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Dissolving into Visibility: Early American Natural History and the Corporeality of Interspecies Encounters

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Exploring Animal Encounters

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Abstract

This chapter analyzes three early American writers’ engagement with natural history discourse and portrayal of interspecies encounters in which shifting animal materiality and the permeability of human and nonhuman bodies heightens the visibility of bodies and raises questions about definitions of agency, personhood, and creaturehood. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Leonora Sansay, and John James Audubon reveal moments in which the natural world and the plantation system overlap and converge, where animal materiality shifts, making visible the systems and the effects they have on non-white and nonhuman bodies. These moments, informed by natural history discourse, feature careful, attentive observations of bodies and the natural world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 89.

  2. 2.

    For debates concerning theories of American degeneracy and their role in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), see Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

  3. 3.

    Katy L. Chiles, Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literatures of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 110.

  4. 4.

    Kelly Wisecup and Toni Wall Jaudon, “On Knowing and Not Knowing about Obeah,” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 130. Wisecup and Jaudon explain that “these practices were constituted by what we would now designate as separate medical and religious components: the knowledge and application of herbal remedies; singing or chanting prayers or powerful words; a diagnosis of physical ailments; and mediation with non-human powers.”

  5. 5.

    Justine Murison, “Obeah and Its Others: Buffered Selves in the Era of Tropical Medicine,” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 145–147. See Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 11–12; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007), 27–41.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 156.

  7. 7.

    Parrish, American Curiosity, 15–16.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 23.

  9. 9.

    Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 86, 98–99. Parahumanity, as theorized by Allewaert , challenges the hierarchical, anthropocentric organization of life, placing plant , animal , parahuman, and human beside each other. The figure of the parahuman is not a closed or unified body; rather, it is an “opened and dispersed series of parts” (98).

  10. 10.

    Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2; Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 143.

  12. 12.

    Parrish, American Curiosity, 20. Parrish argues that “Crèvecoeur stood at the end of a long tradition of theorizing about the climate’s effects on race, sex, intelligence, generation, politics, and cultural achievement.”

  13. 13.

    Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 129.

  14. 14.

    Paul Outka, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 79.

  15. 15.

    Christopher Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 136.

  16. 16.

    Michelle Burnham, “Obeah’s Unproductive Bodies: A Response to ‘Obeah Knowledge, Power, and Writing in the Early Atlantic World,’” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 241.

  17. 17.

    Ibid.

  18. 18.

    Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 134.

  19. 19.

    James Bishop, “A Feeling Farmer: Masculinity, Nationalism, and Nature in Crèvecoeur’s Letters,” Early American Literature 43, no. 2 (2008): 361.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 372.

  21. 21.

    Ibid.

  22. 22.

    Kathleen Brown, “‘Strength of the Lion … Arms Like Polished Iron’: Embodying Black Masculinity in an Age of Slavery and Propertied Manhood,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 174.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 189.

  24. 24.

    Outka, Race and Nature, 13.

  25. 25.

    Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010), 88.

  26. 26.

    Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 50.

  27. 27.

    Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 39.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 130.

  29. 29.

    Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 3–6.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 193.

  31. 31.

    J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York: Penguin, 1986), 177.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 177–178.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 178.

  34. 34.

    Parrish, American Curiosity, 292.

  35. 35.

    Ibid.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 293.

  37. 37.

    Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 164.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 167.

  39. 39.

    Ibid.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 168.

  41. 41.

    Ibid.

  42. 42.

    Outka, Race and Nature, 39.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 40.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 51.

  45. 45.

    Albert E. Stone, “Introduction,” in Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1986), 23. First published in 1925, Sketches, discovered in 1923 in Normandy France by Henri Bourdin, features twelve essays similar in subject and tone to Letters, but which Crèvecoeur “omitted either by design, necessity, or accident from both the English and French versions of Letters.”

  46. 46.

    Crèvecoeur, Letters and Sketches, 288.

  47. 47.

    Chiles, Transformable Race, 119.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 120–121.

  49. 49.

    Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology, 150. Born in 1773, Leonora Sansay grew up in Philadelphia; by the end of the century, she would become the lover of Aaron Burr before marrying “Louis Sansay, a French creole from Saint-Domingue, who in 1796 had sold his coffee plantation to Toussaint Louverture and fled the ongoing Haitian revolution.”

  50. 50.

    Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “The Secret History of the Early American Novel: Leonora Sansay and Revolution in Saint Domingue,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 40, no. 1/2 (2007): 78.

  51. 51.

    Michelle Burnham, “Female Bodies and Capitalist Drive: Leonora Sansay’s Secret History in Transoceanic Context,” Legacy 28, no. 2 (2011): 178.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 182.

  53. 53.

    Parrish, American Curiosity, 315.

  54. 54.

    Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology, 147.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 160.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 179–180.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 155.

  58. 58.

    Leonora Sansay, Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura, ed. Michael Drexler (Peterborough: Broadview, 2007), 145.

  59. 59.

    Ibid.

  60. 60.

    Ibid.

  61. 61.

    Ibid.

  62. 62.

    Ibid.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 146.

  64. 64.

    Burnham, “Female Bodies,” 195.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 195–196.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 196.

  67. 67.

    Ibid.

  68. 68.

    Ibid.

  69. 69.

    Abby L. Goode, “Gothic Fertility in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History,” Early American Literature 50, no. 2 (2015): 450.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 463.

  71. 71.

    Ibid.

  72. 72.

    Ibid.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., 460–461, emphasis added.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., 449, emphasis added.

  75. 75.

    Sansay, Secret History, 145.

  76. 76.

    Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 255.

  77. 77.

    John James Audubon, Writings and Drawings, ed. Christoph Irmscher (New York: Library of America, 1999), 77.

  78. 78.

    Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 274.

  79. 79.

    Chiles, Transformable Race, 2.

  80. 80.

    Audubon, Writings and Drawings, 90–91.

  81. 81.

    Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 275.

  82. 82.

    Audubon, Writings and Drawings, 241.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., 218, 256, 262.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., 239–240.

  85. 85.

    Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 255, 276.

  86. 86.

    Christoph Irmscher, The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 208, 214.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., 217.

  88. 88.

    Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 276.

  89. 89.

    Amy R.W. Meyers, “Observations of an American Woodsman: John James Audubon as Field Naturalist,” in The Watercolors for the Birds of America, eds. Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. (New York: Villard Books, 1993), 48.

  90. 90.

    Ibid.

  91. 91.

    Irmscher, The Poetics of Natural History, 208. Irmscher observes that, for Audubon, “alas, the only way to procure the readers sympathy, as it were, is by procuring specimens.”

  92. 92.

    Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 277.

  93. 93.

    Ibid., 255–256.

  94. 94.

    Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology, 98. Allewaert does not consider Audubon in her analysis.

  95. 95.

    Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 3.

  96. 96.

    Audubon, Writings and Drawings, 755–756.

  97. 97.

    Ibid., 757.

  98. 98.

    Ibid.

  99. 99.

    Roberts, Transporting Visions, 78.

  100. 100.

    Ibid., 86.

  101. 101.

    See “To Lucy Audubon, May 15, 1827,” in Audubon, Writings and Drawings, 803.

  102. 102.

    Audubon, Writings and Drawings, 761.

  103. 103.

    Ibid., 754.

  104. 104.

    Roberts, Transporting Visions, 81.

  105. 105.

    Ibid., 109–110.

  106. 106.

    Audubon , Writings and Drawings, 305. This decomposition as transformation can also be seen in Audubon’s description of the Black Vulture in Ornithological Biography, where the vultures wait until the alligator decomposes “in an almost fluid state” in order to be able to “perforate the tough skin of the monster.”

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  1. Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT, USA

    Julie McCown

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  1. North American Department, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Dominik Ohrem

  2. Department of Philosophy, California State University, Fullerton, CA, USA

    Matthew Calarco

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McCown, J. (2018). Dissolving into Visibility: Early American Natural History and the Corporeality of Interspecies Encounters. In: Ohrem, D., Calarco, M. (eds) Exploring Animal Encounters. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92504-2_8

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