UC Davis

This study examines representations and invocations of plant life in works by Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Each of these authors takes plant life seriously, explores the affinities between plants and humans, and finds in vegetality something that threatens to overcome or undermine anthropic structures and systems. I argue that, in order to fully appreciate the vegetal aspects of my authors’ work, we must develop an anti-anthropocentric reading practice which takes plant life as its guide and remains open to encountering plant-being on its own terms. Throughout my dissertation, I attempt to reject (or at least bracket) human-centric conceptualizations of identity, mind, narrative, ethics, sexuality, and more—following the plants (and the novels, stories, essays, and poems) into registers of life that precede and exceed signification-as-such.Through this analysis, I illustrate the ways in which human-plant relations in the antebellum United States shape, and are shaped by, the period’s epistemologies and societal power structures. I identify and analyze the epistemological underpinnings of two competing American ethnobotanies – one of mastery, and one of practice. As my primary goal is to excavate the cultural work (philosophical, psychological, and ecological) my chosen literary texts are doing, my primary methodology is a species of close reading inflected by posthumanism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and what I call critical ethnobotany. The texts I examine cultivate complex and multi-directional ecopsychologies: knowing, thinking, and experiencing are not solely human activities, but interspecies (and interkingdom) ones. My authors’ creative and intellectual work – and their identities, their ways of being in the world – are inextricably influenced by more-than-human cognitive relations. It is not just that plants are good to think with, to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss’s influential comment about animals. Rather, plants are producers and co-producers of knowledge, and in their lifeways they can directly, actively intervene in the fields we call philosophy, theory, and literature.