The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (review)

Locating herself as a scholar of Appalachia as well as a person who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt brings to her work the interwoven strands of ecofeminism; Appalachian studies; archival work with the letters, diaries, and photoscrapbooks of women social crusaders in Appalachia; and analyses of novels and poetry by lesser-known and unknown Appalachian women writers. Choosing to focus on the "roots of ecological feminism" rather than expecting to find "writers in absolute agreement with today's interpretations of environmental and social justice" (4), Engelhardt manages both to construct a convincing argument for the importance of the final four writers in her study—Mary Noailles Murfree, Effie Waller Smith, Emma Bell Miles, and Grace MacGowan Cooke—and also to convey a broader canvas of social and literary figures who engaged in "mountain work" and wrote about Appalachia at the turn of the twentieth century (62).

The biggest challenge facing The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature involves definitions. While acknowledging a range of definitions of Appalachia, Engelhardt poses the idea of Appalachia represented by the writers in her study as "a combination of geographical and cultural factors" (12), thereby laying the groundwork for her distinction between environmentalism and ecological feminism. For Engelhardt, ecological feminism includes attention to gender, race, and class as features of cultural identity and foregrounds social justice concerning both people and their nonhuman environments. Another related definitional challenge involves the four "types" of Appalachian stories written by women between roughly 1875 and 1925 that Engelhardt identifies as "the literature of the voyeur, the tourist, the social crusader, and the literature that forms the roots of ecological feminism" (5).

"Types" may initially seem more related to the narrators' approach to mountain people as literary (and social) subject matter than to literary forms or modes—not surprisingly, the writers Engelhardt focuses on in chapters two and three, "Voyeurs and Tourists" and "Literature of the Social Crusaders," treat their Appalachian characters as objects rather than persons with voice and agency. Yet this typology does allow the author to identify a spectrum of familiar attitudes toward Appalachia with particular texts that may themselves be unfamiliar to most readers. Clearly conflicted about making her own critique of the "social crusaders" in particular, Engelhardt nevertheless manages to make an invaluable contribution to Appalachian studies by adding to the scholarly and critical record a great deal of information concerning the many women who lived and worked in the mountains.

Chapters four and five feature extended analyses of work by Murfree, Smith, Miles, and Cooke. Although at moments in earlier chapters I wanted Engelhardt to do more to distinguish between a writer's characters and that writer's narrator, particularly in her critique of Rebecca Harding Davis, in these two chapters she manages to capture the power of even those narratives with which I was unfamiliar. Engelhardt's careful rereading of Murfree resists critical clichés about the Tennessee writer and stresses the complexity of her portraits of Appalachia. For example, she argues that Murfree's His Vanished Star explores "how the mountains are being sold to absent landowners [and] how a community might resist development it does not want" (108). Smith, Engelhardt claims, writes poetry about "women loving mountains, women exploring alone, and local women defining themselves" within a turn of the twentieth century black feminism that contributes to our ability to see all of Appalachia (129), not just its white citizens, and Engelhardt includes enough of Smith's lyrics to introduce the reader to this poet. Her analysis of Cooke's The Power and the Glory, a remarkably fast-paced and modern novel, engages gender, race, and class in its portrait of an ecological feminist model for the mountains. Finally, Miles's "ecological feminist manifesto" from The Spirit of the Mountains becomes the strongest critique of the negative effects of tourism and the "capitalist boom" for Appalachian women (153).

Sadly, of...