RACHEL CARSON AND THE POWER OF QUEER LOVE

The noted environmentalist was inspired by a love affair.

Maxwell, professor of political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, offers a celebration of queer love and a critique of heteronormativity through her examination of the intimate friendship between Carson (1907-1964) and Dorothy Freeman (1898-1978). The two met in 1953, when Carson built a house neighboring that of Freeman and her husband in Southport, Maine; their immediate emotional bond deepened through the years. Maxwell describes the friendship as “queer” because it “drew them out of conventional forms of marriage and family”; furthermore, she asserts repeatedly, the relationship changed Carson, whose writing “became more vibrant, passionate, and urgent after she fell in love,” empowering her to write Silent Spring (1962), her exposé of the deleterious effects of the unregulated use of pesticides and insecticides on human and nonhuman life. As Maxwell sees it, failure by biographers to account for the friendship’s significance in Carson’s writing of that book “reinforces the ideology of what I call ‘straight love.’” The affair, Maxwell argues, shifted Carson’s perspective on nonhuman nature, fueling her desire “to sustain the vibrant multispecies world that helped create their love.” Although Carson had established herself as an acclaimed nature writer before Silent Spring, still Maxwell asks, “Would Carson ever have realized that nature is a source of ‘wonder,’ if she had not met Freeman, and scripted their love, with her, as a source of wonder?” Setting Carson and Freeman’s love in the context of her own queer relationship, Maxwell encourages everyone to “become more attuned to their queer feelings, what those feelings might teach them about themselves,” and “what politics they might want to engage in.” Reading Carson and Freeman’s letters, Maxwell declares, have taught her that “queer love can change the world.”

An impassioned analysis, at times overly insistent.