Immanent Nature: Environment, Women, and Sacrifice in the Nature Writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Sarah Orne Jewett

Abstract

There remains in Hawthorne criticism today, despite critical rediscovery of his texts in terms of the public sphere, an echo of denunciation that he did not do the cultural work that his contemporaries did, that he "distrusted" and "punished" women, and that his work is irrelevant to today's young readers. He has been largely neglected, as well, by contemporary environmental critics who have found nature in his texts to be insufficiently mimetic. This ecocritical reading of Hawthorne in conjunction with that of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Sarah Orne Jewett resolves these critical problems in that he is established as a nature writer, narratively rendering nature observation (sketches) and an environmental agenda (tales and novels) of expiation for maternal wilderness penetration. The all-important work of Hawthorne might then be called ecological, making him highly relevant in today's world. He is relevant in terms of women, as well, as nature unfolds in gendered terms in his works, and he, along with Sedgwick, positions the human female at scenes of primal violence at the heart of New England colonization, which set in motion the devastation of the American wilderness. Hawthorne's female is a corrective presence to which males remain blind. Jewett envisions a post-white-masculine-hegemonic world of female ascendancy, based on female symbiosis with nature, the fruition of Hawthorne and Sedgwick's preferencing of the female. Environmental criticism examines the human-nature relationships and ecological subtexts in literary texts and encompasses a critique of American culture, a gendered understanding of the landscape, an application of geographical discussion of place and of concepts from ecology and conservation biology. It employs a multi-disciplinary perspective and calls for the addition of "worldnature" or "environmentality" to the categories of cultural criticism. This ecocritical approach combines the historical philosophical, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic perspective of Patocka, Lacan, Derrida, and Staten with ecofeminism, integrating matters of geology, ecology, art, nature writing, and quantum mechanical physics.