Union College Union | Digital Works Honors Theses Student Work 6-2017 Conceptualizing Nature: New England Nature Writers Robert Pinkham Union College - Schenectady, NY Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalworks.edu/theses Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Pinkham, Robert, "Conceptualizing Nature: New England Nature Writers" (2017).edu/theses/71 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Union | Digital Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Union | Digital Works. For more information, please contact digitalworks@union. Conceptualizing Nature: New England Nature Writers By Robert Pinkham ******* Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in the Department of English Union College June 2017 ii Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: William Cullen Bryant’s Pre-Industrial Nature Poetry 13 Chapter 2: The Transcendentalist Response to the Industrial Revolution 37 Chapter 3: Looking Back, or Moving Forward, from the Modern World 67 Conclusion 104 Works Cited 110 iii ABSTRACT This thesis examines five New England nature writers and their works from three distinct historical literary periods―William Cullen Bryant’s poetry from the era before industrialism (up to 1830); Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays (1841-1844) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) from the Industrial Revolution (1830-1860); and finally Robert Frost’s poetry and Henry Beston’s The Outermost House (1929) from the modernist period (1920-1950).
These writers are connected by a shared and intense love of nature; however, because they write during different moments in history, their approaches to and definitions of “nature” vary. This thesis engages with these writers and their times in light of the historical development of industrialism and how it has worked to undermine the importance of connecting with the natural world. Over the course of three chapters, this thesis traces the development of environmental thought among New England writers and takes account of how industrialism changes predominant attitudes about nature. Since each of these writers rejects certain cultural attitudes that prevail in their time, this thesis grapples with how and why they depart from the norm in terms of their thoughts about the natural world.
In pre-industrial New England, Bryant is free to adopt a strong Romantic conception of nature—one that is largely absent of concerns about protecting or conserving the environment. His advocacy for a deep spiritual connection with nature clashes with the prevailing capitalist view of nature that would help industrialism to develop in New England. However, once the Industrial Revolution sweeps across New England, Emerson and Thoreau issue warnings about the dangers of industrialism severing humanity from the natural world. They rail against the institutions and customs of their times, arguing that those will contribute to a society-wide spiritual iv rot.
By the twentieth century, Beston and Frost have to grapple with being lovers of nature in a world that is irreversibly industrialized. Frost is pessimistic about humanity’s ever-decreasing connection with the natural world, while Beston remains hopeful that we can engage meaningfully and spiritually with the environment even in modern times. These somewhat divergent views highlight the tensions of environmental thought in the modern, industrial world between the desire to live in harmony with the natural world and the bleak realities of modernity. Industrialism and its effects of alienating large swaths of our culture from engagement with the natural world have forced these authors to focus on how to protect New England environments and landscapes.
This history of this grand conversation about nature delivers us into the present moment in which we must find a way to cope with global environmental crisis. Learning about the history of environmental thought and writing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New England helps us to better understand contemporary environmental concerns and gives us the chance to move forward in the best manner possible. 1 INTRODUCTION In our contemporary world, urbanized and industrialized and technologized, have we lost our fundamental connections with nature that has sustained us for millennia? Harold Fromm seems to think so. In his 1978 article, “From Transcendence to Obsolescence: A Route Map,” he argues that in premodern times, human societies had a more comprehensive understanding of how our livelihood is entirely predicated on our environment, or more basically, the land―we require clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, healthy food to eat, and building resources for shelter.
This understanding was often translated into spiritual and religious notions of nature as sacred, or at least as deserving of veneration and good care. Since the advent of industrialism during the nineteenth century and the exponential technological growth that came along with it, however, Fromm finds that in Western and industrialized cultures we have made the mistake of presuming that human technology is what sustains us. In doing so, we have forsaken our earlier conception of nature as providing for us and have consequently found obsolete the idea that we share a spiritual connection with nature or that it is deserving of our protection and stewardship. In short, Fromm argues, we have lost our once close connection with the natural world.
This false understanding of technology as the source of our sustenance as opposed to nature is one of the leading conceptual developments that have fostered behaviors toward the environment that have helped to exacerbate the global climate crisis we now face. Fromm spells this out, writing that modern humans “are rarely in a position to experience a connection between the commodity that fulfills their need and its natural 2 source” (Fromm 38). As this connection between that which sustains us and its source has been obscured, we have come to believe that we no longer need nature, and therefore do not need to care about its wellbeing. Fromm highlights this fallacy, comparing it to a group of “affluent teenagers who dump beer cans from their moving sportscar and then drive off” (ibid.
Like the teenagers who believe their waste has vanished when in fact it has not, Fromm argues, our modern industrial society engages behaviors that pollute and degrade the environment without realizing that the carbon we burn to drive our cars does not just vanish but in fact stays in our atmosphere, builds up with other greenhouse gases, and threatens the stability of our planet’s climate system. Because we have become so wrapped up in our technological abilities in the industrial age, we have lost sight of the full repercussions of our actions, and we wake up to find ourselves somehow embroiled in a global climate crisis. The bright side is that there are certainly millions of people around the globe that see the threats to our global ecosystem and care enough to do something about it. There is today a strong and growing global environmentalist movement that seeks to reduce the effects of global climate change and increase the sustainability of our resource use to foster a rebound in the health of the global ecosystem.
The existence of this global movement might seem to contradict Fromm’s analysis, but I argue that it only demonstrates that his purview of the situation is inherently a macro-level analysis of general civilizational trends, which allows for undercurrents that oppose the predominant cultural attitudes and behaviors. So, in spite of the fact that modern civilization, fully industrialized and technologized, has generally tended in the direction of exploiting nature for resources and failing to attach any spiritual significance to it, there have always 3 been individuals who strongly oppose that trend and argue in favor of maintaining or recreating a deep connection between the human and the natural. This thesis project is fundamentally concerned with those thinkers and writers who, in the face of industrial development, have promoted deep spiritual connectedness with nature and behaviors that reflect that conception of nature as sacred. The specific group of writers under consideration in this project all come from New England.
I’ve adopted this regional approach because New England has a specific industrial history that affects the ways in which the writers who come from the region write about nature. These writers share common cultural influences from their region―from Puritanism and Calvinism to individualism and the New England farm ethic―that shape their approach to nature in a common way. The core aim of this thesis is to consider this industrial and cultural history and to read from a historical and regional vantage point how these nature writers respond to industrialism. In light of Fromm’s analysis, we should expect to find that industrial changes and advances from one era to another should change writers’ conception of what nature is over time.
William Cullen Bryant, the first writer featured in this thesis, has a particular Romantic and pre-industrial view of nature that is marked by an unsullied passion for nature and a near total absence of worry or concern about the health of the environment. This view is quite different from how Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who lived and wrote during the First Industrial Revolution, view nature as in danger or being degraded by industrial encroachment on the landscape, which inspires them to prescribe a deepening of our connection with it. This in turn is distinct from how Henry Beston and Robert Frost, modernists who lived in a world irreversibly industrialized, view nature 4 either as on the verge of becoming totally forsaken or as already there. In three chapters, this thesis will examine each of these writers in the context of their historical time period and the extent of industrial development for the sake of tracking how industrialism changes approaches to nature.
As Kate Soper notes in the introduction to her aptly titled 1995 book, What is Nature?, the very word “nature” can mean innumerable different things to different individuals from different cultural and historical contexts. Thus, there is no singular “nature” that all five of these New England nature writers are writing about; rather, each of them has a different understanding of what that word means and how it ought to be used. Because of this, one of the fundamental goals of this project is to approach an understanding of the unique ways in which each writer has in mind when they write “nature.” Nevertheless, it would be useful to proffer a basic and vague notion of what I mean when I write “nature,” since I will have to use that word a lot in writing about nature writers. Whether humans are included in the set of things that count as ‘nature’ is up for debate, among these five writers and among the linguistic community as a whole, but in this thesis.
“Nature” certainly includes all that which is neither human nor made by human artifice. The term may include those human and human-derived things as well, and therefore simply refer to everything contained within the natural universe, but only in specific moments and in reference to one or more of the writers’ meaning nature in that sense. To avoid the confusions inherent in that setup, I will frequently substitute for nature terms such as: environment, ecosystem, land or landscape, and cosmos or natural universe. These terms refer to specific portions of what may (or may not) be considered 5 to be included in the more total term of “nature.” “Environment” and “ecosystem” are similar terms, in that they both generally refer to spaces that are considered to be outside of the realm of humans and human-created things; specifically, however, “environment” refers to the more abstract concept of that kind of space as a space we can be in, while “ecosystem” more specifically refers to a space that constitutes a biotic community, such as a forest or a reef or a mountain.
“Land” refers to parcels or the sum of parcels of the environment or ecosystem that humans consider to have a specific use or function, such as a farm or a park or a campus; “landscape” refers to the abstract notion of the land as an interpretable space for humans to live in.