Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature (review)

S. K. Robisch maps out an American literary landscape that both informs and is informed by various myths surrounding wolves in western culture. Throughout the book, Robisch sets out to demythologize the wolf figure, which he claims American authors and cultural critics have sought either to romanticize or to demonize. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature does a fine job of identifying its ecocritical methodology from the start: careful to set himself apart from those who view nature with a capital N through a privileged pastoral lens, Robisch claims that environmental critics should evaluate literature based upon how it confronts, rather than escapes from, difficult issues. Indeed, this book doesn't run away from the wolf, but rather confronts as a species through which we can deepen our understanding of American literature and culture. At a time when many ecocritics challenge the reality of wilderness by viewing it instead as a social construct, I find Robisch's emphasis on the materiality of nature and nonhuman life rather refreshing.

This book's ecocritical contribution to literary naturalism interests me because of my own efforts to provide green readings of American naturalist writings by Dreiser, Norris, Sinclair, and others. In multiple places, Robisch rightly notes that scholars of London's wolf stories have focused on the politics of race, gender, and class at the expense of biological and ecological realities surrounding wolves as a species. At the same time, Robisch cautions us against the potential pitfall of resorting to nature/culture dualisms (that is, failing to recognize how the two are deeply intertwined) when he says, "the term culture has been invested with almost as many meanings as its frequent antonym, nature." Through carefully crafted close readings of Call of the Wild and White Fang, Robisch shows that readers and critics can locate culture not only in the realm of human language and power struggles, but also within the nonhuman world of nonverbal communication between wolves. In this way, the book provides its most persuasive ecocritical perspective on London's literary works.

Robisch's reading of Jack London's wolf stories doesn't reach its full potential, however, because he fails to consider the complexities of American naturalism, nor does he account for its full historiography. Traditional critics like Charles C. Walcutt have read naturalist novels as socially deterministic, for sure, but more recent scholars such as Jennifer L. Fleissner have illustrated the strong feminist sensibilities present within Wharton's writings, for instance, or throughout Petry's prose. By situating London's wolf stories within a larger context of naturalist narratives that glorify "the rough-and-tumble man of aptitude and strength in the face of a cruel environment," Robisch resorts to old readings of London rather than contributing to a growing field of invigorating scholarship on American literary naturalism.

The book's strongest sections, I think, come through its contributions to ecofeminism. Though he acknowledges the risks of associating women with nature or the land and men with culture or civilization, Robisch convincingly claims that ecofeminists such as Carolyn Merchant can help readers to reevaluate animal narratives or female-authored wolf stories. By giving thorough attention to Lois Crisler's Arctic Wild and Renée Askins's Shadow Mountain, two memoirs written by women about wolves and wilderness, Robisch affirms that "the wolf book is not merely the province of adventurous and atavistic men." Moreover, I find ecofeminist parallels between "wolf-eradication programs," which Robisch's book contextualizes clearly in relation to United States history, and "sexism" or "hypermas-culinism" incredibly compelling. S. K. Robisch's work wonderfully confronts wolves in American literature and culture as an ecological reality from which human readers, scholars, and critics simply cannot escape.