Noble designs of nature and nation: God, science, and sentiment in women's representations of the American landscape (Almira Phelps, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Treat)

This project focuses on representations of nature in the writings of nineteenth-century women authors and examines the languages and modes of perception available to women who use the natural world as a platform for discussing issues of morality, history, and the nation. Sentimental flower language books are often considered the only type of writing about nature produced by women in nineteenth-century America. In fact, another tradition also exists, one in which women challenge sentimental modes and seek instead to present a more scientific, rational portrait of nature. To establish the shape of this tradition, the dissertation investigates the intersections of natural theology, scientific discourse, and picturesque aesthetics in a range of texts, such as botanical manuals, flower language books, travel narratives, and seasonal journals, by writers including Almira Phelps, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Mary Treat. The discussion of trends in women's nature writing is contextualized by looking at key male philosophers, scientists, and writers who influence the writers under discussion: Locke, Linnaeus, Goethe, Humboldt, Darwin, Emerson, and Thoreau.; Chapter One analyzes Phelps's best-selling Familiar Lectures on Botany and outlines the contours of botanical education in the early nineteenth century. Lockean empiricism, which privileges sensory experience forms the epistemological foundations of a woman's interaction with the natural world. Subsequent chapters investigate the various languages (scientific, moral, aesthetic), and perceptual stances (objective, subjective) that women use to record their experiences of nature. Chapter Two analyzes Fuller's travel narrative Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 and shows Fuller exploring the reciprocal relationship between humans and their environment. Chapter Three investigates Rural Hours, a seasonal daybook in which Cooper the limits of the languages available to her to describe nature---religious, scientific, and local---before she settles on the language of aesthetics to resolve her perceptual crisis. Chapter Four examines Treat's Home Studies in Nature, a collection of scientific nature essays written in the post-Darwinian landscape.; By examining texts about the natural world that American women produce throughout the nineteenth century, I show how instead of turning away from nature once its designed coherency begins to crumble, these writers construct new definitions and models of home and community as guides for human interaction with their environment.