Against Sustainability

Reading Nineteenth-Century America in the Age of Climate Crisis

Michelle Neely

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780823288205
  9780823288229
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823288212
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Against Sustainability responds to the twenty-first-century environmental crisis by unearthing the nineteenth-century U.S. literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to sustainability, recycling, and preservation. Through novel pairings of antebellum and contemporary writers including Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book demonstrates that some of our most vaunted strategies to address ecological crisis in fact perpetuate environmental degradation.

Yet Michelle C. Neely also reveals that the nineteenth century offers useful and generative environmentalisms, if only we know where and how to find them. Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson experimented with models of joyful, anti-consumerist frugality. Hannah Crafts and Harriet Wilson devised forms of radical pet-keeping that model more just ways of living with others. Ultimately, the book explores forms of utopianism that might more reliably guide mainstream environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Through new readings of familiar texts, Against Sustainability demonstrates how nineteenth-century U.S. literature can help us rethink our environmental paradigms in order to imagine more just and environmentally sound futures.

CHAPTER 1

Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost

Recycling and reuse were common features of many Americans’ lives during the nineteenth century. While these processes sometimes shade into one another, reuse, the process of fixing or finding uses for damaged or broken items, was particularly standard in all but the wealthiest households (as it had been in earlier periods) given the relative scarcity of materials and the labor richness of rural and urban communities alike. A culture of frugality that found its chief expression in domestic guidebooks promoted reuse practices and provided instruction in some of the more common forms of reuse.¹ Reuse could often be achieved with labor already found in a given home, though items such as clocks might require the care of a specialist to be put back into use. Recycling, on the other hand, had its own economy, one that depended on the poor (and often, poor children) to scavenge and junk dealers to buy and vend. According to Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, scavenging recyclables was “a chore and a common pastime for poor children, who foraged for shreds of canvas or bits of metal on the docks, for coal on the railroad tracks, and for bottles and food on the streets and in the alleys.”²

Occasionally in the nineteenth century, recycling was a more formal part of industry, as in Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” whose diptych depicts first the splendor and comfort of wealthy London bachelors and then the squalid lives of the young American women who recycle those wealthy bachelors’ castoff clothing into cheap paper. This recycling activity means the young women must breathe “fine, poisonous particles, which from all sides darted, subtilely, as motes in sun-beams, into the lungs.”³ In the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth, recycling frequently takes place on the backs of the poor, and recyclers are typically distant from the sites of consumption (if not always production) of the objects they recycle. Wealthy countries often outsource some or most of their e-waste, used car batteries, unwanted clothing, and more to be recycled in countries from Mexico to China to Pakistan to India, often at great economic, health, and environmental cost to the recyclers and those who live adjacent to their recycling activity.⁴ Increasingly, countries are rejecting imports of recyclables, refusing to become a “dumping ground” for the contaminated waste of wealthy countries.⁵ In the United States, the loss of these overseas dumping grounds means that higher percentages of recyclables are being incinerated or heaped in landfills, setting up environmental-justice disasters for the communities who live near disposal sites and putting increasing pressure on the American public to confront the consequences of their consumption habits.⁶

Recycling became increasingly state organized in the twentieth century as the value of scrap increased during the first two world wars, and by 1970 recycling’s familiar logo and rhetoric was in place.⁷ Scavenging activities of the nineteenth-century poor certainly had economic and environmental benefits, but they were not yet touted by the wealthy as part of an environmental vision. Organic-material recycling did emerge as a scientific paradigm during the antebellum period, however, as chemists such as Humphry Davy and Justus Liebig explained the process and significance of decomposition.⁸ Despite lacking the sophisticated “microbiological, biochemical, and pedological techniques and concepts” that would emerge in the 1880s, scientists such as Liebig were increasingly able to describe the nitrogen cycle, the significance of minerals to agriculture, and so on.⁹ As organic recycling emerged as scientific fact in the nineteenth century, it caught the attention of many nonscientists, not least Walt Whitman. Whitman’s poetry is committed to the proposition that all life—all matter, even—is intimately interconnected. This commitment is expressed in his boundless sympathy, in his claims to inhabit imaginatively not just other human subjects but animals of all kinds, trees, plants, rocks, and so on. The proposition is emblematized in Whitman’s obsession with compost, particularly evident in the first few editions of Leaves of Grass. The central mystery of grass, summed up in the child’s famous query of “what is the grass?” turns out to be, more than anything else, compost or, to put it another way, decomposing corpses. After four brief stanzas that offer suggestive but abstract possibilities as answers to the mystery of the grass (“the flag of my disposition,” “the handkerchief of the Lord,” etc.), the poem suddenly provides a concrete answer in the form of an extended, eight-stanza meditation on the grass as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” full of “hints about the dead young men and women,” “hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.”¹⁰ Such “hints” famously culminate in the claim that the dead “are alive and well somewhere; / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.”¹¹ This rejection of death is not just an optimistic metaphor; Whitman means it—matter doesn’t disappear, it simply gets recycled.

As scholars from David Reynolds onward have amply demonstrated, Whitman’s interest in the recycling of matter was stoked by the work of Justus Liebig in particular.¹² Whitman glowingly reviewed one of Liebig’s major publications, Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1847, touting “Chemistry—that involves the essences of creation, and the changes, and the growths, and formations and decays, of so large a constituent part of the earth, and the things thereof!”¹³ Critics who have treated Whitman’s writing about compost have almost uniformly tied it to progressive democratic and environmental attitudes. Mark Noble has argued that “for Whitman, Liebig discloses the organism as a fact of the recombination of smaller bodies, the immortality of materials perpetually recycled and rearranged, and the pure democracy and thus broad possibility that are both inherent in and constitutive of nature.”¹⁴ Paul Outka has taken Whitman’s use of compost in Leaves of Grass to “undo the distinction between the living and the dead, a radical decentering of the anthropomorphic that aligns Whitman here with the deep ecological view of the human as very much a subset of the larger biotic community.”¹⁵ M. Jimmie Killingsworth, reading Whitman’s “This Compost,” finds that “faith in the earth’s bounty … is based in this poem not upon the pioneer’s sense of the world as an inexhaustible storehouse for human exploitation but upon respect for the power of the earth’s processes to restore health and complete its mighty cycles.”¹⁶ Maria McFarland has connected Whitman’s writings about compost to his interest in urban sanitary reform and what we would now call environmental health.¹⁷ Serpil Opperman has argued that Whitman’s poetic use of compost emblematizes what it means “to be mutually environed in nature’s cyclical rhythms.”¹⁸ Through the lens of compost, Whitman has increasingly emerged as a model of ecopoetics, contradicting earlier dismissals of his work by environmentally minded critics.¹⁹

To foreground compost is thus to beg the question of Whitman as an environmental poet. How can a poet who pays such respect to natural cycles, who repeatedly celebrates the interconnection of living and nonliving objects, fail to be one of the United States’ most important environmental writers? In fact, Whitman has been increasingly read in just this way. To be sure, he has not yet received the same degree of attention as contemporaries such as Thoreau or Emerson, but ecocritical interest in Whitman has not been lacking.²⁰ Whitman’s corpus is fertile ground for environmentally minded critics who observe Whitman’s attention to the particular sights, sounds, and rhythms of the nonhuman landscapes and creatures he describes, his interest in waste and decay, and—given ecocriticism’s own expanding and overdue attention to representations of urban space—his portraits of city life.²¹ Such ecocritical work has added richness to our sense of Whitman as a poet and to our understanding of the nineteenth-century US environmental imagination. Yet for all his celebration of “feuillage,” his ecstatic sexual congress with the sea, and his mystical take on material recycling, if we keep Whitman’s famously undiscriminating appetite front and center, he remains an unlikely environmental poet.

In its own time, the heavy emphasis on appetite in the early editions of Leaves of Grass would have been underscored by how its public encountered it: marketed and distributed (and, by the second edition, published) exclusively by the phrenological firm Fowler and Wells. Potential readers might have first met with the book through an advertisement in the columns of Fowler and Wells’ popular health-reformist magazine Life Illustrated, listed among their catalogue of “New and Miscellaneous Books” available by mail or for sale in their New York City “Cabinet,” as the reformers called their storefront and offices on Nassau Street in Manhattan. Imagine the experience of entering Fowler and Wells’ phrenological cabinet to buy one of the first editions: Surrounded by busts and casts of heads, death masks, paintings and drawings of animals and humans, the “savage” and the civilized, the criminal and the virtuous; nestled between the writings of the vegetarian reformer Sylvester Graham and sacks of his coarse, whole wheat “Graham flour”; between books on mesmerism, the water cure, temperance, and the dangers of ladies’ lacing; amid these and other self-help, health-oriented publications and products you would find Whitman’s thin volume of ninety-five pages, “shaped like a small atlas,” as the anonymous 1855 reviewer described it in Life Illustrated.²² In other words, the early editions of Leaves of Grass were sold in what were essentially protomodern health stores, to people shopping for a brand of do-it-yourself self-knowledge and physical perfectionism. Such a consumer history should remind us that for the “poet of the body,” as Whitman denominates his speaker in “Song of Myself,” an interest in intake, consumption, and digestion were literal.

In this chapter, I juxtapose Whitman’s interest in compost with his poetry’s obsession with appetite, exploring the connections between consumption and material recycling and the relationship of both of these to Whitman’s democratic and poetic projects. First I explore the relationship between omnivorous appetite and egalitarianism in order to argue that Whitman’s commitment to indiscriminate consumption and sympathy is fundamentally antireformist: His purposeful determination to incorporate everything and everyone is precisely what prevents Leaves of Grass from modeling a more transformative, egalitarian version of poetic and political community.

Next I connect Whitman’s appetitive poetic stance to his interest in compost, arguing that although compost affords an organic foundation for Whitman’s poetic project of unification, it also authorizes the unlimited appetite—for goods, bodies, sights, sounds, pleasure, and for nonhuman nature itself—so characteristic of Leaves of Grass. In Whitman’s hands, the cyclical quality of compost yields a fantasy of perfect material recycling, of an earth that can convert everything discarded, dead, or used up back into something alive, clean, and usable again. Appetite is thus the twin of compost in Whitman’s poetic environment.²³ At the end of the chapter, I read Whitman’s approach to biotic community, compost, and the celebration of the self against the twentieth-century African American poet Lucille Clifton’s treatment of these same topics. I argue that Clifton, a poet self-consciously in dialogue with Walt Whitman, develops an ecopoetics that insists upon mortality and loss, scarcity and endings, as essential to the production of real ethical and ecological community. Clifton’s rich ecopoetry articulates the difficulties and dangers of Whitman’s (and often, our own) uncritical embrace of consumption and compost.

Ultimately, Whitman helps make visible how recycling authorizes consumption without limits and yields a fundamentally static and therefore nonegalitarian, antiecological vision of community. By demonstrating that material recycling is the linchpin of Whitman’s indiscriminate appetite, I argue that wealthy resource...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraphs
• Introduction. The Unlikely Environmentalisms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
• 1. Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost
• 2. Joyful Frugality: Thoreau, Dickinson, and the Pleasures of Not Consuming
• 3. The Problem with Preservation: Aesthetics and Sanctuary in Catlin, Parkman, Erdrich, Melville, and Byatt
• 4. Radical Pet Keeping: Crafts, Wilson, and Living with Others in the Anthropocene
• Coda. Embracing Green Temporalities: Indigenous Sustainabilities, Anglo-American Utopias
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author