The Vocalisations and Silences of the Infrahuman in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A White Heron’

ABSTRACT

This article aims to advance the research on US, 19th-century regionalist writer Sarah Orne Jewett’s position on the nonhuman in her most famous story, ‘A White Heron’ (1886), by intersecting the perspectives of posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, and the new materialisms, with that of literary soundscapes. Moving from previous assessments of Jewett’s participation in the environmentalism emerging in the US in the second half of the 19th century, it tries to answer the ingrained critique of the aporia inherent in the animal question – i.e. the use of human language to represent the nonhuman – through an accurate examination of the silences and vocalisations depicted in the story. Through her soundscapes, Jewett signifies her intentional and ethical use of the literary device of anthropomorphism, and an intuited, radical take on the animal question.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary soundscapes
• posthumanism
• object-oriented ontology
• new materialism
• sarah orne jewett
• ‘a white heron’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A ‘physiocentric’ position, in the use Mayer borrows from Angelika Krebs (Ethics of Nature. A Map. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), calls for ‘the inclusion of nature into the moral universe for its own sake’, attributing ‘intrinsic value to “sentient nature, especially animals”; to “teleological nature”, i. e. parts of nature such as animals that express intent and purpose; to “all life in nature” and–reflecting a theological stance–to nature as divine creation’ (2016, 106–107). The term is highly reminiscent of Arne Naess’s well-known deep ecology principles, while the dichotomy anthropocentric/physiocentric could be also be thought in the more current terms of anthropomorphism vs bio- or ecocentrism (Krebs’ ‘physiocentric arguments’ attribute value either to some of nature’s parts or ‘to nature as a whole’, Mayer 106).

2. I am of course using this term paradoxically, to render Calarco’s idea of ‘indistinction’ when, next to Deleuze and Guattari’s position, he offers as argument Val Plumwood’s ‘shocking reduction’: the experience she reports of having felt prey for another animal, or – in the same sense as Delueze’s interpretation of Francis Bacon’s paintings of ‘zone[s] of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal’ (Deleuze 2005 (1981), 16) – feeling ‘meat’, i.e. edible matter, for other species, which is a brutal but also immediate realisation of an existing space of alignment with them (Calarco 2015, 60).

3. Leo Marx’s classical, proto-ecocritical study of the pastoral ideal in American literature, in fact, reads Thoreau’s Walden as ‘an American version of the romantic pastoral’, despite its pretence of being the pragmatic test of a ‘heard-headed empiricist.’ According to Marx, Thoreau represents the wilderness as the indispensable trait of a ‘middle ground’, or ‘middle landscape’, in which we should recognise the traditional, literary pastoral withdrawal (Marx 1964, 242–45).

4. Another fruitful perspective in which Sylvia’s character, and her significance for our relation to the environment, could be investigated is affect theory, with its core notion that ‘Affect is thinking, bodily – consciously but vaguely, in the sense that is not yet a fully formed thought’ (Massumi 2015, 10): Sylvia’s agency seems to rely upon a thinking that is mostly intuitive, prerational and preverbal, as if she were thinking with the totality of her body – senses, musculoskeletal- and nervous system. As such, Sylvia’s apprehension is presented by Jewett as more authentic, and her behaviour as more ethical. Moreover, a critical approach intersecting with the wider field of cognitive sciences could provide the idea of situated cognition, i.e. an embodied, or embedded, or extended cognition, which is what Sylvia’s personality seems to be working with in her intra-action with nature and the infrahuman (Robbins and Aydede 2008).

5. I am here using not only Karen Barad’s new-materialist idea of ‘intra-action’ (Barad 2007), but also Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s development of the concept in their Material Ecocriticism (Iovino and Oppermann 2014). Barad substitutes ‘intra-action’ for interaction in order to foreground agency, and its dynamics, as a property of all matter instead of the privilege of individual human beings (141). Iovino and Oppermann stress how intra-actions are relations producing ‘configurations of meanings and discourses that we may interpret as stories’ (7). By intra-acting, all material forms (including the human and the nonhuman) co-produce meaning and become ‘storied matter’, or material textuality.

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Paola Loreto

Paola Loreto is Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Milan, Italy. She is the author of three book-length studies (on Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Derek Walcott). She has written a number of articles and essays on North-American and Caribbean literatures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Wilbur, Robert Bly, A.R. Ammons, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, Sam Selvon, Michael Ondatjie, Joy Kogawa, Jane Urquhart). A specialist in American poetry, she has translated Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wilbur, Philip Levine, Charles Simic, A. R. Ammons, Amy Newman, and some contemporary US ecopoets. Her latest research is in contemporary American poetry and poetics, poetry translation, world literature, ecocriticism and ecopoetry.