Environmental Regionalism Then and Now

After reading and watching Winter’s Bone for perhaps the fifth time, I’m struck by the works’ connections with early 20^th Century American women regionalist literature. In Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground, for example, the protagonist Dorinda first chooses what Gayatri Spivak calls "soul making" over "child bearing" and desire for land over desire for man in order to gain an individuality, a role which at first seems to implicate her in the "imperialistic project" she seeks to evade. Yet by cultivating land in order to make it more fertile, I contend that Dorinda transcends the exploitative potential of the Victorian patriarchal family and the implications of an "individualism" that exists only in conflict with an "other."

Dorinda transcends the imperialism of the patriarchal family and of an individualism that subjugates others only when she sees the land not as an enemy but as a provider with which she has a symbiotic relationship: "Only when she saw victory in terms of crops, not battles, could she feel that she was part of it That men should destroy one another appeared to her less incredible than that they should deliberately destroy the resources which made life endurable" (357). Dorinda's acknowledgment of the land's gifts and her willingness to receive them at first seem to align her with Spivak's "subject" who acts as "recipient." But Dorinda not only receives from but gives back to the land she eventually joins. When scanning Old Farm's acres, Dorinda acknowledges the interdependent relationship she shares with the land: She "felt the quickening of that sympathy which was deeper than all other emotions of her heart, which love had overcome only for an hour and life had been powerless to conquer in the end,—the living communion with the earth under her feet" (Barren 408).

Ultimately, because she blurs the boundaries between herself and the land she seeks to cultivate, Dorinda joins "the whole movement of life" (Barren xii) and redeems herself without exploiting others: "Tut your heart in the land,' old Matthew had said to her. "The land is the only thing that will stay by you'.... While the soil endured, while the seasons bloomed and dropped, while the ancient, beneficent ritual of sowing and reaping moved in the fields, she knew that she could never despair of contentment" (408). By putting her heart into the land, Dorinda does not disembody or eviscerate herself. She is not consumed by the property she owns. Instead, by blurring boundaries between herself and the land, she obfuscates mind/body and reason/emotion distinctions her apparent adherence to Calvinism and Cartesian mathematics would uphold, because for her the heart ultimately serves not only as the center of emotion but also of reason, life, and the soul. By putting a heart that contains thought, the reason to which the land as metaphorical seat of emotion is traditionally opposed, Dorinda narrows the separation between herself, nature and her land. So, by putting her heart into the land, Dorinda gains a "serenity of mind" (408) that surpasses any romantic love she may once have felt.

The heart Dorinda puts into the land combines thought, emotion, and the spirit. Even though Dorinda does first participate in a project that oppresses "others," her choice to offer her heart to the land and accept its heart in return, allows her to fully recover "her girlhood capacity to experience joy and beauty" (Winniford 151), her own soul and emotions. "She saw the rim of the harvest moon shining orangeyellow through the boughs of the harp-shaped pine. Though she remembered the time when loveliness was like a sword in her heart, she knew that where beauty exists the understanding soul can never remain desolate" (Barren 409).

Instead of child-bearing, Dorinda first chooses soul-making, but she declines participation in much of the social mission associated with making souls when she rejects racism and heterosexism through her relationship with Fluvanna and spurns traditions that make the ground and its "owners" barren rather than fertile. Finally, Dorinda becomes more than what Spivak calls "the feminine subject rather than the female individualist" (811). When Dorinda acts as recipient to the contentment the land provides, while providing the land with "Endurance [and] Fortitude" {Barren 408), she transcends "the irreducible recipient-function" (Spivak 811).7 By giving her heart away to that which so willingly gives its own, Dorinda re-covers thought, spirit, and emotion, all that her heart represents.