As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art

by Rebecca Solnit

To Rebecca Solnit, the word "landscape" implies not only literal places but also the ground on which we invent our lives and confront our innermost troubles and desires. The organic world, to Solnit, gives rise to the social, political, and philosophical landscapes we inhabit. In these nineteen quirky, smart, and wryly humorous pieces, Solnit ranges across disciplines to explore nuclear test sites, deserts, clouds, caves, and the meaning of national borders--as well as ideas of the feminine and the sublime as they relate to our physical and psychological terrains.

Sixty images throughout the book display the work of the contemporary artists under discussion, including landscape photographers, performance artists, sculptors, and installation artists. Alongside her text, Solnit's gallery of images provides a vivid excursion into new ways of perceiving landscape, bodies, and art. Animals and the human body appear together with space and terra firma as Solnit reconfigures the blurred lines that define nature.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Essays, Gender, Feminism, Gender Studies, Philosophy

234 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2001

About the author

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering  and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.

Reviews

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Propitiously, the Reading List Algorithm Gods decided I'd read this book alongside Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. So alongside McCarthy's manly men manning their way through their blood-soaked fantasies of the border, I get to float down the Rio Grand with the open and loving mind of Rebecca Solnit.

It's like walking out of a stuffy frat boy's room full of dudes playing Call of Duty or something, and into a breezy field of wildflowers and weeds.

There is some repetition about the nature/culture and gender divide, but in general this is a wonderful engagement with wild art and wild places and good ideas.

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few author write with as much sensitivity and poignancy about landscape, the desert, and the American West than Solnit. Her early book, Savage Dreams, one of my top five books of all-time.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the more intriguing aspects of reading material from Rebecca Solnit is that one knows that it will be reliably rubbish [1].  It hardly matters whether she is writing about her travels, or the West, or the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, or any other number of subjects, what she says will be ridiculous and untrue.  One gets the distinct feeling from reading this book that the author fancies herself far cleverer and far more insightful than she in fact is.  In fact, this book is a good book to hateread, an unfortunate habit of mine I suppose, in that I can tell whether or not someone's opinion will be worth listening to based on how they feel about this book.  If they think this book is amazing, I probably will not respect or agree with much about what they say.  And the reverse is likely to be true as well.  The author and I are simply with opposite worldviews and disagree on fundamentally everything that she talks about in this book.  One has to be a particular sort of person to read a book like this unless you happen to believe in ecofeminism and view leftist tech companies as being too right-wing, and I would not consider that a good thing.

The author at least speaks about a wide variety of subjects.  She begins with a bird's eye view of the west and her tastes in literature.  After that there is a discussion on the damage done to various areas, like Nevada's great basin, due to the bomb.  Then there are some laughable ideas for a new landscape.  The author talks about the desert and her ideas about what kind of people appreciate them (I happen to myself, but I don't think this makes me particularly special).  The author enjoys the thought of unsettling the west through photography, encourages various new landscapes, and has some scaremongering thoughts about technology being too conservative in its approach.  The author has some rubbish thoughts about immigration--apparently failing to recognize that even the Garden of Eden had an angel with a flaming sword to bar the way.  There are discussions about Noah's alphabet, dirt, some art gallery show outside of San Francisco, the landscapes of emergency, caves, perspective, and even the aesthetics of nature calendars and some comments about aesthetics and how it relates to gender.

As a reader of this book, I was disappointed that I couldn't even appreciate much of the photography because so much of it dealt with heretical ideas about the sacred feminine.  When an author has offensive religious views, political views, and views about aesthetics, there is very little to appreciate.  The author's praise of the remote and the wilderness appears to have a high degree of hostility towards humanity in general, especially men, and a desire to be a recluse in a wilderness with only herself and those of like mind to spend time with.  Quite frankly, any world she viewed as a utopia would likely be viewed by most other people as a hell, and most worlds without her would probably be better than this one.  For most people who do not like to read books they know they will despise because the author has nothing of value to say about any topic, this book (or any other one she is involved with) will be easy enough to avoid, but I suppose I can spare some pity for those who do think her worth reading.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Memories themselves seem to smudge from too much fond examination, becoming only the memory of a memory.” In Rebecca Solnit’s As Eve Said To The Serpent, a tapestry of landscape, gender and art is woven with incredible care and variety. This was the perfect book to read after Savage Dreams and Storming the Gates of Paradise, concerned as both are with landscapes, and given this book opens once again at the Nevada Test Site - indeed, material from this book appears also in the other two, written either side of this one. Through photography and other visual art, Solnit probes questions primarily of subjectivity, be that of memory, narrative or interpretation. In one essay, Solnit explores the dirt and its connection to body and spirit; in another, she writes extensively on “the Aesthetic of the Exquisite” and how that applies to the intimate landscape of the female body and (body) hair. With a wry feminist insight Solnit utilises her ability to make associations, in words and images, across time and space, so that even the most abstract notions feel immediate and necessary. There may be a gap in theology where Eve’s conversation with the Serpent took place, but this essay is as good a way as any to fill it - not with conjecture of what was, but with an understand of what has followed the (un)telling of that story.

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebecca Solnit here turns here clear-eyed and lyrical gaze to subjects of art, the landscape, and feminism in this essay collection. She explores caves, clouds, borders, the hydrogen bomb and wandering nuclear physicists, interweaving the imaginative with the historical and political, provoking reflection on how we think about the nature of nature, and how we think, dream and imagine ourselves in relation to it.

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

". . . if environmental problems are really cultural problems -- about the nature of our desires and our perceptions -- then a crucial territory to explore or transform is the territory of the mind." Sounds simple, right?
This is a comprehensive analysis of our evolving relationship with the landscape and how it plays out in our experience as artists. The book begins with the story of Eden and the fall of man and continues forward in time, exploring the influence of the early radical thinkers of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Newton; of Oppenheimer's atom bomb and how his choice of Los Alamos symbolized the grandeur of his vision; to other people and events that helped shape our relationship to the land in profound ways. Solnit examines how artists have respond to the idea of manifest destiny and challenge the mythologies of land and gender.

It's slow reading for me, not because it's dryly written or plodding, but because it's packed with so much important information. Fascinating read. I'll be renewing this book several times over to finish it.

[Jana · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of essays on feminism as it relates to built and natural environments. Somewhere along the way, I lost / sold / exchanged this book as I do with so many... only, this is one I'd soon like to buy back. Every time I read or re-read one of her essays, I was inspired in my own work.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebecca Solnit has a talent for linking disparate ideas in ways that make sense. This is the second book of hers that I've read and I would recommend them both. In this book, I especially enjoy her analysis of calendars (of women and nature). This particular example is both common and noteworthy; there are few places where the connection of these two constructs are more apparent.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has its moments, but fails to come together. I'm always impressed with her style, but this one was not my favorite.

[Mills College Library]

704.9436 S688 2001

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent discussion of Art, landscape and gender. Solnit is a brilliant writer -