Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781-1924

Grounding the Texts: An Introduction

1 Grounding the Texts An Introduction There arose a sudden gust at N.W. so violent for half an hour, as it blew down multitudes of trees. It lifted up their meeting house at Newbury, the people being in it. It darkened the air with dust, yet through God’s great mercy it did no hurt, but only killed one Indian with the fall of a tree. —john winthrop’s journal,  July 1643 Humans no longer believe food comes from dirt. —barbara kingsolver fallen forests begins in the dirt. Or, more accurately, it starts with my hands in the black earth of my grandfather’s garden. A carpenter by day but a horticulturalist by desire, he enlists me as his accomplice in planting: Corn, beans, squash. Potatoes. Pumpkins, peppers. Tomatoes.¹ When winter breaks, we harvest sap for maple syrup; in the spring, set strawberries and onions. Come fall, we fill his battered Chevy station wagon so full with squash and pumpkins that I have to lie spread-eagled across the tailgate as we creep across the street to where we’ll heap our treasure for sorting in the back yard: golden butternuts, crenellated acorns, huge Blue Hubbards. To bring me home to Quascacunquen, which English settlers renamed Newbury, he has crossed the wide mouth of the Merrimack River, “swift water place.”² In 163, our ancestors landed nearby, where the Quascacunquen River uncoils toward the dark Atlantic.³ The New World’s poem was written well before Europeans arrived in Quascacunquen. Or in Greenland, Jamestown, Plymouth, St. Augustine, 2 grounding the te xts the Caribbean, Mexico. The New World’s wealth encompassed vegetable, animal, mineral, and liquid gold: food, timber, fur, human labor, water. Founded through resource wars with European colonial powers and indigenous nations, the emergent United States quickly began to expand its earliest borders. Although often elided from written history, women participated , indirectly and directly, on both sides of transnational encounters. An indication of their presence is the question posed by the distinguished Cherokee chief Attakullakulla, for whom women were central to cultural, spiritual, and political balance. Negotiating with English colonial representatives shortly before the American Revolution, he inquired pointedly, “Where are your women?”⁴ Among those who figured significantly in Cherokee and U.S. national affairs was Attakullakulla’s niece, Nancy Ward (Nanye-hi, c. 1738–c. 1822), whose oratory concerning resource preservation and peaceful cooperation is one of my touchstones in Fallen Forests.⁵ As the nineteenth century advanced , increasing numbers of North American women joined energetically in debates about resources and consumption; Ward was only one among many American women writers of the long nineteenth century who, from various perspectives, addressed issues that we would now deem environmental and that should engage our greatest energies.⁶ How did nineteenth-century American women’s literature (broadly construed to include oratory and as-told-to texts) understand and portray the relationship between women and nature? How did women writers respond to or share in environmental activism, also broadly construed? Why have we forgotten these writers’ lessons? What are their perspectives’ limitations? What productive analogies, as well as instructive contrasts, emerge when we read earlier writers against their twentieth- and twenty-first-century counterparts ? How does their work speak to current environmental concerns and environmental rhetoric? These are some of the questions that I explore in Fallen Forests. Such questions may seem tangential to much of the writing that I discuss . Unlike male writers such as Thoreau, who regarded nature as a means to individual self-development, or painters such as Thomas Cole, who understood it as an object for contemplating the sublime, women in this period more often perceived “nature” and “the environment” within a complex framework of embodied and social experiences. Nineteenth-century An Introduction 3 American women writers not only apprehended nature differently, they represented it dissimilarly; for example, they frequently developed hybrid genres less legible today as nature writing than Thoreau’s nonfiction and more coherently situated within the framework of environmental writing. Evincing what I will call literary emotional intelligence, they also used diverse affective approaches, including a putatively feminine sentimental rhetoric, to accomplish their aims. Fallen Forests expands the literary, historical, and theoretical contexts for some of our most pressing environmental debates, explaining how women writers enlisted genre to promote social change and how their rhetorical strategies—appeals to logic, ethics, and, particularly, emotion—engendered awareness of environmental concerns and...