The Lay of the Land

Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters

Annette Kolodny

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469619569
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

An original and highly unusual psycholinguistic study of American literature and culture from 1584 to 1860, this volume focuses on the metaphor of 'land-as-woman.' It is the first systematic documentation of the recurrent responses to the American continent as a feminine entity (as Mother, as Virgin, as Temptress, as the Ravished), and it is also the first systematic inquiry into the metaphor's implications for the current ecological crisis.

1: Unearthing Herstory

An Introduction

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,
They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.
—JONI MITCHELL, “Big Yellow Taxi”

For the brief space of perhaps two weeks at the end of May 1969, a small plot of deserted ground just south of the University of California campus at Berkeley dominated headlines and news broadcasts across the country. That such an apparently local incident as the “Battle for People’s Park” could so quickly and so effectively capture a nation’s attention suggests that it had touched off a resonant chord in the American imagination. If the various legal, political, moral, and ecological issues involved in the controversy are as confused and confusing today as they were in 1969, they do at least all seem to cohere around a single unifying verbal image that appeared in almost all of the leaflets, handbills, and speeches printed during the uproar:

The earth is our Mother the land
The University put a fence around the land-our Mother.¹

In what has since been partially paved over and designated a parking lot, the advocates of People’s Park dared fantasize a natural maternal realm, in which human children happily working together in the spontaneous and unalienated labor of planting and tilling might all be “sod brothers.”² So powerful was the fantasy, in fact, that many seriously believed that, armed “with sod, lots of flowers, and spirit,” those evicted from the park might return and “ask our brothers in the [National] Guard to let us into our park.”³

If the wished-for fraternity with the National Guard was at least erratically realized, the return to “the land—our Mother,” the place, they insisted, “where our souls belong,”⁴ was thwarted completely. The disposition of the land through “proper channels”—including city council and university officials—was characterized variously as “the rape of People’s Park” or, more graphically, as a case of “The University . . . I fucking with our land.”⁵ For many, hurt and angered at the massive repression their fantasy had engendered, People’s Park became “a mirror in which our society may see itself,” a summing up of American history: “We have constituted ourselves socially and politically to conquer and transform nature.”⁶

In fact, the advocates of People’s Park had asserted another version of what is probably 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—that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification—enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction.⁷ Such imagery is archetypal wherever we find it; the soul’s home, as the People’s Park Committee leaflet and three hundred years of American writing before it had asserted, is that place where the conditions of exile—from Eden or from some primal harmony with the Mother—do not obtain; it is a realm of nurture, abundance, and unalienated labor within which all men are truly brothers. In short, the place America had long promised to be, ever since the first explorers declared themselves virtually “ravisht with the . . . pleasant land” and described the new continent as a “Paradise with all her Virgin Beauties.”⁸ The human, and decidedly feminine, impact of the landscape became a staple of the early promotional tracts, inviting prospective settlers to inhabit “valleyes and plaines streaming with sweete Springs, like veynes in a naturall bodie,” and to explore “hills and mountaines making a sensible proffer of hidden treasure, neuer yet searched.”⁹

As a result, along with their explicit hopes for commercial, religious, and political gains, the earliest explorers and settlers in the New World can be said to have carried with them a “yearning for paradise.” When they ran across people living in what seemed to them “the manner of the golden age,” and found lands where “nature and liberty affords vs that freely, which in England we want, or it costeth vs dearely,” dormant dreams found substantial root.¹⁰ When, for instance, Arthur Barlowe’s account of his “First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America . . . Anno 1584,” described the Indian women who greeted him and his men as uniformly beautiful, gracious, cheerful, and friendly, with the wife of the king’s brother taking “great pains to see all things ordered in the best manner she could, making great haste to dress some meat for us to eat,” he initiated a habit of mind that came to see the Indian woman as a kind of emblem for a land that was similarly entertaining the Europeans “with all love and kindness and . . . as much bounty.” Not until the end of the seventeenth century, when the tragic contradictions inherent in such experience could no longer be ignored, were the Indian women depicted more usually as hag-like, ugly, and immoral. The excitement that greeted John Rolfe’s marriage to Pocahontas, in April of 1614, may have been due to the fact that it served, in some symbolic sense, as a kind of objective correlative for the possibility of Europeans’ actually possessing the charms inherent in the virgin continent. Similarly, the repeated evocation of the new continent as “some delicate garden abounding with all kinds of odoriferous flowers,” and the sometimes strident insistence that early explorers had “made a Garden vpon the top of a Rockie lie . . . that grew so well,”¹¹ tantalizes with the suggestion that the garden may in fact be “an abstraction of the essential femininity of the terrain.” Paul Shepard undoubtedly has a point when he claims that “we have yet to recognize the full implication of the mother as a primary landscape,”¹² especially since, as psychiatrist Joel Kovel has argued, “the life of the body and the experiences of infancy, . . . are the reference points of human knowledge and the bedrock of the structures of culture.”¹³

If the initial impulse to experience the New World landscape, not merely as an object of domination and exploitation, but as a maternal “garden,” receiving and nurturing human children, was a reactivation of what we now recognize as universal mythic wishes, it had one radically different facet: this paradise really existed, “Whole” and “True,” its many published descriptions boasting “theproofe of the present benefit this Countrey affoords”¹⁴ (italics mine). All the descriptions of wonderful beasts and strangely contoured humans notwithstanding, the published documents from explorers assured the reader of the author’s accuracy and unimpeachable reliability. No mere literary convention this; an irrefutable fact of history (the European discovery of America) touched every word written about the New World with the possibility that the ideally beautiful and bountiful terrain might be lifted forever out of the canon of pastoral convention and invested with the reality of daily experience. In some sense, the process had already begun, as explorer after explorer claimed to have “personally . . . w^th diligence searched and viewed these contries” before concluding them to be “the fairest, frutefullest, and pleasauntest of all the worlde.”¹⁵ Eden, Paradise, the Golden Age, and the idyllic garden, in short, all the backdrops for European literary pastoral, were subsumed in the image of an America promising material ease without labor or hardship, as opposed to the grinding poverty of previous European existence; a frank, free affectional life in which all might share in a primal and noncompetitive fraternity; a resurrection of the lost state of innocence that the adult abandons when he joins the world of competitive self-assertion; and all this possible because, at the deepest psychological level, the move to America was experienced as the daily reality of what has become its single dominating metaphor: regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the primal warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape. And when America finally produced a pastoral literature of her own, that literature hailed the essential femininity of the terrain in a way European pastoral never had, explored the historical consequences of its central metaphor in a way European pastoral had never dared, and, from the first, took its metaphors as literal truths. The traditional mode had embraced its last and possibly its most uniquely revitalizing permutation.

As Joel Kovel points out, of course, “It is one thing to daydream and conjure up wishful images of the way things ought to be in order that one’s instinctually-based fantasies may come true;” at the time of America’s discovery, this had become the province of European pastoral. “It is quite another matter, and a more important one in cultural terms,”¹⁶ he continues, to begin experiencing those fantasies as the pattern of one’s daily activity—as was the case in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century America. For only if we acknowledge the power of the pastoral impulse to shape and structure experience can we reconcile the images of abundance in the early texts with the historical evidence of starvation, poor harvests, and inclement weather.¹⁷ To label such an impulse as “mere fantasy” in order to dismiss it ignores the fact that fantasy is a particular way of relating to the world, even, as R. D. Laing suggests, “part of, sometimes the essential part of, the meaning or sense . . . implicit in action.”¹⁸ In 1630 Francis Higginson, “one of the ministers of Salem,” claimed that “Experience doth manifest that there is hardly a more healthfull place to be found in the World” and boasted that “since I came hither . . . I thanke God I haue had perfect health, and . . . whereas beforetime I cloathed my self with double cloathes and thicke Wastcoats to keepe me warme, euen in the Summer time, I doe now goe as thin clad as any, onely wearing a light Stuffe Cassocke vpon my Shirt and Stuffe Breeches and one thickness without Linings.”¹⁹ The fact that he died the next year of pneumonia, or, as Governor Dudley phrased it, “of a feaver,” in no way negates what the good minister claimed his “Experience doth manifest.” American pastoral, unlike European, holds at its very core the promise of fantasy as daily reality. Implicit in the call to emigrate, then, was the tantalizing proximity to a happiness that had heretofore been the repressed promise of a better future, a call to act out what was at once a psychological and political revolt against a culture based on toil, domination, and self-denial.

But not many who emigrated yearning for pastoral gratifications shared Higginson’s “Experience.” Colonization brought with it an inevitable paradox: the success of settlement depended on the ability to master the land, transforming the virgin territories into something else—a farm, a village, a road, a canal, a railway, a mine, a factory, a city, and finally, an urban nation. As a result, those who had initially responded to the promise inherent in a feminine landscape were now faced with the consequences of that response: either they recoiled in horror from the meaning of their manipulation of a naturally generous world, accusing one another, as did John Hammond in 1656, of raping and deflowering the “naturall fertility and comelinesse,” or, like those whom Robert Beverley and William Byrd accused of “slothful Indolence,” they succumbed to a life of easeful regression, “spung[ing] upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil” and “approachfing] nearer to the Description of Lubberland than any other.”²⁰ Neither response, however, obviated the fact that the despoliation of the land appeared more and more an inevitable consequence of human habitation—any more than it terminated the pastoral impulse itself. The instinctual drive embedded in the fantasy, which had first impelled men to emigrate, now impelled them both to continue pursuing the fantasy in daily life, and, when that failed, to codify it as part of the culture’s shared dream life, through art—there for all to see in the paintings of Cole and Audubon, in the fictional “letters” of Crevecoeur, the fallacious “local color” of Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and finally, the northern and southern contours clearly distinguished, in the Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper and in the Revolutionary War romances of William Gilmore Simms. “Thus,” as Joel Kovel argues, “the decisive symbolic elements [of a culture’s history] will be those that represent not only repressed content, but ego activity as well.”²¹

Other civilizations have undoubtedly gone through a similar history, but at a pace too slow or in a time too ancient to be remembered. Only in America has the entire process remained within historical memory, giving Americans the unique ability to see themselves as the wilful exploiters of the very land that had once promised an escape from such necessities. With the pastoral impulse neither terminated nor yet wholly repressed, the entire process—the dream and its betrayal, and the consequent guilt and anger—in short, the knowledge of what we have done to our continent, continues even in this century, as Gary Snyder put it, “eating at the American heart like acid.”²² How much better might things have turned out had we heeded the advice of an earlier American poet, Charles Hansford, who probably wrote the following lines about the middle of the eighteenth century:

To strive with Nature little it avails.
Her favors to improve and nicely scan
Is all that is within the reach of Man.
Nature is to be follow’d, and not forc’d,
For, otherwise, our labor will be lost.²³

From accounts of the earliest explorers onward, then, a uniquely American pastoral vocabulary began to show itself, releasing and emphasizing some facets of the traditional European mode and all but ignoring others. At its core lay a yearning to know and to respond to the landscape as feminine, a yearning that I have labeled as the uniquely American “pastoral impulse.” Obviously, such an impulse must at some very basic level stem from desires and tensions that arise when patterns from within the human mind confront...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Lay of the Land
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1: Unearthing Herstory
• 2: Surveying the Virgin Land
• 3: Laying Waste Her Fields of Plenty
• 4: Singing Her Past and Singing Her Praises
• 5: Making It with Paradise
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index