Herland/Hisland: Merchant and the Gendering of Space

• In Event: Sex, Race, and Merchant’s Scientific Revolution

Abstract

Paraphrasing the title of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic feminist utopian novel Herland, historian Susan Armitage describes the American West as “Hisland” – a majestic space filled with drama, wealth, adventure and heroic men. My project envisions Hisland more broadly and more fundamentally, exploring the idea that while natural forces have been gendered female, natural spaces have been gendered male (and racialized white). This understanding of natural space complements Carolyn Merchant’s classic work, Reinventing of Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. In this, and other works, Merchant places women and gender at the heart of her analysis. Merchant shows the profound ways that gendering nature female framed a multitude of attitudes and activities, from relations with native peoples to resource extraction. Using American texts, this paper examines the other gendered element in human-nature relations, that of space. One consequence of such gendering appears to be the ways the natural world has been treated, as either a resource to be exploited or a wilderness to be protected. What other ways might the natural world be envisioned if we move beyond these masculine understandings? The texts examined include the captivity narratives of Puritan minister John Williams and Mary Rowlandson, writings by Henry Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston, and the existential nature treks of Chris McCandless and Cheryl Strayed.

Just as Merchant’s work explained the consequences of female natural forces, understanding the creation, perpetuation, and privileging of Hisland in cultural representations, social approval, and public policies help us understand the ways natural spaces have been both exploited and protected, and what the consequences of understanding wild places as male may have for humans and nature.

Author

• Amy Hay, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley