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A review by karabc19
Wild Life by Molly Gloss
5.0
In her novel Wild Life, Molly Gloss manages to combine great storytelling with a strong message about wildlife conservation. Using the frame tale device, diary entries, character sketches, and short story excerpts, Gloss experiments with narrative form to present us with the formidable feminist and adventure authoress Charlotte Bridger Drummond, who, while in search of her housekeeper’s granddaughter Harriet in the Washington wilderness, becomes part of a Sasquatch family, truly living the wild life. The frame tale warns us that this could be made up, the early drafting of a novel, but Gloss prefers that to be ambiguous. And, ultimately, for her story, it does not matter if it is true or not. What matters is the suggestion that “we human beings seem no longer fitted for life in the wilderness—have been weakened by centuries of civilized life—but there may yet be something inherent in our natures, some potentiality which wants only the right circumstances to return us to the raw edge of Wilderness” (206). Gloss shows her Romantic colors throughout the novel: her Emersonian glorification of the wild, native man; her Thoreauvian appreciation of nature and lamentation of its loss in the name of human progress; and even the occasional Hawthorne-esque nod to the mysteries of humanity and the “unthinkable voids and immense wildernesses in the human heart” (241). Written in 1999, and set at the turn of the twentieth century, the novel argues that humanity is defined by conquering the wilderness; in fact, something of our humanity is lost with the loss of the wilderness.
Gloss also ties in this message with feminism, for it is the woman warrior whose humanity is redeemed by her journey into the wild. Using the framework of second-wave feminism, Gloss has Charlotte constantly proving herself, proving that she can do anything that a man can do. Men are unjustly violent: Harriet’s father is responsible for her murder as well as for sexually forcing himself on his wife; one of the young Sasquatch is shot and killed by a miner; and Charlotte is groped by a logger. In contrast, Charlotte, a widowed single mother of five boys, bonds with the Sasquatch family via the mother, suggesting that women’s maternal, caring, and empathetic natures will save nature. In a story of how “this country was tamed and hedged about, emptied of the last of its mysteries, and the connection between ourselves and the wild world irrevocably broken” (245), Gloss hints that feminism and women will redeem humanity and save the earth. I should clarify that I don’t think Gloss means to suggest that it will be through traditional feminine qualities (she presents cogent critiques of marriage as a barrier to women’s self-actualization, a popular feminist argument of the time period). Although the human and Sasquatch females bond as mothers, it is their “wildness” that is their greatest quality. Charlotte learns to feel and hear in the wild what she never had before; she develops a special affinity with nature and the creatures of it; she becomes a part of it.
One last piece of Gloss’s romanticism is her conviction that by losing the American wilderness, we will lose one of our greatest sources for storytelling and metaphor. “The Wild Man of the Woods strikes [Melba, Harriet’s grandmother] as altogether too near to the real, and consequently dreadful. It is a discredited feeling in civilized nations, but I believe we are all still afraid of the dark, and here in this land of dark forests the very air is imbued with such stories; indeed, the loggers had the tales first from the Indians. The realness of them is another matter. As the woods are daylighted, and wilderness gives way to modern advances in education and technology, I expect to see the end of the Wild Man, exactly as faeries and gnomes disappeared with the encroaching of the cities in Europe” (31). Without the mystery and depths of the forest, we lose the Wild Man, both figuratively and literally.
Gloss also ties in this message with feminism, for it is the woman warrior whose humanity is redeemed by her journey into the wild. Using the framework of second-wave feminism, Gloss has Charlotte constantly proving herself, proving that she can do anything that a man can do. Men are unjustly violent: Harriet’s father is responsible for her murder as well as for sexually forcing himself on his wife; one of the young Sasquatch is shot and killed by a miner; and Charlotte is groped by a logger. In contrast, Charlotte, a widowed single mother of five boys, bonds with the Sasquatch family via the mother, suggesting that women’s maternal, caring, and empathetic natures will save nature. In a story of how “this country was tamed and hedged about, emptied of the last of its mysteries, and the connection between ourselves and the wild world irrevocably broken” (245), Gloss hints that feminism and women will redeem humanity and save the earth. I should clarify that I don’t think Gloss means to suggest that it will be through traditional feminine qualities (she presents cogent critiques of marriage as a barrier to women’s self-actualization, a popular feminist argument of the time period). Although the human and Sasquatch females bond as mothers, it is their “wildness” that is their greatest quality. Charlotte learns to feel and hear in the wild what she never had before; she develops a special affinity with nature and the creatures of it; she becomes a part of it.
One last piece of Gloss’s romanticism is her conviction that by losing the American wilderness, we will lose one of our greatest sources for storytelling and metaphor. “The Wild Man of the Woods strikes [Melba, Harriet’s grandmother] as altogether too near to the real, and consequently dreadful. It is a discredited feeling in civilized nations, but I believe we are all still afraid of the dark, and here in this land of dark forests the very air is imbued with such stories; indeed, the loggers had the tales first from the Indians. The realness of them is another matter. As the woods are daylighted, and wilderness gives way to modern advances in education and technology, I expect to see the end of the Wild Man, exactly as faeries and gnomes disappeared with the encroaching of the cities in Europe” (31). Without the mystery and depths of the forest, we lose the Wild Man, both figuratively and literally.