[In the following excerpt, Buell discusses the distinct manner in which nineteenth-century women depicted nature.]

The feminist critique of wilderness romance should not block us from seeing how pastoral modes have functioned as a means of empowerment for women writers. While researching environmental writing and commentary from Thoreau's day to ours, I was surprised to find a significant degree of interdependence between the “major” male figures and the work and commentary of women writers less well known. Roughly half the nature essays contributed to the Atlantic Monthly during the late nineteenth century, the point when the nature essay became a recognized genre, were by female authors.¹ Among early appraisals of Thoreau, I found, unexpectedly—given the predominant notion of Thoreau as appealing more to men than to women—that commentaries by women were more likely to be favorable than those by men. The first posthumous fictional recreation of Thoreau was by a woman, Louisa May Alcott (Moods [1864]). The first book, to my knowledge, published by an outsider to the transcendentalist circle that celebrates nature as a refuge from hypercivilization with explicit invocation of Thoreau as model and precursor was written by a woman: Elizabeth Wright's Lichen Tufts, from the Alleghanies (1860). The first Thoreau Society was founded by a group of young women (1891); the first doctoral dissertation on Thoreau (1899) was written by a woman, as was one of the best early biographical studies of Thoreau.² John Burroughs and John Muir, the most prominent male literary naturists in the generation following Thoreau, present even more conspicuous cases of female affiliations. Both had mothers who played a major part in nurturing their love of nature; both as adults were sustained by the encouragement of women who shared that interest; a woman was one of the candidates for the post of Muir's literary executor (but was edged out by editorial patriarchy), and a woman actually did take charge of Burroughs's literary affairs (at his own request). Burroughs in particular was convinced that his most sympathetic readers were women; and his literary executrix, Clara Barrus, in her biography stresses that appeal, explaining that turn-of-the-century women looked on nature excursions as a means of liberation from the parlor.³

Patriarchy, in turn, considered nature observation, particularly botany, a quite safe pursuit for Victorian women. An anonymous writer for the Maine Monthly Magazine in 1837 spoke the consensus in affirming that “botany may be safely commended to the attention of young ladies without incurring the censure of any party.” For the “practical pursuit of botany” was “peculiarly feminine. The dust and effluvia of the laboratory will never commend it to delicate nerves, while many of its tasks are scarcely within the limits of female strength.”⁴ American women, for their part, were quick to seize on this space for enterpreneurship as early as the mid-eighteenth century, when Jane Colden became the “first lady Linnaean.”⁵ That women would have been attracted almost as readily as men to natural history is in keeping with the prototypes for nineteenth-century representation of men's and women's experience vis-à-vis nature. These prototypes are not so discrepant as they are often made to seem by stark juxtapositions of wilderness romance and domestic fiction. Writers of both sexes commonly picture the early childhood stage of both sexes as a state of natural piety. The first books of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetic bildungsroman Aurora Leigh resemble those of Wordsworth's Prelude in this respect. The child-seer of Wordsworth's “Immortality Ode,” that nineteenth-century literary fountainhead of Anglo-American natural piety, is virtually sexless or androgynous; and in American writing influenced by its vision the child is more often female than male.⁶ In adolescence, female protagonists become socialized away from nature, while the male continues to enjoy freer mobility and the option of questing and of conquest within nature, which is frequently and revealingly symbolized as female. Starting well before Thoreau, male narratives of self-reliant cabin-dwelling isolatoes are common, whereas the commonest counterpart in women's narrative is the story of the “female hermit” who has not risen above society but fallen below it as a result of a disastrous love affair, usually extralegal, which has left her with a child, who usually dies. For women like Joanna, the hermitess of Shell-heap Island in Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs, nature is where you go if you have no place to go. Yet the personal bond to nature can also retain a more positive value for the mature woman protagonist who, as Annis Pratt and Barbara White put it, may “look back to moments of naturalistic epiphany as touchstones in a quest for her lost selfhood.”⁷ This is precisely how Thoreau pictures himself when confessing that one of his earliest childhood memories was of being taken to Walden Pond, so that by his return to live there “I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams” (Wa [Walden] 156). A similar reenactment process is evident in the work of the early female Thoreauvian mentioned above.

Having being cosmopolitanized after an Alleghany girlhood and a purgatorial stint of pioneering in Illinois, Elizabeth Wright returns with a group of friends for a holiday in the woods of northwestern Pennsylvania. Self-conscious though she is about the element of playacting (“like overgrown children”), she considers herself a good woodswoman and longs “for the cool pure liberty of their hidden depths.” To her companions, overbaggaged with “civilized rubbish,” Wright quotes Thoreau on simplification, from which ensues a pungent commentary on how nature gives the lie to civilized distinctions and in particular to the niceties of conduct that hem tenderfoot women in. (“I wondered then, more than ever, where people ever get the absurd notion of talking about ‘refined’ and ‘vulgar,’ or ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ employments. It sounds as ridiculous as the French way of calling knives masculine and forks feminine. My knives are no more masculine than my forks. Elvira's shooting was as feminine as her curls, and the Professor's cooking as manly as his beard.”)⁸ Wright's keyed-up jauntiness reassures the more conventional reader that despite appearances of revolutionary fervor, her work will be a mere carnivalesque inversion of the proprieties. But it is an inversion: a sustained exercise in pushing limits whereby nature authorizes mid-Victorian woman to level the social distinctions that gall her.

Along the way, Wright also sets herself against stereotypical female appropriations of nature, such as the “satiny, perfumed” nature rhetoric in gift books or the “twaddle” of botany textbooks written for young women.⁹ In the work of the less outspoken of the period's female naturists, such distinctions are more subtle, though not invisible. A case in point would be the nineteenth-century American literary season book that comes closest to rivaling Thoreau, Susan Cooper's unjustly neglected Rural Hours (1850, revised 1887): a calendar of natural and cultural history observations that reveals a Dorothy Wordsworth-like keenness of environmental perception. As Vera Norwood has shown, it is instructive to think of this text as a center of meditation on classic American nature writing in place of, say, the forest romances of her father, James Fenimore.¹⁰

At first sight, Susan Cooper seems sedately entrenched within the sphere of decorous floral observation. Unlike her litigious father, she does not confront head-on the burning contemporary sociopolitical issues any more than Dorothy Wordsworth does, and in this and several other respects Rural Hours exhibits the characteristic stylistic differences we have been taught to find in precontemporary women's narratives as opposed to men's: the figure of the experiencer is played down relative to the object described; the setting is more local, within the circuit of the writer's own daily excursions; and the mimetic level is less romanticized. The author's quiet eye, however, sees a number of things the eye of a James Fenimore Cooper novel tends to miss. In place of his romantic savagism, which sees Indians as a doomed archaic race because the twain can never meet, Rural Hours envisions a possible integration whereby “men of Indian blood may be numbered among the wise and the good, laboring in behalf of our common country.” Whereas her father has Natty Bumppo elegize over the “wasty ways” of the settlers in The Pioneers and The Prairie, she makes specific recommendations about the conservation of trees before Thoreau did. Though hardly prepared to go so far as he in praising the wild above the good, Cooper shows a projective empathy for nature's rhythms as a corrective to the human-built: it is more than fortuitous that the book's structure implicitly asserts the need for the human order to accommodate itself to the natural as well as vice versa.¹¹

As these examples suggest, Cooper's instinct, unlike Wright's, is to valorize the natural by incorporating it into a vision of society brought closer to nature, not to set society and individual free expression at odds. The latter is present only latently in Rural Hours, as for instance in Cooper's most detailed set piece of wildlife description, on hummingbirds, concerning which these two interesting points emerge: that their dainty diminutiveness is deceptive (hummingbirds are actually bold and confident), and that a major threat to their existence is their tendency to fly indoors and get trapped there. “We have repeatedly known them found dead in rooms little used,” Cooper writes.¹² Clearly Rural Hours is not “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but the prevailing sedateness of the female sketchbook norm warrants our being brought up by the muffled vehemence of such passages. Consequently, we should also see such a passage as embedding a more substantial challenge to status quo perceptions both about hummingbirds and the power or vulnerability of tiny creatures generally than we would ascribe to a passage of the same decibel level in Thoreau. To take another example, Thoreau risked nothing when he (guardedly) praised Walt Whitman, flanked as he was by sympathetic transcendental brethren; but for a female Atlantic contributor to begin a mid-1880s nature essay on grass with an epigraph from Whitman, not long after Leaves of Grass had been banned in Boston, was an act of risk taking, chaste though the ensuing discourse was by comparison.¹³

This undertone surfaces in Mary Austin's turn-of-the-century books and stories about the California desert, starting with Land of Little Rain (1903). Unlike Thoreau, Austin rarely parades the “I,” and in keeping with a strong tradition in women's rural writing she ends Little Rain with a vision of community—an idyllic Mexican American village—that contrasts greatly with Thoreau's ironic “return” to Concord at the end of Walden. But the main narrative, typically for Austin, displays an assertive, somewhat prickly, sardonic persona. She disorients, for instance, by refusing to map her territory with English place-names. This reticence becomes part of a strategy, despite disclaimers of ignorance, for unfolding her environmental knowledge (including knowledge of non-Anglo cultures, Indian and Hispanic) and thereby pulling the whole territory away from prior Anglo claims to it—both legal and interpretative—into a domain of which she alone is the interpreter. She reinforces her control through peremptory declaratives: “This is the nature of that country,” “Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback,” and so on (LLR 9, 83). In the process, Austin is careful to discredit masculine romance about the west à la Bret Harte, sketching her version of a remote frontier town in an anthropological realist retort to “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Ultimately the Austin persona beats Harte's in realism, in toughness, and in bonding to the environment.

To align Wright, Cooper, and Austin with Thoreau is to form a picture of “men's” and “women's” representations of nature and wildness blending into each other to the point that distinctions start to seem porous. Walden executes the antisocial, individualistic flight from the settlements featured in masculine wilderness romance, but the break is not total, the woods are not too dark and deep, the experience becomes domesticated as the lifestyle is expatiated and the protagonist's lococentrism stressed, and the persona remains always in dialogue with and to that extent always a member of the community whose norms he rejects. Little Rain tells no such story of the writer's repudiation of community and indeed barely allows the persona to exist as an independent character; but the persona speaks from the position of being in the wilderness and disengaged from the complacencies of settlement culture. Altogether, it seems that premodern women's pastoral was, like its Thoreauvian counterpart, capable of questioning the normative values that seemingly regulated it, and of exploring the claims of self-realization against those of social constraint.

Notes

1. The more important contributors include Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter, Edith Thomas, Olive Thorne Miller, and Sophia Kirk.

2. For bibliographical guidance to late nineteenth-century Thoreau criticism, see Gary Scharnhorst, Henry David Thoreau: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism before 1900 (New York: Garland, 1992). Elizabeth Wright's Lichen Tufts, from the Alleghanies (New York: Doolady, 1860) is discussed below. For the early society, see Walter Harding, “An Early Thoreau Club,” Thoreau Society Bulletin, 77 (Fall 1961): 3-4. The first Thoreau dissertation, since lost, was by Ella A. Knapp, the published monograph by Annie Russell Marble (1902). For a more astringent view of Thoreau by a literary naturalist-feminist who is also a Thoreauvian, see Ann Zwinger's presidential address to the Thoreau Society, “Thoreau and Women,” Thoreau Society Bulletin, 164 (Summer 1983): 3-7, which starts by noting Thoreau's misogyny and then measures his writing against ten passages by nature-observing women from Dorothy Wordsworth to Rachel Carson.

3. Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 1: 333-334; 2: 294, 319. For the influence of mothers on Muir and Burroughs, see William Frederick Badè, Life and Letters of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 1: 16; and Edith Burroughs Kelley, John Burroughs: Naturalist (New York: Exposition, 1959), pp. 49-50. The story of Marian Parsons's being denied an important role in Muir's literary affairs is told in the correspondence between Badè and Houghton Mifflin editors (Houghton Mifflin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University), especially Badè to Ferris Greenslet 7 January 1915, Greenslet to Badè, 12 January 1915, and Badè to Roger L. Scaife, 12 May 1915. Respecting posthumous editions of Muir's works, Badè declared to Greenslet that Muir “would have had a fit if any one had suggested to him that a woman was to edit his work.” Greenslet replied: “I share your distrust of a female editor for a work of this character. No doubt Mrs. Parsons can do a fairly workmanlike job on the Alaska book, but the production of a definitive edition is unquestionably a man's job.”

4. C———y, “Study of Botany,” Maine Monthly Magazine, 1 (1837): 491, 492.

5. Joseph Kastner's A Species of Eternity (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 23, is one of several general histories of premodern American natural history, all of which mention Jane Colden. For a short profile, see Marcia Myers Bonta, Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists (College Station: Texas A & M Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 5-8. This book documents an extensive array of women botanists, entomologists, and ornithologists working in premodern America. For further background on nineteenth-century botanizing by women in America, see Elizabeth B. Keeney's chapter “Gender and Botany,” in her book The Botanizers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 69-82; and Vera Norwood, Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 1-24. While recognizing that genteel constraints against, for example, free-ranging specimen collecting limited women from botanizing fully, Keeney is more optimistic about botanical pursuits as a way of extending women's sphere than is Ann B. Shteir, “Linnaeus's Daughters: Women and Botany,” in Women and the Structure of Society, ed. Barbara J. Harris and Jo Ann K. McNamara (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984), pp. 67-73. Shteir argues that botany in the eighteenth century “served, and in some quarters was intended to serve, as a form of social control, substituting innocuous activities and attitudes for others more threatening to conventional views of womankind” (p. 73). She goes on, however, to underscore the seriousness of the women botanizers she has studied and the importance of their neglected contributions to botanical science.

6. See Anne T. Trensky, “The Saintly Child in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction,” in Prospects 1, ed. Jack Salzman (New York: Burt Franklin, 1975), pp. 389-413.

7. Annis Pratt, with Barbara White et al., Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Sussex: Harvester, 1981), p. 17. For the importance of the green world to identity formation in childhood, see Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), a pioneering work of interpretative developmental psychology based on autobiographies of childhood as well as on analytical observation.

8. Wright, Lichen Tufts, pp. 9, 11, 16, 51.

9. Ibid., p. 81.

10. Norwood, Made from This Earth, pp. 25-41, argues persuasively that Cooper's appearance “sets the stage for women nature essayists” by “conjoining women's roles as domesticator and the American landscape's new image as home” (pp. 26, 28), from which unassailable basis she proceeds to address herself to a mixed-sex public on such issues of public significance as environmental protection.

11. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours (New York: Putnam, 1850), pp. 182, 202-218. Cooper certainly reveals herself to be her father's daughter, in that here and elsewhere Rural Hours shows a protectionist sensibility rather like that of The Pioneers by developing a wide range of environmental concerns (e.g., wasteful ways of logging, fishing, and game hunting) from a combination of moral, utilitarian, and aesthetic perspectives. In Rural Hours, however, all dimensions of the environmental critique are more systematically amplified except for the legal aspect, concerning which The Pioneers is especially masterful in weaving the latter part of its plot around the violation of Judge Temple's game laws.

12. Cooper, Rural Hours, p. 120.

13. Edith Thomas, The Round Year (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886), p. 73.