ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the cultural function of wilderness as a mythic place broadly within the American imaginary and specifically within postapocalyptic narratives about environmental catastrophe. Through a close reading of Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015) and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020), the chapter examines the authors’ critiques of settler colonial myths of wilderness and how these myths are conflated with the idealization of “mother earth” and by extension patriarchal myths of motherhood, or the “good” mother, as endless sources of preservation, growth, and sustenance. The chapter discusses the theme of maternal abandonment as a response to ecological grief and extinction and argues for reading the maternal ambivalence at the heart of both novels through Rosi Braidotti’s vision of a posthumanist nomadic subjectivity. The chapter’s conclusion proposes the need for new mythologies or ecocentered narratives that respond to the Anthropocene and its ongoing realities of environmental precarity through a posthuman wilderness ethic that resituates human–nonhuman relationships based on mutual survival and vital practices of restoration and rewilding.
