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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Duquesne University: Digital Commons Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 2014 Women and the American Wilderness: Responses to Landscape and Myth Gina Bessetti-Reyes Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Bessetti-Reyes, G. (2014). Women and the American Wilderness: Responses to Landscape and Myth (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/308 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WOMEN AND THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS: RESPONSES TO LANDSCAPE AND MYTH A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Gina Marie Bessetti-Reyes May 2014 Copyright by Gina Marie Bessetti-Reyes 2014 WOMEN AND THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS: RESPONSES TO LANDSCAPE AND MYTH By Gina Marie Bessetti-Reyes Approved March 10, 2014 ________________________________ ________________________________ Thomas Kinnahan, Ph.D. Linda Kinnahan, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English Professor of English (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ________________________________ Kathy Glass, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ James Swindal, Ph.D. Dr. Greg Barnhisel, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate Chair, English Department School of Liberal Arts Associate Professor of English Professor of Philosophy iii ABSTRACT WOMEN AND THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS: RESPONSES TO LANDSCAPE AND MYTH By Gina Marie Bessetti-Reyes May 2014 Dissertation supervised by Thomas Kinnahan, Ph.D. “Women and the American Wilderness” explores three, middle to upper-class white women's responses to wilderness from texts published between 1823 and 1939. Through an exploration of James Fenimore Cooper's heroine Elizabeth Temple in the novel The Pioneers (1823), Isabella Bird's published letters entitled A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1873), and Muriel Rukeyser's reaction to the Gauley Bridge Tragedy of the 1930s in her book of poems The Book of the Dead (1939), I show that women's responses to the American wilderness not only included a reaction to the physical terrain but also to the developing or established masculine myth of the American wilderness and concept of Manifest Destiny. In chapter one of my study, I show that Elizabeth Temple counters the developing masculine myth of the wilderness through her active engagement with the outdoors and challenges the passive, home- bound femininity being espoused in the 1820s. Despite her challenge to hegemonic gender norms, however, she does not challenge the established patriarchal power hierarchy but utilizes her class iv privilege within it to gain her own desires, thereby often reinforcing the racism and classism of her time. As I argue in chapter two, the real life Isabella Bird had to carefully negotiate between her own desires for wilderness adventure and socially-sanctioned standards of femininity. In order to maintain a respectable front, Bird capitalized on doctor-prescribed travel as her mode of escape from a home-bound life, and her careful self-representation and depictions of others along her route reinforces her feminine respectability as she climbs a mountain, takes long, solitary horseback riding excursions, and embraces solitude. Yet in her text Bird also does not challenge the masculine paradigm of the wilderness myth but uses her femininity to protect her character and justify her wilderness travels, thereby garnering the freedom associated with the wilderness for herself. As I argue in chapter three, however, Muriel Rukeyser's depiction of the historical American wilderness undermines the masculine myth by highlighting the role of the “other” in America's development. I also show how her text links the historical racism and classism undergirding the myth of the wilderness and concept of Manifest Destiny to the exploitation of lower-class workers, especially migrant African-American workers, who died from work- induced silicosis at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, during the 1930s. Together, Cooper's novel, Bird's letters, and Rukeyser's sequence of poems highlight the complexities that race, class, and gender bring to women's reaction to wilderness and help us to begin to explore the multi-layered responses that women had to the American wilderness and wilderness myth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. v DEDICATION To my husband, Roberto Reyes, Jr., and to my parents, the people I love most in this life and without whose constant love and support this dissertation may not have been written. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee for the time that they spent carefully reading, discussing, and responding to my work. I would also like to thank the English Department for the gift of my education, including the privilege to teach for many years as I pursued my M.A. and Ph.D. I am also indebted to my parents, who instilled in me a strong work ethic necessary for independent study, and to my husband, whose prayers and confidence in my abilities gave me the strength I needed to continue in my work during the lonely times. Finally, last but not least, I would like to thank to my fellow Ph.D. candidate and friend Rebecca Cepek, who willingly shared in both my misery and triumphs throughout the dissertation process and spent countless hours working alongside me at Starbucks. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract...........................................................................................................................................iv Dedication.......................................................................................................................................vi Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................vii Introduction.....................................................................................................................................ix Chapter 1: “James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers: Elizabeth Temple as Ideal Woman of the American Wilderness”...............................................................1 Chapter 2: “'Travellers are privileged to do the most improper things with perfect propriety, that is one charm of travelling.': Isabella Bird: Rocky Mountain Traveler, Mountaineer, Adventurer, Lady”......................................69 Chapter 3: “'There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost': Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead: Uncovering and Recovering History in the American Wilderness”.....................................................139 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................217 Works Cited.................................................................................................................................228 viii Women and the American Wilderness: An Introduction Since the beginning of European exploration of the New World, the wilderness has maintained a stronghold on the imagination so that the wilderness eventually became and has maintained its status as a defining feature of America’s nationhood. The real and imagined American wilderness has also birthed and shaped some of America’s most interesting characters and real-life adventurers, such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Natty Bumppo, Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Henry David Thoreau, and John Wesley Powell, among others. Although a few women connected to wilderness are well known, like Sacajawea for her role in Lewis and Clark's expedition, Pocahontas for her connection to John Smith, or Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley for their exploits in the West, when one thinks of the trapper, the sojourner, and the adventurer of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rarely does a woman come to mind because few individual women, real or imaginary, are associated with the wilderness, west, and frontier in American history or popular and literary culture. Women in general are too often overlooked in historical studies, leaving many unanswered questions about women's specific roles and everyday lives in the American wilderness, such as how women fared with their families when they traveled westward to claim land in the 1800s, what influence they had in the changing landscape or attitudes toward wilderness from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, or how their identities were influenced by their interactions with the land. The general question, therefore, of how women responded to wilderness prompted this study, in which I explore women's responses to the American wilderness in James Fenimore Cooper's 1823 The Pioneers, Isabella Bird's 1879 A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, and Muriel Rukeyser's 1938 The Book of the Dead. These texts highlight differing responses to both the physical landscape and a growing or established masculine myth of the wilderness, ix deepening our understanding of the role of the American wilderness and wilderness myth in the creation of women’s

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