Beyond the Binary

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of binary opposition considers oppositional categories as a fundamental effect of human cognition. Humans, Lévi-Strauss argues, structure the world and their existence in it by way of symbolic oppositions that are represented and negotiated analogically. Nineteenth-century writing about nonhuman nature has been commonly regarded as a male-dominated field focusing on encounters with nature as a feminized other that resides in contraposition to man and manmade settings. This essay seeks to theorize the inconsistencies represented in feminized nature, to lay bare the ways in which scholarly interpretations of nature writing are traditionally structured around binary boundaries, and to reassess the conceptual framework of feminist geography, which has historically employed a dichotomous structure to expose traditional representations of gender. Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals each illustrate an awareness of the transcorporeality of human bodies and ecological spaces as enmeshed in a complex, shifting ontology. Both writers attempt to reconstruct an inclusive “non-gendered” ecology that transforms the binary landscapes of “village-woods” and “island-garden” into non-hierarchical vistas that de-enforce the subservience of nature, making these spaces compatible, harmonious, and synergistic.