Rhetorical Analysis of "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp"

March 4, 2016

The essay Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp by Joy Williams was written to draw attention to the misuse of the environment by American Society, in a snarky, satirical form that differs from the ways that these issues are commonly addressed. In her essay, Joy assumes the perspective of an environmentalist who uses guilt, sarcasm, descriptive vocabulary, and her skills as a fiction writer to speak her mind about her qualms with the audience’s view of the environment. All of which made this into a very effectual piece for her purpose. There is a strong message amongst the sarcasm and blame, and I found it to be both entertaining and thought provoking.

One very effective choice made by Williams that I immediately noticed was her avid use of the word “you” as a direct finger pointing at her audience from start to finish. She directly addresses her readers in a blaming way in the very first sentence; “I don’t want to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately- that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much” (Williams 634), and keeps on with the abrasive tone and uses ‘you, you, you’ until the last page; “You have made only brutal contact with Nature, you cannot comprehend its grace. You must change” (Williams 645). Generally when you make accusations against a person they feel either guilty or defensive, or both. Because Williams is an environmentalist, the use of an accusatory tone is likely intended to make the readers feel guilty and ashamed of the things she described. The strong tone is meant to make a real impression on the audience and it certainly grabbed my attention.

Williams also uses advanced and eloquent vocabulary throughout the essay. These less common words make some parts hard to understand if her reader is not part of an academic discourse, but also added a certain element to the tone of her paper. When I was reading I got a strong impression that she was addressing a variety of people, rather than just her fellow colleagues, students, and other academically inclined people. The blame she was placing was not confined to one discourse, or lifestyle, except for the general majority of American society.

“Your eyes glaze as you travel life’s highways past all the crushed animals and big gulp cups” (Williams 634)… “You seem to have liked your dinoseb. It’s been a popular weed killer, even though it has been linked with birth defects. You must hate weeds a lot” (Williams 636)… “They want you, all of you, to have all the shrimp you can eat and more.” (Williams 637)… “You are no longer benign in your traveling somewhere to look at the scenery.” (Williams 637)… “Recently you, as tourist, have discovered your national parks and are quickly overburdening them. Spare land and it belongs to you!” (Williams 638)… “The museum claims to be educational because you can watch a taxidermist at work…You can get real close to these dead animals, closer than you can in a zoo. Some of you prefer zoos, however, which are becoming bigger, better, and bioclimatic” (Williams 640).

Loving Shrimp, using weed killer, tourism, and zoo preferences are not limited or common only to people who would know the definition of words Williams used such as trepidation (635), eschewing (637), extirpate (638), effluent (639), baroque (640), mitigating (642), avarice (644), and nihilism (644). For writing this essay, she developed a speaker and wrote from that speaker’s perspective; I believe the choice of vocabulary was most likely used because it holds true to her character’s persona, gives an impression of intelligence, and commands respect while she addresses the entirety of American society.

Also included before her essay, were a couple of paragraphs explaining Williams’s educational background. It is unclear whether she wrote this, or it was included by the people who printed her essay, but the explanation of her background as a writer and teacher also gives her more ethos appeal as an educated author. The information about her says that she has received several degrees in writing and “has taught creative writing at a number of universities, including Houston, Florida, California (Irvine), Iowa, and Arizona” (Williams 634), and

“is best known for her work as a fiction writer; her books include the story collections Taking Care (1982), and Escapes (1991) and the novels State of Grace (1973), The Changeling (1978), and Breaking and Entering (1989)………. has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Award (1973) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974)” (Williams 634).

The inclusion of this information gives the audience an idea of who the author is, and knowing that Williams is a well known writer and is well educated made me feel looked down upon when I was being confronted by this essay in such a scolding manner. However, it would also make sense to me that the emphasis on her being specifically a fiction writer was included to give the audience a chance to not take this so seriously as an accusation and to read it as a piece of artwork, too.

Another choice which struck me as significant were the times that Williams included dialogue from the reader’s assumed perspective. On a few occasions she uses a dialogue to address what her character is certain the readers must be thinking. Joy Williams puts words into the mouth of her audience:

“Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you’ll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility but don’t push me, you say” (635)… “That’s ironic, you say, but farmers will suffer losses, too, oh dreadful financial losses, if herbicide and pesticide use is prohibited.” (636)… “We know that. We’ve known that for years about farmers. We know a lot these days. We’re very well informed. If farmers aren’t allowed to make a profit selling surplus crops, they’ll have to sell their land to developers, who’ll turn all that arable land into office parks. Arable land isn’t Nature anyway, and besides, we like those office parks and shopping plazas, with their monster supermarkets open twenty-four hours a day with aisle after aisle after aisle of products. It’s fun. Products are fun.” (636)… “We’ve heard about TED, you say” (637).

Her dialogue on behalf of the audience is not only full of assumptions, but also sounds like she is mocking them. She italicized words like “products” and “maybe” to emphasize the snooty imitation she is doing of the reader. She has likely heard something similar in an environmental debate before, and used dialogue to address the thoughts that the reader may be having in response to her rant, and responds with a complete, well thought out return fire. In some parts of the essay, the speaker is pretty much making fun of the audience, and even repeats the word “aisle” three times. She also makes the audience sound like they don’t know what they are talking about, when inserting dialogue for them, and maybe did that to make readers think maybe they don’t know as much as they think.

For the conclusion of her essay, Williams dropped the sarcastic persona and changed to a more serious tone, basically asking her audience to change:

“The ecological crisis caused cannot be resolved by politics. It cannot be solved by science or technology. It is a crisis caused by culture and character, and a deep change in personal consciousness is needed. Your fundamental attitudes toward the earth have been twisted. You have only made brutal contact with Nature. You cannot comprehend its grace. You must change. Have few desires and simple pleasures. Honor non-human life. Control yourself, become more authentic. Live lightly upon the earth and treat it with respect…” (645)

And then concludes with more dialogue of what her speaker is sure we are thinking in response to her pleading:

“A moral issue! Okay, this discussion is now toast. A moral issue… and who’s this we now? Who are you is what I’d like to know…. But I’ve got to go. That’s dusk out there. It is dusk isn’t it? It certainly doesn’t look like any dawn I’ve ever seen. Well, take care.” (645)

This is dialogue that she is doing on behalf of the audience, and is the very last sentence of her essay. Her use of italics to emphasize “moral issue”, “we” and “you” helped me to hear this as spoken with the inflections on those words, adding defensiveness and then disregard to the tone of the audience’s dialogue. The “dawn” reference seems to be a metaphor for a new beginning, and Williams’s use of it makes it obvious the speaker doesn’t think that anything will change. To me this quote is not only used to continue the speaker’s assumptions of the audience, but is also included because she is using this as her way of challenging the reader, to make them want to prove her wrong. I think she is using reverse psychology and implying that nothing will change, in order to subtly persuade the audience to make it happen.

Williams also goes deeply into some descriptions and paints not-so-pretty pictures for the reader in her effort to show what exactly she thinks is so horrible about the “casual mistreatment” (634) of the environment:

“…the filth cut into your fun time. Dead stuff floating around. Sludge and bloody vials. Hygienic devices- appearing not quite so hygienic out of context- all coming in on the tide. The air smelled funny, too.” (644)… “a picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo.” (635)… “…it’s quite apparent the environment has been grossly polluted and the natural world abused and defiled” (641).

The terms; filth, sludge, bloody, dead, poor old, exhausted, doomed, grossly polluted, and, abused and defiled, are used to describe what is happening to nature and are strongly descriptive and powerful. She also includes the fact that the forest service has “a system of logging roads eight times larger than the interstate highway systems” (Williams 638), and when talking about nature photographs being depressing, she reminds the audience that “What’s cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is a plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot” (Williams 635). These clear descriptions are used to give proof to her accusations of how we have invaded upon the beauty of nature. Her use of detailed descriptions paint pictures that are hard to forget and are uncomfortable to hear about for many people. I perceived this use of detail as a blow to the audience’s conscience, definitely meant to help her make them feel guilty, and stir up strong feelings. It is hard to read these descriptions and not feel slightly disgusted or put-off at the effects being described. However, I never lost interest in finishing the paper, and the harsh and vivid descriptions that Williams used made this more memorable than any other environmental essay I have read.

The whole essay is dripping with satire and snarky remarks from the speaker: “Yes! If it weren’t for the people who killed them, wild ducks wouldn’t exist!” (Williams 638), obviously she doesn’t actually believe that ducks wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for people that killed them, based on her comments on the same page about what the audience views as “growth” being “like cancer or something” (638), and because the way that she says it makes it sound so like an oxymoron; killing things doesn’t exactly help them exist. When I read this I can hear the tones of sarcasm and annoyance in my head without even having to speak it out loud. The blame and satire is so strong that some points; “You are lost, you know. But you trust a Realtor will show you the way” (Williams 639), that it seems like the speaker wants the audience to not only feel guilty but she really seems to be purposefully being rude, like she needs to express how angry she is.

The intent of this essay seems to be to draw people’s attention to real issues concerning the environment and to make a powerful piece that people will react to, in a strong way, whether they agree with it or not. In the introduction before her essay, it states Williams has “anger she feels in response to humanity’s casual misuse of the planet” (634), which would lead me to guess this was written as a chance to express her anger and also to make a memorable impression of the environment on anyone who reads it. It seems the speaker in the essay and Williams herself are looking for a reaction and to get a point across. She says it’s time to address the audience’s “greed and vanities and quest for self fulfillment”(634), and is fine with calling her readers greedy and vain in order to get her point across. In the beginning of the essay, Williams also mentions that “Joyce Carol Oates suggests the reason writers… don’t write about nature is that it lacks a sense of humor and registers no irony” (635). She possibly includes this statement because she gives examples of irony, not in nature itself, but pertaining to our relationship with nature. Also, her paper has lots of finger pointing but also includes a lot of sarcasm, which can be type of humor, albeit a dry one. Williams cared enough about the statement by Joyce Carol Oates to include it in her paper; it seems like she did so as a form of satire, since her essay is about nature and includes both examples of irony, and dry humor.

I found Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp to be well written and very stimulating. There was so much depth to the entire text and I read it five times and was still noticing subtle sarcasm and details. The wagging finger of the speaker and the vivid unpleasant descriptions stirred the guilt inside me and left me stunned afterward. The accusations and examples were so blatant that this paper is very memorable. Some parts raised my defenses, but I was entertained, and in the end I was definitely more aware of the wastefulness and disregard for the environment from American society and myself. I could see this paper provoking a very negative reaction towards the author, but even with an unfavorable tone, the essay was very captivating and memorable.

Works Cited

Williams, Joy. “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp.” Being in the World 1993: 634-645.

The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2010. Web. 3-10-16.