University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School November 2018 Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida Haili A. Alcorn University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Scholar Commons Citation Alcorn, Haili A., "Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida" (2018). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7462 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida by Haili A. Alcorn A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Laura Runge, Ph.D. Gurleen Grewal, Ph.D. Cynthia Patterson, Ph.D. John Henry Fleming, Ph.D. Date of Approval: October 29, 2018 Keywords: animal studies, literature of place, wilderness, ecocriticism, Everglades Copyright © 2018, Haili A. Alcorn TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter One: “A Paradise of Fish”: Idyllic Florida in Bartram’s Travels (1791), Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s Alligator Crossing (1959) and “Plumes” (1930) 12 Introduction 12 Feathered Songsters and Innumerable Fish: Bartram’s St. Johns Eden 18 Miracles of Light: Douglas’s Rebranding of the Everglades 29 Conclusion 47 Chapter Two: “Wild Things Out In The Wood”: Ambiguous Animal Ethics in Rawlings’s Cross Creek (1942) 49 Introduction 49 “Where the Snakes Cross”: Self-Defense in the Florida Wilderness 57 “My Hypocritical Gun”: Hunting at Cross Creek 61 Laying Down Arms: Rawlings’s Ecological Turn 69 Ethics of Eating: A Tale of Two Yearlings 71 Conclusion 76 Chapter Three: “A Good Price…For Live Creeturs”: Opportunistic Florida in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” (1946), Rawlings’s The Yearling (1938), and John Henry Fleming’s Fearsome Creatures of Florida (2008) 80 Introduction 80 Returning the Stare: Fishing in Florida’s “Boundless Natural Aquarium” 85 For Pleasure and For Science: Animal Violence in Fearsome Creatures of Florida 95 “We got to eat”: Ethics of Hunting in The Yearling 109 “Too Wild to Pen”: Problems with Pet-Keeping in the Scrub 118 Conclusion 126 Chapter Four: “Misty Green Vistas of a Strange, Nonhuman World”: Mysterious Florida in Bishop’s “Florida” (1946), Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea (1952), and Fleming’s Fearsome Creatures of Florida (2008) 129 Introduction 129 Careless and Corrupt: Bishop’s Mysterious “Florida” 134 “Just Beyond Our Grasp”: Carson’s Search for Meaning in the Florida Keys 141 Remnants of Mystery: Fleming’s Monstrous Florida 153 i Conclusion 163 Conclusion: Weapons 165 References 170 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation owes much to the insights about Florida and its literature cultivated by Dr. Laura Runge’s Literature of Place course. I am grateful to Dr. Runge for approving the subject of my dissertation and for guiding me throughout the process of realizing my ideas. I also thank her for allowing me to pursue a topic that grants both personal accomplishment and scholarly fulfillment. My committee, Dr. Gurleen Grewal, Dr. Cynthia Patterson, and Dr. John Henry Fleming, has been vital to this work in providing their areas of expertise to enhance and direct my argument. Completing my dissertation would not have been possible without the support I received from family and friends. I am sincerely thankful for the camaraderie of my fellow English scholars: Megan Stowe, Stephanie Lance, Dr. Heather Fox, Neal Fischer, and Rachel Tanski. I thank my husband, Dr. James Alcorn, for discussing my ideas with me, reading chapter drafts, and providing a consistent source of encouragement about the value of my work. I am grateful to my son, Elliott, for serving as another reason to keep going and to fulfill my potential as a mother and role model for the possibilities of higher education. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Patricia Vinson, for first inspiring my love of animals and nurturing in me the spirit of activism that has driven my scholarship. iii ABSTRACT Place theory examines the relationship between human identity and physical locations, asking how meaningful attachments are formed between people and the spots they visit or in which they live. Literature of place exhibits this relationship and the myriad ways humans connect to their environment through storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. Florida literature, an emerging and dynamic genre, features characters, cultures, and histories heavily embedded in place. Florida’s places also abound with animal presences, and literature about Florida almost always illustrates significant human-animal interactions that drive plots and character development. Therefore, Florida literature invites consideration of how animals influence human attachment to the land in stories written by Florida authors. Scholarly attention has noted the important relationships formed by humans and animals in literature about Florida, but no extensive study incorporating place theory, ecocriticism, and close reading has been done on the literary representation of Florida animals or their contribution to the state’s diverse reputations. This dissertation brings together theories about place attachment, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies (CAS) to illustrate the roles of fictional and nonfictional animals in works by six Florida authors: William Bartram, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Elizabeth Bishop, Rachel Carson, and John Henry Fleming. These works contain prominent animal characters that illuminate four ways of seeing Florida: idyllic Florida, wild iv Florida, opportunistic Florida, and mysterious Florida. These identities build off historical views about Florida as place: explorers, tourists, and developers projected their hopes for advancement onto the state based on its reputation as an exotic paradise, wild hinterland, or untouched beacon for industry and agriculture. Literature helped to produce these ideas about Florida through travel writing, but Florida stories also critique opportunistic ideologies responsible for harming animals and the environment. Literature can also preserve Florida’s mysteries and myths, offering narratives about nature and animals that challenge notions of human superiority. Thus, literature enacts a dynamic engagement with the four faces of Florida I discuss. Florida animals are vital to the construction of these four identities. For example, Henry Bunk, the protagonist of Douglas’s Alligator Crossings, sees the Everglades as an idyllic alternative to the city for its many birds and fish. Rawlings depicts Cross Creek as a wild host to deadly snakes, predatory big cats, and ubiquitous insects. Bishop captures through poetry the ordinary activity of Florida fishing in such a way that invites us to question the harm inflicted on animals for the opportunity of recreation. Fleming’s stories suggest that exploration, industry, and science have mostly erased the mysteries of Florida’s natural world, but his enigmatic and monstrous animals, along with their ties to the land, offer hope for reviving a meaningful attachment to the land. This dissertation connects literary representations of animals to real forms of violence occurring in Florida today, including fishing, caged hunting, and animal captivity. The works examined herein can prompt readers to rethink their own relationships to place and to nonhuman nature. As a cultural force, literature holds the potential for effecting change in our world. v Beginning with the local is one way of witnessing this potential for the dynamic interplay between literature and place. vi INTRODUCTION In January of 2015, I participated in the Miracle March for Lolita held in Miami, Florida. Lolita was captured from Puget Sound in 1970 and sold to the Miami Seaquarium for $20,000. Originally called Tokitae, Lolita was renamed for the heroine of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel; an issue of The Miami News described her as “that pretty new girl at the Seaquarium…Lolita, the slim, trim, killer whale” (“Lolita” 30). For the past 48 years, Lolita has circled her concrete tank, the small size of which violates federal standards, as calls for her freedom continued to build.1 I joined thousands of concerned advocates in Miami’s Virginia Key Beach Park, where we met to organize the march days before a scheduled ruling by the National Marine Fisheries Services on Lolita’s endangered status.2 On that sunny Florida morning, where, even in January, it was sweltering before noon, I realized what my animal advocacy had been missing. I had followed Lolita’s case for a while, but as I walked and held my sign with her tank in sight, looming over the fenced attraction at the Seaquarium on Rickenbacker Causeway, I recognized the importance of place. Being present with Lolita nearby made her plight more real for me, invigorating my passion for helping her and inscribing my location with the myriad emotions I felt. My attachment for Virginia Key Beach 1 In 1999, the U.S. Department of Agriculture certified that Lolita’s tank satisfied