ABSTRACT
The historic andro-centric or at least anthropocentric domination of the poetic horizon in America has its origins in the “conquest” of the “New World” when, as geographer David Harvey explains, the landscapes of the frontier were ‘deterritorialized, stripped of their preceding significations, and then reterritorialized according to the convenience of colonial and imperial administration’ (quoted in Davidson 2003, 64). Indeed, these landscapes have been repeatedly written-over, culturally encoded to such an extent that, as Frederick Jackson Turner proposed in 1976, it is ‘to the frontier that the American intellect owes its striking characteristics’ (Turner 1976, 38). Throughout its cultural reproduction, to quote Martin Friedman, ‘the artist-observer who surveyed the terrain [ … ] was the invisible, controlling, but distanced presence’ (Friedman 1994, 26). Perhaps most representative of this trend is the traditional Western landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. In Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry, Bonnie Costello, drawing on the work of Leo Marx, suggests that these paintings are illustrative of ‘the nineteenth century’s effort to reconcile industrial progress with the pastoral ideals of the early Republic’ (Costello 2003, 197). Asher B. Durand’s View toward the Hudson Valley from 1851 (Figure 3.1) is a prime example. Whilst Durand’s painting superficially celebrates America’s natural beauty, the figures in the foreground survey the pastoral idyll and hence the framed landscape is encoded with the Manifest Destiny of the American empire: an androcentric vision in which the “wild” is “civilised” in the name of progress. Asher B. Durand, View toward the Hudson Valley (Kornhauser, Ellis et al. 2003, 107). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203374337/34c5f673-2762-4dc7-b3a2-b4e776c55be5/content/fig3_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
