Women in Wasteland – Gendered Deserts in T. S. Eliot and Shelley Jackson

Abstract

The notion of the gendered desert as an ambivalent setting, encompassing death and survival, has found manifestations in both modernist and postmodernist Anglophone literature. The wasteland topos is seen here as a paradoxical offshoot of the pastoral tradition. Whereas T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) employs it to express post-war disillusionment in abstract, psychological terms, Shelley Jackson's hypertext narrative Patchwork Girl – or A Modern Monster (1993) – turns it into a symbol of deconstructing a male-dominated literary paradigm. Desert landscapes are understood as gendered in both texts – representing the female as a jigsaw totality of womanhood. From a diachronic point of view, Eliot's text renders its female subjects as victims of failed Western civilisations. An ecofeminist reading compares the desert landscape with sterilised female sexuality and spirituality. By contrast, Jackson's hypernarrative invites a rather more optimistic, cyberfeminist reading, denoting the overcoming of gender boundaries imposed by ecofeminism. Presenting her readers with a prototypical cyborg, Jackson offers a positive outlook to a technophile Western readership. To provide a theoretical foundation, this article examines (post)modern approaches to the pastoral mode as well as aspects of current feminist criticism and feminine American frontier mentality.