Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics of Alienation

Abstract

Rochelle L. Johnson explores “the American alienation from nature” (17), a cultural turn away from material nature that was the paradoxical product of “three of the most memorable cultural achievements” of the early nineteenth century: “the landscape painting of Thomas Cole, the landscape design movement of Andrew Jackson Downing, and the transcendental philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (2). Johnson contrasts these figures with Susan Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau, who represent a “counteraesthetics, which assumed that the value of nature resided in its physicality, rather than in metaphors for human experience” (3). In a well-informed discussion of Cole's attempts to shape landscape painting in accord with an American version of the picturesque, Johnson observes that Cole's aesthetic is consistently determined by “nature's potential to accommodate Euro-American progress” (78). Similarly, she finds in Downing's garden plans “the possibility of an aesthetically ideal landscape” which might “contribute to the further refinement of American culture” (134). Both artists use nature, and therefore erase it, to pursue cultural imperatives. The heart of Passions for Nature is Johnson's comparison of Emerson's Nature and Cooper's Rural Hours, texts in which the question of metaphor and the larger meaning of “nature” are paramount. Johnson argues that “nature served Emerson primarily as a metaphor for reason itself” (148), leading him to compel “his readers to recognize the physical world as a mere means to a heightened intellectual state” (154). Emerson's conviction that the experience of nature could open new philosophical insights, Johnson holds, was evidence that he regarded nature “as a means to an end” (147). In contrast, Cooper “envisions nature as truth itself, and not as a vehicle for anything other than what it is” (147). This contrast is problematized, however, when Johnson explains that Cooper's understanding of nature is based on her conviction “that the physical world is the creation of a Christian God” (169). That too is a kind of trope, making nature a sign of God, though one that, in Cooper's rendering, teaches humility rather than providing philosophical illumination. There is, Johnson writes, a productive tension “between her Christian faith and her belief in the importance of fidelity to the real details of nature” (167). The post-Walden Thoreau of the Journal and “Wild Fruits” offers a clearer contrast to the Emerson of Nature. Thoreau became more inclined simply to name and record the phenomena of nature, seeing that as a less intrusive and perhaps more reverent stance to take before nature. He was a writer moving “toward a prose that conveys experience as accurately—and as literally—as possible, without the intrusion of metaphor” (208). Johnson's study raises by implication difficult questions about the very possibility of “nature writing.” The translation of nature into language is an act of abstraction and distillation, always carrying the mark of human culture. We can find this struggle in some of our best contemporary nature writers—Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver provide good examples. Passions for Nature thus highlights a difficult question for environmental criticism: can one write nature without ultimately displacing it?