Seeing the Lady in the Land, or Actually, Seeing Land as Lady (Weekly Reading Response #3)

I am fascinated with Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land.  The premise of her book is that since the beginning of America’s colonization its settlers have viewed the land as a feminine figure.  Kolodny explores the implications and psychological impact that this view has had on Americans and on the environment that we call home.  The general problem that she finds with explores and settlers feminizing the landscape is that once they view it as a woman then it becomes something to conquer, dominate, and control—in the same way that a woman would have been courted, married, and then been under the dominion of her husband.  Basically with the land viewed as a woman it becomes a second class citizen like a woman.

Kolodny breaks up her chapters according to the evolution of the image of the feminized American landscape as presented in numerous travel journals, letters, documents, and pamphlets written to encourage the settlement of the “new” land.  The American environment has been thought of and written about as mother, lover, courtier, and damsel in distress; all of these are problematic images according to Kolodny because they have moved from being European metaphors to American reality. 

Fertile Virgin Land

From 1500-1740, Kolodny finds extensive written evidence that explorers and settlers viewed America as a fertile virgin land waiting to be seeded and cultivated (10-11).  Claims like Thomas Morton’s remark in 1632 that America is “a faire virgin, longing to be sped, And meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed” encouraged settlers to claim their plot of “untouched” land (qtd. in Kolodny 12).  As quickly as the sacred purity of America entered the American psyche, the idea that “she” needs to be protected did too.  Americans began to write that their fellow colonizers were not caring for the vulnerable feminine land properly revealing what Kolodny calls the “conflict locked in the heart of the American Pastoral: that which is contained within the matrix of the feminine, however attractive . . . or nurturing as a mother robin, must inevitably fall victim to masculine activity” (24).  Kolodny’s explanation helped me grasp the essential contradiction behind our “love of land” and inclination to violate it; I also see how we need ecofeminism to address this idea of a feminine land.  From the beginning, we expected and imagined a pastoral paradise.  Much like Buell proposed in his book, The Environmental Imagination, Kolodny also proposes that we did not see what was already there but instead imagined what we wanted to see—Kolodny’s textual evidence makes it clear that the colonizers wanted to see a lady in the land.   

Seeding the Soil

In the eighteenth century, America the pastoral desire to live in a pure natural environment manifested itself in agrarianism: “agriculture came to be seen as the primary and indispensable foundation both of national prosperity and of political democracy” (Kolodny 27).  Also, the need to defend the feminine American land against the British motivated revolutionaries to fight for independence.     

Kolodny finds that during the eighteenth century, two competing visions of the landscape prevail.  First, the uncultivated land is perceived as primitive, yet erotic; second, many Americans call for further “taming” and farming of the land as a patriotic duty.  The desires to live in a motherly wilderness and to plow the fields of the virgin land form what Kolodny calls the “pastoral paradox: man might, indeed, win mastery over the landscape, but only at the cost of emotional and psychological separation from it” (28).

Bartram’s Unfeminine Landscape    

What are the implications for the 1791 Bartram text that I am exploring?  Well, it was written during the transition from the view of American a bountiful virgin land to the agrarian, patriotic view that plowing the soil was equivalent to building a democracy.  Strangely enough, references to a feminine land are almost completely absent in Bartram’s massive text; for the most part nature is not personified. 

Strangely, where I do see a feminized nature I also find a masculine land:

“Dewey evening now comes on, the animating breezes, which cooled and tempered the meridian hours of this sultry season, now gently cease; the glorious sovereign of day calling in his bright beaming emanations, leaves us in his absence to the milder government and protection of the silver queen of night, attended by millions of bright luminaries” (Bartram 121).

Bartram views the land as masculine and when he sees it feminine he sees a powerful woman, a queen.  Could his elevated metaphors of nature, produce the greater respect that is present in his travel journal?  When compared with the texts of his peers, who saw the eighteenth century American frontier as an exotic woman, Bartram is much more respectful and attentive to the environment, the natives, and even in his introduction says that man, animals, and plants are equally valuable because men needs nature to live: “Man and manners undoubtedly hold the first rank—whatever may contribute to our existence is also of equal importance, whether it be found in the animal or vegetable kingdoms” (li).

It seems that in place of the land-as-lady view, Bartram uses land-as-paradise, a “glorious display of the Almighty,” instead.  The constant Elysian Fields references follow the trend of describing America as a bountiful rich nation; however, the corresponding call to claim the fertile, feminine land is missing. 

Instead, Bartram sees this paradise as already occupied and under the rule of “natural” kings and queens.  He even presents a gator presiding over a sink-hole formed by the eruption of a spring as a King: “A very large alligator at present is lord or chief; many have been killed here, but the throne is never long vacant, the vast neighboring ponds so abound with them” (150). 

So, does Bartram viewing nature as divine and as already possessing its own royalty and dominion account for why his text is revolutionary for its time in its respectful view of nature?

 Kolodny closes her book by asserting that we need a “radically new symbolic mode for relating to” nature (148).  She points out that metaphors lead to oversimplification of what we truly mean, and in the case of America, thinking the land is a woman.  If viewing the land as a woman is problematic and leads to the reduction of the environment, then what are the implications for Bartram’s metaphor the land is a kingdom filled with its own natural rulers?  Is this a better metaphor? Is his respectful attitude evidence that this is a healthier metaphor?  And why did the editors of the early American anthology that I read as an undergraduate think the gator beating passage was at all a representational passage of Bartram’s text?  Did he feel satisfaction “defeating” the gator because he sees it as a masculine equal?  Is this a problematic effect of Bartram’s “kingdom” metaphor? 

Phew, I am now breathless and full of more questions. 

Until next time, try and notice when you unconsciously feminize the land and be aware of how this affects your view of America “the beautiful.”

~Blake