Conference Paper

[Jay Jay]

Sarah Kemble Knight’s Nonhuman and Human Encounters: 

Hazzardos Rivers, Terrifying Darkness, and Surly Old Shee Creatures

This paper functions as an exploration of Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York through an ecofeminist lens by examining the representation of human and nonhuman in the text.  Specifically, I investigate the relationships forged by Knight between human and nonhuman entities through her use of language, rendering the entity as either subject or object.  Vivid descriptions of urban and rural lands are provided by Knight, as well as numerous interactions with people she encounters during her five day journey between Boston and New Haven.  Knight participates in enforcing the dominant patriarchal ideology of her culture by describing the land she encounters as an object rather than subject, and categorizing women, Native Americans, and African American slaves as othered objects.  Ecofeminism reveals the connection between the degradation of nature and the domination of women in Knight’s journal, which is expressed in terms of subject and object.

Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola examines Knight’s relationship with the land through the filter of the picaresque genre in her essay “The New England Frontier and the Picaresque in Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal.”  The frontier becomes “literary, colonized, domesticated, ‘urbanized,’ dangerous, comic, practical, and amoral” through Knight’s use of the picaresque (123).  Knight’s amoral descriptions of the land challenge the Puritan dialectical view of the land, rendering Knight’s voice unorthodox.  Additionally, Knight’s portrayal of the land is not informed by the garden metaphor found by Annette Kolodny in other women’s writings; in contrast, Knight often “urbanizes” the land she travels through, referring frequently to towns rather than the frontier.  Despite her unorthodox voice, Knight still enforces dominant patriarchal ideology, privileging the urban over the wild.

Robert O. Stephens claims that Knight describes the land in two manners: the world or the actual, and the underworld or the mythic.  He argues that scholars should focus on the mythic elements found within the journal rather than take the journal as a “literal diary.”  Stephens’s essay resituates Knight’s work within the “fruitful tradition of colonial American, and particularly New England, literature” (254).  Peter Kratzke states that whether Knight uses mimetic or mythic language and imagery, both are polemical in nature.  The body and spirit, and human and animal imagery are addressed briefly, and Kratzke notes that the “polemical landscape is blurred by very real physical danger,” which is of interest to this project (48).  Rivers in particular are the most frequently mentioned aspect of the land in the journal as Knight records her struggles to cross them without drowning.  If the landscape is the only imagery that escapes clear cut polemical categories, how does this affect the relationship of human to nonhuman in the journal?

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.

Conference Paper Proposal

[Jay Jay]

Conference Paper Proposal:

Madam Knight’s Journey: Bad Rivers, Spangled Skies & Terrifying Darkness

This paper will function as an exploration of Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York through an ecofeminist lens by examining the representation of human and nonhuman in the text.  Specifically, I will investigate the relationships forged by Knight between human and nonhuman entities through her use of language and metaphor, which has the power to render the entity as subject or object.  Vivid descriptions of urban and rural landscapes are provided by Knight, as well as numerous interactions with people she encounters during her five day journey between Boston and New Haven.  I am interested in whether or not the binary of human and nonhuman remains static, or changes with each encounter during the journey.  A sense of fluidity could indicate Knight’s willingness to view her relationship with the landscape as subject-to-subject, rather than subject-to-object.  

Ecofeminism explores the connection between the degradation of nature and the domination of women, and the consequences of patriarchy artificially linking the two entities.  By examining the manner in which Knight represents human (particularly other women, Native Americans, and African American slaves) and the nonhuman environment, I hope to locate moments of resistance to patriarchal ideology by Knight.  However, I suspect I will find Knight more often than not upholding, and even participating in, the degradation of both nature and the domination of people of color based on their economic, class, and racial status.  If certain humans are described as objects rather than subjects, can a connection be found to landscape as subject too?

While this paper utilizes ecofeminist literary criticism, which is a branch of ecofeminism, it still adheres to the call to action inherent in ecofeminism.  By applying ecofeminism to an early American text that has secured its place in the canon, I am arguing that it can withstand multiple interpretational lenses.  If Knight’s journal can provide critics and readers with another scholarly perspective not previously explored, then perhaps other texts from the same time period can do the same.  Additionally, Knight’s journal is available in a scholarly anthology, making it easily available (and affordable) for the college classroom.

My intervention in the current scholarly discourse about Knight’s journal does not disagree or contradict previous scholarship; on the contrary, borrowing a phrase from Annette Kolodny, it is a turning of the lens that can only add, not detract, to the conversation.  Scholarship regarding Knight’s journal does not yet include the landscape or the environment as an entity in its own right, nor does it explore the connections between women and nature.  Ecological literary criticism and ecofeminist criticism are growing fields, and this paper is an experiment to see how well an early American text withstands an ecofeminist reading without falling into the trap of ascribing feminist or ecological motivations to Knight.