ENGL 680
Critical Digest
October 17, 2000
Digest on Annette
Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and
Annette Kolodny
states that her original reason for writing The Lay of the Land “was
[her] growing distress at what we have done to our continent” (ix). She examines what different writers have
said about America and how they have turned America into a female to be
possessed and destroyed. Though some 25
years old, Lay of the Land might today be viewed as eco-feminist; the
Kolodny book fits quite nicely with the whole idea of ecofeminism. Kolodny purposely leaves out any women writers
because she feels that “the masculine appears to have taken power in the New
World” (ix).
Kolodny uses a broad overview method to write about poet Philip Freneau and writers Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur, John James Audubon, James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. She also examines the early writings of some of the European explorers and how they viewed this new, unadulterated land that they had found. The first explorers to come to America described this land as beautiful and feminine. In the beginning, the explorers relished the beauty of the native women. It was not until around the end of the 17th century that native women began to be described as “ugly and immoral” (5). The explorers saw in this new land all the beauty that had been gone for centuries in Europe. There were vast open spaces and a land just waiting to be penetrated. What more could people want? As Kolodny shows, the words that these explorers and writers used to describe this new land certainly point in that direction. They spoke of the land as a nurturing mother, but they also spoke of raping the land. The land is forced to play the dual part of woman as mother and woman as virgin.
The early English
explorers equated this new land with heaven and Eden (10-11). William Bryd of Westover “complained ‘that
people live worst upon good land, and the more they are befriended by the soil
and the climate the less they will do for themselves’” (17). So many people wrote back to Europe of the
unending bounty and beauty of this land that people believed the plants and
animals were so plentiful in the New World that they would not have to do any
work to survive (17-18). Many settlers
were very disappointed to find so much work that actually had to be done in
order to make the land their home (18).
In order to avoid having the northern states spoiled in the same way
that the southern states had already been, John White wrote of the North as
being a place where a man must work hard to keep himself alive (19). These new settlers had to penetrate the
ground to till the soil, to penetrate the woods to go any further west, to rape
the land by cutting down the trees and making the land fit for living. They did not accept the land as it was, they
had to force the land to become what it was not, a cultivated and gentle
place. After awhile, the people writing
back to Europe began to write a bit more truthfully of the hardships to be
faced upon arrival, but still the pastoral ideal of America had already taken
form in many people’s minds, and it would be a hard ideal to get rid of.
The ideal of the
pastoral persisted through the next few centuries, and it could be argued that
it is still with us today. George
Washington found fault with the way that people would come in, destroy the
land, and then leave it when it is no longer useful to them (27). Thomas Jefferson pleaded “for ‘the
cultivation of wheat’” because, unlike tobacco which left the earth wasted,
wheat “preserv[ed] its fertility’” (28).
“For Jefferson, then, the eroticism of the landscape was as compatible
with its maternal image, as the wild forests were, with the cultivated tracts”
(28). Jefferson was also worried about
people mining, or penetrating, the earth and, when they were through, just
leaving the wasted earth behind (29).
The settlers used and abused this new land without thought to the later
consequences. No one thought that this
fertile land might eventually run out, or that there could be another ocean hemming
them in so closely. They just plowed
forth on their seek and destroy mission.
And, by the end of the 1800s, the frontier was officially considered to
be closed (136).
Philip Freneau is
the first author that Kolodny examines to find this "seek and
destroy" mission mentioned above.
Freneau wrote poetry that infused the image of the nation as feminine
with the “larger femininity of soil and landscape, so that, whatever the
ostensible object of the poem, the image of the nation as woman became one and
the same with the image of the landscape” (30). Freneau clung to the idea of the pastoral, even as the demands of
history tried to get him to abandon his belief (36). Freneau’s poetry shows us the biggest tension that much American
literature struggled with: “the growing disillusionment with the pastoral
possibility in conflict with a commitment to maintain that possibility, almost
at any cost” (51). People could look
almost anywhere around themselves and see that the pastoral illusion was
disappearing, but they did not want it to disappear. They wanted to maintain the illusion for as long as
possible. American literature helps to
further the illusion even after people can see that the pastoral America has
slipped through their fingers for good.
The next writer,
Crevecoeur, writes of the pastoral ideal, but he personally becomes
disillusioned with the whole idea of a benevolent and loving land when he
returns home to find his wife dead and his children in the hands on strangers. When Crevecoeur came to the New World he
“arrived [. . .] saturated with the Enlightenment’s faith that here [. . .]
Europe might produce the kind of society it had only dreamt of on the old
continent” (53). Crevecoeur writes
letters in the persona of ‘Farmer James’, a man with little education, writing
to the well-educated man ‘Mr. F.B.’ (53).
He has James explore “the metaphor of land as woman” which is one of the
central themes in the American pastoral.
James does not like the foresters, hunters, traders, and frontier people
(59). He instead prefers the people who
cultivate the middle settlements (59).
“Crevecoeur [. . .] has James experience England as a cruel and unloving
mother, responsible for sowing discord among her American children” (61). Interesting how England is portrayed as the
bad mother and America is thought to be the good, loving virgin. Crevecoeur’s writing took a turn toward the
ambivalent though as he got older. He
was not too sure about “the prospect of continued and unlimited cultivation” of
this country. He was not the first to
question America’s seemingly unlimited expansion.
John Audubon also
questioned the expansion with his first sketch (writing) suggesting that maybe
human contact with the land was more disruptive than people noticed (75). Audubon was one of the first people to just
wander around the new frontier, trying not to do too much damage. He did exert his power to kill animals from
time to time in order to draw them, but it could be argued that he was on
overall benevolent force on the land.
Unlike the settlers that he studied, he did not use the land until it
could give no more. He did not clear
forests, plant crops, or remove animals that came onto his property, because he
really had no property. The biggest
threat to Audubon’s pastoral dream were “the aquisitional strivings of ‘the man
who, with his family, removed to the [new territories],…assured that [. . .] he
could not fail to provide amply for all his wants’” (80-81). Audubon lamented the way that people were
taking over the land, calling the land a woman and describing the damage done
to ‘her’ in feminine terms.
Land-as-woman is a
common theme running through all the authors so far and James Fenimore Cooper,
Kolodny’s next study, is not much different. Kolodny does not focus quite as
heavily on land-as-woman in the Natty Bumppo books. She more so examines the way in which Cooper shows the settlers
ruining the land. She says that
“Cooper’s fictionalized settlers appear to be a peoples who grasp only weapons
of destruction” (92) such as the plow, the rifle, the shovel. Natty, on the
other hand, is a white man who more so identifies with the native ways of doing
things; he takes only what he needs to survive and leaves everything else
untouched (95). But, Cooper also keeps
Natty in an infantile and pre-sexual state, because that is the only way for
Natty to retain his sense of the pastoral (115).
The next author, William Gilmore
Simms also sees the land-as-woman, but he goes back to the phallic and birthing
images. His images are much more vivid
than the ones that Kolodny describes Cooper using. When Simms describes the Revolutionary War, he writes about the
land (feminine) being assaulted by the soldiers (masculine) (116). Simms gives you the impression of angry men forcing
the feminine land to do their bidding.
Simms also describes the land as “the green bosom of their mother earth”
and “the virgin forest” (qtd. 118). You
cannot get much more feminine than that.
Simms describes Clarence Conway, the hero of his book Scout, in
an overtly phallic manner as “the ‘upright’ young man guiding his canoe by
means of an instrument’ or [. . .] ‘his wand of power’” (118-119). Then Simms has Conway pass through a dense
thicket while kneeling low, almost in a fetal position, in representation of a
birth (119). Simms really pushes the
feminine images in his writing, leaving little to the imagination. Whether or not he meant to come across in
this manner, he can be read in a very
ecofeminine way.
I started reading the next and final chapter of the book expecting Kolodny to come to a conclusion, but I felt that she might have overlooked the conclusion in her desire to fit so much information into the book. Kolodny brings up the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby, from The Great Gatsby, but she does not give an ecofeminine example of the text (138-139). Kolodny begins to digress from the ecofeminine here just a little bit, and by the end of the chapter I felt that she had switched to psychology. Kolodny also looks at “The Bear” by Faulkner, showing how Ike McCaslin should be read “as a comment on the course of an entire nation’s pastoral impulse” (140). From there Kolodny moves to the idea of land-as-woman as a metaphor and what that means. She feels that the fact that we see the land in feminine terms “bears out a consistent correlation between that set of linguistic images and certain psychological patterns that became codified in our literature and acted out in our history” (149). She then goes on to say that even though we may think that we have stopped viewing the land in feminine terms, that “we have not ceased to experience it [. . .] in such a way” (149). Kolodny then reminds us that she only looked at the writings of white males.
I was not sure how
much of an ending this book really had.
I did like the quick overview of all the authors and the ideas that she
wrote about got me a bit more interested in looking at some of these texts from
the ecofeminine point-of-view. It was
also an interesting book to read because the examples that she used tended to
really keep the main point of her argument in focus. This book would be a good reference for someone who was
interested in learning how certain American male writers gendered the
land. It is a good survey of authors,
but that made it somewhat hard to read the book from front to back. Kolodny easily ties all the parts together
with the feminist perspective, but in reading the whole book, I felt that I was
almost reading the same ideas over and over again, just applied to different
authors. If you are not looking for a
feminine read on the land, stay away from this book. But if you want to see one woman’s take on our early American
literature and how it has shaped the opinions of people today then, by all
means, run out and pick this book up today.
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as
Experience and History in
American Life and Letters.
Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1975.