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On Not Describing Death: Washington Irving, John Kirk Townsend, and Natural History’s Descriptive Agency

2024; Oxford University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/alh/ajae119

1468-4365

Sylvan Goldberg,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

Abstract This essay discusses the use of description in early American natural history and in travel writing by Washington Irving and John Kirk Townsend. In Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies (1835) and Townsend’s Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains, to the Columbia River (1839), both writers use description to stall narrative progress so as to avoid narrating the deaths of bison and other animals they hunt on journeys into the western United States. In so doing, they stave off the ethical and emotional consequences of killing nonhuman animals. Unlike the many scholarly accounts that emphasize description’s diminishment or decentering of the human, here description amplifies human agency by masking actions about which these writers feel ambivalent.