Reconciling Nature

Robert M. Myers

Description

Reconciling Nature maps the complex views of the environment that are evident in celebrated American novels written between the Centennial Celebration of 1876 and the end of the Second World War. During this period, which includes the Progressive era and the New Deal, Americans held three contradictory views of the natural world: a recognition of nature's vulnerability to the changes brought by industrialism; a fear of the power of nature to destroy human civilization; and a desire to make nature useful. Robert M. Myers argues they reconciled these conflicting views through nature nostalgia, policing of wilderness areas, and through strategies of control borrowed from the social sciences. Myers combines environmental history with original readings of eight novels, producing fresh perspectives on Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Stephen Crane's Maggie, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Mary Austin's The Ford, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. While previous ecocritical works have focused on proto-environmentalism in classic works of literature, Reconciling Nature explores the ambivalence within these texts, demonstrating how they reproduce views of nature as threatened, threatening, and useful. The epilogue examines the environmental ideologies associated with the development and deployment of the first atomic bomb.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Resisting the Resistance Narrative

1. Civilizing Nature in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2. The Ecological City in Crane’s Maggie

3. Therapeutic Nature in Chopin’s The Awakening

4. Disciplining Nature in Sinclair’s The Jungle

5. Progressive Conservation in Austin’s The Ford

6. Surveilling Wilderness in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy

7. Assimilative Nature in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

8. Environmental Stewardship in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• États-Unis
• History of the Americas
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438476803
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reconciling Nature
Frontispiece: Man wrestling a bear, ca. 1902 (Wikimedia Commons)
Reconciling Nature
Literary Representations of the Natural, 1876–1945
Robert M. Myers
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Myers, Robert M., 1959– author.
Title: Reconciling nature : literary representations of the natural, 1876–1945 / Robert M. Myers.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018058275 | ISBN 9781438476797 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438476803 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Nature in literature. | American literature—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PS163 .M94 2019 | DDC 810.9/36—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058275
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION Resisting the Resistance Narrative
C HAPTER 1 Civilizing Nature in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
C HAPTER 2 The Ecological City in Crane’s Maggie
C HAPTER 3 Therapeutic Nature in Chopin’s The Awakening
C HAPTER 4 Disciplining Nature in Sinclair’s The Jungle
C HAPTER 5 Progressive Conservation in Austin’s The Ford
C HAPTER 6 Surveilling Wilderness in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy
C HAPTER 7 Assimilative Nature in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
C HAPTER 8 Environmental Stewardship in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses
E PILOGUE
N OTES
W ORKS C ITED
I NDEX
Illustrations Figure 1.1 Mississippi River improvements, 1882 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure 1.2 Martha Maxwell’s exhibit (Carnegie Library for Local History/Museum of Boulder Collection) Figure 2.1 Jacob Riis, “Dens of Death,” 1902 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure 3.1 Ladies Home Journal cover, 1894 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure 4.1 Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, 1904 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure 4.2 Chicago stockyards, 1909 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure 5.1 LA Aqueduct construction, 1912 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure 6.1 Big Moose Lake postcard, ca. 1929 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure 7.1 Herbert Hoover Dike on Lake Okeechobee, ca. 1935 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure 8.1 Roosevelt hunting bear in Mississippi (Harvard Theodore Roosevelt Collection) Figure E.1 Hiroshima, 1945 (Wikimedia Commons) Figure E.2 Edison, Burroughs, Ford, and Firestone camping, 1918 (The Collections of The Henry Ford)
Acknowledgments
I have many to thank for their help with this book. Lock Haven University provided me with grants to travel to conferences and research institutions, and I am especially grateful for a sabbatical in the fall of 2016 that enabled me to finish the manuscript. The staff at Stevenson Library was efficient and courteous, procuring the many books and articles I needed. When I visited the Adirondack Experience Library, director Jerold Pepper was generous with his time and the resources of the library (even producing a locket of Grace Brown’s hair!). His successor, Ivy Gocker, was also very helpful. Mary P. Stripling, retired librarian of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, provided useful information about Mississippi game laws.
An earlier version of chapter 2 was originally published as “Crane’s City: An Ecological Reading of Maggie ,” American Literary Realism 47.3 (Spring 2015): 189–202; chapter 6 was published as “‘A Purely Ideational Lake’: The Representation of Wilderness in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy ,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 20.2 (Spring 2013): 377–95; and chapter 8 was published as “Voluntary Measures: Environmental Stewardship in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses ,” Mississippi Quarterly 66.4 (Fall 2013): 645–68. I appreciate the permission to republish this work, and I benefited much from the editors and anonymous readers who offered input on these articles.
I feel fortunate to have been published by SUNY Press. My editor Michael Rinella was supportive and helpful throughout the entire process, and my readers were exceptional: their prompt, useful reports made this a better book. Eileen Nizer’s careful copyediting of the manuscript was extremely helpful, and Kate Seburyamo did a fine job with the promotions.
My dissertation director, James West, has remained a friend and an inspiration for more than twenty-five years. His comments on an early draft of this project were immensely helpful. When I write, I hear his voice counseling clarity and directness. My friends and family have patiently listened to my thoughts about literary nature, often while we were sitting around campfires in wilderness areas. My hiking buddy and colleague in physics, John Reid, was a good sounding board when I was writing the chapter on the atomic bomb. My colleague and friend Larry Lebin, who is responsible for me being at Lock Haven University, read the manuscript and offered many helpful suggestions a few months before he passed away. My son Michael Myers, Evan Reibsome, and Carrie Shirk all contributed thoughtful ideas as we were climbing Adirondack peaks and listening to loons at Lake Kushaqua.
But most of all, I owe this project to my colleague, my office-mate, my wife, Elizabeth Gruber. If it were not for her inspiration, I would not have taken on such a project at this point in my career, and her careful reading of multiple versions of the manuscript improved it tremendously. As with all other aspects of our life, she made writing fun.
Introduction
Resisting the Resistance Narrative
In the summer of 1876, the celebrated literary naturalist John Burroughs killed a loon. In his collection of essays, Signs and Seasons (1886), Burroughs notes that like hummingbirds, loons were exceptionally difficult to shoot given their alertness and quickness. But while fishing at Pleasant Pond in the Maine woods, Burroughs had the advantage of a breech-loading rifle, and he bagged his first loon. Burroughs was not hunting for meat—his motive was purely scientific. He exulted, “The bird I had killed was a magnificent specimen,” and when he returned home, he took pains to display the loon in a realistic manner (67). Avoiding the mistake made by most taxidermists, who mount loons standing on their legs, Burroughs placed his specimen on a table “as upon the surface of the water, his feet trailing behind him, his body low and trim, his head elevated and slightly turned as if in the act of bringing the fiery eye to bear upon you, and vigilance and power stamped upon every lineament” (67–68). 1
I suspect that many contemporary readers would find this episode surprising since Burroughs, or “John O’ Birds” as he was called, is recognized as one of the early voices of avian conservation. In 2000, Frank Bergon argued, “Burroughs’s awareness and sensitivity establish, even today, an essential standard for anyone aspiring to become a fully engaged environmentalist” (25). Indeed, in another essay in Signs and Seasons entitled “Bird Enemies,” Burroughs denounces in vitriolic terms bird collectors, “men who plunder nests and murder their owners” (134). Distinguishing between “genuine” ornithologists and those “sham” ornithologists who are driven by vanity, affectation, and mercenary motives rather than the pure principles of science, Burroughs insists that killing species that have already been documented is wasteful: “Thus are our birds hunted and cut off, and all in the name of science; as if science had not long ago finished with these birds. She has weighed and measured and dissected and described them, and their nests and eggs, and placed them in her cabinet” (134–35). However, this distinction is problematic, if not disingenuous, when applied to Burroughs’s loon. Although he was elected an associate member of the American Ornithology Union in 1883, Burroughs was not a professional scientist, and he never published the results of his analysis of the loon he killed. Furthermore, by 1876, the loon had already been scientifically documented in works such as Elliott Coues’s Key to North American Birds (1872). As if aware of this problem, Burroughs admits that the “student of ornithology” must occasionally kill a bird to identify it (136). But he explains that “once having mastered the birds, the true ornithologist leaves his gun at home”; accordingly, the real enemy of the birds is the “closet naturalist” with “his piles of skins, his cases of eggs, his laborious feather-splitting, and his outlandish nomenclature” (136). 2
The dismissive phrase “closet naturalist” and the reference to “outlandish nomenclature” place Burroughs’s polemic in an interesting moment in the history of ornithology. In A Passion for Birds , Mark V. Barrow demonstrates that in contrast to other sciences, ornithology maintained into the early twentieth century a close alliance between professional ornithologists and amateur bird collectors. But that alliance was not without tensions. Amateurs were likely to see professional scientists as effetes, divorced from the rugged outdoor life of collecting, and they were especially troubled by scientists’ use of trinomial nomenclature to indicate subspecies. Barrow points out that this new emphasis on subspecies variation reflected the influe