| This study examines representations of animals in American nature writing, arguing that the progressive environmental messages found there are frequently undermined by gender codes that enforce traditional power hierarchies. At the end of the twentieth century, nonfiction environmental literature is still troubled by heroic subtexts that perpetuate notions of the land as a virgin wilderness to be explored by a lone male. These subtexts shape the ways animals are portrayed by mirroring or enabling the masculinity of the narrator. The land has traditionally been gendered as feminine, and gender-specific roles have been prescribed for men, women, and animals in literature about nature; thus, a truly revisionist view of environmental issues requires subverting gender stereotypes about land, humans, and other animals.;This project explores the contrast between the many animal representations that reinforce gendered conceptions of nature on the one hand, and those that make efforts at gender neutrality on the other in the work of American nature writers, primarily Barry Lopez, Doug Peacock, Susan Zwinger, and Terry Tempest Williams. These authors are compared with major figures from the canon of American fiction and non-fiction, including Melville, Thoreau, Muir, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Leopold. Lopez and Peacock utilize stereotypes to define the animal behavior they witness in ways that affirm their power and masculinity in the wilderness, whereas Zwinger and Williams subvert stereotypes of women and animals by presenting nontraditional views of both nature and women. By acknowledging the agency of nature and animals, some authors support ecological and feminist arguments about relational ways of encountering the world, revealing that as long as nature writers perpetuate the idea that "nature" is a pure, virgin place "out there" and describe encounters with other animals as an affirmation of their masculine prowess, real environmental reform cannot take place. |
