[Jay Jay]
Kolodny, Annette.
The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Print.
Chapters Read:
- “Unearthing Herstory”
- “Surveying the Virgin Land”
- “Laying Waste Her Fields of Plenty”
- “Singing Her Past and Signing Her Praises”
Annette Kolodny is amazing. Amazing, and brilliant. Her writing captured and held my attention the entire time I spent reading through her book.
In chapter one, “Unearthing Herstory,” Kolodny introduces her theory that not only did the New World landscape function as an object of domination and exploitation, but that it also represented land-as-woman. Kolodny describes the consequence of such a metaphor as “the total female principle of gratification—enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction” (4). This metaphor of land-as-woman contributes to “America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land as essentially feminine” (4). This fantasy is recorded in American history, via both our living memories and our literary products. Kolodny goes on to describe what she thinks is unique about American pastoral—Americans look the pastoral metaphors as literal, not just literary truths. In drawing together and then connecting literary and literal pastoral metaphors and experiences, Americans created an “uniquely American pastoral vocabulary” that captures and conveys the “American pastoral impulse” (8). These two major concepts, that of the land-as-woman, and of the American pastoral connecting literary and literal reality, form the backbone of Kolodny’s book as she draws upon American men’s writings, both fiction and non-fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. (The fifth chapter, which Blake and I decided to skip for now, addresses the twentieth century.).
Chapter two, “Surveying the Virgin Land,” covers the years 1500—1740 and explores the language used by writers to describe the New World. The language is highly sexualized but also split into a binary: filial homage/erotic desire. Kolodny describes the distinction and creation of pastoral imagery in both the South and the North, touching briefly on the manner in which Southern writers managed to delete highly sexualized allusions from literature about the New World’s landscape. New England attempted to “limit the scope of pastoral possibilities” in order to distinguish themselves from the dangerous “sensuously abundant ambience” of the South (19). The writers believed that if their colony was painted as a perfect paradise in which no labor was necessary to flourish, they would only attract lazy, slothful immigrants. In promotional publications from New England, a fine line is seen between recruiting immigrants with the promise of paradise and the reminder for the need for human labor.
