Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (review)

Abstract

However, this book also has at least two other aims. one of these is to expand readers’ critical vision beyond the “flower language books” (2), with which nineteenth-century women nature writers traditionally have been associated, to a much broader range of nature writing. the volume illustrates women’s relationships with plant catalogs, botanical textbooks, travel narratives, seasonal journals, and scientific essays. Another of the book’s goals is to examine how women variously resisted and embraced the language of science through these different forms of writing. indeed, the book’s greatest strength is its observation that not only were many women “quite willing to grapple with the interpretive shifts in the meaning of nature” that accompanied the development of science generally (2), but they were also willing to embrace the new ways of seeing offered by Darwin in particular. rather than surrender their moral authority as a result of Darwin’s theories, Gianquitto argues, “[w]omen made room for morality . . . by focusing on the construction and maintenance of the homes of the natural world” (12), eventually extending the notion of domestic space to encompass the entire biosphere. Gianquitto is strongest in her four case studies, especially when she is immersed in the analysis of a particular passage. Her examination of Mary treat’s work is the highlight of the book. the chapter on Margaret Fuller, by contrast, is the least successful. Here, the connection to science is more tenuous and the evidence for Goethe’s influence is less definitive. “Good Observers of Nature” also struggles at times in its attempts to generalize, given the differences among the cases and the small sample size. Additionally, readers may desire more biographical information, including illustrations of the authors. Finally, the book’s long chapters might usefully be divided into slightly smaller sections. nevertheless, the well-written book includes several creative turns of phrase: Gianquitto observes, for example, that “phelps performs a rhetorical cartwheel” (45). in all, “Good Observers of Nature” is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on nineteenth-century American women and their relationship to science and nature.