"Sickly" nature

Like Brooke, I was very much struck in this section by the repeated characterization of nature (in Brooke’s post, specifically water) as poisonous to humans.  This is a theme repeated with a difference from Traill’s work, as Traill is concerned with the healing or poisonous properties of plants.  In our discussion of Traill, we talked about how she (mainly) characterizes plants as curative and humans as sickly.  I think Austin does something different here, as she describes a “sickly” nature.

Austin suggests repeatedly that nature itself is sick, in ways that blur the difference between the human body and the natural world.  She uses the word “sickly” twice, describing both earth (“soil sickly with alkali-collecting pools”) and water (“sickly, slow streams”) (92).  Less obvious word choices also serve to characterize nature as sickly.  She refers, for instance, to “wastes” of reeds.  “Wastes” can be read as a geographic term signifying an empty expanse (Melville uses it to describe the ocean, for instance), but also suggests the “wasting away” characteristic of tuberculosis.  In the same vein, she repeats imagery of being bleached – a “faded white” heliotrope and “ghostly pale” reeds – creating the image of a nature which has wasted like an invalid’s face.  She describes stalks as “succumb[ing],” as after a long illness, says pools of water are “evil-smelling like old blood,” and describes the “leakage” from canals – the water, here, is like the pus from an infected wound (92).

This view of a sick nature is one which is decidedly less useful to humans than those articulated by Audubon, Cooper, Traill, Melville, etc.  These authors all depict a nature which is in some way harvestable by humans: Audubon and Melville both describe the “harvesting” of animals, while Cooper and Traill “glean” nature for plant specimens.  The nature depicted by Austin in this passage (with the exception of the healing heliotrope) is decidedly un-harvestable.  It is, rather, a nature which is sick, and capable of making humans who wish to better understand it sick (malaria could be the consequence of exploring the tulares, for instance.) 

The question is, what made nature sick?  If this is a proto-environmentalist text, then the answer seems to be the poisonous run-off from agriculture in the West (and Brooke’s reading of water as pharmakon supports this.)  But could there be other causes for nature’s sickness, or could sickness be the natural state of the “land of little rain”?

Perhaps unconnectedly, I think the point Sam made in class about Austin’s opaque style is suggestive here.  Nature is sick, and Austin’s difficult sentences are a diagnosis painfully described.  Unlike Cooper, though, or Traill (to some extent), we don’t see long moralistic asides about the ideal human relationship to the environment in Austin’s work.  Rather, Austin seems content to diagnose nature as sickly and refrains from recommending a cure – perhaps indicative of her overall attitude toward human-environment interactions.