David Hollingshead
Brown University
I study American realism and naturalism. My book project, The Biomatters of American Modernity, argues that the cross-pollinations between the culture of transatlantic science and literary representations of the human in the latter part of the nineteenth century engendered a fundamentally new way of conceptualizing "life" as an object of governmentality. My essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literary Realism and Studies in the Novel.
Naturalism and Women's Domestic Ecology
In the 1880s and 90s, a new female “type” began to take shape in the American cultural imagination: the domestic ecologist. From Ellen Glasgow’s female entomologist in The Descendant, who has just written a study on the “The Domestic Habits of Centipedes,” to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s heroines, crawling around amongst the “endless fungus growths” of the modern home, to the actual pioneers of American ecology such as Ellen Swallow Richards and Mary Treat, who wrote pedagogical pamphlets and empirical studies on the relationship between microscopic organisms and domestic economy, it’s clear that contrary to the assumption in much cultural theory that ecological thinking entails a (masculinist) flight from domesticity, the modern home has been ecological from the very start.
A historical product of both salutary and repressive historical forces—new economic and educational possibilities for women along with an increased biopolitical emphasis on the home as “the social workshop of the making of men,” as Henrietta Goodrich put it—the domestic ecologist provides a remarkable case study for the way environmental constraints delimit yet never fully determine the possibilities for utopian and emancipatory thinking. This paper reads the strange proliferation of human/insect hybrids in women’s naturalist literature as figures that encode both the horrors of enforced domestic labor and the unrealized dream of an alternative to it. While Gilman, Glasgow, Richards, and Treat frequently traffic in the rhetoric of racial hygiene and public health, depicting insect ecologies as fantasmatic threats to the integrity of the person and the nation, I argue that they also imagine them as politically inchoate forms of mass life that have not yet been coopted and privatized by the technocrats of the modern home, and thus as a site of unrealized political potential. From this perspective, I read American naturalism as a kind of counter-archive of the domestic science and public health movements, documenting the ways American women at the turn of the century looked towards their nonhuman “enemies” for a way of imagining forms of female collectivity from within the isolation of the home.
