature function as infectious agents, each evoking a figurative “diffusion” between body and environment in which space becomes racialized and race spatialized. Nationalism inflects the American environmental imagination with a twofold desire for racial and spatial purity, an ideology that pervades not only fiction, but non-fiction and science, spanning the long nineteenth century. Many nineteenth-century texts portray the environment as a “purification machine” or an ideal space in need of preservation and at risk of contamination. 1 We tend to think about systemic domination of empowered “whites” over other races in America as a matter of bodies: skin color or blood can be the mark of non-citizenship. 1 This term comes from Bruce Braun’s “‘On the Raggedy Edge of Risk’: Articulations of Race and Nature After Biology.” In regards to the get back to nature campaigns of environmentalists like John Muir, he writes,
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