Feminist historian Annette Kolodny observes, for example, that New England Puritans were as inclined as other explorers to personify uncharted land as a woman waiting to be taken and “improved” by male conquerors. The image of the New World as a female body open to the plowshare of the bold husbandman became a dominant metaphor in colonial experience. Thomas Morton, in 1632, spoke of New England as “a faire virgin, longing to be sped, and meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed.” William Strachey, in 1609, described the landscape of Maine as a female whose “fertility and pleasure” could be enhanced
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