Now, what do I have to say about Trist's diary?

Early American Women and/in Cultural Studies

Individual Paper Proposal

A Cultured City Woman in the “Wild” Woods: Unearthing Early Euroamerican Views of Nonhuman-Animals in The Travel Diary of Elizabeth House Trist

        Early American scholars, such as Timothy Sweet and Daniel Philippon, agree that the canon of nature writing should be expanded to include texts such as diaries, travel journals, and letters; however, few examinations have been done to explore these genres from an ecofeministl perspective, and even fewer from an animal studies angle.  The Travel Diary of Elizabeth House Trist, written in 1783-84, is one such text; Annette Kolodny claims that Trist imagined that the frontier would be developed into garden cities, while Susan Imbarrato elaborates that Trist’s first-person observations provide scholars with the opportunity to see the early American landscape through a settler’s eyes—which anticipated the prospect of human improvement of the raw “wilderness.”       

I argue that studying Travel Diary through an ecofeminist/animal studies theoretical angle gives modern scholars access to early Euroamerican views of animals and I find that Trist’s perspective reveals that animals were treated as unrecognized laborers and as curious spectacles.  Both of these views reinforce the socially fabricated human/animal binary and contribute to the inability to recognize nonhuman animal agency and human-animal interdependence on nonhuman animals as companion species.  Specifically, I will look at Trist’s relationship with her horse, livestock, and game animals; and her reaction to mammoth bones, a pelican killed for the sake of examining it, and an unseen crocodile as bizarre curiosities.             

Therefore, I find that The Travel Diary of Elizabeth House Trist reveals dominant early American attitudes and behaviors towards animals that inform our current unsustainable views and treatment of animals such as our commercial use livestock, failure to acknowledge our dependence on animal labor, and our denial of animal agency and rights.