Shifting the ground: Four American women writers' revisions of nature, gender and race

My dissertation examines the relationship between cultural conceptions of nature and gendered, racial and national identities. While Americans have historically defined themselves in terms of their conquest of the "virgin land," this identification has often proven disastrous to those peoples, such as women, Native Americans and African-Americans, who were regarded as nature incarnate, part of the ground upon which the founding fathers would erect the nation. I argue that the writings of Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Leslie Marmon Silko incorporate alternative conceptions of nature from highly diverse popular and indigenous traditions, such as sentimentalism, Voodoo, African-American animism and Laguna Pueblo story cycles, in order to revise the dominant culture's denigration of women and native peoples. In rewriting nature, these writers create more reciprocal formal relations between knower, words and world, as well as more complex and fluid conceptions of gender and race. These revisions shift the ground of national identity, and offer us a more richly comprehensive mapping of "America."; Chapter One argues that Emily Dickinson redeploys the sentimental identification of women and nature in order to denaturalize Victorian separate spheres gender ideology. Chapter Two examines Zora Neale Hurston's revisions of the colonial representation of black women as animals. In Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston suggests that Afro-Caribbean Voodoo spirituality offers black women a counter image of nature as a cyborgian interpenetration of opposites. Chapter Three argues that the protagonist of Alice Walker's Meridian wields visions of animistic collectivity against the racial divisions of the segregated South. Chapter Four traces Leslie Marmon Silko's use of Laguna Pueblo story tradition in Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead to reframe the history of the conquest of America as a "story" war between opposing Native American and European conceptions of nature.