'The Hypersexualization Of Nature In Merchant's The Octopus'

Coinciding with man’s entitlement to tame nature is the hypersexualization of nature found in the same American texts that serve as the foundation for man’s duty to redeem nature and woman. As Merchant elucidates throughout the text, the rhetoric of Western literature “is filled with language that casts nature as [a] female object to be transformed and [man] as the agent of [the transformation]” (Merchant 145). The colonization narrative of the United States is, at its most basic level, “a story of male energy subduing female nature” (Merchant 146). Man’s despotic control of nature is driven by an egocentric drive to capitalize upon it, and the control exerted is disturbingly carnal: man extracts “resources from nature’s bosom, [penetrates]

Merchant demonstrates this through her assessment of passages from late author Frank Norris’ novel The Octopus: A Story of California. In the novel, Norris graphically illustrates nature as a sentient and sexual woman, “palpitating with the desire of reproduction” (Norris 45). Norris grossly characterizes the woman personifying nature as a compliant pawn, “offering itself to the caress of the plow” (Norris 45). Norris painfully prolongs the metaphor of plow as man, a choice made to reflect “male agriculturalists’ [fixation on compelling] female nature to produce” (Merchant 145). The already tasteless comparison of plow and man becomes even more deplorable as Norris turns the “the seduction [into] violent rape” (Merchant 146), describing the “vigorous, male, [and] powerful” (Norris 47) force of the plow, nature’s “quivered response” (Norris 47) to the plow, and the eventual violation of nature through the plow’s “rude advance, so robust as to be almost an assault, so violent to be veritably brutal” (Norris 47). In conjunction with one another, the hypersexualization of nature–as manifested in The Octopus: A Story of California–and the gender-biased exegesis of Judeo-Christian biblical imagery effectively condition man to do unto woman what they have done unto

Merchant discusses how the unimpeded “energy of wild female nature is suppressed and pacified” (Merchant 147) by man, who impose the concept of “nature nurtured”, or “Natura naturata– the natural order, or nature to be ordered and tamed” (Merchant 147)-–onto the wild female nature. The enforcement of Natura naturata terminates the existing concept of “nature naturing, [or] Natura naturans–nature as creative force” (Merchant 147)–that wild female nature represented. Modern civilization is the paragon of Natura naturata, as the principles of 21st-century society are heavily influenced by the revolution of “female nature into female civilization through the mutually reinforcing powers of male energy” (Merchant 150). Man continues to subjugate the “unpredictable external nature and unruly internal nature” (Merchant 153) of woman today. To combat the patriarchal values that continue to impact woman and nature, ecofeminism supports the adoption of a “new narrative [that] would entail reclaiming [woman’s role] in the history of science and asserting female power in contemporary science and technology” (Merchant 155). The ethics of ecofeminist philosophy aver that “both sexes can participate in the recovery” (Merchant 155) narrative. Remedying the consequences of the historical gendering of nature “will be achieved