Fawn Redux

I thought you might enjoy this updated version, with an Indiana twist, of Cooper's fawn tale.

Narrative Strategy and Weeds in "Summer"

In light of our discussion of “Spring” Monday and of the difficulty of classifying Rural Hours (“amazing, unclassifiable” according to Professor Irmscher’s essay) I am quite struck by one of James Fenimore Cooper’s descriptions of the work.  He writes his daughter that, whilst editing the proof sheets, he finds that her entries “carry me along with the interest of a tale” (Introduction, xii).  Of course, the work resists actually being a “tale”: there are only minimal events; the disjunctures between journal entries curb any rising action or emotion; and the main recurring character is Cooper’s “we.” 

Yet the work does seem to proceed with the motion of a tale, not only on the large-scale cycle of the changing seasons, but also in a pattern of seeking, finding, and gathering which is daily repeated.  Sights, plant specimens, and scholarly references are all sought and repetitively “gleaned” and assembled by Cooper.  This recurring structure of searching and finding allows for the development of certain tensions which I think contribute much of the narrative interest of the “tale.”  I am thinking specifically of the tension between what is found and what should be found, what belongs and what doesn’t belong, and who decides what should be where.  (Note: I found Sam’s description of Cooper’s colonial relationship with her environment incredibly interesting in this respect.) 

One example of this tension of belonging/not belonging comes in Cooper’s discussion of weeds in the entry from June 6 (pp. 64-7 in the standard edition.)  Cooper invokes two binaries here, distinguishing between weeds and other, desirable plants as well as between home-grown or “American” weeds and “Old World” invaders.  Cooper asserts that European weeds have nearly overrun the native kind; the reverse trans-Atlantic journey, of American weeds to Europe, has been comparatively less successful.  This discussion of movement, settlement, and – importantly – encroachment hints at anxieties about immigration, and about who belongs where.  Perhaps such anxieties speak to the Cooper family’s history of taking land which formerly belonged to native “others,” or perhaps they are based on apprehensions of European “others” arriving on America’s shores, or perhaps such anxiety is a reflection of Cooper’s sadness that a place formerly controlled by her family now belongs to “other,” perhaps less heroic or productive, settlers.  In any case, the personification of the weeds allows them to serve as proxies for Cooper’s exploration of the tension of belonging.  The weeds are personalized as “individual[s] of the vegetable race” (66).  This individuality is defined by unwantedness, by the weeds’ insistently misplaced presence:

Upon the whole, it is not so much a natural defect which marks the weed, as a certain impertinent, intrusive character in these plants; a want of modesty, a habit of shoving themselves forward upon ground where they are not needed, rooting themselves in soil intended for better things, for plants more useful, more fragrant, or more beautiful (66).

 

It is not simply the weed’s specific evil (noxious smell, ugliness, etc.) that is offensive to Cooper, but rather the daring implied by their presence.  The weeds seem to trespass the boundaries of good etiquette.  As well as being immodest and forward, they are referred to as “rude” and “troublesome,” and appear “so freely and so boldly,” like unwanted working-class visitors in Cooper’s best parlor (64).  Their presence is also bad economy, a poor allocation of resources: they take up space that could be better filled by worthier plants.  I cannot help thinking here of one of the chief arguments for Indian removal.  Indians, it was said, failed to use land as they should; they wasted the rich resources of the American wilderness (this is all tragically ironic in hindsight) by failing to cultivate land in the same way that Euro-American settlers would.  They were, in a sense, the “weeds” which were removed by the “planting” of Cooperstown (see p. 139 for a discussion of civilized improvements made after the “savages” were dispatched.)  This passage doesn’t have to be about Native Americans, though, despite the interesting echo.  It could also be about supposedly lazy Irish moving to Cooperstown, or John Field types, or any model of presence different from that of cultured, upper middle class Susan Fenimore Cooper. 

To bring this back to the idea of narrative, and of Rural Hours inspiring “the interest of a tale,” it seems to me that Cooper’s strategy is to amplify a base narrative (I think of it as searching, finding, and gathering, but perhaps this would be an interesting question to discuss) with scenes that invoke tension, thereby complicating or enriching the cycle.  In this case, the weeds are profoundly not sought, although they are found, and only gathered in the sense that they are listed, classified, and characterized in the work – gathered textually but not physically. 

Tomorrow I’d like to look at two additional episodes in “Summer” which seem to me to complicate the searching/finding/gathering narrative: the Indians’ visit to Cooper (pp. 107-113) and the story of the tamed fawn (pp. 149-151).  I like to think that these two episodes speak to each other in some ways; perhaps we can talk about that as well.

portrait of a scientist

Portrait of Rosa Smith Eigenmann from Eigenmann  mss. 

Last semester, I came across Rosa Smith Eigenmann's name when doing some preliminary research for another topic for another class. Our discussion about Maria Audubon last week (particularly about women in the academy) reminded me that I had been meaning to track her down at the Lilly. I was lucky to discover that the Eigenmann mss. has many rich and beautiful handwritten letters written to and from Rosa and her close and extended family, and I’m hoping to do more with the collection as the semester progresses. In the meantime, Prof. Irmscher thought it would be neat to share this stunning portrait with the class.

Abbreviated background information:

First, Rosa is regarded as the “first female ichthyologist of any accomplishments” (her Wikipedia entry also lists her as the “first notable female ichthyologist”). She spent most of her youth in California near San Diego, and then moved to Bloomington to study at Indiana at the request of David Starr Jordan, first president of Stanford but who was teaching at Indiana at the time. Rosa published several scientific articles and discovered at least one new species of fish before she married her husband Carl (also a student of ichthyology at Indiana and a famous alumnus as well). Rosa and Carl also collaborated on several articles. Following the birth of their five children, Rosa “retired from active research,” instead “continuing as the editor of her husband’s manuscripts rather than as his collaborator.”

On to the portrait, which to me reads like an intersection of Victorian ghost & post-mortem photography and old and new portraits of scientists with their specimen.

There are at least two “editions” of this photograph in the Eigenmann mss. The one included here is larger but also cropped, so that we see less of the interior of the room. My guess is that it was taken in the early to mid-1940s (she looks quite old and died in 1947), possibly by her daughter Thora. What strikes me first are Rosa’s cataracts (her left eye is almost completely clouded over) and the similarly white and foggy portrait (or x-ray) of the fish she holds in her left hand, presumably near her right knee, or lap, as others would hold a kitten, perhaps. Rosa’s wrinkly skin, cataracts, and fish silhouette share the same ghostliness, while her knitted sweater and the upholstered curtains weigh down the portrait.

Obviously, this would be a completely different photograph if the fish wasn’t there. In a sense, Rosa was her fish. Her life—the people and places that mark her biographies—was contoured by her study of them; fish led her to Carl, and her marriage to him in effect ended her participation in field research. Prof. Irmscher notes that other portraits of scientists include the actual specimen, not “just" a photo or some other representation of them. In Rosa’s portrait, there seems to be a parallel between the fish “by proxy” that she holds and her later role as Carl’s “editor” (instead of “collaborator”): reading and editing scientific data about the fish is not the same as pursuing the fish in real-time. In the morbid Victorian sense, the inclusion of the fish-by-proxy might be a way of visually preserving the “Specimen”—and her career in ichthyology—for future generations while implicitly functioning as a mirror of both her own and her viewers’ own mortality (a la memento mori). Finally, I think it’s poetic that the species of fish that she discovered in her youth was the blind (!) goby (and that she endured several surgeries in old age to fix her failing eyesight before dying of heart disease.)

There’s a lot more to say about the photograph, but I think I’ll leave it there. 

Blind Goby from Science Photo Library

some thoughts about "Nature"

Note: I haven’t thought these ideas through but in the meantime thought I would provide a sort of sketch-type response. I apologize in advance for the messiness and erratic italicization and bold-ing; I’m using this post as a place to work through some of my thoughts about the essay.

First, probably because the essay itself was so confusing, I find myself going back to the epigraph by Plotinus—similarly perplexing but at least more concise: “Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know” (1, my emphasis). I’m including the quote because this language of “doing” is important to my first bullet point below.

Anyway, here are some admittedly confusing notes (I feel like Emerson’s writing prompts similarly convoluted responses…)

      1)  I’m interested in the relationship and difference between Emerson’s “Nature” (in all of its various iterations…the “NOT ME,” as Wilson suggests) as that which “only” does (and I’d like to know what that doing is—I was thinking about Erasmus Darwin’s classes of motion in Zoonomia) versus the human’s (and/or citizen and/or American’s) capacity and will for both doing and knowing. I was sensing a very Protestant vibe, particularly with the language of progress and betterment (“must,” “need,” “force,” etc. are words that repeat throughout the text). Emerson’s “naturalist,” as I understood him, seemed to be an “improved” edition of the familiar Capitalist spirit. Relatedly, the essay’s segments are apparently divided according to the different capacities of what “Nature” can do for us—as if Nature, in both its physical and abstract dimensions, exists (and “does”) so that humans might have some experience of self-making, transcendence, divinity, understanding, etc.: “All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation” (9). Later, in the segment “Prospects” (again he persists with a Protestant-progress theme), Emerson writes: “At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted and he is a selfish savage” (31). In applying the remaining half of his “force”—to “ratchet things up,” so to speak—man might “behold the real higher law” (32). I’m not sure if the last couple of pages were a call to a combined sort of scientific-spiritual innovation through the superior understanding of nature and God—“when a faithful thinker [shall] kindle science with the fire of holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation”(32)—but maybe?

      2) Second, I’m curious about Emerson’s use of the language of “impressions” and “surfaces,” particularly in relation to the “transparent eye-ball,” the on-set of photography, and perhaps the new relationships between types of verbal and visual descriptive (and also scientific) representation and documentation. God, for instance, “refuses to be recorded” (26), and Emerson seems more capable of describing a unity of landscape than “minuteness in details” when there is no “archetype” he can hold the cluster of “things and thoughts” against for comparison/parallel (28-29). I also think there’s something interesting he’s doing here with the sublime (the Romantic sublime versus an overwhelming data-overload, anti-sublime of science & industry or something).  

This all might be total misinterpretation and/or cliche, but I felt compelled to post…

Emerson, "Nature"

Travis will guide us into the text, but since a few of you have reported difficulties with Emerson's style, I thought I'd offer a few reading tips.  It's also useful to bear in mind where we ended up in our discussion of Audubon:  indoors, with the death of a captured bird in a cage, killed solely for the sake of art.  Audubon killed his eagle in Boston in 1833;  Emerson offered his definition of "nature" in Boston in 1836.   Here is an image of the title page of the first edition of Nature; on Wednesday I will show you a first edition in the collections of the Lilly, with Emerson's own handwritten annotations.


1. Consider the structure of Emerson’s essay. The essay develops from the “Introduction” to “Nature” (a kind of definitional statement with the description of an exemplary experience at the end--the “transparent eyeball” passage) to “Commodity” (which talks about the uses of nature; the access we have on the level of the senses) to “Beauty” (which discusses the “higher” uses of nature, as something that satisfies the soul and the intellect and leads to the creation of art) to “Language” (where Emerson claims that all of nature is a “metaphor for the human mind”) to “Discipline” (where Emerson details the “lessons” nature teaches us, “the moral influence of nature”) to “Idealism” (dedicated to the question “whether nature outwardly exists”) to “Spirit” (which sort of provides an answer to the previous section--namely that “the Supreme Being does not build up Nature around us”) to, finally, “Prospects,” where Emerson refers to Bronson Alcott, twice, as his “Orphic Poet” and suggests--critically, of course--that “Man” presently applies to nature “but half his force.”

2. The hidden theme of Emerson’s “Nature” is “man.” Why?  What other possible conceptions of the relationship between “man” and “nature” can you imagine? Look, for example, at the following passage: “The instincts of the ant are very unimportant considered as the ant’s; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits become sublime.” (Charles Darwin believed that the brain of the ant was a much more amazing instrument than that of humans).

3. Can you relate Emerson’s theory of language to his own writing style? Are there different levels of discourse in the essay? Where does he bring himself and his own experience of nature in (if at all)?

A Note About In-Depth Class Preparations

I have included a link to topics for in-depth preparations and added the names of those who have already signed up.  Those of you who haven't yet, please make sure you do so as soon as possible.  Your in-depth class preparations can take different forms.  Let's assume you had been assigned the essay on the "Golden Eagle."  You could have taken different approaches:

1.  Comparative:   Talk about the relationship between image (or images) and text.  You could begin wit a short summary:  explain the differences between the painting and the print; summarize the text.  Then ask questions:  How do we experience the painting or print; how do we experience the text?   Ask the class about differences between the two?  Is Audubon more innovative as an artist than as a writer?   The print tells a story (the bloody hare; the abandoned log in the background); whereas the text constantly asks us to see.   Make sure that you know, or ave thought about, the answers to the questions you are asking.  This need not last more than half an hour; although you would be welcome to moderate the entire class, know that I stand ready to take over after 30 minutes at the latest.

2. Analytic:  Focus on the text only.  Read and prepare the text carefully.  Identify references to sight and seeing.  Work with the rest of the class on identifying references to sight and gazing and think about their significance.  You could bring another (literary) text for purposes of comparison (let's say Poe's "The Tell[-Tale Heart").

3. Contextual:  research golden eagles in the 1830s (numbers; other contemporary books about birds including references to golden eagle--you can easily find those by going through the Lilly catalogue or nby searching googlebooks, limiting the time frame of the sources in which you are interested).  Who is Moses Kimball (from whom he acquires the bird)?  Who is Dr. Parkman?  Why was the hunter eliminated from the print?  Other plates with Audubon's self-portrait?

The last approach would require the most preliminary research.   Generally, be as creative as you would like!  These are just three ways of preparing these presentations.  No one needs to fear that he/she will have to conduct an entire class!  And I am always available to help you map our your own approach.

Link to my post about Radcliffe College

Here's a link to my recent post about women's education in the early days of the Harvard Annex, later known as Radcliffe College.

Audubon and his readers

                Both Scott Russell Sanders and Christoph Irmscher address the problems inherent to studying Audubon’s writing, problems which stem in part from the “tidy-minded” editing of his granddaughter, Maria Audubon (Sanders 1).  Sanders describes how the Audubon writing “cooked” by Maria’s editing is blander than the original – stripped of references to sex, feelings, or excess – and made, in other words, more correctly Victorian (2-3). 

                In addition to these deletions, Maria also excises Audubon’s frequent references to his audience.  In “My Style of Drawing Birds” (Irmscher edition), Audubon repeatedly invokes his reader as companion, student, admirer, and judge.  He tells us that his original “mankin” “cannot [be] describe[d] in any other terms than by telling you that when it sat up it was a very tolerable looking ‘Dodo’!” (760).  The tone of jovial camaraderie is followed by a strategic withholding of information from the reader.  In speaking to the wife of his tenant at Mill Grove, Audubon tells us “a curious scene ensued… which is not worth your While to hear” (761).  Such authorial reserve could be interpreted as an instruction to the reader to pay greater attention to what follows, as this will take the place in the narrative of other, held-back information.  A paragraph later, he engages the reader again: “Think not reader,” and, later in the paragraph, “Reader, this was what I shall ever call” (761).  These calls upon the reader urge him/her to participate as witnesses in the trajectory of Audubon’s bildungsroman.  The more frequent calls upon the reader occur at the climax of the “New discovery,” when Audubon begins using wires to arrange recently-deceased birds prior to painting them.  Audubon does not just conceive of his reader as companion (or admirer?) at such moments of discovery, however.  He also invites his reader to judge the finished product which stems from that moment, “Successfull or not, I leave for yourself to decide” (763) – essentially a rhetorical question.  Audubon seems to be constructing an ideal audience: one which will laugh with him at his early attempts, pay attention to the important parts of the narrative, admire the apparent stroke of genius which allows him to go forward with his project, and be present for the final, triumphant, reveal of the drawings.

                Maria deletes each of these references – either excising the single words, “reader,” “you,” or the entire clause or sentence which refers to audience.  This is puzzling: Maria’s recalibration of her grandfather’s character to erase its “asperities” (to borrow from Audubon’s description of his own style) is understandable, albeit lamentable in our eyes.  But why should she interrupt the conversation which Audubon establishes with his audience?

                I am not sure why Maria should interfere in this particular way with Audubon’s writing, but will speculate that this aspect of her editing perhaps stems from the same motivation which inspired her to delete his references to strong feeling, sex, etc.  If her goal was to re-craft Audubon’s persona into a standard-issue Victorian gentleman, then the references to the reader – which could be seen as emphasizing the distance between author and reader – must be deleted as well.  Audubon’s readers were wealthy, sometimes noble, and highly-educated; Maria would prefer that Audubon be seen as one of them.  Instead, Audubon’s references to the reader could be seen to establish his role as one emphatically distinct from them: the authentic frontiersman leading his audience into the wilderness.  His attempts at establishing a conversational equality with his readers would be interpreted by Maria as another acknowledgment of their actual inequality.  Whenever we come across a reference to ourselves as readers, after all, we are reminded that we are just readers, and are distinct from the author as consumers rather than producers of the text.  In this sense, Maria’s consistent deletions of Audubon’s “dear reader” moments could be seen as re-fashioning Audubon’s character by papering over, however slightly, the differences between a wealthy cultured reader and an individual whose buckskin dress figures the nineteenth-century status of American culture, emerging out of the wilderness.

                Imaginatively, I wonder if Maria cringed as she thought of her grandfather walking through London in fringed buckskin.  Perhaps she would have preferred that he be a more genteel armchair naturalist, the kind which he repeatedly assured his readers he was not.

New link added

I have changed the design a little bit--take a look at the link on the menu bar in the upper left.   I have provided some secondary readings on Audubon--all of them strictly optional--ranging from Scott Sanders's seminal piece from the 1980s to a 2007 essay by the ecocritic Michael Ziser.  No need to read them thoroughly: scan them if you'd like to get some additional ideas!

Audubon, excerpts from Ornithological Biography

Here are links to the Audubon essays from Ornithological Biography (1831-39).  All of these, with the exception of the last, are pdfs, made from my edition of Audubon's Writings and Drawings (Library of America, 1999).  If you want to rotate them in order to read them online (rather than printing them out), just download the pdf.   The bird biographies are "The Great-footed Hawk"; :"The Carolina Parrot"; "The White-headed Eagle"; "The Passenger Pigeon"; "The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker"; and the "Common Gannet".   For comparative purposes, I am also including the chapter on "The Slaughter of the Pigeons" from Cooper's The Pioneers  (1823), which was likely one of Audubon's sources.

"My Style of Drawing Birds"

Compare the original version of this important essay (transcribed by myself from the manuscript) with the version published in 1897, in Audubon and His Journals, by the artist's granddaughter, Maria R. Audubon.
All the Audubon texts (with the exception of the "Common Gannet") are from my edition of Audubon's Writings and Drawings, published by the Library of America,

Welcome to the Course Blog for L-632

This blog was created as a forum for your reading responses and as way for all of us to exchange ideas about nature writing.  I am asking that each of you submit at least four entries over the course of the semester.  There is no deadline, and no prescribed length.  If you decide to write more, this will affect--positively, of course--your final grade!   Enjoy.