"I Like These Plants That You Call Weeds": Historicizing American Women's Nature Writing Author(s): Karen

L. Kilcup Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jun., 2003), pp. 42-74 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176851 Accessed: 19/11/2009 05:23
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"I Like These Plants That You Call Weeds": Historicizing American Women's Nature Writing
KAREN L. KILCUP

1887 poet Celia Thaxter published a fiery essay in Audubon Magazine urging women to resist the fashion for wearing birds and feathers. Employing several rhetorical traditions, Thaxter pleads passionately throughout "Woman's Heartlessness" for an end to such destruction: "Does any woman imagine these withered corpses (cured with arsenic) which she loves to carry about, are beautiful? Not so; the birds lost their beauty with their lives. Today I saw a mat woven of warblers' heads, spiked all over its surface with sharp beaks, set up on a bonnet and borne aloft by its possessor in pride! Twenty murders in one! and the face beneath bland and satisfied, for are not 'Birds to be worn more than ever?' " Puncturing the veneer of beauty imagined by the wearer and promoted by numerous women's fashion magazines, Thaxter contends fiercely and effectively against a practice that she constructs as barbaric. She also formulates a connectionone that many women of our own era would overlook-beVineteenth-Century literature, V)ol. 58, No. i, pp. 42-74. ISSN: 0891-9356.

IN

? 2003 by The Regents of the University of California/Society. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California
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Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

Celia Thaxter, "Woman's Heartlessness" (1887), in Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology, ed. Karen L. Kilcup (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), p. 282. Hereafter referred to as American Women Writers: An Antholog,.

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tween the mistreatment of animals and the objectification of women's bodies, themselves construed as part of nature.2 This connection situates Thaxter in the recently constructed category of ecofeminist writing, which is based in the broader (if contested) genre of American women's nature writing.3 In spite of the flowering of anthologies and criticism con2 Thaxter's attitude toward nature, especially as nature embodied the "savage,"is not unproblematic; see Karen [Kilcup] Oakes, "'Colossal in Sheet-Lead': The Native American and Piscataqua-Region Writers,"in A Nobleand Dignified Stream:ThePiscataqua Regionin the ColonialRevival, 1860-1930, ed. Sarah L. Giffen and Kevin D. Murphy (York, Me.: Old York Historical Society, 1992), pp. 165-76. On women, nature, and animals more generally, see Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature,ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1993). As Carolyn Merchant emphasizes, middle-class U.S. women at the turn into the twentieth century worked vigorously in every area of preservation and conservation, although "men have received most of the credit for conservation" (Earthcare: and theEnvironment[New York:Routledge, 1995], Women p. xviii). Merchant also discusses at length the period's rage for wearing feathers on hats, as well as the efforts to discredit this fashion (see pp. 123-28). 3 The complexities of such terms as "nature writing," "ecocriticism,"and "ecofeminism" have engendered productive discussions. For some terms and definitions, see, for example, Reweavingthe World:TheEmergence Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond and ed. of Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990); Cheryll Glotfelty, "Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,"in TheEcocriticism Reader: in Landmarks Literary ed. Ecology, Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. xv-xxxvii; William Rueckert, "Literature and Ecology: An Reader,pp. 105-123; William Howarth, Experiment in Ecocriticism," in TheEcocriticism "Some Principles of Ecocriticism," in The Ecocriticism Reader, pp. 69-91; Thomas J. Reader,pp. 276-81; LawLyon, "ATaxonomy of Nature Writing," in The Ecocriticism rence Buell, The EnvironmentalImagination: Thoreau,Nature Writing, and the Formation of AmericanCulture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 7-8; Gretchen T. Legler, "Ecofeminist Literary Criticism," in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Natures:Race, Gender, FeministThePress, 1997), pp. 227-38; Noel Sturgeon, Ecofeminist ory, and PoliticalAction (New York and London: Routledge, 1997); Reading the Earth: New Directionsin the Study of Literatureand Environment,ed. Michael P. Branch, et al. (Moscow: Univ. of Idaho Press, 1998); Ecofeminist LiteraryCriticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy,ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1998); David Mazel, AmericanLiteraryEnvironmentalism(Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2000); and Patrick D. Murphy, Farther Afieldin theStudyof Nature-Oriented Literature(Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000). Murphy pursues the question of taxonomy energetically (see especially his "Introduction: Toward a Taxonomy of American Nature-Oriented Literature," in FartherAfield, 1-11 ), and he notes the pp. "intense debate about the degrees to which some ... recovered authors are feminist or ecological or ecofeminist" (Farther Afield, p. 176). While I share Murphy's skepticism about taxonomy (see FartherAfield, 65 and pp. 1-57), activist and social amelioration p. movements have necessarily struggled to elaborate a self-definition as a way of establishing a presence in American culture-and part of this self-definition for a selfempowering literary tradition, even one that seeks an activist presence in the world,

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cerning both of these groupings, ecocritics have concentrated their efforts on a small group of writings and on women writers of the twentieth century. For example, in John Elder's massive, compelling collection on American nature writers, the only women included, besides Thaxter, are Sunineteenth-century san Fenimore Cooper and Gene Stratton Porter.4 The reasons for such omissions are numerous, even discounting the lack of interest of some critics and scholars. First, many writings by nineteenth-century women remain relatively inaccessible, in spite of the exponential growth in recent years of collections and reprint series.5 Second, in many works the author's attitude toward nature is ambiguous or complicated in ways that make the writing resistant to recuperation, especially by critics seeking a relatively unproblematized, even idealistic, connection between women and nature; 6 this category of writing could include a work such as Margaret Fuller's 1844 autobiographical narrative Summer on the Lakes, in 1843.7 One such complication may be the writers' employment of Christian rhetoric, which for many readers today may appear hostile to an ecofeminist perspective. Third, like Fuller's narrative, much writing by nineteenthcentury American women evinces a high degree of genre hybridity, rendering it amenable to interpretation within a nummust be canon formation. Murphy's call for a situated ecocriticism, aware of geographical, historical, and interpretive location, is not inconsistent with a movement toward developing such a self-definition. 4 See AmericanNature ed. Writers, John Elder, 2 vols. (New York:Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996). There are, of course, exceptions; for example, on Sarah OrneJewett, see Tradition(New York: A Josephine Donovan, NewEngland Local ColorLiterature: Woman's Frederick Ungar, 1983); and Sarah Way Sherman, Sarah OrneJewett,an AmericanPersephone(Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1989). Although Lawrence Buell Imagination,p. 8), clearly admires Susan Fenimore Cooper the most (see Environmental he also discusses several early women writers of nonfiction. And Mazel writes extensively about the ecofeminism of Teresa Yelverton's 1872 novel Zanita:A lale of the Yosemite(see AmericanLiterary Environmentalism, 133-56). pp. 5 Vera Norwood's groundbreaking study touches upon a few important nineteenthcentury American women nature writers; she explores the relationship between women's cultural roles and their situation in nature (see Norwood, Madefrom this Earth: and AmericanWomen Nature [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993]). Buell discusses the role of publishers in canonization (see Environmental Imagination,p. 341). 6 Many recent ecofeminist critics problematize this connection; see, for example, the essays collected in Ecofeminism: Animals, Nature. Women, 7 See on Margaret Fuller, Summer theLakes,in 1843 (Boston: Little, Br-own,1844).

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ber of different literary traditions.8 When critics situate a work firmly in one tradition, locating it elsewhere simultaneously can be challenging; as David Mazel observes, environmental literature possesses an "incredible heterogeneity ... [and] cuts across so many genres."9 Finally, in a problem related to the last two, critics of American women's nature writing have omitted consideration of nineteenth-century works because of the absence of critical tools to incorporate these works satisfactorily into the tradition.10 In this essay I extend backward Patrick Murphy's call (in both Literature, Nature, and Other and Farther Afield) for the expansion of genres and modes in our understanding of American nature writing."l By limiting our view of American women's nature writing, in particular, to works that are unambiguously "about nature" (if such works are even possible), as well as by constricting our perspective to writings principally from the twentieth century, we contribute to the creation of a literary monoculture; what we require instead is, in Lawrence Buell's adept phrase, an "ambidextrous response" (Buell, Environmental Imagination, p. 13; see also p. 16). Moreover, we must study the ecocultural systems encom8 See Karen L. Kilcup, "'Essays of Invention': Transformations of Advice in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing," in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Women Writers: CriticalReader,ed. Kilcup (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 184A 205; and Karen L. Kilcup, "Writing 'The Red Woman's America': An Introduction to Writing by Earlier Native American Women," in Native American WomensWriting, c. 800oo-924: An Anthology(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 1-1 2. 9 Mazel, "American Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orientalism," in The Ecocriticism Reader,p. 137. See also Buell, Environmental Imagination, p. 397; and Eric Todd Smith, "Dropping the Subject: Reflections on the Motives for an Ecological Criticism," in Reading theEarth, p. 35. 10 On theory and ecocriticism, see Patrick D. Nature, and Other: Murphy, Literature, Ecofeminist Critiques(Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1995); Sueellen Campbell, "The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet," in TheEcocriticism Reader,pp. 124-36; Reading theEarth;and Buell, Environmental Imagination. 11 Genre distinctions are, in any event, Western, as Murphy notes (Farther Afield, p. 8) and as feminist theorists such as Paula Gunn Allen and Gloria Anzaldua have repeatedly emphasized (see Allen, The SacredHoop: RecoveringtheFemininein American Indian Traditions[Boston: Beacon Press, 1986]; Allen, "Introduction," in SpiderWoman' TraditionalTalesand Contemporary ed. Granddaughters: WritingbyNativeAmericanWomen, Allen [Boston: Beacon Press, 1989], pp. 1-21; and Anzaldfia, Borderlands/LaFrontera: TheNew Mestiza,2d ed. [San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999]). Murphy argues for a distinc-

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passing authors diverse not only by race, class, ethnicity, age, region, and religion, but also by period.12 By omitting most American women writers we also obscure nineteenth-century the complicity of some women in perspectives that depart from-or even question-today's so-called progressive and affirmative stances on nature and the environment, and in the process we reaffirm an essentialist affiliation between women and nature. As Susan Kollin points out more generally, "Ecocriticism often uncritically positions wilderness and nature writing as its primary objects of study and in the process celebrates nature as a restorative and regenerative force."13 Finally, in order to understand adequately our present and anticipate our future, we must remember our past. My discussion as a whole seeks to demonstrate the synthetic vision of women writers, who are often more likely nineteenth-century to regard nature in the context of gender politics or struggles for social amelioration than as a separate political or cultural concern. For interpretive convenience, I begin with the relatively normative genre (in nature writing) of Romantic poetry, and then move to those genres that are more marginalized in mainstream literary tradition and that sometimes manifest a
tion between genre and mode (see Farther Afield,p. 49). He also argues forcefully that the nonfiction essay, which has provided the touchstone for American nature writing and the basis for the construction of a canon of such writing, has a number of problems, including its foundation in a Eurocentric, Judeo-Christian Enlightenment perspective that specifies observer detachment and assumes alienation from nature; its emphasis on the individual; and its refusal of political themes (see FartherAfield, pp. 52-54). But Murphy's advocacy of a consciously environmental perspective in literature, while politically meaningful, skews the discussion of environmental writing toward more recent literature and unintentionally devalues many earlier women writers. 1' Such synthetic and politicized attentiveness is one way of responding to Buell's concern that "the worst thing that could happen would be foi ecocriticism to become just another branch of literary criticism" (quoted in KarenJ. Winkler, "Inventing a New Field: The Study of Literature About the Environment," Chronicle HigherEducation, of g August 1996, p. A15). More recently, Buell has underscored the need for a more comprehensive survey of writing: "No treatment of environmental imagination can claim to be comprehensive without taking account of the full range of historic landscapes, landscape genres, and environmental(ist) discourses" (Lawrence Buell, Writing for an EndangeredWorld:Literature,Culture,and the Environmentin the US. and Beyond
[Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2001], p. 8).

3' "The Wild, Wild North: Nature Writing, Nationalist Ecologies, and Alaska,"American Iiterary History, 12 (2000), 44.

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travel writing and chilhigh degree of genre hybridity-namely, dren's writing. In the process of this discussion I hope to contribute to all three strands of ecocriticism outlined by Cheryll Glotfelty: a consideration of representations (here of women and nature); an enlargement of the tradition of American nature writing; and a broadening of its theoretical foundation.14 Both Paula Bennett and I have explored, in different contexts, the work of women nature poets; Lizette Woodworth Reese, for instance, is a powerful precursor to such twentiethcentury poets as Robert Frost.l5 Yet more than a decade after Mary V Davidson's appeal for an expansion of the American women's nature poetry tradition via the recovery of British Romantic poets,16 a large number of poets whose stance is somewhat more complex remains to be studied, including the important, prolific antebellum writer Lydia Sigourney. Sigourney's origins in a working-class family may have contributed to her wide-ranging perspective that respected natural and cultural ecologies.17 Although exploring people's attitudes toward nature was not the principal impetus for most of her work, Sigourney belongs in this tradition for several reasons. First, in
14

See Glotfelty, "Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,"

15 See Paula Bennett, "LateNineteenth-Century American Women's Nature Poetry and the Evolution of the Imagist Poem," Legacy,9 (1992), 89-103; and Karen L. Kilcup, RobertFrostand FeminineLiterary Tradition (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998). 16 See "WhatWe've Missed: Female Romantic Poets and the American Nature Writing Tradition," CEACritic,54, no. 1 (1991 ), 1 o- 8. 17 On Sigourney's subjectivity, see Annie Finch, "The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney's Nature Poetry,"Legacy,5, no. 2 (1988), 3-18; see also Murphy on the "I"of Romantic poetry (Literature, Nature, and Other,pp. 33-35). Buell highlights the "self-relinquishment" of some nature writers (see Environmental Imagination,pp. 156-79) and comments with appreciation on Mary Austin's "guarded impersonal voice and diffuse perceptual centers" (p. 177). It is worth noting that Sigourney's father was an estate manager for a wealthy Connecticut family and that one of his responsibilities may have been gardening. The reluctance of critics to consider Sigourney and writers like her in a tradition of women's nature writing may emerge in part from the (faulty) characterization of her work as principally sentimental and popular, and from the denigration of sentimental attitudes toward nature and and pastoralism. See Leo Marx, TheMachinein the Garden:Technology thePastoralIdeal in America(New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 5; Bernard Rosenthal, Cityof Nature: to Romanticism(Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press and Journeys Naturein theAge ofAmerican Associated Univ. Presses, 1980), p. 67; and Buell, Environmental Imagination,p. 199.

in The Ecocriticism Reader, pp. xv-xxxvii.

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her poetry and prose she conducts powerful investigations of people's place in the natural world. For example, her poem "Niagara" (1835) places humans in a role subsidiary to that of the powerful waterfall: Every leaf That lifts itself within thy wide domain, Doth gather greenness from thy living spray, birds Yet tremble at the baptism.-Lo!-yon Do boldly venture near, and bathe their wing Amid thy mist and foam. 'Tis meet for them, To touch thy garment's hem, and lightly stir The snowy leaflets of thy vapour wreath, For they may sport unharmed amid the cloud, Or listen at the echoing gate of heaven, Without reproof. But as for us, it seems Scarce lawful, with our broken tones, to speak Familiarly of thee.-Methinks, to tint Thy glorious features with our pencil's point, Or woo thee to the tablet of a song Were profanation.18 In this Romantic poem with strong affinities to William Cullen Bryant, who was (and is) widely acknowledged as a nature poet, Sigourney figures the interrelatedness of natural systems, with the leaves demonstrating a living sensitivity to the redemptive power of the falls and the birds rising closer to "heaven" than humans can safely approach. Human speech seems both sacrilegious and utterly inefficacious in the face of Niagara's sublime power. Transforming the traditional Christian perspective affirming human domination over nature, Sigourney proffers a visionary view of the natural, urging restraint and recognition of the relative insignificance of human beings in this spectacle "of terror and beauty" (1. 2).19 In addition, like many of her counterparts, Sigourney highlights the punineteenth-century
An 18 Lydia Sigourney, "Niagara" (1835), in American WomenWriters: Anthology, p. 43; 11.27-42. "' For a discussion of nature writing's Romantic roots, the sublime, and nineteenthcentury American male writers, see Michael Branch, "Indexing American Possibilities: The Natural History Writing of Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon," in The Ecocriticism Reader,pp. 282-302.

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tatively silent voice of nature; hence, her work complicates current discussions on this important subject.20 "Niagara" was published during a period of intense national self-examination, including discussions about the role of wilderness in America; especially potent discourses of nationalism surrounded the place of persons of color, both African Americans and Native Americans, in the emerging nation.21 Ecocritics could interpret "Niagara" as a poem that participates in totalizing discourses of white nationalism, claiming supremacy for the land's Christian conquerors; as Buell observes in another context, "American pastoral has simultaneously been counterinstitutional and institutionally sponsored" (Environmental Imagination, p. 50). Such a normative reading, however, would fail to recognize Sigourney's broader cultural ecology, demonstrated by her lifelong activism on behalf of Native AmerSee Christopher Manes, "Nature and Silence," in TheEcocriticism Reader,pp. 1529; MichaelJ. McDowell, "The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight," in TheEcocriticismReader,pp. 371-91; and Smith, "Dropping the Subject." 21 As Roderick Nash points out, national self-examination about wilderness began early, with John James Audubon, George Catlin, Thomas Cole, and Francis Parkman and the AmericanMind [New Haven: Yale Univ. among the prompters (see Wilderness Press, 1967]). On the discussions surrounding Native Americans and ethnicity more A generally, see Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagismand Civilization: Studyof theIndian and the AmericanMind (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988); Lucy MadAmerican Literatureand the Politics of Indian Affairs dox, Removals:Nineteenth-Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); and Dana D. Nelson, The Wordin Black and in White: I Reading "Race" AmericanLiterature, 63 8- 867 (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). On the connections between nature and nationalism, see Rachel Stein, Shifting the Ground: AmericanWomen Writers'Revisions Nature,Gender, and Race (Charlottesville: of Univ. Press of Virginia, 1997); David Mazel, "'A beautiful and thrilling specimen': George Catlin, the Death of Wilderness, and the Birth of the National Subject," in Environmentalism, xviii-xxv Reading theEarth, pp. 129-43; Mazel, AmericanLiterary pp. and passim; and Frederick Turner, "Cultivating the American Garden," in TheEcocriticismReader,pp. 40-51. For an early (1824) captivity narrative that explores the relationship of Native American women to nature, seeJames E. Seaver, A Narrativeof theLife of Mrs. MaryJemison,ed. June Namias (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1992). See also June Namias, WhiteCaptives:Genderand Ethnicityon the AmericanFrontier(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993); Susan Walsh, "'With Them Was My Home': Native American Autobiogaphy and A Narrativeof theLife of Mrs.MaryJemison," American Literature,64 (1992), 49-70; and Karen [Kilcup] Oakes, "'We planted, tended and harvested our corn': Gender, Ethnicity, and Transculturation in A Narrativeof theLife of Mrs. MaryJemison," Women and Language: Women and theLanguage of Race and Ethnicity, 18, no. 1 (1995), 45-51. Both Buell (in Writingforan EndangeredWorld)and Murphy (in FartherAfield)argue for an international perspective on nature-oriented literature.
20

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icans and expressed in both her prose and her poetry. She authored numerous poems, including "Traits of the Aborigines of America" (1822), a five-canto, four-thousand-line blank verse poem "uniquely structured from the Indian point of view," which in Nina Baym's opinion "ought to be considered a belated entry in the competition for 'the' American epic."22 Sigourney's shorter poems, the most famous of which today is "Indian Names" (1849), were often reprinted in the CherokeePhoenix, deemed by many scholars to be the first Native-American periindicates the importance of odical in the United States-which her perspective to Native Americans. Like much of Sigourney's work, "Indian Names" advances a proto-ecofeminist perspective that accentuates the interconnection not only between humans and nature but also between peoples. The poem opens: Ye say they all have passed away, That noble race and brave; That their light canoes have vanished From off the crested wave; That, mid the forests where they roamed, There rings no hunter's shout: But their name is on your watersYe may not wash it out.92 In spite of the problematic assumption concerning the "vanishcould arguably be a rhetorical stance, ing American"-which in view of the poet's personal correspondence with Cherokees such as David Brown and of her publication in the Cherokee Phoenix-the poem contemplates the connection between Native Americans and nature in suggestive ways.24 On the one hand, such an alliance was, like that between women and nature, both reductive and ultimately silencing. On the other hand, Sigourney endeavors both to awaken the nation's con22 Nina Baym, "Reinventing Lydia Sigourney," in The (Other)American Traditions: WomenWriters,ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers Nineteenth-Century Univ. Press, 1993), p. 64. An Writers: 2" Lydia Sigourney, "Indian Names" (1849 version), in AmericanWomen Anthology,p. 46; 11.1-8. 24 See David Brown, letter to Lydia Sigourney, Hartford, Conn., 6 November 1822, Connecticut Historical Society. My thanks to Stephen Brandon for pointing me to this connection.

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science concerning its roots in the attempted extermination of Native Americans and to reclaim for them an important form of cultural power. Using a transformative and apocalyptic Christian rhetoric, Sigourney appropriates for Native Americans the Adamic task of naming, as she enumerates sites throughout the country where Indian names have predominated: Niagara, Rappahannock, Massachusetts, Monadnock. Equally important, through her natural images she envisions the inevitable interconnection between Native American and European American, for nature prohibits the segregation embodied in culture: "Rappahannock sweetly sleeps / On green Virginia's breast" (11. 15-16). This implied maternal image is particularly telling, for it intimates Sigourney's larger project of human interconnection through maternal love, a project profoundly (if paradoxically to some today) enabled by Christianized reform rhetoric and paralleled in the culture at large by the powerful image of the Republican Mother. Regarded from this angle, Sigourney's work, which manipulates conventional images on behalf of activist goals, accomplishes several things: it complicates current ecofeminist discussions about the affiliation between women and nature; it acknowledges the intimate link between control of nature and neocolonialism; and it underscores the imbrication of the natural with the cultural both in earlier American women's writing and in American culture more broadly. The juxtaposition of "Niagara" and "Indian Names" highlights the necessity for what we might call "situated criticism" for nineteenth-century American nature writers-that is, we are more likely to err about a writer's stance (as with "Niagara") if we fail to apprehend her writing as a network of conversing ideas and concerns. Working in a similar vein, critics might then contemplate the work of a writer such as Lucy Larcom, whose Civil War-era poem "Weaving" shares with "Indian Names" an the interconunderstanding of cultural ecology-specifically, nection between the matrix of exploitation involving Southern slave women, Northern white women factory workers, and cotton production-and whose Cape Ann (Massachusetts) poems represent a slightly earlier model for Celia Thaxter's Isles of Shoals poems.

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"Flowers of the Fallow" (1884), one of Larcom's most powerful poems, invokes and then transforms the traditional affiliation between women and nature. The poem begins with resistance to the Romantic ideal of nature as pure, and as purely beautiful: I like these plants that you call weeds,Sedge, hardhack, mullein, yarrow,That knit their seeds Where any grassywheel-track leads Through country by-waysnarrow.25 The harsh, consonantal sounds of the plant names reinforce the poet's perspective of a nature that encompasses the ideas of wild and cultivated; the opening also underscores the powerfully adventitious nature of these "weeds," which are, paradoxically, linked to the presence of culture via the metaphor of "seeds" and the literal inroads made by the technology of wheels.26 Opening to a metaphoric reading of the wild weeds as social outcasts, the stanza that follows transvalues these putatively excluded plants by asserting their primal, prior status, which occurs before the time of hill farms themselves "grown old with cultivation" (1. 7). It is not surprising, perhaps, given the affiliation that Candice Bradley, in her essay "Keeping the Soil," points out between weeding and housework, that the second stanza of "Flowers of the Fallow" also introduces the ostensibly conventional image of nature as female, here described as a "matron" (1. 9) and in the third stanza explicitly as "Mother Earth" (1. 11). This figure offers resistance to the human urge to transform the natural world, filling the spaces created by plows with "humbler blossoms" (1. 19) in a form of speaking that emerges from "flowery lips" (1. 13). Revealing an understanding of the historical role of men in the literal and conceptual creation of the American landscape, stanza five articulates another perspective
An 25 Lucy Larcom, "Flowersof the Fallow" (1884), in AmericanWomen Writers: Anthology,p. 179; 11.1-5. 26 For a useful discussion of women and weeds, see Candice Bradley, "Keeping the Soil in Good Heart: Women Weeders, the Environment, and Ecofeminism," in Ecofeminism: Women,Culture,Nature,pp. 290-99.

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on the relationship between humans and nature: here Larcom imagines how Nature "yielded to your axe, with pain, / Her free, primeval glory" (11. 21-22). Yet the poet exceeds this understanding and engenders a sophisticated link between a postlapsarian nature and the image of the aging woman, envisioning a redemptively powerful role for such women: You say, "How dull she grows! how plain!" The old, mean, selfish story! Her wildwood soil you may subdue, Tortured by hoe and harrow; But leave her for a year or two, And see! she stands and laughs at you With hardhack, mullein, yarrow!
(11. 24-30)

As Annette Kolodny's work indicates, this conception of a female adversarial nature is not new;27 what is innovative about Larcom's stance is her creation of an old, tired Mother Nature, coupled with the poet's own explicit identification with Mother Nature in the poem's final stanza, where the poet envisions the weedy flowers as tangible evidence of "heaven's breath" (1. 32) and herself as integrally, even intimately related to them: "And I lie down at blessed ease / Among thy weeds and grasses" (11.34-35). Exposing the objectification of Mother Nature and of old women in American culture at a time when the position of "redundant women" was under energetic discussion,28 Larcom creates an ecosystem that resists patriarchy in all of its forms, and, like Sigourney, she invites a reappraisal of ostensibly conventional metaphoric affiliations between women and nature that reinforce cultural gender norms and hierarchies. Published both in the influential Atlantic Monthly in 1882 (as "Fallow") and in Larcom's own popular collection of poetry in 1884, "Flowers of the Fallow" entered American culture at
See Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphoras Experience and History in American Life and Letters(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975). 28 See Martha Vicinus, IndependentWomen:Workand Community Single Women, for
1850-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985); and Lee Virginia ChambersSchiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-I840 27

(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984).

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a time of increasing concern for the exploitation of nature in America, soon after the inauguration of the national park system with the setting aside of Yellowstone in 1872.29 Larcom evokes the contemporary feminist concept of simultaneity of oppression through a nineteenth-century poetic strategy that we might call "shifting subjectivity."30 For nature writers in particular, this strategy offers the possibility of undermining the and nature that such dichotomy between humans/culture twentieth-century writers as Diane Ackerman, Annie Dillard, and Vicki Hearne also seek to deconstruct.31 More generally, Larcom's work sponsors an implicit argument for the articulation of analytical categories within a tradition of American women's nature writing that incorporate age and aging as part of a more inclusive cultural ecology. Like Sigourney's, Larcom's work-based in a working-class a situated understanding within the personal history-requires author's writing as a whole. It also raises such questions as: How much nature writing must a writer produce in order to be encompassed by this category? Must the writer express a perspective amenable to today's ecofeminist sensibilities in order to be considered part of a tradition? And how do we handle writers whose work sometimes affirms and sometimes complicates or rejects conventional affiliations between women and nature? Beyond such questions of conceptual coherence, the work of these poets raises important questions about genre itself. Given the dominant Romantic model for earlier American nature poetry, for example, how do women writers circumvent or subvert objectified and distanced representations of nature? Does poetry as a genre inhibit the development of innovative perspec29 Mazel reminds us that "displaced Native Americans were the primary victims in the creation of national parks"in the western U.S., while "in the East, the victims were as likely to be poor whites" (AmericanLiteraryEnvironmentalism, 166, n. 5). He also p. notes that some scholars regard Yosemite, which was set apart by the federal government in 1864 and ceded to the state of California before its return to the national park system in 1890, as the world's first national park (see pp. xix and 167, n. 7). 30 See Finch, "Sentimental Poetess"; and Bennett, "Late Nineteenth-Century American Women's Nature Poetry." '3 See Ackerman, 'he Moon by WhaleLight: And OtherAdventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians,and Whales (New York: Random House, 1991); Dillard, Pilgrim at TinkerCreek (New York:Harper's Magazine Press, 1974); and Hearne, Adam'sTask:CallName (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). ing Animals by'

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tives? Or perhaps a better question for ecocritics might be, how does any genre constrain a writer's ecological viewpoint, and what, if any, strategies does she develop to counteract or evade the weight of genre tradition? 32

I now turn to travel writing, the second, more marginalized category of nature writing. Much travel writing adheres at least in part to an essentially normative
32 Other poems that could readily be regarded within one or more of the conceptual frameworks that I have outlined include Alice Cary's "If and If" (1866) and "The Sea-Side Cave" (1866), and Emma Lazarus's "The South" (1888) (see AmericanWomen Writers: Anthology,pp. 151-55 and 377-79). I will add one additional word on the An situation of poetry in the category of American women's nature writing: recent scholarship has sometimes emphasized the role of embodiment, especially female embodiment, as an important characterizing feature (see, for example, Deborah Slicer, "Toward an Ecofeminist Standpoint Theory: Bodies as Grounds," in EcofeministLiterary Criticism,pp. 49-73; and Stacy Alaimo, "'Skin Dreaming': The Bodily Transgressions of Fielding Burke, Octavia Butler, and Linda Hogan," in Ecofeminist LiteraryCriticism, pp. 123-38). Although Emily Dickinson is customarily placed in the category of nature writing for her poems directly about nature-if particular Dickinson poems can or should be limited in such a way-such as "It sifts from leaden sieves" (1862) and "A narrow fellow in the grass" ( 1865), we can also include her poems of embodied erotics, such as "Astill volcano life" (1863), in this category if we take the female body as an ecosystem in the way that Larcom's poem suggests. Although the body could be a delicate area for nineteenth-century American women writers to discuss, recent recovery work suggests that such explorations were frequent, if coded (see Paula Bennett, "The Pea that Duty Locks: Lesbian and Feminist-Heterosexual Readings of Emily Dickinson's Poetry," in Lesbian Textsand Contexts: Radical Revisions, ed. KarlaJay and Joanne Glasgow [New York: New York Univ. Press, 199o], pp. 104-25; and Paula Bennett, "'Pomegranate-Flowers': The Phantasmic Productions of Late-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Women Poets," in SolitaryPleasures:The Historical, Literary,and Artistic Discoursesof Autoeroticism, Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II [New York: Routed. ledge, 1995], pp. 189-213). For example, Harriet Prescott Spofford's autoerotic poem "Pomegranate-Flowers" (1861) proposes an intimate link between nature, myth, the body, and creativity;its Romantic coding of the self both participates in and rejects uncomplicated affiliations between women and nature. Such poems as "PomegranateFlowers," Frances Anne Butler Kemble's "Noonday: By the Seaside" (1859), and Rose Terry Cooke's "In the Hammock" (1866) anticipate the homoerotic nature poems of Amy Lowell in the twentieth century. For a reprinting of these poems, see NineteenthPoets:An Anthology,ed. Paula Berat Bennett (Malden, Mass.: CenturyAmericanWomen Blackwell, 1998), pp. 215-22, 49-51, and 158-59; on Lowell's poems, see Kilcup, Robert Frost,pp. 163-68, 220-21. Of course, as I discuss below, the sexual body that white women were seeing as a potential source of liberation remained for Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Winnemucca, and others often a source of confinement and exploitation.

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the autobiographical essay.33 genre for nature writing-namely, At the same time, women writers often exceed the boundaries of this form by framing it in terms that potentially diminish the self-assertive quality of the (usually male-authored) autobiographical essay or that dilute its focus. For middle-class women-and even for some working-class women-travel represented (or was supposed to represent) an opportunity for self-betterment: such self-improvement rendered the traveler a more sophisticated wife and mother. While, as Mary Suzanne Schriber indicates, much women's writing in this period explores travel abroad,34 a significant number of narratives depict travel in the United States or, in an extension of the genre, concern themselves with the American landscape, often as it reflects character. Although for many male writers, such as Henry David Thoreau, travel was self-initiated for the purposes of personal development, for many women such development was reluctant at best. This unwillingness may generate in women not writers a more critical, less idealistic perspective-though we might expect from travel necessarily a negative one-than writing as a genre, and hence it may supply a similarly critical view of the representation and deployment of nature in the construction of national or gender identity. One important early writer whose work combines elements of the autobiographical essay, the travel narrative, and the sketch is Caroline Kirkland. As Sandra A. Zagarell notes, Kirkland's innovative A New Home, Who'll Follow? Or, Glimpses of WesternLife (1839) "satirize[s] a range of habits, conventions, and states of mind of both the Eastern and Western United States."35 Kirkland's account of moving with her husband to the western frontier juxtaposes nature and culture in provocative
I am not arguing the status of autobiographical nature writing in the mainstream canon; rather, I am suggesting that one of nature writing's internally canonical forms is the autobiographical essay. Nevertheless, I am not wholly convinced of Buell's argument that nonfiction nature writing is itself neglected, given Thoreau's emblematic stature. See Murphy, Farther Afield,for a persuasive opposing view that underscores the "nonfictional prejudice" of critics (p. 28)-that is, their privileging of nonfiction narrative. Murphy also emphasizes the murky line between fiction and nonfiction (see especially pp. 1-58). 34 See (Charlottesville: Univ. Writing Home: American Women Abroad, i83o-1920 Press of Virginia, 1997). 35 Sandra A. Zagarell, "Introduction," in Caroline M. Kirkland, A New Home, Who'll Follow?Or, Glimpsesof Western Life, ed. Zagarell (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ.
33

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ways; her opening chapter, for example, measures the dimensions of a Michigan "mud-hole": In the "settlements," a mud-hole is considered as apt to occasion an unpleasant jolt-a breaking of the thread of one's reverieor in extreme cases, a temporary stand-still or even an overturn of the rash or the unwary. Here, on approaching one of these characteristic features of the "West"- (How much does that expression mean to include? I never have been able to discover its limits)-the driver stops-alights-walks up to the dark gulfand around it if he can get round it. He then seeks a long pole and sounds it, measures it across to ascertain how its width compares with the length of his wagon-tries whether its sides are perpendicular, as is usually the case if the road is much used. If he find it not more than three feet deep, he remounts cheerily, encourages his team, and in they go, with a plunge and a shock rather apt to damp the courage of the inexperienced. (A New Home,pp. 5-6) With its concreteness counteracting what Buell terms "the aesthetics of the not-there" (Environmental Imagination, p. 68),36 Kirkland's description transports readers out of the metaphoric realm, grounding us in physical reality as she easily deconstructs the boundaries between concepts of both settlement and frontier and the Eastern and Western United States. Moreover, in her stylistic stops and starts figured by generous dashes, Kirkland performs a bodily encounter with an apparently boundless nature. Rather than being awed by this boundlessness, Kirkland adopts a posture of humorous inquiry, in the
process critiquing "Romantic cliches and tropes"-particularly

"an eastern-based vision of the West while simultaneously "establish[ing] digenous western culture" (Zagarell, xxxii). Frequently Kirkland's humor

as unspoiled 'nature'"the existence of an in"Introduction," pp. xxx, functions both to chal-

Press, 199ggo), xv. Subsequent references to A New Homeare to this edition and are inp. cluded in the text. 36 Buell's point about the resistance of contemporary literary theory to representational works, including nature writing (and, I would add, vice versa), is extremely important (see Environmental Imagination,pp. 83-114); some of the women writers cited here clearly undercut this theoretical perspective.

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lenge the artificial boundaries established between humans and nature and to interrogate the idealization of nature in American culture. One of Kirkland's most complex investigations occurs in her two-volume autobiographical narrative, Forest Life (1844), when she discusses the insects of the West. Explaining for Eastern readers the difficulty of locating cattle allowed to range widely in insect season, Kirkland parodies the academic inclination toward taxonomy and collection: One may observe, enpassant, that ours is a rare region for the study of entomology. Those virtuosi who expend their amiable propensities in transfixing butterflies and impaling gnats would here find ample employment from May till November. Indeed they might at times encounter more specimens than they could manage comfortably and without undue precipitation. First, in early April, appear, few and far between, the huge blue-bottle flies, slow-motioned and buzzy, as if they felt the dignity of their position as ancestors. Next in order, if I forget not, come the most minute of midges, silent and stealthy, pretending insignificance in order that they may sting the more securely.37 Implicitly undermining Romantic notions of the West and of wilderness in general, Kirkland simultaneously assumes and mocks an intellectual perspective on the discomfort caused by bugs. Nature's beauty cannot be distanced and killed, easily transfixed or impaled; indeed, the human impalers become the impaled. As she had done in A New Home, Kirkland in Forest Life underscores the necessary, even painful connection between humans and nature, while elsewhere in the book she gives her readers an appreciation of nature's beauty, even its sublimity. This perspective is enabled by her dual position as insider and outsider, traveler and native, to the western country that she describes; it is also fostered by her perspective as a woman traveler. The vulnerability and ingenuity of humans in this implicit dialogue between themselves and nature emerge in a passage describing how people cope with the swarms of insects in the
37 [Caroline Kirkland], Forest Life, 2 vols. (New York:C. S. Francis and Co., 1842), I, '43-44-

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western wilderness. Initially Kirkland gives us ironic hints about how the "refined" cope with swarms that render "black ... the prevailing color of ceilings," and then she describes more brutal measures: Less fanciful people, frugal housewives and hard-hearted old bachelors,-place a large tumbler, partly filled with molasses, and covered with a piece of innocent-looking pasteboard having in the centre a hole large enough for a blue-bottle to enter toute deployee,but affording a poor chance for escape after he has clogged his feet and wings in the too eager pursuit of pleasure.... And again those of us who may by some chance have attended a course of chemistry, show our superior advantages by using a little water impregnated with cobalt, which carries swift destruction in every sip; and having at least the recommendation of not being sticky, answers a very good purpose, unless the children happen to drink it. Yet this ingenious variety of deaths makes no perceptible diminution in the number of our tormentors, and I have heard a good old lady exclaim against such contrivances altogether, saying that if you kill one fly, ten will be sure
to come to his funeral. (ForestLife, I, 146-47)

As Joseph W. Meeker argues in a different context, "to evolution and to comedy, nothing is sacred but life itself," and "the lesson of comedy is humility and endurance."38 Kirkland's rhetoric draws attention to itself and indicates the sophisticated ways in which early American women constructed the conversation between human beings and nature. Again utilizing a binocular stance as both participant and observer, and emphasizing her feminine perspective by contextualizing her discussion of insects in traditionally female domains of home and housework, Kirkland simultaneously conjures and departs from the genre of travel writing, implicitly inviting her readers to reassess the meaning of "home" and-like Larcom-anticipating current interest in bioregionalism.39 No domestication of the
38 Meeker, "The Comic Mode," in The Ecocriticism Reader, pp. 165, 168; see also Turner, "Cultivatingthe American Garden," p. 45. 39 On the Envisignificance of home to nature writing, see Mazel, AmericanLiterary ronmentalism, 136-42; on its significance to working-class women, see Karen L. Kilpp. cup, "Introduction: A Working-Class Woman's View of Europe," in Lorenza Stevens Berbineau, FromBeaconHill to the CrystalPalace:The 85 1 TravelDiary of a Working-Class

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"natural" West is possible, she suggests-a standpoint embodied in the restless movement and ironic voice of her narrative. One of the first American women writers to use humor as a vehicle for consciousness-raising about the environment, Kirkland deserves a prominent place in a tradition of American women's nature writing; her work suggests that critics in the field need to consider women whose serious work may investigate the potential for humor in the relationship between humans and nature.40 The generic complexity of Kirkland's narrative invites us to consider another nineteenth-century work that seems even further outside the travel-writing-or, indeed, nature-writingmode: HarrietJacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). As we contemplate how nineteenth-century writing by women of color might compare with works that fit more transparently into a tradition of American women's nature writing, we are forced to see how narrowly constructed our customary categories are, and how the traditional emphasis on portraits of nature might exclude them.41 Writers such as Frances E. W. Hared. Wloman, Kilcup (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2002), pp. 2-3. On bioregionalism, for see, for example, Carolyn Merchant, RadicalEcology:TheSearch a LivableWorld(New
York: Routledge,

suggests the writing of Gail Hamilton, whose "MyGarden," from her CountryLiving and CountryThinking (1862), opens another field of investigation: Writings,ed. Sugarden writing (see Hamilton, "MyGarden," in Gail Hamilton:Selected san Coultrap-McQuin [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992], pp. 31-54). Another writer whose work deals fundamentally with nature is Nebraskan Kate Mcwith Selected Phelim Cleary (see Susanne K. George, Kate M. Cleary:A LiteraryBiography Works[Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997]). On a tradition of American women's Humor and AmericanCulture SeriousThing: Women's humor, see Nancy A. Walker, A Very (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988). Mazel discusses Kirkland briefly, emphasizing her juxtaposition of domestic (female) and economic (male) values (see American Environmentalism, 137-39). Less obviously situated in the category pp. Literary of travel writing, Mary Hallock Foote's 1888-89 series for the widely distributed Century Magazine, "Pictures of the Far West,"anticipates in different ways the works of her more famous counterparts MaryAustin and Annie Dillard. This series, along with some of Foote's other work, is amenable to interpretation in the tradition. For some reprints, An Writers: Anthology, 359-61. see AmericanWomen pp. 41 Jacobs's responses to nature do not figure in recent work on the writer; see, for example, Jennifer Fleischner, MasteringSlavery:Memory,Family,and Identityin Women's Slave Narratives(New York:New York Univ. Press, 1996); Frances Smith Foster, Written by LiteraryProduction AfricanAmericanWomen, 74 6-i 892 (Bloomington and byHerself: of Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993); and Carla L. Peterson, "Doers the Word":

40 Kirkland'ssatire

1992), pp. 217-22.

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per, Sarah Winnemucca, andJacobs (to name only three of the best-known examples) concern themselves more intensely with cultural ecologies than with the idea of nature-i.e., not with, as RandalL Roorda observes, "los[ing] the humans."42 We can locate Jacobs in the context of travel writing by emphasizing her tripartite relocation: geographical (from South to North), psychological (from slave to free person), and biological (from girl to mother). In these relocations, nature entersJacobs's experience in ways that complicate our understanding of white writers and of nature writing. In his study of the relationship between geography and identity in African American literature, Melvin Dixon points out: "Slaves knew that as chattel they were considered part of the property and wilds of nature, which a smoothly functioning plantation could restrain. The nearby woods contained enough birds and roaming animals to provide slaves with geographical and naturalistic references for freedom." Nevertheless, he notes, "Fugitives also had to recognize the basic duality in nature; the same natural force, such as a wide river, deep valley, soggy swamp, treacherous storm, or impassable mountain, was

Women and Writers the North (1830o-88o) (New York: Oxin African-American Speakers ford Univ. Press, 1995). For a perspective on Frederick Douglass's slave narrative that complements my remarks on Jacobs below, see Michael Bennett, "Anti-Pastoralism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery,"in BeyondNature Writing:Expanding the Boundariesof Ecocriticism, Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesed. ville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2001), pp. 195-210. As Patrick Murphy observes of contemporary literature, many marginalized writers write about nature as part of a matrix of struggle (against colonialism, war, or racism, for example) and hence may be silenced by normative expectations about nature writing. Without a self-conscious tradition of American nature writing to look back on, nineteenth-century women would not have been so constrained-rather, it is critical norms today that delimit and silence them. Discussing twentieth-century African writing, Murphy notes that in such literature "the environment cannot be treated without attention to violence, warfare, government corruption, and transnational corporate greed" (Farther Afield, p. 68); he also emphasizes the need "to appreciate cultural diversity as a physical manifestation of biWorld Buell offersJane Addams's ological diversity" (p. 74). In Writingforan Endangered description of a neighborhood garbage dump as an example of writing about the environment, modeling one way in which our perspective and formal categories might be expanded (see pp. 15-16). 42 Dramas of Solitude:Narrativesof Retreatin AmericanNature Writing (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998), p. 5. Two important later women-of-color writers are E. PaulineJohnson and Zitkala-Sa.

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both obstacle and aid."43 In Incidents, asJacobs describes herself hiding out after fleeing from the young Mr. Flint's plantation, her encounter with nature is far from elevating: I ... concealed myself in a thicket of bushes. There I remained in an agony of fear for two hours. Suddenly, a reptile of some kind seized my leg. In my fright, I struck a blow which loosened its hold, but I could not tell whether I had killed it; it was so dark, I could not see what it was; I only knew it was something cold and slimy. The pain I felt soon indicated that the bite was poisonous.44 Although darkness promises concealment, it also enables the dangers of nature (which must be braved for the ultimate goal of freedom) to emerge more plainly. Emphasizing African Americans' grounding in Christian religious traditions, Dixon underscores the significance for slaves of three metaphors: "The wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop are broad geographical metaphors for the search, discovery, and achievement of self" (Ride Out the Wilderness, pp. 4-5). As she invokes the biblical image of the serpent, Jacobs may be symbolically representing herself on a journey through a wilderness-spiritual as well as physical-that brings painful knowledge but that may also offer a means of deliverance. Nature, however, offers not only a promising metaphor of freedom but also a literal and concrete set of dangers that, even more stringently than the discomforts in Kirkland's account, counteract "the aesthetics of the not-there." Later in Jacobs's the form of the Snaky Swamp, with its narrative, nature-in snakes, noises, and potential disease-is terrifying for the eswoman slave. Jacobs confirms her increased apprehencaping sion due to the earlier snakebite; nevertheless, she endures another encounter with wildness. Even with her friend Peter to help, there is little comfort:
43 Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness: Literand Geography Identityin Afro-American atuire (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 17, 26. Dixon focuses on male writers' slave narratives;as the remarks and quotations fromJacobs below indicate, the situation may have been somewhat more complicated for female slave narrators. 44 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidentsin theLife of a Slave Girl, Written Herself,ed. Jean Faby gan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 98. All subsequent references are to this edition and are included in the text.

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with a large knife [Peter] cut a path through bamboos and briers of all descriptions. He came back, took me in his arms, and carried me to a seat made among the bamboos. Before we reached it, we were covered with hundreds of mosquitos. In an hour's time they had so poisoned my flesh that I was a pitiful sight to behold. As the light increased, I saw snake after snake crawling
round us. (Incidents, p. 112)

Such a scene, with its subtle, ironic depiction of male chivalry and its bald account of pain, contrasts sharply with the indoor sophistication of Kirkland as she combats insects. For Jacobs, however, nature is far less menacing than the human brutality of her owner, Dr. Flint. In both of these episodes in Jacobs's narrative, we distinguish nature as something separate from and hostile to humans; in some sense, this attitude indicates both Jacobs's necessary alienation from her own body and her a imprisonment in it. Nature becomes a way station-and a hellish, oppressive South and an painful obstacle-between ostensibly civilized North. Jacobs's narrative also offers insight into the connection between women and nature via the body (an important set of concerns for ecofeminist critics today),45 for Jacobs appropriates and subjectifies her female slave body as a means of resisting cultural imperatives demanding submission to the slavemaster. In traveling her three journeys, she indicates that her when she suffers body is weak, or conventionally feminine-as illness and paralysis during her seven-year self-confinement in the attic of her grandmother's shop. But her body is also strong, or conventionally masculine-as we are led to conclude from her survival of this "confinement" (a prelude to self-birth), from her resistance to Dr. Flint via a sexual alliance with another white man, and from her perilous escape. It is significant that Jacobs figures the passage from South to North, from slavery to imagined freedom, in a natural, embodied image: the wind on the deck of the ship that carries her "Northward Bound." In chapter 30 she writes: "I shall never forget that night. The balmy air of spring was so refreshing! And how shall I describe
45 See note 32 above; see also Deborah Slicer, "The Body as Bioregion," in Reading theEarth, pp. 107-16.

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my sensations when we were fairly sailing on Chesapeake Bay? 0, the beautiful sunshine! the exhilarating breeze! and I could enjoy them without fear or restraint. I had never realized what grand things air and sunlight are till I had been deprived of them" (p. 158).46 This image gains ironic weight, however, when we learn that the putatively free air holds a false promise: with the (delicately implied) menace of the Fugitive Slave Law, even the atmosphere is stained and the loveliness of the sunrise compromised. She continues: "The next morning I was on deck as soon as the day dawned. I called Fanny to see the sun rise, for the first time in our lives, on free soil; for such I then believed it to be. We watched the reddening sky, and saw the great orb come up slowly out of the water, as it seemed. Soon the waves began to sparkle, and every thing caught the beautiful glow" (p. 163; emphasis in original). Although Jacobs articulates the potential for beauty in the natural scene, that beauty is contingent upon the freedom of the viewer. ForJacobs, unlike for her white counterparts (even those who, like Kirkland, were unwilling travelers), geographical travel affords no necessary self-improvement or opportunity for freedom from gender roles (housework, for example); instead, it affords only a replacement of legal and social constraints. While Kirkland possesses the freedom to observe with an ironic and humorous "distance" that invokes a shared female perkeenly aware of the irony spective, Jacobs's "distance"-while that in this era North and South are virtually interchangeable in their handling of black women's bodies-must negotiate with an audience conceived of as both the same (women) and different (white women). In asserting that nature is for the slave woman hardly an idealized, feminized object to be conquered, but is instead both an obstacle to and a symbol of freedom, Jacobs deconstructs the culturally normative alliances between women (especially women of color) and nature, and, more explicitly and consciously than Sigourney in "Indian Names," she underscores the connections between the domestication of nature and neocolonialism. Moreover, with her acute under46 This passage echoes two others, by Henry Bibb and by Frederick Douglass, that Dixon suggests also contain African elements: "in African beliefs water, as well as the wilds, was a place of divine power" (Ride Out the Wilderness, 24). p.

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standing and canny manipulation of cultural and literary ecologies, as well as a profound awareness of the multifaceted relationship between nature and black women, Jacobs invites us to reconsider the constructed boundaries between culture and nature, as well as between nature writing and other genres. By defining such writing as exclusively or even principally focused on nature, we reinscribe the racial and ethnic boundaries that have concerned a number of recent ecofeminist literary critics.47

Of all of the genres that I have surveyed, children's writing may seem on the surface to be the least obviously connected to nature writing. In the region of children's literature, however, nineteenth-century American women writers sometimes found their most amenable domain for exploring both women's traditional place in nature and the relationship between humans and nature. Although not considered serious literature by modernist critics and their successors, children's literature was a widely respected genre in the nineteenth century, and important writers, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Dean Howells and Sarah OrneJewett, wrote for children. In some sense, this genre most precisely and emphatically deconstructs the artificial boundaries between culture and nature, perhaps because of American culture's understanding of children as, like women, closer to nature. In her complex 1878 story "Woodchucks," Sarah Orne Jewett dispels our bifurcated and gendered notions of humans and nature from another angle.48 "Woodchucks," included in
47 In addition to Patrick Murphy, see, for example, Allen, The SacredHoop; NorNatures. wood, Madefrom this Earth;Stein, Shifting the Ground;and Sturgeon, Ecofeminist 48 As Sarah Way Sherman has observed about another ofJewett's children's stories, "The Best China Saucer" (1878), the relationships between women, class, and nature are carefully calibrated (see Sherman, "PartyOut of Bounds: Gender and Class inJewett's 'The Best China Saucer,"' inJewettand Her Contemporaries: Reshapingthe Canon, ed. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards [Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1999], pp. 223-48). Among early writers of children's literature, Lydia Maria Child stands out: see especially her "anti-captivitynarrative," "Adventure in the Woods" (first pub-

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Jewett's Play Days: A Book of Storiesfor Children (1878), serves for us today as a counterpoint to her famous Romantic nature story "A White Heron" (1886).49 In "A White Heron" the child Sylvia resists the incursions of a violent, masculinized culture represented by the unnamed male hunter, who would kill and stuff the birds he seems to admire so much. In "Woodchucks," however, ostensibly written for children, no such idealized segregation of nature from humans is possible: whether adult or child, people help to create, as well as participate in, the potential cruelty of animal (and human) life.5? Jewett begins "Woodchucks" by emphasizing the closeness of the brother and sister protagonists, Joe and Nelly Abbott.
lished in her Juvenile Miscellany,1 [1826], 5-13, one of the first children's periodicals in America). Child's reform perspective aligns her with Sigourney; early on, her activist stance on behalf of African Americans and Native Americans cost her dearly. On Child, A see Carolyn L. Karcher, TheFirstWomanin theRepublic: CulturalBiography LydiaMaof ria Child (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1994); and Karcher, "Introduction," in Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and OtherWritingson Indians, ed. Karcher (New Brunswick, N.J.:Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986), pp. ix-xxxviii. 49 See "AWhite Heron," in Sarah OrneJewett, Novelsand Stories,ed. Michael Davitt Bell (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1994), pp. 669-79. For critical discussion of "AWhite Heron" in this context, see, for example, Josephine Donovan, Sarah OrneJewett(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), pp. 69-72; Margaret Roman, Gender(Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1992), Sarah OrneJewett:Reconstructing pp. 197-205; and Louis A. Renza, 'A WhiteHeron"and the Questionof Minor Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 116-22. 50 In "Woodchucks" Jewett may have been responding, at least indirectly, to her New England predecessors' image of the woodchuck. For Thoreau in Walden(1854) the animal provides the model for where to place his house, but it also a garden pest that he kills and eats; while for Ralph Waldo Emerson the woodchuck embodies the natural state from which humans must escape: "let us be men instead of woodchucks" (see "Nature" [ 1844], in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essaysand Lectures, ed.Joel Porte [New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983], pp. 541-55). Clearly, if she had Emerson in mind, Jewett may have been particularly ironic. From another angle, it is likely that she was familiar with the origin stories of the local Abenaki Indians, who "believed that the woodchuck was their maternal ancestor" (Carolyn Merchant, Ecological and Sciencein NewEngland [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North CarRevolutions: Nature,Gender, olina Press, 1989], p. 44). See also Frank G. Speck, "Penobscot Tales and Religious 48 Beliefs,"Journal of American oblk-Lore, (1935), 1-107; Jacqueline Shea Murphy, "ReHisLiterary placing Regionalism: Abenaki Tales and 'Jewett's'Coastal Maine,"American tory, lo (1998), 664-90; Sandra A. Zagarell, "Response to Jacqueline Shea Murphy's Literary History, o (1998), 691-97; and Charles G. 'Replacing Regionalism,'" American Leland, Algonquin Legends (New York: Dover, 1992), pp. 127-29. From this perspective, "Woodchucks"becomes an even more searing indictment of humans' alienation from and abuse of animals.

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Living on a remote farm with their parents and Andrew, "the man who helped to do the farm-work," they are nevertheless not lonely, because the isolation enables them to work and play together with no constraints about gender roles: "Nelly liked to do the same things that Joe did; and if their mother wanted some apples sliced for drying, or some rags sewed together for the carpet she was making, Joe could help Nelly as handily as she could help him drop potatoes in the spring or pick them up in the fall."5 Jewett's description here seems to indicate the contiguity, indeed the lack of boundaries, between indoor and outdoor-"female" and "male"- tasks, but she underscores immediately the impermanence of this situation: "By and by Nelly's work will be nearly all in-doors and Joe's nearly all outof-doors, but now it is very pleasant for them to work and play together" (p. 119). But this apparently Edenic life has its temptations. While the children are roaming around setting traps for squirrels, their father interrupts them and asks them to trap woodchucks instead, for the creatures damage both field and garden crops; as an incentive, he offers to pay them ten cents for each animal they capture. Feeling proud of their new responsibilities, they have a conversation with the hired man, Andrew, who warns them that woodchucks "are pretty cross and they bite dreadfully" (p. 121) and who advises them that digging out the creatures with the help of the family dog, Tiger, will be easier. Then he tells the children that they "can knock them on the back of the head and kill them"; when Nelly protests that the children "mean to tame them," Andrew cautions: "You will get more bitten fingers than the woodchucks will get good manners" (p. 122). Nature, according to Andrew, is hostile and untamable. At dinner that night, the children's parents recount their own childhood memories about woodchucks. Mrs.Abbott's narrative, about a misunderstanding that she had with her grandfather when he said "woo'chicks" in a clipped way that made her think he said "witches" (p. 122), is both humorous and
51 Sarah Orne Jewett, "Woodchucks,"in her Play Days: A Book of Stories for Children (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1878, 19o6), p. 119. All subsequent references are to this edition and are included in the text.

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telling; the grandfather's conclusion to the inquisitive and confused girl, who has been reading about the Salem witchcraft trials, is "don't you try to be too knowing, mind ye!" (p. 123). In this highly coded narrative, Jewett figures the role of women in both nature and culture: ignorant about nature, women share with the witches a dangerous, excessive knowledge about culture. In Mrs. Abbott's storyJewett also highlights the inability of men and women easily to speak the same language, as well as men's determination to control the terms of discourse. In contrast to the powerlessness signified in Mrs. Abbott's tale, Mr. Abbott's story focuses on his youthful dominance over both nature and human nature. He meets a boy who tells "great stories" about his "tame" woodchucks, which propels Mr. Abbott to capture his own and keep them in a box (p. 123). His putative mastery over both wild and human nature reemerges when he trades some worthless items with the boy for three woodchucks, which the young Mr. Abbott "brought ... home snarling in a box" and fed 'June beetles" and bread (p. 124). Mr. Abbott's father, taking pity on the "poor wild things," manufactures a tale about how the animals gnawed their way out of the cage one night, and then gives his son a quarter. Echoing his own offer to pay Nelly and Joe for the woodchucks they capture, Mr. Abbott's story reinforces the economic basis of the transaction. YetJewett carefully avoids making simplistic connections between men and culture, women and nature. Mr. Abbott's father, we learn, was a sailor, and "he never could bear to see anything in a cage." His time at sea made him appreciate the freedom of home in other ways; we learn that "if he happened to be at home in spring-time, when the leaves were coming out, he would be so pleased with them, and sit out-doors in the sun, looking round, most all day" (p. 125). In addition to being an implied source of danger, then, nature also provides pleasure and beauty. This description forecasts the idyllic conditions the next morning, when Nelly andJoe set off to trap their own woodchucks: "the clover and buttercups and white-weed were in full bloom, and some places were clear yellow or white or red, and in others the colors were mixed together. . . . and every now and then Joe and Nelly started a ground sparrow from its nest, or a bobolink fluttered up out of

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the grass as they went along, singing its best, for it was such a pleasantJune morning" (pp. 125-26). This harmonious environment belies the implements of destruction that the children bring with them: "the steel-trap and a stake for it, a spade and hoe, and a hatchet to cut the turf with," as well as sticks "to knock the woodchucks over with, and a big tin pail" to drown the animals out of their holes (p. 126). The children are both innocent and deadly, and the mood of the story at this point is ambiguous. Certainly, we need to acknowledge that children raised on a New England farm would be likely to learn from their parents, asJoe and Nelly have, that woodchucks can cause significant damage to the family's livelihood. But with her utopian descriptions, Jewett propels readers past such practical associations. The children's most serious weapon is the aptly named dog, Tiger. They find a hole and begin digging with Tiger's assistance: "suddenly Tiger made a plunge and poked his head into the hole, pulling the dirt out with his paws. All at once he yelped and backed, and the children saw that a creature about as large as a rabbit had its teeth in poor Tiger's nose and was scratching him furiously." Moving the reader-watch as "Tiger howled away, Joe and Nelly-and and shook his head, and the woodchuck squealed and held on gallantly." As the action becomes more fierce and intense, Joe manages to club and kill the woodchuck. Tiger's response is the most shocking moment of the story: "when he found his enemy was dead he barked triumphantly, wagged his tail, and proceeded to shake the creature until nothing was left but a forlorn bunch of brown fur, torn and bloody and covered with dirt" (p. 127). Here Jewett in effect deconstructs the Romantic idea (which she uses later in "AWhite Heron") about the supposedly natural affiliation between childrenespecially girl childrenand nature. In "Woodchucks" this affiliation consists more of a mutual violence than of the lovely scene of flowers, birds, and bees that closely precedes the killing. With the children's assistance, Tiger has reduced a "gallant" creature to a bloody, dirty, incoherent object. Even more shocking, the children's reaction to this event is matter-of-fact: they go on to capture another woodchuck, which they bring home. We repeatedly see this ani-

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mal's communication with the children, who hear only noise as it is being captured ("What a racket the creature made!") and refuse to understand its protests at being caged: "He sat up and chittered angrily and bit at the bars as if he didn't like them at all" (pp. 128-29). Mr. Abbott encourages the children's particin a market economy by paying them, and although ipation Andrew tells them stories that momentarily highlight the subject position of the animals, the children are successfully integrated into the larger culture that regards such animals as objects. Growing "crosser and crosser," the caged woodchuck is eventually killed by the butcher's big dog, and "nobody was of all Mr. Abbott, who is able to make a sorry" (p. 130)-least good trade with the butcher because of this loss. By making the animal's murderer the butcher's dog,Jewett delicately emphasizes her own criticism of wantonly caging and killing animals. The concluding exchange between Joe and Nelly brilliantly illuminates the stakes in this story: Nelly said, mournfully: "Poor thing, we hated him because he was a woodchuck and he couldn't help that; he was made so. I'm glad I'm a girl, aren't you, Joe?" "I'm glad I'm a boy," saidJoe, proudly. (p. 130; emphasis in original) Nelly understands the central tension in their adventures to be between humans (of both genders) and nature, embodied in the "wild" woodchuck, which "was made so"; in effect, she simultaneously seeks to understand the artificiality of the boundaries between humans and nature and to reinforce those boundaries with her assertion, which we might translate as "I'm glad I'm not a woodchuck." Joe reconstructs these boundaries, placing them between genders and indirectly (and "proudly") affirming his dominance over both nature and females. In effect, this series of events has transformed him from an ungendered child to a male-the capture and killing of sentient, speaking creatures prepares him for inflicting the kind of diminishment of others that Mrs. Abbott has received as a girl from her grandfather ("don't you try to be too knowing"). Jew-

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ett underscores how intimately culture relies on nature to construct its meanings-and its cages. Nevertheless, unlike in "A White Heron," where the sides are securely drawn between genders, and where the girl-child is the guardian of an idealized nature, here Nelly is complicit with Joe in the diminishment of a nature that is both impurely beautiful and beautifully impure. Mr. Abbott's father, in contrast, appreciates nature in a way that the narrator of "Woodchucks" also appears to do, and he, unlike his offspring, "never could bear to see anything in a cage." At this point, we might reasonably inquire how Jewett's narrative, clearly so concerned with culture, can be construed as nature writing-that is, if we define the term so broadly as to include works that feature nature as one part of their project, then are we not diluting the meaning of the term? 52 Frederick Turner's caution about the continuity between the ends of the ostensible binary between nature and culture seems sensible and important here.53 By performing the situated criticism of placing "Woodchucks" beside Jewett's famous, Romantic story "A White Heron," we are able both to understand the complicated stances articulated by many nineteenth-century American women writers and to unpack what we might now denominate the ecofeminist rhetoric of "Woodchucks"-ecofeminist because of "its awareness that under patriarchy nature and women are subordinated together" (Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism, p. 153). Compared to poetry or travel writing, children's literature may seem, paradoxically, to offer both the least obvious and best opportunity for a flowering of a critical (that is, political)
52 In a in very different realm, Adrienne Rich's broad definition of the term "lesbian" 1980 raised some of the same conceptual difficulties regarding potential dilution (see Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs, 5 [1980], 631-60). 53 Seeking a broader view, Kathleen R. Wallace and Karla Armbruster have made the same point in their introduction to BeyondNature Writing (see "Introduction: Why Go Beyond Nature Writing, and Where To?"pp. 4-19), and in their selection of essays. For two provocative applications of ecocriticism to nineteenth-century American women's writing, see Mark T. Hoyer, "CultivatingDesire, Tending Piety: Botanical Discourse in Harriet Beecher Stowe's TheMinister'sWooing," BeyondNature Writing,pp. 111-25; in and Terrell F. Dixon, "Nature, Gender, and Community: Mary Wilkins Freeman's Ecofiction," in BeyondNature Writing,pp. 162-76.

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nature writing.54 In "Woodchucks"Jewett combines elements of the children's story with advice and natural-history writing; this genre hybridity, coupled with the narrative's marginal location in literary tradition, suggests that modern scholars, in order to understand the history of today's flowering of American women's nature writing, need to explore the interstitial places where (to borrow Larcom's metaphor) "weeds" persist. All of the works that I have explored highlight the determination by to earlier American woman writers to complicate-even cultural ideologies that specify a close affiliation combat-the between women and nature, as well as their determination to explore the alliances between various forms of domination and hierarchy in American culture.

Patrick D. Murphy asserts that "in order to have a women's nature writing, there must be a breaking of traditional genre conventions established by men, and accepted by women, working within patriarchal structures" (Literature, Nature, and Other, p. 35). We can see this fracture already beAmerican gun, and well established, in nineteenth-century women's writing, which constitutes a basis for rereading today's writers, male as well as female. For, as Greta Gaard and Murphy argue, "definitions of literature, its genres, and its canons that attempt to establish timeless universals by relying on a few male authors and ignoring the contextual, historical, thematic, and aesthetic dimensions of literary production can also be only distortions."55 Studying the works of earlier American women our choice of interpretive emphawriters enables us-through sis-to complicate generic concepts of nature writing and to deconstruct universalizing and totalizing gender dualities. In some sense, the very difference of their works from the models for nature writing established by much later critics provides a fruitful source of theoretical discussion; it also counterbalances
54 See, fbr example, Alice Cary, "Three Bugs" (1876), and Lucy Larcom, "March" (1884), in American Women Writers:An Anthology, pp. 155 and 177-78. 55 "Introduction," in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, p. 6.

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our tendency to privilege more recent embodiments of nature writing and allows us to see the potential problems with idealizing and essentializing connections between, for example, women and nature or Native Americans and nature. Sometimes less consciously but no less emphatically than their ecofeminist counterparts today, nineteenth-century women nature writers not only recognized the connections between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature, but also emphasized that "these two forms of domination are bound with class exploitation, racism, and colonialism and neocolonialism" (Murphy, Farther Afield,p. 86). Ultimately, perhaps, it may be perspective and voice, rather than theme and genre, that will best help us to define a tradition of American women's nature writing, one that appreciates the small (metaphorically and traditionally feminine) 56 as well as the grand and sublime. To come full circle, Celia Thaxter seems most relevant to this endeavor, as she investigates the dimensions of a localized nature via the child's sensibility. Known to her intimate friends as "Sandpiper," Thaxter wrote a children's essay/sketch-clearly also for parents-that emphasizes her values. In "The Sandpiper's Nest" (1867) she describes a ramble "through rocky gorges, by little swampy bits of ground, and on the tops of windy head-lands, looking for flowers," as she provides a synaesthetic description that combines sentimental appeal, humor, "Natural History," and advice.57When she sees a sandpiper that appears to be injured, Thaxter recalls that the birds feign injury in order to draw threats away from their nests; engaging in a colloquy with the bird, she says: "pray don't give yourself so much unnecessary trouble! You might know I wouldn't hurt you or your nest for the world, you most absurd of birds!" (p. 281 ). Representing nature's equal speech, the answer that she attributes to the bird figures the perspective performed by many nineteenth-century American women writers, as well as the attitude of active listening that these writ56

See Bennett, "The Pea that Duty Locks."

57 Celia Thaxter, "The Sandpiper's Nest" (1867), in AmericanWomen Writers: AnAn thology, pp. 280-81.

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ers invite: "As if she understood me, and as if she could not brook being ridiculed, up she rose at once, strong and graceful, and flew off with a full, round, clear note, delicious to hear"
(p. 281).

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

ABSTRACT

Karen L. Kilcup, "'I Like These Plants That You Call Weeds': Historicizing American Women's Nature Writing" (pp. 42-74)
In spite of the flowering of anthologies and criticism concerning American women's nature writing, ecocritics have concentrated on a small group of writings and on twentiethcentury authors. The reasons for such omissions are numerous. Many nineteenthcentury women's writings remain relatively inaccessible, in spite of the exponential growth in recent years of collections and reprint series. Moreover, in earlier writing the author's attitude toward nature is frequently ambiguous or complicated, making the literature resistant to recuperation, especially by critics seeking a relatively unproblematized, even idealistic, connection between women and nature. Much of this writing also evinces a high degree of genre hybridity, rendering it amenable to interpretation within a number of different literary traditions. Finally, critics of American women's nature writing have omitted consideration of nineteenth-century works because of the absence of satisfactory critical tools. Advocating the continued expansion of genres and modes in our understanding of American women's nature writing, this essay underscores the synthetic vision of nineteenth-century women writers, who are often more likelv to regard nature in the context of gender politics or struggles for social amelioration than as a separate political or cultural concern. As a whole, the essay considers representations of women and nature; enlarges the tradition of American nature writing; and broadens its theoretical foundation.