Making the Desert American

Abstract

Landscapes, as Heike Schaefer states clearly, do not simply exist; they arise from a process of cultural construction in which the personal experiences of the observer are blended, moulded, and shaped by a congeries of his own past experiences, the history embedded in the landscape, and a collection of cultural and social tropes about the land. The feelings a landscape evokes – love, revulsion, indifference – are, in part, the creation of this process. In their encounter with the New World, Europeans passed through a dizzying series of sometimes contradictory reactions to the land before them, all freighted with long familiarity with both the landforms and the metaphorical, even mythical, understandings of that land. To the Atlantic coast of what would later be the United States they applied especially metaphors of a gendered landscape, a female land ripe and ready, needing only men to bring it to its natural fertility. This way of understanding the landscape worked well until the Europeans, pushing west, passed into space more and more arid, until at last they encountered the desert Southwest. There the tender, female gendering of space, which had defined much of their emotional interaction with the young United States, collapsed. Groping for other metaphors, many travellers reached into the Bible, which offered a rich series of tropes