Women and Wilderness (1)
American women poets and the myth of the frontier
Readers of Wilderment or of any of my books are already aware of my interest in the ways we understand “nature” in relationship to gender. In fact, my new book, Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal is dedicated to exploring the stories we’ve been told (by ourselves and others) about the connection between women and nature through birds, and some of the outcomes of these stories for humans, birds, and the planet. What can the bird-encounters and permeations of Mary, Leda, Philomela, and Freya tell us about the way we imagine women? What can Victoria’s Secret or Britiney Spears or fashion advertising tell us about the same?
As such, I thought it would be fun to share some of what feminist scholars and theorists have to say about gender and nature, as well as some of the women poets who have engaged with and challenged these questions through their writing. If you have any appetite for literary criticism, this is for you, and I’ll also try and keep my discussion as accessible as possible for those of you who may (understandably) not share that appetite, or prefer smaller portions of it on your plate.
“It is crucial for feminism to contend with the nature that has been waged against women.”
– Stacy Alaimo
As a disclaimer, I should say that I’m using the fraught word “nature” here to describe the idea of the living planet – forests, fields, plants, lakes, and non-human animals – as distinct from human culture and human-constructed systems/environments. This is, of course, a false binary; the distinction is imaginary (a product of the Western, patriarchal thought systems) but it can be useful in discussion because it has real ramifications for the ways we think, feel, and act.
The conceptual divisions between man/woman and culture/nature have repeatedly positioned women and nature as “other” in contrast to man and culture. Woman is envisioned as a territory to be looked at, possessed, and claimed, a landscape that might be pristine and “virginal,” tamed and domesticated, or wild, beastly, and monstrous. In The Second Sex, a groundbreaking work of feminist philosophy published in 1949, Simone De Beauvoir interrogates how this condition of the “subject” and the “other” is embedded in our very language. For example, “the terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form” when in fact “man represents both the positive and the neutral” and “woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria.” She goes on to note how women, in contrast to men, are always assumed to be somehow limited by their biology – their “nature”:
Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands such as testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively…
As scholar Stacy Alaimo writes in her discussion of Carolyn Merchant’s the Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, “By the sixteenth century, pastorals depicted nature as both mother and bride who would ‘soothe the anxieties of men distraught by the demands of the urban world,’ comforting them with nurturing, ‘subordinate,’ and ‘essentially passive’ female natures.” White American culture inherits and extends this idea, which was brought over by the pilgrims and translated into the mythos of the American frontier, as “European colonists set foot on the ‘New World’ of ‘virgin’ land only to inscribe that land with the same old stories of violation.”
“…the Genius or Destiny of America is no log or sluggard, but a man incessantly advancing, as the shadow on the dial’s face, or the heavenly body by whose light it is marked.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In her book The Birth-mark, poet Susan Howe also addresses the intermixing of colonial expansion with Christian doctrine when she observes that the first settlers in New England “tied themselves and their followers to a dialectical construction of the American land as a virgin garden pre-established for them by the Author and Finisher of creation.” So, by the privilege of both gender and religion, the American colonists felt entitled to control and tame the land, as well as women.
Having been excluded from the mythos of the American frontier, women have taken as their domain a more circumscribed version of “nature,” the domestic sphere. Thus, women writers from colonial times (such as Anne Bradstreet) to the present developed their own mythos of the home and the garden. The imaginative exploration of the domestic can be seen as its own area of resistance, compensatory as it may be. Annette Kolodny writes,
Having for so long been barred from the fantasy garden, American women were also, at first, wary of paradisal projections onto the vast new landscape around them. Their imaginative play, instead, focused on the spaces that were truly and unequivocally theirs: the home and the small cultivated gardens.
The idea that “woman’s place is the home,” is old, but it remains powerful. The cultural image of the housewife and nurturing mother has been synonymous with “fulfilled” womanhood, and is just one of the ways that culture situates woman in relation to nature. This fantasy imagines woman as domesticated, tamed, and happy under male domination. After having been made submissive to him, she raises his children, tends her safely-enclosed garden, and is available to him night and day. And somehow, man enjoys the simultaneous beliefs that he has tamed something wild, but is also necessary for its protection. Dismantling this fantasy was one of the major projects of Second Wave feminism from The Feminist Mystique to Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature, to poet Adrienne Rich’s entire oeuvre.
While some American women writers have embraced the domestic in their work – particularly when barred from male mythologies of the frontier and wilderness, others have, in Alaimo’s words, instead “invoked nature in order to critique cultural roles, norms, and assumptions and to escape from the confines of the domestic.” It is the latter group to which I’ll turn my attention in a subsequent essay, looking at poems and poetic prose by a number of North American women poets who have – from the 19th century to the present – contested conventional narratives of the relationship between gender and nature, specifically troubling the relationships between womanhood, wilderness, and the domestic. In a couple of weeks I plan to share a post looking at the little-known 19th century poet Sarah Piatt, as well as the (much better known!) mid-20th century poet Sylvia Plath. After that, I may post a third essay looking at Chicana writer and feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldua and poet Gertrude Stein.
I hope that wasn’t too much for your criticism palate. I’m still discovering what kinds of things I want to share in this space, and what you’d like to see. Please know that I’m always open to feedback from Subscribers about what kinds of posts are most enjoyable, informative, and inspiring to you. For me, it can be interesting (as well as helpful) to delve into the conceptual frameworks that underlie many of the challenges – and predicaments – we’ve inherited. For example, just last night my sister Krista and I were in a monthly progress meeting with our Future of Water artists along with two special guests, one of whom was Samantha Krop, Neuse Riverkeeper, and the other of whom was Matt Gladdek, a city planner and VP of Economic Development for the Durham Chamber of Commerce. Matt was reflecting how Southern cities are still repeating the mistake of rapacious land-grabbing. We keep building out and out and out from city centers with single-family homes, decimating forests, endangering wetlands and rivers, and ensuring more and more car traffic. We need to have some tough conversations with ourselves, he said, about how we really want to live and what it means. Part of this has got to be releasing ourselves (Americans) from our obsession with land, and frontiers generally. One can spend about five seconds looking at our political discourse (local as well as national) and see how it’s still considered masculine and powerful (and therefore desirable) to extract, to subdue, to tame.
When we asked Matt and Samantha about their wild, ideal visions for what they’d like to see in Durham in fifty years if everything goes right, Samantha talked about the idea of many “creek keepers,” community members who are trained to take water samples and watch over the health of our local waterways. Matt talked about shifting our idea of what “home” can look like, moving away from the single-family plot, toward denser development (triplexes, quads) that facilitates more walkable neighborhoods and less environmental destruction. Both of these visions, it occurs to me now, trouble the binaries of wilderness/domestic, of personal property, and of the traditional spheres of gender as they blend the private with the public, and politics with care.