The purpose of this paper is to discuss what Annette Kolodny calls the nature-as-woman metaphor (technically a simile) in American history and literature. It will consider the more specific components that go to make up the metaphor, explore how it links together gender relationships and ecological relationships, and discuss how it tended to affect western expansion.
As soon as the American colonies were founded, a tradition of hucksterism in populating them was also founded. Extravagant advertising of the virtues of the new ôvirginö lands was everywhere, to lure the young, adventurous, and/or unwary into emigrating to and populating these new enterprises. This tradition continued on into the nineteenth century, luring Europeans over to settle the American frontier, and even into the twentieth century; at least, one can understand the leaflets (made famous by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath) that lured the ôOkiesö out to California during the Depression as being a continuation of this tradition.
Annette Kolodny argues that one of the most compelling elements in the imagery of a Paradise almost free for the taking was the ôblatantly psychosexual promiseö of a ôParadise with all her Virgin Beauties.ö In her ground-breaking monograph, The Lay of the Land, Kolodny had argued that the use of a female metaphor or personification for the land helped create certain attitudes toward the land, toward nature, and toward women. It was, she said, a verbal accommodation that permitted repeated physical accommodations to an often very hostile environment.
This was an important safety factor in the New World, because entry into a new territory, though initially exciting or exhilarating, can threaten sanity itself if one is forced to live daily with the unknown. To avoid the heart of that darkness, she says, male adventurers ever since Columbus have projected onto the land a metaphorical complex that represented for the...