Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781–1924 by Karen L. Kilcup (review)

At the confluence of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and feminist rhetoric, Karen Kilcup’s Fallen Forests maps contemporary environmental concerns onto an earlier generation of environmental writers, tracing how women writers of the long nineteenth century engaged issues that today are framed as resource wars, deforestation, environmental justice, sustainability, Christian ecology, and globalization. Kilcup’s study establishes that American environmental writing has deeper roots, has been purveyed in a wider variety of genres, and has been written by a more diverse set of authors than has commonly been acknowledged. By opening up the study of environmental writing to include nineteenth-century works by women of diverse race, class, and ethnic backgrounds, in genres that include oratory, as-told-to texts, maternal sermons, advice writing, autobiographical novels, a domestic servant’s diary, poetry, and hybrid genres, Kilcup illuminates women’s embodied relationships to the environment and examines how their gendered rhetoric—rhetorica—participated in environmental debates in their time and prepared the ground for a later generation of activist women rhetors working toward reformist goals.

Moving chronologically the book opens by examining texts from 1781 to 1840 that speak out against Euroamerican confiscation of Native lands. Regarding conflicts between settlers and indigenous residents as resource warfare, Kilcup analyzes Nancy Ward’s (Cherokee) speeches, Lydia Sigourney’s poetry, and Mary Jemison’s (Seneca) captivity narrative, showing how the different religious and cultural positions of these women influenced the form and reception of their appeals to emotional intelligence in their championing of environmental justice. Chapter 2 continues the focus on affective rhetoric, balancing Caroline Kirkland’s use of humor and Lydia Sigourney’s sentimental appeals, both of which question the extractive ethos of westward expansion, with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which suggests that concern for natural resources must include care for the plight of human resources. Accordingly, Kilcup next discusses midcentury laboring women’s texts that reveal how “progress and economic growth have meant the exploitation of women’s bodies and labor, both conceptualized as expendable natural resources.” An autobiographical novel by Harriet Wilson, a domestic servant’s diary by Lorenza Stevens Berbineau, and a poem by Lucy Larcom highlight the class, race, and place differences among women and prefigure conditions today in the sweatshops of multinational corporations. Chapter 4 shifts the focus from producers to consumers in the late-nineteenth century, anticipating today’s investment in “green fashion.” Studying the rhetoric of Celia Thaxter, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Pauline Hopkins, Kilcup makes ecofeminist ties between fashion, respectability, and sexuality on the one hand and environmental sustainability on the other. Encompassing the period 1880–1920, the final chapter turns to rhetorica by women of color, who employed a supple mix of rhetorical modes—sentimental, Christian, legal, humorous, and apocalyptic. Works by Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute), María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (Mexican American), and Zitkala-Ša (Sioux) address discriminatory public environmental policy, a topic that remains relevant today. An afterword on contemporary environmental writers Barbara Kingsolver, Jamaica Kincaid, Annie Dillard, and Winona LaDuke connects these writers’ subjects and emotionally intelligent appeals with those of the earlier writers that Kilcup honors in Fallen Forests.

Kilcup’s writing is refreshingly clear; her close readings are perceptive and sensitive to context; and the book’s scholarship is impeccable, featuring eighty pages of small-print endnotes and a fifty-six page bibliography. In addition to its valuable contributions to ecocriticism and feminist rhetoric, Fallen Forests will be a wonderful resource for teachers, introducing under-studied texts that, as Kilcup deftly shows, link meaningfully to pressing contemporary issues.