| abstract |
This dissertation explores the ways in which landscapes have acted as healing agents during trauma and loss. Viewed in the light, the natural world can become a resource not for human exploitation but for connection and encounter. Furthermore, this work analyzes the ways writers, specifically poets, have allowed landscapes to influence their work, especially in relationship with trauma and loss. The specific landscape explored is Provincetown, Massachusetts. The intersection of environment, trauma, and poetry as witness and testimony is at the core of Provincetown's evolving identity in the 21st century.
One major framework I will be using to understand trauma will be Shelly Rambo's theological work. Rambo's term for the experience of trauma is "The Middle Day" or "Middleness". A key characteristic of her work is the notion of trauma survivors being in the middle, or in the midst of an experience of death and life. Trauma occurs when a death event intrudes on life, changing the nature of that life, including one's experience of time and place. While Rambo uses Christian theology to better frame the experience of trauma and survival, this paper moves that terminology into the environmental and literary world. The coastal space of Provincetown witnesses to a kind of Middleness, while poets are able to testify from this territory about the experience of living in the aftermath of trauma and loss.
A place on the very end of the continent, Provincetown has been a refuge for artists for decades, particularly artists in the gay community. There, out on the edge of town, gay men and women have been able to find a connection with the natural world that has offered healing, creative inspiration, solace, and companionship.
In this way, this dissertation seeks to help restore humanity's appreciation of nature as a resource during trauma and loss, providing even more reason to protect that nature from destruction. Writers like Mary Oliver and Mark Doty create out of this space of both landscape and loss, pointing toward a new, ecocritical aesthetic emerging from the Middleness of Provincetown's coastline in the 21st century.
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