First-Year Seminars 110LD - A Landscape of One's Own

This seminar will focus on portrayals of women in nineteenth and twentieth-century America in the context of nature and landscape. We will explore how women, often objectified in visual images set in nature, appropriated established devices or developed new images and structures to represent womanhood in their own terms. With selected works by Thoreau as our springboard, texts will include essays or sketches, short stories, novels, paintings, films, and photography. Virginia Woolf wrote of the need for a woman to have "a room of one's own," a quiet space for creativity and reflection. What emerges in the works of women writers who chose the land beyond that room for their creative space? The course will focus on women who told the stories of their lives in the context of islands, forests, prairies, and deserts of the United States.

Mount Holyoke first-year students only, by placement.