The Role Of Sexism In John Muir's Into The Wild

Wilderness as a settler-colonial construct that embodies prejudice--racism and sexism--and that continues to shape and engrave settler-colonial ideologies in our society’s mindset, it should be questioned as to how it has been so powerful a cultural enterprise. Stories are what empower cultural persistence and cultural identity. In particular, the United States has implemented the use of story to shape and construct its cultural ideologies and to marginalize and disempower women and Indigenous people so that white men can assume a position of supremacy. Within these stories, the heroes are often depicted as innocent--similar to anti-conquest in which the colonizer naturalizes his own presence while establishing his power over native peoples

American wilderness stories depict wild-nature as separate from human and as only pure and grand when it meets the criterion of being free from human intervention--emptiness. The components of these stories is really a recipe for constructing and embedding settler-colonial logics in the the minds of the citizenry. John Muir’s, My First Summer in the Sierra Nevada, does an effective job at achieving this. Just like Christopher McCandless in Jon Krakauer’s, Into the Wild, he fetishizes land that is free from human intervention, referring to the mountains, groves, and waterfalls as “glorious mountain sublimities” by which man’s “worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in” (Muir 11, 25). Quintessential dualism, he is segregating the human world from the non-human world; polarizing the relationship while acquiring the land for his own pleasure and therapy (Jacobs 28; Glenn 6). Just as the ideals that the United States are built on, he has a “belief in separate realities” where one reality is a product of civilization and is—as Bell Hooks, in Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, describes it in her piece, “Earthbound”— “a sea of trash” (Colors of Nature 187, 195). The other reality is where a “daydreaming adventurer” (John Muir) sets out to have the “wilderness experience” and indulge in the pleasures of the “Big Outside” –an ideal coined by Dave Foreman, a leader

John Muir targets women and Indigenous People--he, whether intentional or not, renders women and Indigenous People as bodies that are not fit for the wilderness landscapes. Throughout his entire journey, he emphasizes how they--being he’s or his--must see the divine landscapes for themselves because his words alone does God’s work no justice (Muir 26). Towards the end of his journey and the end of Summer, during his passing of Tenaya Canyon he realizes a familiar bird and say’s, “so familiar to every boy in the old Middle West States, is one of the most common of the woodpeckers hereabouts, and makes one feel at home” (Muir 38). This passage from the memoir not only omits women from the wilderness experience, it also teaches young readers and parents that nature and the wild bodies within nature should only be familiar to boys, and this renders wilderness land a place meant only for the male body--a common trope of Western hyper-masculinity. Moreover, he goes on to glorify the “infinite lavishness and fertility of nature” and how it is capable of replenishing a degraded landscape (Muir 51). Just as in the case of the National Geographic where women’s bodies were used to symbolize the magazine's ability to bring the wilderness experience to everybody