Reconciling Nature: Literary Representations of the Natural, 1876–1945 by Robert M. Myers (review)

In Reconciling Nature, Robert Myers paradoxically provides readings that refuse to reconcile the conflicting currents of thought that he sees running through eight canonical American novels. Indeed, the thesis of this study is that the “ideology of domination” of nature is so prevalent in American culture that it permeates even literature often perceived as protoenvironmentalist.

Myers’ stated aim is to “offer a more complete map of environmentalism in the period between the Progressive Era and the New Deal.” Ecocriticism, according to Myers, has mainly told a “resistance narrative”—beginning with Thoreau and running through Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and the contemporary environmental movement—that emphasizes the ways in which writers have resisted and countered the mainstream American ideology that warrants the rapacious utilization and domination of nature. This narrative, however, is too simple and rather inaccurate, and this book aims to add tension and counterpoint to the resistance narrative. Myers does this by uncovering the competing, often contradictory, ideas running through eight novels and their cultural contexts. The novels are compelling for their breadth and diversity: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), Maggie (Crane), The Awakening (Chopin), The Jungle (Sinclair), The Ford (Austin), An American Tragedy (Dreiser), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), and Go Down, Moses (Faulkner). Together, they represent a diverse range of geographies, ecosystems, concerns, and voices.

One of the main strengths of this book is its solid grounding in environmental history. The book’s extensive and well-researched contextualization situates these novels thoroughly in the political and cultural milieu of their times. This historical context foregrounds the complicated ways in which Americans were wresting with the dawning realization that nature is increasingly threatened by industrialization and urbanization—but also threatening to American progress. Thus the ideology of domination persists and intermingles with the growing resistance to that ideology.

For instance, the chapter on Maggie contextualizes Crane’s novella by examining progressive efforts to ameliorate the suffering in New York City’s slums. These efforts represented the dawning of an ecological view of the city, as they stemmed from the realization that the over-crowded, impoverished environment was itself a negative influence. But Myers emphasizes that these efforts wielded ecological insight in order to control nature, humans included. So here we see not so much the “resistance narrative” as the “ideology of domination” dressed up in ecological science. Ecology has been named the subversive science, but here Myers shows how it was wielded as tool of domination and control.

The book’s clear, consistent structure aids clarity. Each chapter follows the same organizational path: introduction, cultural context and environmental history, then close reading that integrates primary texts with that cultural and environmental context. This may sound elementary, but such clear communication of ideas is becoming ever rarer in humanities scholarship, so Myers text is a welcome respite.

In a broader context, this book pushes back, albeit very gently, against the idea that scholarship and activism are synonymous, an idea prevalent not only in ecocriticism but in humanities scholarship more generally. Myers notably refrains from using his readings as a means to address or advance ideologies in our own time. This is not incidental but central to his project here. He writes in the epilogue that “It is always tempting to read contemporary discourses into texts written during a different era and thus uncover the embryonic beginnings of our modern perspective.” It is exactly this tendency among scholars that has led, in his opinion, to the advancement of the inaccurate or incomplete “resistance narrative.” It is exactly this tendency that he has dedicated an entire monograph to countering. And he does a rather convincing job.