Description

First paragraph:

Can wilderness, Nature, be strongly identified as a place in which individuals disappear, die within, and yet remain, somehow, somewhat impotent? If we look to texts such as Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” and Surfacing, Andrea Barrett’s Servants of the Map, and Julia Leigh’s The Hunter—all texts in which individuals disappear and die within an ostensibly dangerous wilderness—the answer would look to be, yes. For, owing to the fact that we cannot but compare it to aggressive human beings, their culture/civilization, that is, to the truly empowered, in each of these texts Nature is made to seem relatively powerless. Though in none of these texts is aggressive human culture overtly, unambiguously praised, there is a sense in each of them that it works to facilitate the empowerment of their main protagonists. And, given what we see happening to Annie Dillard as she deals with a truly empowered and brutal Nature in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, it may be that empowering Man in these narratives is something most writers are want to do, for fear of what they might otherwise be involving themselves in an encounter with a power they dare not confront—uninhibited maternal power.