American Audithology: Bird Sounds from Jefferson to Thoreau

This dissertation examines the representations of bird sounds in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century US writings and their critical contributions to the idealisation of American identities. Several figures have engaged with avian soundscapes relating birds’ utterances to their understanding of the newly-born nation. In their personal correspondences, Thomas Jefferson and Abigail Adams advance a political and cultural argument by means of the representation of birds’ vocalising, contrasting the well-known theory of the degeneracy of American environments promulgated by European thinkers, in particular Buffon. John Adams, instead, connects avian soundscapes to his Massachusetts domestic environment and to the virtues of his nation. Distancing themselves from such a political stance, William Bartram and Alexander Wilson initiate the study of ornithology in the United States. Echoing Daines Barrington’s studies on bird vocalising, they simultaneously explore territories unknown to white settlers and lyrical modes of writing about sounds, in the wake of eighteenth-century natural historic prose. John James Audubon and Thomas Nuttall expand Wilson’s legacy in alternative ways. Audubon’s Ornithological Biography is a fictionalised autobiography of the adventurous figure of the ‘American woodsman’. In contrast, Nuttall’s Manual collects references from various sources to offer insights into the sonic landscapes of the United States. However, this dissertation highlights that all these writers acknowledge the ultimate untranslatability of the listening experience, a theme that is deepened by Henry David Thoreau in his Journal. Through the analysis of the three stages of his personal journal, the connections between the ineffability of bird sounds and the unexplorable and unexplored depth of human self emerge, as he links avian soundscapes to his concept of wildness. In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates the contribution that the analysis of avian soundscapes in literary texts could have in the understanding of the imagination of the early United States, their images of identity, and the concept of otherness as expressed in human-bird relationships.