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

Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781-1924 marks the latest installment in Karen L. Kilcup’s notable, career-long devotion to the recovery of American women’s writing from the long nineteenth century. In the introduction, Kilcup explains that, at the most basic level, this volume “provides historical background to complicate discussions of women’s rhetoric” (p. 19). Indeed, Kilcup’s project substantially contests many traditional assumptions about women’s rhetoric—by which she means writings, oratory, and as-told-to texts—largely through analyses of hybrid genres (texts that resist and sometimes blend conventional genre categorizations). Beyond this, however, Fallen Forests demonstrates unexpected rhetorical engagements with the relationship between women and nature and with historical forms of environmental activism. Through Kilcup’s admirable “capacious and flexible” approach to analyzing women’s rhetoric, she argues for quite radical refigurings of traditional understandings of both sentimental literature and literary ecocriticism (p. 8). With seventy-eight pages devoted to notes and fifty-six pages featuring an impressive list of works cited, this sizeable study provides a scrupulously researched analysis that spans not only genre categories but also the races, classes, and the physical landscapes comprising the nation.

A specific success of this volume is its convincing joining of two fairly discrete lines of scholarship. Kilcup gracefully acknowledges both: in its focus on women writers, Fallen Forests is indebted to work by, among others, Elizabeth Ammons, Nina Baym, Paula Bennett, Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, Annette Kolodny, and, we must add, Kilcup herself; in its revision of the (until now quite-small) canon of early women’s writings about nature, Fallen Forests builds upon work by, among others, Michael P. Branch, Tina Gianquitto, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Daniel J. Philippon. One particularly exciting result of Kilcup’s merging of these lines of scholarly inquiry is her anticipation of the increasingly common scholarly attention—largely through material feminism and its related theoretical avatars—to the materiality of social experience and to human physicality as a form of environment. She seeks, as she puts it, “to reground textual study in physical reality, even while realizing the widely varying meanings of materiality” (p. 15).

Each of Kilcup’s chapters centers on a group of authors and explores an aspect of the authors’ engagements with nature and environment. Chapter one explores Nancy Ward (Cherokee), Mary Jemison (Cherokee), and Lydia Sigourney in the context of Native American removal and resource wars. Another chapter investigates the writings of Caroline Kirkland, Sigourney, and Harriet Jacobs as “manifest[ations of] an ecological intelligence that counters” their era’s “extractive ethos,” while a third illuminates the exploitation of women’s bodies and labor through works by Lorenza Stevens Berbineau and Harriet Wilson (p. 75). Chapter four explores how the writings of Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Pauline Hopkins countered discourses of consumption through rhetorics of simplicity and restraint, and the final chapter features analyses of works by Sarah Winnemucca, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša, Sioux) in the contexts of resource extraction, race, and ethnicity. An afterword then attempts to forge “appreciative and suggestive” connections between these writers of the long nineteenth century and select contemporary writers: Barbara Kingsolver, Jamaica Kincaid, Annie Dillard, and Winona LaDuke (p. 19). Through its integrative treatments of race, religion, ethnicity, and labor alongside topics such as deforestation, extractive consumption, and environmental justice, Fallen Forests invites readers to recognize that much literary scholarship persists in maintaining an ideological divide between nature and culture, world and society, and universe and meaning.

In a study of this scope and ambition, one is bound to perceive both moments of great strength and areas of relative weaknesses. Early on in the book, I questioned Kilcup’s casual echoing of a reductionist view of...