In “missing All,” Emily Dickinson’s poetic eye misses the sweep of the sun’s course across the sky that extends and engulfs from light into dark. Her eye averts from the celestial turnings that stage this movement with the dismissal: “’Twas not so large that I / Could lift my Forehead from my work / For Curiosity” (6–8). The poem’s speaker dwells and settles into close attendance to her work within and against the open-jawed “All” of omniscience. Her diminished view is neither deficient nor exceptional; her work not as groundbreaking as “a World’s / Departure from a Hinge / Or Sun’s extinction” may seem. What does she see? Not the Earth in its round magnificence, nonchalantly shrugging off the daily flotsam and jetsam that does not adhere to its broad curvature; nor the opposite possibility of Earth’s spectacular demise.

If Dickinson’s eye looks away and looks inside, she is nevertheless aware of the axial rotation of the Earth and the curvature of its surface. Each of the possible figures evoked—the day’s close at sunset or a sun’s eclipse—emphasizes a view not of “All” but of something sinking incontrovertibly into the horizon line, an evanescence, perhaps periodic, perhaps terminal. This is a sense of something just as it sighs out of view, and a view that is itself not direct but averted from the object as it disappears. The “Extinction,” which suggests both the extinguishing of the sun’s flame and the extinguishing of life dependent on its light, connects planetary and biological temporalities, and returns us to the living experience of this diurnal turning—and to the poetic subject’s “work.”

This oblique and narrow view of a sun’s extinction in Dickinson’s “missing All” suggests a camera obscura that allows for the indirect study of eclipses by filtering sunlight through a small hole that casts a miniaturized and inverted projection of the sun onto the opposite wall of a darkened box or room. Through the camera obscura, Dickinson’s poetic eye avoids the submerged immensity of this phenomenon as too abstract, too terrifying, too excessive of our experience to grasp and to know. And yet it registers extinction through its tiny aperture. Seeing the outside as the inside; seeing the world but seeing it averted, shadowy, partially; seeing it as partial. Rather than the axes of the cosmos, Dickinson’s poetics relies on the coordinates of her room, the width of her window, the distance from the side of the eye to the hinge of the door. Dickinson’s aperture of “missing All” is enmeshed in a more minor ecology.

The poem’s pendulous swing to “Curiosity” signals the epistemological import of this environmental attention, of how to discern the impressions, alarms, and residua of the world. Alongside a nineteenth-century natural history more conventionally concerned with the accumulation and promulgation of knowledge, this partial ecology observes carefully what can be seen through diminishment. Averted from the “All,” the poem’s curiosity is caught up in the inertia of observation and insists on a caesura in that momentum. This strain of curiosity is a part of the epistemic weave; it, too, looks to see, not necessarily to know, but to regard, consider, question. The final uplifting drum of Dickinson’s “For Curiosity” belies any reading that would dismiss the poem’s fidelity to observation, for curiosity also denotes a delicate and meticulous attention to detail, as well as a scientific scrutiny.² In the end, like many of Dickinson’s binaries, the oppositions of “World” and work, the “All” and the minor, collapse in ironic relation with one another. Her diminished view of her world and her work—on axial rotations that are at once celestial and quotidian, geographical and biological—still has the capacity to apprehend extinction as a partial but palpable loss.

The coordination of these multivalent spheres represents a new scientific trend in the nineteenth century, one that linked the study of the planetary or geographical (the Earth’s inorganic systems, patterns, and processes) to the study of biological life (the organic). As Laura Dassow Walls and Aaron Sachs have shown, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s geographical approach especially influenced popular and scientific views of nature and the development of ecological thinking in nineteenth-century America.³ Humboldt’s descriptions of his scientific travels in Spanish America from 1799 to 1804 were widely read, and his later writings on plant geography set the foundation for the modern science of biogeography. Yet Dickinson’s poem indicates that this new biogeographical approach also correlated with a sense of diurnal devastation.

Biogeography could take the “All” and present Earth as a certain ecological whole always in danger of demise, always on the hinge of departure. Often aligned with a surveyor’s gaze, biogeographical vision facilitated the territorial appropriations of the nineteenth century.⁴ Government-sponsored research that explored territories and seas provided the means by which comparative if not fully global natural historical studies could be carried. The Lewis and Clark expedition of the Northwest Territories (1804–1806) inaugurated the United States’s use of exploration and westward expansion to promote national and commercial growth, whether through the direct establishment of trade relations and land claims, or through the more preparatory work of scientific research. And yet this expansion—its epistemological orientation and its physical, political, and cultural consequences—also resulted in the very extinctions and genocides that became perceptible via its biogeographical method. It is this totalizing perspective and drive toward mastery that lingers past the scientific and aesthetic practices of the nineteenth century and sustains anxieties concerning knowledge in our contemporary moment.

But biogeography also harbors a science of figuration that gives us an Earth of obscure transformations and turns—not a nature of holism but a nature of diminishment. By training her eyes upon more piecemeal work, Dickinson circumvents the “All” to pose how to sense the world and its living things from a non-remote and uncomprehensive point of view. In doing so, the “missing All” poses the minoritarian possibility of a partial but also open-ended ecology as it was coming into definition amid the dislocations of so many species—human and nonhuman—that leave the world gaping. This version of a biogeographic view allows for a different sense of materiality, one that is tenuous and fragile but also mutable and able to survive the “Sun’s extinction.”

In what follows, I first give an outline of an optics of diminishment recessed in the enlightened expansions of the nineteenth century. Alongside this outline, I offer a proposal for how these optics project the alternative engagements of a partial ecology hinted by Dickinson’s camera obscura. I then situate this natural history of diminishment within the nineteenth-century production of natural knowledge and the emergence of a biogeographical materialism, which forms the context of engagement for the writers and scientists examined in this volume. To articulate the stakes of partial sight in this nineteenth-century moment, I take Harriet Jacobs with her loophole of retreat as a participant distant from science but still caught up in its episteme. I close by discussing how partiality forms the critical method of this study.

Partial Sight/Site, Partial Ecology

How does a partial view—a partial biogeography or a partial ecology—modify senses of environmental and biological relations? How does it change senses of species extinction or survival, of species development or transformation? If partiality offers a loophole in a romantic natural history, it also remains bound to its biogeographical sensibilities. As typically understood, biogeographical vision may seem overwhelmingly synoptic and imperial; however, it is also deeply empirical, relying on the close scientific observation and detailed collection of specimen in distinct locations to compare the diversity of earthly forms and their historical and ecological development. With this more partial empiricism, biogeographical observation could give rise to alternate views of nature as itself incomplete and open-ended. Upon that premise, this study retreads the grounds of empiricism to draw out the persistent dispersals and survivals of natures not recognized by desires for wholeness or progress.

The nineteenth century was marked by shifting understandings of what constituted the epistemic criteria for empirical observation. As Lorraine Daston notes, observation since the eighteenth century had become an “epistemic category,” that is, “a key learned practice and … a fundamental form of knowledge.”⁵ Observation produced scientific knowledge in which to see is to know, or rather, to see and to repeat that seeing reliably is then to posit and know a fact. As Daston and Peter Galison have argued, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science valued observation that revealed what was considered the truth of nature—in perfect and ideal types.⁶ Yet through the course of the nineteenth century, the composition of images “drawn from nature” became less fascinating than the growing awareness of the physiological and situational discrepancies in vision. Daston and Galison describe the advent of “mechanical objectivity” in the mid-nineteenth century as a mode of science that began to value the accuracy of registering the imperfections, irregularities, and discontinuities of individual natural specimen. Michel Foucault corresponds this turn to the study of vision’s flaws, its immanent and phenomenological quirks, to a disciplinary reorganization of the sciences around the study of life, subjective and interior, and to the instantiation of a modern human subjectivity. Classical natural history is, as he writes, “the nomination of the visible,” while modern sciences cut into a deeper identification beyond surface differences to conceive of life itself.⁷ Likewise, Daston and Galison note that the criteria for objectivity necessarily presume criteria for a scientific subjectivity—one that attempts to be more passive and procedural, to merely document and register phenomena rather than selecting, typifying, or generalizing. This history of a modern objectivity and subjectivity based on optics runs parallel with the development of geographically inflected sciences.

Situating biogeographical materialism in the interplay of epistemic criteria for observation, the optics of this study recall the environmental conditions that mediate vision. In the wake of expeditions documenting natural phenomena at sea and in various parts of the globe, nineteenth-century audiences became familiar with both ordinary and rare mirages. Mirages occur when air temperature differences bend light rays so as to displace the image of an object, making it seems as if an object were higher or lower, reversed laterally, magnified or shimmering. Nature appears to be making figures in the air: the mirage depends upon atmospheric anomalies and contingencies—reflective surfaces or vapors, strata of air pressure and temperature, location and altitude of the sun—as well as the position of the observer, which must all be in synchrony for such an illusion to occur. A mirage, in other words, can be read as a material image of nature: an optical assemblage of ecological serendipity. The environmental conditions of sight, what I call environmental optics, act as crucial participants rather than inert factors in making a sight/site. In bridging physiological and environmental modes of seeing, biogeographical observations of sight/site trouble inherited rules of mechanical objectivity. Participants are no longer divested from what they are seeing but involved with myriad other participants in the practice of seeing.

At the same time, observation in this biogeographical setting remained caught between traditional criteria for the idealized “truth of nature” and the growing awareness of environmental contingencies that beset nineteenth-century “objectivity.” Even mechanical objectivity could become reified as the correct seeing of a procedural observer—unbiased, technical, and even disembodied. All previously unexplained or magical phenomena could be expounded by mechanical objectivity. In his Letters on Natural Magic (1832), a popularization of his Treatise on Optics (1831), Scottish physicist of optics David Brewster comments on the relatively recent understanding of mirages and also hints at the tension between mechanical objectivity and the “marvellous” in environmental seeing:

Brewster’s examples from the “last forty years,” often having to do with views from a ship, are culled from travel narratives that mark how comparative geographical methods emerging at the end of the eighteenth century affected not only the biological sciences but also the physical sciences. Henry David Thoreau, whose own obsession with mirages figures in Chapter 4, read Brewster’s Natural Magic sometime in 1857 and must have tracked descriptions of such optical phenomena in the travel literature that he read, such as Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804, which was also referenced by Brewster.⁹ Significantly, Brewster’s “truth” or “nature” is no longer an idealization but rather the revelation of mechanical workings that produce natural phenomena. Besides reflecting a mechanistic view of reality, Brewster also suggests how objectivity may be manufactured by optical apparatuses. As Jonathan Crary has argued, nineteenth-century methods of observation relying on mechanical objectivity used technological tools and toys to capitalize and play tricks upon human observation.¹⁰ Brewster’s methods show that manufacturing vision meant that objective seeing could be explained and fabricated from a rather omniscient perspective; for example, discussing examples of looming where erect or inverted images of ships appear above the real one, his diagrams show a disembodied eye receiving the light rays refractively curved so that they appear to be coming from a higher point. Shorn of the very magic that attends their miraculous aura, Brewster’s mirages are problems to be solved (and reproduced) by a removed human viewer or all-seeing eye.

Despite his “enlightened” views, Brewster still attests to a certain “wonder” for these “phantasms” and “atmospherical spectres” in his descriptions of mirages. The magic, irreducible to mechanics then, of natural phenomena may be attributed to the “atmosphere” imbued through an actively participating environment (and body) rather than one of passive reflective surfaces and passive observers. “The eye of a day,” Brewster’s figure of speech for high noon, may be taken seriously to evoke this active atmosphere as another participative bodily apparatus for seeing. Perhaps inadvertently, Brewster leaves open a different kind of materialist sight/site whose fuller expression I locate in the critique of objectivity by twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist science studies scholars.

Donna Haraway revises objectivity by bringing “situated knowledges” to bear upon perspective. “Situated knowledges” are partial and embodied; they are apprehensions mediated by what she metaphorically calls “diffraction.” Diffraction is not just the materiality around seeing but also a method of observation that attends to “the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference,”¹¹ in opposition to a transparent, objective seeing that purports to reflect or mirror the object of study. Critically, this history includes how social discourse and figures of speech construct the material world. Taking up this feminist revision of objectivity to examine the diffraction apparatus used by physicists to study particles, Karen Barad emphasizes that the patterns of difference formed by diffraction effect material entanglements between space, time, and matter. Not merely a figure of speech, or rather merely that by actualizing figuration itself, diffraction manifests what Barad calls “specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world.”¹² Barad’s interest in the materiality of seeing takes these apparatuses as lively and entangled with the very observers and world that it attempts to see. For Barad, a mirage would render any viewing apparatus, including the human eye and body and the “eye of the day,” eminently conspicuous as materially part of the mirage.

Optics transform, then, our sense of subject–object relations. As Barad notes, the geometrical optics of traditional mechanical objectivity assumes the objectivity of an image that bounces back to us from a mirror. Because we see our reflection in a mirror, we think that vision works by bouncing off reflective surfaces, separating the “self” that is reflected from the “other” surface of the mirror. Further, we come to believe that what we see is exactly this “mirror effect,” that we may see something in an undistorted, objective way. In place of this version of the mirror stage, Barad proposes a “physical optics” of diffraction that takes the situated knowledge of light and lens into account; that is, it is an optics that refuses to reduce nature into simplified variables of light and geometrical angles.

In Barad’s account, “diffraction” is both a phenomenon and a figure of speech for material figuration or entanglement in the world. When used to describe forms of circumstantial mediation and technological apparatuses, diffraction figures phenomena as fully entangled intra-actions between subjects (viewers and viewed, humans and nonhumans). Barad develops the figure of diffraction in relation to the discourse of quantum physics:

Any phenomenon is an event or becoming of multiple ongoing relations. For Barad, however, accountability and responsibility are not what we would normally think of as a debit and credit system or an eye-for-an-eye exchange, but rather open-ended and ongoing intra-actions among all subjects involved. There is still a differentiation or “cut” between participants, but it is one that does not separate them into different spheres and instead holds them together in their differences. How we see, what we see, and the virtues derived from those standards of seeing are indelibly blotted together, a process Barad represents with the concatenated term “ethico-onto-epistemological matter.”

Through this description of optical phenomenon, Barad presents a sense of densely intermeshed environmental relations made visible through optics itself. She shares this approach with Bruno Latour who emphasizes the relationality between subjects and objects through what he calls a “scenography” of their networks of action.¹⁴ Moving away from the traditional objectivity of a subject (human) to object (nonhuman) gaze, these theorists’ critical attention to visual technology as making or siting the world affirm new forms of ecological activity between humans and nonhumans that accord agential capacity to both.

The emphasis on the role of the apparatus reveals aesthetics—as a formal apparatus—to be a technology for materially configuring the world. By reading literary texts as an apparatus for visualizing nature, I locate them along with other visual technologies within a scientific tradition of empirical observation. While this study will illustrate the way formal apparatuses (textual and optical) materially and figuratively constitute nature as sight/site, it is also particularly attentive to a kind of situatedness that Haraway terms “partial connection,” “partiality not universality,” or “partial sight and limited voice.”¹⁵ The situatedness of this sight/site—Dickinson’s “missing All”—does not assume that restoring the interrelationships among objects and observers will also restore richer and more distributed forms of agency. Barad’s and Latour’s scenographies dramatize, for example, a certain ease of making relations visible and legible, of making descriptions describe, and assume a transparency and plenitude of activity.¹⁶ Instead, I distinguish diminishment as ensuing from a lens of diffraction that notices not only the webs and circuits of interrelations between humans and nonhumans but also the delimitations of experience and the caesuras that make relations and actions precariously nebulous.

Adapting Haraway’s and Barad’s revision of objectivity to an environmental optics of diminishment, I argue that literary forms specifically in what I call the sketch mode work as apparatuses of diminishment. The sketch, as I define it, is a way of seeing through partial and obscure views that reveal entities not in direct relation to one another but interacting more indirectly and implicitly. More strongly substantiated kinds of environmental actors might be expressed in terms of cause and effect: contaminants, invasives, or aggressors versus victims, virgins, or natives. In comparison, a mirage’s elusive character, subject to environmental exposures and contingencies of diffraction, suggests “sketchy” forms of relation in nature—hazy, transient, weak. As with recent ecocritical attention to recessive actions and nonproductive but assistive environmentalisms, I am also interested in the slight, noncumulative, and diurnal works that manage to form the ecological gossamer that holds the world together.¹⁷ The verso of this is, of course, that the tangencies of ecological codependency, synchronicity, and so forth are also easily disrupted. Emphasizing the frangibility of relation, the texts of this study dwell less on the salience of the embodied or active and instead trace the indentations and surface tensions of slower, less visible environmental and biological relations—relations that give way to loss and transformation.

This study focuses on how the sketch mode became a critical literary apparatus for the empirical observation of nature in the mid-nineteenth century. In that sense, my definition of the sketch mode may seem akin to the genre of the sketch that became popular in the nineteenth century. Short essays, travel writing, and stories in the picturesque style often figured in the sketch genre. After all, the sketch genre was named by its literary style of visualization—akin to drawing, painting, portraiture, and so forth—as well as by its diminutive stature as a brief piece. As Kristie Hamilton argues, the American sketch in the antebellum period represented a bourgeois narratorial authority with the leisure to travel or digress and claimed generic affiliation to the traveler’s “crayon sketch” with its sense of movement and ephemerality, as well as a roughness and on-the-road quality that denoted its authenticity of transcribing from raw materials.¹⁸ Turning to how African American writers in this era utilized the serial sketch genre, Derrick Spires instead emphasizes that the form’s open-endedness produced by its episodic installments “cultivated the sense that the future as well as the past were always in the making and open for critique and revision.”¹⁹ While crucial aspects of the works discussed in this study are influenced and shaped by the sketch genre’s affinity with empiricism and incompleteness, distinguishing the sketch mode from a sketch genre serves to specify a very particular form of observation not necessarily evident in all texts of the genre. As will be discussed further in Chapter 1, I seek to loosen the “sketch” from genre-based arguments that may be too totalizing and generalizing. Instead, I define the sketch mode as an optical technology of diminishment.

The sketch is not a genre whose characteristics may be taxonomized and exemplified; it is an orientation or vantage of partiality. Crucially, its relation to natural knowledge from the perspective of nonmastery allows the sketch to enact diminishment as a form of environmental and biological difference in the context of one’s own history or one’s own work. The questions that concerned the texts and thinkers included in this study come out of perspectives of duress and lack, or of attentiveness to discontinuity and loss. Their figurations of plants, animals, and humans in the sketch mode trace oblique relations and outlying possibilities for survival. What does species extinction suggest about natural processes? If the human is not a culminating link in the chain of living things, then how does the human fit into nature? What kinships across and within the human and other species are possible? If nature does not hold a design, how does one read its flux and fugitive movements—as degeneration, as difference, as diversification? How does one read nature’s patterns if species and races, and even climates or biomes, develop and migrate across continents and oceans? How do different forms in nature persistently and subtly survive? These are questions still relevant to our current sense of environmental change.

In an era where the scale of human-induced environmental degradation encompasses the entire planet—from climate change to the alteration of the geological record now called the Anthropocene—it may seem perverse to turn to a perspective of diminishment. Ursula Heise has emphasized how ethical commitments to place and identity are constituted by global networks and flows, hybridity and diaspora, that are in some ways better suited to addressing wide-scale environmental issues such as climate change.²⁰ She points to photographs of the Earth from outer space taken in 1968 and 1972 as the uneasy initiation of this planetary sense with its lingering utopic and apocalyptic associations. Comparative methods in ecocriticism have thus turned more attention to the global relevance of environmental sustainability and justice in contrast to a traditionally Americanist ecocriticism, which drew upon American environmental history and writing for preservation of “the wild” and the Edenic. Furthermore, Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the widening gyre of a planet falling apart demands both intrahuman and international political interventions, and a form of transcendental nonhuman or species-thinking commensurate with the scale of environmental problems.²¹

This study retreats to the grounds of Americanist ecocriticism and the experiential conundrum of subject–object relations to glean how biogeographical materialisms of diminishment already offered alternate figures of survival at the very moment when an American environmentalism based on appropriation, preservation, and recovery began to be articulated. I read the sketch’s view of nature in the shadow of the nineteenth century’s awareness of extinction as a technique of partial ecology’s marking of lapse—incompletion, dislocation, loss, lacunae—as part of the form of nature and natural history itself.²² These lapses indicate the blind spots and incomprehensiveness of a natural history that purports to be encyclopedic or an epistemology that purports to be cosmological. Alexander von Humboldt’s unfinished Cosmos (1845–1862) and Louis Agassiz’s even more foreshortened Contributions to the Natural History of the United States (1857–1862) each attest to a natural history of romantic holism that cannot write itself complete.

As a view of partial ecology, I argue that the sketch mode incorporated a scientific and materialist sense of difference and transmutation in which species and race—as well as text—were crucial figures of the environment in which vitality and place intersect to allow for the possibility of a diverse survival. While the sketch draws a slight and incomplete picture of nature, it also allows for a closer but also partial ecology of mutable and transient entities formed by indirect relations. Not based on strong cohering forces of immersion, permeation, and integration, partial ecology relies on weaker, precarious forces of diminishment, adjacency, absence, and errata as biological forms disperse across geographies. In this view, there is no Earth visible in its spherical wholeness with a circle or web of life connecting all; there is, then, no Earth to save, no urgent narratives of forestalling demise by heroic efforts. Rather, our everyday work—reading, sewing, turning on and off lights, writing a letter, walking, and so forth—are already minutely and haphazardly implicated in the turning of Earth into home for a life potentially different from what one leads now and for lives potently different from one’s own.

Recent Americanist ecocriticism has become increasingly interested in theorizing forms of ecology that push against the assumptions of subject–object relations that have informed the model of Earth that we see in photographs of the whole planet from outer space. These subject–object boundaries between the scientist and the specimen or between the human and nature stem from Enlightenment conceptions separating life from matter as well as Romanticist responses championing organicism against a materialist mechanism.²³ In late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century studies, the debate of whether to allude to a vital principle as a superadded or transcendent spirit (vitalist) or to locate it in a material or immanent part of the organism (materialist) preoccupied scientists in their theories of life. The dichotomy of materialism and vitalism in these traditional narratives revolve around a dialectical relationship between matter and life, mechanics and spirit, determinism and autonomy, moving toward a human subject’s synthetic ratiocination or transcendence over these contentious forces.

By reconsidering these boundaries through alternate materialisms, empiricisms, and affects, new ecocritical approaches question assumptions of subject–object relations that privilege the human, teasing out histories of imbrication and permeability between nonhumans from humans. To borrow Latour’s vocabulary, if the human is merely one actant in a diverse network of actants, the material interactions between these actants manifest a wider spectrum of agencies and vitalities.²⁴ Posthumanist, new materialist, and feminist critiques seek to represent “other” forms of agency or vitality in nature that may be broadly described as a vital materialist approach that blurs the boundaries between subject and object, life and matter.²⁵ This volume contributes to long nineteenth-century minor histories of human and nonhuman entanglements, exploring how a biogeographical materialism observed vitalities and agencies as dispersed forces incidentally and tangentially touching in their transitory trajectories. This is a nature of attenuated relations and errant transformations, a nature that cannot be fully grasped and appropriated because it is only obliquely available or already turning from view.

Toward Ecology: Romantic Science, Biogeography, and Casualty

In contrast to Dickinson, we can find a nineteenth-century planetary view that does presume to see “All” in Josiah Holbrook’s pamphlet for his Scientific Apparatus (1847), which advertised how science could be brought to an indoor audience—at home, at school, and at the lecture hall. The text purveys an array of objects for “large and varied exercises for the eye and hand, in practical lessons on the laws and works of our Creator; and thus secures the most solid improvements for the pupil, while producing visible, tangible, portable illustrations, instructive to all human beings—alike to the unlettered savage and accomplished scholar.”²⁶ In the American lyceum culture that Holbrook himself helped to initiate, the scientific study of nature was an integral part of what constituted “lessons on the laws and works of our Creator,” which lent itself to all manner of mechanical, optical, metrical, and illustrative technologies that coordinated observation. The “Tellurian,” engineered by Holbrook, is an instance of how a technological apparatus “secures” the pupil in the optical and mechanical exercise of advancement in knowledge. An orrery with a pulley system, the Tellurian demonstrated how the relations between the sun, the Earth, and its moon affected the shifts in day and night, seasons, tides, and eclipses. A candle could be placed to mimic the sun’s light while the Earth rotated and orbited, bringing a view of the planets into a room. Through these optics of ratiocination, the pupil could then see the entire Earth and its greater planetary system from a celestial perspective.

As Holbrook’s catalogue indicates, this view of the universe sets itself as the means by which the technology of seeing could promote “the diffusion of knowledge, as the most sure and effectual mode of individual improvement.”²⁷ He envisions, then, scientific knowledge spreading across the nation, from hearth to schoolroom and from savage to scholar, matching the westward tread of the sun and “civilization.” The eye that surveys the world laid out before it is the eye that drives American geographical and optical narratives concerning the accumulation of knowledge, the expansion of territory, and the succession of one enlightened people over the “unlettered” and apparently darker savages. The Tellurian with its mechanical revolutions casting one side of the Earth in light while another falls into darkness suggests that the natural and divine laws enabling these movements depend on the eye that oversees them.

Settler colonialism’s geographical and optical expansions contributed to knowledge of ecological relations even as it depleted natural resources and threatened species loss. Premonitions of extinction that would lead to the modern American environmental movement toward the end of the nineteenth century can be traced back to earlier iconic observations of the diminishing populations of passenger pigeons and American bison. These observations were coupled with the growing sense that the soils of already settled and cultivated lands in both North America and Europe were rapidly becoming exhausted. Depending on the critiques of the period, sources of the soil crisis in particular were located in capitalism, urbanization, industrialized agriculture, or slavery. As a result, various geopolitical actors in the nineteenth century including the United States sought out arable lands and pastures for territories and traversed oceans for fertilizers such as guano, as well as expendable human agricultural labor.²⁸

Vermont statesman George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) punctuates the American nineteenth-century’s emerging ecological awareness.²⁹ He valued geography in particular for its empirical but also comparative and aggregative data, and placed an inordinate amount of scientific and moral agency in human civic, industrial, and technological achievement to control and correct the environment.³⁰ For Marsh, geography was the key to both the study and stewardship of nature because, as he wrote, “the importance of human life as a transforming power is, perhaps, more clearly demonstrable in the influence man has thus exerted upon superficial geography than in any other result of his material effort.”³¹ Geography trained the eye to survey the Earth’s surface and therefore observe the environmental changes wrought by humans. This observational objectivity is consonant with a god’s eye view that sees the Earth as an object or system that can be viewed, categorized, modeled, and synthesized. In the introductory sections to Man and Nature, Marsh warns of “changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit” through “operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or inorganic world.”³² Marsh was certainly not alone in conceiving of human-caused environmental deterioration, but his sense of the global environment points to its intertwinement with American settler-colonial narratives of decline, original nature, and human agency.³³ His nature is one that humans “interfere” in: humans have the power to harm but also, then, to recover and steward nature to its Edenic state.

The ecological thinking underlying American settler colonialism thus goes hand in hand with a romanticism that sees nature as an organic whole with a fixed or original order.³⁴ Naming “ecology” in the mid-nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel emphasized the science as a comprehensive and systemic sense of nature investigating, in his words, “the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment …. [Ecology] is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.”³⁵ As Haeckel evinces, the trend toward ecological thinking was influenced by a romantic holism that perceives nature in terms of an organic whole of interrelationships. His reference to Darwin reveals, further, that scientific concepts of biological and environmental relations were linked to those of development. Ideal forms of nature could be represented and progressed toward, assuming a perfect harmony or wholeness as their moral telos or centripetal force of incorporation; while deviation from this design assumed a declensional or sometimes subversive narrative toward monstrosity or death as the “fallen” falls away.³⁶ Romantic holism thus underpins the naturalized narratives of succession that environmentalist concepts of preservation or restoration depend upon.

The decline in species and resources was also associated with the decline of certain racialized peoples—in particular Indigenous peoples and Africans—as synonymous with nature itself. As in Marsh, American environmentalism in this earlier period moralized the diminishment of species and sought to cultivate a nature of plentitude and progress while at the same time rejecting the savage forms of nature as declining or dissolute. Scholarship has shown how nineteenth-century American women writers productively engaged with this version of Christian environmentalism.³⁷ Still, the culture of improvement in this early environmentalism relegated the “savages” to countless reforms as they faced their world’s departure while those carrying the light devised plans for how to build and salvage the New World. The last of a tribe and the tragic mulatto were tropes of racial degeneration tied to biological theories of species succession that follow from a preservationist ethic of an original nature.³⁸ Caught up in discourses of civilization and empire, scientific studies aided the constitution and reform of the so-called wilderness, and they also abetted the continued enslavement or tutelage of so-called inferior races. Judgments of their dissoluteness justified their assimilation and exploitation. If American nature was “open” for the cultivation and use by a modern white civilization, so were the nonwhite peoples associated with that nature. In this way, the narrative of a white American civilization depended on its natural succession over diminishing subjects of the environment.

Instead of nature as ideal, whole, and successive, this study examines a natural history that emphasizes difference and differentiation. If the emergence of geographical and ecological studies seemed to aid and abet the naturalization of Euro-American civilizations, it also pricked the threads that could unravel the holism and total vision that these geopolitics depended upon. I situate this study, then, in a mid-nineteenth century moment marked by the emergence of biogeographical materialism; that is, when biological entities became geographical, when they began to be understood not only as organic, physiological individuals but also as part of a milieu such that the reproduction and succession of a species correlated to its geographical distribution and migration. Glossing Darwin’s understanding of how species evolve and diversify, Georges Canguilhem writes, “for Darwin, to live is to submit an individual difference to the judgment of the ensemble of living beings”:³⁹

Canguilhem stresses how the concept of divergent evolutions that results from the struggle between organisms relies on an ecological understanding of relations between living beings—an understanding premised upon studies of the range and distribution of organisms. This sense of an “ensemble” of dynamic relations spread out over time and space contrasts Lamarck’s unilinear sense of biological inheritance which attributed species transformation to individual responses and modifications that are passed down to a descendant. In other words, the biogeographical perspective made Darwin’s ecological view of nature and his understanding of species diversification possible. Following this line of thought, I tell an alternate history of biogeography, one that eschews the holist tendencies to aggregate and synthesize large quantities of data across the globe, for the partial empirical observance of matter’s differentiation as it develops within specific milieus.

Chapter 1, for example, considers the problem of “weeds” proliferating in new geographical locations, such as European weeds spreading in the United States. In the narrative of the up-and-coming young nation, the pitting of invasive species against vanishing native species actually supports the implantation of new Euro-American “natives.” Countering this logic of succession, this chapter examines how nature writers depicted “endangered” native species and Indigenous peoples, and how this may open out to sketch a species’ potential to transform and translate their ecological practices even while sustaining severe depredations or facing environmental distresses. Chapter 2 turns to the biogeographical problem that sparked the debate over Darwinian species transmutation in the American scene: if identical or similar species are found in widely disparate locations, are they related genealogically to one another, somehow migrating apart or losing the populations that bridged them, or did they separately develop in their naturally (and divinely) designated places? In particular, Asa Gray’s study of plant specimen collected in Japan and North America by the US North Pacific Exploring Expedition (1853–1855) would allow him to corroborate his hypothesis of the kinship between such disjunct species, directly contradicting Louis Agassiz’s use of special creation in multiple locations to dismiss the disjunctures. The theories of the migration, mutability, and diversification of species contributed toward the disruption of the romantic order of nature. The dominant species does not necessarily conquer all and species do not stay in their original locations. Rather than a divinely ordained taxonomy, dispersal insists on forms of life that do not maintain idealized categories.

These scientific debates about species succession and development undergirded Euro-American assumptions of their civilizational superiority. This sense of civilization was, in turn, based on a claim to humanness. The settler colonial geopolitics that divided a burgeoning United States depended upon concepts of the human species, and therefore also of race, and a certain telos of natural history. Agassiz’s polygenetic concept, for example, consequently categorized and located different human races as separate species, which supported advocates for slavery who considered Africans a primitive or bestial race. Nevertheless, as Brit Rusert has shown, African American practitioners would utilize natural history’s empirical as well as speculative methods for the very purpose of disrupting that order of nature.⁴¹ Chapter 3 locates, then, the African American physician James McCune Smith’s biogeographical theory of African dispersal and its cross-species kinship with, surprisingly, coral in the Pacific Islands among this fugitive science of racial uplift. Imagining a mixed and diverse human civilization, McCune Smith embedded an archipelagic form of African diaspora into the American continent as a vital, if fraught and arduously achieved, part of its civilization. Chapter 4 continues to follow theories of dispersal through the work of Henry David Thoreau and shows how his thinking about plant dispersal connected to human dispersal through precarious relations of off-chance coincidence. Set in scenes of wreckage where shipwrecks bring immigrants to shore or thistledown drifts in the air across bodies of water only to crash on the other side, Thoreau’s formulation of dispersal highlights how the passage from one place to another is necessarily buoyed by gossamer threads of relation and rife with loss. As these chapters suggest, biogeographical dispersal significantly shapes not only the ecological relations between species and their environment but also the very matter of their formation. McCune Smith’s against-the-odds coralline uplift of an African diaspora and Thoreau’s dispersal by wreckage discern matter as not only mutable but also less cohesive, more likely to fall apart—fragility and casualty are points of weakness but also means of survival.

This biogeographical materialism situates matter among a shifting array of living relations with other entities—matter that moves within and through environments that are likewise mutable. We can see this migratory materiality at work even in holist versions of biogeography that changed the narrative of design or telos in nature to one of orchestral transformation. From research based on exploratory expeditions, scientists interpreted a much longer geological history of the Earth with fluctuating climates and a far more connected biological history of kinship between species and races. However, these Earth-system-wide theories also depended on biogeography’s empirical observations, which were in practice necessarily partial. And it is by following the partiality of these observations that I argue that the thinkers included here offer a different emphasis in natural history—of dispersal and also, ineluctably, of loss as a part of survival.

Into the Loophole

Perhaps Dickinson’s “missing All” imagines turning away from a Tellurian to attend to the flickering chiaroscuro cast apart from the focal demonstration in the darkened room. Perhaps the eye tracks the faintest wan and ebb of shadows in a room where sunlight barely filters through an aperture. The bounded surround and dim outlines of these shadowy sketches intimate a different kind of planetary sense glimmering at the edges of the eye. I constellate Dickinson’s work of “missing All” with Harriet Jacobs’s writing by her tiny one-inch wide loophole in a garret as perhaps the most extreme version of a partial view. Brought together, they show how natural historical terms can figure diversely in minor forms of perspective. Although Jacobs did not engage in the sciences the way other authors in this study did, her writing shows how the epistemic framework of biogeography extends even into secreted or fugitive lives. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Jacobs narrates her fictionalized self as Linda Brent who escapes her owner by hiding in the garret of her grandmother’s shed where a tiny pinhole in the wall becomes her window to the outside world and the means by which her narrative projects her world.

The garret becomes a paradoxical space of vision and enclosure. It lets in both too little and too much, devastating her physically and psychically:

Like Dickinson, Jacobs offers a perspective overwhelmed by the environment even as it nonetheless threads relations to environmental conditions. Jacobs’s pinhole serves as both a faint illumination for her domestic labors and a conduit for viewing her children and other passersby, as well as an apparatus for reflecting on her situation, an arrangement that many critics have connected to the camera obscura.⁴⁴

Importantly, it is by means of this aperture with its duality of confinement and projection that “work” or “housework” is done—shaped, figured, and delimited. In Dickinson’s and Jacobs’s respective enclosures, the many valences of oikos—home, family, domestic management, economics, and environment—are closely and thinly compressed together. What draws Dickinson and Jacobs together is not necessarily the objects they attend to—for this depends on the very specificity of their different environments—but how their techniques of seeing are both shaped by a form of natural history and wary of its telos toward comprehensiveness.

These techniques of seeing correspond to Dickinson’s and Jacobs’s location proximate to but marginal from what might be construed as the principal production and politics of knowledge that intersect with colonization and slavery. Dickinson’s poem composed around 1865 and Jacobs’s narrative published in 1861 mark a period of settler colonial expansion fueling geopolitical tensions leading to the Civil War that also coincides with scientific debates concerning the organization, development, and transmutation of life. As Holbrook’s Tellurian demonstrates, the spheres of geography and science, politics and nature, are not separate but mutually implicated with one another by an optical configuration that naturalizes the laws of settler colonialism, slavery, and cultural imperialism. As a white woman with access to but not full participation in white, male scientific communities, and as an enslaved and then free black woman, Dickinson and Jacobs respectively occupy perspectives resulting from and closeted by these systems.

Even as they retreat from the remote synoptic view of the Tellurian, their observance is girded by a necessary sensitivity to their environments and its extinctions. Dickinson’s poetic attention to her work at hand, her reading, sewing, and writing, is only foregrounded by its backdrop against the sense of extinctions that are occurring at the frequency of everyday, minor events. Jacobs’s sense of her family’s enslaved status and its effects upon their well-being is her everyday concern, and the work she does within the garret heightens her sense of the painful disjuncts between labor, freedom, and family life. Dickinson’s and Jacobs’s camera obscura optics on “minor Things” are bound by a domestic, but not unworldly circumference—for what they choose to assess are those things tied to the receding world, delimited by the comings and goings into a room and marked by the daily run of sun and shadow as it swings across floors and walls. What is scarcely as large as one star twinkling episodically in the night sky is what Jacobs’s eye glimpses; what is smaller than the world and the sun’s extinction is what Dickinson’s poetic eye sees. These partialities with their sublunary ratios are what do appeal to an attention both withheld from and obtained within “Curiosity.”

What does Jacobs’s Linda Brent do by the light of the loophole? What is her work? In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs draws the material coordinates of the fugitive slave who is conceived as a “natural” resource (as slave labor that also biologically reproduces itself) into the small pocket of freedom afforded by hiding in the garret. Escaping the sexual abuse of her owner Dr. Flint, but unwilling to leave behind her family, Jacobs’s narration of the long confinement from 1835 to 1842 awaiting an opportunity of freedom for both herself and her children reveals her vulnerability to environmental exposure. Following Hortense Spillers, this is a vestibular space that reproduces the biologism of slavery and its sexual politics that affect generations of slaves, slave owners, and their descendants through the gendering of roles to sustain the families of slaves and masters.⁴⁵ However, by functioning as a camera obscura, the tiny pinhole in this garret becomes Jacobs’s window to the outside world and the means by which she projects her “nature.” As Michael Chaney has observed, Jacobs subverts the traditional use of the camera obscura as a model of disembodied and remote viewing (since it allows the viewer to remain invisible) by asserting her position as an embodied observer who is part of the outside world.⁴⁶

As with Dickinson’s “missing All,” Jacobs only seems to eschew environmental catastrophes to attend to her domestic affairs. Subtending my reading is the multivalent sense of oikos that conditions her life. Jacobs’s double bind in a family and society twisted by slavery is the very vestibular structure that puts her in a situation suffering from the bites of little red insects; the extremes of heat and cold, suffocation and drenching; and the atrophy of her muscles and joints due to lack of movement in the crawl space under a slight roof, accompanied with the constant anxiety of caring for her family. These are, of course, environmental conditions she is willing to endure in order to nurture the possibility of escaping slavery.

At the same time, to be in the garret is to be exposed to inverted conditions of slavery. These domestic affairs examined by the faint light of her loophole reveal that Jacobs is not free from ecological and racial circumscriptions. If her attention to her children, to her family, and to childless slaves betrays the web of relations that ties them to their white families, the apparatus of that attentiveness also produces the possibility of an alternate oikos of fugitivity. She marks the passing of seasons, events, and passersby through the loophole, and at the death of her Aunt Nancy who was the sole house servant of the Flints, she wants an audience for her family’s sorrows:

In this moment, Jacobs imagines the denied reckoning that looking upon Aunt Nancy’s face would reveal: she contemplates how her friend had been “slowly murdered” by her years of labor under a cruelly selfish mistress who “had rendered her poor foster-sister childless.”⁴⁸ Nancy is a slanted version of Jacobs herself, likewise bound to her prison by the shadow of the Flints. Nancy, Mrs. Flint, and Jacobs reveal family relations that are not direct but of intimate if unacknowledged proximity: Mrs. Flint had been nursed by Nancy’s mother, Jacob’s grandmother. Thus flickering between the life and death of her self dimly reflected in her aunt, Jacobs sitting by the loophole represents the loop of thought that manages to thread this tenuous connection between her own confinement and the generations of cruelty and suffering not only in the lives and deaths of all those bound in slavery’s institution, but also in the unborn and miscarried.

The acuity of this biological awareness is one that, denied the direct view of her aunt, yet comes to register her loss and the uncounted—countless—indirect losses slavery involves. It affords the barest pinprick of an aperture that modifies and interrupts the vestibular space of the garret. As with a loop that threads between Dickinson’s “missing All” and the “Sun’s extinction,” Jacobs’s prolonged abeyance in the garret with its tiny loophole opens her to a deeply partial and extended sense of loss. She becomes sensitive to the biological “eclipse” of her family, which is correlated with the spatial and optical structure of slavery that I have described as a far more amorphous and elongated set of relations than one that might be described more directly as making female slaves sexual captives for their owners and confining slave bodies to the South, to the plantation, or to labor. Instead Jacobs’s loophole shows complex degrees of sexual harassment and attenuated biological violence filtering across generations (or foreclosed generations), as well as a blurring of how close or strict confinement might be.

Via the camera obscura structure, Jacobs is finally able to transform her biological awareness into a geographical one. As Katherine McKittrick has argued, Jacobs’s camera obscura reveals the constraints of fugitivity—which leaves little room for a slave absconding as one remains always vulnerable to capture and racial violence—but also becomes a “retreat” from which Jacobs is able to extend her geographical reach.⁴⁹ She uses the loophole to project her own reflections and plans as far as New York and Canada by writing letters to Dr. Flint in its meager light and arranging to have them postmarked by couriers from these various locations to make it appear like she is moving through them and throw him off from finding her actual location. Her “Loophole of Retreat,” as she calls it, sketches her biogeographical awareness of how slavery structures the environmental conditions of her life—the material, spatial, and biological coordinates of a looser and more precarious weave.⁵⁰ In mapping how these shadowy optics are materially entangled with one’s future milieu, Jacobs’s fugitive letters begin to chart and realize a life outside of slavery through the loophole of the garret. Her narrative performs its camera obscura view through, as she puts it, a “little loophole scarcely large enough to give [her] a glimpse of one twinkling star.”⁵¹ In contrast to the view of the Tellurian, it is precisely this winking view that initiates her into an acute sense of environmental and biological relations and her place within it to exercise her will. Its optics affords a view of the world through a tiny pinpoint aperture—a view that is shadowing, obscured, dim, sketchy. The camera obscura view is a diminished biogeographical view but a biogeographical view nevertheless.

Biogeography introduces the problem of lifeforms as not merely situated and enmeshed in their habitat but rather moving across terrains and oceans—did the fugitive slave Linda Brent or Harriet Jacobs retreat in hiding, disappear, perish, or escape to New York, Boston, or Canada? Did the swallow dive into the water to hibernate or did it migrate to winter elsewhere? When biogeography introduces these figures, it also introduces the sense of nature in motion and subject to disappearance, loss, metamorphosis, drift, diversification. Besides techniques of collection and survey to compare and thus correlate and unify regions across the globe, biogeography through the loophole—through the averted and partial gaze—could be a science for encountering and registering migration and fugitivity. As this study will argue, a certain version of biogeographical materialism that tracks the lines of dispersal and difference allows for an environmentalism of diminishment—a sense of weaker, tenuous relations and of difference amid immense loss. What I point to here is not difference merely for difference’s sake but difference that emerges in circumstances of duress, differences of tenacious fragility.

Method

“Part of a process”—“participate”—“impart” and “apart”—perhaps if I could enumerate all the kinds of partiality I could at last put my finger on what this is. How do we know partially, in part, in parts? How can we but know partially if our object is itself amorphous or ungraspable? Rob Nixon turns to Rachel Carson as an example of a writer-activist who made systemic yet diffused environmental violence known more immediately and urgently. He borrows her incisive phrase “death by indirection” in Silent Spring as an apt description of what he calls “forms of oblique, slow-acting violence.”⁵² Complementing Nixon’s understanding of environmental violence’s obliqueness as a form of structural violence, but also departing from his reliance upon forms of direct response or description, how might we address objects of ecocriticism that seem only indirectly, figuratively, slightly, or partially relevant to “the environment” and how might critique take up these forms in its own approach?

This volume is written from a perspective of partiality as an attempt to come to terms with how an approach may be critical at the same time that it is experimental and tentative. It is a mode of being partial, partial to something, partial of something, with partiality as form itself, and partiality as a potential form of history and of experience, as partial histories or partial knowings or not knowings. Maybe partiality remains attentive to and part of the provisionality of what I have arranged as partial readings. Part of something, but barely. The contingency of our happening to be, our trying.

In embracing partiality as its own methodological orientation, this study emphasizes the interdisciplinary connections between literature and science not only through a historicist approach to a critical notch of time that marks the development of the ecological and biogeographical sciences, but also through close reading literature’s own partiality to figurative text as a crucial mediation of a new materialist natural history in the nineteenth century. With Monique Allewaert, I share an interest in drawing out a materialist figuration that “untethers parts from wholes to make the partial and the particulate prior to any whole and also the driving force of material and literary processes.”⁵³ How do specific kinds of figurations—metaphors, mixed metaphors, merismus—work to hold parts apart rather than taking a part to represent a whole? How do these figurations contribute to a biogeographical materialism that disperses parts as the conveyances animating differentiation? How does figuration matter?

I use the term materiometaphorical to denote the particularly literary form of materialist aesthetics configuring ecological relationships that arises in nineteenth-century American philosophy. “Materiometaphorical” attests to the material relation between text and world: figuration does not just construct our sense of the world, it materially interacts with that world. As Charles Feidelson, Jr. has noted, the perennial drama in the nineteenth century of reconciling matter and mind following Cartesian dualism cast literary language as the means of bridging the divide because it “renders the idea and the thing as interdependent factors in a creative movement of experience.”⁵⁴ He focuses especially on the ability of symbolism in canonical nineteenth-century American literature to perform that unification of mind and matter through metaphors, explaining, “The language of literature is a body of terms whose significance has been built up by metaphor and whose power is the power of synecdoche.”⁵⁵ Feidelson identifies metaphorical poiesis with the figure that uses a part to represent the whole, which, as he puts it, “retains its organic character as part of a whole.”⁵⁶ His conception of metaphor (as synecdochal) is, then, profoundly dependent on a romantic sense of literary language as organic and holistic—that the parts of figural language are always reminiscent of the totality that it comes from.

Yet metaphor does not necessarily only function synecdochally; and the term “materiometaphorical” articulates language as the medium for the interaction of the ideal and the material without assuming that the relation between figural subjectivity and the objective world is then holistic. Instead, the materiometaphorical relations that this study tracks are partial: not relations only of conjunction but also of disjunction, not relations of strong bonds but of tangential impressions. As scholars have shown, nineteenth-century American debates about language were couched within philosophical disputes in theology and transcendentalism that responded against the mechanistic rationality of denotative referentiality by seeking to reclaim a spiritual sense of language.⁵⁷ Some thinkers found consonance with romantic conceptions of a language of nature that based itself on the concept of nature itself as a unification of mind and matter with language as its living medium. Others, however, became interested in figural language’s vital capacity for a plurality of meaning, as well as an ambiguity and suggestiveness that had the indirect power to generate meaning. If the nineteenth century’s interest in a language of nature had an especially materiometaphorical potency, it also pointed to the possibility for a materialist figuration that does not adhere to romantic holism.

By attending to the aspects of language with a materiometaphorical potential for untethering the partial from the whole, for holding parts apart, I reflexively practice a deliberately tenuous form of close reading in order to highlight figurative language’s at once formative and incidental role in how one sees nature. This partiality to close reading refuses to abrogate language’s figurative and material potential, but it also recognizes that that potency is based upon the slightest of connections afforded by figural relations between language and its referents. Close reading the minute nuances of figures of speech forms, in other words, a loophole in critical methodologies overdetermined by a totalizing developmental or objective narrative. This volume thus contributes to current reexaminations of method in literary criticism that resituate literary criticism’s arguments within a weaker theoretical circumference of merely “reading” or even writerly reading.⁵⁸ Partial to reading, I cannot but describe the scope of this study as partial to the metaphorical and metonymic, figurative and descriptive capacities of language to differ or defer from a dominant historical narrative, to make different stories.

Reading the partiality of language and observation in the nineteenth century also intertwines with a natural history of loss. Narratives of species decline may open out to another way to see nature and narrative itself. How do techniques of language and observation figure an unideal nature; how do they take part in a natural history of diminishment? Rather than salvaging and extracting resources, what would it mean to let go of fruition to glean a kind of knowledge, or rather nonknowledge, of remainders taken here and there, the curious perusal that yields a miscellaneous and partial impression, the obscure illumination wrought from what is leftover and unfit yet still sustenance. What is the shape of vacancy? Not history as survey or totality or even as collective project, but history as casualty.

Chapter Sketches

This study considers how literary forms in the sketch mode attend to the tenuousness of environmental relations rather than accessing a preserved or restored ideal nature. Through more errant and slight apprehensions, the sketch visualizes and participates in a partial ecology—an ecology not based on strong determinative or systemic connections but rather “weak” or fragile environmental relations. These indirect or adjacent forms of relation catch at a point of tangency where the biological intersects with the geographical, where the organism or species becomes situated, where it also, then, comes apart and disperses across the very geography in which it had seemed established. It is this biogeographic figuration that forms the very optical apparatus in which Darwinian concepts of species transmutation, evolution, and ecology could emerge. Each chapter of the book constellates instances of life’s materiality within small indentations of the developing natural history of mutable nature. These instances take shape as biogeographical entities momentarily held in the American mid-nineteenth century’s technological views: migrating birds in the picturesque view of a magic lantern (Chapter 1), dwindling pine trees through a window (Chapter 2), coral insects telescoping from the microscopic to the geological scale (Chapter 3), seed dispersal through a mirage’s metamorphosis (Chapter 4), and, across all, figural language itself as a visual and textual technology for materiality.

As this intervallic structure suggests, the archive of this study is in no way comprehensive. I dwell on figures of diminishment—birds, autumnal haze, leaves, stems, trees, coral insects, seed conveyances from squirrels to milkweed floss to rags—that offer a sketch of partial ecology. What distinguishes the texts, further, is that they are all works of writers deeply engaged with the natural history of their times. The writers of this study exhibit a scientific interest in nature that comes to inform not only the content of their work but also the formal structures or apertures with which they write nature. These are loopholes that may be only the merest hint of an opening as in some writers such as Susan Fenimore Cooper and Simon Pokagon, while in other writers such as Thoreau, they come to shape a preponderance of manuscripts. These writers’ perspectives and techniques are based upon their orientation. They comment upon and critique American settler colonialism from a vantage of being adjacent to it: in dialogue with the heart of its settled power primarily in the Northeast but in no way holding its power. Although deep in the midst of an antebellum United States strenuously debating the expansion of territory and slavery and the scientific organizations of nature that merited the various positions, these writers construct a loophole of retreat within the more dominant understandings of species, race, development, and human civilization.

Chapter 1 introduces the framework of sight with which this critique is organized by connecting literary and aesthetic technologies of observation to the sense of diminishing species in the nineteenth century. It tracks incipient forms of a diminished seeing in John James Audubon’s, Susan Fenimore Cooper’s, and Simon Pokagon’s “American” sketches of nature. Although they interpret nature and its consonance with the native toward more romantic idealist forms, their sensibility toward the vulnerability of their subjects—the brink of extinction that they imagine native flora and fauna to suffer in the face of an unruly western expansion—begins to suggest the relations of vulnerability and mortality shared across the spectrum of viewers and viewed through a more entangled environmental optics. For example, Cooper’s magic lantern effect for viewing picturesque “natural” scenes, which also relies on the technological apparatus of a camera obscura, paints the seasonal transformations of American vicissitudes that she corresponds with biotic transformations. The species of seeing afforded by an American sketch, in Audubon’s and Cooper’s fashioning, presents an awareness of species extinction and succession through a geographical tracking of civilization’s encroachment over the western wilderness. Adapting these aesthetics, Pokagon’s transfiguration of native species and peoples into his sketches provides an opening into more accommodating and improvisatory forms of inhabiting nature.

The following chapters then present case studies of three writers—Emily Dickinson, James McCune Smith, and Henry David Thoreau—and the scientific milieu with which they were engaged in order to draw out how the figural potential of their writings in the sketch mode dovetailed with scientific observation of biogeographic dispersion and difference. These chapters trace each writer’s readings of and potential connections with scientific thinkers and texts available to them. These include major scientists of the nineteenth century such as Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, in Britain and Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, and James Dwight Dana, in America, as well as the less well-known Charles Pickering. Rather than giving a survey of general influences or of the many scientific engagements of each writer, the chapters highlight specific biogeographic problems that the writers engaged with. The focus is less on the denouement of the problem in the history of science than on how these writers’ literary technologies engage with biogeography to yield a materialism attentive to how life may survive through fraught yet vital ecological relations.

Where diminishing species form the subject of the first chapter, the second chapter deepens that focus into an inquiry of the subjectivity and figuration that can apprehend diminishing species. Returning to Dickinson’s pinhole aperture for viewing nature, Chapter 2 examines her poetic eye’s relinquishment of the omniscient objective gaze. Her poetic figurations shrink from fully grasping their objects of view while still approaching and holding in tension the fine distinctions between immanent and transcendent forms of nature—the provincial “New Englandly” view of American species and the cosmopolitan “Queen’s” view of species. This species of seeing, as I call it, allows for both a sensitivity toward species, as well as a speculative placeholding for the species that are missed, even as it maintains the disjuncture between local and divine positions of observation. I situate Dickinson’s animating figurations of difference amid the debates of species differentiation that pushed the prominent American scientists Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray toward opposing anti- and pro-Darwinian arguments concerning whether species migrated and diversified across geographical zones. Agassiz, Gray, Darwin, and Dickinson thus represent how views of species, as ideal or representative creations or as Dickinsonian figures of apprehension, allow for remarkably divergent trajectories: species fixity and extinction or its transformation and survival.

Shifting these opposing arguments to the consideration of human species shows how biogeography became so influential in cultural and political debates on race. Pro-slavery advocates who maintained a hierarchical distinction between races infamously invited collaboration with Agassiz’s theory of polygenetic special creation to support their claims of Africans as separate species or even as a human species tending toward degeneration without the stewardship of a civilized race. The history of this American ethnology is not, however, the import of this study. Instead, I turn to how a subject marked by diminishment might fashion the possibility for survival with the same scientific materials. Chapter 3 focuses on one such subject: African American physician James McCune Smith whose writings, medical training, and public activities put him in correspondence with an African American republic of letters organizing politically, scientifically, and aesthetically for racial uplift. Although less well-known than his friend Frederick Douglass, McCune Smith’s scientific acumen lent him a particular insight into the ethnological and biogeographical arguments concerning race and its genealogical and geographical origins. He would bring this to bear in numerous essays and sketches in publications such as Frederick Douglass’ Paper and The Anglo-African Magazine. I trace how these arguments are recapitulated through the figural affinity McCune Smith ties between African American racial uplift and the coral insect’s formation of reefs that slowly rise up from the sea to form land. Chapter 3 thus considers how the microbiological and geographical lens overlap in the nineteenth-century scientific imaginary of the coral insect and how McCune Smith performs this view in oblique ways through his sketches “Heads of the Colored People.” He perversely opts to sketch figures nonrepresentative and unideal in “Heads,” contrasting Douglass’s own autobiographical progress from slave to man. His fugitive works dispersed in occasional and short-lived African American publications of limited distribution suggest an alternate form of racial uplift based on a diasporic coral of life, as well as an alternate nonrepresentative, nonideal form of writing life into being.

If these figures of species and race seem to tend toward a narrative of the political, philosophical, and religious arguments that coalesced in the American nineteenth-century conflicts over territory and slavery, this study averts its gaze from a history that annexes nature as a resource for its developmental telos to register instead the casualties of that history. Chapter 4 turns to Thoreau’s posthumous nature sketches where the optical metamorphoses and dispersals of organic matter form a natural history where casualties are not absences but outlying presences upon whom fragile survival depends. Thoreau’s sketches depend upon his biogeographic studies of dispersal, particularly his method of observing these dispersals. Following the circuit of weak impersonal relations traced by his environmental optics but continuing lines of sight on both race and species, I track how Thoreau’s studies of the dispersal of the material conveyances of life—rags, weeds, bodies, and text—hold open the possibility of a natural history written by human and nonhuman coincidences and adjacencies. Although this optical figuration remains hazy and partial, it is precisely this looseness of form that lets relations slip, lapse into the losses that attend the transfigurations from seed to plant, from seaweed to Irish moss to corpse. As this final chapter demonstrates, the sketch’s minoritarian practice of figurative seeing forms a partial history that makes loss constitutive of the environment and of living things.

By dwelling on forms of partiality in nineteenth-century ways of seeing, I am not laying out a genealogy of modern science as it manifests in literary experiments of vision nor pursuing a barometry of the greater milieu and its concepts of seeing and relating to nature. Partiality is both a counterpoint of and a loophole in the nineteenth century’s paradigms of advancement and omniscience; it is the epistemic retreat and circumference that delineates a latent philosophical mode: the penumbra of a greater eclipse, the motes lit up by a brighter sun, the dust lingering in volcanic eruptions. It is neither typical nor exemplary of its moment; but the “gleanings—or what time has not reaped”⁵⁹ that remain pertinent to our times and our apprehensions of departures and extinctions.