Conference Proposal

[Blake]

Examining the Ecofeminist Elements of Bartram’s Anthropomorphosis Figures in Travels

 
        In the introduction to Chapter Three of William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings, Laurel Ode-Schneider analyzes Bartram’s views on the relationship between human and nonhuman nature as presented in two previously unpublished letters.  She finds that Bartram’s anthropomorphosis figures in these letters are used to reverse the human/animal hierarchy in order to illustrate its unbalanced nature.  Ode-Schneider remarks that the anthropomorphosis figures found in Travels fail to function in a similar manner as the ones in his letters; she states that they operate only as unserious metaphors.

 I disagree with Ode-Schneider that the anthropomorphosis figures in Travels are insignificant.  Instead, I agree with Charles H. Adams who proposes that Bartram’s anthropocentric metaphors work to illustrate the interrelatedness of humans and animals and remind his readers that they should observe themselves in nature because nature is essential to humans.  I expand upon Adam’s ecological argument, and find that when examined with an ecofeminist lens the anthropomorphosis figures reveal Bartram’s recognition of (an)other in nature, human and nonhuman interdependence, and the necessity for diversity instead of domination.  Therefore, an ecofeminist analysis proves that Bartram’s anthropomorphosis figures in Travels function to expose the false nature of patriarchal Enlightenment ideology, which espouses that man is superior to animals. 

Because Adams demonstrated that Bartram’s anthropocentric literary devices are used in a liberating instead of oppressive manner, I believe the term “anthropomorphosis” is more appropriate because the metaphors are not employed to show that humans are central to the universe, but they are a means to oppose the Enlightenment idea that “a mere mechanical impulse” drives nonhuman animals instead of reason and emotion.             

I will examine three specific anthropomorphosis figures in Travels to illustrate my claim: a bear cub that Bartram describes as crying like a child after hunters kill its mother, which shows that animals are not something Other than human, but instead are Another being with their own families and emotions; a spider that he imagines is a Native American hunting prey demonstrates that animals and humans are similarly interdependent on the web of life for sustenance; also, by painting a group crayfish as soldiers fighting a school of fish, he demonstrates a need to acknowledge that the diversity of biota expands beyond narrow categories of Linnaean classification and includes diversity in characteristics such as temperament, intelligence, strategy, building ability. 

Bartram’s expression of ecofeminist-like philosophical beliefs through his anthropomorphosis figures proves that they are not merely “whimsical,” like Ode-Schneider says, but that they function to reject patriarchal ideology.  It is essential to recognize these figures in Travels as one of Bartram’s devices to express his opposition to the Enlightenment man/nature hierarchy because it further clarifies how Bartram was resistant to colonial ideology of his time.  Future exploration of the relationship between the anthropomorphosis figures in Travels and the metaphors in his subsequent letters might show that the letters reveal views that Bartram had always held but did not feel they could be blatantly stressed in a published text because his primary audience was Enlightenment America.