Douglas A. Vakoch
A Different Story
The essence of feminist literary criticism is difficult, if not impossible, to define. In part, the challenge arises from the many ways the term is used.[1] In the context of studying literature, some use “feminist criticism” to refer to any criticism written by a woman, regardless of the subject matter. Others restrict the use to criticism written by women from a specifically feminist perspective, whether the original work being analyzed was written by a woman or a man (Kolodny 1975b). Still others would make the term inclusive enough to refer to literary criticism written by either women or men, as long as the analysis is informed by feminism.
Feminist criticism also resists generalization in terms of its methods and ultimate goals. Instead, it recognizes as legitimate a plurality of approaches—sometimes even in contradiction to one another (Rooney 2006). Critics have often viewed these sometimes incompatible strategies with caution, reflecting a lack of coherence and clear definition. In contrast, others have argued that such pluralism in feminist literary criticism is the only stance consistent with the multiple ideologies that inform the broader women’s movement, and that a quest for a uniform conceptual model is antithetical to the enterprise. While for some this pluralism portends a chaotic future for literary inquiry, others argue that by embracing such pluralism, feminists can continue to search even more deeply for patterns of oppression as well as connection. To acknowledge the value of multiple perspectives, they must merely forfeit the claim that their current theories are self-sufficient and all-encompassing (Kolodny 1980/2007).
Similarly, ecocriticism has multiple manifestations. Stated succinctly, ecocriticism examines the relationship between the physical environment and literature (Glotfelty 1996). Some ecocritics, however, avoid an overarching description that is universally applicable, seeing their field instead as a confluence of practices in which diversity of approach is a virtue. But regardless of the theoretical or methodological stance from which they begin, ecocritics are committed to keeping environmental issues at the center of their work (Buell 2005).
The openness of both feminist literary criticism and ecocriticism to multiple, even incompatible perspectives, without the insistence on unitary definitions of their fields, provides the possibility for the formation of a new field: feminist ecocriticism. This hybrid discipline is also called ecofeminist literary criticism, which has been described as “politically engaged discourse that analyzes conceptual connections between the manipulation of women and the nonhuman” (Buell, Heise, and Thornber 2011: 425).[2]
This cross-fertilization of perspectives has already begun to make itself apparent, with ecofeminism being seen as one of the catalysts for ecocriticism’s increasing recognition of the complexity of environmental issues. Like feminist theory, ecocriticism recognizes the discontinuities and tensions between historical and poststructuralist approaches to its discipline, as well as between Western perspectives and more globally inclusive understandings. Ecocriticism has increasingly acknowledged the complex interplay of environment and culture, and feminist perspectives have provided a guide for doing so (Buell 2005).
In the years immediately following François d’Eaubonne’s coining of the word “ecofeminism” (d’Eaubonne 1974), few literary critics adopted this perspective. Nevertheless, related ideas were being discussed in other areas of the humanities and social sciences. For example, anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner (1974) argued that the universal devaluation of women relative to men could be explained by assuming that women are seen as being closer to nature than men, while men are seen as being more intimately connected with the “higher” realm of culture (Vakoch 2011). But in literature departments, the intersections of ecology and feminism were largely ignored during the 1970s and 1980s (Gaard and Murphy 1998). By the following decade, however, literary critics had begun to examine in depth “‘the woman/nature analogy,’ defined by Warren as ‘the connections—historical, empirical, conceptual, theoretical, symbolic, and experiential—between the domination of women and the domination of nature’” (Carr 2000: 16). Though the significance of a specifically ecofeminist perspective for ecocriticism has been recognized by some, its potential has largely been seen as unfulfilled (Garrard 2004).
It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. . . .
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1989: 168)
Earlier collections on ecofeminist literary criticism (Gaard and Murphy 1998; Carr 2000; Campbell 2008) have provided examples of literature that reveal the oppressiveness of patriarchal, dualistic thinking. The current volume builds upon these works to explore the range of specifically emancipatory strategies employed by ecofeminist literary critics as antidotes, asking what our lives might be like as those strategies become increasingly successful in overcoming oppression. In this view, ecofeminism should not be confined to critique, but should instead identify and articulate liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world, in the process transforming everyday life (Carr 2000). In the process of exploring literature from ecofeminist perspectives, we can expect to reveal strategies of emancipation that have already begun to give rise to more hopeful ecological narratives (Murphy 1991).
For example, by Douglas Werden’s (2001) ecofeminist analysis, Edna Ferber’s novel So Big challenges dualism by advancing an ideal of beauty that repudiates patriarchal preconceptions. As Werden recounts the life of Selina DeJong, a woman farmer who is the protagonist of this early twentieth-century work, at the outset of the novel we see the link between the male domination of the land and the domination of women. On a personal level, this is manifest in the relationship between Selina and her husband; on a broader societal level, it is evident in the expansion of capitalist agribusiness.
The dual oppression of women and nature is symbolized in So Big by Selina’s future husband picking a trillium flower, taken from a neighboring man’s woods. Once this flower is picked, along with the three life-giving leaves nestled immediately below it, the plant is destined to die or take years to recover. So too is Selina’s exuberance for life threatened by her husband’s dismissiveness, domination, and neglect—attitudes and actions that are reflected more broadly in his farming practices.
In So Big, we see how Selina benefits by caring for the land and the farm’s animals, employing conservation methods long before they were common practice. Initially, she benefits slowly, continually constrained by her husband’s opposition to improvements. After his death, however, she prospers. Supporting her son’s college education by diversifying and expanding her farming operation, Selina overcomes dualistic thinking, with the abundance of her farm yielding both financial and spiritual sustenance. Similarly, she values individuals who live in urban environments, as well as in rural settings—not falling prey to a simplistic urban/rural dichotomy of valuation. In the process, tapping a multiculturalism espoused by many ecofeminists, Selina revels in coming to know and care for people of diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Selina cultivates beauty through her relationship with the land—symbolized through the elegance of her weathered hands. Not bound by patriarchal notions of feminine pulchritude, she redefines beauty in a way that ultimately reflects the richness of her own life as she engages with others, not avoids them. To Selina, beauty is “all the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make something fine come of it” (Ferber 1923: 209; as cited in Werden 2001: 195). As Werden observes, Selina embodies the core principles of ecofeminism nearly a half century before the movement was formally recognized.
This volume’s opening chapter, Eric Otto’s “Ecofeminist Theories of Liberation in the Science Fiction of Sally Miller Gearhart, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joan Slonczewski,” helps us understand a panoply of ways that women and nature might relate to one another. In his analysis of Gearhart’s (1979) The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, Le Guin’s (1985) Always Coming Home, and Slonczewski’s (1986) A Door Into Ocean, Otto distinguishes two stances toward understanding the relationship between women and nature: cultural ecofeminism and rationalist feminism. Throughout this book, we will repeatedly return to these two broad approaches, albeit under varying names.
According to cultural ecofeminism, there is an innate connection between women and nature. By positing an inherent tendency of women to be attuned to nature—to care for it, to recognize their interrelationship with it—cultural ecofeminists recognize the value of actions and characteristics typically devalued by the dominant (patriarchal) culture. But some argue that by identifying these traits as innate, however ecologically positive they may be, the social and historical factors that have led to women’s oppression are obscured. Moreover, this essentialist assumption implies that men have inherent limitations in their ability to connect to the natural world by virtue of their sex.
The Wanderground provides a strong statement of cultural ecofeminism through the story of the Hill Women, who have escaped the oppression of patriarchy by establishing a civilization in the wild based on pacifism, receptivity, and interconnectedness. Possessing spiritual capacities that could not emerge in the presence of men, the Hill Women are connected to one another and to nature in a manner unknowable to men from the City.
Ultimately, Otto concludes, Gearhart’s depiction of maleness and femaleness in The Wanderground is essentialist, positing unchangeable tendencies. While there are moments when she opens the possibility of an alternative to this dualistic depiction of the sexes, she ends by reaffirming the dichotomy. For example, she describes a band of men known as the Gentles, who recognize that the planet’s hope lies with women; though they have curbed their violent tendencies, the Gentles recognize their latent aggressiveness and remain separate from women.
While The Wanderground, Always Coming Home, and A Door Into Ocean all articulate aspects of cultural ecofeminism, the latter two especially also include elements of rationalist feminism, which is “grounded in the potentiality of human beings to consciously and rationally create a free ecological society” (Biehl 1991: 130; cited by Otto). In the process, Always Coming Home and A Door Into Ocean expose the tensions that ecofeminist theorists and practitioners confront as they attempt to challenge the oppression of women and nature.
Le Guin’s Always Coming Home clearly articulates the oppressiveness of her future world’s masculine Condor society, living in a post-Industrial Age “City of Man” that, like its predecessor civilization, exists “outside the world” (Le Guin 1985: 153; cited by Otto). The male Condor warriors strive to be united with “the One” through denunciation of the rest of existence, “killing the world, so that they could remain perfectly pure” (Le Guin 1985: 201; cited by Otto), believing “that animals and women were contemptible and unimportant” (Le Guin 1985: 345; cited by Otto). In contrast, Always Coming Home’s matriarchal Kesh society offers liberation through an intermingling of human and nonhuman natures. The ecological interconnectedness of life and the rest of nature is reflected in the Kesh’s typology of entities, highlighting the kinship of the heavens and the earth, as well as humans, animals, and plants.
But LeGuin’s novel does not reflect an essentialist stance. The Condor patriarchy is portrayed as being more malleable than biologically determined, conditioned by its hierarchical religious language. Similarly, the ecological sensibilities of the Kesh reflect the influence of egalitarian language and inclusive rituals more than inherent feminine attributes. Consistent with rationalist feminism, Le Guin suggests the possibility of overcoming oppression by restructuring social practices.
Finally, Otto considers Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean, which describes the response of the all-female waterworld of the Sharers when threatened by the patriarchal forces of a neighboring planet. In the same way the Condor are likened to their Industrial Age precursors in Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, the patriarchy in Slonczewski’s novel is compared to an earlier civilization that destroyed itself in a nuclear holocaust. The common lesson from these ancestral examples is that a world can hope to sustain itself only by moving beyond hierarchical domination. In A Door Into Ocean, this awareness of the oppressiveness of hierarchy extends beyond a repudiation of patriarchy, and also encompasses a critique of racial essentialism and anthropocentrism. So too is sexual essentialism challenged. The notion that either sex has a fixed range of responses is contested by examples: the brutally aggressive Chief of Staff of the patriarchal army is female, while a male teenager from the same dominating society willingly finds a new home in the egalitarian world of the Sharers.
In the next three chapters, we move to an examination of the preconditions for instantiating and communicating ecofeminist alternatives. Theda Wrede’s “Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams: Ecofeminist Subversion of Western Myth” shows the importance of relationality for fostering egalitarian alternatives. The heroine of Kingsolver’s (1990a) Animal Dreams, Codi Nolina, learns how to inhabit the town in which she was born by caring for members of her community. Avoiding an essentialist dichotomy that would preclude men from developing such a sense of relationality, Wrede suggests that men are more impeded by a cultural script that advocates individualism than by an inherent incapacity for intersubjectivity.
Drawing on Jessica Benjamin’s (1988) psychoanalytically-based model, Wrede emphasizes the value of developmental notions drawn from the object relations school. Rather than viewing maturity as arising from the eventual separation from the mother, as did Freud, Benjamin emphasizes the value of the close early maternal bond in developing a sense of intersubjectivity. In this model, autonomy does not arise from separation, but from “mutual recognition,” in which successful individuation depends on parents’ ability to navigate their children’s attempts to control them. Depending on the expectations of the culture in which they are reared, boys and girls can develop a sense of self in starkly different ways. Boys may feel the demand to become autonomous, resulting in a sense of emptiness, while girls may lose their sense of self by merging with their mothers. While excessive domination or submission may interfere with mutual relationships with others, an adequate level of reciprocity can yield a “paradoxical mixture of otherness and togetherness” (Benjamin 1988: 14–15; cited by Wrede).
When Wrede uses these ideas to analyze Kingsolver’s (1990a) Animal Dreams, we see the protagonist, Codi, develop a strong sense of interrelationship with both her community and the land. Having lost her mother as a young girl, Codi is initially unable to engage in meaningful relationships with others. By shifting her focus from herself to her community’s environmental problems, however, she develops a capacity to care. This care is not a form of self-sacrifice, however, but involves reciprocal responsibilities and rewards. Through an increased engagement in environmental activism, Codi fosters a more sustainable physical environment, while also increasing her ability to rely upon a culturally diverse community.
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A decade later, Kingsolver (2000) returns to related themes in her novel Prodigal Summer, as Richard M. Magee demonstrates in “Reintegrating Human and Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology in Rachel Carson and Barbara Kingsolver.” Each of the three intertwined plots of Prodigal Summer recounts the conflict between an ecologically minded woman and an anti-environmental man, with the three plots intersecting through family ties and bonds within a single rural community. In each case, the women are “arcadian ecologists,” individuals who are not reliant solely or even primarily on scientific reason and causal explanation in understanding the environment, but who instead emphasize an empathetic understanding of the natural world.
The interconnection between human action and environmental response is clear throughout Prodigal Summer. The ubiquity of cockleburs, plants seen as a nuisance to local farmers, is ultimately traced back to the actions of an earlier generation of settlers, who overhunted the parakeets that had consumed these plants. With the incursion of humans, and their appetite for the birds, the delicate balance of the ecosystem was disrupted.
Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer compellingly conveys the interdependence of humans and the environment through a narrative that is emotionally charged while simultaneously being scientifically accurate. A similar rhetorical strategy, Magee notes, is used by Rachel Carson (1962) in Silent Spring. As only one example, when Carson recounts the poisoning of a one-year-old child with an insecticide—originally reported in a medical journal—she repeatedly refers to the infant as a “baby,” capturing the image of a Christ-child, innocent but taking on the sins of those who were guilty of using this toxic chemical. Both Kingsolver and Carson, trained as scientists but not limited to the language of reductionistic science, communicate environmental threats in an emotionally immediate manner, while portraying nature as intimately related to human communities.
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Repeatedly in this volume we encounter the problems presented by dualistic thinking, manifested in a range of dichotomies, especially male versus female and human versus nature. As we seek to overcome these dichotomies, to avoid living in only half of realities that can be characterized by two poles, we can learn much from those who have traveled through boundaries of nature and culture. As Charles S. Brown (2007, x) notes, “[P]roblems of boundary formation and negotiation recur at all levels, and a coming to an understanding of the nature and types of boundaries poses a truly interdisciplinary challenge to environmental thinkers.”
Marnie M. Sullivan’s “Shifting Subjects and Marginal Worlds: Revealing the Radical in Rachel Carson’s Three Sea Books” provides insights into border-crossing that help us understand both the possibilities and threats of living and thinking at the margins between realms. In Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea, all written over two decades before the same author’s better-known Silent Spring appeared, Carson shows the reader “that human beings are no longer of central importance” by examining the life within the boundary “where sea meets land, where life emerged from the sea in the course of its leisurely evolution” (Gartner 1983: 69; cited by Sullivan).
As Sullivan explains, Carson continually reminds us that boundaries may not be obvious. The edge of a land mass and the beginning of an ocean may be obscured; a continental shelf may extend outward far into the water, invisible to the human eye at the ocean’s surface. Similarly, the ocean below is far from homogeneous. Its varied life is distributed in horizontal strata, each layer a distinct bioregion, an ecosystem of interrelated species.
While the transgression of boundaries can be invigorating, as seen in geographical regions where human cultures meet, it can also be dangerous. As Carson (1951/1989) observes in The Sea Around Us, a feeding fish that wanders too far above its habitual life zone may be afflicted with the bends; the lowered pressure of the higher stratum expands the gas within the fish’s air bladder, pushing the animal ever nearer the surface. If the fish cannot force itself downward quickly enough, such a boundary crossing may be fatal. Such lessons from the sea remind us of the threats facing all who would move beyond their habitual environments—dangers with which any theorist or practitioner attempting to avoid constraining dualisms may need to contend.
Monique LaRocque’s “Decadent Desire: The Dream of Disembodiment in J. K. Huysmans’ A Rebours” highlights the life-denying consequences of an extreme dualism that sees the male as superior to the female, and culture as superior to nature. The protagonist of J. K. Huysmans’ (1884/1969) A Rebours (Against the Grain), Des Esseintes, is a prototype for the Decadent ideal of seeking refuge from both women and nature, attempting transcendence into a realm of pure aesthetics. This dualism positing the superiority of men over women and of culture over nature has a long history in Western civilizations. LaRocque’s chapter reminds us that this dichotomy is expressed even more clearly during certain historical periods and in specific artistic schools, such as the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement that was, in part, a response to Romanticism’s valorization of unbridled nature.
The particular life history of Des Esseintes contributes to his starkly dualistic repudiation of nature and women. The death of his mother while he was a young child deprived him of a sense of relationality, an important factor in one’s capacity to develop a more egalitarian and non-dominating relationship with nature—an idea highlighted in Wrede’s chapter exploring the development of a sense of connectedness to others in early childhood.
For Des Esseintes, nature is at its best—and safest—when it is controlled and distanced. This is seen in his description of the terrain as viewed from his window, high upon a hilltop. From that vantage point, he looks outward and downward, seeing the remote landscape as if it were a mere representation in a painting and not part of the natural environment. In parallel, Des Esseintes seeks refuge from his body by devaluing his sexuality—hosting a dinner to celebrate his impotence—which also allows him to escape the threats posed by women, reminiscent of the Gentles’ withdrawal from women in The Wanderground.
But we should not view Des Esseintes, LaRocque argues, as simply a pathological individual, but rather as a manifestation of late nineteenth-century capitalism. In Des Esseintes’ eyes, women are like the material objects created to satisfy the needs of consumers. He sees women as monotonously the same, like mass-produced trinkets or wind-up machines. Through this denigration of women, coupling the individual tendencies of Des Esseintes with the economic forces of his society, we see the life-denying consequences of a dualistic, hierarchical mindset that valorizes the masculine and the aesthetic over the feminine and the natural.
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Vicky L. Adams observes in “‘Discourse Excellent Music’: Romantic Rhetoric and Ecofeminism in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man” that the recognition of agency within nature is consistent with contemporary ecological theories founded on chaos and complexity. Adams affirms Carolyn Merchant’s (2003: 216–217; cited by Adams) call for seeing nature as “an active subject, not a passive object,” rather than viewing the forces of nature in stable balance, as posited by those relating to nature in egocentric, as well as social-interest and ecocentric ethical frameworks. Merchant suggests we consider ecologist Daniel Botkin’s (1990) metaphor of “discordant harmonies.” Botkin states that the harmony of nature is reflected not in simple, invariably pleasant melodies but through contrasting passages of strife and resolution. A capacity to hold the tension between such opposites, Adams argues, helps us confront environmental challenges in their full complexity.
Adams finds these competing ethics in Shelley’s The Last Man, a Romantic era future history, set in the late twenty-first century and narrated through the recollections of the last survivor of ecological disaster. Shelley portrays the disastrous effects that pride and personal ambition can have on the environment and in turn on humankind, ultimately leading to the plague spreading to all nations. In one scene, Lord Raymond (the Byronic character) sets the tone of discourse when he favorably recounts those philosophers who “have called man a microcosm of nature, and find a reflection in the internal mind for all this machinery visibly at work around us”; and he goes on to quote Francis Bacon’s observation that “the falling from a discord to a concord, which maketh great sweetness in music, hath an agreement with the affections, which are re-integrated to the better after some dislikes” (Shelley 1826/1996: 54, cited by Adams). Yet strong individual desires defeat Raymond’s best intentions, just as Bacon’s project to exert dominion over nature and Descartes’ mechanistic dualism have unexpected consequences. Adams warns against searching for a more harmonious relationship between nature and society through a simple merging of opposites, advising instead that contrary voices be “carefully composed in order to allow for difference without cognitive dissonance.”
As Lee Quinby (1990: 126) observes, to embrace seemingly contradictory views can be challenging, even for avowed ecofeminists: “Like the ecology and feminist movements from which it derives, ecofeminism is not devoid of impulses to develop a ‘coherent’ theory.” And yet, Quinby argues, such an emphasis on coherence and consistency is limited in the face of modern power relations through which domination occurs. By Quinby’s (1990: 123) analysis, ecofeminism is most effective in opposing the oppressions of modern power by maintaining a multiplicity of theories and practices: “Against such power, coherence in theory and centralization of practice make a social movement irrelevant or, worse, vulnerable, or—even more dangerous—participatory with the forces of domination.”
In this spirit of embracing seemingly contradictory positions, Jeffrey A. Lockwood considers the dangers of excessive coherence for ecofeminism in his afterword. In “Ecofeminism: The Ironic Philosophy,” he observes that “an element of inconsistency seems necessary to live and act in a world where ecological variation, perverse incentives, unintended consequences, moral luck, and humbling complexities abound. And it is in this sense that the ironies arising from the ecofeminists’ view of literature might be understood.” As Lockwood reviews the preceding chapters, he notes that the contributors to this volume have already made significant progress in moving the field of ecofeminism forward, but that an ongoing ironic stance can help foster deeper self-reflection within this developing discipline.
As examples of the ironies that Lockwood points out, consider his treatment of scientific objectivity, as well as parallels between ecofeminism and other philosophical traditions. In a field that so emphasizes the intimate connectedness between humans and nature, ironically ecofeminists often excel at maintaining a sense of detached objectivity. As Sullivan describes Rachel Carson’s suspension of preconceptions to encounter nature in its own terms, we see the sort of detachment that has long been an ideal of scientific practice.
Similarly, in spite of ecofeminists’ critiques of prior philosophical systems, we see some striking insights from certain schools of thought. In LaRocque’s chapter, we see the consequences of living one-sidedly in Des Esseintes’ unbalanced self-absorption, contrary to Aristotle’s emphasis on the virtue of moderation in his Nicomachean Ethics. So too can we see parallels between ecofeminism and a more recent philosophical tradition: pragmatism. Both encourage a pluralistic, perspectival understanding of truth, where theory and practice are always intertwined.
Ursula K. Le Guin argues in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” that literature can provide a container for unexplored possibilities—alternatives to the heroic “killer story” of the status quo (1989: 168). In this spirit, this volume examines the interplay of women and environment through a variety of stories, drawing on insights from such diverse fields as chaos theory and psychoanalysis, while examining genres ranging from nineteenth-century sentimental literature to contemporary science fiction. Our aim is to examine the central claim of ecofeminism—that there is a connection between environmental degradation and the subordination of women (Mellor 1997)—with the goal of identifying and fostering liberatory alternatives.
See Chowdhury (2009) on the heterogeneous meanings of the broader term “feminism.”
Gaard (2010) suggests that “feminist ecocriticism” and “ecofeminist literary criticism” can be used interchangeably. Bile (2011) and Lockwood (2011) discuss the difficulty of characterizing “ecofeminism” with a single definition.