RECONSIDERING REGIONALISM: THE ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT, KATE CHOPIN, AND WILLA CATHER Kelly Clasen, B.S., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2011 APPROVED: Ian Finseth, Major Professor Jacqueline Foertsch, Committee Member Stephanie Hawkins, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Clasen, Kelly, Reconsidering Regionalism: The Environmental Ethics of Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather. Doctor of Philosophy (English), August 2011, 248 pp., references, 166 titles. This study identifies environmentalist themes in the fiction and nonfiction of Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather and argues that these ideals are interdependent upon the authors’ humanistic objectives. Focusing on these three authors’ overlapping interest in topics such as women’s rights, environmental health, and Native American history, this dissertation calls attention to the presence of a frequently unexplored but distinct, traceable feminist environmental ethic in American women’s regional writing. This set of beliefs involves a critique of the threats posed by a patriarchal society to both the environment and its human inhabitants, particularly the women, and thus can be classified as proto-ecofeminist. Moreover, the authors’ shared emphasis on the benefits of local environmental knowledge and stewardship demonstrates vital characteristics of the bioregionalist perspective, a modern form of environmental activism that promotes sustainability at a local level and mutually beneficial relationships among human and nonhuman inhabitants of a naturally defined region. Thus, the study ultimately defines a particular form of women’s literary activism that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century and argues for these authors’ continued theoretical relevance to a twenty-first-century audience increasingly invested in understanding and resolving a global environmental predicament. Copyright 2011 By Kelly Clasen ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I extend my warmest gratitude to members of the University of North Texas English Department for their generous assistance with this project. First, I must thank Dr. Ian Finseth, whose patient guidance was instrumental in bringing this dissertation to fruition. In particular, his deftness at identifying shortcomings in my research and pointing me in the right direction consistently broadened the scope of my project and brought depth to my work. Dr. Jacqueline Foertsch and Dr. Stephanie Hawkins are also forever in my dept for their timely readings of my chapters and for their insight. Well before I had a first draft of anything for my dissertation committee to read, however, two UNT professors were instrumental in my development as a scholar. Dr. Theresa Flowers, a friend and mentor, was the first person to encourage me to pursue a doctoral degree—not without the sage warning, ―If getting a PhD were easy, everyone would have one,‖ of course. Additionally, I found retired Professor David Kesterson‘s unfailing enthusiasm for American literature inspiring and catching during my first few semesters of graduate studies. These professors have been, for me, models of conduct in both academia and life, and I am eternally thankful for their influence. I must also acknowledge Jessica Oxendine, a Shakespeare scholar who made innumerable trips to the library and local coffee shops with me during my research and who never failed to lend an ear and offer her advice. Finally, I extend much gratitude to my family, the English department, and the Toulouse School of Graduate Studies, whose generosity facilitated my research and writing. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………............iii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1. TO ―LOOK AT NATURE BY THE LIGHT OF THE SUN‖: CONTRASTING EXPRESSIONS OF ENVIRONMENTALIST RHETORIC IN RURAL HOURS AND WALDEN……………………………………………………………………………..15 2. WOMEN ACROSS THE WATER: THE HEALING HERMITAGE IN SELECT BIOREGIONALIST WORKS……………………………………………………….67 3. FEMINISTS OF THE MIDDLE BORDER: GARLAND, CATHER, AND THE FEMALE LAND ETHIC…………………………………………………………...119 4. RESISTING THE COMMODIFICATION OF CULTURES: NATIVE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHIES IN THE WORKS OF JEWETT, CHOPIN, AND CATHER……173 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………231 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..237 iv INTRODUCTION When the narrator of Sarah Orne Jewett‘s 1896 novel The Country of the Pointed Firs bids farewell to the declining coastal community that has been her summer home, she does so with such descriptive poignancy in the book‘s final chapter, suggestively titled ―The Backward View,‖ that she seems to be saying goodbye not simply to Dunnet Landing and her curious cast of friends there, but also to a particular way of life. Stricken by the emptiness of her room at Mrs. Almira Todd‘s house, she muses: ―So we die before our eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end‖ (485).1 With this grave reflection, Jewett‘s anonymous metropolitan narrator might as easily be referring to a chapter in American history, as her statement echoes the anxiety and wistfulness that many Americans felt as they took stock of the vast changes to the socioeconomic and cultural makeup of the United States occurring in the decades after the Civil War. As the country burgeoned into a center of industry and technology, saw distant regions connected through improved transportation systems, and witnessed swift population growth and movement out of remote places like Dunnet Landing and into urban centers, regional writers of the era struggled to preserve snippets of the nation‘s history that were in danger of being forgotten while they also attempted to shape the course of the country‘s future. Inevitably, tensions arise between these authors‘ insistence, during the country‘s shift toward an increasingly international modernity, upon the importance of regional cultures and their simultaneous disparagement of local societies‘ close-mindedness. This dissertation traces one vital intellectual trend among the many literary responses to this tumultuous period of American prosperity. It focuses on regionalism, a dominant literary mode during this era that I do not treat as a fixed category, but rather as a fluid term for prose texts whose authors exhibit a concentrated interest in place-specific qualities and issues, even 1 though these authors might have also produced works that resist regional classification. Specifically, this dissertation identifies the shared tendency among three female writers from different regions of the United States to employ feminist and cultural themes to suggest not only the need for increased human rights among the inhabitants of their primarily rural settings, but also the dangers of a dominance-based philosophy of existence, ultimately promoting lifestyles based on cautious consideration of ecosystems, rather than on competition with nature. I find that inherent to these authors‘ recognition of the problems associated with capitalist systems that perpetuate the subjugation of women and racial minorities (such as plantation society) are also warnings about the environmental effects of unchecked post-bellum industrialization and economic growth—warnings that might be categorized as proto-ecofeminist. Indeed, these authors‘ attention to environmental change surfaces primarily in texts that also encourage greater independence for women and, to a lesser extent, racial minorities such as Native Americans and African Americans. This conceptual orientation aligns these turn-of-the-century authors with reformists of the late twentieth century who identified and challenged connections between human abuse and environmental abuse that are supported by patriarchal systems under which both nonhuman nature and women are treated as objects intended for men‘s use and control.2 Of course, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather were writing well before science could provide a full (though ever-changing) portrait of a planet at risk due to human activity, and to characterize any one of them as an environmental activist in today‘s sense of the term would be an overstatement. These authors‘ environmental warnings stem largely from their appreciation for nonurban landscapes and their reluctance to sanction changes to certain places to which they felt emotionally connected, sentiments that reflect a growing pessimism about the state of American civilization at the end of the nineteenth century and a corresponding mounting 2 respect for the wilderness, which had become a valued emblem of the country‘s formative pioneer past.3 In addition to being personal, these authors‘ interests are also primarily anthropocentric, their intermittent advocacy of resource management more indicative of conservationist philosophy than more radical modern environmentalist thought. Nevertheless, almost a century before the threat of global climate change and the embarrassment of ocean garbage vortexes became a part of the national debate, these women took note of what was occurring in their surroundings and recognized that rapid environmental change posed problems for its plant, animal, and human inhabitants. Focusing on specific regions of the United States, they called attention to these threats and suggested that the natural world was in need of greater attention for various reasons, including the spiritual and aesthetic