American Lit II: Think for a moment about what’s been happening during the years marked out by the composition of “Circumstance” (1860), “A White Heron” (1886), “South of the Slot” (1909), and “The Bloody Sire” (1941). Think of Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Think of the record-breaking, industrial-scale lethality of the Civil War. Think of the decline (though not the disappearance) of romanticism and the rise of literary realism and naturalism, and then of modernism, with its fixation on human alienation from nature and the “natural” self. Think of the German philosopher Nietzche’s pronouncement that God is dead. Think of the devastating Belgian “rape of the Congo” and of World War I, the “war to end all wars” that made the American Civil War look like a game of checkers.

In this time period science not only challenged traditional understandings of religion, it also made it possible for nature to bear completely new meanings and be put to completely new literary and ideological uses. History, meanwhile, in its stubborn, plodding way, continued to pose new and increasingly vexatious questions about human nature and human potential. And through it all, writers like Spofford, Bierce, Jewett, London, and Jeffers continued to do their writerly duty and try to make art out of it all, and maybe even help us readers make sense of it all.

In “Circumstance” and “A White Heron,” Harriet Spofford and Sarah Orne Jewett rewrite the biblical story of the Fall, each in their own way and each toward radically different ends. Sylvia, the poor little country child in “A White Heron,” resists the temptation of the satanic hunter and does not seem to fall at all, though the story ends with the brooding sense that her innocence and her oneness with nature cannot last forever — a sad thought, beautifully expressed in Jewett’s marvelous prose, but hardly earth-shattering news. In Spofford’s story, the man with the gun is not the Satan but Adam. He seems to be a “type” or forerunner of the Christ who will later save all humanity, just as in the story he saves his wife.

Different as these two stories are, they both understand the violence that an expanding nation inevitably does to nature. They are both in some way informed by the romantic conception of nature as a site of redemption and a source of value. And both stories hint at the conflict that results when a nation physically destroys the very thing — wild nature — from which it draws so much symbolic value. And, finally, they both attempt to do so while remaining within a traditional Christian imaginative framework, which is not the same thing as remaining “Christian” in a doctrinal sense.

Jack London and Robinson Jeffers have said goodbye to all that. Like Jewett, London continues to use nature — the “wild” nature of Buck in Call of the Wild and of Big Bill Totts in “South of the Slot” — to represent an essential self. By this time, however, that self can be reimagined in Darwinian terms as the gift of our evolutionary history, even as it remains a self from which we are alienated by civilized life. With London, as opposed to Spofford and Jewett, that alienation is no longer to be understood in the Christian framework as a “fall” from grace, reversible by the mysteriously transformative powers of the blood of the lamb. Now it’s merely a historical and sociological fact of modern life: civilization is alienating. If you don’t like being alienated, then do like Buck and Big Bill Totts and ditch civilization.

For Jeffers, the Darwinian understanding of nature likewise provides not only a scientific explanation of the origin of species but also a philosophical source and literary symbol of ultimate value. In “The Bloody Sire” Jeffers does not see the outbreak of World War II as a sign of fallen humanity’s sinfulness and depravity (much less as a sign of the approaching End Times). For Jeffers, war is a reminder that humankind remains immersed not in sin but in nature. We are not alienated from “nature” at all, says Jeffers. We remain as completely a part of it as always. We are as much bound up as ever in the violent processes of Darwinian natural selection that produced us as a species in the first place.

At first glance, Jeffers and Spofford would seem to be as different as Johnny Rotten and Jars of Clay. Then again, maybe not. I think it’s possible to read “Circumstance” as the story of a young woman who only thinks she is part of the grand unfolding of some divine plan — of a cosmic plan that conveniently enough seems to center upon her own nation and her own family and her own self. She might think this, but her “circumstances” remind us all too vividly of what she really is: just part of the food chain, a bit of fresh meat that can fuel the metabolism of a big cat, just another animal, albeit an animal that has evolved enough self-awareness to be able to regret the fact that it is about to die. In biological terms, our heroine is reminded that perhaps she is just a bit player in the ongoing and utterly aimless and amoral drama of the survival of the fittest. In political terms, she is reminded that she is merely a cog in a vast (and utterly immoral) imperial machine that lets neither cougars nor Indians stand in its way.

In other words, maybe “Circumstance” is as bleakly Darwinian as “The Bloody Sire.” If we pay attention once again to the story’s religious symbolism and see the young pioneers as Adam and Eve, we can ask ourselves, Who is the little “babe” the man carries in his arms? We all know the answer: “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain.” In the Book of Genesis, it is Adam and Eve, those gentle vegetarians, who have “all the world before them” as they leave Eden and initiate the Bible’s mythic human history.

In Spofford’s Americanized revision of that story, it is not just Adam and Eve, but Adam and Eve and Cain, the first murderer, baptized in the violence of an already-fallen world, who have all the New World before them, and who initiate a mythic American history. The baby symbolizes the American future, and because the baby is Cain, it looks like that future is going to be murder. And the murderers are not mountain lions and Indians (who of course are engaged not in murder but in self-preservation and homeland security, respectively). The murderers, the American pioneers, are the progeny not of Seth but of Cain.

At the end of Spofford’s story the mountain lion is dead, but the violent American future symbolized by the baby survives, the world all before it, where to choose. I’m not suggesting Spofford foresaw the specifics of that future. Writing in 1860, she might not have foreseen the final Native American body count, nor the millions of that child’s descendants would kill in the Philippines and Central America and Vietnam and Cambodia and Iraq, but somewhere in the back of her mind, lurking behind the frontier mythology, she seems to have divined the truth of her nation’s general modus operandi.

This is not to say Spofford was not sincerely religious. Far from it. The archetypal pattern is right there in her Bible: after Adam and Eve comes Cain, who unwittingly arouses God’s ire by killing his own brother, and a millennium or so after Cain comes Joshua, who quite knowingly earns God’s praise by slaughtering the Canaanites — by ethnically cleansing the Promised Land to receive God’s Own Nation. Like most other Americans, on some deep level Spofford understood the pattern inherent in both her religion and her national experience, and (perhaps on an even more deeply repressed level) she understood the terrible implications of that pattern and wrote them into the fabric of her story. In doing so she produced something that expressed far more truth than she consciously intended. Art can be like that.

Now let’s contrast Spofford to Jeffers. We’ve already seen how they might be read as similarly bleak in their casual acceptance of violence. But how, in terms of theme and worldview, do they differ? In “Circumstance,” the evil aspect of nature is represented by the mountain lion and the evil aspect of humankind by Native Americans. Both cougars and Indians, in turn, are seen as manifestations of Satan: the cougar is repeatedly called an “Indian Devil,” and the Indian raiding party leaves behind it the “work of their accomplished hatred and one subtle footprint in the snow.” (For nineteenth-century American readers familiar with Milton’s Paradise Lost, both the hatred and the subtlety would conjure up an image of Satan.)

By attributing both natural violence and human violence to the devil, Spofford places both natural history and human history on an equal plane and folds them both into the cosmic history of Christianity. Jeffers, by contrast, having traded the Christian worldview for a Darwinian one, does not put them on the same plane. For him, human history is just a subset of natural history. He thus folds human history (wars and the like) into natural history (ongoing evolution-by-natural-selection) and leaves it at that. Beyond nature, there is nothing. But that’s okay, Jeffers seems to say, because nature itself is a wonderful source of values.

After all, it created us. Didn’t it? Read more!

Senior Seminar. At the same time that Herland is busily defamiliarizing sexism and the patriarchy it is also steadily developing the characters of its three male traveler-protagonists. You don’t always see a lot of character development in the utopian genre. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Jeff Margrave and Vandyck Jennings are fully developed or “round” characters, but Herland certainly does more with them than Utopia does with Raphael Hythloday or Looking Backward with Julian West.

Is there something intrinsic to the feminist dystopia that demands, or at least encourages, greater character development? More generally, does Herland suggest any ways in which a feminist utopia’s focus on gender revises the very form of the utopia? Or does the focus on gender never get beyond mere content? Read more!

American Studies. By now you should be well into that classic of environmental literature, John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra. Reading this book again after many years makes me think that the summer of 1869 was a key moment in the history of human consciousness, an altogether new alignment of the stars of perception and sensibility.

There’s John Muir — with a mind trained in both botany and Christian creationism, and a literary taste built by Emerson and Wordsworth on a foundation of the Psalms and the Book of Job — set loose in an unspoiled Yosemite at precisely the moment when he could see the possibility of its spoiling, under this precise combination of influences creating a great book and an environmentalist sensibility, all while sitting on the ground, his back against some log as he wrote in his journal.

At the same time, he was accumulating evidence in support of a theory about Yosemite Valley’s creation that would eventually prevail over the competing theories of California State Geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney. He also seems to have spent his entire three months in the mountains on a more or less uninterrupted natural high.

It’s worth spending a moment to admire the suppleness of Muir’s prose. As a representative sample, consider this bit about one of the Sierra Nevada’s monstrously large ants (whose painful bite he has just finished describing):

This wonderful electric species is about three fourths of an inch long. Bears are fond of them, and tear and gnaw their home-logs to pieces, and roughly devour the eggs, larvae, parent ants, and the rotten or sound wood of the cells, all in one spicy acid hash. The Digger Indians are also fond of the larvae and even of the perfect ants, so I have been told by old mountaineers. They bite off and reject the head, and eat the tickly acid body with keen relish. Thus are the poor biters bitten, like every other biter, big or little, in the world’s great family. (46)

Note first the frequent, metrical use of consonance, assonance, internal rhyme, and other techniques more commonly associated with poetry than prose (“spicy acid hash,” “so I’ve been been told by old mountaineers”). Note also how the description moves steadily outward, from the ants themselves, to their place in the natural world (as food for bears), to their place in the human world (as food for Indians), to their place in the cosmos (“the world’s great family”).

Good stuff. But what can My First Summer tell us about environmentalism as culture? Can you find places where the cultural-environmental theory we’ve been reading can help us appreciate the contemporary significance of Muir’s writing? You might want to look particularly at his description of the Merced River headwaters and the lily (16-17), of the poisoning of the sheep (22-23), of shepherds generally (23-25), of the bear hunter David Brown (27-31), and of Native Americans (e.g., 54-55 and 58-59). Read more!

American Lit II: I would argue that Cheyenne Autumn’s final paragraph draws on a conceit that has been quietly building throughout the story: that Little Wolf is a Cheyenne Moses, leading his people out of bondage to their Promised Land. Consider this passage from the Book of Deuteronomy, in which Moses, having led the Israelites out of Egypt, is permitted to look across the Jordan River and see the Promised Land — but not to enter it:

Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land...all the land of Judah as far as the western sea, the Negev and the whole region from the Valley of Jericho, the City of Palms, as far as Zoar. Then the Lord said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.” And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab.... The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over. Now Joshua son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands on him. So the Israelites listened to him and did what the Lord had commanded Moses. Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, who did all those miraculous signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do in Egypt — to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel. (Deuteronomy 34:1-12, NIV)

Compare the above to the closing words of Cheyenne Autumn:

For twenty-five years Little Wolf lived so, the humblest of a reservation people. When he died in 1904, there were some who still remembered and still loved him. They propped his body up tall on a hill and piled stones around him, drawing them up by travois [a two-poled vehicle for dragging heavy loads] until he was covered in a great heap. There Little Wolf stood on a high place, his face turned to look over the homes of his followers and beyond them, down the Rosebud that flowed northward to the Yellowstone. (272)

Sandoz’s use of this Promised Land conceit strikes me as pointedly ironic, given that it was also used by American imperialism to justify the Cheyenne’s dispossession. She’s basically casting the Cheyenne as the Israelites and the Americans as the Egyptians.

Anyway, now that we’re done with Cheyenne Autumn, what are your thoughts? I’m especially interested in what you think about the book as “witness literature” and as a counterpoint to O Pioneers! Does Cheyenne Autumn succeed in fulfilling the moral obligation that we never forget what happened to the Cheyenne people? Does it help correct Cather’s romanticized and “white”-washed version of the frontier? Or what? Discuss. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Despite Edward Bellamy’s bland prose, Looking Backward was a runaway bestseller. (In fact it was the third-best-selling book in 19th-century America. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of course, was number one.) And despite its high kumbaya index it was taken quite seriously and prompted the birth of “Bellamy Clubs” devoted to promoting its brand of socialism.

While it can be argued that Bellamy fundamentally misunderstood capitalism, a few of the economic ideas in Looking Backward have taken root (in the form, for example, of consumer cooperatives like REI and warehouse stores like Costco). But most economists today would probably just laugh at Bellamy’s insistence on the necessity of central government economic planning:

In your day the production and distribution of commodities being without concert or organization, there was no means of knowing just what demand there was for any class of products, or what was the rate of supply. Therefore, any enterprise by a private capitalist was always a doubtful experiment. The projector having no general view of the field of industry and consumption, such as our government has, could never be sure either what the people wanted, or what arrangements other capitalists were making to supply them. (140)

Actually, a free-enterprise system “without concert or organization” does have a “means of knowing” about supply and demand. Marketing departments do a great job of figuring out “what the people want,” and advertising actually creates wants where none existed before. And the profit motive (as Marx was fully aware) provides a tremendous incentive for capitalists to diligently seek out and exploit weaknesses in the existing production and distribution of goods. (There are no comparable incentives for government planners.) Less efficient businesses get destroyed by more efficient ones, leading to the continuous improvement of the economic system overall.

Yes, argue the free-marketeers, this system is unstable and in many ways wasteful, but on balance the gains in efficiency far outweigh the losses of what is sometimes called capitalism’s “creative destruction” (which refers to the way old practices are continually destroyed as new ones are continually created — or, as Marx put it, the way “all that is solid melts into air”).

Part of what Bellamy seems not to understand is the general idea of spontaneous order, in which highly organized systems emerge on their own without any actual agent doing the organization — systems whose organization is in fact far beyond the planning capabilities of any agent. (Think of the evolution of ecosystems — who could possibly design one from scratch?) As the philosopher Friedrich Hayek pointed out, capitalism is such a system and thus works best when left to operate on its own. (Needless to say, Hayek is one of the key figures in modern conservativism.)

Here’s another passage I want to call to your attention but can’t think of any clever paragraph transition for:

Now nothing about your age is, at first sight, more astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled and overthrown…. Your contemporaries, with their mutual throat-cutting, knew very well what they were at. The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible and as common to increase one’s private hoard by practices injurious to the general welfare. One’s worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he produced was what each particular producer desired. It was for his interest that no more of it should be produced than he himself could produce. To secure this consummation as far as circumstances permitted, by killing off and discouraging those engaged in his line of industry, was his constant effort. When he had killed off all he could, his policy was to combine with those he could not kill, and convert their mutual warfare into a warfare upon the public at large by cornering the market, as I believe you used to call it, and putting up prices to the highest point people would stand before going without the goods. The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied. (140-141)

The modern free-market economist would agree with Bellamy that, when private greed leads to greater “aggregate wealth,” such a result is “merely incidental.” But so what? The question is not whether capitalism’s contribution to the aggregate wealth is intentional or incidental, but whether it is greater than socialism’s contribution. On this point, at least, history has not been kind to Bellamy.

On the other hand, Bellamy’s criticism of monopolies was spot-on in the 1880s and still rings true today. We still have antitrust laws designed to prevent the creation of monopolies. And we still generally insist that certain “necessit[ies] of life,” such as drinking water, be produced and distributed in common rather than by private enterprise.

Of the many responses (both pro and con) to Looking Backard, perhaps the best, at least from a purely literary perspective, was News from Nowhere by British socialist William Morris.

Edward Bellamy had a cousin named Francis Bellamy, who was a Christian socialist and who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. Now for your questions: Which economic system is most consistent with Christian values? Are things like economic efficiency and aggregate wealth creation relevant in answering such a question? Read more!

Comm Arts II: Over at the Tyson Foods website is a page titled “Our Core Values.” Two of the listed values are religious:

We strive to be a faith-friendly company.

We strive to honor God and be respectful of each other, our customers, and other stakeholders.

Another of the listed values is more worldly:

We strive to earn consistent and satisfactory profits for our
shareholders.

Given that Tyson is located in Arkansas, I’m guessing the “faith” they’re talking about is Christianity and the “God” they strive to honor is Jesus.

But wait a minute. Didn’t Jesus tell people not to lay up for treasures for themselves on earth, because where their treasure is, there will their heart be also? And don’t huge corporations like Tyson Foods exist to generate profits, that is, to “lay up treasures on earth”? Is Tyson lying about its core values? Or has it hit upon some clever theology that allows it to honor Jesus by repudiating the words of Jesus? Read more!

American Studies. In “Wet, Dark, and Low: Eco-Man Evolves from Eco-Woman,” Andrew Ross observes that, at the same time feminism was calling masculinity into question, environmentalism was offering men new ways of being masculine. Perhaps more accurately, environmentalism was offering men new rationales for continuing to indulge the same old fantasies and enjoy the same old privileges of patriarchy:

Among the so-called new social movements, the ecology movement has been exceptional in ceding a leading role, in theory and in practical activism, to heterosexual white men. It has been one of the few spaces in post-New Left politics where such men have felt that they can breath freely and easily, while indulging in the wilderness cults traditionally associated with the making of heroic white male identities: the frontiersman, the cowboy, the Romantic poet, the explorer, the engineer, the colonizer, the anthropologist, the pioneer settler, and so on. (220)

Environmentalism might prompt men to question their impact on the environment and their implication in an environmentally destructive economic system, but it didn’t require them to think very deeply about their gender. Keep this in mind later in the semester as we read works by John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Dave Foreman.

Toward the end of his essay Ross argues that the “wild man” phenomenon was closely tied to the yuppie generation and was giving way to the cyborgism of the young:

For tourists of the soul like the Wild Man and the goddess worshipper, the forest is a place of white flight, a traditional location for regrouping and for recharging spiritual batteries with the exotica of Amerindian and ancient European myths. For their sons and daughters, the all-night sweatfests of the rave were semi-outlawed events, throwing up retrofitted memories of their parents’ pastoral hippie gatherings, once the creative social crucible for new forms of sexual and familial behavior. (235)

Is Ross basically right? Are we now seeing the replacement of the organic hippie ideal with an increasingly technological youth culture?

Update: Per popular request, I’ll set aside 30 minutes or so before the exam Thursday so we can finish the discussion of environmentalism, gender, and social class in WALL-E. There’ll still be plenty of time to finish the exam. Let’s meet again in the Haynie Center — if you need desks for writing your exams we can use the computer tables. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Among many other things, The Communist Manifesto portrays capitalism as dystopian. Consider, for example, this description — not at all inaccurate for the time — of how

the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him…. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois State; they are hourly and daily enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. (61-62)

Then there’s the effect of capitalism on the proletarian family, or rather

the practical absence of the family among the proletarians…. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. (71-72)

This point is driven home in our edition by the footnote about an 1833 law permitting children aged 9-13 to be worked 48 hours per week and those 13-18 to be worked 69 hours per week.

Here are some questions: Are workers today “enslaved to the machine”? If so, how? In what ways are families and education nowadays degraded by capitalism? More generally, what are some of the ways capitalism today provokes the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,” so that “[a]ll that is solid melts into air, [and] all that is holy is profaned”?

Do you think that capitalism has found a way around what Karl Marx considered the inevitable result of capitalism’s “uncertainty and agitation,” namely, that “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life”? Is there any future for communism? Read more!

American Lit II: Mari Sandoz’s Cheyenne Autumn can be read and evaluated as an example of the “literature of witness,” as a work whose primary purpose is to bear witness to an epochal tragedy. The usual example of such an event is the Shoah or Jewish Holocaust, though there are many others, including Native American genocide.*

The basic idea is that something important happened here, something so important it behooves us never to forget. The event simply must be recorded — and, unavoidably, interpreted. In this conception, a work qualifies as witness literature if it is a particular author’s attempt to give permanent shape to their own conception of the event and its meaning.

The psychology of thus bearing witness is complex. Part of it is the sense that to forget the tragedy is somehow to compound it, and thus that one has a strong ethical obligation to ensure its remembrance. Not just anyone, of course, but certainly anyone who knows of the event and has felt its power, who has the first-hand experience or archival access necessary to relate it accurately, who has the literary skill to do it justice, and who is otherwise is in a good position to bear witness to it.

One can easily imagine Mari Sandoz feeling herself in such a position and thus more or less obligated to tell the story of the Northern Cheyenne.

Sandoz, of course, is an individual. What about nations? Does a nation like the United States — created in large part through conquest — have a moral duty to support the witness of its own atrocities? (Anyone looking for an essay topic might consider comparing and contrasting the American cultural treatment of Native American conquest to the German handling of the Holocaust.)

* Whether this nation’s treatment of Native Americans should be considered “genocide” is a controversial question. I believe it should; others disagree. Some, for example, claim the label “genocide” is inaccurate because the nation’s intent was not generally to kill Indians simply because they were Indians. Compare to the Nazis, who killed Jews for no other reason than that they were Jews. America’s killing of Indians, while certainly immoral, was incidental to other aims and thus cannot be considered true genocide. I think this conception is too narrow. I argue that the term “genocide” should apply to any unjustified state action pursued in the full knowledge that it will lead to the widespread death of a particular group, even if the killing is not the primary aim. Read more!

Comm Arts II: Allow me to get all academic for a moment and suggest that we think of the practices Peter Singer describes in chapters two and three of Animal Liberation as examples of what happens when animal treatment meets modernity. Modernity saw the rise of science and industrial capitalism, and thus provided the conditions for animal experimentation and factory farming.

But now we’re leaving modernity behind and entering postmodernity, which I’ll try to explain today in class. Right now all I want to say is that most of Singer’s argument can be seen as a reaction against some of the key values of modernity — most of that argument, but not all of it. He also criticizes Jewish and Muslim dietary laws, which are decidedly premodern, and genetic engineering, which is postmodern (152-157). I bring this up in part because maybe, as we leave modernity behind and our conditions of existence become more and more postmodern, we’ll need a new book that takes on the problems Singer only begins to ponder in Animal Liberation.

Anyway, what do you think about the genetic engineering of nonhuman animals? Is it ethical to use genetic engineering to create an entirely new species of animal? Should it be legal to patent such a creation? Read more!