Representations of Evil in Fiction and Film

Abstract

sors’ concern for being uprooted as she writes about the fate of entire cultures who travelled across vast spaces. Chapters four, five, and six come back to several of these concerns yet focus on “how nature is understood and treated” (4) by a culture so intensely preoccupied with travel. Here, Boschman’s reading of Bradstreet shows how the female speaker ultimately sacrifices her interest in wilder aspects of nature to her patriarchal audience’s colonial perception of the land, even though some of her quite controlled poems retain the desire for a different perspective. With regards to Bishop, the study emphasizes how her notion of place “ground[s] itself more authentically in the physical world” (143) as she combines ample detail with a cosmic reach in her often ironic embrace of nature’s otherness. The final chapter on Clampitt stresses how her work intertwines physical nature and spiritual transcendence, as well as human and natural histories, and that it is in many ways due to her embrace of Christianity that she manages to address the irresolvable paradox of our human existence vis-à-vis nature with such astounding force. Overall, Boschman’s study shows that the seemingly divergent visions of Bradstreet, Bishop and Clampitt share a profound interest in the interconnectedness of travel and the natural environment, and how all three, as they write from different personal and historical perspectives, seek to revise patriarchal, utilitarian, Eurocentric ideas of nature’s subjugation and colonization. On a different level, it also demonstrates how and why poetry is able to express some of the complexities of nature and human-nature interaction that today’s prime ecologists call for us to see.