Eighty Degrees of Separation: Languages of Landscape

Abstract

We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. Willa Cather, My Àntonia Above the carpet bedding, on one hand, there is a green hedge, and above the hedge a long row of cabbage trees. I stare up at them, and suddenly the green hedge is a stave, and the cabbage trees, now high, now low, have become an arrangement of notes-a curious, pattering, native melody. Katherine Mansfield, In the Botanical Gardens Two writers in the early 1900s, Katherine Mansfield in New Zealand and Willa Cather in the United States tallgrass prairie, chronicled both the cultural and-physical nuances of their respective frontiers. Their stories are set in rich textural backdrops, made vivid with their descriptions of natural environments. These descriptions provide the text for this exploration. Their dense and evocative imagery provide a point of departure for a comparison of the two landscapes understood not as 'scenery' but as lived places.