rethinking dichotomies in terry

8/12/2019 Rethinking Dichotomies in Terry

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C SS NDR KIRCHER

Rethinking Dichotom ies in TerryTempest Williams'sRefuge

In her work of creative nonfiction, Refuge, Terry Tempest Williamsseems to embrace many of the dichotomies that have long been stan-dard in Western thought: throughout the book she often connectswomen with nature and men with culture, each in opposition to theother. Williams sees wom en's connection to nature as virtuou s, em-powering, comforting, and good, while portraying the institutionsshe identifies with the patriarchy as harmful or, at least, problem-atic. For example, she depicts the Utah landscapethe Great SaltLake, the mountains, the desert, the earthitself, and the sky aboveitas female, while she often depicts the manipulation of the land-scape for political, religious, or military ends as m ale. Besides theseimplicit dichotomies, Williams also explicitly announces an alliancebetween the female and natu re against the male dur ing a discussionthat she has with one of her friends:

We spoke of rage. Of women and landscape. How our bodiesand the body of the earth have been mined. It has everyth ing to do with intimacy, I said. Men defineintimacy through their bodies. It is physical. They define inti-macy with the land in the same way.Many men have forgotten wha t they are connected to, myfriend added . Subjugation of women and nature may be a lossof intimacy within themselves. (10)

Just over 250 pages later, as if to remind the reader of her politicalstance, one ultimately grounded in deep ecology, Williams again

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9 8 I S L Eexplicitly aligns wom en w ithnature: 'The Earth is not well and nei-ther are we/ she says to her grandmother. 'I saw the health of theplanet as our ow n ' (263). She repeats this message in the book'sfinal chapter when describing her dream about women understand-ing the fate of the earth as their ow n (288) and saying that to denyone's genealogy with the earth was to comm it treason against one'ssoul (288).In spite of my love and admiration for this book, a response thatmight even stem, in small part, from romanticized valorization ofwomen and nature (especially from my vantage point as a womanreader), I also question Williams's apparent investment in male/fe-male, cu ltur e/n atu re oppositions, as I imagine many other readersdo.Williams's decision to plot women and nature against men andcultu re in a wo rk of nonfiction, and the way that she orchestrates thisplotting, can be seen as simplistic. As ecofeminist Maureen Devinesuggests, when explaining the need to move beyond such obviouslydefined dualisms (29),

we have detailed accounts of parallel use and abuse of womenand nature through the centuries. The images are easily avail-able to us: natu re as nu rtu rin g m other, the mother earth, virginwoods, images associated with the prem odern organic world. Itwould be simple en oug h to cast these in the role of the protago-nists, with the antagonist (villain?) being modern patriarchalmechanistic society; the market economy, industrialization,technology, progress. In short everything we identify with ourpresen t cu lture. (29)

Williams, it could be argued, relies in pa rt on prefabricated dualismsto structu re her book, a decision that reveals an e ithe r/o r sensibilityon her par t and a penchan t for cliche.Her depiction of women and their connection to nature, for ex-ample, results from a fairly basic equation: through figurative lan-guage W illiams consistently associates the natural world with the fe-male, and through her presentation of herself, her mother, hergrandmother, and other women, she associates the female charac-ters in the book w ith the natu ral w orld. By describing wom en char-acters who easily commune with nature, Williams taps into whatSherry Ortner identifies as cultural constructs that envision womenas closer to nature because of their body and natural procreativefunctions (73). And by describing the Utah landscape as female,



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Rethinking Dichotomies 99Williams uses metaphoric descriptions that fall in line with age-oldaccounts that objectify the land as woman, either virgin or mother.Just as some writers and explorers (primarily male) have describedvoluptuous female landscapes, Williams, too, sees sand dunes as fe-male, sporting sensuous curvesthe small of a woman's back.Breasts. Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes ofEarth (109). And just as these same writers, philosophers, and ex-plorers also depict the maternal aspect of the land, Williams oftendescribes the Great Salt Lake as mother (122, 151) and refers to theearth being ripped open by a backhoe as Mother Earth (204). Byperpetuating these woman/land connections that Annette Kolodnyand others have labeled as regressive, and by relying on cultural as-sumptions that Ortner says must be transcended, Williams in asense strengthens harmful stereotypes when she could, in fact, bereinscribing the landscape with her own metaphors.

Williams also sets up a second easy equation in Refuge: any op-pressive forces in the book are male or, more often, are related to pa-triarchal urban culture. She illustrates this equation in a number ofways. The beergut-over-beltbuckled men (12) associated with theGun Club in the book's first chapter demonstrate their opposition tonature when they needlessly destroy the burrowing owl's nest tobuild a parking lot. Their attitude is also apparent during their flip-pant discussion with Williams:

You gotta admit those ground owls are messy little bastards.They'll shit all over hell if ya let 'em. And try and sleep with 'emhollering at ya all night long. They had to go. Anyway, we gotbets with the county they'll pop up someplace around here nextyear. (12)

Because they are the first men depicted in the book, their behaviorresonates and they set the tone for what follows. Later, Williams moreoften than not depicts powerful religious, political, and scientificcomponents of culture as out of sync with nature in the same waythat the men from the Gun Club are.

Williams represents the simplicity of male/female, culture/na-ture dichotomies in her description of two antithetical sculptures.The first represents the male. Described in phallic terms, the newlyerected (127) piece of art by Karl Momen resembles an 83-foot-highlightning rod (127) complete with colored spheres that Williamsdubs tennis balls (127). From a distance, the sculpture rises like a



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1 0 0 I S L Esmall pha llus dwarfed by the open space that sur rou nd ed it (127).In contrast, a second scu lpture em bodies the femaleness, the ro und -ness and c ircularity Williams sees as intrinsic in the land and in her-self.Created by Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, comprised of four tun-nels laid upon the ground, can be entered by the viewer. Holes cutthrough the walls in the upper half of each tunnel frame the GreatBasin landscape within circles (269), allowing light from the sunand moon to enter. While the narrator sees the first art piece as op-pressive, ugly, and destructive something that has no relationshipto the land, something that casts shadows across the salt flats like amushroom cloud (127)she experiences the second piece in a nir-vana-type trance. Clearly, the first sculpture is meant to representthe enemy, while the second depicts communion between womenand the landscape. And clearly, these art pieces are meant to rein-force and exaggerate the dichotomies that Williams consistently por-trays inRefuge, dichotomies that can be seen to falsify the relation-ships between m en, wom en, nature, and culture.

Finally, in light of ecofeminism, a theoretical discourse evolvingout of the w omen's and ecology movem ents of the 1970s, Williams'sdichotomies become even more problematic. Though ecofeministstend to agree that the same patriarcha l attitudes which degrade na-ture are responsible for the exploitation and abuse of wom en (Salleh,98), they disagree about the usefulness and wisdom of equatingwomen an d n ature. Whereas radical feminists, such as Mary Daly inGyn/Ecology,reinforce the dichotomies by emphasizing the morallysuperior character of women and nature in relation to the patriar-chal culture that dominates them, most critics believe that this sortof valorization leads to problem s. Equating natu re and w omen, theysay, objectifies wo men and relegates them [nature and women] to aposition of 'otherness/ inferiority, and powerlessness relative to cul-ture and male (Devine,1).Furthermore , most ecofeminists believea real political shift m eans letting go of the culture vs. natu re polar-ity altogether (Salleh, 98), in pa rt because it preserves the artificialseparation of masculine and feminine ge nd ers (Salleh, 98). Thesecritics, including Y nestra King, Carolyn Merchant, and Chaia Heller,who rely on historical analysis to support their arguments, hope toreconceptualize these male/female, culture/nature dualisms andwould most likely look uponRefuge and its embracing of dualismswith more than skeptical eyes.



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Rethinking Dichotomies 101Fortunately, my criticisms of Williams's dichotomies do not ade-quately capture the intrinsic complexity of Refuge. The ways thatWilliams problematizes both the fem ale/na ture and male /cu ltu realliances and, more important, the way she moves beyond dichoto-mies to depict a circular notion of family keeps the book from beingessentialist. Although Williams, unfortunately, never questions thecultural representation of nature as feminine, and although shemuch more closely connects all women herself,hermother,,wom-enkind in general) to nature than she connects the men in the book,she also moves women out of an exclusive collaboration with na-

ture by linking them to nondestructive institutions such as the UtahMuseum of Na tural History and the Morm on Church, which offerswomen a valuable community within a patriarchal framework. AsOrtner realizes, it wo uld be impossible for w omen n ot to participatein culture somehow (73);Williams's allegiance to certain cultural in-stitutions, in fact, may even demonstrate her own attempt to forge asynthesis between na ture an d cu lture.Furthermore, Williams seems to understand that linking womento nonpowerful cultural institutions or giving them subordinateroles within powerful institutions is not enough. She further prob-lematizes the alliance between women and nature by depictingwomen (including herself) who challenge the destructive patriar-chal powersreligious and politicalthat they despise or, at least,question. She knows that change can best occur by confronting herreligious and political enemies, and thus connecting herself to cul-

ture through activities such as organized protests, even if it meansbeing arrested or paying another kind of price. Obviously, the ac-tual writing ofRefugeplaces Williams within the cultural realm , es-pecially because the book does mo re than docum ent her experienceswith cancer and floods; it also works as a critique of twentieth-century culture.In the case of Mormonism, Williams and other women who up-hold many beliefs of the Mormon Church often defy the traditional,patriarchal doctrines that keep their gender from full participationin religious rituals. Althou gh Williams rarely depicts women overtlychallenging church protocol, she and her mother and grandmothersecretly give each other the M ormon blessings(158),which are taboofor women to give inpub lic.Williams herself challenges deep-seatedMormon beliefs, not just church practices, by reenvisioning the H oly



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1 0 2 I S L EGhost as female, as a mother in heaven who can balance the sacredtriangle . Althou gh W illiams makes these moves to criticize the Mor-monism that is so much a par t of her life, she stops short of doing thesort of all-out critique of patriarchal religion that feminists JudithPlaskow and Carol P. Christ do in their work. Completely dismiss-ing Mormonism for Williams would mean becoming what she calls a member of a bord er tribe among [her] own peo ple (268) or break-ing family connections altogether a price she does not want to pay,even if it means deceiving herself abou t her ow n religion.SoWilliamskeeps one foot in Mormonism while looking often to the naturalworld for religious consolation. Besides seeing the Holy Ghost asfemale, for example, Williams also sees bird s as her guides, comfort-ers, and intercessors, wha t she calls mediat[ors] between heavenand ea rth (18), what can be thou ght of as the spirit of God mani-fested in this world. Williams also considers the landscape reli-giously charged. In one scene she drives past the Mormon Church'sfamous temple and practices her own brand of religionone that isanimisticon the shores of Great Salt Lake, that spiritua l magnetthat will no t let [her] go (240).When Williams challenges the political powers in Refuge, she is,generally, more confrontational. Several times in the book she criti-cizes the Utah legislature's decisions on flood control and ques-tions the legislature's un ders tand ing (or, rather, lack of und erstand -ing) of the natural world. In the book's last chapter, she and nineother women loudly and angrily condemn the government's testingof atomic bombs after learning about the ravaging of the Utah des-ert; this is when Williams finally reveals that this testing may havecaused Utah's unnatural cancer epidemic, along with her mother'sown death.1InRefuge, Williams portraysherself,not as a victim ofthe patria rchy or as an agentless female object, but as a fighter whoknow s that tolerating blind obedience in the nam e of patriotism orreligion ultimately takes . . . lives (286) and that the lessons taughther as a child not to make waves or rock the boat (285)need tobe rejected. As a fighter, she is connected both to nature and toculture.

Williams also problematizes the fem ale/natu re and m ale/cu lturealliances by challenging the metaphoric equation of woman and na-ture.Tho ugh she never presents the landscape in as radical a way as,for instance, Gretchen Legler argues that Gretel Ehrlich doesbyportraying the Wyoming wilds as an erotic, primarily male, lover



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RethinkingDichotomies 103with its own desire and autonomy (45-55)Williams often doescomplicate the equation of women and the land handed down fromearly American explorers and writers by specifically placing eitherherself or her mother into the generalized woman's slot in the di-chotomy and thereby personalizing the metaphor and connecting itto actual women. In the passage below, Williams undercuts hercliched, virginal description of the land, once she attempts to be-come one with the sand dunes in paragraph two. At this point, thelandscape's status changes from an objective female Other to muchmore of a subjective agent as Williams works to experience existencefrom the land's point of view:

There are dunes beyond Fish Springs. Secrets hidden frominterstate travelers. They are the armatures of animals. Windswirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is musculature indunes.

And they are female. Sensuous curvesthe small of a wom-an's back. Breasts. Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the nat-ural shapes of Earth. Let me lie naked and disappear. Crypsis.The wind rolls over me. Particles of sand skitter across myskin, fill my ears and nose. I am aware only of breathing. Theworkings of my lungs are amplified. The wind picks up. I holdmy breath. It massages me. A raven lands inches away. I exhale.The raven flies. (109)

This kind of complication, where Williams binds or attempts to bindnature with herself rather than with women in general, also exists inother examples: I am desert, she writes, I am mountains. I amGreat Salt Lake (29). And later, I want to see the Great Salt Lakeas woman, asmyself,in her refusal to be tamed (92). She links her-self to birds when describing herself as a woman with wings (273),admitting that she would rather be a bird than a human (266), andshe also links herself to the celestial world when moving from a gen-eral image to one that is more specific: As women, we hold themoon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moonenergy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescentphase (136).

Just as Williams's representation of land can be inextricablybound up withherself,her representation (below) of land is inextri-cably connected, not stereotypically with Mother Earth, but with herown mother as earth:



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1 0 4 I S L EThe pulse of Great Salt Lake, surging along Antelope Island'sshores, becomes the force wearing against my mother's body.And when I watch flocks of phalaropes wing their way towardquiet bays on the island , I recall watching M other sleep, imagin-ing the dreams that were encircling her, wondering what sheknow s that I must learn formyself.The light changes, AntelopeIsland is blue. Mother aw akened and I looked away.Antelope Island is no longer accessible to me. It is mymother's body floating in uncertainty. (64)

In this passage, Williams writes about the land as if it were hermother's body, just as she uses her own bod y in the sand du nes pas-sage above to coivrvect w ith the n atu ra l world . But while in the sand-dune landscape a connection exists because of the similar shape ofdunes and women, the island landscape and her mother's bodymerge because both face the similar fate of disappearance.Theisland,pristine and populated by wild animals, may flood. Her mother'sbody, invaded by wild cancer and weakened by chemotherapytreatments, may die. In the passage below, Williams does not evenneed to inscribe the land as a body in order to see her m other in thelandscape. After her mother dies, she sees her dead mother's spiritradiating from natural matter:

I am reminded that what I adore, admire, and draw fromMother is inherent in the Earth. My mother's spirit can be re-called simply by placing my ha nd on the black hum us of moun-tains or the lean san ds of desert. Her love, her warm th, and herbreath, even her arms around meare the waves, the wind,sunlight, an d w ater. (214)

By depicting the natural w orld as her own m other, Williams breaksnew ground. Not only does it allow her to challenge Peter Fritzell'sassertion that na ture writers have generally dissociated their cen-tral narrating figures from f am il ia l. .. relations and concerns (306),bu t it also allows her to challenge pornograp hic representations ofnatu re as violated wom an by reinscribing them as familial.2ThroughoutRefugeWilliams also problematizes many pairings ofindividual men with culture and, by doing so, validates the men inher life, particularly those she loves. Outside of a few men in thebook whom she presents as villainous, most men, such as her hus-band, father, brothers, friends, and colleagues, are described as ad-



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Rethinking Dichotomies 105mirable, likeable, and feminist in many of their viewpoints. Thoughmost play minor roles in this book about three generations ofwomen, Williams portrays these men as individuals separate fromthe political, religious, and scientific institutions that she depicts asnature's antagonists. These men are not solely aligned w ith culture;rather, like Williams's women characters, who thrive in their rela-tionship with nature, most of the individual men she depicts alsohave connections to and a love for the naturalworld.Although theTempest family's pipe-laying business could be view ed as a violationof the landscape, Williams does not see it that way. W hat she sees aremen whose work outdoors brings them closer to nature. Many men,in fact, serve as her guides and companions into the natural world:for example, her father as well as her m other in troduced her to cam p-ing and hiking, and her husband often joins her in exploring thewilderness.

Whereas many feminist texts depict individual men as sympa-thetic human beings and the institutions they are associated w ith asdestructive, Williams challenges such simplistic descriptions. Out-side of Mormonism, which her male family members enthusiasti-cally participate in and which Williams describes, at least partially,as sexist, she positively po rtrays m any of the cultural institu tions as-sociated with the individual men she knows. The medical held, forexample, often represented in feminist texts as harmful or threaten-ing to women (see Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, Marge Piercy'sWomanon the EdgeofTime,and Charlotte Perkin Gilman's The Yellow Wall-pap er, among others), is affirmed. Although Williams expressesfrustration and anger abou t her mother's disease, she does not blamethe medical establishment thatistreatingher.Rather, she respects thephysicians, considering them friends and acknowledging Dr. GarySmith as family (295).Archaeology also receives favorable ratings.Williams portrays the men involved in this field as knowledgeableabout and respectful of the artifacts they find as well as curiousabout past cultures' relationships to the land and to modern peo ples.One of the male archaeologists, because of his scientific kno wledgeand curiosity, is able to help Williams imagine herself more clearlyin relation to an Anasazi woman who has been exhumed; withouthis expertise, she would not have gained the self-knowledge shedoes (though she gains know ledge by appro priating it from a de-fenseless ruin just as she also app rop riates feathers from a dea dcurlew). In the case of archaeology as well as medicine, scientific



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1 0 6 I S L Etechnology is used benevolently by men for something other thanbuilding atomic bombs or other such horrors found in the book'smore destructive patriarchal institutions.These shifts in the female /n atu re , m ale/c ultu re paradigm , how-ever, are not nearly as crucial to und erstan dingRefugeas W illiams'sprimary trope of the circle, which binds the book together. Thistropeitself,which has been draw n so often and by so many w ritersand thinkers, is nothing new. Although much celebrated and oftenused in the twentie th century, the circlew hat Emerson calls thisfirst of forms (179)stems from a trad ition tha t seems to cut acrosstime and space and is reflected in such diverse sources as Ec-clesiastes in the Bible and Native American beliefs as spoken byBlack Elk.Just as many natu re w riters use this circle trope to explain the waythe w orld wo rks, Williams, too, depicts the circularity of the naturalworld inRefuge: the life and death of the women she loves and therebirth of their souls, the migration of the birds, the pattern of herown grief. Perhaps most ubiquitous is her circular presentation ofGreat Salt Lake:

Great Salt Lake is cyclic. At winter's end, the lake level riseswith moun tainrunoff. By late spring , it begins to decline whenthe weather becomes hot enough that loss of water by evapora-tion from the surface is greater than the combined inflow fromstreams, ground water, and precipitation. The lake begins torise again in the autumn, when the temperature decreases, andthe loss of water by evap oration is exceeded by the inflow. (6-7)As depicted in this passage, the lake's annual rhythm is naturallycircular, but even when its waters flood, as they do throughoutRefuge, the Great Salt Lake rises an d falls in a cyclic pattern .Williams, like so many other na ture w riters,3also chooses a circularstructu re for her book w hen she organizes her chapters according tothe ebb and flow of the flooding Great Salt Lake, a poin t she em pha-sizes by the inclusion of lake depths in the table of contents and asthe subtitle of each chapter. WhenRefugebegins, the lake m easures4204.70 feet, the exact dep th that it measures at the book's end.

In many ways, Williams's appreciation of the circle differs littlefrom how other nature writers have used it. In another way, how-ever, Williams reenvisions the circle throu gh her m etaph or of the ex-tended family, a metapho r that expands upo n and uses as a starting



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Rethinking Dichotomies 107point the strong notion of family that she grew u p with and that shehas transferred to her thinking and writing about natu re: W hen Italk about writing natura l history, Williams admits durin g an inter-view, I must begin whe re I have always begun, and that is with myfamily (Lueders, 41). It is with this backgrou nd that Williams ex-tends her notion of family from relatives and people of other cul-tures wh ose history, like her own, is tied to the lan d (14) to includethe landscape of Utah's Great Basin as well as the birds that stopthere, birds she calls relatives (19) and with whom she shares the same natural history (21). By focusing on this notion of the ex-tended family, Williams positions herself within a site of patriarchythat she is determined to revise. Instead of depicting a family inwhich the father is an authoritarian figure, the top point of a tri-angle, as her own father seems to be, she depicts an ever-expandingfamily in which all members are equal, merely small parts of an in-tricately interconnected system of life that promotes diversity, pre-cludes hierarchy, and includes even the ravaged: The headless snakewitho ut its rattles, the slaughtered b irds, even the pu m pe d lake andthe flooded desert, become extensions of my family (252). In Wil-liams's extended family, life is not more valuable for humans thanfor animals, or even for an imate than for inan imate objects:

There are other lives to consider; avocets, stilts, and stones.Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am lessafraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life thatsurrounds us. (29)

As opposed to the linear configuration of dichotomies, the sort ofconfiguration that, for example, places nature on one end of a spec-trum and culture on another, the metaph or of the extended family iscircular, encompassing inside its boundaries the values of natureand even of culture that Williams believes in.Throughout Refuge,Williams often explicitly depicts the circlemetaphor, as in the image of her family spreading out its sleepingbags in a circle, heads pointing to the center like a covey of quail(15);at other times she depic ts larger, more ab stract, circles expan d-ing outw ard:In the blue light of the Basin, I saw a pe trog lyph on a large boul-der. It was a spiral. I placed the tip of my finger on the center



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1 0 8 I S L Eand began tracing the coil around and around. It spun off therock. My finger kep t circling the land, the lake, the sky. The spi-ral became larger and larger un til it became a halo of stars in thenight sky above Stansbury Island. A meteor flashed and asquickly disappeared. The waves continued to hiss and retreat,hiss and retreat.In the West Desert of the Great Basin, I was not alone. (190)

Here the narrator's circling includes everything within her vantagepoin t the rock, the land, the lake, the sky, and the ancient Fremontpeoples represented by the petroglyph. A lthough m any people maysee the boundaries b etween the natural, animal, and h um an worldsas uncrossable, Williams crosses them with in the b ou nd s of the cir-cular family. Outside its boundaries lies all that she doesn't believein the disconn ectors of the universe, religious and politicalwhich she associates with her vision of patriarchy.Rather than creating a literary metaphor in Refugein the wayThoreau and others do, Williams ultimately posits the circle as aworking metaphor that she hopes will have specific, direct culturaland political consequences instead of consequences that tend to beapolitical, private (that is, a matter between the text and the reader) ,and muted. This is to a great extent Williams's project inRefugetoreconceptualize her relationship with the world in language in orderto change the wo rld or, at least, in orde r to try to change the way thather readers perceive the relationship between humans and natu re. Itseems to be a valuable project.Yet because Williams often fails to examine the circular connec-tions she makes, her method of merging her hu m an family w ith thefamily of nature, represented by the lake and the birds, is not w ith-out its limitations. Although her notion that all life forms are equal,that we are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us(29),can be seen as noble, it can also be seen as romantic and risky.When, for example, Williams equates her mother's death and thedeath of three birds, she seems to be asking for criticism and weak-ening the metaphor of the extended family. Before her mother dies,she finds, in three separate instances, a barn swallow, a swan, and acurlew that are dying or have just died. The birds serve to prepareher for her mother's death, and the connection between birds andmother seem s deliberate. At one point, Williams even explicitly con-nects her dying mother to one of the birds: Her head was turned



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Rethinking Dichotomies 109now, and with each breath her head drew back, reminding me of theswallow I beheld at Bear River, moments before it died (230). In an-other example, Williams spreads out a dead whistling swan on thebeach with the same pains she used to prepare her mother's body af-ter her death. In the following scene, however, she sits down to anelaborate turkey dinner without any hint of regret or sorrow. By sug-gesting that these two dead birdsthe swan and the turkeyaresomehow of a different class, Williams romanticizes one bird whileconsuming another and fails to see the relationship between them.Failing to make this sort of connection lies at the heart of the environ-mental crisis Williams seems to want to address. In a last example,when Williams and her husband happen upon a dead curlew, theyperform an impromptu ceremony, later mirrored in the ceremonyperformed for her mother:

We kneel down and run our fingers down its long, curved bill.Brooke ponders over the genetic information a species is bornwith, the sophistication of cells and the memory held inside agene pool. It is the embryology of a curlew that informs thestubby, straight beak of a chick to take a graceful curve down.

I say a silent prayer for the curlew, remembering the bond oftwo days before when I sat in their valley nurtured by solitude.I ask the curlew for cinnamon-barred feathers and take them.(151-52)

In this passage, as well as the one that follows, kneeling, touch, andprayer honor the dead, as both bird and human are similarlymourned and honored.

We knelt around her body. Dan held Mother's head in his lap.Our father offered a prayer for the release of her spirit and gavethanks for her life of courage, of beauty, and for her generosity,which enabled us to be part of her journey. He asked that herlove might always be with us, as our love will forever be withher. And with great humility, he acknowledged the power offamily. (231)

Although Williams assumes, in the pages ofRefuge,that this sort ofmetaphoric connection is credible, that the death and suffering of ahuman equals that of a bird in type as well as importance, it is thecircular metaphornot any sort of thoughtful revelationthatforces her to make a connection she might not otherwise have been



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1 1 0 I S L Eprepared to make. If not for the power of metaphor and its ability toovercome both the text and its intentions, Williams might have beenhesitant to make such a romantic comparison between her ownmother's death and that of a curlew.Williams also fails to examine the consumerism she depicts inRefuge or to acknowledge that, because of this preoccupation withmaterial goods, the human members of her extended family are in-trinsically different from the non hu m an mem bers. Thoreau, wh o leda life of simplicity antithetical to the materialism already evident innineteenth-century America, set an antimaterialist precedent in na-ture writing. Walden,especially its first chapter, Econom y, inwh ich he meditates up on the necessities of life, can be read as a cri-tique of America's materialistic values. In the book's later chapters,Thoreau moved more to a presentation of the philosophical, to anawareness of transcen dent moral and spiritual values antithetical tomaterialism. Most nature writers have followed in Thoreau's foot-steps,almost as if an unspoken rule exists, perhaps not by critiqu-ing materialism or even necessarily living lives of simplicity, bu t byavoiding materialism in their work and concentrating on the naturalworld. Williams, however, if not explicitly promoting materialisticvalues, at least makes frequent allusions to material possessionssuch as fine clothes, cars, and cosmetics, often calling attention totheir quality and cost through her use of specific details: her gloves,for example are deer-sk inned , her pistol, pearl-han dled. Whilemany nature writers describe their rustic Waldenlike cabins or theflimsy tents they carry with a few other essentials upon their backsinto the backcountry, Williams writes about the new home she andher husband have bought up the canyon, about shopping in elitedepartment stores and eating in expensive restaurants. With theseallusions W illiams seems to suggest tha t spirituality, which is so pre -valent in Refuge,can still exist in twentieth-century, materialisticAmerica. On one hand she should be commended for being honest,for not trying to hide details that might be antithetical to the genreshe is writing in. On the other hand, it seems possible that eitherWilliams's class privilege, which is eviden t and perh aps offensive tomany readers ofRefuge,might not be evident to her, or she deliber-ately fails to acknowledge her class privilege because acknowledg-ing it means she must accept that her own conspicuous consum ptionmay be destroying the earth she loves.



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Rethinking Dichotomies 111ThroughoutRefugeWilliams moves randomly back and forth be-tween these two configurations that I have been discussing: the con-frontational, linear dichotomies (which she often problematizes)and the circularity of the extended family, not being qu ite able to letgo of the former while she experiments with the latter. Because sheis doing two things at once,Refugeis slippery, so slippe ry tha t m anyreaders, especially ecofeminists committed to exposing the negativeimplication of linking women with nature, may be tempted to dis-miss the book. Whereas Maureen Devine argues inWomenand Na-turethat the seven novels she studied all begin w ith a premise of du -

alistic opposition before their authors question and reject this samepremise, Williams's strategy does not involve setting up dichoto-mies just so that she can attack them. Rather, by failing to abandoneither dichotomies or circle, Williams presents a confused pictu re ofhumans and their relationship with nature at the same time that shepresents a confused pic ture of herself an d her ow npolitics.Paradox-ically, perhaps, I believe that this confusion not only is interestingand challenging bu t also opens upRefugeas a site for critical debate.By including both dichotomies and the circle metaphor that bringsome confusion and con tradiction to the text, Williams creates a non-authoritative space for reade rs to consider the issues in the book m orecritically, since her own w ord canno t be entirely accepted.

N O T E S

1. Cancer, which is in some ways a natu ral disease, does not seem nat-ural in the kinds and quantities we see it today. In 1900, cancer of all kindscounted for4percent of all dea ths in the United States. Now, after hea rt dis-ease, cancer is the second biggest killer. Fifty years ago a w oman's chance ofgetting breast cancer was 1 in 20, but today it is 1 in 8 (Clorfene-Casten,52-56 ; Brady).2. For a discussion of the way traditional American nature writing por-

trays the landscape in a porn ographic manner, see Legler, 45 -46 .3. Thoreau, for example, lived at Walden Pond for two years, but con-densed the experience into one year in order to obtain a form for Waldenthat related to nature's cycles. Other writers have borrow ed Thoreau's sea-sonal, yearly structure. See, for example, Sue Hubbell's own Walden, ACountryYear:Livingthe Questions.Besides relying on the cyclical pattern oftime, nature writers also structure their work circularly in other ways to



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1 1 2 I S L Econvey Emerson's axiom that there is not an end in nature, bu t every end isa beginn ing (179). An n Zwinger, for example, who seem s to be linearly or-ganizingRun,River,Runfrom the birth of the Green River in the Wyomingbackcou ntry to its dea th when it merges with the Colorado River, ulti-mately dep icts what Aldo Leopold calls the neve r-ending circuit of life(Leopold, 175): And, as it rose in rock, so it ends in rock, not in the ha rd,shattered gray granites, but the sediments from more ancient mountains,layered, worked , rewo rked (Zwinger 1975, 279). In the last chapter ofBe-yondthe spenGrove,Zwinger's organization takes on another permutationof the circular as she describes the layers of ecosystems and history encir-cling the rock she is sitting on.

R E F E R E N C E S

Abbey, Edward.DesertSolitaire.NewYork:McGraw-H ill, 1968.Black Elk.Black ElkSpeaks.Translated by John G. Ne ihard t. Lincoln: Univer-sity of Nebraska Press, 1932.Brady, Judith, ed.1 in3:WomenwithCancer Confront anEpidemic.San Fran-

cisco: Cleis Press, 1991.Christ, Carol P., and Judith Plaskow, eds. Womanspirit Rising: A FeministReaderin Religion. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979.Clorfene-Casten, Liane. The Environmental Link to Breast Cancer. MS.(May/June 1993): 52-56.Daly, Mary.G yn/Ecology:The MetaethicsofRadicalFeminism. Boston: Beacon,1978.Devine, Maureen.Women andN ature.Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1992.Ehrlich, Gretel.Islands,TheUniverse,Home. NewYork:Viking, 1991.Emerson, Ralph Waldo.The Collected Works ofRalph Waldo Emerson. Editedby Joseph Slater et al. Vol. 2. Cam bridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.Fritzell, Peter. Nature Writing andAm erica. Ames: Iowa State UniversityPress,1990.Gilman, Ch ar lo t te Perk ins . The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Stories of Char-lotte Perkins Gilman.Edited by Denise D. Knight. Newark: University ofDelaware Press, 1994.Heller, Chaia. For the Love of Nature: Ecology and the Cult of the Roman-tic. In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature,edited by Greta Gaard,219-42.Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.Hubbell, Sue. A CountryYear: Living the Questions. New York: RandomHouse, 1986.King, Ynestra, and Adrienne Harris, eds.Rocking the Shipof State:Toward aFeminist PeacePolitics. Boulder: Westview, 1989.



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Rethinking Dichotomies 113Kolodny, Annette.The LayoftheLand:Metaphor as Experience and History in merican Life andLetters. Chapel H ill: University of North Carolina Press,1985.Legler, Gretchen. Toward a Postmodern Pastoral: The Erotic Landscape inthe Work of G retel Ehrlich. ISLE:Interdisciplinary StudiesinLiterature andEnvironment1,no. 2(1993):45-55-Leopold, Aldo.ASand CountyAlmanac.NewYork:Oxford University Press,1966.Lueders, Edward.Writing NaturalHistory:Dialogueswith Authors.Salt LakeCity: University of U tah Press , 1989.Merchant, Carolyn. Earthcare. Environment23,no. 5 (1981): 6 ff.Ortner, Sherry. Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Cu lture? InWoman, Cul-ture,andSociety,edited by Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67-8 7.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974.Piercy, M arge.Woman on the Edgeof Time.NewYork:Fawcett C rest, 1976.Plaskow, Jud ith, and CarolP.Christ, eds.Weaving theVisions:New PatternsinFeministSpirituality.San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.Salleh, Ariel. Second Thoughts onRethinking EcofeministPolitics:A Dialec-tical Critique. ISLE:Interdisciplinary StudiesinLiterature and Environment

1, no. 2 (1993): 93-1 06 .Thoreau, Henry D avid.W alden,and Resistance to CivilGovernment.Edited byWilliam Rossi. 2d ed. N ewYork:N orton , 1992.Williams, Terry Tempest.Refuge.NewYork:Pantheon, 1991.Zwinger, Ann.Beyond the spenGrove.New York: Harper and Row, 1981..Run,River,Run.Tucson: University of A rizona Press , 1975.



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