Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard

67 Pages·2016·0.5 MB·English

Masaryk University
Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Markéta Tomášková

Searching for Home on This Earth:
Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard
Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D.

2016
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

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Author’s signature
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Acknowledgement
I am very grateful to my supervisor Dr. Martina Horáková
for her guidance, kind support, and valuable comments on the manuscript. I would also like to thank
my family, including Riki the dog, for providing me with a cosy and warm dwelling,
which made the writing and the completion of this paper possible.
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Searching for Home on This Earth:
Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard
Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................- 5 -
1 The Perception of ‘Objects’ ............................................................................................- 9 -
1.1 ‘Objects’ in Dwellings ............................................................................................. - 14 -
1.2 ‘Objects’ in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ....................................................................... - 18 -
2 The Perception of Animals ..............................................................................................- 24 -
2.1 Animals in Dwellings .............................................................................................. - 29 -
2.2 Animals in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ........................................................................ - 36 -
3 The Feeling of At-homeness in Dillard’s and Hogan’s Texts .........................................- 48 -
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................- 61 -
Works Cited ..........................................................................................................................- 64 -
Résumé .................................................................................................................................- 66 -
Resumé .................................................................................................................................- 67 -

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Introduction
The present study explores the field of nature writing, a field which could be
characterized by “awakening of perception to an ecological way of seeing” (Lyon x); nature is
thus seen as a network of relations that create communities, as grounded in “patterns [which]
radiate outward to include the human observer” (Lyon x). Nature writing as a genre then
seems to be as manifold and its diverse tendencies as intertwined as the natural world it is
concerned with, while the authors who cultivate it might be also perceived to form certain
“communities” and their writing to “radiate outward” to reach to the reader and pull him/her
into “[the] realm of complexly interwoven relationships” (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
85), into the landscape shared with “the other presences that surround and influence our daily
life” (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous 7). Conveniently enough, Thomas J. Lyon provides
those who are on the verge of losing themselves in or are already overwhelmed by the colours
and smells of this rich field with “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing” that could make a helpful
companion on their expedition.
Lyon identifies in the chapter, in his small field guide, three principal traits of nature
writing as such, namely “natural history information, personal responses to nature, and
philosophical interpretation of nature” (20) while “[t]he relative weight or interplay of these
three aspects determines all the permutations and categories within the field” (20). His
overview ranges from specimen which show only occasional “personal or philosophical or
literary” passages and the content is thus mostly of an informative character, as it is the case
with “a professional paper or a field guide or a handbook” (20), through “natural history
essays” which represent a marriage of “expository descriptions of nature” and “a literary
design so that the facts then give rise to some sort of meaning or interpretation” to “rambles”
which Lyon describes as “a classic American nature writing form, [where] natural history and
the author’s presence are more or less perfectly balanced” (21). The ‘rambler’ undertakes
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walks in the vicinity of his or her home, of his or her “home ground”, loved and cherished,
and describes the events and encounters as “observer-participant” (Lyon 21, 23). The more to
the right of Lyon’s spectrum (22), the more is the author present in the writing and the
personal experience in or with the natural world begins to prevail over the expositions of
natural history (23); “Rambles” are therefore followed by three species of “the nature
experience essay”, “Solitude and Back-Country Living”, “Travel and Adventure”, and “Farm
Life” respectively. As these three categories are not relevant for the focus of the thesis, they
just serve as a bridge to the other end of the scale which features the category designated as
“Man’s Role in Nature”. These are in their essence philosophical works whose authors
employ their experiences and accounts of natural history to pave way for the findings and
thoughts they want to share (Lyon 25).
This thesis focuses on two representatives of American nature writing: Annie Dillard
and Linda Hogan, more particularly on their nonfiction works or collections of essays Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek and Dwellings respectively. Lyon classifies Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
as an example of the category “Rambles” and, though he does not state to which part of the
spectrum Linda Hogan belongs, she seems to fit best to the area of “Man’s Role in Nature”,
except for her writing is far from being “abstract and scholarly” (Lyon 25). This thesis seeks
to study in detail the possible ways of perception, understanding, and interpretation of the
natural world and of its many voices, smells, and textures, within the field of nature writing.
The choice of the texts by Annie Dillard and Linda Hogan was not, however, inspired by the
categorization and by what the distinct categories may imply; the inspiration has grown from
their close neighbourhood in the anthology At Home on This Earth: Two Centuries of U.S.
Women’s Nature Writing, where they are presented as unified by a common interest for nature
but in fact manifest a diversity of approaches and attitudes.
In the introduction to the above-mentioned anthology, Lorraine Anderson provides a
short account of the history of women’s nature writing and of the changes its position has
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undergone in the wider context of literature and in relation to the literary canon since the
beginnings of the genre in the middle of the nineteenth century (2-5). Since women were
confined to the households and their surroundings by the character of the role society had
ascribed to them (Anderson 3), their writing tends to be more “home-based” than that of their
male counterparts and “the word home comes up often in women’s nature writing” (Anderson
5, original emphasis). This tendency represented almost till the end of the twentieth century a
hindrance in the women’s nature writing being included into and regarded as a part of the
literary canon (Anderson 3-4) as they did not produce “the kind of nature writing that this
culture has recognized as such” (Anderson 3). At the same time, the historical and social
circumstances gave rise to an interesting and very important phenomenon: perceiving the
natural world as home. Anderson draws attention to the fact that “many women nature writers
have found freedom from the domestic sphere and all that it traditionally entails by finding a
home in nature” and “have embued the concept of home with new meaning by expanding it to
encompass the wider world” (Anderson 5). The broadening of the idea of home as to cover
“the wider world” or the world in its entirety right away could be viewed as an essential
ingredient in our desire to protect it. It is the emotional ties of the feeling of at-homeness, the
feeling of safety, cosiness, and belonging, that make us treat the (natural) world with care.
The thesis aims to provide a comparative analysis of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by
Annie Dillard and Dwellings by Linda Hogan, searching in particular for the feeling of at-
homeness in the worlds these two works create. It strives to investigate the distinct ways the
two authors perceive nature and how they translate into the texts of their essays. Although
they belong to the same generation (Dillard born 1945, Hogan 1947), they started to publish
their works in different decades, Dillard in 1970s (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974) and
Hogan in 1990s (Dwellings in 1995), which may have shaped the principles on which the
worlds are built, as well as their ethnicity (Hogan is of a Chickasaw origin). It is not the
objective of the analysis, however, to map possible correlations between these contextual
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factors and the specificity of their texts, and it would have even been implausible in a case
study of two authors and two works. Instead, the focus is on the variability of roles nature
could play in the texts by writers often classified as nature writers.
One of the most prominent contemporary experts on the roles nature plays and has
played (not only) within the Euro-American civilisation as well as in our daily lives is David
Abram, an American environmental philosopher. Abram’s works, namely The Spell of the
Sensuous and Becoming Animal, offer a comprehensive framework for revealing and
interpreting approaches to nature, handy and fitting tools analysts can rely on when delving
into the waters of creeks and exploring the nooks of dwellings. Abram’s philosophical
concepts and ideas introduced in the publications mentioned above provide a methodological
guidance and support for the whole thesis.
The thesis consists of three main chapters. Having explained the relevant concepts of
David Abram’s philosophy, the first chapter proceeds to a discussion of Hogan’s and
Dillard’s rendering of ‘objects’, of the material world, and of the senses they employ in
accessing it. The second chapter provides an insight into Abram’s perception of animals, or
better, of non-human inhabitants of the world, and characterizes the parts they play in
Hogan’s and Dillard’s texts. The last core chapter summarizes the findings of the two
preceding analytical chapters and highlights the elements that are constitutive of the feeling of
at-homeness and those aspects which disrupt it or inhibit it. The concept of feeling at home on
this earth thus becomes the yardstick leading to the crucial distinction between Hogan’s and
Dillard’s essays.

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1 The Perception of ‘Objects’
“There is a rather dull cupboard here
that knew the voice of my great aunts,
that knew the voice of my grandfather dear,
that knew the voice of my father, too;
and to these memories it is true.
You're wrong to think it can only sit,
because I talk with it.”
FRANCIS JAMMES
The cupboard which might seem “rather dull” at the first sight, an object simply
placed in a certain part of the room and used for storing some sort of things or another, is
endowed, at least in the eyes of Francis Jammes – since many “do not believe in such a spirit”
– with qualities that are traditionally ascribed solely to human beings. It (“elle” in the French
original, which might purely indicate the grammatical gender of the word “armoire” as well
as represent a way to emphasize the cupboard’s animate nature) was attentive to the voices of
people who moved around the house, remembers them, and now it interacts with its present
inhabitant. However even if no actual words are uttered on the part of the cupboard and the
lyrical subject himself remained silent, Jammes hints at one of the crucial parts of David
Abram’s philosophy: there is more to ‘objects’ that surround us than we think it is (Cf.
Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, “Philosophy on the Way to Ecology”)
In The Spell of the Sensuous, hereafter designated as The Spell, Abram accents the
importance of Edmund Husserl’s contribution to philosophy, namely his recognition of
“the intersubjective world of life” (40) or Lebenswelt, “life-world” in Abram’s translation.
European scientific tradition had been and, as Abram suggests, has still been substantially
shaped by the views of Galileo Galilei and the philosophy of René Descartes, which rejected
the direct sensuous experience of the material reality as merely subjective and therefore
irrelevant with regard to the cognition of the world we inhabit (31-32). Dismissive of the
information our senses feed us, we entrust ourselves to science which is regarded as the single
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source of objective knowledge, bridging the gap between our limited bodies and the world
which was reduced to “a determinate structure whose laws of operation could be discerned
only via mathematical analysis” (Abram, The Spell 32). This concept of our contact with the
world led, in Abram’s point of view, to an utter paradox: “The fluid realm of direct
experience has come to be seen as a secondary, derivative dimension, a mere consequence of
events unfolding in the “realer” world of quantifiable and measurable scientific ‘facts’”
(Abram, The Spell 34). Tangible contours of reality that envelops our bodies, and textures,
colours and smells we encounter on our daily journeys, were given a certain eloquence again
by Edmund Husserl who, in an effort to bring the attention back to the direct experiencing of
the world, established phenomenology, a philosophical discipline that “would seek not to
explain the world, but to describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself
evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience” (Abram,
The Spell 35). Eventually, Husserl reached a conclusion that our body would play the key role
in this experience as well as the fact that the perceived phenomena reveal themselves not only
to our own senses but also to the eyes, ears, and fingers of other subjects with whom we share
the particular place (Abram, The Spell 37). Thus he coined the notion of intersubjectivity and
intersubjective phenomena, “phenomena experienced by a multiplicity of sensing subjects”
(Abram, The Spell 38). This new view of reality freed the world from the grip of tweezers that
had held it in the vacuum of objectivity and suggested that the science can instead provide us
with more intersubjective insights and help us learn how a particular phenomenon is
perceived by a variety of subjects (Abram, The Spell 38-39). In this light the world ceases to
be a specimen with clear-cut limits continuing silently its existence on a Petri dish and comes
to life as a many-faceted and constantly changing realm that assumes, in every pair of eyes
watching it, a different shape and colour, in every ear a specific sound and in every nose or
muzzle a particular scent. It is “an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions,
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