Bartram the Gator-hater Update

After some old-fashioned research (well, not really—there was no card catalogue involved) I uncovered the 1998 naturalist edition of The Travels of William Bartram.  I compared this recent version with a micro film copy of the original text and the preface, introduction, commentary, and edited appendix seem to be the only editions; the original text reads the same. 

I opened Travels with the expectation of finding more (literal) animal bashing.  Based on the excerpt of Bartram’s travels in my undergraduate Early American Literature Anthology, I thought I could prove that though Bartram saw the natives with an unusually un-colonial eye he viewed nature as something to be conquered.  However, as far as I have read into this lengthy text I have only encountered Bartram’s deep appreciation and scientific observation of nature.  Bartram records his experience of Florida in great detail, even noting that “the Live Oaks are of an astonishing magnitude” and observing “the plunging and roaring of the crocodiles, and the croaking of the frogs” at night (54; 57). 

Though I do see how Bartram’s text can be used to further the pastoral myth that nature is America’s cultural capital.  At one point, he pauses to describe the land is a “retired spot of earth . . . where the wandering Seminole, the naked red warrior, roams at large . . .  sublime enchanting scenes of primitive nature . . . visions of terrestrial happiness” (69).  Though this passage uses the myth of the noble savage, it does what Bartram seems to do throughout his travel journal—actually view the land as other than empty. 

Though he sees Florida as a lush landscape, he does not stress that it is ready for colonization.  His tone is surprisingly genuine.  For example, when he remarks that “It is really astonishing to behold the Grape-Vines in this place,” I believe the excitement in his narrative voice (56). 

My findings lead me to realize that the excerpt chosen for the anthology seem to be the exception to a text full of nature-loving prose (I still need to finish the 300 page text).  Why was this one passage where it appears that Bartram has a dominating attitude towards nature used to represent the entire work in an anthology?  I believe that the alligator passage is not representative of the text as a whole and actually conveys Bartram as having a colonizing and superior attitude about nature.  However, once observing the rest of the text, I really do not think this is true.  Then, it seems that my problem is not with Bartram’s text but with the anthology.  Though they introduce Bartram as a naturalist and as respectful to natives the passage chosen seems to indicate otherwise.  I need know why this passage was chosen.  Was it chosen because the editors thought the sensational battle with alligators would intrigue undergraduates?  Did they realize that it is not representational of Bartram’s attitude about nature as a whole?

As an undergraduate, I certainly finished that passage thinking Bartram was a masculine explorer out to conquer nature and take no names.  I was sad for the alligator that he shot and viewed his “exploration” as invasion.  If the editors really wanted to show that Bartram was the patient naturalist (a more feminine profession in early America) they should not have chosen this passage.  I am excited to read the peer-reviewed articles that I requested through interlibrary loan to see what other scholars have said about Bartram. 

Well, I have finished my post and not even discussed this week’s reading.  I will post my formal reading response tomorrow.  Here is a preview:  

Nina Baym, in her book Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-70 describes writers of woman’s fiction as envisioning many different ideal relationships with nature.  The most interesting writers are the women who “imagined the new West as the eventual locale of garden cities, wherein urban life preserved greenery and natural pace of the country” (46).  Could these texts contain early American women imagining a respectful relationship between humans and nature? Could I find early American women engaging with concepts that for their time were eco-conscience?

~Stay Gator friendly ;-)

Weekly Reading Response #1

[Jay Jay]

Buell, Lawrence.  The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.  Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995.  Print.

Chapters read:

• “Introduction”
• “Pastoral Ideology”
• “New World Dreams and Environmental Actualities”
• “Representing the Environment”

In the introduction, Buell outlines three broad topics his book, The Environmental Imagination, will cover: environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences of imagining a more “ecocentric” way of being (1).  While we’re not reading the entire book, the sections that we’ve selected did an excellent job of covering a little bit of each of these three topics.  Rather than go through the chapters point by point, I’ll be pulling out the highlights that grabbed my attention.

Buell speaks about “environmental double-think” in America, illustrating the ways in which Americans and our culture is both nature-loving and resource-consuming at the same time (4).  We are able to enact these two contrasting ways of life because we compartmentalize our actions.  I’m sure each of us could provide examples of this environmental double-think from our own personal lives.  For example, my washer and dryer is certified energy efficient, but I’ll toss something in the dryer for 5 minutes to de-wrinkle instead of ironing it, which would be way more energy efficient.

What I loved about Buell’s book is the historical aspect; Buell provides a history of American literature in order to expose and explain the relationships that have been built between literature, theory, genre, and the environment.  The construction of American literature has actually occurred three times, something that to be honest, I had given very little thought about.  Buell describes the three constructions as follows: constructed in the image of old world desire, reconstructed in the image of American cultural nationalism, and finally, reconstructed in the image of American exceptionalism (5-6).  The idea of, and construction of American literature did not happen in a vacuum, and we must take into account influences from Europe.

Buell provides four criteria of an environmental text, describing it as a “rough” check list.  I’m including it here because I think it will be an invaluable tool for Blake and I throughout this course in identifying appropriate primary texts.

1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.

As you can see, the list is rather short and it also illustrates, as Buell points out, how inclusive or exclusive the idea of “environmental” as a category can be.  It would be a mistake to say that all of an author’s works automatically fall within the category of environmental text—instead, scholars must look at an author’s works one by one and decide on an individual basis whether or not it meets enough of the above criteria.

The double-edged sword of new world pastoral writing: How do we truly “see” nature? (Weekly Reading Response #1)

As I sit down to write my findings for this week, I had to fight the urge to walk two blocks down and take pictures of the Crane family that frequents the retention pond near my apartments.  I am pretty sure they are Snadhill Cranes, and the little brown baby that stands only half the height of his parents’ legs is adorable. 

After writing this post, I had to go out and snap a shot of the crane family (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/ says they form mated pairs).  I was excited to find that there are actually two babies.  I worry about them living so close to a busy street, but aparently they have a long fossil record.  The crane family was across the street from their normal pond looking for what might be bugs, roots, or worms to snack on. 

Does it matter what humans call the animals around us? Certainly not to the animals.  So, it is harmless then for humans to use the power of language to name, divide, and classify the natural worlds around us—well, not really.  Buell describes the genre of New World pastoral writing as prose that “promotes the idea of vast territories of the actual globs subsisting under the sign of nature” (54).  This again sounds like a harmless thought that might even inspire ecocritical thought.  We live in nature.  However Buell says New World pastoral writing also, “lays the groundwork for developing the myth of the land as properly unspoiled, a myth that can give shape and impetus to more recent environmental restoration projects” (54).  Buell goes on to say that “contemporary new world pastoralists,” or modern environmentalists are challenged by needing to overcome this myth, the “green world, a dream, a concept” (55).   Basically, the danger of new world pastoral is that the colonizers of early America used it to describe the American landscape as a form of cultural capital, and this lead to the writers not seeing the actual environment that was there but instead what they imagined was there; Buell calls this “the aesthetics of the not-there” (68). 

Laura commented on my post from last week that it seems like William Bartram never actually saw the gators that he sketched.  I think her instincts were right on.  Bartram, who Buell says was writing settler pastoral travel non-fiction, imposed his imagined green dream on the landscape and his dragon-like vision emerged. 

There is a doubled edged-sword that seems to characterize new world pastoral writing though.  The writers are appreciating nature and lauding its beauty, but because they are looking at the world through colonizers’ eyes they see new lands as “empty” and ready to be filled by their classifications and interpretations.  The world is non-existent until the colonizer looks upon it and names it. 

Photo of William Bartram's drawing “View of the Alegator [sic] Hole,” 1790. Bartram’s note:

“Location of this sink was near the ancient Indian village and trading station of Talahasochte”

Image from www.floridamemory.com

So, yes writers like Bartram appreciate nature, but they are trapped in the colonizer’s ideology.  Bartram thought he was doing a good thing by categorizing and naming the Florida fauna, flora, and animals, but wasn’t he just colonizing it with his words?  Buell says that Bartram’s Travels in Florida, “is conquest in the guise of passive observation” (62).  I am not sure I would describe killing alligators as passive.  I still need to read the full text to make my final judgment.  Does Bartram kill other animals because they were in his way?  Buell mentions a snake that he had to kill, but I get the feeling that scholars who view Bartram as a one of the more sensitive, eco-friendly early American travel writers have excused some of his behavior toward nature because he was writing trapped in the colonial ideology.  But why excuse him and make excuses?      

I have personally been sucked in by the modern pastoral myth of a sublime, pure, green world unspoiled by humans.  However, I am beginning to try to see the “real” nature beyond this modern environmental rhetoric—though if it convinces people to be more responsible I am not sure it is a bad thing like Buell seems to suggest.  Is the crane family any less “natural” or pure because they like to fish and nest in the local retention pond?  I don’t think so. 

The retention pond that the crane family frequents most often.  They also like the park across the street and another pond next to a Walgreens.

This brings me back to Bartram and his Alligators.  I was surprised as I read more of Buell that he uses Bartram’s text as an example of early American non-conquest oriented pastoral writing. He claims, “Bartram’s excitement by the sense that the country in which he finds himself really seems like a pastoral Eden (despite mosquitoes and alligators) converts his intellectual ambitiousness into a defense of the region’s integrity, not an apologia for conquest” (63).  Buell focuses on how Bartram describes the Creeks and Seminoles with the same respect as the while settlers.  Ok, I see that, but what about how he describes the land, the animals?  He seems to have that “man is greater than nature; so, I have a right to be master of it” attitude.  Buell offers Bartram’s non-conquest pastoral writing and ingenious pastoral writing (used “as a weapon against cultural dominance” as alternate examples to the colonizing potential of new world pastoral writing.  I am just not ready to accept this until I explore the text more.  I fell that Bartram has an instrumentalist attitude (nature is to be used as an instrument for man’s benefit) that needs to be acknowledged.  I am not sure what this means for the text as a whole, or how scholars should look at new world pastoral writing differently.

Oryx and Crake Tangent

While reading Buell, I could not help but think of Oryx and Crake.  I have a feeling this will happen often because I spent last semester writing three lengthy papers on the novel and giving two presentations on it.  Anyway, I am now convinced that Crake’s problem is that despite his mathematical, scientific mind he wholeheartedly believes in a green dream, of nature unspoiled by humans and that is why he is driven to do what he does (I won’t give spoilers).  Also, I think this is why he insisted that the “perfect” humans that he created should all have green eyes.  It is a symbolic gesture—a  message that he wants them to see the world with green sight.     

Actually, I Felt Sorry for the Gator.

While reading Jay Jay's post about our first ecocritical brainstorming session, I realized that I am also interested in studying this theoretical approach because I feel that it can provide a lens to view the travel journals that I have read in a new perspective and perhaps answer some of my many questions about them.  Like Jay Jay, my primary research interest is in early American studies, and I am curious to see what I can discover about these texts by applying ecofeminist theory to them. 

I wonder, where does the simultaneous American love and abuse of nature that Lawrence Buell describes originate?

I took my first course in early American literature as an undergraduate.  One of the travel narratives that I read struck me because I was not sure what to make of it; my survey class did not offer much time to deconstruct it. I am referring to William Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida.  I was intially excited to read this because I am from Jacksonville, Florida, near the St. John's River where Bartram describes an encounter with alligators.  Growing up, I wondered why there were schools and places named after someone "Bartram."  As I read this travel journal, I anticipated finding the great deeds that he had done to receive this honor.

Copy of title page of 1792 reprint for J. Johnson. First published Philadelphia, 1791.
Image from Florida Photgraphic Collection at http://www.floridamemory.com/

I learned that Bartram was a Quaker naturalist and botanist whose stories and sketches of Early American wilderness inspired writers  such as Coleridge and Wordsworth.  Unfortunately, I was dismayed by Bartram's description of a violent brush with alligators while fishing on the St. Johns River, which ends in him shooting a gator that climbs onto the shore after he pulls his canoe onto the dry ground.

This text was disturbing to me because as a peaceful Quaker, botanist, and naturalist I did not understand why would Bartram be so aggressive with these creatures.  Yes, he might have been in danger is they attacked him, but he invaded their swamp to fish.  He also mentions that for the most part they did not molest him.  He even seems to take pride in shooting the large gator at the end even though he is not threatening.

It puzzles me that the introduction in The American Tradition in Literature, edited by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins, describes Bartram as only killing large animals "if hard pressed" (271).  From the brief excerpt from his journal, I see an early example of the current contradictory American "love" for nature, which disappears the moment nature is in between us and what we want. 

Like Bartram beating the gators in the head with an oar to get to a good fishing spot, even today Americans will move endangered Joshua trees in the high desert to build the latest development of identical suburban homes. So, what does Bartram's travel journal mean through an ecofeminist lens?  Can we say that it is one of the sites of the origin of dualistic relationship to nature? Perkins et al. assert that this text, "helped fix in European minds pictures of an American wilderness lush and untamed . . .it depicted a world both inviting and threatening" (271).

First, I need to see what other scholars have said about this text.  Second, I need to learn more about the origin of this text, and about the impact on its readers.  Yes, the text was widely published in London, but how long was it in print for? Who read it? Could it have contributed to the American view of the wilderness as the enemy of humans, or was this imported from England and simply reinforced by texts such as these?  Is Bartram really the naturalist hero who deserves to have schools and parks named after him, or does this text show a darker side?  Did he "other" the Florida wilderness in such a manner that contributed to the othering of the natives that would eventually be rooted in the American perception of the wilderness?

I pulled up a photo of Bartram's drawing of alligators in the St. Johns River and I was surprised that they looked almost like dragons.  What does this drawing say about how the gators looked in his eyes?  What bearing does it have on the text?  I will need to think about this more.

Photo of William Bartram's Sketch of Two Alligators in the St. Johns River, 1773 or 1774.  Image from Florida Photographic Collection at http://www.floridamamory.com/

Bartram's notes with the sketch:

Figure 1 represents the action of this terrible monster when they bellow in the Spring Season. They force the water out of their throat which falls from their mouth like a Cataract and a steam or vapour from their nostrils like smoke.

Figure 2 represents them rising up out of the water when they devour the fish. From the standpoint of natural history, perhaps the most important drawing ever executed by Bartram.

Well, like the female student that Nina Bayam describes as feeling sorry for the lion killed in Ernest Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, I admit to feeling sorry for the gator that Bartram shot.  It is this dissonance in the text that disturbed me and sparked my curiosity.

Until next time, don't go fishing where there are alligators. 

Blake

Jay Jay's Personal Goal Statement

[Jay Jay]

Blake and I are sitting next to each other in the large auditorium in the Classroom Building, listening to Dr. Patrick Murphy lecture in LIT3313: Science Fiction.  We are two of the three graduate graders for the course; our classmate Spencer is stuck on the other side of the classroom.  Dr. Murphy is lecturing on either The Dazzle of the Day or Girl in Landscape, I cannot recall which, and he starts speaking on ecophobia.  Our ears perk up, symbolically speaking.  We’ve been living and breathing Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood all semester long for another course, and Dr. Murphy has given us permission to teach the first half of Oryx and Crake to the undergraduates.  Ecophobia.  It’s perfect.  We begin to write down our ideas and thoughts on a piece of paper, our handwriting criss-crossing the page, alternating, crossing out ideas, making notes or changes to each other’s notes.  It’s sloppy, we misspell words, our writing becomes increasingly illegible as our excitement grows.  At the time, none of that matters to us, because we’re focused on capturing and recording the active act of collaboration before our inspiration flees.  

But it is the start of this independent study, although we did not know it at the time.  Within a few weeks we’re asking Dr. Murphy to oversee an independent study that combines our new fascination with ecocritical and ecofeminist theories with a field of literature, early American literature, which had already grabbed our attention and passion, thanks to Dr. Lisa Logan.  Would it be possible, we think to ourselves and to each other, to apply current ecocritical or ecofeminist theories to an early American text, a text that existed “before” ecocritical study?

This independent study, for me, is an academic experiment.  My goal is to learn the history of ecocritical theory, to identify and locate current trends in ecocritical theory, and apply aspects of ecocritical theory to selected texts.  My only experience with ecocritical theory comes from listening to Dr. Murphy lecture to his undergraduates, so I have much to learn.  I briefly encountered snippets of ecofeminism in Dr. Kathleen Oliver’s course, LIT6936: Theories of Space and Identity, this spring.  We read chapters from A Companion to Feminist Geography and Putting Women in Place that touched upon environmental issues, and the way in which an artificial link between woman, as a construct, and nature has been asserted as “natural.”  To be honest, these small doses of ecofeminist theory only served to whet my appetite for more—the field is fascinating, and I cannot wait to learn more about the theories and those who write them.  What does it mean to be an ecofeminist?  Can we locate ecofeminist authors or characters in early American literature?  If so, what role does race, gender, or class play?  

By the end of the course, I hope to have created a glossary of literary/jargon terms for the site (collaboratively, with Blake).  I want to be able to identity past and current trends in ecocritical theory, and contribute my own voice and ideas to the field.  The purpose of the blog is to share our reactions with the material with others—our peers, our professor, and other scholars who might visit the site.  While the formal assignments such as the paper proposal, abstracts, preliminary bibliography, and two papers will be clear and organized, the weekly reading responses will serve to record our process of exploration.  As such, they might written in a more “stream of consciousness” manner, or they might ask more questions than they answer.  Readers of the blog might see my handwritten notes uploaded to the blog, and you’ll be able to see the back-and-forth interaction between Blake and I on the site itself.  We’re also hoping that other graduate students that we know, and some that we’ve recently met at conferences, will be able to contribute to the blog as well, whether through guest posts or by leaving comments or recommendations.  It is our hope that the site becomes a resource center for other graduate students, faculty, and scholars.

I am looking forward to my academic experiment this summer, and sharing my experience with you all.

-Jay Jay   

What is Ecofeminism?

I realize that I did not provide a specific definition of Ecofeminism in my first post, as the title promised; so, here is an awesome diagram that I believe presents Ecofeminism in nutshell (pun intended).  

My limited understanding of Ecofeminisim—which I plan to expand through this study—is that Ecofeminists seek to dispel the myth of the 1/0 binary of human/nature that our society perpetuates.  As a beginner in this field, I am afraid that my knowledge of Ecofeminisim equates to "vulgar," or reduced Ecofeminism, and I look forward to discussing the intricate details in this blog.

~Blake

This image was taken from the blog: http://www.cottenielab.org/2010/11/ecofeminism-not-just-tree-hugging-and.html 

What is Ecofeminism and how can I incorporate it into my academic work? (Blake's Personal Goal Statement)

As I begin this blog, I realize that my motivations for pursuing this independent study are rooted in my personal history.  I was lucky enough to be raised by three women, who each taught me to view the world through different perspectives. 

My grandmother, with her political and journalistic career, always told me to be aware of how people interact with the world around them because this relationship signals everything about a person and about the culture they live in.  By showing me how to raise our eclectic “farm” of animals, my mother taught me an acute awareness of animals, and I learned to see them as complicated living beings instead of as instruments of human survival.  Finally, my science-minded aunt always took me on nature walks; bought me a telescope so I could explore the stars; and even explained how thunderstorms work, that are necessary for our ecosystem, and that they are nothing to fear.

My interest in Ecocritical and Ecofeminist studies blooms from my childhood fascination with people, the environment, and animals.  I have always been curious about the juncture where human, animal, and plant meet and what happens when we write about these experiences. 

Of course, I believe that these divisions (human/nature) are merely misrepresentations perpetuated by our culture, and that people are always interacting with nature.  I believe that it is a myth that we can live separate from nature, and escape it in our houses. 

I am not using an Ecofeminist philosopher to reach these conclusions but actually Henri Lefebvre—I believe it is correct to describe him as a Humanist Marxist.  Unfortunately, I do not have enough experience with Ecocritical theorists to look at nature through their lenses. I want to participate in the Ecocritical conversation with scholars in this field. This is the root of my problem that I hope to solve during this independent study.    

My goals are to develop a theoretical foundation that will allow me to successfully interact with scholars as an Ecofeminist.  Along with this specialized knowledge, I want to develop my lexis so that I may write in a manner appropriate for a scholar participating in this discourse community.  I want to become familiar with the conventions of this community and learn what constitutes a good argument and what evidence is acceptable.  I hope to interact with many other academics through this blog as we all work together to discuss the issues in the texts that I will read for this semester.  I will write a paper which employs eco feminist theorists to better understand an American literary work and submit it to an academic conference. Basically, I want to learn and practice how to apply Ecofeminist theory to literary texts and decipher the implications for the culture the text was written in and what it means for society today. 

This first week I am reading eco theorist Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination.   I am looking for the tools to analyze the intricate web that is the intersection of human, animal, nature, and culture.

In his introduction, Buell says that if many philosophers, such as Freya Mathews and Neil Everden, believe that addressing the environmental crisis involves changing our ethics and the way we perceive the world, “then environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relationship to it” (2).  Buell encourages an exploration of the presentation of nature in literature in order to re-imagine nature in a way that will serve as a basis for humans to acknowledge the contradiction in the American attitude towards nature; for example, we “love” nature yet we use toxic substances and amass large piles of trash that we relegate to lower-class neighborhoods so the wealthy can enjoy the natural beauty of a landscape without a landfill.    

 Buell asserts that in literature “natives” and “women” are often linked with nature to justify viewing them as less-than human: “nature has been doubly otherized in modern thought. The natural environment as empirical reality has been made to subserve human interests, and one of these interests has been to make it serve as a symbolic reinforcement of the subservience of disempowered groups: nonwhites, women and children” (21).  He points out that these prejudices are built into our culture and we need to become aware of them, define them, address them, and ultimately imagine “alternative models” (21). 

In terms of addressing literature, I am beginning to see how Ecocritical theory can be used to find biases, and analyze them.  It seems to me that imagining alternative models will be the most fun an eco critic can have.  I am still not sure the specifics of how these steps should be accomplished, but by studying Buell’s application of Ecocritical theory to Thoreau, I will have an initial model for the process of Ecocritical analysis. 

As a closing thought, because of my eco-sensitive upbringing I have always sought to show others the inherent value in nature.  However I, like everyone else, operate within the ideology that commodifies and instrumentalizes nature.  My mother did ultimately sell the dogs that she bred as a commodity, and my nature-loving aunt lauded technology that helped us advance and “progress” as a culture. 

I wonder: Can America be an ecologically conscious nation and still be a capitalist nation? Can America be a technologically advanced nation and ecologically responsible? What has our literature said about our thoughts as a nation on this topic?

Again, many thanks to all of our followers who will take this intellectual journey with us; we can’t wait to read your responses.

Sincerely,

~Blake