What’s entertaining about Cleland’s language is that it’s not pornographic, because it pulls you away from the putative subject into the viscerality of its metaphor, asking us to feel not desire which moves closer but admiration which stands back for the fine view. It suggests the extent to which landscape was already a superlative, an ideal to which other things could be brought, so that these genitalia are offered up, as it were, on the altar of landscape beauty and metaphoric adventure, back then when the geometrical lines of formal gardens were breaking up into an aesthetic of wilderness. It’s not very far removed from William Gilpin’s essay on the superlative gardens at Stowe, published a year earlier: “A Mile’s riding, perhaps, would have carried me to the Foot of a steep Precipice, down which thundered the whole Weight of some vast River, which was dashed into Foam at the Bottom, by the craggy points of several rising Rocks: A deep Gloom overhung the Prospect, occasioned by the close Wood that hung round it on every Side.”
I wonder if it’s that complex language makes it possible to appreciate complexity, or if the aesthetics of gardens extended to bodies back when Pope said “painting, poetry and landskip gardening” were sisters. Or brothers, because in that era, which cultivated the aesthetic experience of the sublime and the beautiful (which Edmund Burke in his treatise on the sublime carefully delineated as, respectively, masculine and feminine), Cleland could make men into landscape with equal felicity. Here’s the key portion of a tumescent guy “whose exquisite whiteness was not a little set off by a sprout of black curling hair round the root through which the jetty springs of which the fair skin shewed as in a fine evening you may have remark’d the clear light aether through the branchework of distant trees overtopping the summit of a hill: then the broad and bluish-casted incarnate of the head, and blue serpentines of its veins.”
There is a huge body, so to speak, of literature and art that portrays nature and landscape as feminine, from the Song of Songs’s “A garden enclosed is my beloved” to Edward Weston’s blank nudes in blank dunes. This could simply be about the heterosexual male voice, since the beloved is always nature. Imogen Cunningham’s honeymoon pictures, from her soft pictorialist phase before she cofounded the sharp-focus-committed f/64 movement, not only portray the man as the spirit of the land but make the actual man do all that uncomfortable self-exhibition that female models have spent so much time doing. Cunningham’s groom stands in lakes a lot. They look cold, and so does he. In fact, it’s just as easy to cast the landscape as masculine, at least if that landscape is big, austere, and sublime. Saguaro cacti are also helpful.
I don’t believe women are more like nature, but I believe we often share a political fate, not least as the sites on which a dominant culture exercises its fears and desires. Did Fanny Hill prefigure the Lake District and the aesthetics of wildness? And if that is so, then what about these bodies that are as much the result of toil by waxers and surgeons as the happy result of genetic dice and exercise? Do they represent the mall, the space capsule, the superhighway, the laboratory, the gated community, the prefab home, drive-through fast food, virtual space, the security state? Is that also what the nature calendars represent, since in them there is, as in porn, life without death, bodies without functions, results without processes, access without roads? If the beloved is always nature, then what are these landscapes and bodies without biology, without threat, without mystery, without darkness?
Where did the complexity go? Landscape photography in what we might have to call the art world has for more than a quarter century been striving to embrace a more complex, compromised vision of the organic world, an organic world whose human traces are not necessarily scars or damage, a landscape of processes as well as spectacles, of beauty without perfection. This undoes the virgin-whore dichotomy calcified out of Porter’s and Ansel Adams’s vision, which cannot imagine the works of human beings as other than violation and therefore fetishizes nature as a place apart (it’s this that made nature photography seem more like girlie calendars—in which the subject is solitary but inviting—rather than like action porn). This is a nature whose existence is more dubious than ever before, as well as a kind of alienation environmental thought is getting over pretty nicely.
We might also ask where the hair went. To imagine the quantities of waxed women toiling on behalf of the Internet’s most successful business is to imagine a collective clear-cut that might, were some web nerd to do the calculations, amount to acres. The answer is also to be found in the art world, which at this point is beginning to seem like some sort of wilderness preserve for all kinds of tangled banks. Ann Hamilton, in a mid-1990s show at the Dia Foundation, covered a vast area of floor with swathes of horsehair that visitors had to come into contact with, if only with their feet. A plethora of women artists has affirmed a different female body in art, one that might be beautiful, but not safe or simple, a body that is full of hair, organs, processes, fluids, consciousness, and will. They’ve represented, as I once said, “everything classical marble removes: the squishy, mobile, mutable stuff of and the traffic of appetites through bodies in process.” This work has had fun with hair, again and again, and if anything affirms that hair is political it’s this abundance, this tangle, this forest of it in the feminine avant-garde while the stuff is vanishing from the bodies of mainstream porn.
Which is to say, in sum, that if there’s anything to complain about in these mainstream photographic territories, it’s that they’re about sex and wilderness in which wildness is proscribed.
Seven Stepping Stones down
the Primrose Path
A Talk at a Conference on Landscape and Gender
[2002]
1
When I first started looking into gender and landscape, the questions seemed metaphysical—about which sex had what relationship to nature, or, rather, whether women really had a special relationship to nature. I was young and easily converted to the ecofeminist essentialist position that women are closer to nature or more like nature or one of those warm, fuzzy positions. That was the era of the book When God Was a Woman and a general sense that Near Eastern agricultural matriarchies were paradise lost—one thing about this culture, no matter how much it excoriates the Judeo-Christian tradition, it can’t resist retelling the tale of Eden and the fall from grace, even if Judeo-Christianity becomes that fall from grace. In this When-God-Was-a-Woman version, women were better than men in all kinds of ways you already know about, and when women ruled, everything was peachy.
Of course, there were critiques of this all along—the feminist art magazine Heresies put Mount Saint Helens on the cover of its nature issue as if to say that if we’re like nature, she’s not delicate, sweet, and passive. And later on, the notion came to prevail that hunter-gatherer life, with all its pantheistic anarchy and low levels of labor, was paradise, and that, in comparison, even matriarchal agriculture seemed like earning your bread by the sweat of your brow, and how fun was that? By that point in the late eighties/early nineties conversation, gender was seen as constructed, so that male and female were only points on a social spectrum, like straight and queer, with a lot of range in between, rather than essential truths of human nature. And of course race entered the picture—which makes me think of environmental justice leader Carl Anthony’s great question, “Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of color?”
But I was looking through the lens of landscape photography mostly in those days, and what I saw was this, as I wrote in the mid-1990s:
Through the mid-1980s, it seemed possible to propose a relationship between gender and landscape ideology. While many of the men were taking pictures premised on an irreconcilable schism between nature and culture (or at least emphasizing the occasions where culture violated nature), a lot of women were making images of a bodily and spiritual communion with landscape/nature, one which didn’t respect nature and culture as useful categories (a radical departure in the West, whose federal land policies and
conservation movements have both been based on belief in a pristine, uninhabited land distinct from civilization). Even compositionally, the genders seemed distinct, with the women’s work abandoning the sweeping prospect for more intimate and enclosed scenes.
I think that much of the critique of wilderness as the only nature, as a place apart, came from feminism; but postulating gender as an absolute category just erected another Berlin Wall, while so many were coming down. Since then, things have changed in photography—and, of course, once you broaden your gaze, a lot of other things sneak in.
2
Portraying landscape as masculine is, so to speak, just as natural as portraying it as feminine, as Jane Tompkins points out in her book West of Everything:
Men may dominate or simply ignore women in Westerns, they may break horses and drive cattle, kill game and kick dogs and beat one another into a pulp, but they never lord it over nature. Nature is the one transcendent thing, the one thing larger than man (and it is constantly portrayed as immense), the ideal toward which human nature strives. Not imitateo Christi but imitatio naturae. What is imitated is a physical thing, not a spiritual ideal; a solid state of being, not a process of becoming; a material entity, not a person; a condition of object-hood, not a form of consciousness. The landscape’s final invitation—merger—promises complete materialization. Meanwhile, the qualities that nature implicitly possesses—power, endurance, rugged majesty—are the ones that men desire while they live. And so men imitate the land in Westerns.
3
So essentialist constructions of gender and nature are misleading maps. But there are some places in the territory of the imagination where feminism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, and environmental critique overlap, and that is still valuable. As I wrote in “Elements of a New Landscape,”
Here the word landscape itself becomes problematic: landscape describes the natural world as an aesthetic phenomenon, a department of visual representation: a landscape is scenery, scenery is stage-decoration, and stage decorations are static backdrops for a drama that is human. The odalisque and the pleasure ground are acted upon rather than actors, sites for the imposition rather than generation of meaning, and both are positioned for consumption by the viewer within works of art that are themselves consumable properties. As a social movement with specific social goals, feminism sought to acquire rights and representation for women as other social justice movements before it had sought them for hitherto marginalized classes, religions, and races of men; as an analysis of entrenched structures of belief, feminism reached far deeper to disrupt the binary relationships around which the culture organized itself. The subject/object relations of modern art and science I’ve been trying to describe align a number of beliefs: the gap between subject and object, observer and observed, creator and creation; the essential immateriality of mind and mindlessness of matter; and the association of men with energy, form, mind, and women with substance, nature and earth.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared only a year apart, in 1962 and 1963—and we could easily switch the titles, to the Silent Feminine and The Chemical Mystique. Feminist, environmental, and postmodern theories have sometimes converged, at least in some basic ideas about the inadequacies of dualistic and binary descriptions of the world; the interdependences of a world better imagined as networks and webs of interconnected processes than as a collection of discrete objects; the value of diversity, whether cultural or biological; the intricate interpenetrations of mind and body, individual and environment. The worldview that emerges is less about discrete objects and more about interwoven processes.
Another way to put their commonality is in an emphasis on place: literal place for environmentalism, the location from which one can speak for feminism and postmodernism. By grounding voice, such thinking deconstructs authoritative versions, voices, histories; by denying the possibility of a voice that is nowhere, voices begin to arise everywhere, and the hitherto silenced speak. Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones—the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.
4
What’s interesting about Tompkins is that she makes it clear that no matter which way the nature/culture construct is genderized, men come out ahead—in the Western, nature is not the chaos that needs to be subdued but the sublimity to which we must submit, and women are just the schoolmarms and parasol-toters who, like Aunt Sally in Huckleberry Finn, are out to civilize the hero, giving him grounds to flee farther into the landscape. And really, in practical terms, this ability to flee deep into the landscape as John Muir did has been much more available to men than to women, and it’s this practical stuff that interests me most.
Even in that fabulous Inuit movie this summer, The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat), it’s clear that hunters often get to roam farther and more often than gatherers, but it’s as though they move through two different landscapes, noting different things, and perhaps the gatherers know less terrain with greater depth and intensity. In the book The Geography of Childhood, Stephen Trimble writes,
Once children reach adolescence, American girls typically never catch up to boys in spatial competence (perceptions of the relationships of objects that determine our understanding of place, as tested by working with models and maps). Remember, though, that we build all our cultural biases into experimental design; in Eskimo culture, both girls and boys accompany their fathers on extensive hunting trips, and both sexes perform equally well on spatial tests. Roger Hart studied what he called “the geography of childhood” in a small New England town in the early 1970s. He found that boys were allowed to range freely more than twice as far away from home as girls in all grades. In fourth grade, as children took on their first jobs, the boys delivered papers and mowed lawns, learning the lay of the town; girls hired out as babysitters. Boys broke their parents’ rules about boundaries more than girls. . . . Hart and his co-researcher Susan Saegert summarize the depressing and inevitable result of such control of girls: “Not only is environmental exploration and freedom denied to them, but also their confidence and ability to cope with environmental matters are likely to be undermined.”
So my question nowadays is not what gender is the landscape but what gender gets to go out into the landscape.
The Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko, who has written a great many more lyrical and spiritual things about landscape, declares, “Women seldom discuss our wariness or the precautions we take after dark. . . . We take for granted that we are targeted as easy prey by muggers, rapists, and serial killers. We try to avoid going anywhere alone after dark. . . . I used to assume that most men were aware of this fact of women’s lives, but I was wrong. They may notice our reluctance to drive at night to the convenience store. . . . but it is difficult for me to admit that we women live our entire lives in a combat zone.”
In my book Wanderlust, I asserted:
Women have been enthusiastic participants in pilgrimages, walking clubs, parades, processions and revolutions, in part because in an already defined activity their presence is less likely to be read as sexual invitation, in part because companions have been women’s best guarantee of public safety. In revolutions the importance of public issues seems to set aside private matters temporarily, and women have found great freedom during them (and some revolutionaries, such as Emma Goldman, have made sexuality one of the fronts on which they sought freedom). But walking alone also has enormous spiritual, cultural, and political resonance. It has been a major part of meditation, prayer, and religious exploration. It has
been a mode of contemplation and composition from Aristotle’s peripatetics to the roaming poets of New York and Paris. It has supplied writers, artists, political theorists and others with the encounters and experiences that inspired their work, as well as the space in which to imagine it, and it is impossible to know what would have become of many of the great male minds had they been unable to move at will through the world. Picture Aristotle confined to the house, Muir in full skirts. Even in times when women could walk by day, the night—the melancholic, poetic, intoxicating carnival of city nights—was likely to be off limits to them, unless they had become “women of the night.” If walking is a primary cultural act and a crucial way of being in the world, those who have been unable to walk out as far as their feet would take them have been denied not merely exercise or recreation but a vast portion of their humanity. Virginia Woolf’s famous A Room of One’s Own is often recalled as though it were literally a plea for women to have home offices, but it in fact deals with economics, education, and access to public space as equally necessary to making art. To prove her point, she invents the blighted life of Shakespeare’s equally talented sister, and asks of this Judith Shakespeare, “Could she even get her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?”
The answer is clear, and its contemporary American corollary is, “Could she go backpacking by herself in the Rockies or roam Central Park without spending most of her time thinking about safety?” I think it’s important to remember not only that every designed landscape is a place that expresses its maker’s imagination but also that the best measure of its success is how it invites, inspires, and liberates the imagination of its visitors. There’s a massive history of writers, poets, musicians, philosophers, physicists working out their ideas while walking, and so making places to walk is making places to dream, imagine, and create, a relation to the shaping of others that is perhaps more direct than any other medium. Virginia Woolf thought up her novel To the Lighthouse “in a great, involuntary rush” while walking around Tavistock Square.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 31
