Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (review)

Feminist theorists have devised an array of arguments about Nature, nature, domestication, and women. An especially contested subset of this body of work concerns certain ecofeminists’ attempts to revalue the idea that women are somehow closer than men to the processes and even the logic of the natural world. Stacy Alaimo confronts resistance to this revaluation by analyzing creative work by U.S. women who have looked to Nature as an alternative to social and cultural trammels. Surveying the work of authors as diverse as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Austin, Nella Larsen, Leslie Silko, and Octavia Butler, and of visual artists Barbara Kruger and Ana Mendieta, Alaimo draws attention to texts that “inhabit nature in order to transform it, not only contending with the natures that have been waged against women but writing nature as feminist space” (13). The reason inhabitation, as opposed to domestication, has appealed to gender-conscious authors, Alaimo suggests, is a perception that “this space was not already designated as ‘truly and unequivocally theirs’ and thus was not replete with the domestic values that many women wished to escape” (16).

Chapters that explore imagined inhabitations discuss literary works as well-known as Hope Leslie, Deephaven, Lost Borders, Quicksand, Ceremony, and the Xenogenesis trilogy. Among less canonical work, Alaimo is especially intrigued by Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth and by novels ranging from Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds to Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart and Marian Engel’s erotic anomaly Bear. As these lists indicate, Undomesticated Ground collects and probes an archive diverse enough to support Alaimo’s argument that U.S. women artists, especially the literary sort, have sought for generations to imagine ways in which to embrace rather than “tame” Nature and nature, both within and outside the home. Alaimo concludes with a rich theoretical challenge, which draws on both Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, aimed at those who deem ecofeminism inherently retrogressive. “Feminist theories, politics, and fictions can travel beyond the false dichotomy of rejecting ‘nature’ or valorizing the whole ideological package,” Alaimo asserts, and thus “‘play nature’ with a vengeance by deploying discourses of woman and nature in order to . . . destabilize the nature/culture divide while constructing feminist alliances with postmodern natures” (136).

This vision will be controversial among feminist theorists as to both feasibility and merit. But students of nature writing, women’s literature, and more familiar forms of imaginary domesticity will find rich insights in Undomesticated Ground. It will be interesting to see whether, in future work, Alaimo will go on to scrutinize writers less obviously political (for example, Gene Stratton-Porter, Annie Dillard, and Jon Krakauer) to see if their descriptions of the natural world counter or extend the inhabitations she describes. For now, Alaimo’s thoughtful study alerts scholars to the multiple ways in which certain artists have tried to subvert circumscribed notions of home sweet home.