Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860.Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
The Land Before Her examines the ways in which women reacted to male fantasies about the “frontier.” Frontier representations in Fredric Jackson Turner’s and others’ imaginations rely on images of paradise and femininity. Paradise, in other words, becomes a sexualized term, such as "Paradise with all her Virgin beauties" and the frontier is a "bride" that offers "sweet embraces." These representations deprive women any ownership of dominant frontier myths. Without access to these dominant frontier myths, women constructed their own mythology in part through the planting of gardens; a means of taming the wilderness. Kolodny examination then attempts to fill in the gaps of Turner’s “frontier” thesis with women’s perspectives and confronts what she sees as Turner’s over reliance upon mythology rather than history (adapted from Liz Seabrook’s essay at http://www.columbia.edu/~es305/project2/Turner-Kolodny.html). [L. McReynolds]