Voyager: Disturbing the Ecosystem of the Past?

So in the interest of pressing on, I am choosing to leave behind individual instances of themes I established in previous books.  There are things to be said here about ghosts--Roger and All Hallows' Eve, Claire and Jamie appearing as ghosts to each other in their absence, stressing that ghosts aren't really gone from us.  There are also things to be said about Jamie's printing business tying into the literacy theme by showing the subversive potential of print.  But I've gotten hung up on the small moments.  And this goes back to the ease of reading and marking on the Kindle.  I read on, which is what I needed to do at the time, and instead of stopping to linger over moments, or lingering over them in my head rather than on the blog, I left the moments behind to come back to later.  Meanwhile, I marked them indiscriminately.  That is one explanation.  The other explanation is that, since this is the third book, I have too many threads to follow.  The threads have been accumulating, and the author has had all of the strands that she built up over two books to weave together in the third... and the fourth... and so on.  So I find myself notating something on every other page... in a 1000+ page book.  This is the beauty of having a thesis--it forces us to be selective.  I have several theses, and a few loosely affiliated ideas.  And for now, it is too much, though other times, it works out for me.  My brain is simply in a different mode right now, which happens.

So I'm trying out "being more selective."  And in being more selective, I wanted to point to a moment in Voyager that my friend Melanie of the Wine Dark Sea (whom I don't think is embarrassed to have read the Outlander books) cited as something that bothered her.  So here it is, as Claire returns to the past, armed with several resources for her journey, including... wait for it... a peanut butter and jelly sandwich:

     I pulled it out and carefully unwrapped it. Peanut butter and jelly on white bread, it was considerably the worse for wear, with the purple stains of the jelly seeping through the limp bread, and the whole thing mashed into a flattened wedge. It was delicious. (309)

In honor of National Peanut Butter Day (January 24th--didn't you know that?  Yeah, neither did I...), The Huffington Post published a piece on the history of peanut butter--which, incidentally, places its invention in 1884 at the earliest, and debunks the attribution of peanut butter to George Washington Carver (whom I greatly admire), and emphasizes its New World origins.

So over 100 years before the invention of peanut butter, Claire sits in Edinburgh eating a peanut butter sandwich.  Yes, you should read that sentence with a tiny bit of incredulity.  The narrative continues:

     I swallowed the last rich, sweet bite of my old life, and crumpled the wrapper in my hand. I glanced around, but no one was looking in my direction. I opened my hand, and let the bit of plastic film fall surreptitiously to the ground. Wadded up, it rolled a few inches on the cobbles, crinkling and unfolding itself as though alive. The light wind caught it, and the small transparent sheet took sudden wing, scudding over the gray stones like a leaf.
     The draft of a set of passing wheels sucked it under a drayman’s cart; it winked once with reflected light, and was gone, disappearing without notice from the passersby. I wondered whether my own anachronistic presence would cause as little harm. (309)

Melanie recounted her own horror? dismay? at the plastic wrap, and I have to concur.  It's disturbing.  Particularly in this post-environmentalist world, where we know about interconnectedness, we understand the risk plastics pose to wildlife and how long it takes a diaper to decompose.  But Claire easily shrugs it off:  "I wondered whether my own anachronistic presence would cause as little harm."

On the one hand, Claire's dismissal of the importance of the plastic wrap might be another reactionary moment.  As certain key tenets of feminism--or at least certain feminist revisions of the past--are dismissed in the Outlander novels, as, say, Jamie justifies corporal punishment of his wife in reasonable-sounding terms, perhaps an over-sensitivity to environmental concerns is being lightly critiqued.

Another possibility, however, is that we are supposed to feel a little bit outraged as readers, that Claire, our heroine, is introducing 20th Century trash to the 18th Century environment.  Perhaps we are supposed to think about what the possible consequences will be--the poor duck that tries to eat it and ends up suffocating, or just the problem of litter anticipated by this faux pas.  One thing is certain--the reader is supposed to register this moment, and not simply to shrug it off.  Once we have become a bit outraged, we think about Claire's statement about her "own anachronistic presence... caus[ing] little harm," and wonder... perhaps that statement points to something to come!  Perhaps Claire's presence will cause harm--as much as, or more than, the introduction of 20th Century trash!

Admittedly, I resist this reading.  The plastic wrap disappears from sight.  It disappears from the narrative, from Claire's mind, and from the reader's mind.  Whatever effect it might have fails to matter in the grand scheme of things.  And so, we might extrapolate, does Claire's presence in the past.  Perhaps.

The plastic wrap is the vehicle, here, for reintroducing the dilemma of time travel.  Clearly, this is something that is on the character's mind--it is real on some level to Claire.  And clearly, as a reader, I am supposed to be concerned about this on some level.  Except that... perhaps I'm not.

Time travel does continue to be a dilemma in the novels.  Even after Culloden--Claire's attempts to alter history--the possibility that if Jamie and Claire had any influence on Culloden, they might have helped precipitate the uprising, and to insure it's failure, thus bringing about the outcome that was more or less predetermined according to Claire's future perspective on history, we will come back to time travel.  But why?  How is it that this question hasn't been definitively answered at this point in the series?

Well, perhaps it's just too huge a motif--too huge a metaphysical question--to let rest, even after 2500 pages or so.  Perhaps it could be that, as humans, we not only recognize the cosmic oddity of time travel, we also want, desperately, to know that we have influence on the world around us.  Isn't that, after all, what environmentalism is about?  Certainly, environmentalism acknowledges that nature should be more important than us, but ultimately, it grants us the power to upset... well, everything.  And maybe that's also what we want from time travel.  Validation--even of our disruptive destructiveness.

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.