Writing a Wondrous Earth: Susan Fenimore Cooper's Episcopalian Ecology

Abstract

Abstract:This essay explores how Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours (1850) anticipates the ecological concept of nature. It argues that Cooper uses print culture, in particular transatlantic scientific writings and works of Anglican natural history, to create an aesthetics of wonder that negotiates ecological relationships between self and world, individual species and life zones, seasons and geological epochs. Yet wonder is not a presciently areligious affect that vaults her book into natural science's more secular future, as some critics have suggested. In Rural Hours, the religious and secular mutually inform each other as Cooper writes a wondrous earth. The essay details her interventions in Alexander von Humboldt's emergent ecological science and illuminates the ways her Episcopalian Christianity enriches Rural Hours through her denomination's emphasis on communion and balanced textual authority, in contrast to nineteenth-century Protestantism's reputation for individualist, sola scriptura hermeneutics. The essay also proposes that understanding Cooper's religious-scientific aesthetic of wonder helps clarify the gender and settler colonialism contexts of Rural Hours.