Author Archives: Sierra Cruz-Phillips

Better Ways to See History in Rivers Solomons The Deep

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In Rivers Solomon’s novel The Deep, they use an extended metaphor of empty spaces (such as cavities and vessels) to depict the Wajinrus’ forgotten history as a literal void carved into its people. This is clearest in Yetu, whose role as historian turns her body into a sort of container for communal memory, one that is filled and emptied at a great cost. Solomon uses this metaphor to urge their audience to see the trauma of historical loss as not merely just emotional but constitutional; it shapes who a person becomes through a history that they must hold (in Yetu’s case) or the history they lack (in the Wajinru’s).  

In chapter one of The Deep, Amaba says:

One can only go for so long without asking ‘who am I?’, ‘where do I come from?’, ‘what does all this mean?’, ‘what is being?’, ‘what came before me and what might come after?’. Without answers there is only a hole. A hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities (Solomon 8).

Solomon uses repetitive anaphoric rhetorical questions—“Who am I? What does this all mean? What is being?” This repetitive structure creates momentum and rhythm creating a feeling of longing and searching in order to emphasize the uncertainty and human need for understanding oneself. Most prominent is the imagery of the “hole” and “cavities.” These words visually create a picture of emptiness and loss due to a past, or in this case, history, that has been erased. The “hole where a history should be” is an absence of ancestry, a lost and forgotten origin. The “hole” in this case would be a symbol of a void left from the disconnection from heritage and identity. Amaba’s last words, “we are cavities,” extend this metaphor of a “hole” in history as a way to describe how trauma and loss quite literally shape people. There isn’t merely just a “hole” in history; the people most impacted by that “hole” become empty and hollow—like a cavity. In Pauline Alexis Gumbs article “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals,” Gumbs discusses what it means to Remember, and in reference to what she has been deprived of, the people and things she has lost, she states: “I’ve come back for all the names I’ve never known since you were stolen. And I am never far away from you in fact. I am creator and creation. Right here, the source of all love ever” (Gumbs 35). Gumbs phrase “names I’ve never known” parallels how the Wanjinru’s historical trauma creates gaps in identity. Which, in turn, connects back to Solomon’s metaphor of “holes,” these losses that exist not because the past doesn’t exist but because it was violently taken from them. Furthermore, when Gumbs says “I am never far away from you,” she resists the idea of total absence of what is lost. The Wajinru’s past and history, for most of the novel, is just out of reach, leaving them structurally hollow, rarely able to access the past that shapes them. On the other hand, the rememberings are literally “never far” from her as her role as historian. Yetu becomes the vessel of collective memory defined by what she holds. While the Wajinru, stripped of that history, become cavities defined by what they lack and are hungry for. Further, the line “I am creator and creation” suggests that the act of remembering, as well as recalling history, is an act of survival and identity. Yetu, and the Wajinru as a whole, are “created”  and are self made (creator) by the lack of their history, though that history does not just fully disappear; rather, it restructures bodies and identities through its absence.  

In succession to the first quote, Amaba believes that Yetu wouldn’t understand what it’s like due to her being the “historian.” Though Yetu thinks to herself that she “did know what it was like. After all, wasn’t cavity just another word for vessel?” (Solomon 8). The Oxford Dictionary defines cavity as “an empty space within a solid object, in particular the human body,” and a vessel is described as “a hollow container, especially used to hold liquid, such as a bowl or a cask.” A vessel, in Yetu’s case, is just another sort of cavity. Yetu is a vessel (cavity) made to hold the past and ancestors for the Wajinru people, then, when the time comes, those are scooped out of her and poured into the cavities of her people. And a cavity left untreated, left unfilled, can lead to pain and infection in a person, much like a cavity in one’s tooth. Solomon’s use of “cavity” and “vessel” is evocative of Gumb’s understanding of identity formation, where she explains: “I think about repetition and code, and when we prioritise what communication and why. And how we ever learn our names in this mess. And the need that makes us generalise and identify. Become specific and vague” (Gumbs 31). Repetition and code parallels Solomon’s repeated metaphor, depicting how history is encoded into one’s body, not simply just told through language. The pondering of “when we prioritise what communication and why” reflects the  Wajinru’s having a Historian hold all the memories of their people, then only annually placing those memories into the people. This form of communication of the Wajinru people depicts how when history is communicated, or withheld, is just as important in shaping one’s identity as the history itself. Gumbs goes on to describe the movement between “generalizing” and “identifying,” which corresponds with how Solomon depicts the Wajinru’s collective versus Yetu’s individual identity. For the Wajinru people, their trauma is shared or “generalized,” while Yetu’s is so individual to her as a hyper-specific vessel of memory. Gumbs’ insight to identity becoming specific and vague exemplifies Solomon’s cavity and vessel paradox. The Wajinru’s identity is vague because of how removed the past has been from them. Whereas Yetu’s is painfully specific due to holding all the ancestral memories, which overwhelm her body. Gumbs quote reinforces Solomon’s metaphor that history is constitutional and how the distribution of the past and memories is determinant in how whole or hollow someone becomes. 

In chapter five of the novel, after Yetu has left the Wajinru and her role as historian, she meets two legs and finds herself irresolute without the rememberings. Suka (one of the two legs) holds out her hand, sparking a lost memory in Yetu, but “when she reached out for the past, nothing was there. The emptiness inside her stretched far and wide in every direction like a cavern. It was lonely. She had thought herself unmoored when she was the historian, but this did not compare. She was a blip” (Solomon 78). For the first time, since before she was about fourteen, Yetu is experiencing what the rest of the Wajinru’s lives are like. As she tries to find where or what this memory is “the emptiness inside her stretched far and wide in every direction like a cavern,” there is yet another metaphor/simile for this emptiness that Solomon describes—cavern. A cavern, according to Merriam Webster, is a cave, one of large or indefinite extent. This simile expands Solomon’s metaphor from that of something that holds (cavity) or carries (vessel) to something that is an expansive, inhabitable absence. Comparing the lost memories to a cavern is as if to say that Yetu was living in a space of absence. Solomon describes this absence, ending the quote with a fragment: “she was a blip.” Now that she is unable to reach for those memories, she has a diminished sense of self. Like the Wajinru, without her history, she is a “blip,” there is a certain insignificance and impermanence to her identity. In Helen Rozwadowski’s book Vast Expanses: A History of the Ocean, Rozwadowski discusses the sea as a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical historical archive. To evolve our relationship with the ocean, she declares that “we must transform our understanding of the sea, to one bound with history and interconnected with humanity. Such a new vision, with new metaphors, can form the foundation for positive change” (Rozwadowski 227). Rozwadowski’s claim that the sea is “bound with history and interconnected with humanity” aligns with the Wajinru’s connection to memory, where their trauma originates in histories that are submerged, not erased. Additionally, Rozwadowski mentions this need for “new metaphors,” which we see Solomon depict in the Wajinru, especially Yetu, where memory is something physically carried in the body. Solomon’s metaphor pushes forth the “foundation for positive change” that Rozwadowski calls for; the metaphor of void spaces replaces abstract notions of history being intangible, with bodily constitutional consequences. Essentially, what Rozwadowski means is that metaphors shape ethical outcomes, hence Solomon’s metaphor demonstrating the conceptualization of history as something detachable at the cost of one’s identity and wholeness. For example, when Yetu becomes “a blip” without the rememberings, Solomon affirms the danger of a worldview that disconnects humanity from its histories, as warned by Rozwadowski.

By the end of the novel, in chapter nine, Yetu realizes a better way for her and her people to hold and carry history. As Amaba begs for her to not bear it all alone, Yetu ponders for a moment, “usually, after the remembrance, the historian waited nearby, empty of memories, but what would happen if they stayed? […] could they live out their days all sharing the memories together?” (Solomon 148). The historian being “empty of memories” continues Solomon’s extended metaphor of the body as a void to be filled or left hollow, thus reinforcing memory and history as being housed within. The phrase “empty of memories” also treats memory and history as something tangible that can occupy space. Yetu then rhetorically poses the questions “what would happen if they stayed?… sharing memories together?” This line of questioning invites the reader, as well as Yetu, to imagine an alternative structure of sharing history and memories. This communal language of “they” and “together” raises the possibility of distributed memory, challenging the isolation of the historian’s role and the Wajinru’s emptiness and longing for the past. By posing this question of a new way of sharing memories, Solomon urges their reader to consider the moral costs of isolating trauma to a single body, along with the trauma to one’s body of not having any history to hold. Rozwadowski, too, acknowledges the importance of knowing and understanding the past, especially the past in relation to the ocean: “Many environmental narratives lapse into tales of inevitable decline. Until we recognize the ocean’s past, and our inextricable relationship to it, we will not make much headway in changing that relationship for the better” (Rozwadowski 227). Both Rozwadowski and Solomon emphasize this “inextricable relationship” to the past, whether that be ecological or cultural. There is an emphatic importance to understanding that history, or memory, is not something that is merely disposable but deeply entwined to humanity. When Yetu proposes the idea of a shared remembrance, she too rejects the narrative of “inevitable decline” by suggesting that a collective reconnection to history can reform a people’s suffering. Solomon and Rozwadowski implore their audience to heal by refusing narratives of inevitability and embracing shared responsibility for history and its trauma. It is through this shared responsibility that one’s relationship to their environment can change for the better. 

Solomon’s overarching metaphor solicits their audience to understand the dangers and harm that a loss of history and ancestry causes a person. It leaves them filled with questions and uncertainty, and a hole that is hard to fill. By using this metaphor throughout the novel, Solomon implores one to think about how history is told, how history is held, and better ways of sharing history. The novel portrays the real human costs of the erasure of histories and an urge to imagine the advantages of shared history, especially histories that are often (and quite literally) lost to sea; histories that need shared “remembering” to enable healing rather than prolonging trauma. 

Works Cited

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.” Soundings (London, England), vol. 78, no. 78, 2021, pp. 20–37, https://doi.org/10.3898/SOUN.78.01.2021.

Rozwadowski, Helen M.. Vast Expanses : A History of the Oceans, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=5631456.

Solomon, Rivers. The Deep. Saga Press, 2019. 

Final Post

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Before starting this class I was unsure how vastly mermaids and merfolk stories correlated to our environment. Furthermore, my understanding of mermaids was limited to the more widely told Western stories such as “The Little Mermaid.” I entered this class with an open mind, ready to learn, and as each week passed I found myself bewildered by all that merfolk tales communicated about the world, and how we impact it and are impacted by it. It is due to this class that I have seen how humanity and the environment are so interconnected. Whether that be through history, language, societal expectations, and how people identify. 

I believe the moment that the class really was around week six during our reading of Melusine. I really started to understand exactly how people’s views on the environment shape our understanding of our world and how we tell stories. This insight also comes from our class practice in close reading, which indisputably helped in my understanding of the texts that we read. My close readings, especially from Melusine on, are what has helped me most in my learning of this class. There is an art to taking what is simply on a page and making observations and an understanding of it. 

Moreover, I appreciate that we were able to look beyond Western stories for learning about merfolk and the environment. As we have learned from this class, our tellings of history are flawed because we do not have perspectives beyond the ones we deemed were worth telling. Yet history is not just what is in the textbooks we receive in school, history is in art, architecture, and especially literature. So to be able to get a more rounded view of merpeople folktales and the environment of other peoples and cultures, is the opportunity to learn a history yet unheard by a majority. It is from this class that I have learned about what it means to read stories in critical and thoughtful ways. I have learned to look beyond the conventional perceptions of stories and question what the story is asking of us.   

Final Essay Proposal

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For my final essay, I am committed to focusing on The Deep. I will focus on the trauma that lingers from history. With that, I will be building off my week thirteen blog post, so my working thesis is based on that and will most likely be changed as I continue writing. The author’s language in her metaphors of cavities, holes, and vessels of Yetu and the wajinru people depicts how knowing history and or lack of knowledge of your history impacts a person. In lieu of some research, from the article “Salvaging Utopia: Lessons for (and from) the Left in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), The Deep (2019), and Sorrowland (2021)” by Megen de Bruin-Molé, there is much to discuss in how history and sharing history in kinship is important not just for the community that is impacted but for those outside that community too. This allows and helps me discuss characters outside of the Wajinru such as Oori. 

Final Project Ideas

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For my final project I have decided to do my essay on The Deep. I have really enjoyed the first four chapters and feel like there is a lot to discuss. I want to focus on history, though maybe more so on the trauma that lingers from history. I need to keep on reading to really know exactly what my thesis will discuss. With that, what I need to learn for my project is based mainly on doing the reading, as well as doing some research for the outside sources for the final project. Possibly doing research in our school online database on The Deep, as well as research on ancestral trauma from history.

Hopefully feedback on Tuesday from my peers will help me with direction and clarity on my thesis!

Decolonizing History in “The Water Will Carry Us Home”

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In Gabrielle Tesfaye’s “The Water Will Carry Us Home” at timestamp 3:36, her imagery is fluid, featuring floating, womb-like forms with gentle water coloring, both of which create a space of rebirth, continuity, and liberation for a people considered lost to history. This imagery de-centers land as the main source of history on earth and instead portrays the ocean as an ancestral world of transformation (4:30), thus imploring her audience to perceive history from a decolonized point-of-view.

The setting in the given frame isn’t merely a backdrop but a fully lived in, active, and inhabited world. The use of water color dissolves borders and boundaries and creates something more fluid and alive, contrasting that of the static and grounded imagery associated with land. In Western civilization, history is written on and in monuments and borders; it is fixed and owned. Imagery in the short film rejects that, through the frame, ancestry (the figures) is something in motion and situated in memory rather than geography. By turning to water, Tesfaye implores her audience to see from a decolonized point of view. In resisting the idea that home, belonging, and history are anchored to land, one remembers the history of people thrown to the sea. There are people, such as the Igbo people, whose history—usually that of migration—is tied to the ocean. In this case, the ocean is a sort of archive without any edges where spirits go to live, transform, and remember. 

What is most striking in the frame is the curled, womb-like figures. Though these women’s bodies were tossed in the sea with intentions of death, the imagery of the figures suggests a sense of rebirth despite not being on solid ground of earth. These forms are untethered; they float in suspension, emphasizing a weightlessness to a rootedness. Furthermore, many of the figures cradle their wombs; their nurture is literally happening in water, much like how we are born from the water in the womb. The ocean itself becomes a symbol of the womb, a sight of gestation instead of intended destruction from Western colonizers. Western ideology often imagines birth and creation coming from solid ground—Adam from Earth and civilization from soil, for example. Tesfaye shifts this land-centric point of view to that of creation from the sea. This aligns more closely with African mythologies, where water spirits (such as Omambala mentioned in the film) embody life and power. The given frame, specifically, reframes the Ocean as a source giving life rather than devouring it, offering a counter narrative to that of a Westernized history. The Igbo people are depicted as a part of history that lives on instead of lost souls in the sea. 

A few frames later, at timestamp 4:30, we see the floating figures transform into merpeople with a third eye in between their brows. Given research, the Third Eye is significant in Indian cultures to someone’s intuition and trust in a higher power that cannot be seen. Tesfaye uses the Third Eye as a visual assertion that spiritual intuition is as much of a legitimate form of history as written history, especially in a world where African culture and history was neglected and was never documented in the first place. Furthermore, each of the transformed merpeople have a Third Eye depicting this intuitive truth, or knowledge, as being carried in one’s body, community, and spirit. This depiction of these newly transformed beings carrying their knowledge challenges Eurocentric histories where “true” knowledge is found solely in written archives and documentation. Tesfaye’s recentering of African systems that honor spiritual sight as a form of culture and history sequentially restores knowledge erased or suppressed by means of colonization. By reclaiming history from a colonial subjective version, the floating figures/merpeople are not mere objects of violence but are subjects of spiritual and knowledgeable authority.  

The inclusion of mermaids and collage artwork, both in frame 3:36 and 4:30, depicts African diaspora “hybrid” experiences. Tesfaye’s artwork itself is a collage, including the merpeople depicted; the art is assembled piece by piece, containing memories, oral stories, and traditions of African cultures, building and completing a history untold by colonizers. As seen from her official website, Tesfaye herself comes from a multicultural background, descending from a Jamaican and Ethiopian background, and has lived in places such as Thailand and India. Her experience as a Black woman oriented around many cultures, genres, and narratives bleeds into her short film. In turn, her film analyzes eco-critical frameworks from and in relation to African experiences that are “hybrid,” much like herself. By emphasizing merpeople as symbols of hybrid narratives, Tesfaye rejects colonial ideologies that view mixed or hybrid diasporic cultures as being less legitimate to history. 

Tesfaye’s short film invites the audience to rethink how history is written. Reworking history by crossing merfolk narratives with African cultures reclaims history by depicting a different narrative than those, namely from colonial points of view, previously told in Western history. That a terra-centric history is not the only history, just because it is what is commonly taught. The enslaved people who were thrown out to sea have a history, and though it may not be on land, it lives on. “The Water Will Carry Us Home” creates a more rounded and whole version of the past, and asks those watching to recognize the importance of understanding a history beyond Western archives. 

Cavities, Vessels, and the Weight of Memory in The Deep

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In chapter one of The Deep Amaba says:

One can only go for so long without asking ‘who am I?’, ‘where do I come from?’, ‘what does all this mean?’, ‘what is being?’, ‘what came before me and what might come after?’. Without answers there is only a hole. A hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities (Solomon 8).

Solomon uses repetitive anaphoric rhetorical questions—“Who am I? What does this all mean? What is being?” This repetitive structure creates momentum and rhythm creating a feeling of longing and searching in order to emphasize the uncertainty and human need for understanding oneself. Most prominently is the imagery of the “hole” and “cavities.” These words visually create a picture of emptiness and loss due to a past, or in this case history, that has been erased. The “hole where a history should be” is an absence of ancestry, a lost and forgotten origin. The “hole” in this case would be a symbol of a void left from the disconnection from heritage and identity. Amaba’s last words “we are cavities” extends this metaphor of a “hole” in history as a way to describe how trauma and loss quite literally shape people. There isn’t merely just a “hole” in history, the people most impacted by that “hole” become empty and hollow—like a cavity. 

In succession to the first quote Amaba believes that Yetu wouldn’t understand what it’s like due to her being the “historian.” Though Yetu thinks to herself that she “did know what it was like. After all, wasn’t cavity just another word for vessel?” (Solomon 8). The oxford dictionary defined cavity as “an empty space within a solid object, in particular the human body,” and a vessel is described as “a hollow container, especially used to hold liquid, such as a bowl or a cask.” A vessel, in Yetu’s case, is just another sort of cavity. Yetu is a vessel (cavity) made to hold the past and ancestors for the Wajinru people, then when time comes those are scooped out of her and poured into the cavities of her people. And a cavity left untreated, left unfilled, can lead to pain and infection in a person, much like a cavity in one’s tooth. 

Solomon utilizes the imagery of feeling lost, uncertain, and unfulfilled through Amaba and Yetu’s individual, and yet similar, experiences with the absence and “hole” that having their history be forgotten has hurt them. Solomon’s overarching metaphor that solicits their audience to understand the dangers and harm that a loss of history and ancestry causes a person. It leaves them filled with questions and uncertainty, and a hole that is hard to fully fill. 

Walcott’s Challenge to Eurocentric History

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In stanzas ten and eleven of Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History” employs vivid imagery, allusions, and metaphors to argue that the Caribbean’s true history is buried beneath the surface of Western narratives. Walcott’s poem asks his readers to look deeper into who gets remembered and who gets erased in history, and that history is not simply something written in stone but alive in people and places (such as the sea) that has been long silenced. 

Stanza ten of the poem challenges Eurocentric understandings and definitions of “history” and “civilization.” Walcott starts the stanza by describing “the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, / and that was Jonah, / but where is your Renaissance?” In light of some research, the poem’s allusion to Port Royal is a reference to a wealthy city, a haven for debauchery and pirates, in Jamaica which was destroyed by an earthquake and massive tidal wave in 1692. Furthermore, the poem also alludes to Jonah, the prophet swallowed by a whale. The combination of these two allusions with the tidal wave “swallowing” Port Royal parallels Jonah’s swallowing by the whale, symbolizing natural retribution and an almost divine judgement. Walcott, in tandem with the allusions, reflects on a Eurocentric narrative of progress and civilization rhetorically posing the question: “where is your Renaissance?” The question presents the audience with a sense of irony, a contrast of Europe’s time of cultural rebirth with the Caribbean’s history of destruction and loss. The tenth stanza is a reframing of Western progress taking into account the Caribbean’s past, of slavery and conquest, and gives the Caribbean a “renaissance” of its own.  

Then going into stanza eleven Walcott depicts the sea’s history, specifically the Caribbean, as something that is “submerged” not erased. Stanza eleven begins by “answering” the rhetorical question from stanza ten: “Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands / out there past the reef’s mailing shelf, / where the men-o’-war floated down” The speaker notably uses a creole-inflected dialect, “them sea-sands,” which emphasizes and asserts Caribbean identity and oral storytelling tradition. This type of narration frames the poem in a point of view that isn’t Western, but from someone and someplace that version of history has yet to be told. A version of history “locked in them sea-sands” implying that the ocean is an archive for a past tossed in the ocean at the hands of colonial suffering. 

The Ocean as Memory: Tesfaye Reclaiming History Through Water

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Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film “The Water Will Carry Us Home” focuses on the Igbo peoples time on a slave ship through the middle passage, and who were thrown out to the sea. Tesfaye’s depiction of this story de-centers land as the main source of history on earth, and instead portrays the ocean as an ancestral world of transformation. There is fluidity to her imagery, with floating figures, womb-like forms, and gentle water coloring creating a space of rebirth, continuity, and liberation for a people considered lost to history (3:56).

The setting in the given frame isn’t merely a backdrop but a fully lived in, active, and inhabited world. The use of water color dissolves borders and boundaries and creates something more fluid and alive, contrasting that of the static and grounded imagery associated with land. In western civilization history is written on and in monuments and borders, it is fixed and owned. Imagery in the short film rejects that, through the frame ancestry is something in motion and situated in memory rather than geography. By turning to water, Tesfaye implores her audience to “see” in a decolonized point of view. In resisting the idea that home, belonging, and history are anchored to land one remembers the history of people thrown to the sea. There are people, such as the Igbo people, whose history—usually that of migration—is tied to the ocean. In this case, the ocean is a sort of archive without any edges where spirits go to live, transform and remember. 

What is most striking in the frame is the curled, womb-like figures. Though these women’s bodies were tossed in the sea with intentions of death, the imagery of the figures suggests a sense of rebirth despite not being on solid ground of earth. These forms are untethered, they float in suspension emphasizing a weightlessness compared to a rootedness. Furthermore, many of the figures cradle their wombs; their nurture is literally happening in water much like how we are born from the water in the womb. The ocean itself becomes a symbol of the womb, a sight of gestation instead of intended destruction from Western colonizers. Western ideology often imagines birth and creation coming from solid ground, Adam from Earth and civilization from soil for example. Tesfaye shifts this land centric point of view to that of creation from the sea. This aligns more closely to African mythologies where water spirits (such as Omambala) embody life and power. The given frame, specifically, reframes the Ocean as a source giving life rather than devouring it, offering a counter narrative to that of a Westernized history. The Igbo people are depicted as a part of history that lives on instead of lost souls in the sea. 

Tesfaye’s short film invites the audience to rethink how history is written. That a terra centric history is not the only history just because it is what is most commonly taught. The enslaved people who were thrown out to sea have a history, and though it may not be on land it lives on. “The Water Will Carry Us Home” is a short film that asks people to see a history of water and the sea, one beyond Westernized ideology.

The Moral Cost of Industrialization in “Undine”

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In “The Day After the Wedding, from Undine,” Undine’s speech focuses on the literary elements of nature, romanticizing and spiritualizing nature amongst a world of industrialization. Froqué’s romanticized and spiritualized depiction of nature is used to contrast and emphasize industrial and moral decay. By doing this, the audience understands the need to critique the moral and spiritual implications of industrialization, both in the past and in modern day. The consequence of modernization is nature’s purity and thus humanity’s spiritual decay. 

Undine begins her speech to Huldbrand by describing “A vast family of water spirits live in the lakes and streams and brooks. […] they wander over the pure sand of the sea, and among lovely variegated shells […] which the present is no longer worthy to enjoy” (Penguin 104). Froque vividly illustrates these water spirits environment that has “lakes and streams and brooks” as well as “lovely variegated shells.” Such imagery paints this place as magnificent and “other worldly.” Though somewhat supernatural the water spirits, contrastingly, are personified with human-like qualities such as “wandering” and “living;” suggesting movement and community in the environment. The mystical imagery, along with the aspects of human qualities amongst these spirits, present nature and wildlife (or the inhuman) as being very much alive and animated. This world and these entities in the quote and passage are descriptively romanticized, which makes sense for a 19th-century text. Specifically, this passage contains a lyrical quality in its alliteration within the s sounds of “streams and brooks” and “pure sand of the sea.” The alliteration gives the imagery rhythm that makes it literally sound as beautiful as the imagery paints it out to be. In turn, the imagery and romanticizing of this supernatural world and entity beautifies the “other,” turning it into something attractive. This attractiveness for which the “Other” has, is no longer “worthy” to be enjoyed by the “present,” or ideology of the industrial age, due to its push toward urban growth, destroying its beauty. 

Furthermore, Froqué not only romanticizes the water spirits but also exalts their beauty more than that of humans, emphasizing purity in things untouched by civilization. Undine tells Huldbrand that “Those, however, who dwell” in such elements “are very fair and lovely to behold, and for the most part more beautiful than human beings” (Penguin 105). Froqué, again, creates this ethereal image of beauty with diction such as “fair,” “lovely,” and “beautiful.” There is a hyperbolic sense of charm to Undine’s words, that water spirits are “more beautiful than humans.” It is a way of “exaggerating” the depiction of water spirits as manifestations of beauty and the supernatural perfection beyond human standards. Doing so idealizes nature, tying it back to Romantic themes, making nature pure and uncorrupted, whereas humankind has fallen, relating back to “the present” (ideology of the industrial age), no longer being “worthy to enjoy” its beauty. Froqué depicts the water spirits in this pure light to show the importance of and purity in what humankind’s urbanization cannot or has not touched, that it is important to uphold these things in a higher place than human nature. 

Later, as Undine continues her speech to Huldbrand, she confesses that her kind “vanish into dust, and pass away, body and spirit, so that none of the stage of us remains behind; and when you mortals hereafter awake to a purer life, we remain with the sand and the sparks and the wind and the waves” (Penguin 105). Dust, in this context, can be seen as a symbol of divine morality and the decay of industrialization. Modernization of nature turns nature to dust, eroding and destroying its purity. Undine describes these elements of nature, the “sand,” “wind,” and “waves” as idyllic and eternal, yet with industry’s materialism, these things are reduced to dust. This elemental imagery of dust reflects that of Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The scripture from the Book of Genesis is supposed to be a reminder that there is no amount of human achievement that can defy human destiny. Allusions to such scripture are used as a way to mourn how humankind’s “progress” loses its spiritual and natural connection to the environment, and due to Industrialization, people have turned the environment, not to a sacred dust, but to a polluted ash. Romantic ideals of spirituality are tied to Christian cosmology, “awakening to a purer life,” both of which long to move beyond industrial corruption and instead put spiritual and natural divinity above it. Ultimately, Undine’s fear of vanishing into dust reflects that of humanity’s fear of spiritually losing themselves amidst mechanization. A world in which moral worth is measured by production, and not a person’s soul. 

In the following quote from that stated previously Undine goes on to say that water spirits “have no souls; the element moves [them], and is often obedient to [them] while [they] live, though it scatters [them] to dust when [they] die; and [they] are merry, without having aught to give [them] […] but all beings aspire to be higher than they are” (Penguin 105). Froqué’s depiction of the water spirits as “soulless,” counteracts his previous hyperbolic depictions of their beauty. This contrast from being something beautifully lively to being “soulless” parallels what industrial society does to nature and its laborers. The people and environment become valued for their work and function, rather than what they have inside or, in other words, their soul. The environment and its elements, in this case, are personified—“the elements moves us.” The personification of the elements depicts Romantic views on nature having spiritual vitality, while the mechanical world, in contrast, “moves” humans with a mechanized obedience. Undine and the water spirits lack a “soul” is a symbol of modernization alienating people from the divine and natural world. The final line that “all beings aspire to be higher than they are” is a Romantic and Christian view on this need to reunite with the natural world’s surroundings. Christian rhetoric is used by Froqué as a means of expressing Romantic ideals. The use of Christian teleology critiques industrial times’ view on “progress” away from the sublime. Religious framing, in essence, reinforces Romantic ideals that salvation is not just found through faith but the preservation and restoration of spirituality with nature. 

Froqué’s Romanticization of nature in Undine’s speech functions as a moral critique of industrialization values. There is a spiritual cost in the name of “modern progress,” that the liveliness and purity of nature give way to “soullessness” in a world of industry. Undine’s speech to Huldbrand acts as a warning to him and humanity that a loss of connection to nature means losing connection to divinity, echoing Romantic and Christian ideals of morality. Froqué’s use of imagery elevates nature to a higher status as a way to call for humanity’s re-evaluation of “progress” as a connection to nature rather than industry. 

William Cronon on the Commodification of Nature

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In the essay “The Trouble with the Wilderness” William Cronon depicts the ways in which the wilderness, despite it being “othered,” is often “civilized” by humans’ ways of interacting and discussing the environment. Because of this people need to think more critically about how we treat nature as a commodity and pastime rather than something bigger and separate from humankind. One excerpt that notably stuck out to me was Cronons depiction of different ways humans are spectators of the environment, describing “The moment beside the trail as you sit on a sandstone ledge, your boots damp with the morning dew while you take in the rich smell of the pines […] Remember the feelings of such moments, […] that you were in the presence of something irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly Other than yourself. Wilderness is made of that too” (8). Cronon immerses the reader in all these different settings with “rich smells of the pines” and “boots damp with the morning dew” romanticizing it in the same way that humans romanticize the environment. Wilderness, here, is personified and contrastingly “something profoundly Other”—giving nature its own identity and simultaneously showing the limits of human understanding of it. This contrast depicts the human-self and the “incredibly nonhuman” aspects of nature as separate yet connected. Cronon interconnects aspects of humankind and nature, to show that “wilderness is made of that too.” Wilderness is not simply made up of the spectacles that people see such as rocks, trees, and animals. Instead, the trees and animals are a manifestation of “otherness,” it is something that is beyond human creation, understanding, or control. 

Though, Cronon later explains that this “otherness” has become commodified by humans as something of entertainment. He clarifies that “As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated” (12). There is a sense of irony to his explanation—that the wilderness, which is thought to be untameable, can be domesticated through human tourism and spectacle. Even the use of the word “tourist” implicates human kind as guests on foreign land. People who have come to romanticize a place and “culture” that they may not fully understand. In this case, Nature becomes commercialized, making something “sublime” controlled. 

Cronon’s essay is a critique on societies tendency to consume nature as a form of entertainment rather than something greater than themselves. That in order to appreciate nature for more than simply being a means of profit, people must think critically on their past views of nature. Past views, due to a history of colonization and capitalism, deem nature and wilderness as a form of property. Instead, there has to be a reframing of wilderness as autonomous with honor.