Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975.
Annette Kolodny argues against the sex-typing of Nature as woman or mother because of how it contributes to both gender stereotypes and a potentially dualistic (humans and nature as separate entities) and resourcist idea of Nature. Thus, terms like "the rape of nature," "virgin land," and the pronouns "she" and "her" to refer to Nature may be problematic. The basic nature of the image leads one to forget about its potential for imbuing any story in which it is used with sexual meanings, and the gender implications of a female landscape have only recently begun to be studied. Annette Kolodny has studied the traditional canon from this approach. She theorizes that the hero, fleeing a society that has been imagined as feminine, then imposes on nature some ideas of women which, no longer subject to the correcting influence of real-life experience, become more and more fantastic. The fantasies are infantile, concerned with power, mastery, and total gratification: the all nurturing mother, the all-passive bride. Whether one accepts all the Freudian or Jungian implications of her argument, one cannot deny the way in which heroes of American myth turn to nature as sweetheart and nurture, anticipating the satisfaction of all desires through her and including among these the desires for mastery and power. (found in "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors," written by Nina Baym for American Quarterly (33, 1981); (http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/baym.htm)). [L. McReynolds]