The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction by Louise H. Westling (review)

106Rocky Mountain Review Byron's wife, Annabella Milbanke, took the opposite approach and endeavored to "forge a better Byron" (72), as Soderholm notes. While critiquing the fetishistic preoccupation some of Byron's readers developed for him (like Lamb) through poems such as "The Byromania" and writing "salvational poetry" designed to turn Byron away from his fans and toward her, Milbanke's plan only exacerbated Byron's rebellious side. Teresa Guiccioli, Byron's lover from 1819 to 1824, had a strong influence on Byron's work through editing and copying, but her greatest shaping force on his image came after he had died. By holding séances "with" Byron and allowing "him" to speak through her automatic writing, Guiccioli "pioneered the first biographical transfiguration of Byron" and "raised the stakes of Byromania" (12) as "she forged one of the Byron legend's most occult textual fantasies" (105). Similarly, Marguerite Blessington also engaged in a posthumous construction of Byronic imagery by publishing her version of conversations she had with Byron (while he was still living, of course). "As an aspiring writer, Blessington read Byron like a book, but this book was the one she was writing ," Soderholm observes. While trying to project her self into Byron's world, he adds, Blessington produced "an alternative glossy and grainy portrait of both the interviewer and the interviewed, a play of reflections and refractions that makes it difficult to tell who was the subject of whom" (137). Soderholm contends that "Reconstructing contemporary receptions and reproductions of Byron's works is a good way to explore the emergence of a mode of literary fame, a contest of englamoured images in which the fanciful and the real are lost in the veils of soulmaking" (6). This contention is, in fact, realized here in a study that will clearly make a solid contribution to biographical theory, Byron scholarship, and scholarship on the women writers related to him. SCOTT SIMPKINS University ofNorth Texas LOUISE H. WESTLING. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.211 p. Otating her desire to practice the sort of "deep history" outlined in Max Oelschlaeger's The Idea of Wilderness (1991), Louise H. Westling intends with her latest book "to unravel the strange combination of eroticism and misogyny that has accompanied men's attitudes toward landscape and nature for thousands of years" (5). If she does not altogether disentangle the strands of this complicated cultural cloth, Westling nevertheless identifies and ably discusses many of the significant literary threads involved, from ancient Sumerian hymns to Inanna and the Epic of Gilgamesh to modern Book Reviews107 American works by Hemingway, Faulkner, Cather, Welty, and Erdrich, with occasional stops along the way to consider Emerson, Thoreau, and a handful of other American writers. Although the bulk of her analysis concerns American texts not yet a century old, Westling situates their cultural origins far back and away, in the Indo-European matriarchies of prehistory, where countless human female figurines have been found by archaeologists to accompany those of animals and plants in a wide array of artifacts apparently celebrating, without separating , cycles of human and nonhuman fertility. Touching briefly on the work of Marija Gimbutas, Gerda Lerner, and Paul Shepard, Westling sketches the facts of pastoral and patriarchal displacement of these early goddess cultures and the subsequent spread of ambivalence (at best) and antagonism (at worst) toward that ancient, intimate association of women and nonhuman nature. Both the association and the ambivalence, Westling argues, have appeared time and again in Western literary texts. Even the earliest Sumerian poetry depicts "an uneasy coexistence of competing symbolic forces" in the agricultural goddess Inanna's marriage to the pastoral figure of Dumuzi (15), and, soon after, the much less equivocal destruction of all that the goddess represents by Gilgamesh, whose heroic identity actually requires such domineering display of power ( 19). Fast-forward through several centuries and across an ocean, and one finds remarkably similar attitudes toward a feminized nature in classic American historical and literary heroes. These Westling also sees as acting out a post-colonial "habit of gendering the landscape as female and then excusing their mistreatment of it by...