November
1996
A
New VIsion To The New World
Book Review by Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine |
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The Green Breast of the New World:
Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction
by Louise H. Westling. The University
of Georgia Press: Athens (1996). $29.95 cloth. 199 pages
Louise H. Westling's gripping ecofeminist analysis, The Green Breast
of the New World, provides a full account of the history of the gender-biased
literary landscape, before dissecting the works of Ernest Hemingway and
William Faulkner to uncover a portrayal of Nature where Nature is seen
as alien, corrupting, and conquerable. She compares this view with the
literary worlds of Willa Cather and Eudora Welty, where Nature often
symbolizes spirituality, positivity, community, rebirth and love.
The title, of course, comes from the The Great Gatsby , when
Nick Carraway meditates on a once untouched, seductive Long Island
landscape. The provenance
of such a sexualized and feminized imagery is, Westling argues, long.
It can be traced back to the Sumerian fertility myth of the goddess Inanna
and Paleolithic art, where the human image is depicted as a female with
a large belly or full breasts. The migration of Indo-European warrior
cultures displaced "the goddess-centered cultures with aggressive masculine
cosmologies." By the early Renaissance, in Westling's brief history,
Nature is still depicted as feminine, but the Great Mother of pre-history
has become a female being whom, to quote Francis Bacon, can be "forced
out of her natural state and squeezed and molded" by man and science.
When Europeans came to America, they saw a potential Eden, although
one bordered by a "wilderness" that held deep terrors. The wilderness was
a feminized world to be conquered and tamed by propertied males. For
Cotton Mather, the settlers were new vines to "fill the land," while
for Thoreau, "Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome." For
Emerson, "Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate."
Westling compares this mindset with that of Willa Cather, who
in both the early work O Pioneers!, and late Death of the Archbishop
continues
the destructive gender oppositions and imperialistic nostalgia endemic
in the white male tradition. For Westling, Cather never truly reconciles
her ambivalence about her own sexuality or her depictions of a fecund
natural world with her "notion of wild landscape as inert material to
be shaped into usefulness by European man." However, to Westling, Cather
complexifies this identification by also associating nature with female
companionship and domestic values.
In contrast, Nature to Hemingway's Nick Adams, the representative
hero of many stories, is a place to purge and rid himself of
social entrapment,
again associated with effeminacy. Nick feels the need to leave society
for the woods to make his own comfortable "place," indulging himself
with nothing but fishing, camping and cooking. Nick's feeling of being
married to fishing and camping is an effort to replace the female role
in the male's life - something also evident in The Old Man and the Sea.
Unlike Cather, Hemingway has his hero seek solitude. When Nick feels
at one with Nature it is, to Westling, not "to extend or broaden concepts
of human possibility or participation in the building of community, but
rather to narrow and exclude." Hemingway's hero cannot afford to acknowledge
the balance between life and death or "the centrality of all the fecundity
that has been traditionally coded as feminine."
Her observation also applies to the landscape in Faulkner's depictions
of Yoknapatawpha County, specifically in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down,
Moses. For Faulkner, says Westling, the earth is "wet, fecund, teeming
- 'the supreme primal uterus' - and women are its avatars." In Flags
in the Dust, for instance, Faulkner's female characters are explicitly
linked with nature: Narcissa Benbow, as her first name suggests, is a
delicate flower. Belle Mitchell is "flowered like a hothouse bloom, brilliant
and petulant and perverse." Yet this richness includes a soiled quality-
especially in menstrual fluid or "womanfilth" as one Faulkner character
puts it.
The ambivalence over women and landscape is also present in the
male writers' depictions of Native Americans. Hemingway proudly
claimed his
father had Indian blood and held a romantic notion of Indians all his
life. But in his Nick Adams stories, Indians are a degraded group: Nick's
first love, an Indian, turns out to be promiscuous; in "Fathers and Sons," an
Indian hunting companion, Billy, offers his sister's sexual favors to
Adams; and in "Indian Camp," Adams remembers with horror watching a childbirth
as a little boy. Likewise, Faulkner, while critical of white men, particularly
in Go Down, Moses defines an all-male wilderness where, according to
Westling, he exposes his "confused identification of Indians, blacks
and animals with the feminine and with 'evil'."
Welty, with her Mississippi landscape of hills and alluvial bottomland,
is similar to Faulkner in the richness of her descriptions of earth and
landscape. Yet the heat, the same thick smell of honeysuckle and the
rich Delta soil that threatens Faulkner's ease, for Welty mean peace,
pleasure and intimacy. "The Delta Wedding" and many of her short stories
are discussed in detail. Westling argues that the literary tradition
in female authors pioneers the way for Welty in connecting domesticity
with Nature. Westling contrasts Faulkner's horror of the body and the
feminine with Welty's tactful use, in stories such as "Delta Wedding," of "food
as a medium of exchange between people, connecting them to each other
and to the fertility of the landscape."
As Westling herself claims, none of the writers she studies breaks
out of "the archaic gendered sense of the human relation to the landscape
and its life." She concludes the book by integrating ideas from ecologically-sensitive
writers, anthropologists, postmodern theorists, and others. This is an
attempt to reassure us that Nature portrayed by women who speak from
their connection to the body, animals, and the land itself, is a very
different Nature than that seen by white male writers. In addition, Westling
also examines other social issues - such as racism and colonialism -
and uses the writing of African Americans such as Toni Morrison and Octavia
Butler and Native American Louise Erdich as examples of an integration
of the social and the ecological.
Westling's impressively comprehensive book provides new and insightful
analysis of the gendered landscape usually left unacknowledged in critiques
of Hemingway and Faulkner. She also provides confirmation of Cather's
and Welty's feminine and nurturing landscapes. The Green Breast of the
New gives anyone who is concerned about how environmental issues are
portrayed or neglected in literature a starting point and a meeting ground.
The book also offers alternative reading for a freshly defined American
understanding of Nature.
Born and raised in Taiwan, Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine teaches
English writing and literature courses at the Indiana University
of Pennsylvania. Her area of specialty is postcolonial theory,
with an emphasis on postcolonial ecology. Her recent research
has been focused on ecofeminism and multicultural perspectives
on ecology.
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