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In searching American literary landscapes for what they can reveal
about our attitudes toward nature and gender, The Green Breast of
the New World considers symbolic landscapes in twentieth-century
American fiction, the characters who inhabit those landscapes, and
the gendered traditions that can influence the figuration of both
of these fictional elements. In this century, says Louise H.
Westling, American literary responses to landscape and nature have
been characterized by a puzzling mix of eroticism and misogyny,
celebration and mourning, and reverence and disregard. Focusing on
problems of gender conflict and imperialist nostalgia, The Green
Breast of the New World addresses this ambivalence. Westling begins
with a ""deep history"" of literary landscapes, looking back to the
archaic Mediterranean/Mesopotamian traditions that frame European
and American symbolic figurations of humans in the land. Drawing on
sources as ancient as the Sumerian Hymns to Innana and the Epic of
Gilgamesh, she reveals a tradition of male heroic identity grounded
in an antagonistic attitude toward the feminized earth and nature.
This identity recently has been used to mask a violent destruction
of wilderness and indigenous peoples in the fictions of progress
that have shaped our culture. Examining the midwestern landscapes
of Willa Cather's Jim Burden and Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams, and
the Mississippi Delta of William Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen and Isaac
McCaslin and Eudora Welty's plantation families and small-town
dwellers, Westling shows that these characters all participate in a
cultural habit of gendering the landscape as female and then
excusing their mistreatment of it by retreating into a
nostalgiathat erases their real motives, displaces responsibility,
and takes refuge in attitudes of self-pitying adoration.
A rare first-person account of life in the twentieth-century South,
He Included Me weaves together the story of a black family-eight
children reared in rural Alabama, their mother a schoolteacher,
their father a minister-and the emerging self-portrait of a woman
determined, like her parents, to look ahead. Sarah Rice recalls her
mother's hymn of thanks-"He Included Me"-when God showed her a way
to feed her family, and hears again her mother's quiet words, "It's
no disgrace to work. It's an honour to make an honest dollar,"
spoken when her children were embarrassed that she took in white
people's laundry. Rice speaks, finally, of the determination,
faith, and pride that carried her through life.In a document that
spans more than three-quarters of the twentieth century, He
Included Me presents the voice of a single woman whose life was
rich in complexity, deep in suffering and joy; yet it also speaks
for the many black women who have worked and struggled in the rural
South and always looked ahead.
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