Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love

by Lida Maxwell

Overview

How Silent Spring stands as a monument to a unique, loving relationship between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, and how such love underpins a new environmental politics

After the success of her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson settled in Southport, Maine. The married couple Dorothy and Stanley Freeman had a cottage nearby, and the trio quickly became friends. Their extensive and evocative correspondence shows that Dorothy and Rachel did something more: they fell in love.

In this moving new book, Lida Maxwell explores their letters to reveal how Carson's masterpiece, Silent Spring, grew from the love these women shared for their wild surroundings and, vitally and increasingly, for each other. Carson had already demonstrated a profound environmental awareness by the time she purchased her home in Maine; Maxwell proposes that it took her love for Dorothy to open up a more powerful space for critique. As their love unsettled their heteronormative ideas of bourgeois life, it enabled Carson to develop an increasingly critical view of capitalism and its effects on nonhuman nature and human lives alike, and it was this evolution that made the advocacy of Silent Spring possible.

In Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, Silent Spring's exposé of the dangerous and loveless exhaustion of nature for capitalism's ends is set in bold relief against the lovers' correspondence, in which we see the path toward a more loving use of nature and a transformative political desire that, Maxwell argues, should inform our approach to contemporary environmental crises.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503640535
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	01/28/2025
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lida Maxwell is Professor of Political Science & Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston Universityand the author of Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling (2019), among other books.

Table of Contents

1. Queer Love in Southport
2. Wondrous Revelation
3. Loving Use
4. Environmental Desire
5. Heteronormativity Is a Climate Issue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This wonderfully insightful consideration of Rachel Carson's loves reveals the enduring—and urgent—possibilities within her brilliant work."—Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts

"In this stirring, often revelatory account of Rachel Carson's queer relationship with Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell challenges us to ask for more—more pleasure, more beauty, more wonder, more mystery—for ourselves and the earth."—Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches

"It's not an exaggeration to say that Maxwell's work completely changed how I move through my daily life: who I love, how I love, and the way I think about the non-human world around me."—Liza Yeager, radio producer and writer

"It is no longer enough to recycle or compost, or to shift our consumption to less energy-intensive items; we need to desire otherwise and reshape our cities and pastimes to excite other desires. This book offers an unusual and frequently moving reading of Rachel Carson to shift the tenor of climate writing today." —Lisa Disch, author of Making Constituencies

"Maxwell makes crucial interventions into the study of ecological destruction by placing heteronormativity at its center." —–Elisabeth Anker, author of Ugly Freedoms

"Reading Carson and Freeman's letters, Maxwell declares, have taught her that 'queer love can change the world.' An impassioned analysis."—Kirkus Reviews

"Rachel Carson's environmentalist tract Silent Spring was profoundly influenced by her romantic relationship with her neighbor Dorothy Freeman, according to this bracing treatise.... A stimulating blend of biography and queer theory, this intrigues."—Publishers Weekly

"Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love promotes harmony with nature through an impassioned fusion of biography, cultural critique, and environmental advocacy."—Rebecca Foster, Foreword Reviews

"But the point of the book isn't that we should take individual action—it's about broader structures and narratives. Maxwell's book holds lessons for all readers about acknowledging, and then escaping, the structures that ensnare us."—Brooke Borel, Scientific American

From the Publisher

2024-10-26
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 writeSilent 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 beforeSilent 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.

Kirkus Reviews