In Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836), supposed quack doctor Feuerteufel cites the familiar belief that America was the “most unwholesome land in de earth” and proposes a program of embalmment as a way of alleviating the environmental risks of miasma and “de great sickness” that accompanied it. “You shall adopt my plan for embalm your friends, and you no have no more pad air for de fevers, de bilious, de agues, and de plack vomit,” he claims (404). In the novel, Bird takes seriously the question of embalmment; what would Feuerteufel’s proposition mean if fully actualized? In its perfect iteration, embalmment would ostensibly transform each dead body into an impervious object, removing it from the processes of miasma believed to the source of disease like cholera and yellow fever. Cities like New Orleans (susceptible to such health risks because of its swampy climate) would be transformed. Bird proposes embalmment as a way in which otherwise oozy things might withdraw from the ecologies in which they are otherwise found, by becoming non-actors, or, at least, by differently acting upon the environment.[i] Bird’s other satirical schemes for environmental modification, however, rather than transforming the human body into an impenetrable object, envision the near opposite: the human body disarticulated, as manure, entangled with the soil. This paper considers the ways Bird uses the satirical mode to think about the materiality and ecological dynamism of the human body during the antebellum era, a time of moral, epidemic, and environmental crisis not unlike our own.
Bird, Robert Montgomery. Sheppard Lee; Written by Himself. Ed. Christopher Looby. New York Review Books, 2008.
[i] This idea of the withdrawn object is informed by Rebekah Sheldon’s reading of object-oriented ontology in “Form/Matter/Chora: Object-Oriented Ontology and Feminist New Materialism,” The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin, University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 193-222.
