On Cooper & Social Ecocriticism

On Susan Fenimore Cooper

Prone to the 1st-wave of ecocriticism as I am, I must say I was a bit wary of Bennett’s article – the “Metropolitan” in the title initiating my reservation, but I’ve since gotten over it. Of course, Deep Ecology has its limitations (and unrealistic Romantic musings as Bennett suggests) in being applied critically and I see Bennett’s points here, particularly as is supported by some of the keen insight coming from Ross’s Chicago Gangster Theory; but while I’m not apt to pitch Deep Ecology out the window, I am excited at how Deep Ecology fused together with social ecocriticism provide us a broader lens through which to view literary works environmentally.

Think what you will of the poststructuralists (and I’m as suspicious of them as the Deep Ecologists are), but it goes without saying that “unmediated nature” doesn’t exist, or to clarify, it doesn’t exist for us because we as humans must mediate everything in order to make sense of it. So it becomes, I think, much more interesting to read Cooper’s Rural Hours not from the perspective of it as quintessential ‘nature writing’ or pastoral, but from the perspective of social ecocriticism. Barry Lopez is right, I think, in saying that “natural history writing takes as its proper subjects […] the complex biological, social, economic, and ethical relationships among [the natural world].” Viewed in this way, and here I really agree with Bennett, the scope of ecocriticism is suddenly much more expansive.

While on the surface, Cooper’s book might seem like a journal of fine musings about wildflowers and birds, it’s curious to me what significant things are being said when considered within their socio-cultural context: the passage about exterminated/eliminated Native peoples (pg 48) seems particularly in tune with Lopez’s assertion that nature writing tends towards “justice.” In this passage, Cooper seems to draw our attention not only to the natural world and how she perceives it (mediates it), but how people have interacted with that world, including the socio-cultural forces at work that grant the right of land to some and not others—the precise kind of environmental racism/injustice that Bennett says is equal to the contemporary experience of so many blacks in inner cities and how they, indeed, can be seen as the ultimate ‘endangered species.’ (This, I think, takes the argument too far, however, returning again to an overt anthropocentrization of ecocriticism to the opposite extreme).

Lots of other examples from the reading make Cooper exciting when considered from this evolved ecocritical perspective … for instance, her discussion of naming and the way in which a relationship with a place/region etc., is affected by the use of language—abhorring as she does the Latinate names, stating “What has a dead language to do on every-day occasions with the living blossoms of the hour?” (pg 68). Cooper’s discussion of cultivation, of gardens, etc. while tinged with awe of the natural world is simultaneously appreciative of human construction—not only does she appreciate the cultivated fields and considers them lovely to look at, but she appreciates how the town/village creates an interesting (and enticing) juxtaposition to the natural scenery around it. Here Cooper seems to mediate her world (and the human presence in the natural world) in a way that clearly illustrates Bennett’s central points—that the human quotient, the human impression of nature (which subsequently guides the human relationship with nature) has to be considered in order for ecocriticism to extend to its farthest reaches. How do we qualify nature and our understanding of it and how, in turn, does that understanding influence behavior?

In the same passage referenced above about the stump-fields, Cooper brings to light the differences within the studded fields – how some are cultivated and some are left in ruin – motioning towards a difference that could be more closely examined from a necessary socio-cultural perspective. How is it that one unpeopled, wild field appears beautiful (prompting the human desire to preserve it as such), while the next field is ‘lovely’ with a homestead at it’s center and winter wheat growing at its edge? How, Cooper’s text forces us to consider, do we mediate the natural environment to initiate such differences in the way we interact with the environment? Cooper seems to recognize that while one field is acceptable and the other not (the same type of sentiment she expresses around deforestation), the ultimate questions underscored by the text become: how are these choices being made, and what are the ramifications of these choices? The residents of Cooperstown lovingly tend their gardens, Cooper notes in her journal, but simultaneously destroy their forests—how then do humans determine what is beautiful, what is grotesque, what to clear-cut and what to save – all questions related to the socio-environment exchange that needs to be considered in order to (as Bennett says) effect the kind of change that the Deep Ecologists desire, but in a way that might produce that (positive) change on a grand scale.