Needless to say, nature has long been feminized linguistically as a feminine noun. In the beginning of Chapter 3 “Winter Memory”, Cather directly uses “she”
to refer to nature:
Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nat ure recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. (139)
Signifying nature by a feminine noun is not unusual in literary works.
However, Cather’s feminized nature has more significant femininity than others which are simply referred to with feminine noun. For instance, in Part II Cather shows us the feminized nature imagery by using the fascinating language to create ambiguous and erotic descriptions in the following scene. In Part II, “Neighboring Fields,” the heroine Alexandra leads her family, against all odds, and constructs the beautiful garden on the wild prairie. The description of a gratifying landscape of the great harvest presented in chapter 2 runs as follows:
The Divide is now thickly populated. The rich soil yields heavy harvests;
the dry, bracing climate and the smoothness of the land make labor easy
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for men and beasts. There are few scenes more gratifying than a spring plowing in that country, where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the met al, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness. The wheat-cutting sometimes goes on all night as well as all day, and in good seasons there are scarcely men and horses enough to do the harvesting. The grain is so heavy that it bends towards the blade and cuts like velvet. (57-58)
This is the landscape of a harvest which contains several deep implications.
Firstly, the image of the plow as an instrument appears in this scene. M eeker comments on the image of the plow: “The instrument of cultivation, and the symbol of human civilization, is the plow” (“Willa Cather: The Plow and the Pen”
78). The plow is not only a labor instrument for pioneers but also a symbol of the invasion of civilization into the wilderness. He additionally remarks that “[i]n the course of the novel, it is the plow that converts the land into a source of wealth and status and becomes a central image of the human spirit triumphant” (79). The plow becomes the tool and instrument which on the one hand helps human fulfil their dreams and complete self-realization, and on the other hand, transfers the wild land to crop fields. Land or the wilderness is the rival of humans and is opposed to them.
The image of the plow appears not only here but also in other parts of the novel. For example, in section 2 of Part I, the plow symbolizes human’s vain effort
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to conquer nature: “The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings” (15). A series of words like “insignificant”, “feeble” and “so indeterminate” represent human’s disappointment at not making a mark on the land. This passage forms a sharp contrast to the landscape in Part II, which stresses man’s proud plowing mark on the land.
The plow also reflects the binary opposition between human and land, civilization and nature. In section 4 of Part I, an intense conflict between them is implied: “Then came the hard times that brought everyone on the Divide to the brink of despair; three years of drouth and failure, the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare” (36). In this description, human and land becomes rivals of each other, which highlights the opposition between them.
However, the gratifying harvest scene in Part II shows man’s triumph over nature.
Cather emphasizes that the spring plowing is also a gratifying scene, and the word
“gratifying” expresses the sense of satisfaction which the spring plowing brings to humans. This echoes the positive “plow” image mentioned above; people use the plow to translate the wilderness into a field which brings forth satisfaction and fulfilment to humans.
The word “furrow” seems to put an emphasis on the mark made by a plow and humans, and strengthen the impression of the invasion of the civilization into nature. Even if land has tremendous power in terms of its fertility which human never can obtain, land still yields itself to the plow, and submits itself to humans.
The crop field is signifying man’s triumph over nature. The spring plow certainly
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is a gratifying thing.
Here, the landscape as a feminized nature contains an erotic meaning. Some believe that this is a “lovemaking” feminized landscape which suggests Cather’s hidden homosexual desire. Westling considers that “Cather tried to take narrative space away from male control, maintaining the feminine identification of the land but moving male characters to the side and granting a new kind of agency to female protagonists” (65). She also argues that the language used in the feminized landscape quoted above implies the “lovemaking process” and the ostensible gesture of it conceals the homosexual desire: “the central eroticism of the novel is an expression of the same feminine desire for a feminized object” (68). In this sense, Cather takes away the narrative power of man by establishing the female protagonist intending to express her homosexual desire.
It is a convincing argument that the landscapes of this scene act as a metaphor of the lovemaking process. The feminized landscape itself, however, needs to be explicated more deliberately before we hear the hidden voice of Cather’s homosexual desire. By comparing this scene with one of the dream record in Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, its underlying erotic meaning can be revealed. A dream of a young man, who imagined a picture when he was still in the womb and took advantage of an intra-uterine opportunity of watching his parents copulating, is as follows:
The picture represented a field which was being ploughed up deeply by some implement; and the fresh air together with the idea of hard work which accompanied the scene, and the blue-black clods of earth, produced
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a lovely impression. (410)
What appears in this imaginative picture is similar to the gratifying harvest scene in Part II. The field which is being plowed, the fresh air, and the gratifying atmosphere are mentioned in both scenes. Cather figuratively describes the spring plowing landscape as a physical process of sexual intercourse. The word “furrow”
which means a long shallow trench in the ground emphasizes the mark made by a plow and suggests the vaginal recess of the female body. The plow is a symbol of the phallic power and the process of plowing the land is similar to sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. This landscape is a cultivated garden image of feminized nature, and man’s triumph over nature implicates the man’s triumph over the female and the triumph of patriarchal society as well as of anthropocentrism. The female and nature are in the same subordinate position.
Cather intentionally indicates by emphatically suggesting that nature is female that the hidden theme of the novel is the analogy between nature and women.