SOURCE: Blair, Andrea. “Landscape in Drag: The Paradox of Feminine Space in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.” In The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment, edited by Steven Rosendale, pp. 111-30. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Blair discusses the metaphor of land-as-woman, offers a theoretical foundation for a balanced exploration of gendered landscape representation, and tests her new approach by applying it to Susan Warner's 1850 novel The Wide, Wide World.

Since the 1970s, the feminization of space has piqued the interest of geographers, feminists, and ecocritics alike. The essentializing link between women and the environment has become either a union to esteem—as some early ecofeminists affirmed—or to vilify. Recently, the ecocritical treatment of gender and the environment has been dominated by thinkers who rigorously condemn any determinist bind between women and the natural world. These writers have...