Like Arwen, I was surprised at how Audobon portrayed the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird as a poetic image of domesticity and then "joltingly" described in detail how one might be able to kill it. All content aside, the seeming lack of a grammatical transition between these sections and the abrupt change in tone were enough to disorient this modern reader.
With that in mind, I'm interested in how Cooper also seems to jump between the vices and virtues of nature (all from a human perspective of course) without any real transition. This particular passage caught my eye: "An instance is on record, quoted by Dr. De Kay, in which three men, who went upon Tongue Mountain, on Lake George, for the purpose of hunting rattlesnakes, destroyed in two days eleven hundred and four of these venomous creatures! They are taken for their fat, which is sold at a good price" (54). The next paragraph changes focus and tone almost immediately: "We found this afternoon a very pretty butterfly, pink and yellow; it seemed to be quite young, and scarcely in full possession of its powers yet; we thought it a pity to interfere with its happy career, but just begun, and left it unharmed as we found it" (54). Cooper then concludes her daily entry with a truncated sonnet about the butterfly. Can we attribute this strange transition as a feature of the genre? Or is there some kind of guilt Cooper feels at vast destruction of wildlife and its subsequent monetary gain that she must end this entry with an image of beauty and rebirth? In any event, there appears to be a tension in Cooper between the "use" and cultivation of the land and the fear of its diminishing.
It's also interesting to note the morality that Cooper superimposes upon nature: flowers are praised for shunning "vanity" and spiders are scolded for being "plotting" and "creeping" (61). But Cooper seems to be anthropomorphizing the landscape knowingly: "for it is a natural impulse of the human heart to prefer that which is open and confiding to that which is wily and suspicious, even in the brute creation" (62). And thus the unity that Cooper emphasizes in nature prevents us from viewing the world through a good vs. evil lens (snake vs. butterfly, spider vs. fly): "No doubt these insects must have their merits and their uses, since none of God's creatures are made in vain" (61). Cooper seems to be saying here that what we read as evil in nature is just as essential as what we read as virtuous; we just need to learn to read the Book of the World to extract the proper lessons. I wonder if this religious faith in unity and providence accounts for these "jolts" between beauty and violence and virtue and vice in Cooper's work. I also wonder how different religions may affect writing about the natural world. For instance, has the idea of dominion in Genesis complicated the West's relationship with the natural world?
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Matthew--regarding the influence of Genesis on our relationship with the natural world, Londa Schiebinger (especially in Nature's Body) has argued exactly want you suggest. Cooper's religion we hardly discussed in class, except through the lens of Ruth as a model for her own textual "gleaning" of nature. But there's no doubt that her dismissive treatment of rattlesnakes--along with her view of the presence of weeds in the American paradise--is tinged with her brand of religion (her father was a vestryman at Christ Episcopal Church in Cooperstown, NY). Christianity also influenced her conservative view of the role of women in society. In "Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America" (1872), Susan Cooper extolled the "superior merit" of women engaged in exclusively domestic pursuits. Se believed in the "separate sphere" of women, which she opposed to the "wretched, feverish, maddening struggle to pile up lucre" of "the merchant" and "the manufacturer." Like Thoreau, she believed in craftsmanship and viewed the world of consumption warily.
ReplyDeleteAll of this affected, of course, her view of nature. Since she makes clear from the beginning that what she is doing isn't really science (though it might serve the purposes of science education), she is free to moralize, assess, judge, all the while reminding her readers that her judgment is preliminary (since so often she doesn't know or is easily deceived. Audubon did the same thing, as you point out. His own way of dealing with the contrast between "good" and "evil" in nature is to locate those same qualities in himself--he can be both the slaughterer of birds and their kind preserver and father-protector. Cooper isn't quite as sophisticated--or maybe she's less interested in inserting herself into her text. But: she is also a teacher (note the passage in which she laments the disappearance of the old horn book), and as such she's obligated to point the way--all within the framework of her own status as a potentially unreliable observer who might not know everything.
Re the other issue you raise: it's startling to modern observers that nineteenth-century observers noticed environmental depredation at the local level (as Audubon and Cooper did) but never put the pieces of the puzzle together. But their view of America was a limited one--they couldn't really think on a large scale, as we will also notice in Thoreau....even as they pretended to (which is especially obvious in Whitman). Jefferson's confidence that if the mammoth can't be found in Kentucky it must be hiding somewhere in the woods of Ohio is alive and well throughout the nineteenth century. To some extent, that hope is still there today--viz. the recent alleged sighting of the ivorybill in the swamps of Arkansas.