Women and Nature in Modern Fiction

Author(s): Annis Pratt

Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 476-490
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207443
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WOMEN AND NATURE IN
MODERN FICTION

Annis Pratt

A considerable portion of mythology, religion, and literature is de-

voted to the quest of the youthful self for identity, an adventure often
formalized into a ritual which the individual undergoes in order to be
initiated into the mysteries of adulthood. Thus the young American
Indian fasts in the desert to await the manifestation of his animal self
and in Christianitythere is the parallel practice of retreat before con-
firmation and of fasting and prayer before the novitiate. In literature
the quest for self is less often consciously articulated as such until an
epiphanic vision heralding the advent of selfhood springs upon the
individualin an unexpected moment and in an unsought manifestation:

Suddenin a shaftof sunlight

Evenwhilethe dustmoves
Thererisesthe hiddenlaughter
Of childrenin the foliage
Quicknow, here,now, always-
Ridiculousthe wastesadtime
Stretchingbeforeandafter.'

The first vision most often occurs in a natural setting and is ac-
companied by a feeling of ecstasy, the idyllic aspect of the "green
world"with its budding trees and flowers apparentlyexpressingthe first
sensual blossoming of the psyche. Although such epiphanies are often
first apprehended in childhood, they recur on and off during mature

1T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt,

1963), p. 181.

XIII, 4 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

life as one of those sensations of "somethingfar more deeply interfused"
celebrated by Wordsworth.
Some who have analyzed the quest for self have assumed that there
is a significant difference between the naturistic epiphanies that burst
upon the heroine and the hero. The adolescent girl, writes Simone de
Beauvoir, "will devote a special love to Nature: still more than the
adolescent boy, she worships it. Unconquered, inhuman, Nature sub-
sumes most clearly the totality of what exists. The adolescent girl has
not yet acquiredfor her use any portion of the universal: hence it is her
kingdom as a whole; when she takes possession of it, she also proudly
takes possession of herself."2The quest of the hero, in contrast, is de-
scribed by Joseph Campbell as a "road of trials" or initiatory adven-
tures that consummate in the simultaneous discovery of woman and
earth: "Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the
totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know.
.. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure."3
To Beauvoir's adolescent girl, nature is total existence; to Camp-
bell's hero, woman is a container of truth. The hero comes to "know"
woman and through her the natural world, which the heroine already
possesses as an extension of herself. Campbell's hero, perceiving this
feminine phenomenon of coextension with nature, uses the woman as
a portal through which the green world is perceived. The heroine, in
contrast, worships nature as something (to one side of it) not separate
from her first sexual experiences. If to the hero, then, nature and
woman are corollary goals, the contained and the container, to the
heroine nature is "her kingdom as a whole," a phenomenon which will
be reflected in women's writing. "Nature is one of the realms [women
writers] have most lovingly explored," continues Beauvoir; "for the
young girl, for the woman who has not fully abdicated, nature repre-
sents what woman herself representsfor man: herself and her negation,
a kingdom and a place of exile; the whole in the guise of the other.
It is when she speaks of moors and gardens that the woman novelist will
reveal her experience and her dreams to us most initimately."4
One way of deciding whether Beauvoir's and Campbell's analyses
of heroine and hero are shallow stereotypes or deeper archetypal re-
alities is to compare attitudestowardsnature in female and male fiction,

2 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 362.
3 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Prince-
ton Univ. Press, 1949), p. 116.
4 Beauvoir, pp. 710-11.

MODERN FICTION 1 477

particularlyin the female and male Bildungsroman.Would we find that
the relationship between heroine-hero-natureand hero-heroine-nature
conforms to that suggested? The question is crucial to the determina-
tion of whether there is a "myth of the heroine" as descriptive of the
development of the human psyche as the "myth of the hero," hitherto
taken as definitive.

Sarah Ore Jewett's "A White Heron" (1896) and James Joyce's
epiphanic episode in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
describenaturisticvisions in the developmentof a nine-year-oldheroine
and a sixteen-year-oldhero, and although Jewett's piece is not a fully
developed novel there are a number of points which afford a striking
comparison to the episode in Joyce. In both there are a girl, a boy,
nature represented in a real or figurative water bird; in each case the
youthful self has turned aside from the normal expectations of parents
and peers in quest of a special identity. The epiphanic moment for both
Sylvia and Stephen is accompanied by a view of the ocean, a sense of
soaring aloft, an apparition of a hawk or hawks, and an identification
with the vehicle of the vision-bird and bird-girl-with a passage
through that identity to a fuller understandingof the self.
Sylvia meets a young stranger, an ornithologist, while she is
driving her cow home through the Maine woods. He is determined to
find, shoot, and stuff a great white heron that he believes to be in the
locality. Sylvia accompanies him on his quest, and although she "could
not understandwhy he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much
... [she] still watched the young man with loving admiration. She had
never seen anybody so charming and delightful; the woman's heart,
asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love. Some
premonition of that great power stirred and swayed these young
foresters who traversed the solemn woodlands with soft-footed silent
care."5 The advent of the Prince Charming and his stirring of the
heroine's latent femininity would itself be the moment of epiphany in
the usual fairy tale or narrative. The lyric description of Richard's first
meeting with Lucy in Meredith'sThe Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859)
provides a typical example; the heroine is perceived by a weir among
lilies: "Meadow-sweethung from the banks thick with weed and trail-
ing bramble, and there also hung a daughter of Earth .. . stiller and

5Sarah Ore Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1956), p. 166.

478 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

stiller grew Nature, as at the meeting of two electric clouds."6 The
heroine is coextensive with the meadow-sweet: like the lilies she
"sways";she is incipiently pluckable. The normal mammalian expecta-
tion is a bit of coyness before consummation;the irony in Jewett's story
exists in the tension between this expectation and what actually
happens.
Although fascinated by the stirring of her womanhood, Sylvia is
reluctant to show the young strangerwhere the heron nests: she differ-
entiates between boy and bird, perceiving him and nature as separate
aspects of her psyche which in some way endanger each other. She
experiences her epiphany, a dazzling dawn vision of hawks, sun, heron,
and ocean, when she climbs an enormous pine tree to look for the
heron's nest. The bird, an arrow of potency and grace, could have been
perceived as a portent to point her back to the stranger. When the
heroine of an Arapaho Indian legend follows a porcupine up a tree,
Campbell informs us, the porcupine turns into "a heavenly youth ...
[who] had seduced her to his supernaturalhome,"7and the climb to the
sky for such heroines of mythology as Psyche was similarly rewarded
by the gift of "immortallove."
Jewett reminds us as she describes Sylvia standing all scratched
and torn before the stranger that she "could have served and followed
him and loved him as a dog loves,"8but the little heroine is not inter-
ested: the boy with his gun is too much like a "red faced boy" who
tormented her previously for her to follow him, and she does not
want a vehicle out of her green world. To her a heron is a heron, valu-
able for its heronness, a vehicle only of its own particularityand what
she perceives as the freedom of self in nature in contrast to canine
servitude. One suspects that if Sylvia had been the princess of the fairy
tale in which a toad turned into a handsome prince, she would have
been disappointed, preferringthe toad.
Stephen Dedalus, in contrast to Sylvia, is a sacramentallyminded
young man who sees outward things as vehicles of inward states. His
attitude towards nature is thus of a different quality than hers: he is
not so much finding a freedom or refuge in it as plumbing it for usable
aesthetic images. Like Sylvia, he sees a hawk, but associates him with
his Dedalian ancestor as a portent of his own identity. If a symbol is

6
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (New York: Random
House, 1950), pp. 148-49.
7 Campbell, pp. 53-55.
8
Jewett, p. 171.

MODERN FICTION 1 479

a metaphor one half of which is concrete and the other half of which
indicates something abstract,Stephen'shawk is nearly all symbol while
Sylvia's is nearly all hawk. After his vision of the hawk-ancestor
Stephen, like Sylvia, feels "alone and young and willful and wild-
hearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters,"9but the
climax of his epiphany comes not within his solitary naturism but
through the mediation of a female apparition not unlike Meredith's
Lucy.
Rising like an Irish Aphrodite out of the waters, "pure"but with
a green "sign" of incipient sensuality upon her thigh (seaweed), the
girl stirs the hero's masculinity and provides the catalyst for his ecstatic
moment of self-discovery. Her physical concreteness is taken not for
its own sake but as portent of something besides herself. Where Sylvia's
naturistic epiphany led her to a heightened perception of existence,
Stephen perceives natural objects as vehicles for conceiving an essence.
In Jewett and Joyce, then, we are dealing with two differenthabits
of mind with regard to nature. Where Sylvia turns from the young
stranger to nature, Stephen turns through nature-and-girlto a vision
of something else, of a metaphysical aesthetic, albeit based upon
quidditas or particularity. That neither of them have any more to do
with the human beings who led them to their epiphanies is perhaps
significant: boy and bird-girl are, respectively, nothing more than spur
and vehicle for the young self in quest of identity.
We are left from this comparison with a number of questions con-
cerning epiphanic naturism in the development of the hero and of the
heroine. In the male Bildungsroman,is the typical pattern for the hero
to know and for the heroine to be known? Are the heroes characterized
by what Beauvoir described as "transcendence,"a "living pour-soi," a
fulfilling of "the need to transcend . . . to engage in freely chosen
projects" in contrast to the heroines' lot of "immanence," a "living
en-soi" of the "brutishlife of subjection to given conditions"?10If this
were the case, one might expect that in the male genre the hero's at-
titude toward nature might parallel that of Stephen Dedalus, but do
the heroines of the female genre follow a pattern comparable to
Sylvia's? These questions can only be answered by an analysis of
comparable examples from the male and female Bildungsroman.

9 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man (New York:
Viking, 1959), p. 171.
10Beauvoir, pp. xxix and 63, translator's note.

480 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

 May Sinclair'sMary Olivier, a Life (1919) and D.H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers (1911) are both narrativesof how young artistsemerge
from intensely Oedipal family situations and as Kiinstlerromansare not
unlike Joyce's Portrait. Turning in adolescence from the web of mascu-
line values enmeshing her, Mary begins to prefer nature to people: "By
the gate of the field her sudden, secret happiness came to her. She could
never tell when it was coming, nor what it would come from. It had
something to do with the trees standing up in the golden white light.
It had come before with a certain sharp white light flooding the fields,
flooding the room."" These moments of naturistic epiphany bring her,
as she matures, to an intellectual belief in pantheism which frees her
from the patriarchalChristianityof her family and enables her to con-
front them from a perilous stance of self-determination. Her idea of
a suitable lover is one who would have the body of various men whom
she has admired but "the soul of Shelley and the mind of Spinoza and
Immanuel Kant."'2Her intellectual convictions, built upon her earlier
naturistic ecstasies, are too much however even for those suitors who
pretend to admire them.
It is not surprisingthat Mary spends the years before her fortieth
birthday struggling between her desire for self-determination and the
maze of roles which her family and suitors expect her to conform to.
What is surprisingis that when she finally meets the Spinoza-minded
lover, she rejects him after a period of lovemaking and mutual devotion
in favor of the solitary life. She is more concerned with the "reality"
of her own freely chosen writing life than with "losing Richard," more
devoted to the psychic development initiated in moments of adolescent
naturism than risking this freedom in a marriage. Like Sylvia, Mary
turns away from her lover and towards a natural "reality"that she finds
less dangerous to her selfhood than love.
The natural world is as revelatory to Paul Morel as it is to Mary
Olivier, and he is equally ambivalent as to what extent and in what
manner he wishes to share it with the opposite sex. Paul makes himself
a vehicle for Miriam Leiver's naturism, which in turn initiates their
relationship. He cannot reach out for her sensually, however, because
he is all tied up with his mother; Miriam, correspondingly, is of the
opinion that marriage to Paul would constitute "self-sacrifice" and
holds back from it. The short-circuiting of a healthy relationship re-

l May Sinclair, Mary Olivier, A Life (New York: MacMillan, 1919),

p. 93.
12Ibid., p. 226.

MODERN FICTION | 481

suits, in Lawrence's understanding, in an unnaturally independent
naturism on the part of the heroine: "To her, flowers appealed with
such strength she felt she must make them part of herself. When she
bent and breathed a flower, it was as if she and the flower were loving
each other. Paul hated her for it. There seemed a sort of exposure about
the action, something too intimate."13
Paul finds Miriam's naturism as distasteful as her earlier mysti-
cism, and he is particularlyput off by the enclosed relationshipbetween
girl and flower which puts him on the outside. The male author seems
to be looking at a female phenomenon and disapprovingof it: Jewett's
mature heroines, Mrs. Todd and "poor Joanna" of The Country of the
Pointed Firs, have a similarlyintimate communicationwith herbs, trees,
and animals without incurring their author's disapproval. Pointing to
nothing beyond themselves, the natural objects comfort the women
after the tribulationsof love. To the male hero, in contrast, the heroine
must be submissive; therefore her appreciation of nature, a force em-
anating from the center of her own psyche, is devalued. At one point in
Sons and Lovers, Paul's other lover, Clara, is walking along a beach
after a swim. Watching from a distance (he cannot swim), Paul re-
marks, "Whatis she, after all? ... Here's the seacoast morning, big and
permanent and beautiful; there is she, fretting, always unsatisfied, and
temporary as a bubble of foam. What does she mean to me, after all?
She represents something, like a bubble of foam represents the sea.
But what is she? It's not her I care for!"14
Clara is not a "she" but an "it" to Paul, a vehicle and not an
existence in and of herself. "These girls," William York Tindall once
remarked of Joyce's women, "at once less than girls and more, seem
abstractions,allegorical personifications,or images. Woman, generally
an 'image' to Stephen, also appears in his thoughts as 'the figure of
woman' as it appears in liturgy. By this figure the foolish boy does not
mean woman's figure but woman as figure or symbol."15Having re-
duced Clara to a vaguely representativebubble, Paul leaves her behind
(after literally murdering his mother) to venture towards the city in
quest of an identity which has had as its preliminaryphase a trial-by-
woman. In other classic Bildungsromans,as in Joyce and Lawrence, the
heroes pass through a similar series of relationships with women who

13 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (New York:

Viking, 1958), p. 142.
14Ibid., p. 358.
16 William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (New York:
Noonday, 1959), p. 92.

482 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

must be subdued,escaped, or turnedinto images before the hero's
developmentcanbe completed.Thisis the case,for example,in Samuel
Butler'sThe Way of All Flesh (1903) and in SomersetMaugham's
Of Human Bondage (1915). In Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard
Feverelthe trial-by-woman takeson the qualityof an ultimateordeal,
with the hero left afterLucy'sdeath incapableof anythingbeyond a
"strivingto imageher on his brain."
If thepagesof themaleBildungsroman arelitteredwiththe bodies
of women passed throughin the hero's quest for identity,there are
heroinesenough in the female genre who perceivelove and men as
phasesin theirquestsfor self-determination andless importantto them
than the "reality"of nature.Is there,then, an adherenceto the Beau-
voirian patternin novels of female developmentas there is to the
Campbellarchetypein the male?Rememberingthat the development
of a woman'sidentitytakes many moreyears than that of the male,
since she can only begin to exist after comingto termswith the bio-
logical "immanence"of sexual maturity,let us considerwhetherthe
dichotomyremainsas markedin the female as in the male Bildungs-
roman.
One of the mostfully developedexamplesof a femininenaturism
is Ellen Glasgow's"vehicleof liberation"(her term), BarrenGround
(1925). ThereDorindaOakley'ssexual desirefor Jasonrises simul-
taneouslywith the renewalof a childhoodlove for nature,but when
natureentrapsher in unmarriedpregnancythe landbecomesthreaten-
ing. To this extentGlasgow'sbroomsedgeis similarto Emily Bronti's
WutheringHeightsor to George Eliot's river Floss: a naturalforce
which in its variationsprovidesa corollaryto the developmentof the
charactersand, in its ultimatedestructiveness, recordstheir fate.
It is hardto imagineCatherineEarnshawsolvingher problemsby
replantingthe Heathor MaggieTulliversolvinghersby engineeringa
dam over the Floss, but as Dorindabecomesself-determining, this is
preciselywhatshe does to the broomsedge.Dorinda'sdecisionto apply
new methodsof farmingto the land occursduringa lyricalepiphany,
but it is on the surfacepractical:in farmingshe not only manipulates
the landin orderto becomeeconomicallyindependentbut also "buys"
Jason out in revenge. She is aware of the exploitativeside of her
naturism,however,andquellsit to nurseJasonthroughhis last illness.
At the denouementher relationshipto natureprevailsas the ultimate
realityin her life: "Thespiritof the land was flowinginto her, andher
own spiritstrengthenedand refreshed,was flowingout again toward

MODERN FICTION | 483

life. This was the permanentself, she knew. This was what remained to
her after the years had taken their bloom . . 'put your heart in the
land,' old Matthew had said to her, 'the land is the only thing that will
stay by you.' "16

Should we conclude, then, that nature plays the role in the de-
velopment of the heroine that Beauvoir describes for it in the case of
the adolescent girl, a role of splendid refuge from the self-destructive
lures of masculine expectations? In neither Dorinda's nor Mary
Olivier's case are we dealing with a celibate separatism, it should be
noted, but with heroines who have a healthy taste of sexuality before
they choose solitude. If this type of naturism were limited to women,
we would have to conclude that it plays a differentrole in novels where
heroes, similarly put off by female expectations, light out for the terri-
tory. We are not dealing, however, with absolute sexual categories but
with situations and attitudes more common to the female than to the
male Bildungsroman. Protagonists in both are initiated into naturistic
and sexual ecstasy, the heroine of the female genre being more likely
to view herself as coextensive with the green world and the hero of
the male genre to view his heroine and the green world as coextensive
parts of each other but rightfully subordinate to him. This brings us
full circle, then, to the point where hero and heroine see their sexual
counterparts as opposites, "the other," although the perception of
nature is different. Their situation is most disparate in the fact that
biological and social expectations concerning the sequel to sexual initi-
ation are such for the woman that continued sexual relationship,though
desirable in itself, threatens self-destruction.She is thus more likely to
turn away from the male than the hero from the female because her
very identity is threatened. There are numerous, but probably not as
many, male as female novelists who would have remarked as did Ellen
Glasgow in her memoirs that "If falling in love could be bliss, I dis-
covered, presently, that falling out of love could be blissful tran-
quillity."l7

One cannot fall out of love with everyone, however, and the other
side of "men as trial" occurs for the heroine as for the hero. Although
in "A White Heron," Mary Olivier, and Barren Ground, as in Pilgrim-
age, naturistic ecstasy exists separately from and may preclude sexual

16Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (New York: Doubleday, 1933), p. 524.

17Ellen Glasgow, The Woman Within (New York: Harcourt, 1954), p.
244.

484 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

reciprocity, in other fiction it serves as a prelude or accompaniment to
love, which in turn leads to further stages in the evolution of the female
psyche. "When Gerald died," remarked Ellen Glasgow of her lover,
"I sank into an effortless peace. Lying there, in that golden August
light, I knew, or felt, or beheld, a union deeper than knowledge, deeper
than sense, deeper than vision. Light streamed through me, after
anguish, and for one instant of awareness, if but for that one instant, I
felt pure ecstasy. In a single blinding flash of illumination, I knew
blessedness. I was a part of the spirit that moved in the light and the
wind and the grass."'8An epiphany not unlike the youthful one "in and
out of time," the moment of mature naturistic ecstasy differs in that it
results from the fullness rather than from the advent of sexuality.
In at least one female Bildungsromanthe "spiritthat moved in the
light and the wind and the grass"appears to the heroine as such to con-
duct her towards an earthly lover. In Willa Gather'sO Pioneers! (1913),
Alexandra, like Dorinda, turns from the weak men around her to farm
the land. In her first epiphany "the Genius of the Divide, the Great, free
spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent
to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart
of a man or a woman."19Gatheris doing something quite differentfrom
Jewett, Sinclair, or Glasgow in personifyingthe land itself as a life spirit
that later, after Emil's death, appears as a death spirit, just as for the
hero the goddess always carries the dual potentiality of creation and
destruction: "His white cloak was thrown over his face, and his head
was bent a little forward. His shoulders seemed as strong as the founda-
tions of the world. His right arm, bared from the elbow, was dark and
gleaming, like bronze, and she knew at once that it was the arm of the
mightiest of all lovers."20
All of the elements of the naturistic epiphany are here-dazzling
sunlight, a sense of levitation and of skimming over the earth, and a
mixtureof fear and fascination. Although she ended the original version
of the novel with this vision, Gather changed the final draft so that it
became a psychological crisis leading to Alexandra's acceptance of her
gentle friend Carl as a lover.2'Nature thus becomes an enabling vehicle
bearing the heroine towards sexual fulfillment, the love of Alexandra
and Carl being contained, as it were, in the arms of the vegetal spirit,
18 Ibid.,
p. 166.
19Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton, 1954), p. 65.
20
Ibid., pp. 239-40.
21 See Elizabeth
Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather, A Memoir (Chicago:
Henry Regnery, 1956), p. 61.

MODERN FICTION | 485

the immortal lover. In Gather's "Genius of the Divide" we have the
female equivalent to the "earthGoddess"who plays the role of "matrix
of destiny" and "motherof life" in the myth of the hero, providing him
with rebirth and the elixir of immortalitywhile at the same time threat-
ening him with death or disease.22He is not extolled for his masculinity,
however, in the same way that Gretchen is for her Ewisweiblichkeit in
Goethe's Faust: his primary quality is his naturism and the power that
it representsas the enabling vehicle of the heroine's personality.
Gather's"Genius"is, of course, an expressionof Alexandra'sinner
powers or buried animus: were she an artist rather than a farmer, one
would term him her muse. Campbell has described the apotheosis of
the hero as a moment of recognition that he contains both male and
female principles within his fully realized selfhood, a concept based,
one would gather, on the Jungian theory that "the feminine belongs
to man as his own unconscious feminity . . . the anima," while the
woman's animus, correspondingly, is possessed within her psyche as
her "brother-beloved"or "ghostly lover."23That in her core the human
individual is neither male nor female but androgynous seems implicit
in the passage from Glasgow's memoirs as in Gather's dream-vision.
Through her use of subconscious revery, Virginia Woolfs Voyage
Out (1915) also explores the dynamics of the naturistic and sexual
epiphany: Rachel and Hewet are united within each other's revery in
a heart of light as if they formed a new being that is continuous and
androgynous rather than discontinuous or sexually separate. Woolf
developed naturistic reveries into a continuous stylistic technique in
her later works. In The Waves (1927), for example, she described the
phenomenonof human beings more or less happy to the extent that they
come together, their subconscious minds (seeped in green world mem-
ories) lapping up against each other, always fleetingly, and often ful-
filled only at death. This is not the same dynamic underlying Joyce's
use of the stream of consciousness, it should be noted, since bird-girl,
Molly Bloom, and Anna Livia Plurabelle reinforce a dominant tone of
sexual divisiveness with their fluid countertones. It is not coincidental
that Hewet in The Voyage Out is an articulatefeminist; he is one of the
happy few in twentieth-century fiction who achieve apotheosis by
breaking out of their biological boxes.
This is not to say that the narrative pattern of a quest through

22See Campbell,p. 303.

23 Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation(New York: Pantheon, 1956),
p. 437.

486 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

1
naturism towards a vision of the organic world cycle implemented by
love is unique to female fiction: it provides, for example, the basic
"adventure"for Dylan Thomas' early prose heroes. It is much more
fully developed, however, in the major female novelists, reaching its
fullest expression not only in Richardson and Woolf but also in Doris
Lessing's five-volume Bildungsroman, Children of Violence (1952-
1965). Martha Quest's naturistic epiphanies occur first in childhood
as states of mind in which joy and pain, order and chaos are so mixed
that, experiencing such a moment in adolescence, she consciously re-
jects the labels "ecstasy, illumination":
There was certainlya definitepoint at which the thing began. It was not;
thenit was suddenlyinescapable,and nothingcouldhavefrightenedit away.
Therewas a slow integration,duringwhich she, and the little animals,and
the movinggrasses,and the sun-warmedtrees, and the slopes of shivering
silverymealies, and the great dome of blue light overhead,and the stones
of earth underher feet, became one, shudderingtogetherin a dissolution
of dancingatoms. She felt the riversunder the groundforcing themselves
painfully along her veins, swelling them out in unbearablepressure;her
fleshwas the earth,and sufferedgrowthlike a ferment;and her eyes stared,
fixed like the eye of the sun.... For that moment,while space and time
kneadedher flesh, she knewfutility;that is, whatwas futile in her own idea
of herself and her place in the chaos of matter.24

Lessing's readers will notice here the germ of Professor Watkins' com-
plex naturism to be developed in Briefing for a Descent into Hell
(1971). The epiphany differsfrom Sylvia's in that it contains a negative
as well as a positive side: in this it resembles the sense of underlying
threat in Dorinda's attitudetoward the broomsedge and the deathly side
of Willa Cather's muse. The epiphany on the African veldt does not
always recur in an external setting; its sensations, however, crop up
in Martha's dreams, in moments of intensity and despair as her quest
from marriages and childbirth through divorces and solitude unfolds.
In the last African novel, Landlocked, Martha reaches the center
of her psyche in a love affair with Thomas Stern, coming to "know"at
the same time as she is "known."She describes a room in a shed "built
at the bottom of a large garden"where they make love as "filledwith a
deep forest silence. . . . From this centre she now lived-a loft of
aromaticwood from whose crooked window could be seen only sky and

24Doris Lessing, Martha Quest (New York: New American Library,

1952), p. 13.

MODERN FICTION | 487

the boughs of trees, above a brick floor hissing sweetly from the slow
drippingsand wellings from a hundred growing plants, in a shed whose
wooden walls grew from lawns where the shining arc of a water sprayer
flung rainbows all day long although, being January, it rained most
afternoons."2 In their love Thomas and Martha, like Rachel and
Hewet, feel themselves dissolving into each other, not an immolation
of the self but a passage into something containing it and yet beyond.
Similarly, at the beginning of The Four-Gated City, Martha makes love
with Jack, who reminds her of Thomas, and through him enters the
final phase of her quest through the portals of sexuality: "Sex, heart,
the currentsof the automatic body were one now, together: and above
these, her brain, cool and alert, watching and marking. Body, a surge
like the sea, but the mind above, not yet swung up, absorbed into the
whole....."26 More appreciativethan Paul Morel of her lovers, Martha
is nonetheless involved in a certain instrumentalism,a using of them,
which is, however, reciprocated. Her vision bears no relation to the
"Yes" of Molly Bloom, an essentially resigned, submissive, and im-
manent affirmation. Both Jack and Thomas Stem go mad while
Martha, like Anna of The Golden Notebook and Charles Watkins of
Briefing for a Descent into Hell, undergoes a similar insanity leading
towards a final naturistic epiphany, swept over by "Great forces as im-
personal as thunderor lightning or sunlight or the movement of oceans
being contracted and heaped and rolled in their beds by the moon."27
Sexual and naturistic ecstasy, throughout the history of the twentieth-
century female Bildungsroman,are very often means to each other and
in turn to a visionary naturism that has no precise parallel in male
fiction.

Communion with the authentic self, first achieved by the heroine

in early naturisticepiphanies, becomes a touchstone by which she holds
herself together in the face of destructive roles proffered to her by
society. Models for false selves are constantly being brought forth,
most scathingly in the authors' delineations of alternate female char-
acters playing inauthentic roles and tempting the heroines to do like-
wise. It is interesting that not only Jewett, Cather, and Lessing, but
even George Eliot use canine analogies to describe "normal"courtship

25 Doris Lessing, Landlocked (New York: New American

Library, 1965),
p. 98.
26Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (New York:
Knopf, 1969), p. 59.
27Ibid., pp. 470-71.

488 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

expectations. Desiring only to be human, woman is expected to conduct
herself in a less than human fashion, and thus she turns to nature, which
seems less unnatural,for solace.
In this naturism she does not grow backwards, as it were, to some
childhood nostalgia about fields and flowers: in the novels we have
treated, as well as in Jewett's other fiction and in the passionate
apotheoses of Emily Bronte's Catherine Earnshaw and George Eliot's
Maggie Tulliver, there is an elision from naturism into something that
it contains, a spirit indwelling in the natural object but part of a con-
tinuum extending through and beyond it. The natural object does not,
however, "point" from what is below to some metaphysical "above"
in Joyce's manner; Jewett's pointed firs, for example, indicate less of
an overspiritthan an underspirit,an immanence. Where Beauvoir used
this term to describe "the opposite or negation of transcendence, such
as confinement or restrictionto a narrow round of uncreative and repe-
titious duties,"28the immanence sought by the heroine of the female
Bildungsroman, although an attributeof the biological or vegetal cycle
of existence, carries her through its restrictions towards its opposite,
a transcendence. This "transcendentalnaturism," as I have termed it,
differsfrom transcendentalismin that it tends to be more particularistic
than systematic, more existential than essential. It is less capable of
abstraction than transcendentalisminto a Goethian idealism or prac-
tical scheme of economics like the philosophies of Emerson and
Thoreau.

There are two final problems raised by our research into the at-
tributes of female naturism. First, there is the possibility that we have
come full circle back to the same old set of stereotyped assertions allo-
cating earthiness and personalism to the female and "transcendence"
and abstract thought to the male. I should reiterate that I did not set
out to define the nature of the sexes in any preconceived fashion but to
compare their development in the male and female Bildungsroman:the
categories that I have sketched are not absolute but merely tendencies
in the fiction of a specific historical period.
The second problem is thus the dated nature of the solutions which
many of the heroines take to resolve the dilemma of femininity. If the
publication dates of the female novels treated are examined, it will be
found that they all fall between 1896 and 1927 with the exception of
Children of Violence. Among the earlier group the only instance of

28 See Beauvoir, p. 63, translator's note.

MODERN FICTION 489

sexualreciprocityis in The Voyage Out, where the heroineconven-
iently dies before having to try to live with the hero. The either-or
attitudetowardselfhoodand marriage,the convictionthatone cannot
developfully as a womanin a love relationshipand also developas a
human being, deriveslargely from a specific bio-historicalcontext,
namelythe lack of widespreadand effectivebirthcontrol.The senti-
ment thatindulgingone'ssexualnatureconstitutesself-sacrificeis not
exaggeratedfor a womanwhenthe aftermathof sexualinitiationcon-
sists of an endlessor at best lengthyseriesof childbirthsand miscar-
riages,infantsto raise,corollaryillnesses,dependenceuponmen,waste
of one'sprimeyears,and earlydeath.Maritalcustomsconformto this
biologicalcontextbecauseit is convenientfor economicallypatriarchal
societiesto maintainthe culturallag. ThusevenMaryOlivier,who was
afterall in her fortieswhenshe decidednot to marryRichard,was re-
spondingas does Beauvoirin giving a negativeconnotationto "im-
manence,"definingmarriageas a form of self-immolation.
On her pilgrimagefromman to man, tryingon a seriesof masks
in her questfor a humanisticlife pattern,MarthaQuestbringsus one
phasebeyondseparatismandsuggestsnew possibilities.Evenshe, how-
ever, tends to use men in much the same way the hero uses women:
there is no continuoussexual reciprocity,even though it is desired.
Lessing'sfictionbringsbiologicalsexisminto focusas one amongother
importantsocio-economicfactorswhich eventuallycause Englandto
destroyitself and a new world,possiblybut not inevitablybraver,to
be born. There have been few signs in moder Britishor American
fiction,however,of a worldbeyondsexuallydivisiveselfhood,a world
where men will begin to foster their "feminineconsciousness"and
women their latent transcendenceso that an androgynousand more
fullyhumanlife stylecan emerge.

Universityof Wisconsin

490 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE