That is, Kolodny feels that when workforce refer to the cut as feminine, they will feel justified in treating the land in the same way that they treat women. Some men will treat both women and land with respect and affection, but many will look upon the land as something to be used and thrown away. The metaphor can therefore be a mixed bless(prenominal)ing: it can lead any to exploitation or to husbandry. Kolodny says that historically the metaphor or head game of the land as feminine appears to have been both multipurpose and socially adaptive, as it lured successive generations of immigrants to America's shores and propelled them across the Terra incognito to decrease it.
Like the female imagery underlying it, this fantasy was flexible and adaptable. When the growing demands of the nation called for something more than passive appreciation of a
This metaphor remains resilient today, although without quite as much sexist baggage draw along behind it. When thinking of America's relatively unpopulated areas, guinea pig parks, and areas of wilderness, most people will come up with the term, " convey Nature," as a personification of the land indep give upent of human interference. It would be exaggerating to say that "Mother Nature" is anything like a goddess or saint or heroine, but clearly the imagination is of a natural power (perhaps something like Pele, the goddess/personification of the blowhole in Hawaii) with whom or with which humans may interfere notwithstanding at their own risk.
Paradise, the imagery changed.
The virginal Eden of the hucksters' tracts was replaced by images of a femininity that required, perhaps even invited, conquest and domestication. Kolodny quotes David Humphreys, a poet/ pass/engineer, for whom the transformation of the American earthscape at the end of the eighteenth century seemed to suggest a projection of manly force over a constitution which, he says, " at one time rustic and rude, now embellished and adorned, appears the loveliest captive that ever befell to the lot of a conqueror!" She also quotes Timothy Dwight, the President of Yale, who praised a less brutal but equally erotic transformation, saying, "Where nature, stripped of her belt and her foliage, is now naked and deformed, she will suddenly exchange the dishabille; and be ornamented by culture with her richest attire." It is interesting that both soldier (though a most literate one) and scholar perceive nature as feminine in such parallel ways.
Kolodny, Annette. "Honing a Habitable Languagescape: Women's Images for the New World Frontiers." In Women and Language in Literature and Society. Ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman. 188-204. New York: Praeger, 1980.
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro
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