“Marching across the water”: A Material Ecofeminist Reading of “A View of the Woods”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

My sincerest thanks to Bruce Gentry and Katie Simon for their mentorship and their invaluable insight about this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor: “By the summer of 1956, most noticeable to [O’Connor] was the encroachment of the modern world, as commercialism and industrialization transformed the landscape and Andalusia received its first telephone line … . Georgia Power Company’s Sinclair Dam on the Oconee River had created a high-power generating plant and a fifteen-thousand-acre lake north of town. And Milledgeville was annexing a five-hundred-acre wooded area just across Highway 441 for a housing subdivision” (Gooch, 2009, 279).

² Though many critics have made important arguments about the woods in “A View of the Woods” as being personified and/or that the woods should be read as a character (see Browning, 1974, Desmond, 1987, Westarp, 2002, Achilles, 2015, Vande Brake, 2011, and others), few scholars have acknowledged the woods as having agency.

³ Mark Graybill calls O’Connor “an imperfect environmental activist” (11). Timothy Vande Brake has also written about O’Connor’s environmentalism: “O’Connor is greener than we have taken her to be. Her respect for nature grows directly out of her incarnational theology, which affirms the enduring goodness of God’s creation despite human ability to mar it” (27).

⁴ See Graybill, “O’Connor’s Deep Ecological Vision.”

⁵ See Piggford, “Flannery O’Connor’s Excavator in A View of the Woods.”

⁶ See Vande Brake, “Thinking like a Tree.”

⁷ See Mahoney, “O’Connor’s Subversion of the Country-as-Eden Myth.”

⁸ In addition to all symbols of technology and change in the story: Mr. Fortune’s car, the bulldozers, the character Tilman, the boat, etc.

⁹ Though my reading here does not consider the possible sexual abuse in this story, several scholars have speculated about this topic; see Gentry, 2004 and Hewitt, 2004.

¹⁰ While I use and extend Kolodny’s work, many other foundational and more contemporary ecofeminist texts are important to note as well. See Alaimo, Gaard, 2011 Haraway, 1985, Merchant, 1980, Plumwood, 1993, Shiva, 1988, Warren, 1997, and others.

¹¹ Two weeks after this letter, O’Connor writes again to “A”: “You have convinced me that the Christ symbol is Pitts if there at all. You are right. It’s got to be human” (O’Connor, Habit of Being 196). It is important to note that O’Connor is grappling with these important topics as she was still drafting “A View of the Woods,” and there was an alternative conclusion to the story that she ultimately omitted. Regardless of O’Connor’s speculation here, my point remains: a more nuanced interpretation of “A View of the Woods” considers nonhuman agency (O'Connor, 1979).

¹² Though not a commonly used term, I use “yonic” here as the counterpart to “phallic.” Yonic (adj.) derives from yoni (noun, Sanskrit), “A figure or symbol of the female organ of generation as an object of veneration among the Hindus and others” (OED). The OED cites the first use of yonic by M. Macfie in Relig. Parall. (27) in 1879.

¹³ See Mahoney, 2011, Piggford, 2017, Graybill, 2011, Achilles, 2017.

¹⁴ See Gentry, 2004, Whitt, 1995, Giannone, 1996.

¹⁵ See Kolodny’s, 1975. The Lay of the Land for numerous examples.