Rebecca Gray

For me, Mitchell’s “Imperial Landscape” answered questions I have long harbored about why humans are so taken with landscape, both in concept and in physicality. Let me clarify this quandary: there is a delightfulness that comes with immersing oneself in a landscape that feels distinct and special, whether that’s an NYC street or a dreamy seascape, and I constantly find myself asking why this is true. Engaging with landscape is certainly addictive; it’s why we (humans) like to hike, swim, read in coffee shops and sightsee. But why are we drawn to these activities? The strength of their allure suggests something far more powerful at work than mere aesthetics. I found Mitchell’s “Theses on Landscape” compelling because they not only shed light on this question, but also helped me apply these questions of landscape and meaning to the content of our class–specifically, Betsy Wyeth’s illustrious affair with island life.

“Landscape is not a genre of art, but a medium,” reads Mitchell’s first thesis on landscape. This statement is striking for a few reasons. First, it suggests that the building blocks of landscape: geological forms, human infrastructure, and of course, the life that inhabits place itself, are all instrumental in its creation. This thinking allows us to imagine our own active role in the creation of any landscape we find beautiful; we cultivate our own aesthetic in order to complement that of our surroundings. I imagine it’s why bean boots more fashionable at Colby College than in Manhattan. In this way, we become integral to the landscape we enjoy. As Mitchell says, we are “medium”: paint on canvas. Immersed.

Translating this metaphor to Betsy Wyeth’s endeavor to make a project of Allen Island reveals fresh commentary on the question Ben asked us through an in-class worksheet: “What stories do the Wyeths tell themselves about themselves?” It’s probably the same story we are all drafting: that our existence is important, that our story enhances that of our surroundings.

The very title of Peter Ralston’s “Betsy Wyeth’s World is an Island in Maine” immediately compelled me to reflect on Stephen King’s “The Reach”. I couldn’t help but draw parallels between King’s protagonist, Stella, and the very real character of Betsy. Deeming an island someone’s “world” is no small thing; it holds implications of isolation, obsession, and greater disconnect with the mainland, both in physicality and ideological concept. Yet unlike Stella, who clings to her island home with fear and contempt for mainland, Betsy has found a home in island life by choice; in fact, the illustrious life she has led in both urban and rural mainland spaces has served to texture her relationship with the island and enrich her appreciation for it. This is well communicated in Ralston’s work, in which he describes Betsy’s two worlds (that of the islands and mainland) as sources of “creative tension” that define her work as a perpetual work in progress, unlike Andrew’s paintings, which eventually reach completion (Ralston 2). This raises the question of how Betsy’s “islomania” (a word coined by my great grandfather to describe the enchantment many people, tourists and locals alike, experience when setting foot on an island) has been shaped by her position as a “person from away” (another Maine-ism). Unlike Stella, and many Maine island residents, Betsy now chooses island life within the context of enormous wealth and personal as well as professional success. She has the privilege of making Allen and Benner Islands her “projects” because she can. Yet it’s unfair to say that Maine’s island-borne folk don’t have projects of their own. My question, then, is can island life truly compose a life’s work? And if so, how does the composition of that work change depending on personal standpoints of geography, wealth, and concept of home?

 

By Harley’s account, our dialogue of historic cartography has long engendered oppressive narratives of non-European peoples and their relationships with space. “European map-makers and map users have increasingly promoted a standard scientific model of knowledge and cognition,” writes Harvey, who continues to note that “this mimetic bondage has led to a tendency…to regard the maps of other non-Western or early cultures (where the rules of mapmaking were different) as inferior to European maps” (Harley 4). Here, Harley illustrates a fundamental difference in the way European explorers of the 17th century onward and their cross cultural contemporaries sought to understand their space. Maps can be defined by any number of parameters: coordinates, landmarks, topography, utility, etc. For me, this raised questions of whether there are gaps in how we understand the our homes and how outsiders understand them, and what those gaps are. Even on top of this, how do we define “home”? Is it our house? Our town? Colby, or a family tree? Can a map communicate the fluid complexities of these concepts over time–or, in other words, can we map spacetime?

 

King’s story offers us a glimpse into the spacetime of Goat Island only as Stella sees it; in other words, we know only what Stella experiences or can remember, which we quickly learn isn’t very reliable. We are therefore challenged to draw a comprehensive image of Goat Island based exclusively on the limited testimony of a woman who remembers little and sees ghosts. Given Harvey’s definition, we may therefore consider Goat Island to be a “field of flows” and Stella’s experience of it a small crystal. We learn that just in Stella’s lifetime, the island has seen its share of flux: bitter winters that give way to mild summers, decades of fruitful fishing industry that wax and wane with time, birthdays and deaths and children who move away. Yet despite its ever-changing face, Stella holds onto it for dear life because it is what she knows. This is powerful: how does she continue to find such comfort in the recognizability of a place that is so different now from when she was young? I think considering this question helps us understand her ghosts. She wants so much to hold tight an era that has passed. It is, like the bit of water between her and the mainland, a Reach. With this in mind, it is no coincidence that the literal Reach between Goat Island and the Mainland freezes at the same time Stella’s mind begins to conjure ghosts.

In fact, we should be especially cognizant of Harvey’s use of the word “crystalized” as it relates to the frozen reach as a motif within the story. When Stella encounters a frozen bird on her back porch, she immediately recalls her last similar experience, and although she says “Frozen” out loud, King writes, “something inside her [speaks] another word.” Here, frozen takes on dual meaning. Literally, here is Stella holding a dead bird, smack in the middle of the second coldest winter in her memory. But more than this, an experience that has for so long been held still, unmoving in her memory, rushes back to her, like a river just after thawing.