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