In what ways did nineteenth-century women writers engage in environmental activism? How did they negotiate the dominant understandings of women and nature that shaped their audience's expectations? And how did these writers' concerns about environmental justice anticipate our own? Karen Kilcup grapples with these profound questions in her nuanced readings of texts by Lydia Sigourney (from whom the book's title is borrowed), Mary Jemison, Caroline Kirkland, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and others. Investigating the material and ideological obstacles that these women faced, probing the limitations of their rhetorical efforts, and attending to the utility of their approaches for today's environmental activists, Kilcup considers how these rhetors combined writing and activism to varying effect.
An ambitious book, Fallen Forests attends to “unsettling” texts, hybrid genres, and “taxonomical complexity” (7) in a way that enlarges the fields of study with which it intersects: primarily ecocriticism, ecofeminisms (plural), and environmental justice. Kilcup's lucid prose is a pleasure to read. She deftly interweaves her close readings of diverse texts so that the connections between them are highlighted, both within and between chapters. The codas at the ends of chapters are particularly helpful in building cohesion, transitioning between chapters, and alluding to present-day environmental concerns as revealed by compelling case studies like Kate Middleton's “fascinator” headwear or the popular film Avatar.
Many book-length studies of nineteenth-century American women's writing have pursued the subject of sentimentalism and been structured by attention to a single genre, identity group, or period. Kilcup's work pushes the envelope by treating a variety of genres and including authors from a range of ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds. One of Kilcup's most innovative theoretical moves is to incorporate new research in emotional intelligence – a concept she wrests from its initial applications in psychology and in the business world – and inviting us to consider it as a key feature of environmental-justice literature. Her analysis of how authors attempt to encourage literary emotional intelligence (3) in their readers is persuasive, and it models a compelling new direction for scholars in a range of fields who may be interested in how emotions can be taught and learned, and how affect becomes political.
Intrigued by Kilcup's promise to “critique some ecocritics' idealizing tendency” (3), this ecocritic would have liked to see that critique handled more directly, and pushed a bit farther. Engaging with more contemporary ecocritical theory, in addition to embracing narrative scholarship, would have been more useful in actualizing a critique of ecocriticism. Kilcup's engagement with ecocritical theory looks promising in the introduction but fades in the chapters themselves. While I applaud Kilcup's nuanced readings of texts and her resistance to (simply) celebrating ideologically fraught literary works, her contribution lies more in extending ecocriticism into new temporal and generic areas than it does in critiquing the field.
In such an ambitious and multifaceted study, some categories are sure to be underexplored. For instance, in her third chapter Kilcup explores how Harriet Wilson's Our Nig attributes “character, individuality, loyalty” and “even … subjectivity” (163) to a nonhuman animal (a dog). A more thorough reading of Our Nig's nonhuman animals might have engaged directly with scholars like Cary Wolfe (who is briefly mentioned in the footnotes) or Donna Haraway (who does not appear in the fifty-six-page bibliography). The relatively minor example in this chapter points to a related, global issue in Fallen Forests: some of the longer, more explanatory footnotes would have enhanced Kilcup's discussions in the main text.
Of course, no scholar can include every relevant reference; omissions are inevitable in a book of this scope. Fallen Forests is a well-researched text (as its seventy-eight pages of notes and extensive bibliography indicate), and it succeeds in demonstrating the rhetorical complexity of an impressive array of literary texts. When Kilcup does engage directly with contemporary scholars like Kimberly Ruffin and Stacy Alaimo, that engagement is well timed and useful in developing innovative readings of the study's key texts.
The best work in American studies urges scholars in a range of disciplines to conceive of familiar topics – in this case, topics like consumption, embodiment, emotion, agency, gender, and resource wars – in more complex ways. Kilcup's work does exactly this. Fallen Forests reminds scholars of American literature, ecocritics, ecofeminists, rhetoricians, and many others that we must leave room for nuanced readings of texts, that we must attend not just to familiar categories like gender and class but also to age and to genre, and that unearthing the roots of ecofeminism and environmental justice can be full of historical – and rhetorical – surprises.
