The Idea of Wilderness

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The Idea of Wilderness My purpose in this essay is to argue that wilderness is seen in different ways by people and so, it is presented in different ways in literary texts as well. The literary texts I am going to be based on are three of those we have read in class; two short stories (Louise Erdrich´s “Fleur” and Sarah Orne Jewett´s “A White Heron”) and a children book (Holes by Louis Sachar). I will make difference between wild people and wild nature since it is possible to appreciate a variety of mixture between those in the stories and so, I think these three stories give us the opportunity to look at them in that way. For that, I will make use of different sources in which there are different opinions of what wilderness means for different eco critics. First, I will watch carefully the wilderness that seems to wear both Erdrich´s character Fleur and Jewett´s one, Sylvia, inside them in the two short stories. Then, I will pay attention to the way wilderness is portrayed in nature by Jewett and Sachar in their stories. Finally, Both Erdrich´s and Jewett´s main characters of their stories are presented as wild people if we take into consideration some eco-critic´s statement regarding to this concept. Fleur is a young girl who has been living all her life in an Indian tribe in North Dakota. When she is around 21 she moves herself to a white human being´s village called Argues. The story is told by one of the habitants of that village, Pauline. She describes Fleur comparing to an animal, she says that “her hips (were) fishlike (…) her braids were thick like the tails of animals (…) her teeth, strong and sharp (…) her fifth toes were missing”(p.2834). Moreover, men also see her like an animal since, as Pauline says, they “saw her in the flesh” (p.2834). After being raped by those nasty butcher men, Fleur vanish off that
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