By creating a hybrid creature as the title character in his “medicated novel,” Oliver Wendell Holmes set out to explore and trouble the boundaries between humans and non-humans. Elsie’s strange instincts, desires and diamond eyes are a result of her mother’s contact with a rattle snake and her subsequent “contamination” (as Emer called it) with a snake-nature alongside her human nature. Beyond this primary mixing of nature and the nonhuman within the character of Elsie, Holmes extends this exploration of human/nature hybridity to his expositional passages. He spends much of his descriptions exploring the boundaries of the human and non-human, particularly through personifying and anthropomorphizing the natural settings in the book. In describing “The Mountain” and its overhanging forests, Holmes bestows upon the setting “terror” and “dignity,” as well as describing how it “broods” over the town. He then invokes a Titan to describe the forest as a “robe” and “garment” thrown over the body of the mountain (65).
Later, Holmes describes nature as jealous, first in a kind of petty jealously towards human creation, and then as a kind of jealous hoarder. Both descriptions illustrate that Holmes consistently chooses to create human-centered visions of nature. In chapter 10, Holmes insists that “Nature is jealous of proud chimneys, and always loves to put a poplar near one, so that it may fling a leaf or two down its black throat every autumn” (160). And when Bernard decides to search for the flower Elsie had hidden within his book, he must look for where “the wild girl sought the blossoms of which Nature was so jealous” (204). From reading Darwin, we know that the mountain blossoms grow in a specific place because there is a microclimate compatible to their survival. They struggled with other species in order to carve out a specific niche for themselves in the mountain landscape. Holmes was certainly familiar with this explanation, considering his citation of Darwin, but rather than choosing to describes the flowers specific habitat in this way, he instead decides to personify nature. In this moment, nature is a jealous hoarder, creating only a few places for these flowers to grow in order to keep them to herself. This personification shows how fundamentally anthrocentric the novel is in its descriptions of nature. Nature is a jealous hoarder because it is difficult for people to reach the flowers. Nature isn’t sharing the blossoms easily with anyone but Elsie (who is of nature) and therefore is characterized as jealous and grasping.
Holmes’ anthrocentric vision of nature is embedded in his allusion to Darwin as well. In Chapter 7, Holmes explicitly discusses Darwin’s theories from Origin of Species, comparing ladies’ fashion and appearances in public to “the struggle for life” between individuals and species in Darwin’s work. Holmes uses Darwin in an ironic way to discuss gendered social struggles and completely avoids describing “the struggle for life” in terms of nature and natural selection. Rather, he writes nature in a way that Darwin would have violently resisted.
Throughout the novel, as Holmes personifies nature, he also feminizes it, in accord with a long tradition of gendering nature. Wedded to this construction is the classically derogatory alignment between women and nature. This book does interesting things with these constructions because of Elsie’s complicated position. She is of nature to a greater extent than any other character in the book. But a female being associated with nature was not uncommon at all, especially if their “wildness” could be useful or if it could be tamed. As we discussed in class, Elsie’s crimes are gender transgressions. An alignment with nature is not a gender transgression in the same way as Elsie’s other crimes, such as writing disturbing essays or rudely staring at people with her powerful gaze. However, Elsie’s “contamination” extended her alignment with nature to such an excessive degree that it became a serious problem. Her resistance to being “tamed” and her ability to draw power from her position resulted in a radical decoupling of the “natural” alliance between woman and nature. In Elsie’s case, this alliance was seen as a grave danger and completely unnatural. Thus, acceptable, appropriate female behavior in the novel is severed from nature and the nonhuman world rather than aligned with it
Gender transgressions are inevitably bound up with normative constructions of race and class. The types of behaviors available to women vary across different social classes and subject positions. Elsie’s wildness and affinity with snakes are major transgressions, but are eventually explained by the story of the snakebite. Elsie’s behavior was considered transgressive because her race and class, coupled with her gender, put her into a strict social position with narrow definitions for acceptable behavior. In contrast, the “dark, gypsy-looking woman” who brings an apron full of rattlesnakes to Langdon is not regarded as a threat. The woman brings the snakes looking “as if they wanted to see what was going on, but show[ing] no sign of anger” (226). Langdon thinks the woman is “crazy” for taking that kind of a risk but the narrator goes on to calmly describe the existence of “certain persons” who are always safe when handling snakes (227). Because of her “othered” status, defined by class and racial markers, the gypsy woman’s affinity with snakes is not seen as a threat to the normative social constructions of the white, middle class society. She and “her people”, with their snake charming abilities, are an anomaly but do not constitute a major transgression. They do not have to be explained away as human-snake mutants in order to defuse their abnormal behavior because they do not constitute a threat like Elsie does.
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