Embodiment of a Nation

In this fascinating analysis of American geographical and topographical imagery, Cecelia Tichi demonstrates the many ways in which our history, as well as our cultural values, are embedded in our monuments and historical sites. Using interdisciplinary perspectives from literature, history, and visual and material cultural studies, Tichi shows us how to read our national mythology in our continually shifting interpretation of our national sites and places. -- Wendy Martin, author of An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich A brilliant analysis of how the landscape and physical environment of the United States have been transformed physically and imaginatively by creative, but often destructive, projections of national bodily identities onto the land. Tichi demonstrates how technologies combine with political motives, social impulses, and historical developments to infuse spaces and places with national meanings, even bodily geo-identity. This is bold, original research. -- Emory Elliott, General Editor of Columbia Literary History of the United States

From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s image of the Mississippi's “bosom” to Thoreau’s Cape Cod as “the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts,” the American environment has been represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm.

From Harriet Beecher Stowe's image of the Mississippi's "bosom" to Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod as "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts," the U.S. environment has been recurrently represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Cecelia Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm. Environmental history as cultural studies, her book plumbs the deep and peculiarly American bond between nationalism, the environment, and the human body.

Tichi disputes the United States' reputation of being "nature's nation." U.S. citizens have screened out nature effectively by projecting the bodies of U.S. citizens upon nature. She pursues this idea by pairing Mount Rushmore with Walden Pond as competing efforts to locate the head of the American body in nature; Yellowstone's Old Faithful with the Moon as complementary embodiments of the American frontier; and Hot Springs, Arkansas, with Love Canal as contrasting sites of the identification of women and water. A major contribution to current discussions of gender and nature, her book also demonstrates the intellectual power of wedding environmental studies to the social history of the human body.