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.
- 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.
- The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
- Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
- 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.
What I found fascinating is Buell’s observation that despite the fact that the natural environment is a major theme in the canon of American literature, scholars exclude works that are in actuality devoted to the natural environment. We also privilege fiction over non-fiction, which is a mistake when it comes to environmental texts. While Buell does address the connections between gender and nature, and he does include many examples by women, I think the connection between women’s contributions to the environmental non-fiction field could be one of the reasons why it is so marginalized in the American canon.
Buell repeatedly returns to Henry David Thoreau for examples in his book, and what I did not realize until I read this text is Theoreau’s characteristic genres are strongly linked to nineteenth century women’s writing. For example, Buell lists the journal, the travel narrative, the natural history essay, and the local sketch as genres linked to women’s writing during this time period. But these are the texts that our American canon has chosen to disassociate from Thoreau, which leaves us with an incomplete and skewed picture of Thoreau as a writer, and as a product of his culture. I have to remind myself that Buell’s book was published in 1995, and now one can browse through and read through his collected works online at The Walden Woods Project. Of course, just because more of his writings are available doesn’t mean that his more feminine, in terms of genre, works are being taught in classrooms, but I suppose it is a start.
The chapter “Pastoral Ideology” was a very interesting read. The paradoxical and contradictory nature of the pastoral is made clear by Buell through a variety of examples, including D.H. Lawrence, Leslie Fielder (a literary critic), John Burroughs, Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold. The pastoral is problematic because of its service to local, regional and national particularism, and because of its tendency to identity the nation with the countryside (32). This tendency had two contradictory effects: it opened the possibility of more densely imaged environmentally responsive art, but it also reduced land to a highly selective ideological construct (32). The ways in which these contradictory effects played out in American literary theory are condensed by Buell, and we end up in the 1990s, with the concept that idealizing nature equals exploitation. Furthermore, the nineteenth century American romantic representations of the West are in fact, an ideology of conquest. Buell mentions the exhibit, “The West As America: Reintepreting Images of the Frontier, 1820—1920” at the National Museum of American Art in 1991. Unfortunately, I could not find a link to the exhibit on the National Gallery website, but I did find this collection of articles and reviews by Mary Wood, a professor at the University of Virginia. If you have time, check it out here.
I suppose I should not be surprised when Buell states that American pastoral representations cannot be pinned to a single ideological position, considering the contradictory nature of the pastoral (44). This is best illustrated in the section “Women On Nature,” which explores the relationships between the pastoral, nature, and women writers during the nineteenth century in America (but only briefly). The pastoral, Buell argues, has functioned as a means of empowerment for women writers, as seen through the writings of Elizabeth Wright, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Dorothy Wordsworth, Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mary Austin. Pre-modern women’s pastoral functioned to question the normative values that regulated it (seemingly), while at the same time exploring the claims of self-realization against those of social constraint (49). This dual functionality of the pastoral seems amplified when the author is a woman, which should make our project of locating ecofeminist theories in women’s writing an interesting and hopefully fruitful journey.
In chapter two, “New World Dreamers and Environmental Actualities,” Buell address the concept of settler culture and its relationship to the pastoral. I had never heard of the specific term “settler culture” before, but as I read through the chapter, it made sense. The myth of American exceptionalism is debunked by locating “family resemblances” within settler cultures by examining their pastoral literature. In short, Americans were not the first, nor the last, to locate amazing landscapes in their country. Buell also examines indigenes pastoral, and the ways in which indigenes would use pastoral as a weapon against cultural dominance; his main examples come from literature by Native Americans and African Americans (63).
Buell closes the chapter with two ideas that I think could help me in locating ecocritical and ecofeminist ideas in my selected primary texts. First, Buell states, “[w]ithin the centuries-long series of recorded encounters between observers and landscape in American history are countless instances when the eye’s ‘empire’ is suspended and the eye is educated, the mind shaped, whether for the nonce or forever, by the land’s template” (81). Secondly, “[v]ision can correlated not with dominance but with receptivity, and knowledge with ecocentrism” (82). I think these two ideas can act as a framework of sorts, along with Buell’s four criteria of an environmental text. Can these moments of ecocentrism rather than a homocentric vision be located in women’s writings of early America? I hope so.
The final chapter that we selected, “Representing the Environment,” addresses the filter of the human body and our senses. Ideology, Buell reminds us, is not the only filter through which we read literature. And yet sadly, professors of literature are often anti-environmentalists in professional practice because “good writing” marginalizes biota rather than featuring and celebrating it (85). The devaluing of the nonhuman environment in literature seems to contradict the fact that in American literature, “the main canonical forms of environmental writing are the wilderness romance and the lyric mediation on the luminous natural image or scene” (85). Again we see how the pastoral is contradictory.
Buell presents a new vision of American literature, in which fiction is not placed above non-fiction, and in which the dual functionality of the pastoral is recognized. The art of discovery should be held above the art of fabulation (telling invented stories, often filled with fantasy) (92). What I took from this chapter is the boundaries that scholars have thrown up between fiction and non-fiction are damaging. Non-fiction, especially environmental non-fiction, can contain both fact and fiction, it can tell the truth and wildly elaborate all in the same sentence. Buell states that environmental representations have the power to invent, stylize, and dislocate while at the same time, serving “a decidedly referential project” (99). These texts also have the power to interweave data and autobiographical vignettes, further blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction (100).
I know that I’ve left out a lot of information from Buell’s introduction and the three chapters, but I hope my summaries have been helpful to the readers. I’m still mulling over the large amount of data I’ve consumed in this past week, but I’m glad that Buell provided some excellent tools and frameworks for identifying an environmental text. I think I might turn toward a piece of non-fiction for my first short paper, because to be honest, Buell makes a convincing argument about the wealth of environmental texts found in the non-fiction genre.
I’m going to close this weekly reading response with one of my favorite quotes from the book. I hope you find it amusing too.
"I wonder then, more than ever, where people get the absurd notion of talking about 'refined' and 'vulgar,' or 'masculine' and 'feminine' employments. It sounds as ridiculous as the French way of calling knives masculine and forks feminine. My knives are no more masculine than my forks. Elvira's shooting was as feminine as her curls, and the Professor's cooking as many as his beard." —Elizabeth Wright. (47)
I like your ideas for how we can use Buell’s theories in our own research. I agree that we can look at how writers see the American landscape to identify ecocentrisim and hopefully pre-ecofeminist attitudes toward recognition, conservation, and mutual respect for the land. (I wonder is pre-ecofeminist a valid theoretical category?) I hope to find these attitudes in pioneer or colonial women’s writing. I believe that we can find evidence that not all women merely gazed at the land with the colonizer’s eye.
ReplyDeleteI also think that we can really use Buell’s theory about representing the environment to defend our examination of the literal environment in texts. Buell states that because in contemporary literary theory “‘realism has been deconstructed,” it becomes easy to dismiss nature in literature because it is not reflective of the “real” (87). This leads to a marginalization of nature and even ignoring its presence in literature. He continues by arguing that a “fallacy of derealization” of nature plagues the American mind not only in literature but in daily life because they have lost a “sense of environment dependence” as a result of technological advances (111). Finally, he suggests that literature’s mimesis of the environment is more ecocentric and “far healthier for an individual, and for a society” than a computer generated environment that implies that nature can be accurately reproduced(114).