Robert M. Myers. Reconciling Nature: Literary Representations of the Natural, 1876-1945. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Illustrations. 234 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4384-7679-7.
Reviewed by Robert Briwa (Angelo State University)
Published on H-Environment (November, 2021)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)
American environmental writing has long been celebrated as a literature defined by resistance. Specifically, many scholars present the historical development and significance of this broadly defined genre as a progressive narrative, where nineteenth-century environmental advocates used literature to spark a long and iterative arc of resistance against hegemonic “ideologies of domination” (p. xv). In this telling, there is a clear intellectual lineage from the late nineteenth century to the present, one where “early resistance to the cultural ideologies of domination blossomed into contemporary environmentalism” (p. xiii). Moreover, this progressive narrative finds its contemporary intellectual focus in a selective canon of American writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, and the late Barry Lopez. The progressive, linear stories we tell about American environmental writing are easily digestible but obscure the more complex, plural, and at times paradoxical attitudes Americans held (and continue to hold) toward nature. In Reconciling Nature: Literary Representations of the Natural, 1876-1945, Robert M. Myers complicates the resistance narrative associated with American environmental writing—and the American environmentalist movement more broadly—through ecocritical rereadings of eight American novels published between 1876 and 1945.
For Myers, three views toward nature emerge and mature during this period. The first view sees nature as vulnerable to American industrial development and urbanization. Relatedly, this view is associated with a range of ecological and social anxieties. Ecological anxieties include the loss or near-loss of charismatic flora and fauna, such as the disappearance of passenger pigeons, the near extinction of the American bison, or the clear-cutting of sequoia and redwood stands in California. Associated social anxieties, meanwhile, include concerns about urban Americans’ dislocation from the natural world. These concerns subsequently precipitated a crisis of American identity among Progressive-era elites, who viewed nature and wilderness as a cornerstone of an exceptionalist American experience. Progressives felt nature’s removal from American living spaces eroded national identity. The second view positions nature as a threat. This reflects American reactions to a series of widely publicized disasters occurring across North American landscapes, including severe Plains states blizzards, destructive wildfires, and devastating droughts. The third understands nature as a necessary resource base, to be strategically exploited to further the wants and needs of a burgeoning American consumer culture. For many Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, the latter two views required technocratic solutions, such as massive engineering projects or statist bureaucratic conservation efforts. These three attitudes are familiar grounds for environmental historians and ecocritical scholars. However, both disciplines generally explore them independently of one another, even as they recognize that they do not exist in mutually exclusive historical and literary contexts. At its core, Reconciling Nature considers the confluence of these three views toward nature.
To demonstrate how these views intersect and interact, Myers considers a premiere “cultural production of the period”: popular novels (p. xvii). After a brief introduction that places Reconciling Nature into its scholarly contexts, Myers considers eight novels as case studies that illuminate the contested ideologies of nature present in American society at the turn of the twentieth century.
Each chapter—whether read alone or in conversation with another—represents a refreshing divergence from the usual literary canon of American environmental writing. Myers principally develops his analyses by drawing from ecocriticism, environmental history, and Foucauldian notions of biopolitics and the disciplinary state. Each chapter uses these conceptual frameworks to differing degrees in their explorations of the tensions present in competing views toward nature, but by far the strongest analyses occur when the disciplinary state is a central lens through which Myers views the novels. For example, in chapter 6, Myers deploys the conceptual lens of the surveillance state to his rereading of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) to complicate notions of wilderness spaces. In this instance, the wilderness under question—the Adirondacks in upstate New York—is presented in ways that challenge the assumption that wilderness is a space of lawlessness.
Although selected case studies, like An American Tragedy, Mary Austin’s The Ford (1917) (chapter 5), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) (chapter 7), have already been considered by ecocritical scholars, Myers’s rereadings offer fresh interpretations. For example, his rereading of The Ford complicates Austin’s position as a pioneering environmentalist through highlighting her support of statist water conservation. Other case studies in Reconciling Nature, such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (chapter 1), Stephen Crane’s Maggie (1893) (chapter 2), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) (chapter 3), and William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) (chapter 8), have less visibility in the field, yet Myers effectively argues their relevance. For example, Myers’s analysis of Go Down, Moses highlights the ways Faulkner espoused an individual environmental ethic as an alternative solution to solving the environmental crises of overhunting and deforestation that shaped the landscapes of the American Southeast. Myers therefore makes original contributions by considering these case studies. Exploring new case studies is always a welcome pursuit, for it helps paint a fuller picture of the American literary scene—but Reconciling Nature’s examination of a wider range of American literary works brings other advantages as well.
In particular, the choice to cast a wider literary net destabilizes the notion that texts must directly present images of the natural to be relevant in exploring environmental attitudes. Traditionally, ecocritical scholarship finds its analytical focus on a selected group of authors, so Reconciling Nature’s move outside of this canon is a welcome expansion of potential sources for ecocriticism. Relatedly, Myers correctly notes that ecocriticism privileges works that frame nature as a rural or wilderness phenomenon and uses Reconciling Nature to explore other settings and contexts. For example, in his analyses of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) (chapter 4) and Maggie, Myers offers a helpful road map toward exploring how urban environments become entangled with attitudes toward nature. Second, and perhaps more significantly, all the novels under consideration enjoyed popular receptions at the time of their publications. Popularity—by either critics, a popular audience, or both at once—suggests these works reflected and reinforced Americans’ attitudes toward nature. In other words, Myers’s chosen case studies mattered in how Americans conceptualized nature and their relationship to it.
Despite expanding the scope of ecocriticism, Reconciling Nature still perpetuates literary studies’ focus on “literature” and neglects other forms of popular writing. Myers considers works now considered American classics in the eyes of literary critics, and he fails to comment on the slew of dime novels and other genres of “lowbrow” writing that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century. However, Americans voraciously read these works in astonishing numbers, which suggests that they too shed light on American attitudes toward nature just as much as those pieces considered in Reconciling Nature. This is fundamentally a minor critique: scholars must set limits on the scope of their studies if they are to present effective arguments. Nonetheless, this topical gap presents potentially rich veins of research for other scholars to mine in future studies.
Overall, Reconciling Nature represents an admirable addition to ecocritical scholarship considering American literature. Its foci on treating its case studies as cultural texts produced within wider political and social contexts means that its use transcends literary studies. For example, the whole book might serve as an important framework for advanced undergraduate seminars in North American environmental history or environmental writing. For graduate students, its inclusion would deepen and complement preexisting scholarship, particularly around themes of state control of the environment and the tensions associated with these processes. Finally, Myers’s theoretical breadth, emphasis on the texts’ historical contexts, and clear introductory literature review and methodological discussion means students and advanced scholars looking to refresh their own research will find Reconciling Nature a useful model to follow in the pursuit of literary analyses of environmental writing within the United States and farther afield.
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Citation:
Robert Briwa. Review of Myers, Robert M., Reconciling Nature: Literary Representations of the Natural, 1876-1945.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55768
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