Throughout her putatively “documentary” works, the contemporary American naturalist Annie Dillard locates her voice using the framework of nineteenth-century American transcendentalism, and specifically Emersonian pantheism;...
moreThroughout her putatively “documentary” works, the
contemporary American naturalist Annie Dillard locates her voice
using the framework of nineteenth-century American transcendentalism,
and specifically Emersonian pantheism; she seeks knowledge,
inspiration, and even identity from an impersonal nature coded predominantly
as male. In Dillard’s writing, pantheism functions as a discourse
of exclusively male merger with nature, leaving her protagonist in
a closed system where the endless transformation of pre-existing bodies
supplants sexual reproduction. In some ways, Dillard even wants figuratively
to transcend or erase her own voice and body and replace them
with those of an explicitly male nature; this desire is foregrounded in
her Emersonian wariness of all forms of self-consciousness. Even when
the subject of Dillard’s text is Dillard—as in the autobiographical An
American Childhood—the observing “I” cannot be the focus of her work.
But her still female observer, and the observer’s body, never entirely
vanishes from the tale. Most strikingly, Dillard’s work is not the autobiographical
or non-fiction nature writing of a contemporary woman, but
the trickster fiction, or tinkering, of a postmodern confidence woman
impersonating a male voice that is much older, in a number of contexts.
Winning a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—
which more appropriately should have won a National Book Award as
a postmodern novel—Dillard anticipates an era of James Freys and falsified
memoirs and journalistic accounts; but Dillard’s “transgressions”
are epistemologically, ontologtically, and aesthetically deliberate. She
subverts two genres, women’s memoirs and nature writing, that many
readers trust as inherently authentic, by treating them as inherently
subject to manipulation. Dillard merrily leads readers astray until she
gives up the pretense of writing non-fiction altogether.
Little has been written concerning the discordant effects of Dillard’s
(possibly disingenuous) use of a transcendental male persona as
I attempt to elucidate them in this article. But critics have noted that
“realist nature writing . . . and Transcendentalist literature” often posit
“a male speaking subject and a female object of discourse, and further
assume a hierarchical relationship . . . in which the masculine subject
appropriates the feminine object to his own purposes.” (In
addition, critics such as Donna Haraway have argued that “feminist
objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about
transcendence and the splitting of subject and object”). Dillard’s
anomalous transcendental project simultaneously inhabits, recapitulates,
and possibly subverts this gendered, hierarchical tradition of
nature writing. Dillard’s rehabilitation of pantheistic male views of
nature, developed from the male writers of the American Renaissance,
acts less as a form of influence than a constrictive grammar of self-construction
and literary production in her work.
