Writing wilderness: Conserving, preserving, and inhabiting the land in nineteenth-century American literature

"Traditional nature writing" is a kind of literature which focuses on the concept of "wilderness" in the exploration of three related but distinct themes: critique of industrial progress, praise for empty wilderness, and appeals or demands for preservation. In this dissertation, I trace the historical treatment and development of "wilderness" in six primary texts: Eliza Farnham's Life in Prairie Land (1846), George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), Henry David Thoreau's The Maine Woods (1864), John Muir's Our National Parks (1901), Chief Seattle's speech (1855, 1887, 1972), and Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron" (1886).; Farnham and Marsh both believed that American society was destined to transform wilderness into civilized land, and Marsh argued that natural resources should be conserved so that use by future generations would not be impaired. Thoreau and Muir argued that wilderness ought to be preserved for recreational, spiritual, and aesthetic values, and Muir's work had a powerful influence on public policy. All four of these authors argued that the nation's well-being depended on its interaction with wilderness. "Seattle's Speech" and Jewett's story offer alternative visions, putting humanity back into the wild and describing situations in which humans have discovered ways of interacting with the land which do not destroy its long-term productivity.; An ecofeminist approach to literature encourages twenty-first-century readers to recognize the value of traditional nature writing's critique of industrial progress. This approach also highlights two problematic issues. Wilderness preservation rests on an assumption that human activity destroys non-human nature, and often depends on the removal of people who have developed non-exploitative interactions with nature. Wilderness preservation also ignores the places in which most people live, e.g., cities, and so it offers no alternative to the dominant culture in which exploitation continues. Finally, an ecofeminist approach encourages readers to examine other forms of literature for alternatives to the wilderness preservation paradigm. Limiting our reading of nature writing to nonfiction excludes many texts which offer investigations of human interaction with non-human nature, and limiting ecologically-informed behavior to remote wilderness areas allows the degradation of our habitat to proceed unabated.