Coda to Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love
Dorothy Freeman's Wonder
For almost the entire time that I was writing my recently published book, Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, I was puzzled by a line in a late letter from Dorothy Freeman to Rachel Carson. This puzzle has now, thanks to a friend, been resolved! I want to share the resolution, which has implications for how we can think about Freeman’s evolving understanding of their relationship after Carson’s death, and Freeman’s decision to leave the letters between her and Carson to an archive, rather than destroying them. But first, a brief recap of the book for those who have not read it. (you can skip the next section if you’ve already read it)
Brief Recap of Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love
The book explores what I call the “queer love” between Freeman and Carson and argues for its centrality to Carson’s writing of Silent Spring – the 1962 bestselling book that was a major spark for the modern environmental movement, as well as for the formation of the EPA in 1970. Carson met Dorothy Freeman and her husband, Stan, in 1953 on Southport Island, Maine. After this meeting, Rachel and Dorothy quickly began exchanging letters from their year round homes professing their love – an exchange of letters that continued until Carson’s death in 1964 (interrupted only by the times they were on Southport Island together in the summers). These letters, especially in the beginning, were filled with many romantic excurses about what they called the “wonder” of their love and its relationship to nature.
I suggest that Carson and Freeman were able to affirm their love (rather than see it as a site of shame or disgust) and let it saturate and change their lives because they experienced its mysterious beauty as analogous to the mysterious beauty of nature. Carson and Freeman especially loved the two-tone call of the veery as a site of mystery that resonated with and amplified their love.
I call Carson and Freeman’s love “queer love” not just because it was between two women, but because it is an experience of pleasure and joy that does not fit within heteronormative ideas of love (what I call the ideology of “straight love”). I suggest that Carson’s relationship with Freeman led her to see the urgency of regulating insecticides and pesticides – and in turn, to write Silent Spring – because she wanted to save the natural world that made her love with Freeman possible, and that makes queer love possible for everyone.
Puzzle Resolved
The line that puzzled me the entire time I was writing the book came in a letter dated February 29, 1964 (just a couple of months before Rachel would die of breast cancer). In that letter, Dorothy wrote to Rachel about her worries about saving their letters: “Dearest, since I came home that bag of letters has been constantly on my mind. I wish very earnestly that you would just let Ida take them into the study and burn them quietly. I wish now I had.” She tells Rachel that she does not think she’d want to wade through her own letters, in part because “[t]here are such quantities of yours that I do want to go through carefully.” Then, she states more clearly her reasons for wishing Carson would burn the letters: “darling, please take the step NOW. I really am uneasy about them. In the Sat. Review I read about Dorothy Thompson’s correspondence that went to Syracuse and there was one statement that really frightened me – I don’t want to put it in writing but I’ll just say that the same implication could be implied about our correspondence. So, dear, please, please use the Strong Box quickly. We know even such volume could have its meanings to people who were looking for ideas. Having someone return them to me leaves the possibility of miscarriage of your intentions and I really don’t want them.”
While I was fairly sure that Freeman was referring to a term like “homosexual” or “lesbian” in this Sat. Reviewarticle on Dorothy Thompson, I could not for the life of me find that article. Nor could a research assistant that I asked to give it a try. (as far as I can tell, Carson’s terrific biographer, Linda Lear, also never found it) I was very puzzled about why this article, that Dorothy Freeman seemed to know well, was not find-able. And then, this past weekend, my friend Chris Hager – a wonderful scholar of American literature – sent me an email saying that he had read my book, and also that he had found this Sat. Review article! The reason it was so difficult to find, I think, is that Dorothy references it as if she had just read it, but the article turned out to be from November 16, 1963, about four months before Freeman wrote that letter to Carson. This suggests that Dorothy had been mulling over the article for a while, that it had stuck with her. My friend Chris, being a very nice person, sent me a pdf of the article and told me that my intuition about the term to which Freeman is referring had been correct. I am going to quote the entire paragraph from the second page of the article, written by Granville Hicks (about Vincent Sheean’s book, Dorothy and Red), to which Dorothy Freeman is referring in her letter:
“[S]he [Dorothy Thompson] was a more sensitive, self-analytical, and generally complicated woman than her intense preoccupation with foreign policy made her appear. She not only wrote perceptively and intimately of her relations with Red [her husband]; she set down in an extraordinary series of entries in her diary an account of her feelings toward another woman. Her effort to understand and come to terms with what can only be described as a homosexual inclination is a remarkable illustration of her determination to know herself. (Sheean is convinced that, if she had not been willing for this matter to become known, she would not have given the diary to the Syracuse University Library).”
The main thing that becomes clear, now that we can put this article into conversation with Freeman’s letter to Carson, is that Freeman was in fact worried that their letters would lead people to think they were evidence of a “homosexual inclination.” While this article itself is non-shaming about homosexuality, American society as a whole in this period was quite shaming and discriminatory toward “homosexuals.” The 1950s was the era of the pink scare, and organized queer resistance to the everyday violence and discrimination directed toward the LGBTQ+ community was still only in its infancy in the period in which Carson and Freeman lived.
Freeman’s anxious mention to Carson about this article four months after its publication suggests that Freeman had been deeply worried for a while about the term “homosexuality” being applied to her and Carson – and that she saw this term as shameful. Was Freeman worried about this because she saw the term “homosexuality” as inaccurate or because she was worried about being “found out”? My suspicion is that she saw it as inaccurate, that the beautiful love she experienced with Carson, and the depth and complexity of their relationship, simply could not go together in her head with what she experienced as the negative, shameful, simplistic term, “homosexual.” This is my suspicion based in part in my deep knowledge of Freeman and Carson’s letters, and the freedom and beauty they found in claiming the pleasure and meaning of their love as uncategorizable in human terms, just like the beauty of nature. But my suspicion is also based in my own experience of growing up pre-internet in a homophobic place; it is hard to imagine yourself inhabiting a category that most everyone around you tells you is gross and shameful, without any alternative models to which you can refer.
Carson and Freeman did something that I did not: they created their own narrative of their love, one that I see as fundamentally queer in its affirmation of pleasures that do not fit in our heteronormative, capitalist society. Carson and Freeman affirmed their love and the nature that made it possible, that made living otherwise possible.
Given Freeman’s reference to this article four months after she read it, I am going to hazard a guess that she remembered it for quite a while after that, when she did in fact have her letters returned to her after Carson’s death (Carson did not burn them). I am also going to hazard a guess that she remembered this article as she tried to figure out what to do with all of their letters, and with their story, for the rest of her life. Freeman’s husband, Stan, died right before Rachel did, and Freeman went on to marry a second husband who also pre-deceased her. But Freeman’s relationship with Carson preoccupied her until her death in 1978. She ultimately decided to give all the letters to the Bates College Archives, and she talked with her granddaughter, Martha, about publishing them. Martha did in fact go on to publish a selection of their letters in 1995, entitled Always, Rachel.
Given Freeman’s close attention to this article about Dorothy Thompson, I think it is safe to say that Dorothy Freeman’s decision to give these letters to an archive, where they can be viewed by the public, represents her ultimate willingness for us to see both her and Rachel coming to terms with their feelings for another woman, even if that might be labeled as “homosexual” by some. Indeed, Freeman even chose not to destroy her own letter discussing her fear of a later audience viewing her and Rachel as having “homosexual inclinations.”
These decisions suggest that Freeman was less afraid toward the end of her life than she was in 1964. Perhaps she cared less in general what people thought, or perhaps she realized what so many of us labeled as “homosexual” have realized: that when society tries to use labels to shame you, they are trying to divide you from other people with whom you might find joy and meaning, and from yourself. Maybe Dorothy realized this and leaned into her queerness a little more, thinking, whether or not I identify with the label “homosexual,” I am not going to let society shame me out of sharing these letters that open up connections with so many other people who have had beautiful queer feelings, too.
It would not be surprising if this is what happened, because the practice of “wonder” that both Dorothy and Rachel prized – and that was exemplified in their love – was all about de-habituating themselves out of social conventions that kept them from seeing the shocking, un-categorizable beauty of the world. Wonder is about allowing ourselves to observe and experience the world without having our senses stunted by deadening social categories.
When Dorothy gave her letters with Rachel to an archive, she showed that she was still practicing wonder – still learning to undo the hold of social conventions – so as to render visible the exquisiteness of our lives on this earth. The letters between Rachel and Dorothy, and Dorothy’s own example of loosening her social fears until the end of her life, are a gift from her, that can help us learn to be more open to queer feelings and wonder, ourselves.