Literature and Ecofeminism: Intersectional and International Voices 9780815381723, 9781351209755

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Book Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
Notes on contributors
Foreword
References
Editor’s preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
References
1 “Like a creature native”: Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism
References
2 Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility
Community of virtue
Fellowship of sense
Notes
References
3 Mary Austin’s proto-ecofeminist land ethic in The Ford (1917) and the Owens Valley water controversy
The Owens Valley water controversy and The Ford
The Ford and Austin’s proto-ecofeminist ideals
Conclusion
Notes
References
4 T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist
Note
References
5 Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
Dualism, hegemonic centrism, and backgrounding
Identity and feminism in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novels
Place, nature, and civilization
Nature: from possession to “encounter”
Religion, spirituality, and care
Conclusion
Notes
References
6 “Taking mighty strides across the world” Positioning Zora Neale Hurston in the ecofeminist tradition
Black voices speaking the natural world
The question of anti-speciesism in Hurston’s literatures
Anthropology, folklore, and human/nonhuman relationships
Theorizing animal bodies in Hurston’s folkloric canon
Conclusion
Notes
References
7 Ecofeminist sensibilities and rural land literacies in the work of contemporary Appalachian novelist Ann Pancake
Notes
References
8 Essentialist tropes in At Play in the Fields of the Lord
References
9 Cyborg-goddesses, Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Jade Chen’s Mazu’s Body-guards
References
10 Wolves, singing trees, and replicants Ecofeminist readings of contemporary Spanish novels
Notes
References
11 Ecofeminist moorings in globalized India Literary discourse and interpretations
References
12 The vocation of healing The poetry of Malika Ndlovu
Gender and nature in South Africa
But is Ndlovu an ecofeminist poet?
Strategically essentialist
Specificities of oppression
Conclusion
Notes
References
13 Grace Nichols and Jackie Kay’s corporeal Black Venus Feminist ecocritical realignments
Notes
References
Afterword: Ecofeminism through Literary Activism, Hybridity, Connections, and Caring
Writing as activism
An ethic of care
Ecofeminism and postcolonialism
Shared strategies: hybridity
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Literature and Ecofeminism

Bringing together ecofeminism and ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism), this book presents diverse ways of understanding and responding to the tangled relationships between the personal, social, and environmental dimensions of human experience and expression. Literature and Ecofeminism explores the intersections of sexuality, gender, embodiment, and the natural world articulated in literary works from Shakespeare through to contemporary literature. Bringing together essays from a global group of contributors, this volume draws on American literature, as well as Spanish, South African, Taiwanese, and Indian literature, in order to further the dialogue between ecofeminism and ecocriticism and demonstrate the ongoing relevance of ecofeminism for facilitating critical readings of literature. In doing so, the book opens up multiple directions for ecofeminist ideas and practices, as well as new possibilities for interpreting literature. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, literature, gender studies, and the environmental humanities. Douglas A. Vakoch is President of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence), a nonprofit dedicated to transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars, as well as fostering sustainability of human civilization on multigenerational timescales—a prerequisite for a project that could take centuries or millennia to succeed. Sam Mickey is Adjunct Professor, Theology and Religious Studies and Environmental Studies, University of San Francisco, USA.

Routledge Environmental Humanities Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin Editorial Board Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia Andrea Gaynor, University of Western Australia, Australia Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, USA Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia International Advisory Board William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK Sarah Buie, Clark University, USA Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China Rob Nixon, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Tech­ nology, Stockholm, Sweden Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich, and Co-­Director, Rachel Carson Centre, Ludwig-­Maxilimilians-Universität, Germany Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA Kirsten Wehner, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, Australia The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognizing that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture.   The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicentre of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-­ focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences.   We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change.

Literature and Ecofeminism Intersectional and International Voices

Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-8153-8172-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-20975-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



Notes on contributors

vii



Foreword

xiv

G reta  G aard



Editor’s preface

xvii

S am M ickey



Acknowledgments



Introduction

xx 1

P atrick D . M urphy

  1 “Like a creature native”: Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism

9

L esley K ordecki

  2 Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility

24

C alley A . H ornbuckle

  3 Mary Austin’s proto-­ecofeminist land ethic in The Ford (1917) and the Owens Valley water controversy

40

E mine G e ç gil

  4 T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist

54

E tienne T erblanche

  5 Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot

68

J ulia T ofant š uk

  6 “Taking mighty strides across the world”: positioning Zora Neale Hurston in the ecofeminist tradition N icole  A nae

84

vi   Contents   7 Ecofeminist sensibilities and rural land literacies in the work of contemporary Appalachian novelist Ann Pancake

99

T heresa L . B urriss

  8 Essentialist tropes in At Play in the Fields of the Lord

115

K arl Z uelke

  9 Cyborg-­goddesses, Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Jade Chen’s Mazu’s Body-­guards

128

P eter I - ­min  H uang

10 Wolves, singing trees, and replicants: ecofeminist readings of contemporary Spanish novels

140

C armen F lys J un q uera

11 Ecofeminist moorings in globalized India: literary discourse and interpretations

158

S wapna  G opinath , S ony  J alarajan  R aj , and S oumya  J ose

12 The vocation of healing: the poetry of Malika Ndlovu

169

D eirdre  B yrne

13 Grace Nichols and Jackie Kay’s corporeal Black Venus: feminist ecocritical realignments

185

I zabel F . O . B rand ã o



Afterword: Ecofeminism through Literary Activism, Hybridity, Connections, and Caring

197

A nna B edford



Index

209

Contributors

Nicole Anae, Ph.D., graduated from Charles Sturt University with a B.Ed. and Dip.T. before earning her Ph.D. through the Faculty of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is senior lecturer in literary and cultural studies at Central Queensland University, but has also worked at the University of South Australia (Mawson Lakes), the University of the South Pacific (Laucala Bay Campus in Suva, Fiji), Charles Sturt University (Wagga Wagga), and the University of Southern Queensland (Springfield). Her research interests include colonial and postcolonial writing, embodiment and performance, and the interplay between literature, performance, and identity. Her work typically explores historical and contemporary encounters between literature and culture with a view to examining literature’s role in shaping cultural literacies and identity. She has published in Australasian Drama Studies, Australian Humanities Review, Shakespeare-­Gesellschaft, Transnational Literature, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique, among other journals and monographs. Her chapter entitled “Spectacles of Revulsion: The Challenges of ‘Bush Tucker’ as Contemporary Cuisine”—an examination of the contemporary aestheticization of Australian “bush-­tucker” as pejorative from the perspective of speciesism—appears in Davis, Pilgrim, and Sinha (eds.) The Ecopolitics of Consumption: The Food Trade (Lexington 2015). Anna Bedford, Ph.D., is currently a visiting instructor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2014, with a dissertation focusing on ecofeminism in science fiction. Anna also holds a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, and a Certificate in University Teaching and Learning from the University of Maryland, and an M.A. (honors) from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she did her undergraduate work in English literature. Anna spent three years working at the University of Maryland’s Center for Teaching Excellence, and served two years as president of the Graduate Student Body, as well as senator on the University Senate. She has also served on numerous state, university, and local committees related to higher education. In 2013 Anna won the

viii   Contributors University of Maryland’s Graduate Student Distinguished Service Award. Anna’s recent research and publications have focused upon science fiction and ecofeminism. Other research interests include feminist theory, global studies, narrative theory, and the study of teaching and learning (SoTL). She has published several articles on ecofeminism and on women’s science fiction. She is currently co-­editing an anthology of early women science fiction writers from the pulp and magazine era of the 1920s–1950s. Izabel F.O. Brandão, Ph.D., is professor of literatures in English, and contemporary Brazilian women writers, at Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil. Her publications include A imaginação do feminino segundo D.H. Lawrence (“The Imagination of the Feminine According to D.H. Lawrence,” Edufal, 1999), and books on Brazilian women writers and feminist literary criticism from an interdisciplinary perspective on the body, such as O corpo em revista (“The Body under Scrutiny,” 2005), Gênero & outros lugares (“Gender & Other Places,” 2009, in collaboration). She is currently editing (in collaboration) a feminist anthology in translation (Traduções da cultura: perspectivas crítcas feministas—1970–2010 [“Translations of Culture: Feminist Perspectives 1970–2010”], forthcoming), and a book provisionally entitled Encontros feministas com D.H. Lawrence (“Feminist Encounters with D.H. Lawrence,” forthcoming). She is also a poet and has three books published: Espiral de fogo (“Fire Spiral,” 1998), Ilha de olhos e espelhos (“Island of Eyes and Mirrors,” 2003) and As horas da minha alegria (“The Hours of My Joy,” 2013). Theresa L. Burriss, Ph.D., has a B.A. from Emory University in Atlanta, an M.S. from Radford University, and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute and University in Cincinnati. She serves as the chair of Appalachian Studies and director of the Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center at Radford University (RU). She teaches undergraduate and graduate multidisciplinary classes on Appalachia. Theresa has published several pieces of literary criticism on the Affrilachian Writers, including chapters in An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature (Ohio UP, 2005) and Appalachia in the Classroom: Teaching the Region (Ohio UP, 2013), for which she served as co-­editor with Dr. Patricia Gantt. Collaborating with RU Professor of Dance, Deborah McLaughlin, Theresa was cultural consultant and performance storyteller for three Appalachian-­themed dance/theater pieces, The Shadow Waltz, Sounds of Stories Dancing, and Eating Appalachia: Selling Out to the Hungry Ghost. She was awarded an NEH Summer Institute Grant for the 2015 Transcendentalism and Reform in the Age of Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. She serves as Appalachian cultural competency consultant for the Community Health Center of the New River Valley, and is a board member for the nonprofit organizations Appalachian Community Fund, Appalachian Sustainable Development, and MountainTrotter. She serves as Education Committee Chair for the Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) and serves on the ASA steering committee.

Contributors   ix Deirdre Byrne, Ph.D., is the head of the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of South Africa and editor of the academic journal scrutiny2 as well as a member of the editorial collective of the journal Gender Questions. She has published research on Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction, fantasy, and South African women’s poetry. Carmen Flys Junquera, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of American Literature in the Department of Modern Philology and member of the “Instituto Franklin”, an American Studies research institute, both of the University of Alcalá (Spain). She has co-edited a number of books devoted to ecocriticism (Paisajes Culturales: Herencia y Conservación // Cultural Landscapes: Heri­ tage and Conservation, 2010; Ecocríticas. Literatura y Medio Ambiente, 2010), as well as special ecocritical issues of Spanish journals. She served as the President of EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment) for the 2010–2012 term. She founded and coordinates the only ecocritical research group in Spain, GIECO (www.gieco.es), and is the General Editor of the journal Ecozon@. European Journal of Liter­ ature, Culture and Environment (www.ecozona.eu). She also directs an ecocritical book series, CLYMA, in the Franklin Collection. Most of her publications deal with contemporary ethnic American literatures and sense of place, ecocriticism, environmental justice, and ecofeminism. She has been recently awarded a grant, together with a group of fine arts, to research the synergies between visual and textual arts, and the development of ecological consciousness, and how these arts foster attitudes and values that promote the identification with other beings and the world surrounding us, and thus encourage reflection on the moral consideration of the non-human world. Greta Gaard, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin. She is critically acclaimed for her contributions to ecofeminism and ecocriticism. She is the editor of Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Temple University Press, 1993), co-­editor (with Patrick Murphy) of Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 1998), and author of The Nature of Home: Taking Root in a Place (University of Arizona Press, 2007) and Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens (Temple University Press, 1998). Her most recent volume is Critical Ecofeminism (2017). Emine Geçgil, Ph.D., is an instructor at Bilkent University School of English Language in Ankara, Turkey, where she teaches English as a foreign language. She completed her B.A. and M.A. in English language teaching at Middle East Technical University and Hacettepe University. In 2015, she received her Ph.D. in American culture and literature from Hacettepe University. Her dissertation, titled By Women, For Women, About Women: Social Novels of the Progressive Era, 1900–1920, focuses on a number of forgotten and neglected women novelists of the Progressive Era, who spearheaded social reform and used their novels as a means of cultural lobbying. Emine is also a translator of children’s books. She has translated 30 books from

x   Contributors English into Turkish. She is an active member of the American Studies Association of Turkey. Her major interests include American novels, the Progressive Era, women’s studies, ecocriticism, and literary translation. Swapna Gopinath, Ph.D., is working as associate professor of English language and literature at S.N College, Chempazhanthy, Kerala. She has an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Kerala. Her Ph.D. dissertation is titled Dialectics of Historicity in Modernist Fiction: A Comparative Study Based on the Select Works of James Joyce, Franz Kafka, O  V Vijayan and M Mukundan. Her areas of research interest are culture studies, film studies, and gender studies. She has completed a minor research project with the financial aid from UGC, Government of India. Dr. Swapna had extensively published in high impact journals and has presented in many international conferences. Calley A. Hornbuckle, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English and cocoordinator of Environmental Studies at Columbia College, S.C. In 2011, she had the honor of receiving both the Faculty Excellence Award and The Students’ Choice Award for Teaching Excellence. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina. Focusing on British women writers and the environmental tradition, she has presented several papers on ecological intelligence demonstrated in the works of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Ann Radcliffe, Dorothy Wordsworth, and others. Her research focuses on British women writers’ investigations of ethics, ethology, and aesthetics in light of recent developments in neuroscience and embedded cognition. She serves as executive editor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature for The Explicator. She is currently editing Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, Volume CXXII, Posthumanism and Phenomenology: The Focus on the Modern Condition of Boredom/Solitude/Loneliness/Isolation (Springer 2018, forthcoming), in which her “‘Strange Kinship’: Romantic-era Women Writers and the Posthuman” article will be published, as well. Peter I-­min Huang, Ph.D., received his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from National Taiwan University. Currently, he is professor in the English Department, Tamkang University, Taiwan. He is one of the founders of ASLE-­Taiwan. He served as English Department chair for two terms, 2007–09 and 2009–11, during which time he also was the organizing chairperson for The Fourth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Dis­ course (May 23–24, 2008) and The Fifth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse (December 17–18, 2010). His areas of teaching and research include ecofeminism, ecopoetry, postcolonial ecocriticism, women’s studies, and animal studies. His most recent publications are “Canon Formation in the Study of the Environment in China and Taiwan” and “Rediscovering Local Environmentalism in Taiwan” published in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (December 2014). Other publications include

Contributors   xi “Corporate Globalization and the Resistance to It in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale and the poetry of Sheng Wu,” East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and “Exploring Non-­Human Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Power and Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature,” Forum for World Literature Studies (June 2014). He is also author of Linda Hogan and Contemporary Taiwanese Writers: An Ecocritical Study of Indi­ geneities and Environment (Lexington Books, 2016). Soumya Jose, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English in VIT University Vellore, Tamil Nadu. Dr. Jose obtained her Ph.D. in African American theatre from the Department of English, Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India. She earned her M.Phil. from the Department of English, Annamalai University, and her master’s in English from Kannur University, Kerala. She obtained her B.Ed. from Calicut University, Kerala. Her research interests include post-­colonial writings, African American literature, and diaspora studies. She has published more than 30 research articles in various journals of international repute. Lesley Kordecki, Ph.D., received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto and is professor of English at DePaul University, in Chicago, Illinois. A recipient of DePaul University’s Excellence in Teaching Award, she is a former director of the M.A. in English at DePaul and served as chair of English at Barat College in Lake Forest for over 20 years. She worked as dramaturge for the Shakespeare on the Green productions in Lake Forest, IL, for seven years and co-­authored with Karla Koskinen Re-­Visioning Lear’s Daughters: Testing Feminist Criticism and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) as a result of that collaboration. She is the author of Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds (Palgrave, 2011). Sam Mickey, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor in the Environmental Studies program and the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of Coexistentialism and the Unbear­ able Intimacy of Ecological Emergency (2016), Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence: Ecological Wisdom at the Intersection of Religion, Ecology, and Philosophy (2015), and On the Verge of a Planetary Civiliza­ tion: A Philosophy of Integral Ecology (2014). With Douglas A. Vakoch he co-­edited Women and Nature? Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment (2017). Patrick D. Murphy, Ph.D., earned a B.A. in history from UCLA in 1973, an M.A. in English from California State University, Northridge, in 1983, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis, in 1986. Recent publications include Persuasive Aesthetic Ecocritical Praxis (Lexington Books, 2015) and “Pessimism, Optimism, Human Inertia and Anthropogenic Climate Change,” special climate change issue, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2014).

xii   Contributors Sony Jalarajan Raj, Ph.D., is assistant professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada. Dr. Raj is a professional journalist turned academic who has worked as reporter, special correspondent, and producer in news media channels such as the BBC, NDTV, Doordarshan, AIR, and Asianet News. Dr. Raj served as the graduate coordinator and assistant professor of communication arts at the Institute for Communication, Entertainment and Media at St. Thomas University, Florida, USA. He was a full-­time faculty member in journalism, mass communication, and media studies at Monash University, Australia, Curtin University, Mahatma Gandhi University and the University of Kerala. Dr. Raj was the recipient of the Reuters Fellowship and is a Thomson Foundation (UK) Fellow in Television Studies with the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Scholarship. Dr. Raj has been on the editorial board of five major international research journals and he edits the Journal of Media Watch. Etienne Terblanche, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of English at North-­West University in South Africa. He is the author of T.S. Eliot, Poetry, and Earth: The Name of the Lotos Rose (2016) and E.E. Cummings: Poetry and Ecology (2012). Julia Tofantšuk, Ph.D., is associate professor of British literature at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University, Estonia. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on construction of identity in the fiction of contemporary British women writers, focusing on Eva Figes, Jeanette Winterson, and Meera Syal. She has published articles and delivered papers on gender, identity, trauma, Herstory, the Holocaust, and ecocritical concerns (including Palgrave Macmillan, Peter Lang WV, VW Trier, Interlitteraria, Ariadne Lõng) in British literature, postcolonial and migrant British literature, and Estonian and British literature comparatively. Her recent research and teaching interests include literature by women, gender studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, identity studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, trauma and the Holocaust, art history, woman and landscape in art, and comparative literature. She has developed and taught M.A. courses focusing on ecocritical considerations of twentiethcentury literary texts, especially novels by Graham Swift, Anita Desai, and Monique Roffey, a theoretical Ph.D. course on ecocriticism, place theory, and ecofeminism, and supervised Ph.D. theses in the field. Julia Tofantšuk is a member of ASLE, ESSE, MLA, Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, and Estonian Women’s Studies Center. Douglas A. Vakoch, Ph.D., is president of METI International (http://meti.org), a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) and supporting the sustainability of human culture on multigenerational timescales, which is essential for long-­term METI research. Dr. Vakoch’s edited books include Ecofeminism and Rhetoric: Critical Perspectives on Sex, Technology, and Discourse (2011), Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature (2012), and

Contributors   xiii (with Fernando Castrillón) Ecopsychology, Phenomenology, and the Environ­ ment: The Experience of Nature (2014). He serves as general editor of the Ecocritical Theory and Practice series (https://rowman.com/Action/SERIES/ LEX/ETAP), published by Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. Karl Zuelke, M.F.A., Ph.D., is director of the Writing Center and the Math and Science Center at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He also teaches literature, writing, and environmental studies there. His M.F.A. is from Indiana University and his doctorate is from the University of Cincinnati. His doctoral dissertation is an ecocritical exploration of four genres of nature writing and science writing. He has published ecocritical articles on Terry Tempest Williams in Exploring the Literary Landscapes of Terry Tempest Williams and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in Ecocriticism and Religion (forthcoming), and creative work in a variety of journals including The Antioch Review, ISLE, and The Journal of Kentucky Studies. Dr. Zuelke has been a long-­time member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA) and has presented numerous papers at those conferences and others. His latest projects include a creative/critical blog, Dreaming, Singing, daily creative meditations or critical engagements with the 385 poems included in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and he is also at work on a novel about place, industry, and environmental degradation set in Dayton, Ohio.

Foreword Greta Gaard

Today’s literary readers will appreciate this volume as a map, a decoder, and celebration of the many narratives affirming our humanimal, material connections with place, community, and earthothers. Like a pebble tossed in water, ecofeminism’s ripples continue to expand, touching wider circles of narrative, culture, and history. Water has long been a cherished value, an association, an activist issue for ecofeminist concern—water scarcity, dams, diversions, pollution, privatization, and provision. From Mary Austin to Wangari Maathai, Maude Barlow, Arundhati Roy, and Winona LaDuke, literary and activist women have spoken in defense of water. Their words and actions provide both a “mirror and a lamp,” as literary critic M.H. Abrams (1953) once defined literature’s contributions to humanity. The mirrors in this volume reflect the many texts in literature that articulate the themes and issues central to ecofeminism. Through British historical texts and figures such as Shakespeare’s Ophelia, we recognize the cultural identification of women with water and with flora; the value of ecological and animal intelligence, or the practice of ecospirituality, are reflected in the writings of Anna Barbauld and Sylvia Townsend Warner. From the United States, we read how Zora Neale Hurston’s writing reflects ecofeminist concerns for the intersectionality of identities in terms of race, class, gender, and nature—issues that appear somewhat differently in India as class, caste, gender, and nature. Ecofeminism’s postcolonial perspective—present from the start, strongly expressed in the anticapitalist critiques voiced by the Women’s Pentagon Action and advanced in the writings of Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, and Maria Mies—gained clear articulation through Laura Wright’s Wilderness into Civi­ lized Shapes (2010), though Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Huggan and Tiffin 2010) articulates many of the same analyses, without as much feminist attribution. Here, ecofeminist anticolonial perspectives are prominent in explorations comparing indigenous writers from diverse colonial histories—Linda Hogan in the United States, Jade Chen in Taiwan, Malika Ndlovu in South Africa. Initially expressed through European invasions and conquest of land, enslavement of humans and animals, exploitation of ecologies, and annihilation of culture through the imposition of religion, language, and lifestyle, the enterprises and operations of colonialism are perpetuated by today’s multinational corporations and the economics of industrial capitalism. Through the lens of Appalachian

Foreword   xv women writers, we recognize the operations of mountaintop removal and coal mining as colonial assaults on local poor and working class communities and ecosystems. No longer operating “far away” and “over there,” colonial corporations also operate within their own nation-­states, from Appalachia and South Africa to India and California, as this volume’s literary critiques reveal. A most prominent gendered aspect of colonialism is rape. Feminist texts documenting rape as a weapon of warfare—whether perpetrated against nations, women and children, cultures, race or religion, class or caste, nonhuman animals and nature—extend from Diana E.H. Russell’s The Politics of Rape (1975) and Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975) to Andreé Collard and Joyce Contrucci’s Rape of the Wild (1989), Andrea Smith’s Conquest (2005), and Eve Ensler’s In The Body of the World (2013). Comparable with metaphors of “mother nature” and “virgin forests,” rape is a poor metaphor for what it represents—the lived experiences of individual women, children, genderqueers, and entire cultures. The shame and self-­loathing, the acute sense of violation that accompanies rape is experienced by humans, not mountains, much as we know. Yet “rape” speaks an intuition that all forms of systematic violence are interconnected through the violation of earthothers, that the “logic of domination” (Warren 1990) has no ecofeminist logic at all, only the “power and promise” of oppression. How shall we, as earthothers all, resist? For this resistance, this resilience, is the lamp of ecofeminism. From social workers to ecocritics, feminists do not use “resilience” as a term that relieves oppressors of responsibility: we do not speak of “resilience” to praise third world coastal or island communities who flee rising waters and hurricanes, becoming climate refugees as a consequence of the continuing industrial corporate colonialism that is global capitalism. Ecofeminists use “resilience” as a word that means taking survival—and the eco-­ethics and community this survival requires—into our own hands. Our resilience emerges through life-­sustaining connections, through reciprocal and nourishing relationships across differences of species and class, nations and natures. Queer feminist artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle envision this resilience in “Goodbye Gauley Mountain” (2013), an ecodocumentary exposing the colonialism of mountaintop removal and coal mining in Appalachia, and bringing eco-­queer activists together with local working class communities to perform polyamorous ecosexual weddings, renewing people’s commitments to one another and to the flora and fauna of place. Resilience is the lamp that shines in the ecofeminist poetry of Appalachian writer Kathryn Kirkpatrick (2007, 2012), in Linda Hogan’s narratives of Native American anticolonial activisms, in Jade Chen’s depictions of Taiwanese women’s community care and persistence, and the recuperative poems that transform the suffering and oppression of Black women—epitomized in the life of Saartjie Baartman—into a counterdiscourse of survival and, yes, resilience. Resilience and survival of “all our relations” (LaDuke 1999) requires our active interventions—in the political arena, in our communities, and in our cultural ideologies depicting “right relations” among humans, animals, nature. This ecocritical volume strengthens our resilience.

xvi   Foreword

References Abrams, M.H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradi­ tion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Ballantine Books. Collard, Andreé, with Joyce Contrucci. 1989. Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence Against Animals and the Earth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ensler, Eve. 2013. In the Body of the World. New York: Picador. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. New York: Routledge. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. 2007. Out of the Garden. Bay City, MI: MayApple Press. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. 2012. Our Held Animal Breath. Cincinnati, OH: Word Tech Editions. LaDuke, Winona. 1999. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Boston, MA: South End Press. Russell, Diana E.H. 1975. The Politics of Rape. New York: Stein and Day. Smith, Andrea. 2005. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Boston, MA: South End Press. Stephens, Beth, and Annie Sprinkle. 2013. Goodbye Gauley Mountain. Santa Cruz, CA: Fecund Arts Productions. Film. Warren, Karen J. 1990. The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism. Environmental Ethics, 12, 125–146. Wright, Laura. 2010. Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Editor’s preface Sam Mickey

Ecofeminism is a diverse movement traversing a variety of fields of scholarly inquiry and numerous fields of activism, advocacy, and other forms of practical engagement. The noun “ecofeminism” can be misleading. It might lead one to think that ecofeminism is a homogeneous movement or a single set of beliefs, which is surely not the case. The history of ecofeminism is full of finely textured differences. It has involved the ongoing inclusion of a wide variety of perspectives, welcoming multiple voices from diverse social locations to contribute to a convergence of ecological and feminist theories, methods, and practices. Furthermore, the term “ecofeminism” can be misleading in another way. To some ears, the word might sound like it is primarily or exclusively about nature and women, but that is not the whole story. The convergence of ecology and feminism in ecofeminism definitely involves attention to women and the natural world, and more than that, ecofeminism is about the convergence of different perspectives on relationality. Ecology is the study of relationships between organisms and environmental conditions, and feminism focuses on redressing the subordination of women in gendered and sexually differentiated relationships. The combination of ecological and feminist perspectives opens up multiple ways of understanding and responding to the complex dynamics of relationships, discerning the difference between relations of domination and those of partnership, relations that are destructive as well as those that are creative, and everything in between. The point of ecofeminism is thus not to focus on nature and women to the exclusion of everything else. The point is rather to focus on the interconnections and networks of coexistence, which include the entangled categories of race, class, age, ability, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and many others, along with species, gender, and sexuality. In other words, the point of ecofeminism is fundamentally intersectional, attending to the multitudinous ways in which the various aspects of coexistence interconnect. Not necessarily parallel or symmetrical, intersections abound, tracing paths from personal to political, self to other, environmental to social, class to race, gender to species. This anthology came together out of the ongoing effort of the co-­editors to facilitate the development of multiple ecofeminist perspectives. The aim of this volume is to draw out the international and intersectional range of voices

xviii   Editor’s preface engaged with ecofeminism, particularly in ecofeminist engagements with literature. Rhetorical, poetic, metaphorical dimensions of verbal expression bring into relief the complex dynamics addressed by ecofeminism. Situated in the rapidly growing interdisciplinary environmental humanities, this book brings ecofeminism together with ecologically oriented literary criticism (ecocriticism), analyzing works ranging historically from Shakespeare through contemporary literature, and ranging geographically from American literature to international literature from Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, and India. The diversity in the scope of the book is reflected in the diverse backgrounds of the contributors, whose locations span six continents, hailing from ten countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, India, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States). The voices in this volume demonstrate the relevance of ecofeminism, on one hand, for facilitating critical interpretations of literature, and on the other hand, for thinking, feeling, and acting among the intertwined social, existential, and ecological problems proliferating in our increasingly complex world. There are many methodological approaches at work throughout the following chapters. Some approaches are exploratory, listening for new voices in the environmental humanities, and looking for new connections between ecofeminist and ecocritical perspectives. Other approaches are more descriptive, analyzing and categorizing literary works in terms of ecofeminism, and mapping out the cultural and historical contexts in which literary and ecofeminist perspectives operate. Explanatory approaches are also at work in this anthology, as contributors consider causal factors that enter into the intersecting systems of domination— sexism (androcentrism), speciesism (anthropocentrism), and colonialism—and the ecological, feminist, and postcolonial efforts to critique and replace those systems. The reader will find that descriptive, explanatory, and exploratory perspectives intersect in complementary ways throughout this anthology. The chapters in this book accomplish many things, but of course no book does everything. This book does not present a history of ecofeminism and the many academic and activist branches of its development, nor does it present a synthesis of all contemporary scholarship on ecofeminism. Rather, we present literary analyses from various perspectives of ecofeminist ecocriticism, aiming to represent more intersectional and international voices in the environmental humanities. Furthermore, the contributors to this anthology also aim beyond scholarly analysis and academic inquiry, attempting to contribute to public discourse about contentious topics involving environmental and social issues, such as sustainability and environmental ethics, patriarchy and gender equality, and globalization and the legacy of colonialism. The intended audience of this book is anyone interested in intersections of literature with ecological and feminist perspectives. It is specifically oriented toward students and scholars in environmental humanities, gender studies, and literature, especially courses in ecofeminism and ecocriticism. Although it is aiming specifically for an academic audience, it is also intended to be generally accessible. Ecofeminism and ecocriticism are for everyone who wants to

Editor’s preface   xix cultivate resistance, resilience, and responsibility in the face of tremendous adversity. They are for everyone who cares about planetary coexistence. Ultimately, this is a participatory volume, inviting and invoking the participation of the reader in thinking, feeling, and acting with intersectional and international voices of literature and ecofeminism.

Acknowledgments

First, as co-­editors of this anthology, we must express thanks to the contributors, for without their thoughtful writing, this volume would not exist: Greta Gaard, Patrick Murphy, Lesley Kordecki, Calley A. Hornbuckle, Emine Geçgil, Etienne Terblanche, Julia Tofantšuk, Nicole Anae, Theresa L. Burriss, Karl Zuelke, Peter I-­min Huang, Carmen Flys Junquera, Swapna Gopinath, Sony Jalarajan Raj, Soumya Jose, Deirdre Byrne, Izabel F.O. Brandão, and Anna Bedford. We are grateful for their perspectives and passions and their contributions to the ongoing development of environmental humanities, ecofeminism, and ecocriticism. We would like to thank Charlotte Endersby, Leila Walker, and everyone else involved with the editorial team at Routledge. We appreciate their support for this work and their expertise in ushering it into publication, and we are delighted that this anthology is part of the Environmental Humanities Series. Doug Vakoch is grateful to the members of METI International’s Board of Directors for their friendship and creative collaboration. It is rare to find a community that sees a natural link between sustainability and the search for life in the universe, as reflected in a strategic plan that affirms the “ways that ecofeminism can provide insights into fostering environmental sustainability on multigenerational timescales.” Doug especially thanks Harry and Joyce Letaw for their ongoing intellectual and financial contributions to METI. For creating new publishing opportunities for scholars working at the interface of literature and environment, he thanks the members of the Advisory Board of Lexington Books’ Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series. Finally, to his wife Julie Bayless, Doug is grateful in more ways than he can or will share here. Sam Mickey would like to extend particular thanks to family, friends, students, and colleagues who support this work, including the University of San Francisco, where Sam teaches in the Theology and Religious Studies Department and the Environmental Studies program. The learning community at USF is welcoming and empowering for teaching, research, and writing committed to a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world. For inspiring his ongoing love of poetic and linguistic perspectives, Sam would like to thank his teacher, Haj Ross, whose infectious love of language knows no bounds. Thanks also go out to the ecofeminists with whom he has been in conversation personally and

Acknowledgments   xxi professionally, with extra special thanks to Kimberly Carfore for being a constant source of ecofeminist and ecocritical support. Finally, last but definitely not least, profound acknowledgments must also be given to the air, water, land, and life that have shaped the development of this book and all of its contributors. It is in solidarity with multifarious nonhumans that we present this anthology. Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey

Introduction Patrick D. Murphy

Ecofeminism developed as a movement led by women and with the participation of men around the world taking actions to address gender-­based issues and to conserve and preserve human and nonhuman habitats. These actions exposed the links between the oppression of women and the exploitation of natural environments. As the movement developed, feminist philosophers began to articulate the principles, beliefs, and values of such activism. The term “ecofeminism” emerged as a concept that encompassed a range of viewpoints, orientations, and methods—both methods of activism and methods of analysis and critique. From the beginning various academic and activist factions sought to dismiss or discredit ecofeminism. All varieties of this relatively heterogeneous movement were lumped together and then excoriated for some characteristic of one segment, such as the essentialist belief that women are spontaneously closer to nature or that alternative spirituality is the foundation for practice. Nevertheless, ecofeminist philosophy prevailed and prospered. Eventually, its value was recognized by literary critics and theorists, some coming out of feminism initially and others coming out of ecocriticism. Even then, it faced resistance. When doctoral students where I taught in the 1990s chose ecofeminist theories to guide their research and dissertation projects, one faculty member labored to dissuade them by claiming that it wasn’t being taught anywhere else. The students, of course, quickly recognized the bankruptcy of that claim and continued on their way. Their persistence led to monographs and numerous articles applying ecofeminism to a broad range of literary works cutting across historical periods and national literatures. Since the publication of the first collection of essays devoted to analyzing literature and the relationship of literature to pedagogy and activism, Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, which Greta Gaard and I co-­edited in the wake of her proposed special session at the Modern Language Association conference being rejected, other collections have appeared with varying emphases and different degrees of rigor. This volume builds on those prior achievements and advances the field of ecofeminist literary studies both in terms of depth and breadth. Full-­length ecocritical studies of Shakespeare have appeared in the past few years, such as the one by Simon Estok, and articles have been appearing for well over 20 years. The benefits of ecofeminist analysis of his plays, however, still

2   P.D. Murphy have yet to be fully realized. Lesley Kordecki’s chapter, “ ‘Like a creature native’: Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism,” demonstrates the value of continuing to pursue this line of inquiry with a sense of urgency. Taking a traditional motif, the relationship of women to the imagery of flora and fauna, Kordecki foregrounds the significance of Shakespeare’s treatment of Ophelia in Hamlet, particularly Gertrude’s eulogy. Ophelia functions as a kind of reverse referentiality. Rather than the nature imagery functioning as a symbol for human attributes and attitudes, Ophelia’s mistreatment, instead, functions as a symbol of the abuse, silencing, and destruction of the natural world. To the degree that this woman is identified with nature in the play, her abuse unto death represents the mistreatment and denigration of the natural world of which human beings are a part, not apart. Particularly compelling in this reading is the attention given to the plants with which Ophelia is associated. Identified as healing plants, they reinforce Hamlet’s refusal to pursue anything but a plot of death and destruction. In Kordecki’s concise summary: “Flower and shrub, traditional sign language for our necessary entanglement with the environment, intrude on this most personal and metaphysical drama of the patriarchy, demonstrating the ominous effects of men’s rejecting or even neglecting communion with women and nature.” In Chapter 2, “Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility,” Calley Hornbuckle treats the writings of the eighteenth-­century British critic of the Enlightenment, Anna Letitia Barbauld. She defines her as a precursor of ecofeminist thought, one who anticipates certain themes in ecofeminist philosophy. For example, in “The Hill of Science,” Barbauld deploys the essay form to critique philosophical dualism and counter the rhetoric of the sublime prevalent in the time. Through poetry she redefines the concept of sympathy in a decidedly anti-­ Kantian move. Hornbuckle cogently adumbrates Barbauld’s expansive concept of subjectivities radically proposing an egalitarianism far beyond the democratic ideals of male thinkers of her day. Turning a poetic form popular in the Enlightenment against its male practitioners, Barbauld writes a mock heroic, “The Mouse’s Petition,” to decry environmental injustice and to emphasize intersubjectivity against an anthropocentric subjectivity that renders the rest of sentient life mere object of scrutiny. Hornbuckle then elaborates the implications of this more holistic sensibility through a contrast with William Wordsworth, arguing that Barbauld presents readers with a more egalitarian “Romantic ecology.” Turning attention to a modern author in Chapter 3, Emine Geçgil discusses the prolific activist-­author Mary Austin, with particular attention to her novel, The Ford, which is based on actual water rights struggles in the Owens Valley area of California at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Geçgil explains, Austin not only addressed this particular environmental conflict but also used the novel to develop aspects of her “proto-­ecofeminist” values. In particular, she challenged the idea of private ownership of water, certainly a pertinent issue today as all over the world corporations seek to privatize access to potable water and sovereign wealth funds buy out agricultural lands in drought-­ravaged

Introduction   3 countries for control of the precipitation that falls on them. Austin not only exposes but also proposes ways of developing balanced relationships. When Austin was initially rescued from obscurity and neglect by feminist critics, they tended to focus on representations of her female characters and her collections of short stories, sketches, and essays. Ecocritics tended to focus on those same stories with emphasis on the representations of the southwestern desert landscapes and environmental relationships. The Ford deserves as much if not greater attention because it includes everything admirable about those shorter prose works and exceeds them through its more holistic representation afforded by the novel form. Geçgil’s analysis provides the political, activist, and cultural contexts of the period in which the Water Wars played out and argues that Austin demonstrates an early version of écriture féminine. In a radical rereading of one of the most canonical modernist poems in his chapter, “T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist,” Etienne Terblanche presents a decidedly different, more militant T.S. Eliot than the emaciated character the poet himself promoted publicly. Terblanche argues that “Eliot foreknows by some decades the major, common ecocritical insight that rape of women and rape of Earth diagnose the same stunted patriarchal cruelty.” In that way, Terblanche’s rereading of The Waste Land echoes and complements Kordecki’s rereading of Hamlet. King Tereus has forfeited his authority because he has denied the ecological recognition of the necessity of coexistence. In making such a claim, Terblanche’s reading here complements Hornbuckle’s argument regarding Barbauld’s egalitarianism. An important basis for this reading of The Waste Land is Terblanche’s discussion of a passage in one of Eliot’s 1939 essays. What he suggests is that the poem implicitly presents an environmental awareness that Eliot makes explicit in that later prose piece, but also explains Eliot’s association of a heartfelt spirituality with a healthy natural world, which must necessarily include different attitudes toward sexual and personal relationships than the ones depicted in the poem. And that position, in turn, reflects an aspect of the modernists’ rejection of the fin de siècle optimism about technological progress, which is viewed as lifeless mechanism. Whereas Terblanche focuses on one of the most canonical authors of the first half of the twentieth century, Julia Tofantšuk treats one who has received far less respect than she deserves, Sylvia Townsend Warner. The wicked humor of Warner’s fiction reminds me of the same sharp-­edged wit of Amy Lowell, who also proposed rather unconventional relationships, but did so in poetry rather than fiction. Like Lowell, Warner addresses what Tofantšuk notes as “such important ecofeminist issues as identity construction, possession, exploitation, violation and care.” Tofantšuk provides readings of two Warner novels, Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, which she notes “are both written in the genre of a fantasy novel with a moral edge,” a mode popular in her day. But Warner does so with a decided twist through her choice of characters—unsuccessful middle-­aged British women and men . The one novel Tofantšuk reads by means of its critique of hierarchy and the limitations of the eurocentrism of empire. The other plots a woman’s strategy for

4   P.D. Murphy getting out from under the thumb of patriarchy. Additionally, Tofantšuk finds Warner continuously questioning binary oppositions and the inequities of the dominant/subordinate relationships within them. Warner locates agency in resistance, a decidedly feminist claim that is carried over throughout ecofeminist analysis. In Chapter 6, “ ‘Taking mighty strides across the world’: positioning Zora Neale Hurston in the ecofeminist tradition,” Nicole Anae takes up the work of an American contemporary of Warner, who has become recognized as a major figure in the rise of African American literature, often labelled the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s letters reveal that she develops interracial perspectives of the natural environment, and, according to Anae, views the natural world in ways that contest the American hierarchical racial binary of white/black. In a letter to the Florida author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings concerning her autobiographical novel Cross Creek, Hurston expresses identification with Rawlings’ perspective. Rawlings has become recognized as a major figure in American nature writing who chose her home state of Florida and her own life as the background and foreground of her writing. Likewise, Hurston situates her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in the African American community of Eatonville, Florida, which is now part of the greater metropolitan area of Orlando. In the writings of both of these women, the natural environment functions more as fellow characters rather than setting. Anae argues that Hurston uses the concept of sisterhood, which she espoused in writing to Rawlings, not only for interracial relationships, but for interspecies ones as well. Further, this form of identifying develops out of Hurston’s training in anthropology. In the course of her fieldwork, Hurston noted the way much of African diaspora folklore reflected and reflected upon the co-­evolution of people and environments in its various communities in the U.S. and the Caribbean. According to Theresa Burriss in Chapter 7, the contemporary Appalachian author Ann Pancake demonstrates in her writing “ecofeminist sensibilities.” She makes this claim on the basis of Pancake’s attention to the practical knowledge and spiritual orientation of her characters that demonstrate a deep connection with their rural surroundings. These characters demonstrate that over generations some Appalachian families have become inhabitory people, exhibiting the cultural and economic practices that are associated with indigeneity. Through this type of representation, Pancake avoids any essentialist representations of women as inherently closer to nature, showing that reason as well as emotion guide decision-­making based on generations of cultivated values. Through her analysis of Pancake’s 2007 novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, Burriss takes readers into the heart of an ongoing environmental controversy in the middle of coal country: mountaintop removal. Zeroing in on a single family and the contradictions within it between short-­term economic benefits and long-­term environmental destruction, Pancake shows the damage being done to two interrelated environments: the natural and the cultural. The strength of Pancake’s novel, beyond her sophisticated character development, according to Burriss is Pancake’s ability to render a plot that addresses the complexity of human behavior.

Introduction   5 In her discussion of Pancake and her other two authors under consideration, perhaps surprising to some readers, Burriss avails herself of postcolonial analysis to demonstrate how this region of the United States is treated as an internal colony through the exploitation of resources that primarily benefit other parts of the country with no regard for the long-­term consequences of extractive industrial practices. Burriss, for instance, discusses the postcolonial concept of mimicry, an internalization of the exploiter’s value system that denigrates the local culture, values, and practices. She also makes use of Huggan and Tiffin’s definition of ecological imperialism. Finally, Burriss discusses a pertinent ecological concept certainly unfamiliar to mainstream American culture: solastalgia, which she defines as “an intense emotional distress caused by environmental change.” Karl Zuelke turns our attention to another contemporary author, mainly known for his nonfiction, Peter Matthiessen, but does so through a reading of his novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. He focuses on a text that fits well with Burriss’s chapter, treating external colonization, but at the same time considering the ideological effects of internal colonization. He does that through his treatment of a bi-­racial character, whose assimilation leads him to view the fictional Amazonian tribe of the novel through an essentialist perspective. Matthiessen’s study of an act of genocide, Zuelke argues, addresses contemporary problems of hyperrealism and essentialism in the form of an exposé. This focus on the ideological orientation behind destructive practices forms an important part, according to Zuelke, of the ecocritical trajectory, since it addresses the failure of the main character to reorient his thinking in light of the environmental realities he witnesses. Matthiessen’s novel emphasizes that without such conceptual reorientation environmental destruction will continue unabated. Peter I-­min Huang in Chapter 9, “Cyborg-­goddesses, Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Jade Chen’s Mazu’s Body-­guards” transversally reads Native American and Taiwan texts through a combinatory theoretical orientation that begins with a quotation from Donna Haraway. He comparatively analyzes Linda Hogan’s long narrative poem, Indios, as a rewriting of the western classical Medea story, which he defines as ecofeminist because it synthesizes the relationship of genocide and ecocide. Jade Chen’s Mazu’s Body-­guards also calls up an ancient myth, that of the Chinese goddess Mazu, who has become an indigenous spirit for the Taiwanese. Through this rewriting, Chen, like Hogan, critiques the relationship of colonialism, neocolonialism, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. In both myths, women are rendered as demons when they respond to patriarchal and colonizing abuse. Both works, the poem and the novel, challenge the official myths of the dominant, colonizing societies. Huang draws attention to the ostracism of mixed­race offspring and the efforts of dominant cultures to invent a story of their own purity even as their sexual activities result in producing mixed ethnicities. In contrast, Chen narrates an ancient history of ethnic cross-­fertilization, which when approached through egalitarian relationships can function as a form of biodiversity. Huang notes that in contemporary Taiwan, Mazu worshippers are in the forefront of environmental activism against further nuclear power plant

6   P.D. Murphy development. In treating this manifestation of Mazu practice, Huang returns to Haraway’s concept of the cyborg to argue that the goddess represents a “natureculture” entity. Carmen Flys Junquera, in “Wolves, singing trees, and replicants: ecofeminist readings of contemporary Spanish novels,” notes that within the upsurge of writing by women that calls for an ecofeminist reading, numerous works address issues of environmental justice, critique the logic of domination, and proffer alternative viable relationships with “earth others.” To make her point, Flys Junquera focuses on three contemporary Spanish women writers, the novelist and journalist Rosa Montero Gayo; young adult novelist Laura Gallego García; and biologist and secondary school teacher Concha López Llamas. By selecting these three writers and their works, Flys Junquera is able to demonstrate the variety of literary strategies appearing within the past five years that address gendered environmental concerns. In her novel, López Llamas develops the parallel of the violent oppression of women, hatred of wolves, and assaults on rural lifestyles. She does so through alternating chapters, the ones focusing on the abused Beatriz and the others focusing on the wolf, Oak. Both sets of chapters educate readers about the respective behaviors of the species emphasized. López Llamas also notes how the violence against wolves is reproduced in the efforts to extinguish rural traditions. The loss of diversity is a necessary component of the drive to produce a globally homogenous population of conspicuous consumers, a homogeneity everywhere present in metropolises worldwide and rapidly extending its blight into the countryside. López Llamas makes her thematic parallelism explicit in the final chapter, when the two female main characters, one human one wolf, meet. As Flys Junquera notes, Gallego García’s young adult fantasy novel, When the Trees Sing, is set up as a medieval romance. Thus, certain forms of oppression and violence are treated as givens for the era in which the story takes places. Nevertheless, through the trials and escape from barbarians of the main character, Viana, readers are introduced to an alternative socioeconomic reality as a wolf-­like character named Lobo teaches her the survival skills of the forest. From fantasy, Flys Junquera turns to the science fiction of Montero Gayo, who addresses the issues of hierarchical othering and the oppression of the different through the treatment of androids in a twenty-second-century future. Montero Gayo both shows the possibilities for gender equality and polymorphous sexuality and the tendency for hierarchical power relationships to reassert themselves in one direction when outlawed or socially disavowed in another. Despite their differences, Flys Junquera argues that these novels all demonstrate successful strategies for endowing “earth others” with respect and moral considerability, representing others not as alien, and therefore hostile, but as anothers, distinct and relational. In Chapter 11, Swapna Gopinath, Sony Jalarajan Raj, and Soumya Jose begin by taking up an issue addressed by Huang, goddess worship, but do so from the perspective of the consideration of the other. They also use postcolonial theory to consider how the ecological orientation of early Hinduism was subverted by

Introduction   7 British colonization, which replaced a cosmology of dyadic interplay with a linear one of hierarchy, denigrating both wild nature and women in the process. They then develop this argument through a reading of several novels by such authors as Shashi Deshpand, Arundhati Roy, Sara Joseph, and Anita Desai. Gopinath, Raj, and Jose analyze the representations of the family under the drive of globalization to become “micro units” for the oppression of women, the destruction of nature, and the commodification of human relationships. While many contemporary women’s novels rely on a flight to the metropolis, diasporic dislocation, and cultural hybridity to achieve self-­realization or a measure of independence, these critics look at novels in which the women move in the opposite direction toward reintegration with ancestral environments and rural community relationships. The association of women’s bodily rhythms with natural cycles is celebrated, for example, in Gift in Green, while The God of Small Things depicts the pleasure derived from daily activities. Gopinath, Raj, and Jose note that while the authors they treat lament environmental destruction and the destructive forces of globalization, they also depict ecofeminist activities as a life practice affording a sense of optimism for the future. Deirdre Byrne in Chapter 12, “The vocation of healing: the poetry of Malika Ndlovu,” writes about a contemporary South African performance artist whose work focuses on female empowerment and healing. Byrne argues that in order to accomplish that task, she often utilizes in her poetry a “strategic essentialism.” She also invokes mythic themes as part of the process of psychic healing, demonstrating a connection with the authors treated by Huang in his chapter. As a result of her attention to nature and women’s socialization and oppression, Byrne views Ndlovu’s work as demonstrating several different strands of ecofeminism. And only through attention to the connections she draws between the treatment of material nature, such as in the mining industry, and the treatment of women in society, both the violence perpetrated against them and their denigration to a lower status, can her artistry be fully appreciated. Byrne also makes the point that while she employs a strategic essentialism and mythic elements, she nevertheless does not treat women in South Africa as a homogenous entity. Rather, across her work she emphasizes what connects and unites them in a struggle for emancipation while continuing to address their social strata differences. Byrne especially encourages attention to her achievement as a South African woman in a country where there is virtually no significant environmental movement and the rights of women are largely ignored and abused. In the final chapter, Izabel Brandão provides a comparative analysis of two very different contemporary poets, Grace Nichols from the Caribbean and the Scottish poet Jackie Kay. Brandão is interested in how the two poets approach quite distinctly representations of the body through treatment of Sartjie Baartman. Brandão discovers what I would term a relational difference in which the representations from quite distinct perspectives reveal themselves as complementary and thematically expansive when read together. Nichols presents an ironically inflected voice of Baartman, which Brandão defines as a counter­ discourse to the colonial oppression and exploitation that this woman personally

8   P.D. Murphy experienced as microcosm of the othering of colonial peoples. Kay, joining Nichols, treats the body as “home,” and as such renders it a place for a subjective discourse rather than the objectifying ones that have historically circumscribed the concept of this woman labeled the Hottentot Venus. Brandão argues that these two women poets’ recasting of this woman’s image is a political action calling for respect and recognition. Given her use of a dialogical orientation, it seems only appropriate to think of Nichols’ composition in terms of a Rabelaisian use of irony. The woman’s body as nature, as a site of natural activity, and the making of the body that has been viewed as grotesque as a subject, as a site of attention, defies and challenges patriarchy, particularly white South African and European, with an ironic double-­voiced counter discourse. Brandão’s chapter points back through this volume to complementary aspects of her analysis of these two poets and their poems with others presented, such as that of Kordecki’s treatment of the fictional Ophelia, as well as the postcolonial orientation of Burriss. While Terblanche’s interpretation of Eliot produces a radical ecofeminist rereading of a canonical work, Brandão’s two poets provide a radical ecofeminist rewriting of a racist, colonialist example of the center’s efforts to impose on the rest of the world socially constructed definitions of what is “normal” or “beautiful,” that is, what is natural. Ecofeminism in general seeks to promote a fundamentally different worldview from those dominant globally today. Ecofeminist literary criticism contributes to that project through promoting writings that embody its principles, criticizing works that reinforce reactionary patriarchy, and exploring insights of ecofeminist critique of canonical texts. It stands squarely with other forms of ecocritical analysis in reminding readers that not all references to nature are symbolic commentaries on human thought and behavior. Rather, they both refer to the more than human world in which we participate and they make referential statements about the exterior basis for interior thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Note that I wrote, exterior, not external. It exceeds other forms of ecocriticism in consistently foregrounding the inextricability of gender oppression and ecocide. All of the chapters that follow unabashedly advance that agenda.

References Estok, Simon. 2011. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. New York: Palgrave. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge.

1 “Like a creature native” Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism Lesley Kordecki

There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, When down the weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her cloths spread wide, And mermaid-­like a while they bore her up; Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and endued Unto that element. But long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. (Gertrude on Ophelia’s death, Hamlet 4.7.170–181)

William Shakespeare’s famous lines about Ophelia’s death, recited by Gertrude, the only other woman in the play, have generated many centuries of critical inquiry, but none seems to answer satisfactorily the plaguing questions about Ophelia’s role in this most definitive tragedy of Western culture. Harold Jenkins, editor of the play, tells us that “Shakespeare’s conception of Ophelia is profounder than that of his critics; and [this speech] … is its supremely imaginative culmination” (1994, 547). What makes this death announcement the “culmination” of the great poet’s “imagination”? In her groundbreaking 1985 essay, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” Elaine Showalter traces artistic, stage, popular, and critical interpretations to demonstrate the cultural manipulation of this legendary character’s appearance in feminist thought. She follows the “meaning” of Ophelia into the twentieth century, showing how her “erotomania” or sexualized madness helped form the representation of women over the centuries. Showalter calls Ophelia’s story the “history of her representation,” linking female insanity with female frailty and sexuality, and then by the end of the last century, linking her with “protest and rebellion” (1985, 79, 91–92). This argument is well founded, but Ophelia has more to teach us.

10   L. Kordecki We in the twenty-first century can see how Ophelia’s indelible cultural mark is delineated in yet another way by her abundant and exquisite association with the flora and fauna of Shakespeare’s potent language, but now with the political edge that ecocriticism has taught us, we can revise her problematic function as docile victim. Gertrude’s account of her death excerpted above challengingly positions her vital significance. Lovely, ephemeral, fading, here Ophelia becomes the symbolic flowers she poignantly and distractedly distributes to the other characters in her prior scene. But she is not just flowers; the brook that ultimately envelops her “mermaid-­like,” or “Like a creature native and endued [i.e., fit]/Unto that element,” literally absorbs this outcast woman into the natural world. Gertrude’s elegant pastoral eulogy on Ophelia’s drowning in essence grafts the dead or dying woman onto the natural tableau, the fluid water itself, as she becomes its “creature.” These telling signifiers explain the deceptive power of this seemingly passive woman. The other chapters in this volume will show how literature, positioned historically and geographically, is deeply infused with social issues entwining women and nature in the last few centuries. The international scope of the essays alerts us to the global repercussions of patriarchal mindsets in other times and in other cultures. I believe that the sub-­textual resonances of Hamlet explored below will demonstrate the fully formed ecofeminist ideology in the Early Modern stage of Western society. My chapter will argue that Ophelia continues to point the way in the history of feminism, but now emerges as the definition of ecofeminist influences on our perceptions, and reveals the dire effects of ignoring them. Ophelia’s natural associations are not really news, and do not help us much with this overdetermined text unless we study how Hamlet, our beloved protagonist, interacts with her; then the play’s prophetic ecofeminism emerges. Jeanne Addison Roberts reminds us that  The equation of women and Nature is so ancient and so ubiquitous as hardly to need documentation. From Aristotle on, philosophers have seen women as formless matter upon which men must imprint shape, even as Nature was the raw material from which human Culture was to be constructed.  (Roberts 1991, 25) Ophelia assumes the role of eschewed nature for Hamlet, which in turn helps us resolve many of the tragedy’s essential questions. As symbol, Ophelia is not a static romanticized version of the natural world, but a persistent reminder of human abuse, censorship, victimization, and even destruction of nature. Still, she also depicts nature’s healing power. Ecofeminists have noted the impact and the oppression of the environment on the literary texts we love. Ophelia is subject to “the instrumental treatment of nature and its exclusion from ethical significance in western (now global) culture,” as Val Plumwood would put it (1993, 6), by the men around her. She is manifestly used and objectified, as I will show. She and the nature she represents are denied or “backgrounded” to “a dominant, foreground sphere of recognized achievement or causation. This backgrounding of women and nature” (1993, 21) is accom­plished almost indiscernibly and automatically by the human males who define

Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism   11 themselves by exclusion from female and from nature. Both Ophelia and the natural world can be seen as an “independent centre of resistance and opacity” (1993, 157), Plumwood’s careful phrase to include the nonhuman with the female human in our speciesist and masculinist language. Similarly, Shakespearean critics are studying the effect of the environment on the plays. In the 1930s, Caroline Spurgeon recorded the proliferation of natural imagery in Shakespeare and especially in Hamlet (1966, 13, 16, 367–368). Roberts more recently examines how the gendered “wild” interacts with the male self. She tells us that “Seen as passive and receptive, women were repeatedly linked by tradition and specifically by Shakespeare with the earth, the affinity of wombs and tombs became a cliché.” As such, Ophelia, like other women (Lady Macbeth, Hero, Hermione, Thaisa) can be seen as the “tamed Wild,” rebelling through death, even if the death is not actual (Roberts 1991, 25–26). Gertrude’s womb and Ophelia’s tomb both threaten Hamlet’s and thus the play’s sense of the world. I will return to how the grave dominates the action below. The following reading argues how Ophelia represents a more thought-­ provoking notion of nature than hitherto supposed. She incarnates all four of the elements of fire, air, water, and earth, and she attempts to intercede in the fatal outcome of the other characters. Deirdre Byrne (in the present collection) tells us of “elemental energies” still associated with women in contemporary poetry. Like nature itself in Western culture, however, Ophelia is othered and abandoned, the only true innocent in this brilliant study of human struggle. Through her, nature is aligned with many stereotypes of women, and she ultimately emerges as visionary and ruthlessly expendable as the narrative moves in its masculinist directions. Ophelia, so well known for her mad scenes, appears sparsely in Hamlet’s story, but as a representative of nature, she occupies a primary place in his ideological battles. She interacts with Hamlet on stage only in Act 3, and yet her death brings about everyone’s end. Before Ophelia’s appearance in the play, Hamlet, distraught by his father’s death, begins to move away from his stable grip on the environment around him and becomes isolated within his own identity concerns. His first soliloquy compares the world to “an unweeded garden/That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature/Possess it merely [completely]” (1.2.135–137), and in a few lines he is accusing his mother of rushing into “incestuous sheets” (1.2.157). He is then haunted by the ghost of his father, much like the mad Ophelia is later by her own father. When he becomes animated by the unnaturalism of the ghost, he vows to transform himself and embrace his mission of revenge: Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, … And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. (1.5. 98–99, 102–104)

12   L. Kordecki His agitation has been well noted, but it seems that his love for Ophelia and his foundation in the natural world is relegated to “trivial” and “baser matter,” especially since his mother’s actions prove to him the corruption of all female sexuality, as he tells us later. Ophelia’s first scene, with her brother Laertes and father Polonius, establishes her as the element of fiery passion for Hamlet. Her part in the drama of unremitting human catastrophe amid metaphysical contemplation begins with this identification. She is not just Hamlet’s beloved, but is wholly defined by the destructiveness of sexuality, reduced inexorably to her value as virgin by Laertes’, Polonius’, and later even Hamlet’s patriarchal eyes. Laertes warns her not to open her “chaste treasure” to Hamlet’s “unmastered importunity” (1.3.30, 31). Polonius refers to Hamlet’s desire as “blazes” but not true “fire,” and that she must protect herself from his “unholy suits” (1.3.116, 119, 128). Polonius talks to Claudius and Gertrude of Hamlet’s “hot love” (2.2.132). Ophelia brings out the fire in Hamlet. She is nature’s dangerous temptations for him, which he seems to convert later to threatening hatred when he accosts her in Act 3. After this rather conventional plot line exhorting caution with young love, we move to Ophelia’s next scene in which she tells her father how Hamlet appears to her “Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,/And with a look so piteous in purport/As if he had been loosed out of hell/To speak of horrors” (2.1.79–81). But what is happening here? A reading of the love between Ophelia and Hamlet rings untrue if we take a realistic look at their interactions. One could argue that the intelligent, philosophically self-­deprecating Hamlet would trust a woman he truly loves more, would not use her to display his “antic disposition” (1.5.170) in order to achieve his revenge. He expressly tells Horatio and the guards that no matter “How strange or odd some’er I bear myself ” (1.5.168), they should not reveal his conversation with the ghost, but does not afford his beloved the same courtesy. When he first appears to Ophelia offstage, she describes him in this state, but he is deemed to be in the throes of love-­madness, a long tradition of love-­longynge from medieval texts wherein the sufferer transforms into a melancholic. This constitutes a valid conjecture on the part of Polonius and even Ophelia herself unless, like the audience, they were privy to Hamlet’s plan to simulate madness. Significantly, Ophelia is never part of Hamlet’s contemplations about retributive action toward Claudius or even any concerns he harbors about remaining in Elsinore. She is not featured in his decisions or his passions as represented in those extraordinary soliloquies. His declaration of the depth of this love at the end of the play comes as a surprise: “I loved Ophelia—forty thousand brothers/Could not with all their quantity of love/Make up my sum” (5.1.258–260). His love affair rings hollow if she is the mere mortal we take her to be; instead, the text uses her to stand for the natural, the part of the world abandoned by the obsessed Hamlet. This is not to give Hamlet an excuse for his abuse of Ophelia; his ranting is not just a simple betrayal of young love. It tells us more about his inability to embrace the virtues of ideologies outside a masculinist, speciesist paradigm. He rejects all that Ophelia represents while he delays in enacting his vengeance.

Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism   13 We have no scenes of love between Hamlet and Ophelia to compare with what happens when they first appear on the stage together. We see that Ophelia, at first hesitant, is now obedient to her father’s order to have nothing to do with him: “I would not in plain terms from this time forth/Have you so slander any moment leisure/As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet” (1.3.131–133). She returns Hamlet’s letters, which he denies giving to her, and then he turns on her by asking “Are you honest [chaste]?” and suggests that the power of her beauty will “transform Honesty from what it is to a bawd” (3.1.102, 111). With little preface, Ophelia’s sexual honor is being attacked, and Hamlet tells her he lied when he told her he loved her. His love is mentioned after her chastity has been examined, again showing that for Hamlet she is or must be the embodiment of virginity (forestalling sexuality and fertility). Hamlet then utters the famed angry words “Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (3.1.120–121). If these lines are sincere and not contrived to feign madness, he then reveals his consummate wrath toward her, as well as toward himself. His misogynistic accost, “You jig and amble and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness ignorance” (3.1.143–145), expands his condemnation to all women, insulting all as well as the submissive and forgiving Ophelia, who clearly believes in his madness. All women are hypocrites who lack genuineness as long as they can entrap men with their sexuality. Hamlet continues to separate himself from any true natural or feminine contact that can keep him grounded. A long critical tradition asserts that Hamlet knows that Polonius has set Ophelia upon him in this encounter, and therefore Hamlet contemptuously deals with her betrayal when he tells her to “Go thy ways to a nunnery” (3.1.128–129). But this does not explain Hamlet’s first appearance to Ophelia offstage. Hamlet’s treatment of his beloved becomes almost iconic, a rejection that is somehow cosmically antithetical to Hamlet’s mission of revenge. She is more than a mortal lover; she is natural life itself, all its promise and desirable sexuality and fertility, and he cannot entertain thoughts of such during this time. His attack on Ophelia seems to merge with his disgust of his mother’s remarriage. All love toward women and nature becomes subsumed to his duty to avenge his father’s death. As Harold Jenkins notes, Hamlet “denies his own nature” (1994, 153). He tries to make himself into the masculinist ideal that could easily kill Claudius. Ophelia’s lament over Hamlet’s loss of reason illustrates her loving spirit. When he leaves her devastated with his verbal attack, she exclaims that his “noble mind is here o’erthrown.” This man whom she characterized as the “rose of the fair state” (3.1.145) no longer is figured as a blossom. She has lost hope along with the fire of his love: “O woe is me/T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see” (3.1.159–160). The fire of his love takes another turn in Hamlet’s second and last encounter with Ophelia on stage; Hamlet resorts to a mean-­spirited banter with her in the “play-­within-the play” scene. Ophelia, attempting to conciliate him, utters a pathetic “I think nothing, my lord” in response to which Hamlet constructs a crude pun: “That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs … Nothing”

14   L. Kordecki (intimating a penis or a vagina) (3.2.110–114). Again, he may be simulating insanity, but only Horatio is privy to his true self, not the estranged Ophelia. The scene once again casts Ophelia as the threat of passion, a passion gone awry now, and blamed for its sway over Hamlet. Soon after, Hamlet will kill her father, and Ophelia will be abandoned again, first by her brother, with his reductive advice about her virginity, perhaps to keep her value to the family secure in that culture, then by her lover, who again exhorts her to suppress her fertility, seemingly punishing her for Gertrude’s sexuality and remarriage, and finally by her father, who uses their love for each other to prove the cause of madness for Polonius’ own opportunistic gain. Alone, Ophelia becomes the repository of all natural grace for the politically corrupt kingdom and its competing men. The latter part of Act Four deals with Elsinore without Hamlet, and the most potent scenes are devoted to the two in which Ophelia, mad, addresses Gertrude and Claudius, and then later her brother Laertes. This presentation of true insanity, as many have shown, contrasts with Hamlet’s feigned madness, but Ophelia gives us much more to work with. She distributes both song and flowers and both carry the meaning of the domain outside Elsinore. The element of air is inhabited by human speech, and Ophelia’s disordered lines in her mad scenes complete with stylized song show nature’s interruption of our complacent confidence in controlling air through language. These scenes, as others have noted, are especially pointed because Hamlet has simulated the disruption of natural speech earlier in the play. His antics, a precursor to this poignant and naturally occurring chaos, make Hamlet’s imitation of it still witty, but somehow manipulative and empty, even cruel. His beloved will transform into the true and sad madcap, who will soon become the wise fool who airs her evocative refrains to those around her. Before she enters, the Gentleman tells us that she “speaks things in doubt/That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,/Yet the unshaped use of it doth move/ The hearers to collection” (4.5.7–9). Her songs and subsequent lecture on the meaning of flowers bring to light the sins against nature of the characters present. When Gertrude sees her, she immediately talks of her own guilt, her “sick soul” and “sin’s true nature” (4.5.17). Gertrude may indeed be the only auditor capable of absorbing Ophelia’s messages. The first song is addressed to her. Ophelia’s tunes are noted for their reference to sex, once again highlighting the conjunction of female sexuality and female insanity, but they are even more openly about death, and seem to be a fusing of thoughts about both Hamlet and her dead father. The line “How should I your true love know” (4.5.23) may make Gertrude’s guilt about her remarriage sting. The next verse employs natural imagery to look back on Polonius and forward on Ophelia’s own funeral: He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone. At his head a grass-­green turf, At his heels a stone. (4.5.28–31)

Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism   15 And later: White his shroud as the mountain snow – Larded all with sweet flower Which bewept to the ground did not go With true-­love showers. (4.5.36, 38–40) With “grass-­green turf,” “mountain snow,” “sweet flower,” and “true-­love showers” the ditty brings earth and water into the air. Besides the usual linking of death with sex, we have an oral presentation of the deaths that are to come: first Ophelia herself, the rejected natural world, and then the rest of the characters who do not recognize her warnings, her nonviolent strength. Ophelia then enigmatically chants “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be” (4.5.42–44). Jenkins traces the folk-­tale of the baker’s daughter who is punished and turned into an owl for holding back bread for Christ. The owl is known as a “mournful bird” (like Ophelia), whose cry is a “traditional signal of danger” (1994, 532–533). The combination of women and birds, think of the “wise” owl, sometimes involving metamorphosis is an especially noteworthy ecofeminist conjunction throughout the medieval and early modern eras. Ophelia’s Valentine song returns to the question of love and this time destructive sex in which the fire is gone. Jenkins thinks this may be directed toward Claudius (1994, 534), which would implicate both Gertrude and Claudius in their unnatural acts: their hasty marriage and Polonius’ rushed funeral. Her songs are not simply the outward expression of her insanity. They become intertwined with her identity. Later, we hear that Ophelia sings as she dies, “she chanted snatches of old tunes,” “pulled” “from her melodious lay” (4.7.175, 180). First songs and then flowers are metaphorically gifted to her audience, those on stage and then those in the theatre. The allusive quality of song and flora haunt this play that concerns the monarchy and the family. With Ophelia the outside world is brought into the struggle and all of us are invested. But Ophelia is not quite finished warning the others. In a novel move, Shakespeare brings her back on the stage in a second mad scene to continue to urge acknowledgment and repentance, this time with props, the plants, but with limited success. Once Laertes has arrived, the disturbed woman causes even more pathos, and this time brought on in the traditional and emblematic form of flowers. Jenkins believes that the play employs “madness to convey what rational discourse could not” (1994, 537), and ventures a glossing of each kind of plant despite the variety of meanings they acquired over the centuries. Ophelia straightforwardly explicates that rosemary is for “remembrance” and pansies for “thoughts” and gives them presumably to Laertes, the avenging son, but also, the soon to be grieving brother, which may be her less vengeful message. Jenkins speculates that the fennel (dissembling) and columbines (cuckoldry) are directed toward Gertrude, with the rue (regret and repentance) left for Claudius and even

16   L. Kordecki for herself “with a difference” (4.5.173–176), presumably because she regrets different things. The daisy (deception or love) is for Ophelia herself, and the violets (faithfulness) that have “withered” are connected, as she says, with her dead father (537–542). Many critics see how ironically these flowers represent the failings or outright crimes of the characters on stage. In the 1970s, Bridget Lyons asserts that Ophelia “conveys riddling significance,” and “is most persistently presented in terms of symbolic meanings” (1977, 62, 61). In tracing her allusions to the two stories of the goddess Flora, Lyons demonstrates the semiotically rich and ambiguous language of Ophelia as opposed to Perdita’s straightforward flower language in The Winter’s Tale (1977, 63–66). Still, these abundant natural emblems can be interpreted in quite different ways. Ecocritic Rebecca Laroche writes of how the plants Ophelia carries in are recuperative plants to help her with her madness, and should be literally present (2011, 212). The actor playing Ophelia needs to proffer real flowers to reinforce the nonhuman landscape forgotten in this intense human tragedy. This stage tradition will help audiences understand the character’s natural authority. Laroche reminds us that “women practiced medicine widely in the early modern period” and supplies contemporary texts to substantiate this claim (2011, 215). In a recuperative mode, then, rosemary, fennel, columbine, pansies, and rue all have medicinal attributes. The scent of violets means that “to feel good, to find comfort, has disappeared.” She takes Ophelia’s plants “literally” and surmises that “Ophelia belongs to another, perhaps more simple, herb-­filled world, in which plants can restore one’s stability of mind” (2011, 217, 220). Perhaps the flowers can be seen as associated with the health of each of the characters, and Ophelia, nature’s nurse, shows how the world surrounding and embracing our anthropocentric concerns is of utmost importance. Shakespeare’s rich imagery can admit many of these glossings of the plants distributed by a non-­rational character. The flowers bring the outside world into the stifling monarchal and familial struggles of the court. His pun-­laden language of the Fools in other plays, notably King Lear and Twelfth Night, alert us to how he takes the opportunity to strew clues to produce diverse signifieds throughout his texts. We can see here that Ophelia comes to sing her warning and then to move from the air of song to the produce of the earth once her role as the fire of passion is extinguished by all. Not only Hamlet, earlier in the play, underestimates and denies the place of nature by resisting Ophelia, but also Gertrude, Claudius, and Laertes all neglect Ophelia’s gifts of the natural world as they, especially Claudius and Laertes, are engaged and obsessed with human revenge and violence before and after Ophelia’s mad scenes. The “violets” that have “withered all when [her] father died” (4.5.177) are among other things the poisoning of language by the tragedy, and the conversion of helpful plants to inert weeds. Gertrude is not quite the resistant auditor of Ophelia’s plaint as the men around her. Women of Shakespeare’s time would know the recuperative value of plants, but as the only other woman in this drama, she is given the expressive announcement of the death of Ophelia. Gertrude is often seen as a woman too

Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism   17 far removed from nature—too engrossed in the “civilized” and culturally savvy world of the court. She seemingly protects herself from a competitive monarchy by marrying Claudius. Hamlet implies this in his “closet” speech to Gertrude in Act 3, scene 4, and we do not have indication of Gertrude’s acknowledgment of her complicity in a corrupt marriage (if not a murder), until the scenes showing Ophelia’s madness. This heartrending performance of a fellow female’s mental demise could be her turning point, making her believe Hamlet’s words and see Claudius as the real problem. The Quarto 1 version of the play, a less “authoritative text” (Shakespeare, Thompson edition 2014, 487), contains a scene not found in Quarto 2–4 or Folio versions of the play. In this scene, directly following Gertrude’s witnessing of Ophelia’s madness and before she announces her death to Laertes and Claudius, the queen meets with Horatio and learns of Claudius’ plot to kill her son. She speaks of her husband’s “treason” and “villanie” and says that she “will soothe and please him for a time,/For murderous minds are always jealous” (Evans et al. 1977, 1243 textual notes, scene 4.6). This Gertrude, clearly on Hamlet’s side after Ophelia’s mad scenes and Horatio’s report of her son (Lesser, 2015, 3–5), presents a changed character by the time she brings the news of Ophelia’s drowning. The flowers, given to her by the determinedly vague but nurturing Ophelia, have done their job. However, the men awarded flowers clearly reject their recuperative strength. Only Gertrude is carrying them to Ophelia’s grave (“Sweets to the sweet” 5.1.233). Before she leaves the stage, Ophelia returns to the gift of song, and foretells the rest of the metaphoric thrust of the drama: “No, no, he is dead,/Go to thy deathbed,/He will never come again” (4.5.183–185). The lyrics address all key characters, not just Polonius. Death will now be nature’s legacy. Ophelia’s death becomes a major transition in the action, and its unique announcement reveals her continued role in the story. Water of course is the medium of Ophelia’s demise, the brook pulling her back to itself in “muddy death.” Gertrude announces her end with distinctive and memorable verbal figures, as her full speech shows: There is a willow grows askant the brook That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream. Therewith fantastic garlands did she make Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies and long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them. There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, When down the weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her cloths spread wide, And mermaid-­like a while they bore her up; Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress,

18   L. Kordecki Or like a creature native and endued Unto that element. But long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. (4.7.164–181) The willow connotes sadness, according to Jenkins, and the nettle means pain, poison, or betrayal. The daisies are forsaken love (1994, 544–546). All can be worked into a traditional reading of Ophelia’s death. More pronounced, however, is that the insistent personification of the landscape becomes something beyond a romanticized ecosystem. It emphasizes the transference of attributes and the amalgam of participants (woman, willow, flowers, and brook). Neither the woman (nor the willow) is “weeping,” but the brook is, once Ophelia enters it. The willow has “hoary leaves” reminiscent of the hoary head of Polonius or the song from her last song: “Flaxen was his poll” (4.5.188). The “long purples” are “dead men’s fingers” and the boughs have “an envious sliver,” in some way envious that it is not decorated like the garland, or the natural world becomes envious of the possession of Ophelia, and seeks to draw her in. The garlands are now “trophies” of human accomplishment swallowed by the water. Ophelia’s “cloths” we see “bore her up” and become “garments,” “heavy with their drink.” Shakespeare’s language has all of nature fuse into the human and Ophelia transform into the landscape as the imagery transposes the human and the nonhuman. Our societal concerns (suicide or accident?) are rendered unimportant. The poetry considers that she might be “incapable of her own distress,” but then provides a more satisfying option. Ophelia is “like a creature native and endued/ Unto that element,” a vastly different aftermath to her life, than the suicide she is thought to be. Metaphorically, she is one with the landscape, born in (“native”) and accustomed to (“endued”) the “element” of water. But water also means tears. Laertes reminds us immediately of this, and how tears are the province of women in this culture (4.7.187). Consider, moreover, how liquid poison is the means of deaths of not only Gertrude with the poisoned cup, but Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet himself. Only Polonius is truly stabbed to death. Poison, the traditional woman’s weapon, kills all in the last scene, but no woman’s hand has a part in it. Hence Ophelia, associated not just with plants, becomes a creature of the water, born there (“native”) and now dying there, both pastoral and sinister, buoyant in another element, iconic of human/nonhuman synthesis, if not healthy symbiosis. Her death is the unification of human and environment, the incorporation of human into the world itself. The influential oil painting of John Everett Millais strikes some as an exquisite rendering of drowning, made pretty by the flowers all around and on Ophelia’s gown, but even this romanticized image of nature has its potency realized with a look at her face a moment before suffocation. In one sense her death by water, with her incoherent (?) singing might be joyful, an end to the rejections around her. We remember that

Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism   19 the old king dies through corrupted plant life when, as his ghost says, he is struck down “With juice of cursed hebona” in the orchard (1.5.62), the first unleashing of unnaturalism on Elsinore. Ophelia survives in verse today, but with a twist. In Suzanne Lummis’ poem, “How I Didn’t Get Myself to a Nunnery,” the persona’s afterlife begins with the water: “I like rivers./And I’m all right with flowers. I floated/on a bed of roses— well, O.K., rue/and columbine. It bore me up not down” (2014, 10–13). She survives in another life, but her transition is in keeping with joyful natural synthesis. In addition, as a creature, a hybrid mermaid, half fish, half woman, Ophelia is that middle ground that critical animal studies have shown us (see, for example, Agamben 2004, Fudge 2006, Adams and Donovan 1995, Wolfe 2003). She is, as Jacques Derrida says, “the animal that therefore I am” (2008), and displays the deconstruction of essentialist categories of human and animal that this statement implies. In essays below, both Calley Hornbuckle and Nicole Anae pursue this evocative link between women and nonhuman animals (Hornbuckle, Anae). As a living woman, Ophelia is well associated with plant and animal, and in her suffering becomes a repository of male antagonism toward nature, em“bodied” in the women of the patriarchy. In her death, she transcends culture’s political, vengeful, and ultimately petty concerns. She is now an icon of the connected oppression of the female and the environment, not simply the union of women and madness. Beyond her association with fire, air, and water, perhaps most striking is Ophelia’s alliance with earth. As Carol Chillington Rutter argues, Ophelia’s passing is not the end of her role in the play. In Enter the Body, Rutter takes us through how the graveyard scene becomes the definitive interpretive forecast of the devastation at the end (2001, 27–56). The long, strange scene beginning with the gravediggers and ending with Ophelia’s non-­burial brings about the resolution of Hamlet’s revenge better than any human plotting on the part of Hamlet or Claudius can. This scene further articulates the union of life and death much more than the wandering ghost in the beginning. Here the harmless woman becomes part of the earth, but not until human tampering points up the artificial manipulation of death, with a vied-­for grave, a piece of land possessed by men. Ophelia is no longer washed away by the uncontrollable water where she seemed to belong. The free-­flowing water now gives way to the disputed, invaded, and penetrated earth of a graveyard, a human invasion quite literally into the natural landscape. The scene opens with questioning a corpse’s right to a Christian sacrament: “Is she to be buried in Christian burial, when she wilfully seeks her own salvation?” (5.1.1–2). Thus begins a conversation, witty, parodically legal, between the Gravedigger and the Second Man. The amusing banter ends with the Gravedigger saying that those in his profession “build stronger than a mason, a shipwright or a carpenter” as the Second Man puts it (5.1.46–47), because his “houses” “lasts till doomsday” (5.1.55). The Gravedigger’s “house” or grave may last forever, but the occupants will change, making apparent how humans

20   L. Kordecki believe they own the earth, but even their bodies are simply one in a number who inhabit the plot. Ophelia is never clearly buried in this scene, but forgotten at the end with the scuffle between Laertes and Hamlet. This concern about the religious definition of Ophelia’s passing or the decorum of Polonius’ funeral all becomes moot in the play’s inquiry of the meaning of natural, not social, perishing, and the incomplete burial reflects this forcefully. The Gravedigger then sings a short song that, as Jenkins notes, picks up on “motifs from Ophelia’s songs,” in the previous act (1994, 548). He sings of the sweetness of young love, and how age “shipped me into the land” of the grave (5.1.69), again uniting sex and death and reminding the audience of Ophelia’s warnings. After Hamlet and Horatio discuss the Gravedigger’s callous unearthing of skulls, the Gravedigger finishes his melody with reference to “shrouding sheet” and “pit of clay” (15.1.89–90). Hamlet’s musings on the dead tenants of the grave which are now being usurped for Ophelia makes sense in this long and decisive scene about death. He turns to the Gravedigger to ask whose grave this is, and the Gravedigger verbally plays with and bests Hamlet with his drollness. He first replies that the grave is his, and sings his verse line, “O, a pit of clay for to be made,” which is followed by Hamlet’s punning on the word “lie,” one of Shakespeare’s favorite meaningful homonyms. The clever repartee is all about who lies in the grave, and it seems that the Gravedigger is the first possibility, and a dead woman is to be the next occupant, but the lines apply to us all. Hamlet, ignorant of Ophelia’s death, philosophically moves on to his brooding contemplation about a body rotting in the earth. But he and we are thinking about our own deaths, and this scene achieves great potency with Hamlet’s musing on the skull of Yorick, Ophelia’s precursor in that bit of earth. Ophelia becomes the new dead jester, for as Rutter tells us, “the mad virgin and the mad-­cap jester … share a grave” (2001, 40). But as we see, Ophelia, like Yorick, is not to rest comfortably. In most productions, Laertes leaps into her grave and embraces her, creating the image of Ophelia not quite dead, not laid “to rest.” Before Laertes dramatically attempts to circumvent Ophelia’s death by raising her up, he protests to the Priest who excuses the aborted ceremony because of her “doubtful” (possibly suicidal) death (5.1.216). Many have wondered about this seeming digression from the revenge plot. Perhaps more effective would be to ask why does a funeral, a cultural enactment of the ultimate natural event, death, matter so much to Hamlet’s story? Why is there this attention to the nature (suicide or accident?) of Ophelia’s death? And why does the play obsess about the maimed rites of funerals, that of both Polonius and then Ophelia? We begin to see that at her death Ophelia becomes the fauna and flora of the world in an act that blurs the line between accident and suicide. As nature itself, Ophelia’s end is neither self-­imposed nor inadvertent. She is simply absorbed back into the nonhuman. The theological dispute in the graveyard scene, lampooned in the gravediggers’ conversation, and then brought to a head with Laertes and the Priest demonstrates the significance of the loss of Ophelia to all the remaining people, people who have rejected or abandoned her in one way or

Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism   21 another. No rites, maimed or otherwise, impede the finality of death. These social and religious concerns are useless here, and are offered as yet one more cultural battle over nothing. Laertes tells the priest to “Lay her I’th’ earth,/And from her fair and unpolluted flesh/May violets spring” (5.1.227–229), as Ophelia becomes part of the earth and can produce the violets (faithfulness) that she said all “withered” when her father died in her last scene. She delivered blossoms in the last act and now is planted herself, the natural end for all. Hamlet objects to Laertes’ grief, and probably out of his own sense of rue, Ophelia’s body is competed over in death as it was in life. Most productions have Hamlet and Laertes fight each other in her grave, over her body, perhaps crushing her bones. They are protesting their love for, despite their negligence of, her. Gertrude may indeed be the only one who realizes the essential absence of Ophelia, vessel of life and fecundity. The queen hints at the possibility of a future generation in that she returns the flowers given to her by Ophelia in the last act as Gertrude strews them on the dead woman’s grave. She wanted them for her “bride-­bed” for her marriage to Hamlet (5.1.234–235). Her floral attention to Ophelia, like her protective move toward her son when Hamlet lashes out at Laertes’ grief, shows a more concerned woman than she was before witnessing Ophelia’s madness. She thinks of her son’s danger and exhorts Laertes “For the love of God, forbear him” (5.1.262). Later, she compares Hamlet in his madness to the “female dove/When that her golden couplets are disclosed,/ His silence will sit drooping” (5.1.275–277). In other words, when Hamlet’s “fit” runs out, he will be contemplative like the mother dove after hatching her young. And indeed, until the end of the play, Hamlet does quiet down and all thoughts of madness, simulated or genuine, are discarded. Perhaps not a mother dove, he still will emerge at the end of the play closer to the “rose of the state” that Ophelia knew. Recuperative nature guides him after he admits his love for Ophelia. He leaves the graveyard with his rather mild and enigmatic “The cat will mew and dog will have his day” (5.1.281), another linking to the nonhuman world. Shakespeare’s natural imagery again reveals what’s really at stake when Hamlet tells Horatio that he must proceed on with the sword-­play with Laertes, after he first apologizes to him. Hamlet, pensive to the extreme, counters Horatio’s caution and says There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. (5.2.197–200) This new Hamlet, who anticipates his own fatality in the “fall of a sparrow,” has rejoined his natural self. He recognizes his mortality in the graveyard and even in Ophelia’s grave. He feels the camaraderie in a bird’s passing, and is more like his beloved in his figurative correlation with plant and animal. And yet it is all

22   L. Kordecki too late, too late for the fallen Ophelia, and even for Hamlet himself. The design against his life proceeds apace. It is perhaps fanciful to imagine Ophelia as only natural powers, personifying the life outside the human sphere for Hamlet. The role of the mortal woman, however, is so highly “backgrounded” that one seeks to piece together the flow of the love story action with the cramped corruption of the court and the oppressive claustrophobia of family betrayals. Ophelia floats through the play as icon as well as victim. She exerts profound psychic poignancy in her mad scenes, with encoded lessons for all. Her end allegorically represents the death of the open world that becomes shut out with revenge violence. She becomes the incarnation, first of fiery love, then the air’s plaintive song, then watery symbiosis, and finally the earth itself. Hamlet means many things, but our critical progress makes us entertain another, quite fertile prospect. Ophelia’s identity is invariably yoked verbally and pictorially with flora; in her character, the woman matures into both comforting blossoms and strangling weeds. The composite mermaid, dressed in flower and shrub, traditional sign language for our necessary entanglement with the environment, intrudes on this most personal and metaphysical drama of the patriarchy, demonstrating the ominous effects when men reject or even neglect communion with women and nature.

References Adams, Carol J. and Josephine Donovan, eds. 1995. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-­Louise Mallet. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press. Evans, G., J.J. Blakemore, M. Tobin, Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, Frank Kermode, Harry Levin, Hallett Smith, and Marie Edel, eds. 1977. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Fudge, Erica. 2006. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jenkins, Harold, ed. 1994. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Laroche, Rebecca. 2011. “Ophelia’s Plants the Death of Violets.” In Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, 211–221. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Lesser, Zachary. 2015. Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lummis, Suzanne. 2014. “How I Didn’t Get Myself to a Nunnery.” New Yorker, November 3. Lyons, Bridget Gellert. 1977. “The Iconography of Ophelia.” ELH, 44(1): 60–74. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Roberts, Jeanne Addison. 1991. The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Rutter, Carol Chillington. 2001. Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. London: Routledge.

Ophelia’s death and ecofeminism   23 Shakespeare, William. 2014. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury. Showalter, Elaine. 1985. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 77–94. New York: Methuen. Spurgeon, Carolyn. 1966. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930; rpt. 1966. Wolfe, Cary, ed. 2003. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.

2 Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility Calley A. Hornbuckle

One of the first Romantic period writers to foster ecological intelligence, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) puts forth a vision of community predicated on the fellowship of all living things.1 She does so, in part, by advocating a kind of sensibility that breaks down Enlightenment dualisms which privilege the mind over the body, reason over feeling, and humans and culture over nature. Barbauld’s writings suggest an ecological sensibility that depicts human selves and nonhuman selves co-­existing within an interconnected whole, with each having intrinsic value in its own right. Val Plumwood, along with several other ecofeminists, such as Carolyn Merchant and Karen Warren, argues that monological rationalism and hegemonic dualism operate hand-­in-hand to endorse privileged groups and subordinate others. Such ways of thinking constitute a “failure to situate the human in ecologically embodied and socially embedded ways” (Plumwood 2002, 27). Barbauld anticipates the ecofeminists’ articulation of this failure in the implicit critiques of Enlightenment reason that run throughout her prose and poetry. In particular, Barbauld’s allegorical essay “The Hill of Science” (1773) counters the idea of knowledge predicated on dualism by featuring a dichotomous rationale based on the principle of egalitarianism. Likewise, her poems “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773) and “The Caterpillar” (1816) refine the concept of Enlightenment sympathy by synthesizing rational, emotional, and bodily intelligence in terms of imaginative identification with the natural world. By exploring human and nonhuman subjectivities, Barbauld portrays a community of biospheric equality in which all living organisms are intrinsically valued. In effect, her vision of an egalitarian community, comprising human and natural things, emanates a social awareness embodied by ethical and ecological engagement. By reorienting Enlightenment hierarchies and concentrating on the imaginative and feeling powers of individuals, Barbauld features an ecological sensibility that endorses more holistic, interrelated, and virtuous modes of existence.

Community of virtue “The Hill of Science: A Vision” situates Barbauld’s notion of an interconnected community and encapsulates the philosophical underpinnings of her Romantic

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility   25 ecology. In this short essay, Barbauld fictionalizes an anti-­social, monological quest for knowledge that operates at the exclusion of virtue, a virtue that depends not on reason or truth in the highest sense but on an ecology of community, culture, and nature. Framing the allegory through a poetic reverie “naturally inspired” by an autumnal scene whose “fading graces” “open the mind to benevolence, and dispose it for contemplation,” Barbauld envisions an alternate landscape in which the apex of sight is the “temple of Truth” located high atop the mountain of Science (163–164).2 As she contemplates reaching the summit, she discovers that its ascent, though much desired, is most unpleasant in comparison with the open valley before her. To enter the path, one must master Memory at the “gate of languages” and learn to decipher a multitude of “jarring voices and dissonant sounds” (164, 165). If one is lucky enough to make it through the entangled briars and trappings of the thick, erroneous woods, one might retreat to the inspirational “fields of Fiction” or lose oneself in the “artificially shaded” “dark wall of Allegory” (166). She notices that Genius manages to overcome many hurdles, but “his progress was unequal, and interrupted by a thousand caprices” (166). Leaving behind his companions, Genius is seduced by Pride. As he expends much energy on “eccentric flights,” she sees that, even though the Muses hold him dear, “Truth often frowned and turned aside her face” (167). Other climbers succumb to the throng of Passions, Appetites, and Pleasures—“tyrants,” who delight in leading the masses to the “cells of Ignorance, or the mansions of Misery” (168). Still others are swept into the “gulf of Oblivion” by Indolence (169). Watching the many failures in this kind of ascent, Barbauld still envisions the happiness of those who succeed, but as she does, the goddess of Virtue tempers her ambition: “Happier,” said she, “are those whom Virtue conducts to the mansions of Content!” […] “I am found,” said she, “in the vale, and I illuminate the mountain. I cheer the cottager at his toil, and inspire the sage at his meditation. I mingle in the crowd of cities, and bless the hermit in his cell. I have a temple in every heart that owns my influence; and to him that wishes for me I am already present. Science may raise you to eminence, but I alone can guide you to felicity!” (169–170) In Barbauld’s vision, greatness presupposes a happiness that resides in a world embedded in human and natural cultures. Conversely, it is the valley that enlightens scientific progress, the apex of human ambition. Barbauld’s critique of the heights of science, philosophy, and rationalism has inspired many important socio-­political interpretations, but none of these has addressed the ecological threads inherent in her reorientation of knowledge. Considering Barbauld’s acute awareness of religious and political estrangement, as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and tutor at Warrington Academy, Daniel E. White (2006, 78) reads “The Hill of Science” as an allegory of dissent, which is “ideologically nonconformist, middle-­class, and anti-­establishment.”

26   C.A. Hornbuckle Commenting on her heedfulness of the scientific ambition of Joseph Priestley, Barbauld’s mentor and friend, Mary Ellen Bellanca (2003, 54) notes how “ ‘Hill of Science’ reads like a reminder to Priestley of his own assertion that the claims of ‘benevolence’ and moral virtue supersede the pursuit of power over nature.”3 Similarly, William McCarthy (2008, 401) sees “The Hill of Science” as “allegoriz[ing] the perils of the intellectual life.” Deirdre Coleman reads this fable as a counterpart to Barbauld’s later poem “To S. T. Coleridge,” written in 1797, shortly after meeting him. Like Priestley, whom Barbauld admired and admonished, Coleridge was the new “incarnation of that immensely gifted but flawed boy ‘Genius’ ” (Coleman, 1996, 157).4 Lisa Vargo (1998, 61) concurs with Colemen by illustrating how Coleridge’s passion for metaphysical musings causes him to “lose touch” with his “commitment to egalitarian principles.” By contrast, Jane Stabler claims that Barbauld may have had poets such as Young and Collins in mind. Linking “The Hill of Science” with “Against Inconsistency in our Expectations,”5 Stabler (2001, 200) highlights Barbauld’s concern for the business of “genius” that views itself as superior to mankind. Each of these readings concentrates on how Barbauld problematizes elitist ambition that stands too high above the world and consequently neglects the principles on which it stands. Indeed, Barbauld discloses the foundations upon which hierarchical power depends: the many cannot make it to “eminence,” and the path leading to it is narrowly selective; the genius who makes it to the top often succeeds at the cost of friends or at the expense of truth (170). Moreover, the illumination of such glory presupposes a community of virtue whose labors further augment genius’s acclaim. However, Barbauld chooses to remain in the vale where industry, domesticity, and reflection bring about contentment, and here is where she shows her initiative. For Barbauld, science and the pursuit of truth were important Enlightenment categories, but their abstract reasoning and systematic practice tended to invalidate particulars of the quotidian world. Barbauld prioritizes virtue in the realm of the common, which values individual interest. Her own interests were deeply invested in the prospects of equality and sociability for all beings: “instead of proud summits and abrupt precipices,” for Barbauld, the “gentler undulations of hill and vale, with eminences of gradual ascent,” founded upon philanthropy, “work to smooth and soften the too great inequities of life” (2002, 355–56). In contrast to Wordsworth, who gazes down over the banks of the Wye and hears the “still, sad music of humanity,” Barbauld turns her gaze to the possibility of a felicitous, egalitarian landscape infused with the “benign radiance” of virtue (Wordsworth 1991, line 92; “Hill,” 169). As she retires in “silence and meditation” of this benevolent valley, Barbauld foregrounds an ecological sensibility that fosters an appreciation for all living things and prioritizes their value within a social, human, ecological community (170). “The Hill of Science” is not a “green” piece in the sense that it elicits an environmental ethics advocating the preservation of the natural world. This kind of ecological ethics appears more explicitly in “The Mouse’s Petition” and “The Caterpillar,” as well as several other works, such as Hymns in Prose for Children

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility   27 (1781), Evenings at Home (1793), and some of her letters. Nonetheless, “The Hill of Science” epitomizes Barbauld’s vantage point with regard to what Wordsworth would later identify as the interfusion of human and nonhuman worlds. Each entity has a natural order and is integrally related in terms of survival, but immoderate challenging, transgressing, or exploiting of that order disrupts the balance. The autumn scene, in “The Hill of Science,” reflects human nature. As Barbauld reveals, the quest after truth is natural, but when ambition is stationed too high or when one loses connection with one’s fellow beings in that quest, negative consequences prevail. Even Truth looks askance as Genius forgets his humanity and relishes diverting glories. Inspired by a real natural setting, Barbauld’s reverie embodies a model for a harmonious, prosperous community. In her view, the natural world, itself, contains no artificial inequalities. Humankind imposes artificial hierarchies, whereas nature is egalitarian and operates on the principle of benevolence, which is spiritually bestowed. And for Barbauld, the material world is part of an assimilative whole, or God. Body, mind, nature, and culture are integrally related, with each retaining its individual integrity within an immanent holism. In “The Hill of Science,” Barbauld allegorizes the hierarchical problem of Enlightenment masculine reason and mastery over nature, and, in this manner, her orientation anticipates contemporary ecofeminist perspectives. Barbauld distinctly encodes the illumination of Virtue as feminine and the pursuit of Genius as masculine. The effect goes beyond ordinary gender divides because of the political ramifications of these associations. The valley, itself, signifies the masses of individuals. It is the body politic. The valley represents common nature, whereas the Hill represents that which is beyond both human nature and the natural world. The Hill’s astonishing pinnacle reaches into the obscurity of spirit, whose perceived access is through the mind, or Enlightenment reason, not the “temple in every heart” (170). In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Plumwood (1993, 115) notes that, by disassociating reason and the body, the Cartesian revolution stripped nature of its “originative power” and made it “devoid of teleology.” Citing the Phaedo, Plumwood (ibid., 91) points out how Descartes drew upon a Platonic tradition that prioritized the mind over the body, in which the body occupied the lower orders of the soul, the body being instrumental to corporeal existence but “of no help in the attainment of wisdom.” The “effect” of the Cartesian project, Plumwood (ibid., 115) writes, was  to enforce a strict and total division not only between mental and bodily activity, but also between mind and nature and between human and animal. As mind becomes pure thought—pure res cogitans or thinking substance, mental, incorporeal, without location, bodiless—body as its dualised other becomes pure matter, pure res extensa, materiality as lack. Likewise, the new science of Bacon and other thinkers of the time, as Carolyn Merchant (1982) has demonstrated, shifted the perception of nature from a living entity, whose entirety transcended the sum of its parts, to a system of material

28   C.A. Hornbuckle and efficient causes to be broken down, dissected, known, and mastered to maximize their utility. For Bacon (1857, 86), nature was “to be commanded and subdued”; bodies were inert mechanisms. Nature ceased to be an end in itself and, instead, became an instrument of social progress. But, as Barbauld’s allegory suggests, social progress in the name of reason occurs not only at the sacrifice of material nature but at the sacrifice of the body politic, as well. In Barbauld’s orientation, the hill and the valley are an integrated landscape. Genius’s narrow-­sighted ambition, however, like Descartes’ emphasis on the exclusivity of mental consciousness, rules out the wisdom of the valley as well as the many supportive guides along the way. Genius divorces himself from organic holism, a holism, which, in effect, could endorse his very path, not to mention the triumph he would experience once he has reached the hilltop of Truth. His capriciousness keeps him from being attentive to keener insights. Yet Barbauld turns her sights upon the summit back to the vale and female Virtue, which “illuminate the mountain” (170). For Barbauld, there cannot be one without the other. When Genius takes into account all of the common nature(s) that supports him, the vale and the hilltop are mutually illuminating, as are Virtue and Truth. However, the hierarchical positioning of Truth, combined with Genius’s transgressive ambition, constitutes an ideological dilemma of profound political, theological, and ecological implications. When reason rules the body with little regard for the welfare and “felicity” of the body itself, not to mention its essentiality, the effects are counterproductive, especially when reason devalues the very mechanisms and structures upon which it depends (170). By the same token, “The Hill of Science” invokes ecofeminist concerns about the effects of the Baconian ideological shift that changed the perception of nature as a nurturing maternal essence to what Vandana Shiva (2002, 17) calls “female nature,” which became subject to patriarchal control and domination. Shiva (ibid., 14–15) maintains, “Modern reductionist science, like development, turns out to be a patriarchal project, which has excluded women as experts, and has simultaneously excluded ecological and holistic ways of knowing which understand and respect nature’s processes and interconnectedness as science.” Barbauld’s allegory of knowledge, with its subsequent reorientation of truth in the hearts of common individuals, contrasts and exposes the limitations of the new ideology that subjugated nature to systematic dictates of a rationalist enterprise, which served the ends of science, commerce, politics, and empire. As Merchant (1982, 164, 165) observes, industrial science created a “new ethic” concerning the materiality of nature: Sensitive to the same social transformations that had already begun to reduce women to psychic and reproductive resources, Bacon developed the power of language as a political instrument in reducing female nature to a resource for economic production. Female imagery became a tool in adapting scientific knowledge and method to a new form of human power over nature.

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility   29 This new method positioned masculine rationalism above all other forms of reason. And as Shiva’s argument also demonstrates, exploitation of feminized language and imagery served to empower new scientific thought and methodology. Baconian science established a gendered hierarchy that ironically obtains dominance through submission. Bacon decrees (1857, 114): [I]f a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and domination of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her. Bacon’s (ibid.) reversal accomplished two ends and created a double standard. First, he acknowledged nature’s power only to undermine “her”; “her” wildness had to be tamed. Second, he endorsed ambition as an exclusively masculine endeavor. By obeying ambition, men can command its dictates. By obeying the very thing they desire to control, men create the laws of nature as they see them. The men creating these laws, which were based on the principles and values of Enlightenment reason, were not all men, but the privileged few, who had the power and authority to reshape the body politic for what they perceived to be the greater good. Unfortunately, the politics of the greater good tend to adversely affect the most impoverished and disenfranchised, especially women, the poor, and other marginalized populations, including the natural world. Barbauld’s vale, with its socially embedded apex, forecasts the precipices of Baconian and Cartesian appropriations. Nonetheless, despite its critical nature, “The Hill of Science” offers an optimistic alternative to monological reason and dualistic rationalism. Barbauld’s vision ends with the meditation on the beauty of locating truth, virtue, and felicity in the heart (the body) and in a community of common natures that values and esteems the pursuits of Genius when wisdom is mutually recipro­ cating. By shifting her gaze from the apex of the mental, rational, and spiritual to the valley of the material, quotidian, human, and even nonhuman sites, Barbauld not only exposes Enlightenment dualisms that privilege the mind over the body, reason over feeling, and humans and culture over nature, but she also counters the problem of dualistic thinking with a dichotomous rationale based on the principle of egalitarianism and the fellowship of sense. This fellowship of sense extends beyond the realm of the human; Barbauld explores this sensibility even more vividly in “The Mouse’s Petition” and “The Caterpillar.”

Fellowship of sense In “The Mouse’s Petition” and “The Caterpillar,” Barbauld problematizes the Enlightenment human/animal dualism to assert that animals have intrinsic value and that bodily intelligence, combined with human reason, demonstrates how all living beings are interconnected by virtue of the ability to feel. In “The Mouse’s

30   C.A. Hornbuckle Petition,” Barbauld presents the first-­person perspective of a caged mouse, who pleads for his life by enlisting his captor to identify with the terror of the situation. In “The Caterpillar,” written shortly after two revolutions and several wars, Barbauld presents the first-­person perspective of the captor, who comes to sense the caterpillar’s individuality and, consequently, refrains from killing him. Both poems position animals in the state of victimhood, a state of being which may equally apply to nonhuman as well as human subjects, but while “The Mouse’s Petition” concentrates on the despotism of unethical science and social injustice, “The Caterpillar” focuses on the senseless killing and sacrifice of victims of war. With each rendering of the various threads of sympathy at work in these poems, Barbauld emphasizes the importance of fine feeling in recognizing another’s integrity and difference. By illustrating the symbiotic relationship between the mind and the body, Barbauld contemplates how individual emotions and feelings can evolve into an ecological sensibility, which presupposes a fellowship of sense among all communities of being. “The Mouse’s Petition” is an anthropomorphic mock-­heroic about ecological injustice told by a lone rodent victim, vying for his life on the threshold of death.6 A subject lined up for scientific experimentation, the mouse pleads his case in the name of kindred sense. By equating animal and human existence, the mouse places the feelings of both on common ground. This leveling tactic allows Barbauld to explore the equal importance of the mind and the body as well as the human and the natural. Calling upon the emotional core of his captor, the mouse beseeches: “never let thine heart be shut/Against the wretch’s cries” (3–4).7 No matter what the offense may be, the mouse implies that one’s suffering is cause for acknowledgement and pity. This mouse does not relent from his plea. In fact, through a series of reversals, the mouse admonishes the captor with impending guilt, while he keenly positions himself as the embodiment of incarcerated “liberty,” for it is the sigh of “liberty” that the mouse wishes his captor to “hear” (2, 1). As he sits alone, “forlorn and sad,” awaiting his “impending fate,” the mouse reminds his captor that he was once “free-­born” (5, 8, 12). His confinement is unjust, but rather than demanding his liberty with an authoritarian voice, the mouse, instead, constructs an argument laced with emotional pathos in an attempt to regain his freedom: Oh! do not stain with guiltless blood Thy hospitable hearth; Nor triumph that thy wiles betray’d A prize so little worth. (13–16) By appealing to his captor’s need to obey the laws of hospitality, the mouse builds a case for the irrationality of his imprisonment. In doing so, the mouse not only underwrites his own innocence, but he also anticipates the culpability of his captor. These lines forecast a premeditated murder and subsequent violation of nature. If the captor’s “hearth” were truly “hospitable,” the mouse would not be

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility   31 in any danger (14). Through modest decree, the mouse calls attention to his insignificance, and, in so doing, ironically underscores the necessity of his existence. Though a creature of small measure and of perceived lower “worth” by most humans, the mouse reminds his captor that he does no more than collect scraps for his “frugal meals” (18). In fact, the mouse supplies an excellent service by removing the “scatter’d gleanings of a feast,” thus repaying the host’s hospitality (17). Furthermore, the mouse attempts to appeal to the common humanity of his warden by reminding him that they share a divinely bestowed “chearful light” and “vital air” (21). As in Barbauld’s meditative “An Address to the Deity” (1773), in which such blessings serve to remind one that all forms of life are equal in the eyes of a spiritual creator, “The Mouse’s Petition” demonstrates how natural elements that sustain existence cannot be claimed or possessed; they belong to all creatures: “Let nature’s commoners enjoy/The common gifts of heaven” (23–24). Here, Barbauld extends the argument to all beings partaking in existence. Regardless of humans’ underdeveloped knowledge and appreciation for the cognitive capacity of animals, the fact that they exist—not to mention the many that feel and experience emotion—is enough to attest to animals’ value and significance in the cosmos.8 “The Mouse’s Petition” underscores ecofeminist critiques that parse the monological threads of patriarchal systems that exploit both human and nonhuman others. Plumwood (1999, 211) notes how the oppression of Western dualisms is an interwoven web of domination; it naturalizes male/female, human/nature, mind/body hierarchies, and it supports the “inferiorization of many other groups of humans seen as more closely identified with nature.” As Julia Tofantšuk also points out in this volume, marginalized others—women, indigenous peoples, and I would add animals—“are not recognized as ecological agents” having agency in their own right. Warren (2000, 47) has demonstrated how human and nonhuman subjectivities are inferiorized and objectified by “the logic of domination,” or “logical structure of argumentation that ‘justifies’ domination and subordination.” “The Mouse’s Petition” attempts to call out naturalized subjugation and expose the tyranny of its rationale. As Kathryn J. Ready (2004) has observed, “The Mouse’s Petition” elicits a humanitarian cause that censures not only the human/animal hierarchy but also many other systematized, hegemonic structures involving poverty, disenfranchisement, property, slavery, and political oppression. Douglas A. Vakoch (2012, 3) has noted how ecofeminism “articulate[s] liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world.” For Barbauld, “nature’s commoners” extend to all groups oppressed by unfair, unjust, or inequitable treatment—for her own time and ours today (23). Advocating compassion for common humanity and common sense, Barbauld concentrates on bodily sensation by beginning with pain, one of the most feared emotions, because it strips away one’s feelings of control. Through her mouse-­ speaker, she reminds his captor that an intelligent, sentient being would think twice about killing a harmless, innocent creature, and this claim reaches deep into Enlightenment rationality as well as into speculative philosophy:

32   C.A. Hornbuckle The well taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives. If mind, as ancient sages taught, A never dying flame, Still shifts thro’ matter’s varying forms, In every form the same, Beware, lest in the worm you crush A brother’s soul you find; And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind. (25–36) These stanzas deepen the implications of an impending, unnecessary, and exploitative death in the name of scientific research, and by extension all forms of abusive power. The mouse suggests that all matter is part of an interconnected whole; destruction of such matter is fraternal desecration. Julia Saunders (2002, 513) has argued that “The Mouse’s Petition” calls upon Priestley’s “scientific fraternity” to consider the wider ethical ramifications of the speculation that all matter is interrelated and shared. Drawing upon Pythagoras’s theory of soul transmutation, Leibniz’s theory that substance is an embodiment of thought, Newton’s theory of an invisible ether connecting all things, and Priestley’s theory of unified matter and spirit, Saunders (ibid.) observes that the “mouse binds scientist and subject into one shared life based in the material rather than the numinous world.” The mouse’s solicitation of the philosopher’s democratic, “equal eye” certainly lends itself to a shared bodily whole, but I would add that the mouse’s rendering of the philosopher, who “feels for all that lives,” also extends beyond materiality to a combination of emotionality, rationality, and spirituality that involves both the sympathetic imagination and the prospects of entertaining a human-­nature intersubjectivity, despite the fact that humans cannot know animal thoughts but can only anthropomorphize them (27, 28). Through her mouse-­speaker, Barbauld speculates on the shifting of matter, or soul, through “varying forms” (31). Yet, in all these different forms, the essential soul remains “the same” (32). As McCarthy (2008, 78) has also observed, “The Mouse’s Petition” denies the Baconian sanction that a mouse is an excusable “sacrifice to ‘man’s’ ambition to command nature”; rather, the mouse is a “conscious being, a sharer, with Priestley, in nature’s goods.” While Barbauld makes clear that desecration of life—of any form—may have ramifications beyond human speculations and understanding, she, nonetheless, advocates the commonality of suffering and of intersubjective experience. Which “ancient sages” Barbauld had in mind when composing “The Mouse’s Petition” is unclear (29). Nevertheless, Saunders points out that Barbauld seems to invoke an entire fraternity of philosophical thinking. As Barbauld calls upon the

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility   33 bodily intelligence and emotional pathos that reflect the softer affections of the captor’s “heart,” she combines the self-­projective mechanism of sympathy found in Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and its self-­preservation mechanism found in Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) (line 3). She also adds to their theories of projection and substitution the notion that sympathy implies more than one individual’s subjective state. Smith (2000, 3–4) argues that when we see another in pain, we cannot know what that person is truly feeling; we can only project our own imaginings of what we would feel if we were in the same predicament: “our senses will never inform us of what he suffers”; rather, “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.” Sympathy, for Smith (ibid., 22, 5), is but a momentary shift in perspective that triggers pity or compassion, in other words, our fine feeling. Similarly, Burke (1909, 40) argues that sympathy works “as a sort of substitution,” but his claims derive from his analysis of aesthetic pain or pleasure. In art, there is no real threat; there is only the representation, as such. For Burke (ibid., 41), sympathy works in one of two ways: either our passions register the fear or terror in a situation, and we turn instinctually to self-­ preservation, a manifestation of the sublime; or, we register a melancholic kind of distress, and we turn to a “species of pleasure” from the artistic representation, a manifestation of the beautiful. In “The Mouse’s Petition,” Barbauld consistently elicits humans’ emotional and rational capacities to identify imaginatively with the mouse’s distress, in other words, to project, in Smith’s (2000, 3) terms, “by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.” She also integrates a Burkean brand of sympathy, first, by maintaining the theme of self-­preservation throughout each stanza and, then, by turning the tables, in the final stanza, to reveal the oppressor’s own sense of self, if he were to find himself in a similar circumstance. At the same time, Barbauld’s solicitation of “compassion” in the seventh stanza is an attempt to refine Smith’s conception of sympathy, by drawing awareness out of the self rather than back into the self (26). By invoking the philosophic “equal eye,” she renders a kind of intersubjectivity that does not simply imagine a larger self-­awareness; it also “feels for all that lives” (27, 28). In other words, that intersubjectivity senses the otherness of another, thus shifting the locus of sympathy from within the self to outside of the self. Barbauld’s mouse-­speaker first appeals to the emotions of his captor as well as his memory: “If e’er thy breast with freedom glow’d,” the mouse decrees, “Let not thy strong oppressive force” imprison a “free-­born” mouse and take away his liberty, not to mention his life (9, 11, 12). By summoning his captor to recall a time when he may have experienced freedom—emotionally and phys­ ically—the mouse invokes his captor’s bodily knowledge, a knowledge that the captor may never have rationalized. In Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Antonio Damasio differentiates between emotions and feelings. Emotions, he argues, are deeply rooted in the body; they precede feeling and often manifest through actions without our conscious design or awareness. Feelings, by contrast, emerge from complex biological, chemical, and physiological interplays and manifest to us as mental content. Put more simply,

34   C.A. Hornbuckle Damasio (2003, 28) explains, “Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind.” Through analogy, the mouse gradually galvanizes the philosopher’s emotional pathos and brings it into conscious feeling, a sensibility that relies on mind–body symbiosis. The speaker calls upon more than the captor’s emotional capacity; he also invokes the captor’s environmental awareness—that another’s subjectivity exists and has equal significance. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff (2002, 248) point out that “[e]xperience is always an interactive process, involving neural and physiological constraints from the organism as well as characteristics affordances from the environment and other people for creatures with our types of bodies and brains.” In “The Mouse’s Petition,” Barbauld explores an “interactive” experience similar to what Johnson and Lakoff elucidate (ibid.). Barbauld looks at that recursive process within the organism as well as among other organisms. This process manifests itself through the sympathetic imagination, and in both “The Mouse’s Petition” and “The Caterpillar,” Barbauld does not simply incorporate mechanisms of sympathy but also analyzes and refines them in order to render them anew. The mouse-­speaker, valuing “all ” of shared life, calls upon the “pity” within his captor’s “breast” and the preservation of “[t]hat little all ” (38, 39, 40). The mouse beckons his captor to place himself in the same situation, thus invoking the captor’s own instinctual self-­preservation: So, when destruction lurks unseen, Which men, like mice, may share, May some kind angel clear thy path, And break the hidden snare. (44–48) The mouse implores the captor to consider the terror of the immediate threat by imagining himself in a similar situation. Men, too, are just as susceptible as animals to unjust persecution. Contrary to Descartes’ claims that reduce animals to sheer mechanism, Barbauld’s central claim in “The Mouse’s Petition” is that there is no difference in the capacity to suffer. In this instance, the mouse’s argument suggests strands of both Burke’s and Smith’s concepts of sympathy, and, at the same time, Barbauld refines those concepts to bring about an expanded awareness of self and others. While this expanded awareness of a relational self is somewhat latent in “The Mouse’s Petition,” it is much more apparent in “The Caterpillar,” and has major ethical ramifications for understanding Barbauld’s ecological sensibility. Like “The Mouse’s Petition,” “The Caterpillar” advocates the dignity of all living forms, regardless of size or scope, but unlike the mouse-­speaker, who initiates an intersubjectivity between victim and oppressor to be imagined and felt, the human speaker in the second poem actually imagines and feels the other’s individual integrity. In “The Caterpillar,” the captor speaks directly to the victim, and upon the recognition of the other’s (caterpillar’s) essence, she refrains from killing him. In this poem, Barbauld unabashedly positions her

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility   35 speaker as the “sworn” enemy to the insect “race” (14). However, instead of killing the caterpillar, as she is wont to do, the speaker decides otherwise, once she has “scanned [his] form with curious eye” and “[f]elt the light pressure of [his] hairy feet (3, 8). Reflecting upon her past extermination efforts—having “crushed whole families” underfoot and poured “vials of destruction” to get rid of these pests, the speaker suddenly finds herself jolted out of her comfort zone by the presence of a “single wretch”: “—This, I’ve done,/Nor felt the touch of pity; but when thou,—” (20, 22, 24, 23). As designated by the dashes, which elicit the speaker’s shifting consciousness, this “single wretch” forces her to reexamine her intentionality and feel for the creature (24). Conversely, the caterpillar gracefully overwhelms the human subject by presenting its “individual existence” (26). Having only looked upon caterpillars in the abstract, as pests to be destroyed, the speaker comes to appreciate the lone being, “[a] single sufferer from the field escaped” (36). Taken out of the “field,” literally from his natural habitat, but also from the discursive bonds of anthropocentrism, the caterpillar assumes a subjectivity that now puts him eye to eye with the speaker and elicits from her an expanded ecological awareness of the “fellowship of sense” among all living things (36, 27). As in “The Mouse’s Petition,” Barbauld crafts the speaker’s rhetoric in the form of direct address; however, whereas the mouse-­speaker primarily concentrates on the captor’s sense of self, if similarly oppressed, the speaker in “The Caterpillar” focuses her attention outside of herself, on the animal subject, and allows the caterpillar’s beauty to captivate her. Mesmerized by her hostage’s “silver line[d]” back with “azure” and “orange” dividing his “velvet sides,” the speaker begins to see the minute, intricate details of the caterpillar’s design (4, 5, 6). Delighting in what Francis Hutcheson (2004, 67) calls the “internal sense,” or the “passive Power of receiving Ideas of Beauty,” the speaker takes in the creature’s external beauty. This aesthetic appreciation presupposes, in Hutcheson’s (2002, 17) view, a “moral sense” that nourishes a kind of benevolence for one’s fellow being—a benevolence that is entirely independent of self-­interest and sympathy that is equally disinterested. For Hutcheson (2004, 149), such benevolence is universal, a reflection of a divine nature, which “extends to all Bodys in the Universe.” Sensing more from her encounter than what meets her eye, the speaker lingers in her aesthetic experience, curiously observing and feeling the “inquiring” creature “curled” around her “finger,” “with stretched out neck,” seeming to “ask protection” (12, 9, 10, 13). Without words, the caterpillar indirectly calls for mercy and wins over the tyrannous hand, simply through his bodily movement. These sensations, working in conjunction with the receptive, sensibility of the poetic speaker, translate into a kind of intelligence that transcends the interiority involved in Smith’s ideas about self-­projection. The interaction is real. As the caterpillar allows her to feel his “individual existence,” the speaker empirically experiences the common substance of life, while she intuits a “fellowship of sense” that extends beyond the actual moment (26, 27). Such experience takes the speaker out of herself, into an expanded awareness that makes possible the recognition of the caterpillar’s subjectivity.

36   C.A. Hornbuckle The speaker’s sympathetic identification also invokes the complexity of fine feeling, in which impressions received through bodily sense and processed emotionally gradually manifest into rationalized feelings of compassion, appreciation, and benevolence. As James Engell (1981, 143–144) observes, sympathy also becomes that special power of the imagination that permits the self to escape its own confines, to identify with other people, to perceive things in a new way, and to develop an aesthetic appreciation of the world that coalesces both the subjective self and the objective other. Engell’s general assessment of sympathy may be applied to Barbauld’s notions; however, his claim that sympathy “coalesces” both subject and object does not. That perspective speaks to a kind of idealization apparent in some Romantic-­era texts, in which the poetic speakers yearn for a fusion of subject and object, as seen in Shelley’s “The Skylark” (1820) or Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819). In “The Caterpillar,” Barbauld’s speaker does not imagine a merging of her subjectivity and the insect’s; rather, she acknowledges that the caterpillar’s capacity to feel is distinct and separate from her own. The mutual recognition involves not coalescence but, rather, an appreciation for the caterpillar’s alterity, especially one whose will to exist is very real. Through the “sympathy spontaneous” of the speaker’s fine feeling, Barbauld, in effect, reconstitutes the caterpillar—who once was perceived as an object of perdition—into a subject vying for rights and equal footing (41). This endeavor brings her down to a more just sphere of morality as the caterpillar is brought up to the sphere of human morality. And, as Josephine Donovan has pointed out, when we “reconstitute the ‘objects’ of discourse as ‘subjects,’ ” we create a paradigmatic shift in perspective. Drawing upon Martin Buber’s I-­Thou dialogical theory, involving an appreciation of the “ ‘the immense otherness of the Other,’ ” Josephine Donovan (1998, 74, 89) maintains that when we move past the “not I” of a literary text and “restore the absent referent as a ‘thou,’ ” the text itself serves as “a vehicle for the revelation of being, not a mechanism for its domination.” Within this dialogism, other beings “have a reality of their own to communicate, which must be respected and attended to” (ibid., 85). At the end of Barbauld’s meditative lyric, the speaker reveals, “He is grown human, and capricious Pity,/ Which would not stir for thousands, melts for one” (39–40). This “single sufferer,” through the sheer intricacy, delight, and intrigue of his individuality, overpowers his captor and makes a case for his own significance (36). The caterpillar’s individuality prevails, and his meaningful existence shines through to make a compelling case for considering the importance of ecological intelligence and understanding living realities separate from our own. By particularizing the experience of the caterpillar, Barbauld shows how reductionist views of animals—or any kind of victim—in the abstract fail to acknowledge a presence that is concrete and real. And by honing the fine feeling of both speaker and caterpillar, Barbauld inspires her readers, too, to feel in their imaginations the “light pressure of [his] hairy feet” and value the caterpillar’s intrinsic individuality (8).

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility   37 The final lines of the poem give Barbauld’s refinement of sympathy an ecological dimension that is less reminiscent of an innate, subconscious form of sympathy, found in Shaftesbury’s account, and more rooted in a rationalized concept of sympathy, which reflects a great deal about the capacity for dominant subjects to improve their sensibilities. In the final lines of “The Caterpillar,” the speaker writes, “With sympathy spontaneous:—’Tis not Virtue,/Yet ’tis the weakness of virtuous mind” (41–42). Like many of Barbauld’s riddle poems, she adds another prospect to her speaker’s fine feeling for the caterpillar by suggesting that this act of sympathy is really an act of weakness rather than an act of genuine virtue. By problematizing the question of sympathy and one’s innate feelings for one’s fellow sufferers, Barbauld suggests that the speaker’s act of freeing the caterpillar is not so innate but, rather, a rationalized feeling response to the question of another’s suffering. Virtue is learned and cultivated in the hearts of men and women, whereas “Virtue,” like “Truth” in “The Hill of Science,” is a Platonic form, an ideal that is unattainable and pursued by only a qualified elite, who tend to overlook “nature’s commoners,” and the very awareness, as such, may inspire shifts in consciousness (“The Mouse’s Petition,” 23). The sympathetic identification at work in this scenario includes the idea that when one is confronted with one’s power, the implications of exploitation emerge. Justice remains in the hands of one who is in control, but great responsibility comes with that decisive power. Barbauld emphasizes how precarious that position can be, especially when it comes to a life so seemingly insignificant as a caterpillar or a mouse. The implications of that line of reasoning also concern the lives of human beings not having equal statures as persons, as is the case of prisoners of war, victims of market slavery, objects of domestic abuse, and species of nonhuman beings. Such ecological sensibility extends to all beings and the acknowledgement of their alterior existence. In effect, “The Mouse’s Petition” and “The Caterpillar” illustrate how refined sympathetic identification serves as the primary faculty through which one recognizes one’s interconnectivity to all life. For Barbauld, this kind of conscious rationale is deeply seated in the emotions, as they are the wellspring of fine feeling, and the vehicle through which one cultivates a refined sense of spiritual existence. Attention to the minute details and individual existence of every creature brings one to a greater sense of community and contentment. Barbauld’s poetic visions consistently invoke the possibility of an alternative, non-­hierarchical ideology as well as a sense of community embodied by the principles of egalitarianism, moderation, national fortitude, and social justice. By rooting her ideals in the symbiosis of dichotomous realities, Barbauld cultivates an ecological sensibility that foregrounds our conception of Romantic ecology. Her aesthetic awareness of nature intersects with culture and fosters a sense of environmental belonging. Through the valuation and refinement of all matter, Barbauld anticipates a more virtuous community, in which humankind and natural beings coexist, sharing the elements as equally as they share a capacity for suffering. Such empathetic consciousness is fundamentally ecological, ecofeminist, and anticipates the aesthetic appreciation as well as politicization of nature in the Romantic-­era writings that follow in Barbauld’s wake.

38   C.A. Hornbuckle

Notes 1 An earlier version of this discussion appears in Hornbuckle (2008). 2 Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld With a Memoir By Lucy Aikin, 2 Vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825). Quotations from Barbauld’s prose are from this edition, unless noted otherwise. 3 Bellanca is thinking here of Priestley’s History of the Present State of Electricity (1769). 4 As Coleman notes, much of the allegorized natural imagery that threatens to lead Genius and others astray in Barbauld’s fable curiously emerges in “Kubla Khan.” 5 First published in 1773, along with “The Hill of Science.” 6 Originally, written for Joseph Priestley, upon Barbauld finding a mouse caged in his laboratory, this poem successfully freed the mouse but left a wake of public debate about Priestley’s ethos and Barbauld’s concern for her friend’s reputation. See McCarthy and Kraft (2002, 244–245), Ready (2004), and Bellanca (2003). 7 William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). All citations of Barbauld’s poetry come from this edition, unless otherwise noted. 8 See Marc Bekoff (2007), Frans de Waal (2003), and Jaak Panksepp (1998).

References Bacon, Francis. 1857. The New Organon. In The Works of Francis Bacon. Vol. IV. Edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 39–248. London: Longman and Co. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1825. The Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld With a Memoir By Lucy Aikin. 2 Vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1994. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 2002. “Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions.” In Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose. Edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, 345–356. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Bekoff, Marc. 2007. The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter. Navato, CA: New World Library. Bellanca, Mary Ellen. 2003. “Science, Animal Sympathy, and Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition.’ ” Eighteenth-­Century Studies, 37(1): 47–67. Burke, Edmund. 1909. On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, A Letter to a Noble Lord. Edited by Charles Eliot. Harvard Classics. Vol. 24. New York: P.F. Collier & Son. Coleman, Deirdre. 1996. “The Unitarian Rationalist and the ‘Winged Spider’: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” In Imperfect Apprehensions: Essays in English Literature in Honour of G.A. Wilkes, edited by Geoffrey Little, 148–163. Sydney: Challis. Damasio, Antonio. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt Books. Donovan, Josephine. 1998. “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Engell, James. 1981. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ecological sensibility   39 Hornbuckle, Calley. 2008. “Ecological Intelligence: British Women Writers and the Environmental Tradition.” (Ph.D. dissertation). University of South Carolina. Hutcheson, Francis. 2002. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. Edited by Aaron Garret. 1728. Reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hutcheson, Francis. 2004. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Edited by Wolfgang Leidhold. Reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. 2002. “Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism.” Cognitive Linguistics, 13(3): 245–263. McCarthy, William. 2008. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. McCarthy, William, and Elizabeth Kraft, eds. 1994. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Athens: University of Georgia Press. McCarthy, William, and Elizabeth Kraft, eds. 2002. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Merchant, Carolyn. 1982. The Death of Nature: Women: Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. Reprint, San Francisco: Harper and Row. Panksepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Plumwood, Val. 1999. “Ecosocial Feminism as a General Theory of Oppression.” In Ecology, edited by Carolyn Merchant, 207–219. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Ready, Kathryn J. 2004. “ ‘What then, poor Beastie!’: Gender, Politics, and Animal Experimentation in Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition.’ ” Eighteenth-­Century Life, 28(1): 92–114. Saunders, Julia. 2002. “ ‘The Mouse’s Petition’: Anna Letitia Barbauld and the Scientific Revolution.” Review of English Studies, 53(212): 500–516. Shiva, Vandana. 2002. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. 1989. Reprint. London: Zed Books. Smith, Adam. 2000. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Prometheus Books. Stabler, Jane. 2001. “Space for Speculation: Coleridge, Barbauld, and the Poetics of Priestley.” In Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sciences of Life, edited by Nicholas Roe, 175–204. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vakoch, Douglas A., ed. 2012. “Introduction: A Different Story.” In Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Vargo, Lisa. 1998. “The Case of Anna Letitia’s Barbauld’s ‘To Mr C[olerid]ge.’ ” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s.(102): 55–63. Waal, Frans B.M. de. 2003. Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warren, Karen J. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. White, Daniel E. 2006. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1991. Lyrical Ballads. Edited by R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

3 Mary Austin’s proto-­ecofeminist land ethic in The Ford (1917) and the Owens Valley water controversy Emine Geçgil

Ecofeminism aims to establish a community ecology that is sustainable for both human and nonhuman beings, deconstructing the oppressor/oppressed identities that are prevalent in patriarchal society. Anticipating this proposition of ecofeminism, Mary Austin, a woman who became everything—a nature writer, a playwright, a poet, a short-­story writer, a novelist, as well as a social activist—inspired many other women of her generation as well as those in the contemporary world, laying the foundations of ecofeminism. She rejected the nineteenth-­century middle­class conventions of True Womanhood and embraced the twentieth-­century New Womanhood, feminism, and environmentalism, serving as a link between the centuries. She embroiled herself in activism for the Owens Valley water during the California Water Wars (1902–07), a series of controversies between the city of Los Angeles and the farmers of the valley about the acquisition of water rights of Owens Valley. With a view to portraying such an eventful chapter in American history and disseminating her ecofeminist land ethic, Austin wrote her 1917 novel The Ford, blending her female identity as an activist with her literary talents. As a proto-­ecofeminist, she depicts in The Ford how land speculation deprives people of their most essential need, water.1 Suggesting a harmonious relationship between rivers and their beneficiaries, she questions ownership to the land––as she criticizes the patriarchal hegemony over women––and proposes to utilize rivers to make a living, yet being aware of the possibilities and limits of the landscape. All in all, with The Ford, she hints at what occurs when this fragile understanding is broken, and how the abuse of the river leads to the destruction of ecological parameters. Born in 1868 in Carlinville, Illinois, as Mary Hunter, Mary Austin (1868–1934) graduated from college in 1888. Her mother, a widowed woman, decided to move her family to the West, where they established a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley in California. John P. O’Grady (1993, 123–125) views Mary Austin as a “reluctant pilgrim,” who moved from a Midwestern town to the Southwest with her mother and brother against her will. The wild western wilderness, for her, was nothing like the green landscapes of the East, and definitely contradicted the virtues of the Cult of True Womanhood—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Austin took the opportunity to design her own fate, which opposed social norms. In 1891, she married Stafford Wallace Austin, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, and lived in Inyo and

Mary Austin’s proto-ecofeminist land ethic   41 Independent Counties. She poured her love and care for the land and its people into The Land of Little Rain (1903), a collection of short essays that discusses the Mojave Desert and its importance to indigenous peoples. Evoking an earlier version of ecofeminist spirituality, she gave life to the desert, viewing it as feminine, seductive, and bountiful, while calling for environmental conservation and the cultural preservation of the Indian tribes—since they cared most for the land. Austin and her husband, who was a land registrar for the Reclamation Bureau between 1905 and 1906, struggled for the waters of Owens Valley. During the battle, private negotiations with the wealthy local landowners and officials representing the city of Los Angeles resulted in the diversion of the region’s waters to Los Angeles at the expense of its ecosystem (Gabrielson 2006, 651). Her activism during this controversy was to comprise the raw material for her 1917 novel The Ford. Disappointed by the event, she left Owens Valley, divorced her husband, institutionalized her mentally-­retarded daughter, and moved to Carmel, California, where she joined a writers’ community that included Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and Bret Hart (Goodman and Dawson 2008, 21). She then lived in New York, representing the West in literary circles. During this period, Austin participated in the women’s suffrage by writing on social and political issues, including The Young Woman Citizen (1918) and “Sex Emancipation through War” (1918). Austin left New York for New Mexico, where she became more involved in activism for the rights of indigenous peoples as well as environmental issues. Austin spent her last years in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and died in 1934. In her words, Austin was a “woman alone” (Wynn 1937, 245). She always condemned the social hypocrisy which denied her the right to express her intellectual and artistic talents in her works, especially in A Woman of Genius (1912), her most outspokenly feminist novel, which is based on her own life experiences. Austin was regarded as eccentric by her neighbors in Independence because of her outdoor explorations (Goodman and Dawson 2008, 51) and her only friends were the indigenous people in the desert, cowboys, and Basque sheepherders (11). As Heike Schaefer (2004, 53) conveys, Austin’s mother told her that her fascination with nature was unfeminine, and that she should adopt a ladylike appreciation of the environment so that her male companions would continue to admire her. Likewise, in her 1932 autobiography, Earth Horizon, Austin (2007, 112) remembers her mother saying that “You must not quote, especially poetry and Thoreau. An occasional reference to Burroughs2 was permissible, but not Thoreau” since knowledge of the latter was deemed to be too deep, intellectual, and masculine. As Dudley Wynn (1937, 245) states, Austin was misunderstood by her own family simply because she wished to be judged by her intrinsic character and “not by what she could make some man feel.” Nancy Newhall, a conservationist writer and friend to Austin, called her “a strange woman, who had the courage to walk alone” (Wilson 1997, 60). She wanted to be like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, who walked away, and wandered west to follow their wild dreams. However, society was not ready to understand her meanderings, or her attempt to reflect the female experience in nature. Discouraged by her mother, neglected by her husband, and overwhelmed

42   E. Geçgil with the responsibility of a mentally handicapped child (O’Grady 1993, 126), Austin nevertheless managed to realize her literary ambitions. Whether romanticizing the desert as she did in her nonfiction The Land of Little Rain (1903) or providing realistic depictions of the land and its people in her short story collection Lost Borders (1909), or her novels The Flock (1906), which was praised by Theodore Roosevelt as an exposé on the shepherding industry, and The Ford (1917), Austin, above all, embraced her identity as a regionalist nature writer. For Austin, nature was home. There was no distinction between nature and the self; indoors and outdoors; private home and public environment (Green 2001, 145). Within this regard, as a proto-­ecofeminist, she did not “love” nature because she was a “natural caregiver.” Rather, she “loved” nature because she felt more independent exploring the outdoors: it gave her the freedom to escape biologically determined gender roles. She did not even endeavor to balance her domestic responsibilities and field work, and completely ignored her household chores. Her neighbors reported that she was so devoted to writing that the dirty dishes would pile high (Goodman and Dawson 2008, 19). In fact, Austin can be seen as a counterfigure to progressive conservationist clubwomen who dedicated themselves to the conservation of the home, motherhood, and nature (Blend 1988, 14). However, it was not because she did not believe in the importance of grassroots organizations and collective action. Rather, she rejected their domestic world, seeking refuge in the desert and identifying herself with the land. Austin challenged the white, hegemonic male view of the land, which assumed that water resources, as well as forests and minerals, were renewable and could never be depleted (Rudnick 1987, 12). She articulated that there are limits to all resources, reminding readers of the climactic features of the Southwest and how fragile they are. Since there are limits to natural resources, she believed, there had to be limits to human consumption and greed. Not only did she voice people’s concerns about the land and the depletion of resources, but by battling against social restrictions that inhibited women with talent, she also provided readers with an early example of écriture feminine. As also conveyed by Karl Zuelke in this volume (p. 115), women and indigenous peoples are attributed the same characteristics as nature in certain ways, which brings essentialist tropes into play. Austin was opposed to such dualistic thinking, and dedicated her life to the indigenous peoples of the land, and as Louis Rudnick (1987, 16) suggests, adopted the role of a medicine woman, hoping to “transform her fellow Anglo-­Americans’ relationship with the land and its indigenous peoples.” She had a clear mission to fulfill. Although Austin rejected many aspects of the Progressive Movement—particularly those denying women the public sphere and imposing the superiority of the white race over indigenous peoples—her efforts to improve the lives of the underprivileged indigenous peoples in California and New Mexico, and her battle against the municipal authorities that robbed these peoples of their lands and water, make Austin a progressive social activist. The western landscape was definitely important in shaping Austin’s philosophy. As Teresa S. Neal (2006, 96) claims, women writers in the East were more

Mary Austin’s proto-ecofeminist land ethic   43 accepted by the patriarchy because they reinforced sentimental domesticity and municipal housekeeping. Moreover, they asserted themselves as New Women later than western women. In the West, however, women like Austin suffered less from social conventions than those in the East because the West was not bound by the same rules and was far more flexible (70). In her writing, Austin rejected the concept of domesticity that was imposed by patriarchal white Anglo-­Saxon Protestant middle-­class men. She equated the home with nature, working to protect it from being abused. As Rudnick (1987, 26) conveys, what she rejected was a “sentimental domesticity” that “mythologize[d] the entire natural world.” Throughout her life, she favored the “Folk.” As Wynn (1937, 245) states,  She wanted to belong, to be one of a race, to have a home, to express herself and be understood. But she was not home in [an] America which emphasized a repressive morality, worshipped bigness, and divorced its living from its way of getting a living. Austin found her home outdoors, among indigenous peoples who “were still immune to the evils of the dominant American culture.” For them, Austin imagined a “pastoral paradise” of small communities which could support themselves, and emphasized the significance of native peoples, whom she believed cared for the land and respected natural resources (Blend 1988, 17). While reinterpreting the concept of home, she formulated an environmental ethic that influenced her Owens Valley battle. In today’s contemporary terms, as Rudnick suggests, she offered a “bioregionalist thinking” (1987, 26). Namely, she found local solutions to social and economic problems by rejecting federal intervention schemes.

The Owens Valley water controversy and The Ford Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson (2008, 50) argue that throughout the history of the United States, the West was defined in terms of rainfall and the damming and diversion of rivers because aridity and a lack of water prevented the development of the landscape. While conservationist women—affiliates of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC)—were struggling in the East to acquire clean water for healthy homes and children, Mary Austin in the West took up water conservation as a cause to protect the small communities that depended on water for irrigation purposes. In The Land of Little Rain, Austin (1988, 7) observes the delicate relationship between the geography and the inhabitants of the valley, and how the plants, wildlife, and people depended on water. Obviously, the desert is a place where  not the law, but the land sets the limit: … Since this is a hill country one expects to find springs, but not to depend upon them; for when found they are often brackish and unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. 

44   E. Geçgil She further states that “The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations … One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to ‘try,’ but to do” (8). Austin dedicated herself to the water issue after her husband, Wallace Stafford Austin, became a Land Registrar for the US Land Office in Independence. By the early twentieth century, Los Angeles had become an expanding metropolitan center, but its thirst for water had long remained an obstacle to its growth into a major city. Fred Eaton, the former mayor of Los Angeles, and William Mulholland, who served as the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, believed in realizing “Los Angeles’s Manifest Destiny” (Walton 1992, 59). They thought water could be diverted from the Owens Valley River to Los Angeles through the construction of a gravity-­led aqueduct. On the other hand, the Unites States Bureau of Reclamation was planning a federal irrigation district to help the farmers of the Owens Valley by damming the river and allocating the stored water for agriculture (Cassuto 2001, 32). After all, as Samuel Hays (1999, 5) conveys, the conservation movement in the West was originally established to encourage the construction of reservoirs for agriculture, as federal administrators and political leaders were trying to find solutions to western economic growth and water development, so this project was well within its agenda. Owens Valley was a perfect fit for federal intervention because it had an underutilized river and a growing agricultural economy, both of which, if managed correctly, would add to the expansion of the West. As conveyed by David Cassuto (2001, 33), a federal project to create a national reclamation district in the Owens Valley would obviously ruin Eaton’s and Mulholland’s plans. First, they tried to eliminate the Bureau of Reclamation. Eaton bribed the Bureau’s survey engineer, Joseph Lippincott, who served as a double agent to undermine federal plans. He acted as Eaton’s secret consultant, facilitating the acquisition of the valley’s water rights. Marc Reisner (1993, 78) in Cadillac Desert states that Eaton even posed as a cattle rancher, wandering among the people in the Owens Valley, talking them into selling their land. He was also buying options for the best water rights at a cheap rate in order to sell them to the city at inflated prices (Cassuto 2001, 33). In 1905, a farm woman named Lesta V. Parker wrote a letter to President Roosevelt which summarized what was happening and explained her disappointment with the events. The letter provides insight into the dramatic effect the Los Angeles water scheme would create in Owens Valley: Dear Friend Look onto your map of California, along the eastern boundary south of Lake Tahoe and you will find a county named Inyo. Running into this county from Nevada through a small corner of Mono County you will see the Carson and Colorado railroad which after it enters Inyo follows along the Owens River until they both come to Owens Lake, an alkaline body of water. It is about this river I write to you. This river after it leaves the narrow mountain canyon runs through a broad and fertile valley for 100 miles. The first 20 miles of which is all or

Mary Austin’s proto-ecofeminist land ethic   45 nearly so, in cultivation, further south ranches become more scattered. It has four prosperous towns. Indeed the people are very proud of their little valley and what their hard labor has made it. The towns are all kept up by the surrounding farms. Alfalfa is the principle crop. The put up to from two to four ton per acre and it cost from $1.25 to $1.75 to put it up. And sell for $4 to $7 per ton so you see the county is very prosperous. As there is about 200,000 ton raised in the valley if not more every year. Cattle raising is great industry. There never has been any capitalist or rich people come here until lately and all the farms of the Owens Valley show the hard labor and toil of people who came here without much more than their clothes. And many had few of them. Now my real reason for wiring this is to tell you that some rich men got the government or “Uncle Sam” to hire a man named J.B. Lippincott to represent to the people that he was going to put in a large dam in what is known as Long Valley. But—Lo! and Behold! Imagine the shock the people felt when they learned when Uncle Sam was paying Mr. Lippincott he was a traitor to the people and was working for a millionaire company. The real reason for so much work was because a man named Eaton and a few more equally low, sneaking rich men wanted to get controlling interest of the water by buying out a few or all of those who owned much water and simply “freeze out” those who hadn’t much and tell them to “Git.” Now as the President of the U.S. do you think that is right? And is there no way by which our dear valley and our homes can be saved? Is there no way by which 800 or 900 homes can be saved? Is there no way to keep the capitalist from forcing people to give up their water right and letting the now beautiful alfalfa fields dry up and return to a barren desert waist? Is there no way to stop this thievery? As you have proven to be the president for the people and not the rich I, an old resident, who was raised here, appeal to you for help and Advice. My husband and I within the last year have bought us a home and are paying for it in hard labor and economy. So I can tell you it will be hard to have those rich men say “stay there and starve” or “Go.” Where if we keep the water in the valley it won’t be only 3 years until the place will pay for itself. So Help The People of Owens Valley! I appeal to you in the name of the Flag. The Glorious Stars and Stripes. Yours Unto Eternity, Lesta V. Parker. (Walton 1992, 147) Other residents of the Owens Valley were also disillusioned when they learned they had indirectly sold their water rights to officials representing Los Angeles and not the federal government. Mary Austin, “the valley’s literary light,” in

46   E. Geçgil Reisner’s words (1993, 78) was also “convinced that the valley had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles.” She was so aware of the entire scheme that Mulholland reportedly said “that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going” (79). Wary of human greed and the abuse of power, Austin opposed Roosevelt’s justification of urban growth over the preservation of valley farmers (Blend 1988, 18). With her husband, she wrote letters to President Roosevelt, placing the blame on Eaton and Lippincott, and asking the federal government to investigate the scheme (Goodman and Dawson 2008, 54). They also participated in meetings to encourage valley residents to take collective action. Valley residents were hopeful since they believed that Roosevelt, “the bugaboo of monopolists,” would “never let the Owens Valley die for the sake of [wealthy landowners like] Henry Huntington, Harrison Grey Otis and their cronies in San Fernando Valley syndicate” (Reisner 1993, 78). However, this was not the case. The closing of the frontier revealed an important shift in policy. As conveyed by John Walton (1992, 194), while the American frontier benefited from federal aid to develop the West, the rise of Progressivism gave way to urbanization, and the federal government shifted its focus to urban development. As Douglas Brinkley (2009, 444) conveys, “if the western cities didn’t have water, [Roosevelt] worried, they would perish, and their cities would become ghost towns.” Roosevelt, “a progressive who believed in serving the largest number of constituents” (Goodman and Dawson 2008, 54), said “It’s a hundred or thousand fold more important to state that this water is more valuable to the people of Los Angeles than to the Owens Valley” (Reisner 1993, 324). Eaton, Mulholland, and Lippincott lobbied the federal government to pursue the aqueduct project (Cassuto 2001, 33), and eventually their attempts proved successful. The federal irrigation project was cancelled and Congress passed the water diversion project from Owens Valley to Los Angeles. The Los Angeles-­Owens River aqueduct was completed in 1913 and the valley turned into a desert, losing its ecologically important meadows and agricultural value. Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy define ecofeminism as a  practical movement for social change arising out of the struggles of women to sustain themselves, their families, and their communities. These struggles are waged against the “maldevelopment” and environmental degradation caused by patriarchal societies, multinational corporations, and global capitalism.  (1998, 2) Anticipating Gaard and Murphy’s definition of ecofeminism, Austin states in her essay “The American Form of the Novel,” that the novel, as a form, should be concerned with human struggle (1996, 84–88). Written in 1917, The Ford adheres to this model, and is “an avatar of the regional conflict and of the unresolved political, philosophical and ethical issues underlying that conflict” (Cassuto 2001, 32). Specifically, it is a bildungsroman that provides an account

Mary Austin’s proto-ecofeminist land ethic   47 of the coming of age of the Brent family children, Kenneth and Anne, and their struggle with a wealthy local businessman, Timothy Rickart. Anne and Kenneth grow up in Las Palomitas, on their father’s ranch in Tierra Longa, a fictional town based on Independence and Inyo counties where Austin had lived at the time of the controversy. The novel starts in Tierra Longa, where the family is about to lose their farm. After their father Stephen Brent loses Las Palomitas, they try to survive in the newly-­founded oil town. As the years pass, Anne becomes a real estate agent and a powerful businesswoman, while her brother becomes an executive assistant to Timothy Rickart, the wealthy land owner and the father of his childhood friend Frank, whom Anne desperately loves. When Kenneth discovers Rickart’s plan to divert the waters of Tierra Longa into San Francisco in cooperation with city officials, he quits his job, and with Anne’s support tries to persuade people to take collective action. At the end of the novel, the water diversion project is cancelled. Half success and half failure, the struggle gives Kenneth a sense of himself as he finds true love and looks towards the future in a more optimistic way. From Anne, he learns to care for the land and its inhabitants and to accept the power of the New Woman. The struggle equips Anne with the skills to beat Rickart at his own game and gives her more independence to assert her identity as a New Woman. Obviously, The Ford is Austin’s provocative attempt to “articulate a viable relationship between the acute ecological sensitivity of The Land of Little Rain and her equally acute awareness of the need for nonurban space to be recognized and reimagined as part of the landscape and capitalist modernity” (Raine 1999, 247), which are triangulated with the feminist arguments embodied in the text. As Rudnick (1987, 11) conveys, Austin advocated a non-­exploitative harmonious relationship with the land. In The Land of Little Rain, for example, Austin (1987, 90) conveys how water is important to the people of the valley, especially with respect to agriculture. It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are willing. They go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable lands in their own boulder fenced gullies—but how much farther in the man-­made waterways. It is difficult to come into intimate relations with appropriated waters; like very busy people they have no time to reveal themselves. One needs to have known an irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to have lived by it, to mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning, rising and falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far across the valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke, the shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons stalking the little glinting weirs across the field. In The Ford, Austin continues to stress the importance of water, suggesting a harmonious relationship between rivers and their beneficiaries. One can utilize rivers to make a living, yet one should know all the possibilities and limits of the landscape. In the novel, readers witness what occurs when this fragile

48   E. Geçgil understanding is broken, and how the abuse of the river leads to the destruction of ecological parameters. The river that runs through Tierra Longa is  sift and full, beginning with the best intentions of turning mills or whirring dynamos, with the happiest possibilities of watering fields and nurturing orchards, but discouraged at last by the long neglect of man, becoming like all wasted things, a mere mud and malaria. (34) From the very beginning, readers sympathize with the landscape as it succumbs to human exploitation. Nature has long been sacrificed for utilitarianism, and Austin’s narrative in The Ford is a reference to the general anthropocentric tendency of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Roosevelt, or women conservationist clubwomen, who believed that nature was valuable as long as it provided resources for the home and family (Alaimo 2000, 67). During her life, Austin praised the persistence and perseverance of rural people. Yet, as an activist, she also criticizes their greed in The Ford: valley residents are delighted by the easy wealth that will come from selling the land and have no desire to wait for a federal irrigation project (Cassuto 2001, 33). What Austin condemns is the fact that dreams cannot be realized because of a lack of vision among ranchers, and because the people of Tierra Longa, like those of Owens Valley, are unable to unite under a single political cause. They do not take collective action because as Lem, Kenneth’s friend, says: “There ain’t all of us in Tierry Longway ever agreed about nothin’ yet” (380). Although Anne dreams of an agrarian community of solidarity, in reality, the farmers are willing to abandon their land as soon as a good offer comes from the urban planners (Henderson 2003, 206). The farmers themselves are not as committed to the land as outsiders, probably because they know, first hand, its difficulties and the struggle required to live off it. Thus, urbanization seems unavoidable and is even embraced by rural people, which Austin found problematic. Although the Owens Valley controversy resulted in the victory of the state, capitalism, and urbanization, The Ford proposes hope. That the water diversion project is cancelled in the novel instills a sense of optimism—that there is a way out of every dilemma—even for contemporary environmentalists.

The Ford and Austin’s proto-­ecofeminist ideals For Austin, nature was a woman. In The Ford, through the eyes of her protagonist, she sees the land as a mistress:  For a man lives with his land as with a mistress, courting her, suiting himself to her humors, contriving as he can that her moods, her weathers shall drive for and not against him. And in time, he becomes himself subject to such shifts and seasons. He cannot handle himself; he is to be handled. (384)

Mary Austin’s proto-ecofeminist land ethic   49 Stacy Alaimo (2000, 75) speculates that in seeing nature as a mistress, the proto-­ ecofeminist Austin draws the picture of the New Woman because, in her narrative, the land is not viewed as a mother within the patriarchal structure. Austin suggests that the wilderness is a feminine force, and that men must learn to reconcile with her. This reconciliation between man and nature can only be achieved through compromise between men and women; in other words, through an egalitarian social order (O’Grady 1993, 138). In the novel, Austin objects to anthropocentric conventions by creating sexist male characters. Stephen Brent, Kenneth’s and Anne’s father, for instance, is willing to exploit the land and subordinate it to human desires. “Wherever the land flings us a handful of corn we run and scramble for it like beggars in the street. And she laughs—she laughs. I tell you, Burke, we’ve got to master her— we’ve got to compel her” (62). Such dualism is apparent in the twentieth-­century British novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), which is analyzed in this volume by Julia Tofantšuk (p. 68). Warner also created sexist male characters who described the land “with possessive gestures.” The gendered aspect of oppressive attitude is definitely towards the river in The Ford, while it may be other nonhuman entities in other contexts. For instance, Nicole Anae’s “Taking Mighty Strides across the World: Positioning Zora Neale Hurston in the Ecofeminist Tradition,” which is presented in this volume, examines the relations between labor, power, and oppression within the framework of human–animal relations (p. 84). Rudnick (1987, 11) contends that Austin views the land as “masterless,” and asserts that the land should resist male domination. She rejects the androcentric approach, the “Judeo-­Christian imprimatur that man must rule, tame and reform,” because it corrupts ecological parameters, as seen with the Owens Valley controversy (Cassuto 2001, 43). Although initially Kenneth, the son of the Brent Family, seems to be the protagonist of the novel, which narrates his coming-­of-age, Austin deliberately undermines his position, and instead gives his sister, Anne Brent, more prominence throughout the plotline:  Anne was a business woman. She had the gift of detachment; she could buy land without wanting to work it; she could buy it with the distinct intention of unloading it on somebody else who believed himself elected to work it and was willing to pay handsomely for the privilege. (178) Neal (2006, 98) conveys that western women nature writers, like Austin, created strong-­minded, independent female characters, who were outspoken and career-­ oriented. This analysis is particularly correct for Anne, who becomes a businesswoman and a real estate agent in order to buy back their family farm, Las Palomitas, from the land baron Timothy Rickart. Anne is so self-­controlled that she conceals her love for Frank, her childhood friend and Rickart’s son, only to confess it to him to save her brother from being sued by Rickart. Anne

50   E. Geçgil consistently exhibits “New Woman” characteristics because as a lady, she performs “unladylike” behavior: she engages in the male business world and unabashedly reveals her love for Frank. Alaimo (2000, 76) warns that the female characters in The Ford should not be mistaken for “Earth mothers.” Through her female characters, Austin rejects notions of womanhood that enshrine domesticity. Kenneth’s and Anne’s mother, Mrs. Brent, wants to escape frontier life; their childhood friend Virginia is a socialist and suffragist; and Anne is a “hard-­headed” career woman. As a feminist role model, Anne shows female readers in particular how to become economically independent without depending on men. As Vakoch (2012, 3) contends, the emancipatory strategies employed in ecofeminist literary criticism help us see possible ways of overcoming oppression. From this perspective, it is clearly seen that Austin portrayed Anne full of reforming zeal and liberatory ideals to overcome biological determinism. Austin knew that in order to stand on one’s own feet as a woman in the West, one had to know the rules of the game. As Kenneth notes, she is “doing without all the things that used to be thought indispensable for a woman, and making a place for herself that men would envy” (209). While other women seek refuge in the private sphere through marriage and motherhood, she chooses independence in the male public sphere. Interestingly, Austin underscores Anne’s feminist traits through Kenneth’s observations. Austin believes that the cultural practices of the peoples of the land are embedded in both the ecological and social environment. As a social and environmental activist, her work, The Ford, illustrates her attention to the land, which is both scientific and practical, aesthetic and mystical (Raine 1999, 245). Like Austin, Anne is an activist in her own right: she invites readers not to be bound by the social forces surrounding them. Anne advises her brother Kenneth not to believe that the social and economic forces that govern his life are a part of the natural order: It was a mistake, she said, that women had always made, thinking that, because they enjoyed being ordered about by their husbands and cuddling their babies, it was their God appointed destiny and they were therefore excused from any further responsibilities. So that if it was a notion he had of being a Heaven-­built farmer, he could be one, just Baff and Willard were. He could homestead a hundred and sixty acres under his own canal and be happy in it until she or Rickart or somebody of the same stripe came along and took it away from him. (430) Clearly, Austin has a feminist agenda: to encourage women to reject biological determinism, or what Freud would articulate as “anatomy is destiny.” In other words, that women, by virtue of their reproductive body parts, are destined only to be wives and mothers. She calls on women to engage in collective action by challenging their limited social, cultural, economic, and political roles—to break out of the private sphere and embrace more visible positions in the public sphere.

Mary Austin’s proto-ecofeminist land ethic   51 As a New Woman, Anne’s identification with the land is not sentimental but rather practical. She expresses, “Land doesn’t mean crops to me the way it does to you and father; it means people, people who want land and are fitted for the land, and the land wants how it wants them!” (199) She has a “gift of detachment” (178), which enables her to bring laborers and the land together. Although this might seem to be an impediment to her identification with the land emotionally, her scientific knowledge about the properties of the soil helps her match farmers with suitable farmland, which proves her foresightedness (Stout 1998, 92). In an attempt to answer the question who “owns” the land, Anne says to her brother,  Look at the land; I’m learning a lot about land, and the first thing to learn is that you can absolutely find out what land is good for, and in time we’ll find out that, no matter what you feel about it, it only belongs to the people who can do those things. (234) The novel ultimately suggests that “the ownership of the land cannot be determined by capital, but affinity” (Alaimo 2000, 77). In The Ford, Anne is pragmatic and Kenneth is histrionic, suggesting a gender role reversal which strengthens Austin’s feminist arguments. Anne brings a feminist sensibility to her profession, in Schaefer’s words (2004, 170), by balancing “the private and public and the economic, social and environmental aspects of regional planning.” While her brother feels nostalgia for the past, and Rickart regards the land as a commodity, Anne plays a crucial, mediating role between these two extremes. Furthermore, Anne is quite aware of how society denies educational and professional opportunities to women. For her,  Society is a sort of mirage, a false appearance due to refraction…. I mean most of the things we do and think important only seem so because of all sorts of hang-­overs, political, religious, all kinds of ignorances … that’s because we have Androcentric culture. (233) By articulating these notions, Austin increases ecofeminist sensibilities and invites female readers to reconsider their place in society, specifically by contributing to community development and influencing regional politics.

Conclusion Austin wrote The Ford almost 12 years after Eaton secured Owens Valley water through legal land purchases. In a short time, the valley lost its agricultural value, and as conveyed by Forstenzer (1992), the water taken from the Owens Valley has had a negative effect on the environment: when the river water was diverted to the aqueduct, it caused the water level to substantially drop, and by 1924, Owens Lake had already dried. Goodman and Dawson (2008, 56) note that a lawsuit initiated by

52   E. Geçgil Inyo County in 1972 took four decades to prove that ecological balance was corrupted because of the diversion of the Owens Valley water; and finally in December 2006, Los Angeles flew some of its water to Owens River, and in so doing, made an invaluable contribution to wetlands and wildlife. While it is difficult to assess the impact of Mary Austin’s The Ford on environmental activism and politics, as Patrick Murphy (2009, 81) suggests, it is one of the first attempts to deal with environmental issues. It is a critique of modernity, as it rejects federal tendencies to urbanize small communities by depriving peoples of their land and their natural resources. Austin depicts regional development as dependent on local irrigation projects and asks why rural Americans fail to take collective action against capitalistic forces. As a proto-­ecofeminist, Austin criticizes androcentric and anthropocentric society at all levels (rural/urban, local/city/ federal). She contends that “love of the land” does not, and should not, reinforce essentialist ideas about women as the guardians of nature, proposing a more down-­ to-earth, solid female character, Anne Brent, who engages with explicit feminist discourse. She calls for women of all generations to participate in environmental politics, and stand on their feet in the face of injustices perpetrated against the land, nature, natural resources, and the ecosystem.

Notes 1 Because of the anachronistic nature of the term “ecofeminist” in the early twentieth century, “proto-­ecofeminist” is preferred by the author throughout the text. 2 A naturalist, essayist, and a prominent figure in the Conservation Movement during the Progressive Era, John Burroughs (1837–1921) was best known for his scientific observations of nature. Please see A Century of Early Ecocriticism, edited by David Mazel (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 2001, 33–47.

References Alaimo, Stacy. 2000. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Austin, Mary. 1906. The Flock. New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Company. Austin, Mary. 1909. Lost Borders. New York: Harper & Brothers. Austin, Mary. 1912. A Woman of Genius. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company. Austin, Mary. 1988. The Land of Little Rain. New York: Penguin Books. Austin, Mary. 1996. “The American Form of the Novel.” In Beyond Borders: Selected Essays of Mary Austin, edited by Reuben J. Ellis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 84–88. Austin, Mary. 1996. The Ford. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Austin, Mary. 2007. Earth Horizon. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press. Blend, Benay. 1988. “Mary Austin and the Western Conservation Movement, 1900–1927.” Journal of the Southwest, 30(1): 12–34. Brinkley, Douglas. 2009. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. New York: Harper Collins. Cassuto, David. 2001. Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Desert Southwest. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Mary Austin’s proto-ecofeminist land ethic   53 Forstenzer, Martin. 1992. “Dust to Dust.” Los Angeles Times, April 10. Retrieved May 20, 2014, from http://articles.latimes.com/1992-04-10/news/mn-­179_1_owens-­lake. Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D. Murphy. 1998. “Introduction.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, 1–13. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Gabrielson, Teena. 2006. “Woman-­Thought, Social Capital, and the Generative State. Mary Austin and the Integrative Civic Ideal in Progressive Thought.” American Journal of Political Science, 50(3): 650–663. Goodman, Susan and Carl Dawson. 2008. Mary Austin and the American West. London: University of California Press. Green, Amy S. 2001. “Two Woman Naturalists and the Search for Autonomy: Anna Botsford Comstock and the Producer Ethic; and Gene Stratton-­Porter and the Gospel of Wealth.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 29(1/2): 145–154. Hays, Samuel P. 1999. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Henderson, George L. 2003. California and the Fictions of Capital. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mazel, David, ed. 2001. A Century of Early Ecocriticism. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Murphy, Patrick D. 2009. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries and Fields. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Neal, Teresa S. 2006. Evolution Toward Equality: Equality for Women in the American West. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Books. O’Grady, John P. 1993. Pilgrims to the Wild: Everett Ruess, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Clarence King, Mary Austin. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Raine, Anne. 1999. “The Man at the Sources: Gender, Capital and the Conservationist Landscape in Mary Austin’s The Ford.” In Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin, edited by M. Graulich and E. Klimasmith. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 243–266. Reisner, Marc. 1993. Cadillac Desert. New York: Penguin Books. Rudnick, Louis. 1987. “Re-­naming the Land: Anglo-­Expatriate Women in the Southwest.” In The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art, edited by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 17–26. Schaefer, Heike. 2004. Mary Austin’s Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre and Geography. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Stout, Janice. 1998. “Mary Austin’s Feminism: A Reassessment.” Studies in the Novel, 30(1): 77–101. Vakoch, Douglas A. 2012. “A Different Story.” In Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women and Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1–12. Walton, John. 1992. Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture and Rebellion in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wilson, Malin. 1997 “Walking on the Desert in the Sky: Nancy Newhall’s Words and Images.” In The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art, edited by Vera Norwood and Janice J. Monk. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 47–61. Wynn, Dudley. 1937. “Mary Austin, Woman Alone.” Virginia Quarterly Review, 13: 243–256.

4 T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist Etienne Terblanche

Over the past five decades the notion has taken root that T.S. Eliot is sexist.1 This has spawned the assumption that his poetry must also be sexist. Careful reading of his poetic oeuvre shows that his minor poem “Hysteria” does seem to suffer from a misogynist tone. This is an important reason for its minor status. To use one of Eliot’s familiar terms, the poem is failed by its objective correlative. The narrow tones reduce its objects, thus spoiling its emotional bearing for the reader. However, reading any of his major poems allows a different picture to emerge when it comes to Eliot and sexism. As I will argue in the remainder of this chapter, in his major poetry, a rubric including The Waste Land, Four Quartets, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men,” Eliot surfaces as an early ecofeminist. This could come as a surprise to some critics. Has it not been established that Eliot is the epitome of the sexist poet? Does it not speak for itself that this sexist man’s poems oppress women? In response to these demanding questions, this presentation will retain a certain literary equanimity for the moment, turning to The Waste Land published in 1922. The fragmentary configuration of nuggets in this poem offers various images of waste, including images from working life. One of these depicts a scene from the closing of the London business day at “the violet hour” (Eliot 2001, 12), presumably when light fades in its prolonged London manner. Millions return home after a long day at what was then, in the early twentieth century, the world’s central marketplace. As we will see, one of these is a typist returning to her small flat, a scene witnessed by the blind seer-­prophet Tiresias, who turns out to be intriguingly hermaphrodite in Eliot’s poem. Tiresias shares with other figures in the poem such as the Sybil of Cumae and Madame Sosostris a double existence: he-­she-it has the ability to experience the time-­bound world of everyday life as well as the timeless realm of spiritual perception, the numinous. These legendary personas therefore occupy that supreme space, also that very human space, between matter and spirit. They see a more comprehensive meaning because they see the everyday world from a timeless perspective. Like the other personas in the poem who experience unity between the two worlds, though, Tiresias seems to be on the very brink of death: exhausted, de-­vitalized, participating in what Max Weber called in 1904, in a much-­ discussed phrase, die Entzauberung der Welt, that is, the disappearance of the

T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist   55 numinous from everyday life (Josipovici 2010, 11). Now that Tiresias is more or less in place, consider this passage of the poem: At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit… (Eliot 2001, 12) One marvels at how Eliot turns mundane realities and prosaic utterances into the poignant music of poetry. One marvels further at how carefully he depicts the suppression of women in modern time. To begin with, the typist is trapped in a tiny space within a mechanized city. In his 1939 prose essay titled The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot critiques what he terms “the mechanistic life,” a way of existing that according to the poet denies the integrity of religious perception

56   E. Terblanche of the concrete unfolding of existence (1980, 290). For him, this daily denial is the root cause of ecological destruction (290). Of course, fellow poets and philosophers of Eliot’s day were equally troubled by the mechanization of the relationship between humanity and Earth; the poet’s conscious or unconscious choice of the typist image is not incidental. She has been sitting in her office for hours and hours to press the hammers home. She lights her stove, a warm image that reminds of centuries of humanity carried by the intimate ritual of mealtime after a long, hard day prior to a long, unfamiliar night. But she lays out her food in those lonely tins, not least since mechanization and World War I in particular led to the skyrocketing of demand for canned food. The ritual has become enclosed in mass metal. More frighteningly, sex, too, has become mechanized, driven by urban ennui. Carefully these lines suggest the parallel between habitual control of Earth and abuse of female sexuality. But now that the clerk has left, how does the typist respond? The passage movingly depicts her response: She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-­formed thought to pass: “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.” When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone. (Eliot 2001, 12) The mechanical imagery so carefully prepared in the preceding passage finds its culmination. Starting with the images of an engine, a taxi, a stove, and tins, we have progressed to an automatic hand. The typist looks in the mirror, she is too tired to think, her actions are involuntary. The hand that types all day smoothes hair in a disconnected manner. She has been displaced in her home and her so-­ called lover’s assault is just part of the pervasive modern subjugation of an authentic inner existence, inner existence that should be reflected in sensuous outer existence. The progression of mechanical imagery in the poem now goes further, suggesting that loose sex has become automatic: the little hole in the record is placed over the stunted little phallus of the gramophone. It turns and turns but the music probably means as little as the clerk’s approach. And Tiresias knows that sex has remained the most available form of mystical oneness between opposites in modern time but he witnesses how male dominance lays waste the prospect of that fragile unity. As in the case of all Eliot’s allusions, these allusions to past texts in The Waste Land carry his prophylactic awareness of generational corruption to which I will return in this chapter. The timing of the rhyming in these lines of the words “and” and “hand” is almost unbearably sensitive and alive. With fragility the “and” wavers, a lyrical

T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist   57 note, a momentary direct glimpse into the sensitivity that foresuffers the casually disturbing scene. The word “and” comes at the end of its line, suspending the line in expectation. And … what? And: she smoothes her hair with automatic hand. In this way the reader’s expectation is also made to end in the image of repetition, set off against resilient sensitivity. The hypocrite reader is led to sympathize on a refined level with patriarchy’s disregard for the typist and the earthly matters of food, sex, home, and so forth. As is usual in Eliot, the lines get under the reader’s skin, sometimes even before one can explain the lines. But is this the only image in the poem that critiques patriarchy, that is, male dominance that narrows and violates humanity’s experience of Earth and female energies, thus also narrowing the experience of male energies? Far from it: once noticed, the poem teems with images of this important critique. Consider, for instance, the persona of Lil. She is being discussed by anonymous female friends in a bar, presumably in London again. One of these friends gossips as follows: When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said— I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you. And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said. (Eliot 2001, 9) Lil’s friend is apparently quite concerned for her. Now that he has returned from war, Albert just wants a good time and surely a woman ought to do her best for any man, especially if the man has been largely absent performing military duties for his country. After all, he gave her money for new teeth. And Lil’s friend also feels evident sympathy for poor Albert. Perhaps she has an eye on Albert, sensing the weakness of her friend Lil, her sudden opponent. One imagines how the drinks go down in this busy bar late at night in the aftermath of wartime as Lil’s friend continues to say: You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-­one.) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same. (Eliot 2001, 10)

58   E. Terblanche Not only has Albert trapped Lil’s entire existence in his lust but the chemist could not care less about a dispensable woman’s health. It “would be all right” but she is losing her teeth and suffering from the consequences of five pregnancies and an abortion. The poem shows how the male dominant act of modern war leads to hell not only for affluent urban women as found elsewhere in the poem (9) but especially for millions of poor women sitting in bars across the cosmopolitan world. With terror the passage shows what it means for a woman to get trapped in her biology (Brooker 1994, 239), while men cause the entrapment and shrug their shoulders. Though there is too little time here to discuss it comprehensively, the poem as a whole moreover shows intense awareness of a modern cultural language trap, that is, the one-­sided condition at the opposite end of the biology trap, while the poem demonstrates that men are instrumental to the creation of both of these parallel traps. The bartender wants to close shop, calling “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” reinforcing the poem’s overall comment on the disenchanted nature of modern time. Lil’s friend has one or two further observations to make and the little drama closes as her words melt into the much-­discussed goodnight greeting of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet—words uttered by Ophelia just before she commits suicide. Eliot probably cites them in adumbration of Lil’s fate: Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot— HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. (Eliot 2001, 10) And so it is clear that not only men but also women suffer from and participate in the cruelties resulting from war. I mention this because an intrinsic fiber of the poem’s greatness is Eliot’s egalitarian handling of the opposite realms of male and female experience. In a world strangely masterminded by the dry rationalism and control that arise when numinous perception of corporeal existence has lost its vitality in the mind of Europe (or in the mind of early globality, for that matter), Lil, her friend, the carbuncular clerk, and Albert suffer equally and they equally inflict suffering. The victims include not only men and women but also language. In some respects modern English amounts to the poem’s final irony since it is an extension of the Vedic, Greek, and Roman civilizations, while the poem painstakingly relates itself to how these cultures and languages have decayed over time. The poem’s fragmentary English indeed presents a fractured ontology; its modern English ironies point to cultural entropy. These daring acts of fragmenting the artistic medium reflect the risk that this poem and modern art as a whole is willing to take in the face of experience hollowed out by inauthentic inner

T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist   59 worlds. These acts indicate the extent of modern art’s artistic and social commitment. In the case of The Waste Land, that commitment is not afraid to tackle the central matter of skewed relations between men and women. It has not been mentioned, for instance, that gender is central to a passage in the poem containing some of the most extreme fragmentation in Eliot’s oeuvre and modernism as a whole. It occurs at the conclusion of Section III of The Waste Land titled “The Fire Sermon,” where one finds what could be termed an embodied crumbling: “On Margate sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing.” la la To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest burning

(Eliot 2001, 15)

Even at this end of linguistic limits, Earth is crucial to the poetic engagement. (After all, though The Waste Land is abundantly metaphorical, its title does contain the word “land.”) The passage refers to a place that Eliot knew when he was suffering from depression: a seaside resort at the Thames estuary in Margate (North 2001, 15). This sense of place reverberates in the other lines of this passage. One of the most striking is the allusion to the Philomela legend where she is raped by King Tereus in Ovid’s eighth-­century cornerstone text of Western culture titled Metamorphoses: the image reading “The broken fingernails of dirty hands” with its emphatic full stop. It beams into the field of significance with harrowingly concrete realism. The one-­sidedness of excruciating emplacement is paralleled by the one-­sidedness of disjunction between spirit and matter. I am struck further by the rhyming of “hands” with “sands,” which suggests Philomela’s terrible ordeal of being powerlessly pinned to the soil. The fragment viscerally describes the knowledge that the raping of Philomela involves an alienated physical closeness to and psychological distance from Earth. Humans cannot be this cruel without dissociating from Earth and who they are, their nature. From this perspective rape can be defined as the disconnection from nature that is concomitant with brutal employment of physical domination. It is little wonder that the next fragment, equally beaming onto the page as if from

60   E. Terblanche nowhere, “la la,” alludes to the Thames daughters, figures from the pagan past who used to present complete reciprocity between mytho-­poetic insight and the flowing river. The fragment pitifully evokes a lost, sacred sense of Earth. Indeed, elsewhere the poem laments the bottles, sandwich papers, handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, and cigarette ends that the river bears (Eliot 2001, 11). The fragment “la la” moreover alludes to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (North 2001, 14), sustaining the notion that fractious engagement with Earth mirrors the detriment of severance between male and female worlds. The little piece from Augustine’s Confessions, “To Carthage then I came,” centers again on that ultimate earthly and mystical connection, sex—to which the whole of the solipsistic and much-­discussed character of Eliot’s Prufrock of course cannot respond. To Carthage Augustine (1907, 31) comes only to enter a cauldron of unholy loves including all kinds of sexual promiscuities, Manichean complications of body-­soul divisions, and a soap-­opera-like disillusionment. He burns with desire that cannot be fulfilled, a theme not unlike themes carried by the rock songs of our day. Hence the apparently idiotic fragment “Burning burning burning burning” followed by broken images of the Lord plucking out the eye of desire so that tranquility could arrive at last. One “final” and wholly isolated instance of the fragment-­verb “burning” breaks down as the passage and the section in the poem conclude. As in the case of the other fragments in the poem, each fragment here is valuable since it carries a link with the meaningful past, in this instance the Buddha’s fire sermon. There the Buddha identifies the flames of desire (in mind, body, feelings, spirit, and in the eye) as the root cause of human suffering. Extinguishing these desires and the false impressions that bring them about causes what we term the peace that passeth understanding or, in a frequently used current word, mindfulness of coexistence. But what happens to this important recognition if, through interference of an eye such as Albert’s or that of the carbuncular clerk, desire itself no longer occurs but only the automations of patriarchal “perception”? Eliot suggests (1980, 236) that the prospect of calmness, wisdom, and authentic coexistence is thwarted. Not even that full verbal phrase—“to burn with sexual desire”—rings completely true in a society where perception has become automatic. The alive everyday sense of good and evil has dissipated from this kind of perception, leaving humanity in doldrums between religious dispensations, doldrums that keep truly human behavior uncannily alive. And language, having lost some of its vital sexiness because of its dissociation from an enchanted sense of Earth, can at best reflect the loss in a heap of broken images, including the depiction of Philomela’s broken fingernails in the unforgiving sand. Little or no reverence for concrete coexistence on Earth in fact means that matter turns into so much dormant, mute powder—“stuff ”—which The Waste Land summarizes in a caveat reading: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Eliot 2001, 6). Paradoxically, Eliot renders these matters in the form of compellingly embodied poetry that persistently points at the wholeness of being by tracing its absence. The tensions between his dramatic aesthetic lyricism on the one hand

T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist   61 and the narrowly alive flickering of authentic experience on the other furthermore make of this poem a haunting work of art. And part of the poem’s relevance to our time is its mind-­boggling adumbrations in 1922 of climate change or Earth fever, of a somberly solar inner world reflected in the outer world of increasing desert, the desertification of planet Earth’s living complexity (see also Harrison 1993, 149). Within The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot states in so many words that the modern lack of spiritual harmony with Earth would lead to “dearth and desert” and the intense suffering of future generations (1980, 290). But it is in the poem that we find the most lurid images of the desertscape within and without. I cannot do justice to all of these images. Hence I focus on one example: Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water

(Eliot 2001, 6)

By presenting the modern condition of opposites in the form of this immense chanting that rings from a world of complete aridity, in the form of this searing desertscape, and in the form of this place of female hands pinned to the powdery sands of male brutality, Eliot provides a unique prototype of the current ecofeminist insistence (Carr 2011, 9) on the parallels between oppression of women and mutilation of Earth. King Tereus’ “authority” and Philomela’s rape reflect that particular modern lack of perceiving Earth and female energies in deep terms. Where there should be a kind of “threeness” or three-­dimensionality of inner recognition where grown-­up power meets the sensitivity of feeling and sacredness, there is only the meagre and crippling “twoness” represented by two sets of one-­sidedness, as mentioned: one a supposedly reasonable, patriarchal language

62   E. Terblanche trap and the other its parallel, a biology trap of the kind experienced by Lil. At the heart of this or the lack of the heart of this resides the recognition of patriarchy, once more: dissociation of male and female energies results in dominance that emaciates experience, including experience of maleness itself. Dryness cannot find its opposite of moisture to open renewed tangible spaces that would be joyous and fertile for growth. The Waste Land therefore gives us not only a profound and disturbing poetic description of the ecofeminist problem but also offers a diagnosis and prognosis. Opposite worlds that have split into parallel but disengaged sets of one-­sidedness should combine again in that integrity which is of a corporeal, open-­ended, dynamic, sensitive, and participating transcendence. And this can be achieved through re-­membering, re-­integrating, the world of numinous awareness and the world of material being. It is my belief that the poem’s conclusion carefully arrives at open-­ended integration of this nature, as I argue in a monograph on Eliot and Earth (Terblanche 2016, 78). Now, the proto-­ecofeminist picture I sketched here does not show up in the extant critical response to Eliot. Over the past half century new strands of Eliot criticism have emerged that mirror the many shifts in emphasis that have characterized the study of literature, though, of course, excellent close reading of his work and life continued unabatedly. Very broadly speaking, these shifts have amounted to elision of great primary literary works such as The Waste Land in the name of a tidal wave of secondariness that wants secondary contexts to swallow primary texts. Lingering in the moment of the text has not been practiced in these criticisms. Often this view has portrayed authors with considerable gifts as little more than ideological puppets. In many cases the focus shifted to what could be exhumed about authors in a frenzy of personality forensics. In Eliot’s case, he was more or less found to be a sexist, misogynist, totalitarian, fascist, anti-­Semitic racist! The attack has been a little less relentless over the past decade and the jury seems to be out on whether he really was so sexist and anti-­Semitic in life, after all, even though these were of course common diseases from which most men in his days suffered quite unconsciously or “naturally.” Can we expect of our poetic heroes to have risen in their daily lives above the taken-­for-granted prejudices of their time? Perhaps my generation lacks self-­irony here. For example, we do not yet think twice too much about driving our cars and flying in those tiny tubes that cracker us across the oceans despite the knowledge that we are thus borrowing the atmosphere from our children as though it were a gigantic credit card that they will have to pay for by struggling to find water, food, or refuge from oppressive heat and climate migrators. How should they judge the relations between our texts and our lives? At the outset of this discussion I mentioned the tendency among critics to assume that a sexist Eliot must have composed sexist poetry. This brings the conversation to the important cultural studies work of two superstar feminists, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The main culprit, the huge enemy to be brought down in their famous book titled The War of the Words, indeed happens

T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist   63 to be Mr. Eliot. In feminist warmongering huge targets count. Their assault ironically forces Eliot exactly into that terrain that he critiques, namely a binary logic of bitter enmity between two one-­sided camps, one male and one female, as has been shown by Jewel Spears Brooker in her 1994 essay on Gilbert, Gubar, tradition, and female enmity. They soon find Eliot guilty of such binaries: first the man in terms of his unpublished poetry (30, 53), then in terms of the fisher king legend and his life of attending parties and finding a supposed blood brother in D.H. Lawrence (36–38, 89, 112), then in terms of an unlikely crowd who fear the advances of female writing (66, 98), then in terms of his grossly misread prose writings (162, 254), and then, with the greatest of apparent ease, his poetry and The Waste Land in particular. For instance, in a false comparison with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who on one occasion took his wife Zelda’s words as his own, Gilbert and Gubar find Eliot the man guilty of stealing from his wife, Vivien (Brooker 1994, 218; Gilbert and Gubar 1988, 153). But, as Brooker shows, the former was “a theft deeply resented” while the latter was “a gift joyously bestowed” (218). Brooker continues that Eliot invited not only Ezra Pound but his wife to look over his manuscript and make suggestions. In the second section (“A Game of Chess”), Vivien remarked through various words and lines and suggested alternates, with the note: “Make any of these alterations—or none if you prefer.” Some of her recommendations are excellent, a fact Eliot easily recognized. He accepted, for example, her suggestion of “pills” to replace his more general “medicine” in the line that now reads, “It’s them pills I took, to bring it off.” (218) A number of Vivien’s comments are enthusiastically appreciative: “WONDERFUL … wonderful & wonderful … Yes … Splendid last lines,” she writes in bold pencil next to lines in the poem’s draft (218). The tone of her marginalia, writes Brooker, makes it clear that she was delighted to be taken seriously as a reader-­critic. Driven by their ‘battle of the sexes’ metaphor, however, Gilbert and Gubar missed a point that Vivien understood very well. Eliot respected her judgement, as he did that of Ezra Pound. (218) Having found Eliot guilty of female oppression and abuse in life, then, Gilbert and Gubar rush across to the poetry with binaries in hand. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” according to them shows that Eliot prefers culture over nature and therefore maleness over femaleness (Brooker 1994, 225). Rather astonishingly, the opposite is again true: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” signposts that Eliot is sick of culture (225). As for The Waste Land, they

64   E. Terblanche subsequently simply quote a mistaken James Joyce to clinch their mistaken finding that the major poem, too, suffers from the one-­sided binaries that they project onto Eliot (1988, 236). It is therefore necessary to point out, despite the valuable contributions that Gilbert and Gubar indeed made to the feminist debate, among other things by rescuing powerful female writers “from near oblivion” (Brooker 1994, 213), that their jingoist approach misplaces Eliot’s poetry. Most particularly, it misplaces the remarkable ecofeminist aspect of the poem. As a final consideration here, after about 30 years of reading this poet, I would like to linger for a moment in the recognition that I have come to know two Eliots. These two Eliots are sometimes related and sometimes foreign to each other but I know who among them is real, important, and knowable in a special sense. Let us say that the second Eliot is the persona of the man that we are able to build up around access to archives. This is a very important Eliot who is related to the first. But in a deadly sense I do not wish to meet him at my desk tomorrow morning whereas I almost always look forward to meeting again the first Eliot, the one I continue to learn to know in his poetic compositions. There he becomes upon careful reading what George Steiner terms a “real presence” (1989, 4), that is, when we meet in the poems as worlds he transgresses the boundaries of his ego and his personal history into my world as I transgress the boundaries of my ego and personal history into his world, a singular form of human freedom made possible by the immediacy of art. In this sense I meet in the poems what we term by way of the shorthand of his surname, “Eliot.” I am reminded of Jacques Derrida, who cites from Heidegger in his, Derrida’s, much-­discussed biographical movie where Derrida more or less acts himself as a famous philosopher of our time, complete with cat and pipe. In the movie Derrida cites Heidegger, who was asked what we should make of Aristotle’s life: “He was born. He thought. He died,” Heidegger retorted, adding that “the rest is pure anecdote” (Jeffries 2017). This is relatively true but, with Derrida, I presume, I would not go as far as to say that Eliot was born, wrote poetry, and died, and that the rest was pure anecdote. Rather, the analogy that springs to mind for me when it comes to meeting the poetic Eliot in his poems is that of listening to music. It is as though I am a man who lives a shallow, poor life, struggling along. Then in a busy, noisy street this man incidentally passes a window and hears someone playing music on a piano, notes in sensuous touch with the tangible silence they create, while the drifting of that music into his incidental ear shows the man that life enjoys an unfathomable place of resonance where communication occurs on levels not noticed before. In short, the man experiences depth. And the event is entirely akin, as if by itself, to meeting a new person. Perhaps it is for this reason that we refer to Beethoven’s music simply as “Beethoven” and Eliot’s poetry as “Eliot.” “So, who are you reading at the moment?” “Well, I’m reading Eliot.” Behind the frailty of this everyday manner of speaking lies a considerable truth. To boot, the idea of meeting someone in the poems is not as impressionistic as it sounds. Brain research is catching up with this recognition. I recommend

T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist   65 the reading of Iain McGilchrist’s book titled The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World as a whole, even as I necessarily fragment his argument by citing one or two passages from it. McGilchrist put himself in a position to give a particularly thorough and unique perspective on brain division and cultural development because he is an Oxford professor of literature who has qualified himself to practice as a psychiatrist and then, on top of that, as a specialist in the new science of neuroimaging. But of course the proof of the pudding lies in the reading, which I cannot recommend highly enough for those who continue to dare to think about opposite conditions in our time. These adulations I give despite the knowledge that his treatment of modernism in art and Eliot’s poetry (394, 396, 422) fails to see how modernism renders new persons to be met in poetry and new ways of experiencing and artistic depth and context. Despite this criticism (to which I cannot pay the right measure of attention here), the book makes very important points about meeting others in their art. First, though, the book meticulously cleans from the table embarrassing popularized ideas about the divided brain. Language does not sit in the left hemisphere, for example (2012, 1). And the right hemisphere is not picturesque, silent, and conveniently female (2). Equally painstakingly McGilchrist gets rid of the reductive thought that everything can be explained by the physical nature of this imperative organ (4–5). On this basis and much more, and faced with a lack of exact English words, McGilchrist separates two forms of knowing as found in the German words kennen and wissen (2012, 96). Kennen is to know someone intimately and it goes with right brain modes of attention. One does have knowledge, wissen, of one’s beloved: his or her height, age, weight, date of birth, and so on and so forth, but hopefully one does not share a knowing life with him or her based purely on attention to these relatively anecdotal facts that go with left brain modes of attention. Conversely and perhaps more importantly for our time (since we seem to be forgetting it), kennen, knowing in the individual sense, can be applied to apparently impersonal things such as a piece of music or a poem. In McGilchrist’s words: the approach to music is like entering into relation with another living individual, and [brain] research suggests that understanding music is perceived as similar to knowing a person; we freely attribute human qualities to music, including age, sex, personality characteristics and feelings. (96) This is also true, for me, of reading those literary works of art that get to me and stay with me. In the case here I simply applied my experience of reading The Waste Land to the important ecofeminist debate of our time, a lens enabling us to make our past authors present in a special and important moral sense. It is here that I am baffled by the culture studies ease with which critics will glean moral victories from what we know about past persons and apply these supposed facts to the poems as though the poems do not exist as known individuals.

66   E. Terblanche And the case of Gilbert and Gubar is not unique when it comes to Eliot. As I have shown in the mentioned monograph on Eliot and Earth, the inimitable Edward Said for whose writing I have great appreciation alas similarly ignores the poems to dismiss, in that case, Eliot’s orientalism, again as though the alive individual sense of meeting the poems in their very who-­ness has somehow quietly slipped out of the critic’s jargon-­filled office. As McGilchrist probably knows by having examined many students’ papers, the work of peers, and so on, it is not easy to put the individual experience of the poem or the piece of music into words. “The empathic nature” of experiencing the art work, he continues, means that it has more in common with encountering a person than a concept or an idea that could be expressed in words. It is important to recognise that music does not symbolise emotional meaning, which would require that it be interpreted; it metaphorises it—“carries it over” direct to our unconscious minds. Equally it does not symbolise human qualities: it conveys them direct, so that it acts on us, and we respond to it, as in a human encounter. In other words, knowing a piece of music, like knowing other works of art, is a matter of kennenlernen. Coming to us through the right hemisphere, such living creations are seen as being essentially human in nature. (96) In the remarkable kennenlernen of exchanges with the Eliot that I meet in The Waste Land, an Eliot that I certainly also meet in most of his other poems and an Eliot shared with his many other readers in ways that are similar and therefore also different, it has become clear to me that on balance he is an incisive poetic critic of patriarchy, including his early portrayal of the unbearable parallels between rape and Earth-­rape, parallels that have developed into a predominant feature of the past century, our century. This compelling criticism moreover enjoys the visceral nature of the experience of poetry, a lasting and unsettling impact of dazzling, sensitive, and terrible beauty. By way of continuing to catch up with this Eliot on the apparently endless journey of our maturation into living with and within the open-­ended freedom of finding oneself on this Earth, the anachronistic ecofeminism of his major poetry should be given its historical and contemporary significance.

Note 1 I wish to acknowledge with gratitude that the research on which this chapter is based was made possible in part through generous financial assistance by the National Research Foundation in South Africa, though the views expressed here are my own and not that of the National Research Foundation.

References Augustine. 1907. “From Confessions,” translated by E.B. Pusey. In The Waste Land (Norton Critical Edition), edited by Michael North, 58. New York: W.W. Norton.

T.S. Eliot, ecofeminist   67 Brooker, Jewel Spears. 1994. Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Carr, Glynnis. 2011. “Foreword.” In Ecofeminism and Rhetoric: Ecocritical Perspectives on Sex, Technology, and Discourse, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, ix–xviii. New York: Berghahn. Eliot, T.S. 1980. Selected Prose, edited by Frank Kermode. London: Faber & Faber. Eliot, T.S. 1991. Collected Poems 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt Brace. Eliot, T.S. 2001. The Waste Land (Norton Critical Edition), edited by Michael North. New York: Norton. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 1988. The War of the Words. Vol. 1 of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Harrison, Robert Pogue. 1993. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jeffries, Stuart. 2017. “Deconstruct this.” Guardian. Retrieved July 17, 2017, from www. theguardian.com/film/2003/jan/18/artsfeatures.highereducation. First published January 18, 2003. Josipovici, Gabriel. 2011. What Ever Happened to Modernism? New Haven: Yale University Press. McGilchrist, Iain. 2012. The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press. North, Michael. 2001. [Annotations and Notes on The Waste Land.] In The Waste Land (Norton Critical Edition), edited by Michael North. New York: Norton. Steiner, George. 1989. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Terblanche, Etienne. 2016. T.S. Eliot, Poetry, and Earth: The Name of the Lotos Rose. Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series. Lanham: Lexington Books.

5 Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot Julia Tofantšuk Opening her argument in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood (1993, 1) uses a natural metaphor to describe the complex essence of an eco­ feminist investigation: “It is usually at the edges where the great tectonic plates of theory meet and shift that we find the most dramatic developments and upheavals.” Likewise, introducing “[t]his hybrid discipline … ecofeminist lit­ erary criticism,” Douglas Vakoch (2012, 2) points to the potential strength of that “meeting at the edges,” to use Plumwood’s phrase: both feminist criticism and ecocriticism are open to “multiple, even incompatible perspectives” and, ultimately, “liberatory alternatives” (ibid., 12). In this vein, a focus on the writ­ ings of a largely underappreciated woman writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, as illustrative of the complexities of ecofeminist agendas, appears intriguing, though indeed “incompatible” at first sight. Born in England in 1893 and making her literary debut with Lolly Willowes in 1926, three years before Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, Warner is neither a proper feminist nor an eco­ logical writer. However, as my argument will show, it is the ecofeminist per­ spective that has potential for bringing forth Warner’s two early novels (the aforementioned Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, 1927), hoping to add to larger discussions on the connections of feminist and ecological literary criti­ cism. As literature of all times is a mighty means of raising questions concerning topical issues of today, these theoretical intersections can provide insights into still dominant modes of thinking, such as dualism, hierarchical binaries, and cat­ egorization as forms of oppression. Warner’s views on identity and domination of women and nature echo those of contemporary theorists, such as Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Karen J. Warren, Val Plumwood, and Patrick Murphy.

Dualism, hegemonic centrism, and backgrounding Present-­day cultural theorists generally challenge Aristotle’s logic of binary oppositions, which ultimately aims at producing the other in order to justify, among other things, racial and sexual dominance. Foucault (1984) sees it as a disciplining practice of producing a “docile body” (1984, 180) to enact the cultural rituals, which Butler (1990, 173) calls “fabrications,” having “no ontological status by itself.” It is culture that inscribes the roles that the body

Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity   69 has no choice but to “perform.” Cultural construction has been the focus of feminist theorists since the beginning of the Second Wave, with de Beauvoir’s “one is not made, but becomes, a woman.” For Hall (2003), inscribed roles and constructed identities have political ends: based on binaries and con­ structed through difference, they are convenient to be arranged hierarchically, in order to control, to dominate. In a world built upon binaries, which Plum­ wood (1993; 2002) calls “dualisms,” something, in Hall’s (2003, 4–5) words, is always excluded, rendered outside, “abjected,” turned into “a silent and unspoken other” (ibid.) without which the centralized, powerful self cannot exist. As Plumwood (2002) stresses, in the system of hegemonic centrism, which privileges reason and marks the Other as “deviation from the centrality of the One, as colour is a deviation from the ‘normal’ condition of whiteness” (104–105), the One is licensed to control and govern the Other, because the Other represents the opposite to the rational paradigm—irrationality and “disorderly” space. Theorizing binaries/dualisms and hegemonic centrism is crucial for feminists and especially ecofeminists, because it explains the logic of domination of what is constructed as marginal groups. Thus, Plumwood (1993) shows how in the reason/nature dualism of traditional western thought, women have been linked with nature, because emotional, not reasonable (32, 45), and thus rendered infe­ rior. Nature, in turn, because associated with women (irrational, emotional, passive), has been rendered negative, marginalized, and controllable. The result is “backgrounding” of both women and nature, by which Plumwood (1993; 2002) means the unjustifiable culturally constructed position of denied import­ ance and agency. Thus, “traditional” women’s tasks of home labor are not recog­ nized as important but rendered as “background” to “real work” and achievement (Plumwood 2002, 104); indigenous people are not recognized as ecological agents and their land is taken as “unoccupied” (ibid.) for “real” development and cultivation; human dependency on nature appears as “a source of anxiety and threat” (ibid., 108) and is denied unless a disaster occurs—not as “nature’s voice,” but as a signal to human agency to seek further “rational” technological solutions to overcome the “threat.” Analyzing the position of nature and women in patriarchy, Karen J. Warren (2000) brings forth hierarchical dualisms as Up/Down dialectic and speaks, among other things, of the linguistic framework that “feminises nature,” viewing it as “subordinate and inferior,” thus authorizing the domination. Referring to symbolism deeply embedded in the human unconscious, Warren (2000, 27) reit­ erates that it is “Mother Nature (not Father Nature) [that] is raped, mastered, controlled, conquered, mined”; “Virgin timber … felled”; “Fertile (not potent) soil … tilled, and land that lies fallow is barren.” It is remarkable that sexual imagery is used for both women and land in a discourse in which the “Downs” (Warren’s term) are subordinated, their needs are not met and one of the unhealthiest consequences is rape, making the survived women’s life unmanage­ able—in the same way, an ecosystem could be also made unmanageable because of military environmental damage.

70   J. Tofantšuk Oppression and backgrounding are exemplified in this volume in the case study of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Kordecki (this volume) shows how, by being aligned with Ophelia and her eponymous madness, nature is simultaneously “aligned with many stereotypes of women,” though eventually emerging as a visionary countering the masculinist developments of the narrative. Kordecki in fact shows how the previously devaluing attitude of backgrounding can be turned into attributing a positive value to the connection of women and nature. This is exactly what Plumwood (1993, 19) encourages ecological feminists to do: counter the nature/culture binary with “anti-­dualist ecological feminisms” stressing, at the same time (ibid., 40), that the movement should not be toward a gynocentric model—a “women’s culture grown from women’s essential nature”—but an integrative project informed with recognition of various liber­ atory processes. She obviously challenges the feminist utopias of the 1960s Second Wave, the planning of all-­women’s communities and radical, even violent solutions to lack of power women still experienced. Such radicalism would mean a simple reversal of the roles, but not erasing the dualist princi­ ple—and would therefore be as unhealthy a practice as patriarchy itself. Neither is essentialism a solution—if women are nature, to be celebrated for their own specificity, it will be again the other, non-­interactive, non-­dialogic, non-­holistic. Could there be a solution, then? Warren’s (2000) ecofeminist philosophy is not only a way to problematize patriarchy as an unjustifiable practice of domination but a way to suggest altern­ ative approaches. One of them is her view of ecosystem as a process that also includes the human component. In her view, humans are always “selves in rela­ tions” (187), members of ecological communities. This makes her ecofeminist approach different from Buell’s (2005) mainstream ecocriticism: for Buell, the concept of bioregion, which can appear similar to that of “ecological com­ munity,” does not include the human. Defining the bioregion as not only a phys­ ical terrain, but a “terrain of consciousness,” Buell (2005, 83) insists on it being a better alternative to the concept of nation-­state in that it develops the notion of place—an awareness of locality, with potential for environmental literacy and sustainability. Yet it seems that Buell’s literate, sustainable human, often urban­ ite preoccupied with reducing his ecological footprint (Buell 2005, 85) is still in a way above the bioregion, not an organic part of it. He is part of a human/ human or human/nonhuman interaction, aiming at maintaining “a more prudent, self-­sufficient human quality” (84) rather than merging with the environment as one organic whole. Warren (2000), on the other hand, stresses inclusivity, a relational view in which humans are members of an ecological community, along with its other members—nature and the nonhumans. That inclusivity, however, does not erase differences but acknowledges them respectfully, building “selves-­in-relations” (Warren 2000, 187), or “ecological selves” (ibid., 100). Warren illustrates this sense of inclusivity emerging as an “ethic of care”—her important ecofeminist contribution—by a personal account of the experience of swimming with

Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity   71 dolphins. She finds it extraordinary, yet quite natural, that the dolphins chose to swim with her, to include her and not vice versa, once she abandoned the habit­ ual role of a dominating caretaker. “I had let go of my attempts to control the outcome. And I knew that the internal changes in me had made it possible for these intelligent and sensitive creatures to invite me to swim with them” (Warren 2000, 121). The “ethic of care” can be contrasted to patriarchal attitudes described by Annette Kolodny (1984) who, exploring the lives of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury women on the American frontier, points to the difference between male and female response to encounter with nature, the riches and opportunities of the new continent. On the basis of diaries and fiction by wives of the first set­ tlers, Kolodny (1984, 4–11) observes that where for men there is an almost libidinal fantasy, an erotic discovery and possession of the new riches, women are after a sense of home, a search for harmony with that new environment. Men’s activities on the frontier are typical male activities elsewhere in the course of history—at war, during crusades and colonization, intensified by the new demands of capital-­accumulating economy of the nineteenth century. These include, as Kolodny (1984, 4) observes, acute “competition—even between brothers” and, what is worse, “a willingness to violate the very gener­ osity” of that new land, turning nature into “a princess fallen into hands of the robbers, who cut off her fingers for the sake of the jewels she wears” (ibid., 5). Thus, the initial “reaping of pleasure” is turned into “violation,” “transforma­ tion of the wilderness into profit”—in Warren’s discourse, “rape.”1 Moreover, there is a further connection women settlers find between the predicament of nature and their own: while the men are out into the wild, exploring (with the named consequences), the women are locked at home, dreaming of a “howling wilderness” (Kolodny 1984, 11) they feel kinship with. Thus the narratives of these women are “captivity narratives” (ibid.), extending the metaphor to both themselves and the land they are now part of. At the same time, this feeling of kinship prompts a more caring attitude: if men’s ambition is to tame and subdue the wilderness by turning it into cultured space, women strive to preserve some of the wilderness’s own character, some “original beauty of the place” (12), even if in the form of uncut trees for shade, some greenery for garden space, etc. In other words, the caring attitude, “an ethic of care” theorized at the turn of the Millennium as an urgent measure for preserving the dramatically endan­ gered environment, was already adopted intuitively by women settlers centuries earlier. However, as women were not decision-­makers or policy-­settlers (being constructed, like nature, the irrational, muted “other”), that “care” did not and could not become a general attitude, with the consequences we are facing today. Townsend Warner’s novels can be chronologically placed roughly between the frontier narratives and experiences, and the theories of “Third Wave” ecofeminism discussed above. A reading of these novels provides insights into such important ecofeminist issues as identity construction, possession, exploita­ tion, violation, and care.

72   J. Tofantšuk

Identity and feminism in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novels Although both novels discussed here are set in the “voguish” 1920s, they reflect the white middle-­class European mentality of the newly passed Victorian age, still looming large in the fates of the respective protagonists. The narratives, however, work at disrupting that mentality, offering a freshness that was immediately recognized in the author’s own time (Harman 1991, 62–71) with aspects speaking to the readers of today. Laura “Lolly” Willowes is a 28-year-­ old English spinster from a traditional middle-­class family engaged in the suc­ cessful brewing industry in the countryside. After the death of her beloved father, who was responsible for her intellectual and aesthetic growth (strong autobiographical connections with Warner herself ), Laura is left in the care of her two brothers and their wives. It only appears “natural” that she would move to London with one of the families, becoming the conveniently available, unpaid, and indispensable “aunt Lolly”—an identity she would have to inhabit for 20 years. After that comes a moment of awakening: rich flowers from the country­ side and leaves of beech she accidentally purchases fill her with a sudden desire for a life and personality of her own. She buys a map of the region the plants come from and, spotting a village called Great Mop, immediately decides to settle there, buying a house on the income she thinks she has, determined to be making her own decisions for the rest of her life. Announcing the plan to her brother, who is currently her “protector,” the necessary “male authority” in the absence of a husband or father, Laura declares the programmic “Nothing is impracticable for a single, middle-­aged woman with an income of her own” (87)—moving rhetorically from a typical Jane Austen figure to an emancipated 1920s type. Unfortunately, only to discover that the “male authority” has not handled her finances wisely, losing her the resources she had counted on. Never­ theless, Laura departs to Great Mop, causing shock and indignation to all her relatives save nephew Titus, another country lover in the family, and takes a room there, leading a carefree, blissfully aimless life exploring the surroundings and learning local ways. Her complacency is disrupted when “culture” (her nephew) comes to claim her, turning her back into the domesticated Aunt Lolly, and the only way to preserve her autonomy is to turn into a witch, thus merging first with the villagers (also all witches), and then with the environment, called Satan in the novel (perhaps for the sake of thrill) but really standing for nature itself as opposed to everything oppressive (LW, 124)2: “Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament … the Bank of England … and half a dozen other useful props of civilization”—in other words, identity attributes constructing what she is not, while by embracing Satan/nature Laura is finally at peace with what she is. Written a year later and set about the same historic time as Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927) appears totally different in plot and geographic setting. It recounts the story of Timothy Fortune, a former bank clerk from London who, having spent ten years on a South Sea mission, settles on a remote island of Fanua with the ambition to convert its “unconvertible” inhabitants.

Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity   73 After three years there, he has only one convert, a beautiful boy Lueli, who is fiercely loyal to his pastor. The climax of the novel is Mr. Fortune’s discovery that his attempts to turn nature into culture have been futile: his loyal convert is still worshipping his wooden god. The result is what Harman (1991, 71) sees as the ultimate tragedy of the man, reiterated in Sylvia’s own comments on her earlier work (ibid., 124): the missionary himself loses his god, and slides into a bleak realization that we humans cannot “love anything without messing it about” (MFM, 194). Despite the seeming plot differences, there is much similarity between the two novels. First, they are both written in the genre of a fantasy novel with a moral edge—influence of Wells and Stevenson, as well as the vogue of the day. But, differently from her male contemporaries, Warner does not explore the world of pirates or scientists, choosing to work with what Harman (1991, 71) calls “the most unpromising material”—both Lolly and Timothy are “mute, middle-­aged English failures” (ibid.). The biographer (ibid.) praises Sylvia’s skill in opening these characters to the readers’ fantasies, thus achieving an incredible degree of realism. What is most remarkable about these novels, however, is the way they explore and subvert the nature-­culture dichotomy, problematizing it as an unhealthy patriarchal practice and bringing out altern­ atives, such as paganism and witchcraft.

Place, nature, and civilization Place and nature play an important part in the two novels. In Buell’s (2005, 61–69) terms, one can follow the transformation of localities from “abstract space,” a point on a map, to a place that is “seen, heard, smelled, imagined, loved, hated, feared, or revered” (Buell 2005, 63). Sylvia Townsend Warner can be viewed as a regional writer who, like Laura, was first attached to her father’s home at Harrow, Middlesex, then residing in London, until she finally found her own place in Dorset (Thomas Hardy’s country), spending most of her literary and emotional adult life there with her partner Valentine Ackland. There is a strong biographical link between her fictional situations and life experiences. On the basis of an account of her discovery of the Essex marshes, Harman (1991, 52–53) describes the future writer’s, then 28, decision to stay at Drinkwaters indefinitely, having “become properly her own person,” one pos­ sessing inner integrity and self-­awareness that was lacking in her former London self, which she referred to as “the creature of whoever I was with.”3 That dis­ covery of identity evolved, for Sylvia, into “the discovery that it was possible to write poetry” (ibid., 53). In the same way, Laura comes to be her true self in what becomes her “place” (in Buell’s terms)—the remote village Great Mop and the surrounding countryside of Buckinghamshire. For the preceding 20 years, Laura had to accept the family rhythm of summers in the country and winters in London from the second week of Septem­ ber, with the arrival of “unhealthy” season of fallen leaves and damp earth. The imposed dualism of exciting/healthy London vs. dull/unhealthy countryside,

74   J. Tofantšuk though she personally longed for that damp but alive earth, dead leaves and the moon calling her “Now! Now!” (66), resulted in the sense of split personality or false identity she had in that London space: “while her body sat before the first fires and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely sea-­bords, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a wood” (LW, 67). One may observe ecofeminist connections in Laura’s affinity with the moon,4 as well as the dichotomy of city/woods as one of culture/nature, whereof Laura definitely belongs to the latter. Her inner conflict, the uncomfortable situ­ ation of made identity continues until she makes her rebellious decision to go where she belongs—to her place, which she first knows as a place of imagina­ tion and meaning—as Buell’s ecological place. Having announced her determi­ nation to her disapproving brother, she already feels a new person—of her own, not somebody else’s, making: “she had come to the edge of the wood, and felt its cool breath on her face” (LW, 90). Once at Great Mop, she finds it as windy and rainy as her family foretold, which she finds not scary but exciting, remark­ ing inwardly with a sarcastic satisfaction (Warner’s trademark) that “weather like this … would never be allowed in London” (LW, 91). The paradox that weather can be “allowed” is quite explicable in terms of cul­ tural identity based on dualist thought: weather is nature, but in city space nature is subdued to cultural rules, standards, clichés. Just like Laura was not “allowed” to feel the way she did, to have a life of her own, freedom to “sit in the doorway and think” (LW, 194) rather than being “the refuse of [others’] thoughts” (LW, 196), feeding on life’s leftovers if not fitting into the general scheme proper to her class and gender at the time (married, child-­bearing, city-­dwelling, ball-­ going, fashion-­conscious) so nature, too, would be judged as “too” cold/hot, un/healthy, un/bearable, moody, rainy—in a word, acceptable or unacceptable. Thus, both Laura and nature are objects of backgrounding, the Up/Down hier­ archy discussed above. It is worth remarking that the names of Laura’s family allude to British mon­ archs: James, Henry, Princess Caroline, and their descendent Titus, ironically linked to Roman history of conquests. Thus the Willowes represent culture unadulterated by nature, rejecting the countryside they once inhabited, propa­ gating evil and cruelty. They have fused with the mechanistic “waste land” of the 1920s, in which, in T.S. Eliot’s (Townsend Warner’s contemporary!) vision, there is no place for real communication and real feeling. As discussed by Ter­ blanche (in the present volume), Eliot’s Waste Land represents a kind of life that is dangerously removed from a sense of organic unity with nature and, by exten­ sion, members of society (p. 54). In this context, Laura acts as a counter-­force all along: as a country-­dweller, she is interested in herbs and their gastronomic as well as medicinal powers, delighting her father and improving his health; having moved to London, she continues “destabilizing” the harshly ordered, rational household of Henry and Caroline by bringing in lilies and chrysanthemums, or carnations that are always too beautiful, out of season, irrational, impracticable in Caroline’s eyes, in a word, wrong. This makes Laura akin to Ophelia, compellingly discussed in this

Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity   75 volume (Kordecki) and alluded to earlier in my essay: in Kordecki’s view, by bringing in flowers, Ophelia brings a more alive natural world into “the stifling monarchal and familial struggles of the court” (this volume, p. 16), acting as “nature’s nurse” (ibid.), as each flower is associated with a certain character’s health and thus a promise of healing. In the same way, Laura with her lilies and beech leaves brings some life and aesthetic illumination into the rational London household, which, however, does not want to accept the healing, leaving her no alternative but to move to the countryside by herself. It is no wonder that natural imagery is used throughout Lolly Willowes to describe the protagonist, her situation, self-­perception, transformations, and even her political views. For example, a sustained metaphor is employed comparing objectified women to berries and trees: … all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. Nothing for them except sub­ jection, and plaiting their hair … they think how they were young once, … like trees in spring. But they are like trees towards the end of the summer, heavy and dusty, and nobody finds their leaves surprising, or notices them till they fall off. (LW, 94) Here we can see how Warner explores and in fact challenges the standard women/nature association: on the one hand, there is a “natural link” but, on the other hand, it is culture that makes it appear “natural.” Laura, realizing that enforced situation of backgrounding, strives out of it. Making her programmic speech in defense of witchcraft as the only alternative, she suddenly feels not like a rooted tree anymore but like a bird, “as though she had been thrown into the air and had suddenly begun to fly” (194). Remarkably, there are no women in Mr. Fortune’s Maggot,5 but one can see ecofeminist issues in the novel, because from an ecofeminist point of view, not only women, but also other marginal groups, such as people of color, indigenous people, children, and so on, are subjected to backgrounding. In a series of comic episodes, the European missionary is trying to “convert” a Polynesian boy not only to Christianity but also to European ways, forgetting the boy’s own identity and trying to squeeze him into his own. For instance, he spends the whole day sewing clothes for Lueli (a strong cultural marker), only to discover that he had forgotten to allow for the natural curves of the boy’s body, making him feel tight, uncomfortable and look ridiculous, not to mention the torture of being measured and made to try on strange-­looking items, while what the boy wants most at the moment is to bathe in the stream or lie in the shade being comfort­ able in his body in a climate that does not require extra layers physically—so why should they be forced upon him, culturally. As Fortune makes his next cul­ tural attempt, making the boy learn geometry, even he himself senses the dis­ crepancy and absurdity of his intentions. Lying on his back in order to demonstrate the logic of measures and heights, he becomes aware not of these

76   J. Tofantšuk geometrical properties—product of reason—but the natural sensation of “the sun … delicious and the grass soft” (MFM, 180). In that world of nature, pleasure, and wooden gods, there is no place for geometry, a hole in the earth is a hole in the earth and not a geometric point—appointed starting point (170)—and the ocean is vast and to be bathed in, not measured. Another symbolic episode is when Mr. Fortune, having discovered that Lueli has not given up his pagan god for the new Christian one, spends an hour “commanding, reasoning, expostu­ lating, explaining, persuading, threatening” (MFM, 117), the boy sits without looking or listening. Presently, however, he starts listening hard, to sounds that do have meaning: the sounds of a beginning earthquake. Timothy’s watch stops, reminding him that “time is a convention” (MFM, 142). The earthquake, the fire, the tide, and the ensuing rain are, in contrast, “equally natural, equally account­ able for, equally inevitable” (MFM, 147). Indeed, for Lueli, forces of nature is the only frame of reference, as is his “natural” spirituality, his wooden gods that the white missionary attempted to take away. Like in Lolly Willowes, natural imagery is used as illustrative of human predicaments, complications of identity, and degrees of freedom. The bird metaphor, standing for female liberation in the former novel, is employed to describe a situation of pigeon-­holing,6 when Mr. Fortune realizes that by forcing European ways on Lueli he had “enslaved him,” “kept him on a string … tormenting him with that damned geometry” (MFM, 195) in an attempt to discipline him into a docile body of the other: Yes, parrot! You may well whistle. But be careful. Don’t attract my atten­ tion too much lest I make a pet of you, and put you in a cage, and then in the end, when you had learned to talk like me instead of whistling like a wise bird, wring your neck because you couldn’t learn to repeat Paradise Lost. (Ibid.) Here, one should not overlook the allusion to Milton’s masterpiece treated ironically: paradise may be lost not to disobedience, but by obeying culture. Neither should we disregard the symbolic implications of the island’s name: Fanua may be an inversion of fauna,7 a paradise in which humanimals and earth’s others are in harmony for as long as the harmony is not disrupted, inverted by the intrusion of civilization with its principles, geometry, and hierar­ chical religion. The theme of intrusion of civilization upon nature prominent in the colonial account of Mr. Fortune’s Maggot is also quite strong in Lolly Willowes, e.g., in the Turneresque vision of a train as a mechanic monster slashing through the serenity of the countryside: “The wind and the moon and the ranging cloud pack were not the only hunters abroad that night: something else was hunting among the hills, hunting slowly, deliberately, sure of its quarry” (LW, 112). Turner, whose Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) comes to mind as a mirror of this descrip­ tion, had a dual attitude to progress and trains: next to apprehension, he shared his contemporaries’ enthusiasm about technological progress providing greater opportunities for travelling, getting inspiration from “real” nature, and painting

Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity   77 truthfully in plain air. The duality is prompted in the painting by the contrasting color scheme, and the image of a hare running for its life ahead of the train pre­ sented as a slow but noisy, magnificently threatening monster. Laura’s emotion rather resembles that of Turner’s peasant, raising from his work to stare in amazement and apprehension at the passing train. As a modern woman, she cannot share the 1850s peasant’s wonder—hers is already the time of automobile and relatively easy travel. But she does suddenly share the horror, the inappro­ priateness of a train intruding upon her peace, the quiet and season-­bound life she is now leading: “Loud, separate and abrupt, each part of the engine trampled down her wits” (LW, 112). A modern middle-­class woman with a two-­decade experience of London life, Laura now finds comfort and domestic familiarity in the fields, hen farm, and fantasy of a witch’s hut on hen legs, and apprehension in the formerly familiar sight and sound of a train, thus reversing the hierarchy of nature/culture, pro­ gressive/bygone, technology/tradition, science/mysticism.

Nature: from possession to “encounter” Examining the relationship of nature and civilization, their conflict in works of literature, one must not forget that this approach, though aiming at disrupting hierarchies, is itself dualist. As Patrick Murphy (1995) rightfully points out, there is a difference between “nature” writing and ecological writing. The latter is mostly associated with the tradition of the pastoral, which tends to idealize nature, while what is needed for an ecological text is not idealization but “a true encounter with it” (1995, 25). While Murphy (ibid.) is certainly insightful on the role of the point of view in classic pastoral texts as dominating/anthropocentric and thus not truly “ecological,” it would be probably too limiting to claim that “self-­conscious ecological writing … [is] a phenomenon primarily of the late twentieth century and that which precedes it … mostly protoecological” (ibid., 26). In examining the two novels by Warner, we can find, in my opinion, a truly ecological/ecofeminist angle, differentiating between anthropocentric possession and a caring “encounter.” In Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, the protagonist progresses from a possessive atti­ tude to, if not care, then at least realization that a Euro(anthropo)centric approach is erroneous and even harmful. Upon arrival on the island of Fanua, his greatest wish is similar to Laura’s: to be left alone in this newly discovered place they are determined to love. There is a significant difference in attitude, however: Mr. Fortune’s “love” for the island is that of ownership: when the party of Euro­ peans helping him install on the island depart, he sees them off “with a renewed sense of ownership” (MFM, 10), declaring firmly that he wishes to be left alone “for at least a year” (ibid.). Departing after three years of unsuccessful mission, Mr. Fortune realizes how wrong that attempt at a “love” has been. He now feels that Fanua was everything “that was real, everything that was significant” (MFM, 249)—a sense of “place” that is more real than the now remote Europe with a war breaking out (he cannot make sense of who is fighting who, or what

78   J. Tofantšuk they are all fighting about, 248). However, he also realizes his ultimate tragedy at having been unable to approach the place with dignity, to have a true “encoun­ ter” with the place, led by his mind, the Superego that had ideas about Euro-­ Christian superiority, which in his case proved destructive: For man’s will is a demon that will not let him be. It leads him to the edge of a clear pool; and while he sits admiring it, with his soul suspended over it like a green branch and dwelling in his own reflection, will stretches out his hand and closes his fingers upon a stone—a stone to throw into it. (MFM, 193) The passage addresses the common 1920s idea supported, for instance, by D.H. Lawrence, who believed that modern man was unhappy because he had lost touch with his natural Id and could only approach nature through his rational mind, subduing it to his will, through violence. In a brilliantly allegoric poem, Snake (1923), a man is both instinctively fascinated by a snake, “earth-­brown, earth-­golden from the burning bowels of the earth,” and rationally led by the “voice of his education” ordering him to take a stick and kill the snake “if he were a man,” which he does, and the result is not a sense of victory but, like for Mr. Fortune, “a pettiness.” Warner returns to the theme in a 1930s short story The Salutation, written as a sequel to Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. The protagonist, travelling across a South American landscape, identifies himself with a large, clumsy rhea being shot before his eyes (Warner 2000, 80–81). On the one hand, the rhea is but another failure in a world where only the perfect is accepted: There was no need to look for the motive. Opposite slays opposite.… Slender, fiercely erect, racked with youth and pride, the boy with the gun stood in a trance of hatred, defying a world of rheas, a world of harmless­ ness, dowdiness, ungainliness. On the other hand, we can see the harmful dualism exposed here: the rhea represents nature as the other, the protagonist a failure as the other (not “man enough” to shoot or hit with a stick or throw a stone); both are “Downs” in the hierarchical Up/Down logic of western discourse. In Lolly Willowes, the complexity of possession vs. encounter is explored through the character of Laura herself, who undergoes transformation, and nephew Titus, who is not capable of one. Laura’s transformation begins with purchasing gorgeous chrysanthemums in London, making her want to move to the village where they come from. But there is a significant difference between a place in imagination and a real place of care. The episode with cowslips serves as a turning point: Laura encounters them in the field; she does not buy them, does not bring them home to put in a vase, stroking and loving, in a word, pos­ sessing, as she did with lilies and chrysanthemums back in her London days. Instead, she kneels down to the wild flowers, in a symbolic act of catharsis and liberation, laying her face “close to their fragrance” (LW, 123). She is first

Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity   79 amazed at their simple yet complex beauty, and how they chose to grow in the particular field (not where she was looking for them), without observing the calendar (she expected to find them in May but only did in the first summer days). To be more accurate, she does not kneel down to them, but among them, becoming one of them, a “self-­in-relation.” Here in the field, Laura is again like Ophelia (Kordecki, this volume), “like a creature native.” However, she is much more fortunate than Ophelia, sinking into the earth not “to muddy death,” but to a new life. Touching the earth, reuniting with it, Laura simultaneously reunites with her own deeper identity, which is the beginning of her liberation. At the end of the novel, she burrows herself into the earth—to slumber there “among mur­ muring leaves overhead” (LW, 203), for it is autumn and she, having finally departed from culture, embraces the natural rhythms of the seasons.8 The arrival of Titus, who abandons his art studies in European capitals to follow “Aunt Lolly” to Great Mop, makes her aware of the difference, which surfaces during their walks in the countryside. If Laura walks in full awareness of the spirit of the place, grateful to be accepted by the woods and leaves as part of an ecosystem, Titus discusses the landscape, illustrating it “with possessive gestures” (LW, 176), loving it “as if it were a body” (LW, 134), wishing “to stroke it” (ibid.), like Laura was stroking her chrysanthemums at the initial stage she had overcome. We can see parallels with Mary Austin’s Ford (1917) pub­ lished a decade prior to Lolly Willowes and discussed earlier in this volume (Geçgil): land is a mistress to be cherished and courted, but is more often com­ pelled and mastered as a result, subordinated to sexist human desires. As Titus keeps talking about Fuseli, the romantic painter he is working on, who special­ ized in images of witches sacrificing babies and women having nightmares, Laura starts having nightmares about Fuseli (culture) coming to kill village hens and turn the hills into a golf-­course (133). That intrusion of Titus’s psycho-­ sexual fantasies (comparable with frontier conquests discussed by Koldony and capitalist “owning” of the land touched upon by Geçgil) and his pastoral, cul­ tural attitude makes Laura feel as if the spirit of the place is withdrawing from her (LW, 135) and only “silence” is heard where she used to converse with hills, woods, and the moon. Instead of living, talking nature embracing her, she now perceives Great Mop as “a place like any other place, a pastoral landscape where an aunt walked out with her nephew” (LW, 136). The only radical solution is to call out for help—which Nature does send. If in Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, nature’s weapon is the earthquake, in Lolly Willowes it is Satan, king of soil, woods, and bees who he sends to drive out Titus and restore peace, returning Laura to the ecosystem she had nearly lost a place in. This fantastic outcome brings us to the last point—the role of religion and spirit­ uality in the two novels.

Religion, spirituality, and care Karen J. Warren (2000) exposes the patriarchal nature of Judeo-­Christian reli­ gions that put down, in addition to women, “other others”—children, animals,

80   J. Tofantšuk plants, and the earth itself, with stars and God being above all. In this vertical hierarchy, earth and Satan are both “down,” and so are pagan gods, which are made of wood or stone and are material rather than spiritual. In Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, the protagonist realizes the dualism, which demystifies his mission and possibly faith: … such a superior invulnerable God, part of that European conspiracy which opposes gunboats to canoes and rifles to bows and arrows, which showers death from the mountains upon Indian villages, which rounds up the negro into an empire and tricks him of his patrimony. (MFM, 140) It is amazing to find such clear postcolonial insights in a novel written as early as 1927. Considering the role of Christianity, particularly the Bible, in coloniza­ tion, Huggan and Tiffin (2010) point to the “control of textual interpretation” (163) as patriarchy’s way to subdue women and animals, producing “the indoc­ trinated notion of inferior races” (162) and a “hierarchy that will eventually be accepted as ‘natural’, indeed as what constitutes the very ‘nature’ of human beings” (ibid.). If narratives of power we live by today are but product of assumed interpretative power over a historical record, they can be demystified through the same method—which is exactly what Warner does in Lolly Willowes. The novel ends with Laura sensing that she had always been a secret witch, from her early interest in healing herbs to attending a Sabbath at Great Mop (where she meets most of the villagers, including the local clergyman). She also makes acquaintance with Satan himself, who does not appear with horns and hooves, as clichés would have it, but rather as a kind keeper of the woods, and the only creature who would listen to Laura’s speech on the position of women without interrupting and take it seriously. Depicted by Warner, who was not par­ ticularly religious, God and devil appear as constructs to illustrate the philo­ sophical hierarchy of matter/spirit, in which Satan, “enemy of the soul” (LW, 201) belongs to the “lower” former. As spirit is associated with the divine, matter would automatically be “diabolic,” equaling nature that is, as ecofeminist theologian Elizabeth Gray put it (qtd. Warren 2000, 30) “not only at the bottom of … pyramid but … the most full of dirt, blood and such nasty natural surprises as earthquakes, floods and bad storms.” Playing on the Modernist public interest for the gothic and the Uncanny, Warner cleverly links her witches and Satan to earth, which is reminiscent of Lawrence’s Snake/Serpent—“the grass [was] in league with him” and “his roots went down to a pit” (LW, 200). The pit repres­ ents the unknown, but in this novel, it is the eternal and the caring, as Laura con­ cludes, realizing that Satan is not death, neither is he of death—being immortal, “his mind brooded immovably over the landscape and over the natures of men, an unforgetting and unchoosing mind” (LW, 201). Thus, he believes that Folly Wood, cut down during the war, is still there, part of the ecosystem and people are part of that wood. Because “there is no appeasing his witness” (ibid.) of what

Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity   81 earth was like, “at one stage of civilization people said he was the embodiment of all evil, and then a little later on that he did not exist” (ibid.). Thus, writing on such controversial topics as religion and demonology, Warner is in tune with ecofeminist ideas of alternative spirituality. Laura is a witch in that she refuses to be a “docile body”—“not to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either” but “to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own” (LW, 196), which is rebellious and, therefore, “diabolic.” As Foucault maintains, there is no master without a slave. Paraphrasing, there is no God without Satan, and no “good women” without “witches.” There would be no such categories if there were no dualism. A possible alternative to dualism is ambiguity, encountered with sufficient degree in Lolly Willowes, as in the allu­ sion to Baba Yaga9 (LW, 122), the witch from Slavonic/Russian folklore, resid­ ing in the woods (borderline between life and death) in a hut on hen’s legs that can go anywhere at her will. Baba Yaga is an ambiguous creature: she is both evil and wise, a child stealer and destroyer of men, but also the one who tells riddles and who men turn to as the last resort, when all in the human world has failed them. A keeper of the woods, she is accompanied by animals at her serv­ ice—black birds, cats, owls, snakes, frogs—creatures embodying both menace and wisdom (Laura, too, adopts a black kitten she calls Vinegar). This ambiguous, borderline position makes the witch/Baba Yaga a perfect ecofemi­ nist character. Living deep in the woods, we can never imagine her burn them, cut, destroy, or sell to people. In the same way, witch Laura adopts an “ethic of care,” approaching the woods as woods, and herself as one at rest there, neither disturbing nor being disturbed.

Conclusion In Warner’s novels I’ve discussed, those “outside” culture, religion, and civiliza­ tion are in tune with themselves and the environment, as true “selves-­inrelation.” When culture attempts to turn them into a “docile body” (mold a good Christian Theodore out of the intuitive naked Polynesian Lueli, or domesticated Aunt Lolly out of the dreamy, herb-­witting Laura), it is nature that comes to the rescue—sending an earthquake or earth-­rooted Satan, subverting all possible binaries and pigeon-­holes. In the same way, Warner herself can be viewed as a “writer-­in-relation,” resisting labels and eschewing dualism by working at the “tectonic plates” of feminism, anti-­imperialism, anti-­centrism and (proto?)ecolo­ gical writing. Focusing on women and “other others”—middle-­aged failures, “non-­manly” men, ungraceful animals and indigenous people—Warner resorts to natural imagery to underscore their strong link with nature as a source of agency. Problematizing the nature/culture, as well as men/women and norm/other, dichotomy, Warner creates narrative situations of backgrounding (of traditional religions, female identity, and so on) or violence against land and animals. Like her contemporary Mary Austin, she brings forth the idea of “love for the land,” resisting the essentialist equation of women with nature, which would eventually

82   J. Tofantšuk result in backgrounding and subordination. She shows how an affinity with nature can be both complicating and liberating—in a culture of reason, those “others” outside rationality are labelled “mad,” like Ophelia, or “a witch,” like Laura. At the same time, these characters act as counter-­forces who not only restore the organic unity with their own identity, but also challenge the very binary of culture/nature, cleverly sliding around the two concepts towards repre­ senting them as a continuum rather than a binary. Agency is possible for an ecological self, who does not succumb to standard, hierarchical ways of thinking and living. Subverting the dualism, Warner creates fantastic situations and a spirituality that does not exist apart from the ecosystem and materiality of the earth.

Notes 1 Also used by Plumwood (1993, 122) and compellingly by Gaard and Terblanche in this volume. 2 The two novels will be referred to as LW and MFM respectively for convenience. 3 At that point, Sylvia, a talented musician, composer, and music historian, was in a rela­ tionship with Percy Buck, a married man twice her age, which was both an enriching and a stifling, disheartening experience, as one can gather from this comment and her diaries of mid- and late 1920s. 4 Women are traditionally associated with the moon, with symbolism as well as preju­ dices coming from the cycles of the female body, the enigma leading to moon/madness and moon/witch associations, which will prove helpful in understanding Laura’s char­ acter further on. 5 One may argue, however, that the native boy Lueli is clearly feminized and the main character himself is mildly (latently) gay. This may have to do with the prevailing erro­ neous stereotype in the 1920s that homosexuals were like women. As gay agenda in STW’s writings has already been discussed by other scholars (e.g., Swaab 2010) and for lack of space, it will not be elaborated on in my chapter. 6 In Hall’s terms, being forced into an identity and judged according to a restrictive category, always hierarchical. 7 I wish to thank Ann Torday Gulden for this insight and other valuable suggestions. 8 It is easy to denounce such an ending ecocritically, especially bearing in mind Mur­ phy’s (2010) illuminating critique of Thoreau’s Walden. For Murphy (ibid., 20), indi­ vidualistic isolationism is not enough; being simple requires much complication and healthy social interaction. But for a woman (Thoreau puts man foremost) “dissolving in nature” is the only alternative to being enslaved by culture, at least at that point in history/herstory. 9 Nesbitt (2014, 23) believes that Warner benefitted from Ralston’s Russian Folktales (1873) for the image of Baba Yaga.

References Buell, Laurence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon. Hall, Stuart. 2003. “Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul de Gay 1–17. London: Sage.

Ecofeminist philosophy and issues of identity   83 Harman, Clare. 1991. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. London: Minerva. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Women, Nature and the Environment. London: Routledge. Kolodny, Annette. 1984. The Land Before Her. Chapel Hill and London: North Carolina University Press. Lawrence, David Herbert. 1993. “Snake” (1923). In The Norton Anthology of British Literature. 6th ed., vol. 2, 2123–2125. New York: Norton. Murphy, Patrick D. 1995. Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Albany: State University of New York Press. Murphy, Patrick D. 2010. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Nesbitt, Jennifer P. 2014. “A Critical Edition for Lolly: In the Benefits of Being Unre­ garded.” In: The Journal of Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. Staffordshire: Panda Press. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge. Plumwood, 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge. Swaab, Peter. 2010. “The Queerness of Lolly Willowes.” In The Journal of Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. Staffordshire: Panda Press. Townsend Warner, Sylvia. 2000. Salutation (1932). Carlton: The Tartarus Press. Townsend Warner, Sylvia. 2010. Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927). London: Virago. Townsend Warner, Sylvia. 2012. Lolly Willowes (1926). London: Virago. Vakoch, Douglas A. 2012. “Introduction: A Different Story.” In Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Warren, Karen J. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.

6 “Taking mighty strides across the world” Positioning Zora Neale Hurston in the ecofeminist tradition Nicole Anae Black voices speaking the natural world In the hand-­drawn image decorating the Christmas card that Zora Neale Hurston sent to Fannie Hurst in December 1926, it appears deeply symbolic that Hurston omits from the woman’s face any anatomically distinguishable features (Hurston 1926). That this faceless woman almost merges into the surrounding ecology by virtue of her anonymity and her neutrality appears to symbolize an equilibrium between the orders of lifeforms as much as the worlds of the human and nonhuman. Yet, the faceless woman seems to also personify the silencing of women’s voices in the expression of female interactions with the natural environment. The elision of black voices from expressing their relationships with the land, the seasons, and the natural environment, is a concern Hurston (1955) tackles in her essay, originally published in 1950, “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” claiming “That a great mass of Negros can be stirred by the pageants of Spring and Fall; the extravaganza of summer, the majesty of winter … is ruled out” (Hurston 1979, 169–173). The statement memorializes Hurston’s position not only concerning expanding the Black American literary canon but concerning the narrative possibilities to effectively blend the cultural and the environmental with broader pressing questions about social justice, racial inequity, and the interconnectedness of people of color (and minorities) with the natural environment. Concomitantly, Hurston’s stance regarding the powerful relationship between literature and the environment emphasizes women’s authorial power in reimagining a “new” genre beyond nature writing: “Literature and other arts are supposed to hold up the mirror to nature,” claimed Hurston (1995, 955), referring not only to human nature, but the direct relationship between people of color and the natural environment. For Hurston: “With only the fractional ‘exceptional’ and the ‘quaint’ portrayed, a true picture of Negro life in America cannot be” (955). Selected letters from Hurston’s catalogue reveal that she eliminates various forms of negation in bringing together inter-­racial perspectives of the natural environment, and raising the possibility of “seeing” the natural world in order to, if not redefine, then certainly contest hierarchical categories of race—blackness and whiteness—in appreciating ecological lifeform. In Hurston’s letter, for

“Taking mighty strides across the world”   85 instance, this time to the author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953) concerning her autobiographical novel Cross Creek (1942), Hurston expresses a close cross-­racial identification with Rawlings’ view of flora and fauna: Whether it pleases you or not, you are my sister. You look at plants and animals and people in the way I do. You are conscious of the three layers of life, instead of the obvious thing before your nose. You see and feel the immense past, what is now, and feel inside you something of what is to come. (Hurston 2003, 486) Race categories in a like-­minded vision of the “three layers of life”—the ecological past, present, and future—are eliminated in a kind of kinship sisterhood encouraged by this concurrent seeing and feeling of the natural world. While Hurston (1991, 45) argued “There is no single face in nature because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle,” here, literature offered a way in which to bridge those discretionary visions toward appealing to a collective sense of self and the living world. So acutely, for instance, did Hurston affiliate with Rawlings’ realization of her “Negro characters,” and the “ ‘picture-­talk’ ” of the “Negro dialects,” that she claimed that in Cross Creek Rawlings had “written the best thing on Negros of any white writer who has ever lived” (486). By this Hurston appears to meditate beyond what Carol J. Adams (2006, 120) identifies as “definition by negation,” to rethink the means by which race politics defines the level to which living human beings not only afford one another moral consideration but see and feel their natural world and the nonhuman beings within as collectively significant.

The question of anti-­speciesism in Hurston’s literatures “[E]xtending moral consideration to non-­human nature and promoting representative thinking beyond species boundaries” (Smith 2003, 70)—that is, “anti-­ speciesism”—represents the eco-­critical approach adopted in this examination of Hurston’s literary and textual representation of human and nonhuman animals. From this perspective I explore the ecofeminist implications of the ways in which Hurston’s work might be re-­read to examine the ways in which sexism, racism, and the subordination of nonhuman animals intersect and overlap. My aim here is not to define Hurston in terms of absolute partisanship—as, for instance, a deep ecologist, biocentric, ecofeminist, or some other eco-­ethical affiliate category—nor to enforce conventional dualisms by drawing figurative parallels between women and animals, nor to conflate women and/with nature. Rather, my aim is to critically examine how the relations between people and animals in Hurston’s work can be reappraised metaphorically against the broader picture of patriarchy and mechanisms of exchange, commodification, suppression, and speciesism. Hurston does, after all, make this metaphorical allusion quite clear in Their Eyes Were Watching God in the character Nanny’s folkloric observation:

86   N. Anae So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. (Hurston 1937, 19) While Robert Hemenway (2003, 76) argues that “Many stories and sayings about mules became allegories exhibiting the creative capacities of black storytellers defying their treatment of animals,” the mule allegory as applied by Hurston illustrates not only the ways in which forms of subjugation traverse racial and speciesist lines, but also how oppression mediates forms and iterations of human and nonhuman representation. The mule—sterile progeny of a male donkey and a mare—links beings that are associated with exploitation (domesticated animals), with the gendering of human beings (women and men), as well as recalling folkloric mythologies of the mule as miscegeny metaphor, thus creating a three-­way nexus interlocking both species with subjugations (labor, power, oppression). But the nexus itself is fundamentally ambivalent; mules also represent admirable qualities in black folklore: human and nonhuman willfulness, power, endurance. Hurston’s work therefore does not offer clear-­cut examples of what is speciesist and what is not, but rather her anthropological and personal literatures illustrate the complexities around inter-­species relationships which can sometimes include caring for animals (nonhuman and human) while simultaneously exploiting them. For instance, while Hurston’s mule allegory likens women’s suppression to animal’s servitude, she also sometimes conflates woman and animal for specific effect—particularly in reference to herself. Her personal letters and correspondences, for instance, include her allegorical allusion to the mule in her own labor efforts. To the educator and librarian William Stanley Hoole (1903–90), for instance, Hurston (2003, 366) wrote:  I think I must be God’s left-­handed mule, because I work so hard. That’s [sic] very funny too, because no lazier mortal ever cried for breath. But the press of new things, plus the press of old things yet unfinished keep me on the treadmill all the time. In a letter to her editor Burroughs Mitchell she wrote, “If you find a mule tied to a tree, wring his tail and think of me” (563). The dualistic application of the mule allegory might illustrate that systems of production rely on the labor efforts of both the human and nonhuman being. Yet, the very fact that the mule tied to a tree may be symbolic not only of the animal’s own oppression—but that of human willfulness, power, and endurance—craftily illustrates the interconnectedness of gender, labor, and speciesism in forms of literary representation. Many of the African-­American folktales Hurston collected during her anthropological field work in and around Jacksonville, Florida, beginning in February 1927, underscore the various figurative interconnections between gender, oppression, and speciesism: “In Mississippi a black horse runaway with a white lady.

“Taking mighty strides across the world”   87 When they caught the horse they lynched him, and they hung the harness and burnt the buggy” (Hurston 2002, 110).1 This short tale in Every Tongue Got to Confess, and others like it, illustrates the extent to which anthropomorphized animals in African-­American folktales become subjected to forms of human oppression while simultaneously projecting racist hierarchies of exclusion. Animals thus delineated also present probative possibilities in analyzing ideologies of race politics and orders of marginalization: De gopher waz called intuh court. De judge an’ all de jury wuz all turtles. An’ de gopher got up and looked around, an’ ast de court could he be excused. De judge ast him why, an’ he told de judge: “Blood is thicker dan water.” (252)2 First coined by clinical psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970—in deploring animal exploitation and animal experimentation abuses—“speciesism,” simply put, is a form of anthropocentrism, that is, “an ethics completely centered on the interests of human beings” (Yu and Lei 2009, 247). For Tony Mulligan (2011, 226), speciesism might provisionally be regarded as  the endorsement of (or action in line with) any belief whatsoever that is normatively equivalent to regarding humans as the only creaturely bearers of value or as creatures whose value as humans systematically trumps the value of all other creatures. It is from an ecofeminist reading of her work that I examine how Hurston realizes human and nonhuman encounters “to demonstrate that sexism, racism, classism, speciesism, and naturism (the oppression of nature) are naturally reinforcing systems of oppression” (Gaard 1993, 5). From this position, the ecofeminist implications of Hurston’s literatures and writings do not suggest a “single issue” movement, to quote Greta Gaard (1993, 5), but “rests on the notion that liberation of all oppressed groups must be addressed simultaneously.” I am suggesting two separate but interrelated points here: that Hurston’s representation of human/ nonhuman relationships bears more than a coincidental interconnectedness between the concepts of racism, sexism, challenging “quaint” (stereotypical) representation of blackness, and notions of environmental politics; and, by extension, the recognition of “additional similarities between those forms of human oppression and the oppressive structures of speciesism and naturism” (Gaard 1993). This position is structured around Hurston’s anthropological interests and expertise documenting and preserving African-­American folkloric culture.

Anthropology, folklore, and human/nonhuman relationships Hurston assisted in mobilizing and launching the Harlem Renaissance movement between 1925 and 1927 while studying anthropology at Barnard College: then this institution’s only black scholar. In February 1927 she successfully applied

88   N. Anae for funding with the Carter Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and together with the support of German-­American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), Columbia University’s eminent anthropologist, Hurston spent two years travelling to the Bahamas, as well as New Orleans, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia undertaking field research and collating artefacts of black folklore. Hurston (2002, 52) wrote in a letter to Langston Hughes on March 17, 1927: “I am getting some gorgeous material down here, verse and prose, magnificent.” In 1935, while on a field recording assignment in Florida, Hurston undertook studies in folk musicology under Alan Lomax (1915–2002), whose father was the pioneer folksong archivist and curator John Lomax (1867–1948) and then honorary consultant for the Archive of American Folk-­ Song, Library of Congress. In 1938, Hurston agreed under contract to participate in the Federal Writers’ Project, Florida, coordinated by Dr. Carita Doggett Corse (1891–1978). While the project’s main initiative was to provide work for unemployed white-­collar writers and professionals in producing “a series of sectional guide books under the name American Guide” (Library of Congress 2015), one of its greatest contributors to informing the cultural history of the Florida region was Hurston. Corse (1939) recalled that given the rich scope of black folklore Hurston’s fieldwork had yielded: “We took her ‘potlikker’ and sprinkled it liberally for seasoning all through the Florida Guide.” From the sheer scope of black folklore Hurston collated she published seven books during her lifetime: one autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942); two books on folklore—Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938)—and four novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). For Hurston, forms of black folklore, such as music, dance, and oral narratives, represented a real, tangible, quantifiable collection of oral and kinetic cultural documents with traceable lineages back to Bahamian and West Indian origins. Much of this cultural history documents the unique relationships between the black community and the natural environment. Hurston was fascinated with the cross-­ cultural seepage of black folk culture into the very fabric of African-­American life, particularly West Indian and Bahamian resonances in folk arts forms. In “Bone Fish,” Hurston (1999, 91) observed: “Nightly in Palm Beach, Fort Pierce, Miami, Key West, and other cities of the Florida east coast the hot drumheads throb and the African-­Bahamian folk arts seep into the soil of America.” The natural environment plays a vital role in the kinesthetic and mimetic evolution of folk arts forms among black communities: “The singing grew like this,” observed Hurston (1999, 69) in Go Gator and Muddy the Water,  First a singing word or syllable repeated over and over like frogs in a pond; then followed sung phrases and chanted sentences as more and more words were needed to portray the action of the battle, the chase, or the dance. Then, “Somewhere [in time],” she claimed, “songs for sound-­singing branched off from songs for story-­telling until we arrive at prose” (71). The natural

“Taking mighty strides across the world”   89 environment and the nonhuman beings that live within the ecological world each represented twin underlying sources inspiring black folklore as forms and expressions of a black national consciousness. In the realm of black folklore, for instance, animals are afforded moral consideration precisely because of the importance of the animal as protest figure in the history of the oral narratives traceable to the early slaves. According to folklorist Lawrence Levine (1997, 115), for instance, oral stories featuring the animal trickster motif: … were not merely clever tales of wish-­fulfillment through which slaves could escape from the imperatives of their world … They underlined the dangers of acting rashly and striking out blindly, as Brer Rabbit did when he assaulted the tar-­baby. They point out the futility of believing in the sincerity of the strong, as Brer Pig did when he allowed Fox to enter his house. Much of the existent animal trickster folklore therefore effectively maps unique relationships: inter-­species understandings and human/nonhuman interactions while effectively codifying moral parables via the amorality of the animal trickster trope. The place of animals in Hurston’s collected and original folkloric literatures also illustrates that the “interspecies peers” relationships identified by Gail Melson (2001, 97) between human and nonhuman animals often brings to the fore the sometimes harsh realities of life—issues of prejudice, patriarchy, colonization, partiality, and inequitable treatment. Animals make possible the re-­ recognition of the accepted relational affinity between human and nonhuman beings we are socialized as children to embrace while repositioning this relational affinity as an important part of adulthood. It is only really possible for an “interspecies peers” relationship to exist, however, if it is predicated on the anti-­ speciesist logic of human moral consideration for the nonhuman animal. The position of ecocentric theorists, such as Robyn Eckersley (1996, 25), for instance, argues that while it is possible to extend moral consideration to nonhuman nature, … it is not necessary that a being be a morally responsible agent in order to receive recognition as a moral considerable subject or being … it is enough that a being is a centre of agency, however rudimentary, with its own life and special mode of flourishing for it to be recognised as a morally considerable being, deserving recognition and consideration in human deliberation. It is the contention here that Hurston’s literary animals provide dual functions as both actual animal signifier (for instance, domesticated animals such as Hurston’s own pets, her dog, “Spot,” and her cat, “Kitty”) and folkloric signifier, that is, as concepts used to stand in for the actual animal in black folklore. By this I argue that in the former, the actual bodies of animals counterpoint the contemporary distancing from the “real” nonhuman animal being. Hurston documents her encounters with real animals as both corporeal and visceral

90   N. Anae experiences of “the real” as much as real interspecies relationships with her animals. While in the latter, animals as folkloric signifier, or “cultural referents” to adopt the term used by Carol J. Adams (2009, 50), represent a form of “extreme distancing from the experience of most nonhuman animals at the same time that people express and act upon deep longings for connections with others, including nonhuman animals and the rest of ‘nature’.” Actual animal referents help to bridge the modernist gap between the mere “appearance of the ‘actual’,” which Adams argues “displaces the actual experience of nonhuman animals as the referents for our relationships with other animals, feelings of alienation and separation from humans, as well as a deep longing for connection, intensify” (50). This comes to express a defining significance of the representation of the animal in black folklore—as cultural referents maintaining specific links to African-­American folkloric culture of allegorically significance. Yet even as cultural referents, the corporality of Hurston’s nonhuman animals take metaphoric pride of place in Go Gator and Muddy the Water. For instance, her accounts of black folklore never let readers forget that we ourselves are animal beings. “Folklore,” writes Hurston (1999, 69), “is the boiled-­down juice of human living.” Neither does she allow her readers to forget that other animals are also beings. In Hurston’s account of “The Crow Dance,” for instance, which features “The Crow Song,” she explains that because of its background in West Africa, the song’s signature bird, the crow,  is actually what we know in the United States as the buzzard. And the buzzard comes to get something to eat and they [the performers] are talking about it, and they dance it. And one person gets in the center and imitates the buzzard, and the rest of them fall in the background. (174) In this particular performance, the human and nonhuman relationships are intimately connected to both nature and the life cycle:  The dancers costume themselves to represent human beings, birds, animals, and even trees. In short, all nature is taking part in spring. All nature is choosing itself a partner. So the movements of the dance say something about the procreation of life. (156) However, here, animals as cultural referents do not signify the alienation of the human animal from the song’s nonhuman beings given the dance itself encourages human dancers to express and act upon direct corporeal connections with others, including the symbolic referents of nonhuman animals and the natural world. The dance is not an expression of displacement, but rather a symbolic expression of human/nonhuman unity. This crystalizes a defining significance of the representation of the animal in black folklore: as a dual actual/cultural referent maintaining specific links to

“Taking mighty strides across the world”   91 African-­American folkloric culture of allegorical significance. That “The Crow Song,” for instance, also offers a particularly illustrative example of a common trope in black folklore blurring the boundaries between human animal and nonhuman animal beings is significant here. Theriomorphy—the shapeshifting from human to nonhuman—“performs a metanarrative function. It embodies the very hybrid aesthetic of the beast fable that combines the animal as a defamiliarising figuration and the human as the allegorised common ground of experience” (Avlamis 2013, 266). The singer’s chant—“Dis crow, dis crow, goin’ to fly tonight”—personifies the theriomorphic power of transforming the human self into the nonhuman self: a bird in the final triumphant cry: “Oh ma-­ma-ma come see dis crow/See how he flies!/ Cawh!” (Hurston 1999, 156). In fact, this folkloric song and dance linking hierarchies of race and speciesism effectively challenges the crow trope as a disparaging racial epithet to instead reify the crow’s significance in African-­American folklore as intimating divine deliverance, transformation, and emancipation. The nonhuman animal of black folkloric as “culture heroes” (Hurston 1997, 62)—rabbit, bear, fox, lion, buzzard, among others—can sometimes affect the elision of the “human” as a way to remind readers that the human animal is an animal. Hurston, for instance, conspicuously transplants animals as culture heroes in her own personal writing. A letter Hurston wrote to Burroughs Mitchell, her editor at Scribner’s, about her dog (“Spot”) is particularly illustrative of this point: Animals are much more like us (or we like them) than we grant. For instance, fondness for excitement. A small female dog is in heat in my neighborhood. Three or four mornings lately, she and a band of hopefuls have arrived in front of my house. Thsi [sic] morning, the poor little dog was discouraging her suitors by tucking her tail between her legs. Spot, desiring the drama to proceed, went back of her and caught hold of her tail and raised it up. Never [in left margin: “in animals,”] have I seen a thing like that before. I have seen humans egging on excitement in the same way. (Hurston 2003, 685) The sexual allusions to human lust and “excitement” in the allegory of the relations of dogs in heat make clear to readers the equivalencies between human and nonhuman animal behaviors. Hurston’s representation of human “animal” nature acknowledges that these behaviors are more than simply carnal or instinctive impulses over which human beings have no control; they are both conscious and organized. What is “egging on” if not an act of deliberate intent?

Theorizing animal bodies in Hurston’s folkloric canon Re-­reading Hurston’s works utilizing feminist and advocate Carol J. Adams’ “definition of negation” as a conceptual paradigm reveals that Hurston appears to challenge the hierarchies delimiting the extent to which living animals— human and nonhuman—are afforded (or otherwise) moral consideration. For Adams (2006, 120),

92   N. Anae the concept of the “animal” or “animal beings” usually exists in relationship to concepts of human beings in a dyadic dance of definition by negation. When we eliminate the negation that animal has meant to the human, the absence of the human (qualities) that being animal has meant, how does this also redefine, and perhaps dethrone “human”? Hurston, I argue, explores from the position of anthropology the embedded cultural standards by which nonhuman beings are commonly characterized in opposition to “the human.” From this perspective, her literatures thus raise as a central concern the imperative of acknowledging and recognizing the human animal body, and the bodies of nonhuman animals. One of Hurston’s most vivid examples of this imperative is memorialized in a letter she wrote to the editor of the Orlando Sentinel on August 11, 1955, in response to the United States Supreme Court decision to end segregation in public schools in the South that year. Hurston’s position in her letter to the editor entitled “Court Order Can’t Mix The Races” was one of fundamental opposition based on the argument that such a decision was ineffective without fundamental changes to other social hierarchies. Hurston (2003, 611) contended that: “The whole matter revolves around the self-­respect of my people. How much satisfaction,” she asked, “can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?” Hurston makes her point by again calling on the “mule” allegory, but for very specific political ends that metaphorically connect human bodies with animal bodies (mule and mare), while simultaneously deploying the animal metaphor (mule and “white mare”) to express her opinions about the need to address pressing social justice issues: Since the days of the never-­to-be-­sufficiently deplored Reconstruction, there has been current the belief that there is no great[er] delight to Negros than physical association with whites. The doctrine of the white mare. Those familiar with the habits of mules are aware that any mule, if not restrained, will automatically follow a white mare. Dishonest mule-­traders made money out of this knowledge in the old days. Lead a white mare along a country road and slyly open the gate and the mules in the lot would run out and follow this mare. This rule being conceived and brought forth in a sly political medium with eyes on ’56, and brought forth in the same spirit and for the same purpose, it is clear that they have taken the old notion to heart and decided to act upon it. It is a cunning opening of the barnyard gate wit[h] the white mare ambling past. We are expected to hasten pell-­mell after her. (Hurston 2003, 739) Hurston’s aim appears not to metaphorically conflate the bodies of human beings with those of animals, but rather to identify a tactic of race politics—in this instance “the white mare technique”—to challenge the means by which the government structures human hierarchies along racist lines. This ideological

“Taking mighty strides across the world”   93 configuring defines and delimits the extent to which living beings—human and nonhuman—are afforded (or otherwise) moral consideration. Whereas the dishonest mule-­traders exploited to bodies of animals by exploiting an instinctual behavior, Hurston takes clear issue with “the white mare technique” as a way of disguising racist ideologies undermining her contention that not only were the State’s “Negro schools … in very good shape and on the improve,” but the fact that the “the white mare technique” only emphasized deeply embedded racial disparities in educational obligations, bureaucracies, and funding. “The Supreme Court would have pleased me more,” argued Hurston (2003, 740), “if they had concerned themselves about enforcing compulsory education provisions for the Negros in the South as is done for white children.” By linking sexism, racism, and speciesism, I re-­read Hurston’s missive as adopting an ecofeminist reversal of “the standard self-­aggrandizing definition of our species, exposing humans’ negative traits, connecting our history of devastation and cruelty to those with the mentality of dominance” (Dunayer 1999, 22). By this I argue that Hurston challenges this conviction of primacy by reversing the “white mare” device, and undermining the analogy altogether in her claim:  Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-­association. That old white mare business can go racking on down the road for all I care. (740) The allegorical reversal is perhaps even more potent given its ecofeminist allusions to suppression (human and nonhuman) as much as to challenging existing hierarchical power structures which frame racial oppression. Just as Gaard (1993, 1) argues that “no to attempt to liberate women (or any other oppressed group) will be successful without an equal attempt to liberate nature,” Hurston’s application of a familiar animal parable appears to cut across deeply embedded systems of racism that impede attempts to liberate educational equity and efficacy for people of color. The application is also symbolic of the importance of nonhuman beings in Hurston’s own literary activism and their probative possibilities in analyzing race politics and orders of marginalization: While it goes without saying that “humans are animals” the way this insight has been used has been hierarchically, i.e., racial and sexual distinctions were used to equate people of color and women with other animals or to impute animal characteristics on those who were not white, propertied men. “Human” became a definition not only about humans versus (other) animals, but also defining who among Homo sapiens would have the power to act as “humans”—voting, holding property, making laws, committing violence with impunity. Human has always been a label that is tied to power. (Adams 2006, 120)

94   N. Anae The point made by Adams assists in elucidating the voice of the “Other” that simultaneously grounds and challenges Hurston’s commentary on the animal question, and particularly the relation between “the discourse of animality … [and] living and breathing creatures” (Wolfe 2003, xx). Lynda Hill (1996, 80), for example, has noted that within Hurston’s anthropological fieldwork throughout the 1920s and thereafter, Hurston observed “the difficulty of finding tales resembling the animal lore of bygone days but also noted that tales were ‘usually quite brief, sometimes no more than four of five sentences in length.’ ” Hurston’s folktale called “Uncle Monday,” in Go Gator and Muddy the Water, offers a vivid narrative of the complexities of the intersections of the human and the nonhuman animal, as well as centralizing African-­American folkloric culture, spiritualism, nature, and the importance of place.3 Hurston gathers together a number of oral folktales told to her by locals during the course of her anthropological fieldwork as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, Florida, in the late 1930s. In this folkloric telling of an African spellbinder—a “hoodoo doctor”—claiming the theriomorphic power of transforming himself into an alligator, she invites her reader to witness a kind of coming-­of-age narrative about a character called “Old Judy Bronson.” Judy is envious not only of Uncle Monday’s hoodoo powers but experiences professional jealously as herself a hoodoo doctor given he attracts more followers among the local peoples of Eatonville and Maitland.4 Judy slanders Uncle Monday with claims that her power is not only stronger and better than his, but that the “work that he might do, she could not only undo it, she could and would ‘throw it back on him’ ” (Hurston 1991, 115–116). One day, but against her better judgment, Judy feels compelled to go line-­fishing at Blue Sink Lake, which is  startling to all of her family, for she had given up going fishing years ago and said repeatedly that she could not be bothered sitting on fish ponds and having the red bugs and the mosquitoes eating her old carcass up. (115–116) As the sun goes down, and the light grows dim, Judy becomes frightened by the “brush” after dark and feels the darkness “slipping up on her and grabbing hold of her like a varmint.” Just like Uncle Monday, Judy too shares a close proximity to nature, and particularly its secrets. While it is through the body of an animal that Uncle Monday asserts both his masculine power as much as the strength of his hoodooism, this power is ultimately only as convincing as its corporeal presence. It is, for instance, only through Judy’s own body that the veracity of Uncle Monday’s hoodooism is accorded full force. Without Judy’s corporeal experience between her human body and the almost therianthropic animal/human body of Uncle Monday, the allegory loses cogency. Judy is perhaps the only character within the “Uncle Monday” tales that actually experiences firsthand the theriomorphic power of transforming himself into an alligator body. All other references are only witness

“Taking mighty strides across the world”   95 account—such as Jim Gooden, a hunter who “claims to see Uncle Monday turn from an alligator into a man” (Croft 2002, 53). It is within this tale that Hurston realizes, at least in part, a “place where language, gender, and culture merge to give full voice to the otherwise often-­ marginalized black female self ” (McKay 1990, 54). Hurston’s folkloric literatures offer many examples of the role animals play in cultural meaning. In this sense, the contacts between humans and domesticated and wild animals come to suggest Melson’s (2001, 97) concept of “interspecies peers”—that is, interpersonal experiences of the nonhuman species as living animals bringing to the fore fundamental questions of human morality, raising “issues of just, fair, right, and kind conduct.” As Hurston (2003, 685) has written:  I have read that domestic animals are not imitative, but I find the animal psychologists wrong in that respect. Spot, seeing me go out to get the paper every morning, now goes for it without coaching.… It is now my conviction that domestic animals would be much more imitative if encouraged by us, and understand what we are doing. The “interspecies peers” trope as evident in Hurston’s missive makes possible the re-­recognition of the accepted relational affinity we are socialized as children to embrace while repositioning this relational affinity as an important part of adulthood, or perhaps even human-­ness.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that like ecofeminism, the literary anthropological works of Zora Neale Hurston make inextricable connections between women and nature and women’s commitment to environmentalism and the natural world. Also like ecofeminism, Hurston’s literatures inform ecological understandings not only relative to Hurston’s own lifetime, but contribute to broader discourses theorizing the contested ideologies of race, gender, and speciesism in determining environmental imaginaries and ecofeminist engagements by and for women. While Hurston argued that no solitary expression of nature exists by virtue of the fact that nature is essentially the construct of the discrete gaze by the disparate observer, she explores literature’s potential to bridge the multiplicities of the discretionary gaze in appealing to a collective sense of self, both within and unifying with the living world. But Hurston’s further claim that, “I picked up the reflection of life around me with my own instruments, and absorbed what I gathered according to my inside juices” (45), accords with her anthropological conviction that the articles of black folk culture as well as the performance and circulation of this cultural capital was materially significant in recovering the origins of black folklore traceable to African and West Indian forebears. Folklore, for Hurston, was “the boiled-­down juice of human living,” although not belonging “to any special time, place nor people” (1999, 69). But her literatures do establish fundamental connections between identity and

96   N. Anae cultural heritage, not only in the politics of writing about, and for, black folk culture—which in turn exemplified her splits with various key figures of the Harlem Renaissance movement—but in the significance of ecology itself in black folklore as both cultural capital and cultural referent. From this perspective, I have explored Hurston’s unique vision of nature as a way of theorizing the ecofeminist implications of Hurston’s literary imagination, while also aiming to contribute to the dearth in scholarship exploring the ecofeminist possibilities of her position within contemporary ecofeminist debates about the environment as a feminist concern. “For a woman who had been exposed since early childhood to folktales involving human and animal characters,” asserts Brian Roberts (2002, 40) of Hurston’s anthropological interests, “one of the most salient aspects of any culture must have been the narratives surrounding the relationships between humans and animals.” In the final analysis, the larger question that Hurston may arguably posit, from my reading, is whether or not it is possible to include “species” as a comparable taxonomy within the hierarchic categories of gender, race, and class. Alternatively, it is also plausible to suggest that Hurston locates the categories of gender, race, and class within a broader theoretical agenda of anti-­speciesism framing inequities against nonhuman animals. In this light, it is possible to argue that Hurston advances a central question in ecofeminist thought: “the relationship between … the discourse of animality … and the living and breathing creatures who fall outside the taxonomy of Homo sapiens” (Wolfe 1998, xx). Hurston does pay attendant focus on “the animal” as a site in which struggles for human and nonhuman identity play out, as well as a site figuring struggles against power structures and hierarchies of negation. So while from an environmentalist perspective Hurston “engage[s] all life forms seriously, respectfully and equitably” (Hicks 2010, 122), taken a step further, the prevailing taxonomies of gender, race, class, and speciesism underlying Hurston’s ecofeminist sensibilities re-­envision the inextricable connections her literatures chart between women and nature, and women’s commitment to environmentalism and the living ecology. While Hurston (1978, 3) claimed “From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what Squinch Owl says from the house top,” it was through anthropology that she both examined these human and nonhuman relationships and identified animals as “culture heroes” (Hurston 1997, 62). Her writings therefore prove highly fruitful in arguing that the mapping of these lines of enquiry—sexism, racism, classism, and speciesism—within Hurston’s literatures both aligns with contemporary ecofeminist debates about the natural world as well as raises compelling questions about the geopolitical and cultural entanglements of speciesism in contemporary thought well worthy of further ecocritical inquiry.

Notes 1 Massa and white folk tale told to Hurston by Arthur Hopkins. 2 Animal folk tale told to Hurston by Martin White.

“Taking mighty strides across the world”   97 3 The version of “Uncle Monday” appearing in Go Gator and Muddy the Waters was included in the guidebook, providing for tourists shortened retellings of Florida folklore produced by the Federal Writers’ Project (coordinated by Carita Doggett Corse). Also see Huggins (1995, 244–249). 4 This character is in fact a version of “Ant Judy Bickerstaff.” Also see Huggins (1995, 249–251).

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98   N. Anae Hurston, Zora Neale. 1937. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1955. “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” In Folklore, Memories, and Other Writing, 950–955. New York: Literary Classics. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1978. Mules and Men. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1979. “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” In I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, edited by Alice Walker, 169–173. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1991. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper Perennial. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995. “Uncle Monday.” In Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Brenda Smith Huggins, 244–249. New York: Oxford University Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995. “Ant Judy Bickerstaff.” In Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Brenda Smith Huggins, 249–251. New York: Oxford University Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1997. Sweat. Edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1999. “Go Gator and Muddy the Water.” In Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project, edited by Pamela Bordelon. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Hurston, Zora Neale. 2002. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-­tales from the Gulf States. Edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins. Hurston, Zora Neale. 2003. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Anchor Books. Levine, Lawrence W. 1997. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-­American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Library of Congress, 2015. “Federal Writers’ Project.” New Deal Programs: Selected Library of Congress Resources. Retrieved August 15, 2016, from www.loc.gov/rr/ program/bib/newdeal/fwp.html. McKay, Nellie. 1990. “ ‘Crayon Enlargements of Life’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as Autobiography.” In New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, edited by Michael Awkward, 51–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melson, Gail F. 2001. Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Mulligan, Tony. 2011. “Speciesism as a Variety of Anthropocentrism.” In Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments, edited by Rob Boddice, 223–244. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninliijke Brill NV. Nolt, John. 2015. Environmental Ethics for the Long Term: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Roberts, Brian. 2002. “Predators in the ‘Glades: A Signifying Animal Tale in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Southern Quarterly, 41: 39–50. Smith, Graham. 2003. Deliberative Democracy and the Environment. London and New York: Routledge. Wolfe, Cary. 1998. Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside.” Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wolfe, Cary, ed. 2003. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Yu, Mouchang and Lei, Yi. 2009. “Anthropocentric Ethical Theories: Relations with Non-­Human Beings.” In Environment and Development, Vol. II., edited by Teng Teng and Ding Yifan, 247–252. Abu Dhabi, UAE: Eolss Publishers. Retrieved August 6, 2015, from www.eolss.net/Sample-­Chapters/C13/E4-25-07-02.pdf.

7 Ecofeminist sensibilities and rural land literacies in the work of contemporary Appalachian novelist Ann Pancake Theresa L. Burriss Appalachians’ attachment to place has endured throughout centuries. Loyal Jones identified mountain residents’ love of place as significant in his seminal essay, “Appalachian Values.” In his description he explains: We are oriented around places. We never forget our native places, and we go back as often as possible. […] Our folksongs tell of our regard for the land where we were born. It is one of the unifying values of mountain people, this attachment to one’s place, and it is a great problem to those who urge mountaineers to find their destiny outside the mountains. (Jones 1975, 512–513) Even though Jones penned “Appalachian Values” in the early 1970s, and admitted the values could be interpreted as overly simplistic and essentialist, he asserted the necessity of countering decades of reductive, negative stereotyping. And despite Central/South Central Appalachia’s1 evolving, dynamic cultures that respond to regional, national, and international influences, residents’ love of place has persisted over time and was re-­energized by the 1960s and 1970s-era counter-­cultural “back-­to-the-­land” movement.2 This strong cultural value is evident in the region’s literature, where the natural environment figures prominently, often assuming character status equal, if not superior, to humans. A long tradition of both male and female Appalachian authors3 highlights the deep connections between women and nature. During the preparation of her work, The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (2003), Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt explains: What I have come to believe—and what this book is about—is that Appalachia’s women writers and activists from the turn of the past century defined a philosophy of living that can help address social and environmental justice issues at the turn of this century. (2) Engelhardt concludes her work with analysis of two strong early-­twentiethcentury representatives, Emma Bell Miles and Grace MacGowan Cooke, but

100   T.L. Burriss also includes Mary Noailles Murfree and Effie Waller Smith in her assertion in the Afterword: In all four women’s texts, humans are not separated from nonhumans in Appalachian communities. Nature has agency in their stories, which results in decision making that consults whole communities. Environmental and social justice issues are tackled by those whole communities, and structures of power that oppress, damage, and silence community members begin to be criticized. (170) Moving into the mid-­twentieth century, Harriett Arnow’s novel The Dollmaker appeared in 1954, in which she captured male and female relationships with the land and articulated differences in their responses to modernity and mechanization. The year after, yet seven years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was released, Wilma Dykeman published her nonfiction work on an important water artery in Tennessee and North Carolina, The French Broad. The text contains a chapter titled, “Who Killed the French Broad,” with Dykeman issuing an indictment which holds everyone accountable: “One by one we allowed ourselves and others to begin the rape which finally (in places) ended in the murder of the French Broad” (281). In a similar vein, Ann Pancake is a contemporary Appalachian writer with ecofeminist sensibilities and a keen awareness of gendered nuances that distinguish her characters’ interactions, or lack thereof, with the natural abundance that is at risk of destruction. Many of her characters possess both practical and spiritual knowledge of the land, thus demonstrating a land literacy whereby they read the mountains that surround and envelop them. Although land literacy or land-­based literacy is typically identified with native and/or aboriginal peoples,4 many rural Appalachians make meaning of their landscapes, honoring and tapping into the wisdom of the natural world. In this sense, they subscribe to an ethic of bioregionalism, “the practice of ‘learning to become native to place, fitting ourselves to a particular place, not fitting a place to our predetermined tastes’ ” (Diamond and Orenstein 1990, xiv). Pancake develops sophisticated and complex characters, refusing to fall prey to simple binarisms such as women/men, nature/culture, or emotion/reason, even though she does include various forms of oppression and exploitation intimately linking women and nature. Nevertheless, Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been (2007) includes male characters who exhibit a seemingly innate connection to Nature that is just as strong as certain female characters’ ties. Not all women in the novel demonstrate a love of or reliance on Nature. And approaches to motherhood and views on the life-­giving ethos of women are similarly as varied. As a result, Pancake eschews female and male essentialisms and a belief in the inherent connection between women and nature. Instead, she aligns herself with a rational feminist view, which is “grounded in the potentiality of human beings to consciously and rationally create a free ecological society” (Vakoch 2012, 5). Additionally, those

Ecofeminist sensibilities, rural land literacies   101 characters who display an affiliation with the natural environment possess faculties of reason, as well. As Lockwood (2012, 134) asserts, “Ecofeminists do not reject reason; they simply and convincingly advocate balance. They call for us to be fully human by attending to all of our being—feeling as well as thinking.” Without following a rigid chronological timeline, the novel contains chapters devoted to various characters. While most of Pancake’s narrators speak from first-­person point of view, three chapters are presented in third person, including two prepubescent boys who are sons in the nuclear family and one grown man who has left the region but returns briefly to encourage his aging and ailing mother, Mrs. Taylor, to leave with him. Given the advantages of first-­person narration, readers gain intimate insight into the characters’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. However, the characters are bound by both the limitations of their self-­ knowledge and skewed awareness of themselves. Pancake does include chapters later in the novel that reveal certain characters’ transformations, developing self-­ awareness, and subsequent commentary on the past and present. Although the novel ends tragically, Pancake concludes with outcomes that are realistic but still offer seeds of hope. She moves beyond mere critique to “identify and articulate liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world, in the process transforming everyday life” (Vakoch 2012, 3). The eco-­social landscape of Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been documents the ravages of mountaintop removal coalmining in contemporary southern West Virginia and a nuclear family’s conflicting reactions to this form of resource extraction primarily by absentee landowners. Such absentee landownership has persisted in the region since the early 1800s, when federal policy affirmed colonial-­era surveys and large land grant rewards for Revolutionary War veterans. Although underground deep mining was the predominant method used through the early twentieth century, surface mining increased in Central Appalachia as early as the 1950s to satisfy the insatiable demand for steam coal that accompanied the development and growth of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) network of power plants. Mountaintop removal (MTR), an extreme form of surface mining that has been described by many individuals as strip mining on steroids, involves bulldozing all trees and topsoil, what the industry calls overburden, so explosives can be strategically placed to literally blow off the tops of mountains to reveal thin seams of coal. Obviously environmentally devastating, MTR is also socially destructive as communities in these single-­ industry, economically depressed areas become divided between those few who are employed by the coal industry or coal service industries and those who work to stop the obliteration of their homeplaces. The long history of and pride in Appalachian coalmining, especially related to organized labor and the formation of the United Mine Workers of America in the early twentieth century, contribute to the tensions. However, opponents of MTR stress another form of cultural annihilation that results with a loss of the commons and mountain residents’ way of life, which has been dependent upon the flora and fauna for generations. Pancake reveals all these struggles and more in her novel as she highlights the real-­life complexity of the issues. In fact,

102   T.L. Burriss Strange As This Weather Has Been mirrors Gaard and Murphy’s explanation of ecofeminism as a “practical movement for social change arising out of the struggles of women to sustain themselves, their families, and their communities. These struggles are waged against the ‘maldevelopment’ and environmental degradation caused by patriarchal societies, multinational corporations, and global capitalism” (1998, 2). Despite the persistent myth of Appalachia as an isolated region, it has been and continues to be connected to and driven by global market forces that have scant regard for the people or environment. Two of the female narrators, Lace and Bant, a mother and daughter, reveal the personal and social sacrifices of opposing the seemingly absolute power of absentee corporate coal in their community. Just as intensely, they share their internal struggles as they navigate new terrain, whether literally in their discovery of the vast destruction of the mountains or metaphorically in their burgeoning self-­confidence and consequent willingness to take a stand. Both women obtain their mountain knowledge from the matriarch of the family, Lace’s mother, Bant’s grandmother, who exhibits a spiritual as well as physical relationship with the landscape. Even after Grandma dies, her voice and lessons remain acute within the characters, especially as they find their own voices and places within the anti-­MTR movement, places often dangerous and life-­threatening. In many regards, Lace and Bant embark on parallel journeys, more like sisters than mother and daughter. After all, Lace was only 19 and a single mother when Bant was born. Early in the novel, Bant recalls: I’d started running this mountain when I was still inside Lace. […] [A]nd they carried me back up just weeks after I came out. If I said it out loud, Lace would say I couldn’t remember, but I could […]. I helped my grandma from the time I could walk. Good little helper, Bant. Such a good helper, creasies, Shawnee, poke, ramps, molly moochers in spring, blackberries in summer, mayapple and cohosh, then ginseng and nuts—hickory, black walnut, butternut, chinquapin, beech—in the fall. Yellowroot after the sap went down. Sumac and sassafras in November, come Christmas, holly and greenery. I knew these things before I could read. You can live off these mountains, Grandma’d say. And in bad times, she’d say, meaning layoffs, strikes, but also, I knew, the year I was born, we did. (34–35) Bant acquires this woods knowledge, a mountain literacy, before she even embarks on a traditional education path. She reads the plants and seasons just as if she is reading a primer. Describing her grandmother as one who “wasn’t a talker,” Bant further explains how her grandmother educated her. “But even without the talking, she taught me to let into my insides the real of this place. From her I learned the deep of here” (36). In her quiet, reflective way, Grandma passes onto Bant an ecofeminist ethic, for she recognizes the interconnectedness of all living things and refuses to place humans at the top of some socially constructed hierarchy. The lessons Bant

Ecofeminist sensibilities, rural land literacies   103 learns from Grandma are indelibly imprinted on Bant’s psyche, especially as she recounts the three times Grandma whipped her, all three in the woods with switches she made Bant cut herself. The first two were sparked by Bant’s disregard for the land by first throwing Easter candy wrappers on the ground and second for carelessly digging up plants that would not even be used. Not only did Bant get whipped for the indiscriminate plant digging, she also had to replant every single one. The third whipping, as Bant remembers, “was the worst not because of how long and hard she whipped, but because it was the first time I saw she was honestly surprised, a bad sad surprise, at something I had done” (38). That something was the random killing of a spring-­sluggish garter snake sunning itself on a rock. “I must have been about six, old enough to know how Grandma felt about snakes, but I knew how Jimmy Make felt, too. […] I was acting out of the Jimmy Make part of me” (38). Grandma’s words to Bant resonate within her long after they are spoken. When she is 15 and reflecting on her last violation of Nature, Bant remembers the scene vividly, as if it were recent: After the whipping, me sniffling, that snake body still moving, Grandma said, “You know way bettern that. You don’t kill what can’t harm you. And you shouldn’t kill what can harm you unless it’s a threat to you right there. Snakes eat up other things that give us problems, like mice and rats.” And even later, when we were heading home, the hurt gone from my behind but the shame still burning, she had to bring it up again. “Go around just killing stuff, it’ll eventually come back on you. It throws things out of whack.” She shook her head. “As much time as you’ve spent with me up on this mountain …” And there she stopped, like what I’d done was so bad she couldn’t even think what else to say. She shook her head again, not looking at me. “You know way bettern that.” (39) It is symbolically significant that this last whipping was over Bant’s senseless and brutal killing of a snake, a creature defiled and demonized in Judeo-­Christian traditions. Even though Grandma adheres to a strong, fundamentalist Christian faith, she does not forsake the natural world for that faith. Additionally, she exhibits the foundational ecofeminist principles Gaard and Murphy (1998) cite from Ynestra King in their introduction to Ecofeminist Literary Criticism. Grandma takes on “the life-­struggles of all of nature as [her] own.” She recognizes that: life on earth is an interconnected web, not a hierarchy; [… that] a healthy, balanced ecosystem, including human and nonhuman inhabitants, must maintain diversity; [… and] the survival of the species necessitates a renewed understanding of our relationship to nature, of our own bodily nature, and of nonhuman nature around us. (3–4)

104   T.L. Burriss Mogey, Grandma’s nephew, who Lace and Bant affectionately refer to as Uncle Mogey, is the only other character in the novel who displays such a profound compassion toward and spiritual connection with the nonhuman world. In Bant’s retelling of her third whipping, Pancake establishes the schism between the reverence for nature held by Grandma and the disregard, if not outright abhorrence, harbored by Jimmy Make, Bant’s father. Establishing his self-­ worth through the size of his truck, the collection of his tools, his ability to master machinery, Jimmy Make represents historical patriarchal Appalachian mountain culture. Following in his father’s footsteps is Corey, the ten-­year-old third-­born child of Lace and Jimmy Make. Even Bant refers to her brother Corey at one point as the “Jimmy Make copycat [who] did not understand” (154). Although Pancake devotes chapters to Corey, they are presented in third-­person point of view, allowing readers a much greater perspective of the child’s thoughts and actions. Tragically, Corey longs to interact with his father and be allowed into his man world; yet, Jimmy Make does not make the time or effort. Idolizing his father’s F350 truck, Corey boasts through his little big man stream of consciousness: Can that man handle a truck, you better just get in and hang on. Dad could power that truck over any terrain, using nothing but two-­wheel ninety percent of the time, Dad could drive it anywhere, shit, Dad could drive it nowhere, that’s how good Dad could drive […]. (61) Corey even interprets nature’s sounds as machines during a summer storm, “[…] all that empty violence, thunder and lightning, motor noise in the sky” (67). And despite his brief, intense fear when yet another flood descends upon their modular home due to the strip mining above, huge logs and metal parts and trash converging on them, he moves to the front window to witness the event: Corey stood in the sill on his knees and watched the wild water split around the house, and that was when he saw how it was like driving a boat. Like piloting a big old boat, not some little open boat, no, but like a captain in a pilothouse with a wheel. Corey put his hands on his wheel and steered. (68) Perhaps Corey represents the patriarchy/technology binary to the extreme due to his father’s inability or unwillingness to establish a relationship with him. As a result, Corey substitutes the machine for the father. This replacement is poignantly demonstrated when Bant takes Corey up Yellowroot Mountain to attempt to see the extent of the extraction taking place above their home. Because the coal company has fenced the area and maintains guards 24 hours a day, the family has been unable to view the actual damage. Contrary to what Bant hopes to accomplish, however, Corey expresses pure delight, even giddiness, in what he witnesses. “As soon as he sees, he can’t see

Ecofeminist sensibilities, rural land literacies   105 enough. […] It is a great grand giant thing, here in his place of puny things, you can see big things on TV, but this place full of sorry-­ass piddly things” (162). For the first time in his life, Corey sees a dragline, a massive piece of machinery used to remove the overburden.5 In this instant, he recalls a conversation with his father:  When Corey’d seen it in the paper, Dad had told him its real name was dragline, but its nickname was Big John. Like something out of Star Wars, Dad said, maybe the biggest piece of machinery ever built, twenty stories tall, for sure the biggest shovel in the world, and we have it right here in West Virginia. And they call us backwards, Dad said. (163) Clearly, Corey and Jimmy Make fit the patriarchal paradigm in their obsession with the mechanical. Entranced by the magnitude and power of the dragline, the very machinery that is destroying their homeplace, Corey longs to operate it. Choosing words that articulate a desire to possess, Pancake gives readers insight into the extent of Corey’s captivation. After surveying all the equipment on site, and daydreaming of running every piece, he looks longingly toward the drag line: And, finally, he’d scale Big John. That vast mountain-­handling piece of gorgeous machinery. And as Corey climbs it, the smell of its fluids, the good grease he’d get on his clothes. And maybe he’d cut himself a little on something. Maybe he’d bleed a little there. He’d crawl in, settle in the seat, take a look at how it ran, push his legs to the pedals, grip the sticks and handles. That giant, his body in that gigantic body, his body running that body, and the size, the power of that machine: inside Big John, Corey can change the shape of the world. Corey can.  (164) In addition to articulating a phenomenological6 perspective, Pancake positions Corey to symbolically embody the patriarchy in a real corporeal sense through his dreams of “his body running that body.” Given a male name with imposing significance, Big John represents the patriarchy and its efforts to be in absolute control of everything, and in this particular case, the natural world. Yet the words Pancake selects could also be seen as man’s possession of woman in both a material and sexual sense, thus linking the oppression of both Nature and women. Big John’s power is so great and far reaching that it can even “change the shape of the world.” A postcolonial ecocritical analysis is useful here as well to critique the concept of development. Throughout not only the region but the world, the coal industry has spun its rhetoric on progress and the so-­called backwardness of many Appalachians, who the industry claims interfere with and prohibit economic growth. In this regard, the industry capitalizes on the ignorant hillbilly

106   T.L. Burriss stereotype to justify the extraction of the natural resources, and, consequently, the exploitation of both people and environment. Ironically and sadly, Jimmy Make exhibits the postcolonial concept of mimicry whereby he internalizes the industry’s rhetoric and views the presence of the machines in the mountains as evidence of Appalachians’ progressiveness. Huggan and Tiffin (2010) define three forms of ecological imperialism in their introduction to Postcolonial Ecocriticism. Their reference to Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood is particularly relevant as she cautions against “dualistic thinking that continues to structure human attitudes to the environment to the masculinist, ‘reason-­centered culture’ that once helped secure and sustain European imperial dominance […]” (4). The authors continue: As Plumwood argues, the western definition of humanity depended—and still depends—on the presence of the “not-­human”: the uncivilized, the animal and animalistic. European justification for invasion and colonization (sic) proceeded from this basis, understanding non-­European lands and the people and animals that inhabited them as “spaces,” “unused, underused or empty.” (5) Such is the history of Appalachia, what some scholars have deemed an internally colonized region. Although the internal-­colonization model does possess pitfalls, such as simplistic categorizations of “insiders” and “outsiders,” much holds true with a denigration of the culture, oppression of the people, and extraction of natural resources in “underused” spaces that leaves communities in destitute poverty. Pancake aligns herself with Huggan and Tiffin’s argument that “the righting of imperialist wrongs necessarily involves our writing of the wrongs that have been done” (22). By exposing the real-­life tragedies perpetuated on Appalachians and their environment by global corporate entities, she speaks back to such power by documenting life-­threatening floods, whether in the form of rainwater unchecked due to erosion or in the failure of earthen dams built high in the mountains and only tenuously holding sludge, the toxic soup that remains after coal is “cleaned.” She catalogues the violence perpetrated by industry representatives on peaceful marchers at rallies, as well as on individuals whose brake lines are mysteriously cut or dogs mysteriously poisoned. Not only does Pancake unflinchingly write the wrongs, she also celebrates “alternative knowledges and knowledge systems” (Huggan and Tiffan, 20) in such characters as Grandma and Mogey. Huggan and Tiffin describe literature that is not “anti-­developmental,” but rather “counter-­developmental,” (emphasis original) to recognize “the existence of alternative social and environmental knowledges that are neither acknowledged nor necessarily understood by development experts in the West” (20). Recognizing different ways of thinking about and being in the world represents many postcolonial and feminist theorists’ belief in the vital importance of unshackling the imagination and freeing it from the colonizer’s rhetoric.

Ecofeminist sensibilities, rural land literacies   107 Postmodern feminist bell hooks explains the power of literature and her deliberate decision to become a writer herself in the essay, “Narratives of Struggle” (1991): Poetry and novels brought me close to myself, helped me to overcome the estrangement that domination breeds between psyche and self. […] My mind became a place of refuge, a sanctuary, a room I could enter with no fear of invasion. My mind became a site of resistance. [Books] let me know firsthand that if the mind was to be the site of resistance, only the imagination could make it so. (54–55, emphasis added) Only when the oppressed liberate both their bodies and their minds will they be able to envision another way of living. Consequently, they will be inspired to write about that life in a language different from the oppressor’s. Pancake demonstrates her own mastery of creative, anti-­oppressor language as she describes the relationship between Mogey, Grandma’s nephew, and the natural world. Through the character of Mogey, Pancake problematizes the traditional patriarchal binaries male/culture and female/nature. He has only one chapter in the entire novel devoted to him in his own voice, but it is one of the most poignant, eco-­conscious ones of the text. Although he, like Grandma, grew up in a strict, traditional Christian religious tradition, he articulates a deep struggle to reconcile the church’s teachings with his feelings in the woods. When he was younger, he internalized the learned Christian guilt over this, noting, “To walk in woods was a prayer. But I knew it was wrong. Some kind of paganism or idolatry. I didn’t know what you’d call it, but I knew it must be sin” (168). Agonizing over his thoughts, Mogey decides to talk with the preacher, who merely parrots an imperialist interpretation of the Bible, noting man’s dominion over the earth and its natural resources. Mogey still cannot accept such a view: “[P]art of me knew, even back then, that’s not what it is. I knew we wasn’t separate from it like that” (168). Again, similar to Grandma, he intuitively understands the interconnectedness of all living things and demonstrates a rural land literacy that deepens with time. Mogey’s knowledge of the natural world transcends mere seeing to include sensing. At first he is only able to sense how a big animal “throws something off himself,” what Mogey can only describe as a “hum because I don’t got no other word for it” (169). He goes on: As I got older, I’d catch it off small creatures, too, and after I got to be a man, I mean really a man, got past the early man and come to know myself and settled down, I could catch it, just quieter, even off trees and dirt and stone. (169) Contrary to conventional patriarchal socialization, Mogey refuses this indoctrination to honor what he knows as real and true.

108   T.L. Burriss Mogey goes on to describe his first spiritual melding with Nature, significantly on Thanksgiving, when he was only ten years old. After he and his cousin apparently have shot a buck, they lose sight of the animal and take different paths to track it. When both return without any evidence of the buck, not even a blood trail, the cousin stomps off on Mogey’s path, believing Mogey simply did not look hard enough. While Mogey laments the situation, especially because he believes the buck is injured and “it is a very bad thing for a hunter to clip a deer and never find him again,” he stumbles upon a mystical space in the woods, “a little sunken-­down place like a room,” where he believes the buck will be lying (172). However, he reveals, “The buck was not there in body. But something else was” (172). He describes that “something else” as a “mild electric” that currents throughout his body and explains: It blended me […] right on out into the woods. It took me beyond myself and kept going, so I wasn’t no longer holed up in my body, hidden […]. It made me feel bigger in myself, and it made me feel more here even though you might have expected such a thing to make me feel gone. And with it came total sureness. And with the total sureness came peace. (172–173) Editor of The Green Studies Reader (2000) Laurence Coupe cites both Ching-­ yuan and Wordsworth as authors who understand such a spiritual awakening in Nature. Coupe explains, “The point is to learn from nature, to enter into its spirit, and to stop trying to impose upon it the arbitrary constraints which result from our belief in our own importance” (1). Of particular significance for readers attempting to understand Mogey’s experience, Coupe includes John G. Ruby’s commentary on Wordsworth’s poetry: To encounter “the light of things” themselves, one must shed the notion of light as emerging from a separate source. Indeed, one must relinquish the idea of separateness itself. To come into the light of things, one must become the things themselves, must see through things as things. (1) Indeed, Mogey surrenders his separateness willingly to allow for a total synthesis of himself with all that surrounds him. Contrary to traditional patriarchal beliefs in man’s need to control and reign over the natural world, Mogey understands the arrogance and error of this way of thinking. And as a result of witnessing and living with the annihilation of the mountains, his homeplace, Mogey suffers from solastalgia,7 an intense emotional distress caused by environmental change while he continues to live in that environment. Although initially he was physically injured in an underground mine from a kettle bottom8 falling on him, he later begins to have mini-­strokes that affect him both physically and mentally. Consequently, Mogey endures debilitating headaches and night terrors. He remarks, “As the headaches get

Ecofeminist sensibilities, rural land literacies   109 worse, the dreams do, too” (178). In his dreams, Nature has gone awry, with animals sporting plastic bags for bellies, snarling with metal teeth, and leaving piles of scat made of glass. Clearly, his nightmares symbolize man’s interference with and desecration of the natural world, resulting in freakish animals donning manmade materials. Ultimately the dreams contain no images at all and only become “an alarm going off ” (179). Mogey is able to admit to himself that he knows his love of the land and Nature is “not paganism or idolatry or sacrilege or sin. It’s just what I know. And what they tell me, these things I finally let myself trust, is what we’re doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide” (179). Because Mogey is intimately connected to the natural world, is one with it, the destruction of Nature is the destruction of self. Such a position corresponds with a burgeoning movement among evangelical Christians called Creation Care9 but also is aligned with many Christian denominations that exist in the region. Mogey explains: So when I’d first walk into the woods, I’d say to myself, “Look here what God’s give us.” But just about as fast as I could have that thought, this second one would come from deeper: “This is God.” And then, from under that thought, from deeper yet, […] “I go here. This is where I go.” And last of all, the most certain thought, but also the most dangerous: “This is me. This, all this, is me.” (173) Accordingly, Mogey’s physical and emotional illness and agony are manifestations of the violence against the natural world. Pancake directly links this patriarchal violence against nature with violence against women in one of Lace’s chapters. Conceding that her husband, Jimmy Make, does have legitimate reasons to be fearful of her involvement with groups fighting mountaintop removal, groups he calls “shit stirrers,” Lace lists real-­life examples of the viciousness of the pro-­MTR industry folks. She then reveals a confrontation in a gas station/convenience store on her way back from grocery shopping. When she exits the bathroom, which is located in a remote corner of the store, a man dressed in a suit, and looking out of place, blocks her way. Thinking he doesn’t see her, Lace speaks to him with an “excuse me.” However, he refuses to move, knowing full well she is there and seeming to have sought her out. She goes on to relate: He had his hand in his pants pocket, big loose dress pants. I felt his hand move in the pocket and press against my leg, his hand still behind the cloth, and, lord help me if I didn’t think at first it was his dick, and I just pushed harder to bust past and get away. But then he blocked me with his whole leg and pulled out enough of the gun that I could tell what it was. Then he dropped his leg and let me go. (305)

110   T.L. Burriss Throughout history men have sexually violated women in times of war and siege. The gun, symbolic of the phallus, the ultimate representation of the patriarchy, has been utilized as a weapon to control and oppress women. In fact, patriarchal power has misappropriated the penis as a part of Nature and its life-­ giving capacity. Pancake makes the abuse blatant in Lace’s scene, especially as Lace herself first believes the gun to be the man’s penis. Although the man’s assault initially has the intended effect on Lace, after several days pass and she recovers from the encounter, she grows even more determined to fight to save the mountains of her birth. In one of Lace’s chapters (181–199) where she offers painful yet realistic observations of several years of her life, readers come to understand, among other things, the connection Lace has with the mountains, a bond firmly reestablished when she was pregnant with Bant and gathering medicinal plants with her mother. She notes: When I first got started, it was just plants I’d expected Mom to reteach me, things I could sell, but she knew she couldn’t teach that without the other, and when I look back now, I see how much else I relearned. The names of all the little streams off Cherryboy. How the game paths went. Where you could find you a safe drink of water, where you could duck under overhangs to shelter out of storms. It was shortcuts across ridges from hollow to hollow, it was how easiest—footholds, handholds—to scale a particular draw. And although before that year I’d never been the type of person listens any closer than to what comes out of a mouth, all those quiet hours in the woods, I couldn’t help paying other kinds of attention. I started listening in other ways. (139) Similar to her daughter Bant’s experience, Lace is schooled by the family’s wise matriarch as she shares her knowledge of the landscape and encourages Lace to read and understand it as well. Lace’s connection to the natural world is particularly evident during the family’s brief stint in Durham and Raleigh, North Carolina, because her husband, Jimmy Make, had been laid off at the coalmine back home and sought employment elsewhere. She expounds, “That North Carolina, I tell you. Down there, you just can’t get any grip on the land. No traction. No hold” (190). And further on Lace notes: […] I learned fast, you couldn’t ever really get outside. Couldn’t even get in trees, in brush, much less get into hills, you weren’t ever out of sight or sound of a road, a building, a parking lot, and sometimes I’d miss backhome woods so bad I’d feel land in my throat. (193) Tragically, Lace’s mother dies suddenly from a heart attack back in West Virginia while Lace, Jimmy Make, and the four children are in North Carolina.

Ecofeminist sensibilities, rural land literacies   111 As a result, Lace plunges even deeper into depression. When they return to West Virginia to help Lace’s sister ready their mother’s trailer to sell, Lace identifies the intensity of her attachment to the mountains and announces to her husband she cannot leave again, despite their almost insurmountable debt and lack of jobs. After recalling all those who had left the mountains to find work, as well as acknowledging her dead father and now dead mother, Lace perceptively remarks: But I’d already figured out it wasn’t just me. How could only me and my thirty-­three years on that land make me feel for it what I did? No, I had to be drawing it down out of blood and from memories that belonged to more than me. I had to. It must have come from those that bore me, and from those that bore them. From those who looked on it, ate off it, gathered, hunted, dug, planted, loved, and bled on it, who finally died on it and are now buried in it. Somehow a body knows.  (199) This ancestral bond to the mountains, apparently borne through DNA, pulses fiercely within Lace and provides her the strength and perseverance to educate herself and join the efforts to stop mountaintop removal coalmining. Although Bant experienced this intimate relationship with the landscape when she was young, she finds herself struggling to maintain that connection as she grows older, particularly as she becomes aware of the destruction of the mountains: [W]hen I was real little, moving over this land, I never saw myself, never felt myself, as separate from it. I didn’t even know to think about it at that age. It wasn’t until I got older that something started rising up between it and me […]. For a while I wondered if growing up would mean I just couldn’t open to it anymore. Now I was thinking something else was going on. As it was being taken, seemed I was drawing away. (100–101) Bant is conflicted in her response to her birthplace, with her grandmother’s mountain spirit and her mother’s activism tugging at one part of her and her father’s and brothers’ opposing viewpoints or outright fear wrenching another part. When she admits that the Martin County, Kentucky, slurry impoundment break scares her, an event that actually happened in 2000,10 she also confesses her sense of helplessness, particularly because she knows about the Buffalo Creek Flood disaster that killed 125 people in West Virginia in 1972.11 Bant declares, “And from helpless, I had learned, what a short step it was to I don’t care. How else could you grow up, how you could walk around in your body every day, unless you learned not to care” (346). Despite her internal struggle to care, which at times rages like a war much like the battle between her parents, at the end of the novel Bant consciously

112   T.L. Burriss chooses to stay with her mother, Lace, instead of moving again to Raleigh with her father, Jimmy Make, who is taking her brothers. When Jimmy Make asks, “ ‘You coming, Cissy?’ ” Bant relates, “I felt myself shake my head. The dull roar in my ears. Then something told me that, serious as this was, I should speak to him, too. ‘I’m staying here, Daddy’ ” (350). After an awkward hug good-­bye, Jimmy Make drives away, leaving Bant and Lace on the old homeplace. And this is when Bant flees into the woods, heading to the active mountaintop removal site above them, searching for the slurry impoundment she and Lace both believe is there. She discovers not one but “at least four good-­sized sediment ponds under the logjam. Bigger than any of the ones in the hollow” (353). Because she cannot see much below the ponds’ surfaces, she tries to snap off a tree branch to check their depths. But the branch wouldn’t snap from the tree, I had to twist the branch until it tore off, and then, sudden, it came to me how green those trees were, and that put a hurt in me. A hurt for those pitiful trees, how short they’d been dead. Then that hurt started pulling after it the other ones. They started, I felt my self coming back to me, and I inbreathed quick and deep, bit my lip, and back-­stepped my self away. (353) Bant’s surge of hurts floods over her, possessing her thoughts as she reflects on her life and the people who have shaped it. In the midst of this she begins to rediscover herself, rejoicing, “Then I was moving the way I used to in the woods, before the distance came between me and it, the way I moved in woods and woods only” (355). Of particular importance, she conjures both Mogey and Grandma, the two most influential people in her development and her relationship with Nature. Bant exclaims, “I could feel what was nearby, its size, its closeness, its give, beech, poplar, oak, holly hickory hemlock laurel, touching nothing, tripping nowhere, what Mogey always said about the hum” (355). She goes on to recall Grandma’s lessons and words, especially “You can live off these mountains” (355). In an existential moment, Bant ponders, “Was it worse to lose the mountain or the feelings that you had for it? Now that I’d lost this much, I realized that to not care wasn’t to save yourself at all. It was only another loss” (356). Such wisdom belies Bant’s age of only 16. This is partly attributed to the tragic circumstances she and her family have endured but also due to that same ancestral bond to Nature Lace acknowledges. Pancake blends both Grandma and Mogey in Bant’s reminiscences at the very end of the novel. After Grandma’s funeral, when Bant begins to realize the scope of devastation in the mountains and believes everything in her life is dying or being destroyed, Mogey tells her, “Bant, I’ve learned something about times like these. In times like these, you have to grow big enough inside to hold both the loss and the hope” (356–357). Thus it is with literature such as Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been, infused with ecofeminist sentiments, that readers are gifted with

Ecofeminist sensibilities, rural land literacies   113 “liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world” (Vakoch 2012, 3). Pancake provides a roadmap to navigate the difficult terrain of our world, one filled with patriarchal and corporate exploitation of people and environment. Readers are advised to grow, the most natural of phenomena, so they can incorporate both the loss and hope, instead of succumbing to despair, hopelessness, or “don’t care.” As Pancake vividly portrays in her novel, both women and men are inspired to transform everyday life. Characters like Grandma, Mogey, Lace, and Bant become role models, inspiration, for readers who strive to right/write wrongs, who work to end the domination and oppression of the environment and all people.

Notes   1 See Appalachian Regional Commission’s “Subregions of Appalachia” webpage at www.arc.gov/research/MapsofAppalachia.asp?MAP_ID=31.   2 For a simple definition, see http://cr.middlebury.edu/es/altenergylife/definition.htm; and for how the movement affected Appalachia, see www.wvencyclopedia.org/ articles/322.   3 In addition to the authors noted in this paragraph, see works by James Still, Jim Wayne Miller, Wendell Berry, and Lee Smith.   4 See Fitzgerald and Wyss (March 22, 2010) “Land and Literacy: The Textualities of Native Studies” in Early American Literature, and Rios (March 2015) “Cultivating Land-­Based Literacies and Rhetorics” in LiCS 3.1 (licsjournal.org/OJS/index.php/ LiCS/article/download/65/87).   5 See this History Channel excerpt on Big Muskie, the largest dragline created, www. youtube.com/watch?v=jcmGKsHZXZ8; and see this video of Big John, as noted in Pancake’s novel, which operates on a Boone County, WV, mine, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LojPk2VQe5g.   6 See works by Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, for example.   7 Neologism coined by Glenn Albrecht; see www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18027145.   8 See www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1196.   9 See the Creation Care website: http://creationcare.org/. 10 See www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/pha/MartinCountyCoalSlurryRelease/MartinCountyCoal SlurryHC080706.pdf; and the documentary, Sludge, produced by Appalshop in 2005, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sludge_%28film%29. 11 See www.wvculture.org/history/buffcreek/bctitle.html.

References Arnow, Harriett. 1954. The Dollmaker. New York: MacMillan. Coupe, Laurence, ed. 2000. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge. Diamond, Irene, and Gloria Feman Orenstein. 1990. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Dykeman, Wilma. 1955. The French Broad. New York: Henry Holt. 1992/1999. Newport: Wakestone Books. Engelhardt, Elizabeth S.D. 2003. The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D. Murphy. 1998. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

114   T.L. Burriss Greene, Amy. 2010. Bloodroot. New York: Vintage. hooks, bell. 1991. “Narratives of Struggle.” In Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, edited by Philomena Mariani, 53–61. Seattle: Bay Press. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, and Environment. New York: Routledge. Jones, Loyal. 1975. “Appalachian Values.” In Voices from the Hills, edited by Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose Manning, 507–517. New York: Ungar. Lockwood, Jeffry A. 2012. “Afterword.” In Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, 123–135. Lanham: Lexington Books. Pancake, Ann. 2007. Strange As This Weather Has Been. New York: Shoemaker & Hoard. Vakoch, Douglas A., ed. 2012. Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature. Lanham: Lexington Books.

8 Essentialist tropes in At Play in the Fields of the Lord Karl Zuelke

Peter Matthiessen’s celebrated career as naturalist and travel writer was founded on an engagement with the natural world earned through extensive travel, and this gave rise to several remarkable novels and works of non-­fiction that chronicled the degradation of landscapes he came to understand. His novel, Far Tortuga, for example, features a group of twentieth-­century Caribbean turtle fisherman hunting a dwindling population of green turtles, a species which had provided a measure of economic support for Caribbean communities for centuries. The spare prose of that novel arises from Matthiessen’s impression of the sand-­scrubbed, sun-­blasted austerity of the seascape of the novel’s setting, and it underscores as well the difficulties faced by fishermen whose quarry was growing harder and harder to locate. At Play in the Fields of the Lord is set in the biologically riotous Amazon rainforest of Peru, and the novel’s language and complex plot reflect the abundance of the forest in which the novel is set. Most interesting is that in its treatment of women, the forest, the forces arrayed to exploit the forest, and the treatment of the native tribes that inhabit the rainforest landscape of the novel’s setting, Matthiessen’s novel, published in 1965, anticipates ecofeminist conceptual tropes that would only first be articulated by cultural critics more than a decade later. Greta Gaard credits Susan Griffith’s Woman and Nature (1978), Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980), and Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978) as among the founding texts of ecofeminism that “linked oppressions of gender, ecology, race, species and nation” (Gaard 2011, 28). Gaard notes that Merchant’s text, especially, “exposed the historical and cross-­cultural persecution legitimized by the various male-­ dominated institutions of religion, culture, and medical science” (Gaard 2011, 280). Oppressions of gender, ecology, and race are central to Matthiessen’s artistic purpose, and his understanding of the complex interplay of oppressive patriarchal Western encroachment with the forest and the indigenous people who live there, as well as some female characters in the novel, provides for an illuminating reading of At Play in the Fields of the Lord in an ecofeminist context. Gaard outlines in detail the varied criticisms that soon arose to challenge the promise that a nascent ecofeminism seemed to hold in its early stages as a potent feminist system of cultural critique, “building on and transforming the anthropocentric critiques of first- and second-­wave feminism with an ecological

116   K. Zuelke perspective” (Gaard 2011, 31). One of the predominant criticisms leveled against ecofeminism as it developed concerned essentialism. Essentialism, the assumption that women or indigenous peoples share essential characteristics with nature in ways that are unique to them, depends on a superficial, culturally constructed notion of the natural. Even though Gaard maintains that: The charges against ecofeminists as essentialist, ethnocentric, anti-­ intellectual goddess-­worshippers who mistakenly portray the Earth as female or issue totalizing and ahistorical mandates for worldwide veganism—these sweeping generalizations […] have been disproven again and again in the pages of academic and popular journals […] yet the contamination lingers. (Gaard 2011, 32) When viewed through an ecofeminist lens, At Play in the Fields of the Lord is unsparing of its criticism of patriarchy’s treatment of women and the environment. The linkage of female and natural is not done in defense of women and nature, however, which would open up the novel to the essentialist critique that Gaard notes is often leveled, fairly or not, against ecofeminism. The other branch of essentialism’s two-­pronged simplification of human/nature relationships, the linking of indigenous peoples with nature along essentialist lines almost identical to the woman/nature alignment, is critiqued in the novel as well. Matthiessen sees both linkages as symptomatic of the dominant patriarchal system’s domination of women, nature, and indigenous people, with the ultimate aim of an unimpeded exploitation of natural resources. The novel’s critique of essentialism, then, planted the seeds of a defense of ecofeminism’s “contamination” by essentialism even before ecofeminism had been recognized as a conceptual framework. At Play in the Fields of the Lord concludes with an image of one of the novel’s main characters, Lewis Moon, kneeling lost on a beach in the midst of an uncharted stream deep in the rainforest: “He felt bereft, though of what he did not know. He was neither white nor Indian, man nor animal, but some mute, naked strand of protoplasm” (372). Lewis Moon here has escaped the conventional Western orientation toward nature that refuses to take it into account beyond mere resource. Passing through several societies in a symbolic movement eastward towards the wilderness—one of them, the indigenous Niaruna tribe, which has been destroyed—he has also passed through a number of tormenting and failed personal identities that arose from his immersion in societies that failed to integrate him into their social matrix because of his heterogeneous ethnic makeup. Leaving culture behind, Moon reenters nature on its own terms. He recognizes a “protoplasmic” self located within nature, which Matthiessen intends primarily as a spiritual revelation. In other aspects of the novel, attributes of “wildness” and “femaleness,” and “wildness” and “indigenousness,” are linked in an essentialist way with

Essentialist tropes   117 nature, and Matthiessen shows the negative ramifications of these intersecting tropes that serve ultimately to bring the Niaruna and their forest to destruction. The destruction of the Niaruna in At Play in the Fields of the Lord is primarily the result of aggression, with profit as the motive, but Matthiessen’s novel examines how invented, in Umberto Eco’s term, “absolute fake” (Eco 1986, 8) cultural tropes play into the hands of those persons who ostensibly mean the Niaruna well—from the missionaries who travel to the forest in order to save the Indians’ souls, to Lewis Moon himself, who has unconsciously internalized a version of the “noble savage” fantasy. Matthiessen’s depiction of the destruction of the Niaruna recapitulates the histories of countless tribal peoples who have met a similar fate, and the interaction of Moon, the missionaries, the forest, and the Niaruna starkly presents the ways in which cultural misunderstanding, the products of which are hyperreality and essentialism, can lead to genocide. While hyperrealities only obliquely pertain to nature/culture relationships, they apply to this novel in the ways they confuse the picture of native societies, who are victimized by Western encroachment. Matthiessen’s aim for the novel is a deconstructive one—both essentialist and hyperreal constructs are shown to be false, and Moon is the instrumental character in accomplishing the novel’s deconstructive purpose. Moon, who is part white and part Cheyenne, has internalized hyperreal images of the noble savage, which he then desires to become, but, because of his whiteness, he confuses this goal with an unconscious imperialist motive—he allows himself to be set up as a god. Moon thus ends up perceiving the Indians with whom he lives through a hyperreal and an essentialist lens. A critical turning point in the novel comes when Moon, having been blackmailed by the local Comandante into attacking the Niaruna with this airplane, is on his bombing run against one of their villages. He looks down and sees a Niaruna warrior shoot an arrow at his airplane, and the sight is so extraordinary that Moon abandons the mission, thinking that he may have found a living example of that “lost reality” his Indian side despaired of finding. Ultimately, Moon’s perception of the Niaruna is reminiscent of Gerald Vizenor’s critique of the ways that the dominant Western paradigm appropriates images of indigenous societies. Vizenor borrows Umberto Eco’s concept of hyperreality to describe contemporary Western culture’s appropriation of tribal cultures and literatures: “Native American Indian literatures have been pressed into cultural categories, transmuted by reductionism, animadversions and the hyperrealities of neocolonial consumerism” (Vizenor 1989, 5). Eco attributes the American journey into a multitude of hyperrealities as stemming from the situation whereby the American cultural imagination “demands the real thing, and to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (Eco 1986, 8). Vizenor maintains that “tribal cultures, in this sense, have been invented as ‘absolute fakes’ ” (Vizenor 1989, 5). Thus, Moon’s initial contact with the tribe is based on an internalized stereotype that ultimately dehumanizes the tribe. This initiates one of the novel’s main conflicts. But At Play in the Fields of the Lord is remarkable in the ways that a number of conflicting oppositions come into play. Two major plot lines oppose one another in the novel, pitting Moon and his partner, Wolfie, against the

118   K. Zuelke aspirations of Leslie Huben, leader of the local mission, his wife, Andy, and Martin and Hazel Quarrier, missionaries newly arrived from North Dakota, who have come to South America to help in the reaping of a “harvest of souls.” The Protestant missionaries also imagine themselves in competition for those souls with the Catholic church, represented in the novel by Father Xantes, and they find themselves at odds as well with the bullying local government official, Comandante Rufino Guzmàn, who is under pressure to “pacify” (i.e., disperse or exterminate) the fiercely resisting Niaruna while still adhering to the letter of Peruvian law. There are also conflicts within the relationships between the missionaries themselves. It was Guzmàn who had blackmailed Moon and Wolfie early in the novel into using their airplane for a bombing run against the Indian village. The unexpected arrival of Moon and Wolfie had presented a potential opportunity that Guzmàn attempted to seize to help disperse the Niaruna. A sign painted on the fuselage of the Americans’ airplane, “Wolfie & Moon, Inc., Small Wars & Demolition,” shows that their services are for hire, and the two Americans are all too ready to perpetrate a “small war.” At first glance this would seem to put them fundamentally at odds with Leslie Huben’s mission of Christianizing the Indians, on moral grounds if nothing else, and Huben does understand early on that he can hardly make converts of a tribe if its members have been murdered. Guzmàn is portrayed as a foul and swaggering small-­time dictator, with little real concern for the Niaruna or for the forest. Moon’s partner, Wolfie, describes Guzmàn as “some terrible kind of a jungle beast” (33), and we see well enough the hypocrisy when Guzmàn tells father Xantes, “The Indians, in my heart I love them, they are my brothers, but this great land must be made safe for progress” (40). While Guzmàn implies in this utterance (and shows elsewhere by his actions) that he will murder and enslave the entire tribe the moment the opportunity presents itself, Wolfie recognizes Guzmàn’s “beastliness,” showing him as the truly aggressive Westerner, representative of the West in its most naked and unsophisticated incarnation. Moon’s initial regard for the Niaruna is as callous as Guzmàn’s, as is clear to the missionaries. When Martin Quarrier confronts him in the saloon, Quarrier asks, “Do you really think attacking the Indians is going to pacify them?” Moon responds, “No … but killing them is” (57). Quarrier, as missionary, is motivated in his defense of the Niaruna by an abhorrence of genocide, and he wishes to bring them the Word in sincere regard for their souls. The leader of the mission is Leslie Huben, however, and there is reason to think that Huben’s attitude towards the Niaruna is less genuine than the more sympathetic Quarrier. During a prayer, the four missionaries overhear Wolfie shout, in reference to the upcoming bombing mission, “and blow them little brown pricks to Kingdom Come,” to which Leslie mistakenly answers “Amen” (23). Theresa L. Burriss’s observation elsewhere in this volume that, “The gun, symbolic of the phallus, the ultimate representation of the patriarchy, has been utilized as a weapon to control and oppress women” (p. 110) is applicable here. The guns of an old P-­51 Mustang fighter are at one point employed against the Niaruna. If the phallus is

Essentialist tropes   119 symbolic of a weapon, indigenous people whose “little brown pricks” have been blown “to Kingdom Come” are rendered figuratively “impotent” in their ability to resist Guzmàn’s military advances, and their subsequent castration aligns them in a particularly degrading way with the feminine. And, as Burriss observes, “Throughout history men have sexually violated women in times of war and siege” (this volume, p. 110) John Cooley, in Earthly Words, makes the point that the ominous approach of the forces behind Guzmàn and Huben toward the jungle, and the Niaruna, fits a pattern that has been historically repeated, where paternalistic, European concepts regarding the land tend to feminize it—and that the feminized landscape becomes penetrated, conquered, and subsequently owned (Cooley 1994, 171). Cooley argues that in Wolfie’s emasculating shout of “Blow them little brown pricks to Kingdom Come,” Matthiessen extends the metaphor of sexual violation outward to include not only Guzmàn’s prostitutes and the forest landscape itself, but the whole Niaruna tribe. Cooley maintains that, “Violated women and castrated males should make easy targets for the word of God” (Cooley 1994, 172). At Play in the Fields of the Lord makes extensive use of the connections between nature and the female, linking these as well with sexuality, and with innocence, all of which are victimized together at the hands of Huben’s and Guzmàn’s versions of patriarchal cultural aggression. Beyond the validation alluded to by Huben’s slip, there is more evidence of an agenda more in line with Guzmàn’s than the missionaries might be prepared to admit. Huben’s attitude towards the Indians makes of them a kind of spiritual commodity, another product of the forest, like lumber and gold. “I am enjoying the profits of a business deal entered into with the Lord,” Huben had declared in a letter to Mission Fields magazine. “Invest to Gain. The Lord has impressed upon Andy and the Undersigned the command to Go” (10). At one time a success in the business world before feeling the call to missionary work, Huben retains a capitalist-­style profit motive, albeit one that traffics in souls rather than money. His stance towards the spiritual “profits” available from the Niaruna still links him thematically with the merciless industrial/capitalist forces driving Guzmàn. Hazel also demonstrates that she arrives with the same intention of reaping spiritual capital when she exclaims, “the Mart Quarriers are here, and they mean business!” (19). This linkage of missionary work with the violent drive for profit is made more explicit in a conversation with Quarrier, as they plan a strategy for contacting the dangerous Niaruna. The naïve Quarrier is appalled at news of Guzmàn’s participation in the slave trade, and at the news that Guzmàn plans to bomb the Niaruna into submission. Huben remarks that “if the Niaruna can be cowed a little, they will be softened up for an outreach of the Word, and this will make our work […] a darn sight easier” (24). Richard F. Patteson notes, “Huben never sees that his mission constitutes cultural aggression of the rankest sort” (Patteson 1979, 7). Huben intends to “infect” the Niaruna “with a need for cloth and beads, mirrors and ax heads” (154). The metaphor of infection is especially apt, since it hints at other literal infections that will follow—syphilis, the disease of

120   K. Zuelke alcoholism, and the devastating influenza epidemic that sweeps through the Niaruna tribe towards the end of the novel. Ironically, it is the cretin, Wolfie, who most clearly sees the damage that “softening up” and missionary contact does to the Indian tribes: You and them Catholics both. Some holy men! All their lousy backbitin and knifin over people who maybe they don’t want no part of neither of you; well, maybe you ought to think of that before you come sneakin around here criticizin! Maybe them people are better off bein run back into the jungle where they got a little human dignity, for Christ sake, and not where you bastards can make beggars out of them, not to mention all the booze and slavery and syphilis […] that comes after. How long do you think these Neo-­rooneys are gonna last once you’ve softened them up for all these jungle cons? (54–55) There is ample evidence to support Wolfie’s assessment of the effect the missionaries, and civilization in general, have on native tribes once they have been contacted. Madre de Dios, the town in which the missionaries first arrive, is filled with Indians living in the most squalid imaginable conditions, and the aptly name Remate de Males (Culmination of Evils) is even worse. Having been “tamed” (a word used often in the novel to describe the status of Indians lured or forced away from tribal societies), they exist in poverty or depend on the limited resources of the missionaries. Even the prostitutes with whom Guzmàn surrounds himself are all young Indian women. Of missionaries, Matthiessen said in an interview: It is very hard to argue they’ve done anything but serious harm. What they really do is lay those people open to the worst abuses of civilization; booze, thieving, jail, corruption of all kinds. And because they’re uneducated and unsophisticated they’re easy prey to every two-­bit shyster. (Cooley 1994, 171) Part of Moon’s problem is that his Cheyenne and Choctaw ancestors a century earlier had been subject to the same “taming” influences to which the South American tribes are currently subject. During a series of hallucinations induced by the drug ayahuasca, Moon hears a voice tell him, “There is a lost reality, a reality lost long ago” (94). The pride that Moon senses in his past has been replaced by the catalogue of woes so eloquently described by Wolfie. Leslie Huben’s mission functions in the end as another instrument of subjugation, working hand in hand with the more direct methods of Guzmàn and his hired bombs. Whether the missionaries or the pilots reach the Indians first is not especially important; Matthiessen’s implication is that the results will be equally destructive. Matthiessen has shown that the apparent opposition of Guzmàn and the missionaries is at bottom false—the work of the missionaries puts them in

Essentialist tropes   121 line with the hypocritical Guzmàn when he proclaims that above all this great land must be made safe for progress. Moon’s decision to join the tribe comes during a night spent under the influence of ayahuasca, which is brewed by the Indians from a local plant, and which has been used by them for generations as part of certain religious ceremonies. For Moon, ayahuasca provides for a non-­rational glimpse into his past and into his identity which leads him to cut his last ties to Western civilization for an uncertain future with the Niaruna. He abandons his airplane while under the influence of the drug, parachuting into the village. His astonishing descent from the sky convinces the Niaruna that he is the embodiment of their sky-­god, Kisu-­Mu, which leads them to adopt him into the tribe. His integration into the tribe ultimately becomes a step on his journey through it, culminating in that momentary, if tormented, triumph as he kneels on the riverbank, but since this comes at the cost of his life and the lives of the tribespeople who had adopted him, the novel seems to hold strong reservations about the possibility of meaningfully maintaining awareness of the self wholly within nature, given that as humans beings, we are forced to live in a cultural milieu. While culture is sustaining, it also obscures the essential “bedrock of existence” Moon gets a glimpse of with complex layers of reified linguistic and conceptual constructs that can be penetrated with only the greatest, often tragic, difficulty. We see in Matthiessen’s novel that the realistic fictional mode is instrumental in perpetuating these constructs, and that the drug-­induced perceptions that Moon experiences, and that the reader participates in, eventually arise as simply a momentary lifting of the veil. Western rational causality—Moon’s predominant means of forming an understanding of himself and his world— returns, and this helps precipitate his slide into tragedy. Western rational causality and the myth of progress are appealed to in a number of ways in the novel, but it’s more the Western suspicion of what is perceived as non-­rational that justifies the ongoing aggression. Nature and the indigenous native populations are perceived as non-­rational and thus engender intense fears. At one point, Huben absurdly goes to great trouble to enclose his jungle compound with barbed wire, symbolic of his fear of both the jungle and its native inhabitants. Both are feminized as well, through essentialist categorizations and the figurative emasculation of the natives. These fears are underscored in the novel by the roles played by the women characters. The wives of the missionaries, Andy Huben and Hazel Quarrier, represent quite clearly the ways that sexuality, the female, and femininity are linked with nature. Andy is “Leslie Huben’s pretty wife, by far the prettiest face in the pages of the [Mission Fields] magazine” (10). Martin Quarrier falls in love with her, due in part to difficulties in his own marriage. Martin’s love for Andy underscores her sexual attractiveness at the same time that it demonstrates Hazel’s relative lack of it. Hazel is big-­boned and awkward, and she sees herself as ugly. One gets the impression that her husband does as well. Quarrier recalls a moment when he had heard Leslie and Andy making love in an adjoining room, and felt “goaded” by it into making love with his own wife, which he later recalls as the most sordid moment of his life.

122   K. Zuelke Andy’s sexuality, as compared with Hazel’s, is meaningful only in the context of the ways they relate to the world beyond the intimacy of their marriages. The novel’s ecological context often makes use of sexuality and femininity as metaphors that gauge the degree to which characters are in touch with nature. A scene where Andy takes a bath in a forest stream demonstrates the degree to which she is at ease in the forest: After her bath, having no towel, she sat down on a log to dry herself in the pale sun. In her private world of leaves and warm wood and clear water, she felt happy and relieved for the first time in weeks. Sabalo trout were drifting in the shallows, and she could see bright shells of the fresh-­water mussel. A sandpiper came and teetered cheerfully along the margin, and a tiny emerald hummingbird perched near her head. (259) The scene becomes sexually charged when Moon appears naked, as a Niaruna, and puts his hands on Andy’s body, and perhaps kisses her—an advance she welcomes before coming to her senses and running away. The paradisiacal details of Andy’s bath, and the way her mood in the midst of nature leaves her receptive to Moon’s advance, reveals her orientation towards nature in sharp contrast to Hazel’s. Hazel sees nature as monstrous, filthy, and evil. Horrified after a visit to the latrine:  she would not tell Quarrier what the matter was; it was just too awful, too disgusting. But later she said that she had seen two giant frogs or toads squatting half buried in the fecal muck. Trapped in the water of the pit, they had grown fat on the swarming flies and were living out their lives buried in excrement. (135) Hazel’s hatred and fear of nature are infused with her fear of sexuality. Deep in the forest, under unbearable tension from the living conditions and difficulties encountered from the hostile Niarunas, Hazel loses touch with reality: Their suspense and fear were made still worse by Hazel, who spoke wildly of the jungle and could talk of nothing else, describing obscenely the obscenity of the flowering and rot, the pale phallic trunks and dark soft caverns, the rampant hair, the slime and infestations. Once she ran naked from the hut at noon to sprawl and roll in the center of the clearing, writhing and howling, her arms extended to the forest, shivering as in a fit. “He is here,” she cried, “Satan is in this place and he will take me!” (256) Matthiessen further develops the association of nature with sex. Hazel and Martin are in the forest living with a partially converted group of Niaruna who

Essentialist tropes   123 had broken away from the main tribe. Hazel becomes “obsessed with shorts and dresses, once she perceived how sensual these Indians were” (Matthiessen 1965, 148). Disgusted with the open sensuality of the Indians, Hazel strikes away the hand of a young woman who is stroking the genitals of her young son, Billy. Upbraided by her husband for the very real danger of striking an Indian, Hazel responds “Do you want him watching these filthy tricks?” (149). She goes on to call the Indians “nasty little monkeys,” making her orientation towards them clear: A people living naked, in open sensuality, and so close to nature, are indistinguishable to Hazel from animals, and all are filthy. A key thematic scene follows closely upon this incident, involving a dream Hazel has after being “lavishly befouled” by a troop of real monkeys overhead, “and this so suddenly that it seemed to Hazel that the heavens had opened up and voided on her” (151). That evening Hazel dreams she is standing in the “cold clean light” of a North Dakota church listening to the choir. She is enraptured with the beauty of the experience until she notices that the choir members are not the innocent cherubs she imagines, but loathsome creatures that “sniggered and itched and hitched soiled cassocks to scratch hairy white legs, and some broke wind” (151). She looks up to the vaults to “ease her pain,” and a hole opens in the roof and spews a foul slime all over her, the choir, and the church, yet “the voices remained brave and pure, and a light shone everywhere, inextinguishable, illuminating the slime itself, transfiguring it, infusing the very stink of it with eternal life” (152). The associations between the rain forest and the church of Hazel’s dream are clear: both had spewed slime on her, and if a church is the traditional dwelling place of God, it follows from Hazel’s dream that God dwells in the forest as well. In telling Martin of her dream, Hazel declares, “Oh Martin, help me, that hole was the hole of God!” (152). Hazel’s dream serves to connect the attractiveness of an Edenic forest and the beauty that one senses in a church with an associated ugliness: the excremental toads and monkeys that also live there, and the slime that falls from the church ceiling. Hazel’s dream infuses both aspects of church and forest with holiness, though, which can be read as a message to her that in the details of the natural world God is found in the foul as well as in the beautiful. In focusing on the foul, and finding it evil, and rejecting the beautiful—at one point she pulls the wings off of a pet blue Morpho butterfly Andy and Billy had been admiring, saying, “That lovely color isn’t real […] It’s nothing but gray dust” (152)—Hazel in fact rejects God. Her rejection of the inspiriting presence of God in nature, despite her empty piousness, leads her to madness. Once again, as with Guzmàn and the missionaries, Matthiessen reconciles apparent opposites: A natural world which can include both the loveliness of a Morpho butterfly and the horrifying spectacle of toads growing fat in a latrine. Hazel’s dream demonstrates that in the deepest levels of her consciousness she is aware of the spiritual potential of accepting that God resides in all the details of the natural world, but her culturally derived abhorrence of part of it, based on her Puritanical fundamentalism, leads her to reject all of the natural world, and in so doing she rejects God as well. The consequences of this decision cause Hazel to locate her faith in the rules and dogma of religious teaching: 

124   K. Zuelke Had Hazel been reared away from the Protestant heartland of the Great Plains, she would have made a redoubtable Catholic or even Communist; it was the dogma that attracted her, the security of righteousness, for she felt no need to understand her faith. (65) Although Leslie Huben never descends into the madness that swallows Hazel, his attitude toward nature, sex, and religion is similar to hers. We hear about this through Andy in a scene where she talks to Martin about her husband:  There’s an awful lot of things he thinks are dirty, that he can’t even talk about, things he can’t eat, you know […]. Well, I mean, he’s fastidious […]. Sometimes—I don’t mean really but—you know he even finds me a little dirty! (250) Andy’s speech further demonstrates Huben’s abhorrence of the natural (i.e., food, his wife’s sexuality) on the same fundamentalist grounds as Hazel, and develops as well the link between a healthy sexuality and a healthy regard for nature. The degraded sexuality of Wolfie and Guzmàn is associated with their fear of the forest and its people, and their willingness to destroy it. Hazel and Leslie also see the wildness of the forest, and the “wildness” of sexuality, as things that elicit loathing. Andy and the Niaruna, on the other hand, are linked with the wild through their more open expression of sexuality. To say that the Niaruna are more closely associated with Nature than Guzmàn seems obvious, but in fact such an assertion does the Indians the same disservice that causes ecofeminists to question the association of the female with nature. The Indians become “othered,” and this provides justification for their destruction. The Niarunas are acculturated people, not the “monkeys” of Hazel’s bigoted estimation. The Niarunas themselves are sensitive to the ways their culture distinguishes them from the wild creatures of the forest. Aeore, the Niaruna who shot the arrow at Moon’s airplane, tells Moon, “We are naked and have nothing! Therefore we must decorate ourselves, for if we did not, how are we to be told from animals?” (269). Pindi, the young Niaruna woman who sleeps with Moon, becomes pregnant and gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl, but she buries the girl alive in the forest. Her justification is that “only animals drop more than one. I was ashamed” (266). This action is justified in the eyes of the tribe because until a child is painted it is not a “New Person.” It is “nothing” and may be returned to the forest. On one hand Aeore and Pindi are asserting the distinction from nature that is bestowed upon them by the cultural act of face-­painting, but at the same time they seem to reveal a relative lack of confidence in that distinction. “There it was,” thinks Moon after hearing Aeore’s explanation of face-­ painting:

Essentialist tropes   125 The unbearable thing was not the fear that the Great Spirit had forsaken man, nor even that in granting awareness of death He had made man’s hope ridiculous, but that from the beginning He had made no real distinction between the mindless animals and mankind. (269) Acculturated people, the Niaruna nevertheless manage to maintain a close relationship to the natural world. But this is mainly a result of the contingencies of living in close contact with the forest with a technology that adapts easily to it. Their relationship to the forest is maintained by their traditions and spiritual beliefs, in marked contrast to the spiritual beliefs of Huben, whose religiosity equips him to understand nature as merely the abode of the devil, the simplistic opposite of God and civilization. In the end, Matthiessen’s conception of the Niaruna is sensitive to the kind of criticism of the essentialist “Ecological Indian” as defined by Shepard Krech III: “While this image may occasionally serve or have served useful polemical or political ends, images of noble and ignoble indigenousness, including the Ecological Indian, are ultimately dehumanizing” (Krech 1999, 26). After Moon’s brief erotic encounter with Andy Huben during her bath, he returns to the village filled with lust, which he directs toward Pindi: “In this world where the plants writhed, where seeding and flowering, life and death, were all entwined, one could copulate as naturally as one could sleep” (280). Moon makes love with Pindi before an audience of Niarunas curious about Kisu-­Mu’s unusual gesture of having sex in the dark. Moon hadn’t been able to tolerate spectators before, but this time, “before he lost himself and screwed the world, he had pretended that he held not the rank brown Pindi, but the clean pious flesh of Andy Huben” (281). The meeting of Moon with Andy, and his subsequent union with Pindi, has deep ramifications in the novel, not only because Andy passes an influenza virus to Moon, who in turn passes it to Pindi. From her it sweeps through the entire tribe, which has no resistance, and the Niaruna are effectively destroyed by the disease. The thematic ramifications are profound as well. The opposition of the victimized female/nature connection, at odds with the aggressive male/culture connection, becomes ironically deconstructed by this scene when we see that the momentary, but open, expression of Andy’s sexuality is the effective agent of the Niaruna’s demise—and it is much more thorough than bombs or preaching. Moon’s whiteness is also a participating agent in this unwitting but thorough complex of what amounts to cultural aggression. In the end it is Andy’s whiteness that attracts Moon’s whiteness, and their fleeting union is enough to elicit tragic consequences among the Indians. Andy’s behavior, while shocking to Huben and Quarrier (for different reasons), and most uncharacteristic of a “good Christian woman”—it is in fact a brief moment of rebellious adultery, of the kind of fornication that so incenses Leslie—nevertheless serves to connect Andy, in a negative way, to white culture. All of the Western influences that arrive in the jungle work toward the Indians’ downfall, and Andy, even with her natural

126   K. Zuelke sexuality, is no different. Western influence proves insidiously pervasive, and always destructive. Concepts such as culture, the natural, the female, and sexuality combine into an interrelated system of culturally situated phenomena that work together. From the broadest ecological perspective it has become clear that all societies are threatened by culture’s destructive advance on nature. Indigenous peoples, such as the Niaruna, are the most vulnerable, and fall first, but the implication is that the others are linked, and may not be far behind. Ultimately culture is self-­destructive when it fails to take the enormous fact of nature into account. The novel is ultimately anti-­pastoral in this sense: The pastoral middle ground that would mediate for Moon between nature and culture turns out to be part of a disintegrating cultural complex. There is no middle ground. If Moon’s quest is only for cultural belonging, it is a complete failure. His presence among the Niaruna leads to their demise; the cultural milieu he seeks disintegrates upon his entrance into it. The ending of the novel, though, hints at a spiritual fulfillment for Moon that he couldn’t have predicted. Floating eastward towards the remote depths of the vast rainforest, in a flotilla of burial canoes filled with rotting corpses, Moon experiences a kind of rebirth. Moon is bereft, finally, of the constraints of culture. He has found a way across the divide that separates him from an inspirited natural world—the way towards life is finally open. “Laid naked to the sun and sky, he felt himself open like a flower” (373). But, freed from the strictures of culture, Moon is also no longer supported by it. Nothing in the text suggests that Moon will return to the civilized world; he is naked and alone in an enormous wilderness, and will surely die there, but his death marks a real triumph of spirit. The way towards a life freed from culture must lead as well towards death, but it is a death filled with a kind of meaning Moon never had in his life. The price paid for Moon’s moment of tragic freedom has been enormous, however, entailing the destruction of an entire tribe of indigenous people. It is clear that Moon brought a white colonial ethic to bear on his dealings with the Niaruna, and the tone and the consequences of his fleeting but disastrous union with Andy underscore this. Moon’s “Indianness” is undeniable, and in one sense it justifies his approach to the Niaruna, but his “whiteness” controverts his own experience. Since the Niaruna no longer exist, because of their contact with Moon and the missionaries, it appears that in the end Moon has recapitulated the careers of earlier white explorers, and his appropriation of Niaruna experience, more than anything, appears hyperreal and essentialist and is thus ultimately tragic. Matthiessen implies that rational causality, the hallmark and triumph of Western civilization, may ultimately make Western civilization a victim of its own success. From an ecological standpoint, we see that its downfall may very well come from its inability to envision itself in harmony with the environment that supports it. It is also destructive when viewed from a societal standpoint. While some societies have fallen before others, the novel’s implication is that all societies are linked. Since the fictional predicament of the Niaruna has been repeated in countless situations around the globe, there is some urgency to Matthiessen’s fictional warning.

Essentialist tropes   127 Matthiessen’s novel remains an important fictional expression of the ecocritical project that, according to Lance Newman, engages contemporary, ecologically concerned writers who see the present ecological crisis as stemming from “destructive habits of thought” (Newman 2002, 2). This matters, because, according to Scott Slovic, the revolution in thought that is needed to change the ecological relationship of humans to the earth will depend upon the “power of awareness” (Slovic 1992, 169) that art can accentuate, and upon which nature writers pin their hopes. Art in this case accentuates as well the pitfalls of a mistaken construction of an essentialist connection between women and nature and indigenous peoples and nature.

References Cooley, John. 1994. “Matthiessen’s Voyages on the River Styx: Deathly Waters, Endangered Peoples.” In Earthly Words. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Eco, Umberto. 1986. Travels in Hyperreality. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. Estok, Simon C. 2009. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE, 16: 203–225. Gaard, Greta. 2011. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-­Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism.” Feminist Formations, 23: 26–53. Krech, Shepard, III. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: Norton. Matthiessen, Peter. 1987. At Play in the Fields of the Lord. 1965. New York: Vintage. Matthiessen, Peter. 1987. Nine-­Headed Dragon River. Boston: Shambala. Newman, Lance. 2002. “Marxism and Ecocriticism.” ISLE, 9: 1–25. Patteson, Richard F. 1979. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord: The Imperialist Idea and the Discovery of Self.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 21: 30–38. Slovic, Scott. 1992. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1989. “A Postmodern Introduction.” In Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 3–16. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

9 Cyborg-­goddesses, Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Jade Chen’s Mazu’s Body-­guards Peter I-­min Huang

In “New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism,” an article published in ISLE—the distinguished outlet journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)—Greta Gaard points out the failings of mainstream ecocriticism. One of those, according to Gaard, is the lack of address of “the analytical frameworks for gender, species, and sexuality” (2010, 644). The given shortcoming is not merely “a bibliographic matter of failing to cite feminist scholarship.” It signifies in addition a “profound conceptual failure to grapple with the issues being raised by that scholarship as feminist, a failure made more egregious when the same ideas are later celebrated when presented via non-­feminist sources” (644–645). A second weakness of mainstream ecocriticism that Gaard identifies is it underrepresents indigenous, African-­American, Chicana, Asian-­American women, and other minority writers (646). Echoing Gaard’s critique of the two main failings of mainstream ecocriticism, Noël Sturgeon observes that ecofeminism, more so than any other area of ecocriticism, focuses not only on minority writers and artists but also on why and how environmental problems—for example, rural poverty, urban slums, air pollution, and toxic drinking water—disproportionately affect women and other minority populations: “people of color … poor people, Global South people,” and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (2009, 9). In “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”—a writing first published in 1985 and a posthumanist feminist statement that is as relevant today as it was a quarter of a century ago— Donna Haraway embraced the concept and idea of “the cyborg”—the part human and part machine—at a time of great anxiety about and hostility towards new technologies and the rising sun of digitalization and computerized knowledge. Gleefully and audaciously, in a brilliant deconstructive argument, Haraway defended the cyborg by representing it as something that stood for and embodied a way thinking and being in the world that transgressed patriarchal boundaries between “the discursive” and “the material” and “the imagination” and “material reality” (1985, 150). Her essay inspired an entire generation of poststructuralist feminist thinkers, and it remains a founding work for posthumanist feminists. It also complements recent work by ecologists, cognitive

Cyborg-goddesses, Indios, Mazu’s Body-guards   129 scientists, behavioral scientists, social scientists, anthropologists, literary studies scholars, and cultural studies scholars who question conventional boundaries between the material world (so-­called base nature) and the immaterial world (the human mind and soul) that promote oppressive hierarchies. Their questions include a wide range of interdisciplinary interrogations of gender, ethnicity, animality, the environment, and so forth, and so beckon humans to be a part of “otherworldly conversations”; for any “coherent conversation” between humans and other beings, and putative things or objects, as Haraway argues in another essay, “depends on our recognition of the ‘otherwordly’ status of beings besides humans” (2008, 178–179). Material feminist scholars Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, adding to Haraway’s early contributions to ecocriticism (and posthumanism, which in fact does not emerge as a distinct disciplinary area of inquiry for another 15 years after the publication of “A Cyborg Manifesto”), also call for more consideration of “material-­discursive” approaches to being in the world that celebrate “the body” (2008, 5). They point out that “the body” is an entity and concept that patriarchal institutions historically have denigrated. In contrast to that dismissal, material feminism embraces “the body” and the materiality of being (5). At the same time, it rejects ontological thinking and desire for origins. In further introducing the theoretical foundations of and frameworks for material feminism, Alaimo and Hekman critique “the linguistic turn” that occurred in literary and cultural studies in the 1990s. One of the most “serious liabilities” of that turn was the embrace of patriarchal constructions of “the discursive.” Combined with the retreat from engaging with material conditions and states of things and beings, gender-­biased interest in “the discursive” hindered literary and cultural studies scholars from engaging with the nonhuman or other-­ than-human world. For sure, the rejection of materialist thinking was productive in the sense that scholars challenged prejudices rooted in essentialist forms of thinking. However, the hyperbolic emphasis on “the discursive” was equally counterproductive in the sense that “more often than not,” poststructuralist thinkers denounced work that gave credibility to “the body” and finitude. Mainstream poststructuralists thus more often than not implicitly or explicitly accused scholars who were comparing the history and treatment of women with the history and treatment of the environment of undermining poststructuralist theory and regressively re-­founding feminism “upon a naïve, romantic account of reality” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 4). Their “flight from nature” version of poststructuralism overshadowed other kinds of poststructuralism that in effect recognized that poststructuralism had insufficiently accounted for problems of gender, race, and class. The latter direction of poststructuralism included feminist thinkers such as Haraway. Indeed, they were the most interested in disentangling reductive, patriarchal material definitions of “the female” from equally crude material understandings of “nature,” but they also were interested in theoretical and practical positions that did not essentially separate the material from the discursive.

130   P.I.-M. Huang Making a point similar to that which Alaimo and Hekman make, Joanna Latimer and Mara Miele discuss Haraway’s “natureculture,” which stands for the belief that materiality is deeply implicated in cultural realities and “no part of being human … is unaffected by its material interaction with other materialities” (Latimer and Miele 2013). Like Haraway’s more well-­known term and theorization of “the cyborg,” “natureculture” speaks particularly loudly for female experience, for, in modern societies, under patriarchal constructions of “the human,” or under legislation that determines who has the full rights—civil, legal, moral, and so forth—of “the subject,” women often are compared with nature and so treated as if they are not fully human. In this specific sense, women share in common with the environment and the cyborg the stigma of impurity, hybridity, baseness, or baser material existence, and the experience or ascribed state of the object or second-­class subject. In this same sense, as I will argue in the remaining paragraphs by way of illustration of Taiwanese writer Jade Chen’s Mazu’s Body-­guards (2002) and Native American writer Linda Hogan’s long poem Indios (2004), patriarchal dismissals of female identity are critically tied to common pejorative and condescending attitudes toward and treatment of the environment. Indios and Mazu’s Body-­guards both implicitly articulate that patriarchal institutions marginalize and suppress “the female” under various social, political, cultural, and environmental frameworks. They denigrate “the female” for being a mixed, incomplete, and derivative identity and they privilege “the masculine” identity, or the identity that historically was granted the full rights of the subject. For Chen and Hogan, as for Haraway, as I argue here, patriarchal constructions of “the female” parallel speciesist constructions of “the cyborg” that privilege “the human” above all other things and beings in the world. Like Haraway, Chen and Hogan take those constructions, turn them on their head, and re-­appropriate them. “The female” in their narratives speaks for, and celebrates, hybridity, or the sharing, diffusing, recycling, and de-­hierarchizing of power. “The masculine” in their stories stands for accretion, amassing, centralization, hierarchically enlisting, and wasting of power. I thus read Indios as an ecofeminist revision of mainstream patriarchal interpretations of the classical Western myth of Medea as well as a primary narrative about the genocide and ecocide of Native Americans by AngloEuropean colonizers. Indios critiques those interpretations through the figure of the central eponymous character, a Native American woman who marries a “foreigner” and bears children by him. Similarly, in my reading of Mazu’s Body-­guards, I point out content in the novel that functions as a subtle critique of colonial, neocolonial, patriarchal, and environmental policies and practices in Taiwan. That content refers to the three main human female characters as well as to a fourth female character, Mazu, an indigenized goddess whose origins trace to China, and an ecofeminist identity, or material-­discursive and natural-­cultural identity. In the preface of Indios, Hogan states that one of the reasons why she wrote a work inspired by the myth of Medea was because it was “a story from many of our histories … common to all continents” that housed a great untruth (2012, xv).

Cyborg-goddesses, Indios, Mazu’s Body-guards   131 In the most famous account of the myth by Euripides, which Hogan has been familiar with since childhood (xv), Medea is a barbarian who falls in love with Jason and helps him to obtain the coveted “golden fleece.” She leaves her father, her two brothers, and her homeland to return with Jason to his country. She bears him two children before he abandons her to marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. In grief, despair, and rage, Medea presents Jason’s new bride with a gift—a poisoned wedding dress and coronet—and kills her children. As Hogan implicitly argues in Indios, Euripides’ famous version of the myth of Medea exemplifies patriarchal discourses that demonize and ostracize women who marry outside their ethnic and racial communities. Culturally, through texts, and ritualistically, through the performance and codification of those texts, the discourses sometimes center on or include the theme of infanticide and show little or no empathy for the protagonists who kill their offspring (xv). Hogan’s Indios challenges that discourse and perdurable “monologue” (xv). It is a story that, like Medea, is “never the story of just one woman./It is the telling of many worlds, peoples, and lands” (Hogan 2012, 12) that have been blamed and framed under numerous patriarchal frameworks for acts that they did not commit or for which they are not alone responsible. Thus Hogan takes the official patriarchal story of Medea, adapts it, and transforms it into a work about a young North American Native woman betrayed by a newcomer who takes her children from her and destroys her country. Captured and imprisoned on false charges that she is the murderer of her children, Indios, which means In God (In Dios) (Hogan 2012, 37), tells her story from a prison cell. Years before, she fell in love with a foreigner: “When I saw him the first time/As he stood there in all his finery, shining./And the sun was behind him … My heart jumped … I knew no better./I was like one of the fish that jumped from water” (7). She is enchanted by, not repulsed or threatened by or envious of, his beauty or difference: However, her father has seen many men like him come to their country and seduce or buy Native American women and then abuse and abandon them. He has never known one who has given something in return for what he has taken from his and Indios’ people. He fears that one day all of his people will be killed, moved, or unjustly “contained” by the AngloEuropean newcomers (11). Already, they have cleared vast tracts of land to raise cattle, and the Native Americans cannot find unpolluted water or wild animals and they can no longer cultivate their own crops. Retelling that history as an older woman, Indios writes: “There would be no more room in our world/ For birds and owls, for wolves or the elk with antlers” (16). It would be psychologically, ethnically, culturally, and ecologically “killed by what [the white men had] done” (18). It is that world that Indios greatly loved: “The land, and all the small animals” (18). Indios calls attention to the parallel histories of AngloEuropean imperialism and ecological imperialism (Garrard 2004, 123) and to the materially as well as ideologically fraught devastation that imperialism brings and leaves behind. Indios’ marriage to the foreigner is not recognized under dominant racist, speciesist, and patriarchal laws. When the foreigner falls in love with a woman

132   P.I.-M. Huang from his own ethnic community, he leaves Indios and seizes their children. Indios follows them to their new home, to their father’s “mansion” (Hogan 2012, 33). She lives in the trees, secretly watching her children’s comings and goings. Rarely, she is able to meet them and hold them to her breast. One day, she sees the woman who has replaced her hit her (Indios’) son. A “chamber of [her] heart” breaks (33). Another day, she sees a look on her daughter’s face “As if she’d become one of them” (33). “Another chamber of [her] heart” breaks (33). She watches among the trees with a sense of terrible ostracism, disenfranchisement, and despair. She has “slip[ped]” in status “from queen to pawn” (33). The environment that she has grown up with, which included animals, likewise has been stripped of status. The animals are disappearing or under threat because of the ecocidal practices of the foreigners: “the bear … wandered out of her den [and found] the land changed … [t]he wolf mother [tried] to protect her small ones/As they were being smoked out” (33–34). Indios sees no separation between herself and “the environment.” According to the ecological principles and practices of her people, “the human” and “the environment” share or constitute a seamless identity. If her people compromise the environment, they also do a disservice to themselves. The newcomers have different views of the world. They subordinate the interests of the environment to an incompatible and unsustainable set of interests. Not long after Indios’ foreign lover marries another woman, Indios prepares a gift for her. It is a robe made of gold cloth and poisonous local plants. When her children come to her, Indios gives to them the robe enclosed in a box to carry to their stepmother. She instructs them not to open it. Here, at this point in the narrative, Hogan does not make it clear if the woman for whom the robe is intended is poisoned by it or if her children touch the cloth, for she says, “They died from their love of gold” (Hogan 2012, 42). After this, men come and take her children and stone them to death. The men are relieved that Indios’ mixed-­race children will not inherit anything: “those large men … feared/A mixed-­blood child would come to rule” (47). Indios desperately tries to stop the men from killing her children, but they hold her back. She screams and begs them to take her life and spare those of her children. She writes, “I will never forget the sound of stones against the body./I would have died with them if I could” (43). The men then place the corpses of her children on Indios, who has fainted. When she revives, they charge her with the infanticide and inform her lover of the charges brought against Indios. He shows no interest in why or how his children were killed, for, as Indios says, “We were minor stars/Nameless in the dark matter of his universe” (43). Indios is a woman caught between two worlds and punished by the people of the second because she embraced its people and accepted one of them as her lover and partner. Now, both a victim and a perpetrator of violence, Indios is infected by the hatred and prejudice of those who betrayed her. She represents one of the most terrible outcomes of the “collision of continents” or violent history of colonialism in the time of the settling and conquest of North America by AngloEuropean people. She “contains” or suffers that outcome in prison, “in the silence of a body” (2012, 15).

Cyborg-goddesses, Indios, Mazu’s Body-guards   133 The narrator of Jade Chen’s semi-­autobiographical novel, Mazu’s Body-­ guards, the youngest of the three main characters, tells the story of the suffering and punishment of a generation of three women under the rule of colonial and postcolonial governments in Taiwan. Through all three characters, Chen makes ecofeminist as well as postcolonial arguments that challenge the official history or “national myth” of Taiwan. As postcolonial and feminist scholar Liang-­ya Liou argues, mainstream and official accounts of Taiwan’s history are disingenuous fabrications that reduce and suppress the multiple histories and transindigenous identities of Taiwan (2014, 239–240). Those accounts, which are patriarchal as well as colonialist, do not fully or adequately represent Taiwan or Taiwanese people, the majority of whom are of mixed ethnic and racial descent (Liou 2014, 238–244). In Chen’s alternative foundation myth, Taiwan is a very old indigenous place in the world whose people graciously accepted or were forced to accept newcomers—Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Han Chinese, Japanese, and so forth—and in return were denigrated for being a lesser kind of human and for belonging to a lesser kind of country or place in the world. Many of the newcomers did not embrace and respect, as the oldest indigenous people did, the belief and value that material and cultural identities could be mutually and productively shared and embodied. The narrator of Mazu’s Body-­guards first introduces her grandmother, Ayako, a Japanese woman from Okinawa, an island that is now part of Japan but was once annexed by China. She comes to Taiwan to search for her fiancé. She learns that he was killed in the battle at Wu-­she, a reference to the genocidal war that the Japanese colonial army together with Taiwanese of Han Chinese descent waged against indigenous people, forcing them into smaller and smaller areas and then rooting them out and killing them. Subsequently, Ayako marries a local Taiwanese man. Loyal to the Japanese colonial government, he fights alongside Japanese soldiers during World War II. When he and other Taiwanese soldiers return to Taiwan, the Chinese Nationalists, who have taken control of Taiwan, execute them for treason. (This episode also refers to a real incident, the “228 massacre” or “White Terror,” in which the Chinese Nationalists purged Taiwan’s intellectual classes, killing hundreds of artists, writers, and scholars on February 28, 1947.) Earlier, when her husband is with the Japanese imperial army, Ayako has an affair with her husband’s younger brother. Differently from his brother, he despises Taiwan’s Japanese colonizers. He joins a secret underground Communist group in Taiwan, and when it is defeated he flees the island to avoid capture and punishment. Ayako remains in Taiwan and gives birth to a daughter by her husband. Her granddaughter, the narrator of the novel, grows up in a military compound for mainland Chinese (KMT) soldiers and their dependents. Her daughter (the narrator’s mother) has two names, a Japanese name, Shizuko, and a Chinese-­Taiwanese name, Lin Fen-­fang. Shizuko’s husband is a soldier from China who came to Taiwan with the Chinese Nationalist army (Kuomintang) (KMT) after World War  II. The compound where the narrator lives with her mother Shizuko and father is separated

134   P.I.-M. Huang from the housing for other Taiwanese people. The narrator is indoctrinated by the education that she receives at the public schools run by the KMT government. She dislikes Japanese people and resents her grandmother Ayako when she sees her for the first time. She also resents her Taiwanese lineage. She speaks the privileged language of Mandarin only, so she cannot communicate easily with Ayako, who is fluent in both Taiwanese and Japanese and does not speak Mandarin. She internalizes the colonial Han Chinese government’s hatred of Japanese and contempt and disdain for Taiwanese (Han Chinese people who migrated to Taiwan before the nineteenth century who are of either “pure” Han Chinese descent or mixed Han Chinese and Aboriginal descent as well as older people who are of mostly of Aboriginal descent). When she secretly peeps into her grandmother’s room, it strikes her as “a foreigner’s room” (Chen 2004, 66). She calls her grandmother a “Japanese ghost” (66). Colonization has played a very important role in shaping a transethnicity identity for Taiwan (Liou 2014, 246). As Chen’s novel explores that aspect of Taiwanese history, the present government, dominated by Taiwanese people of Han Chinese descent who have deep cultural, familial, historical, political, and other connections with people in China or Japan, or both, pays tremendous attention to that history and very little to the oldest people and environments of Taiwan. The characters of the narrator, her mother, and her grandmother articulate the need for the Taiwanese government as well as other governments in the world to more actively recognize, value, and support transethnic identity rather than to spurn it. In addition, they articulate the contribution that women have made and can make to fostering more peace and accord in the world. Ayako is ostracized by her in-­laws and others in the post-­World War II decades, the 1950s and 1960s, because of her Japanese ethnicity. In that time, the Chinese Nationalists took over control of and “resinicized” Taiwan. When a police officer comes to the family home to take a census, he warns Ayako in satirical tones, “Okinawa belonged to China in the past. Don’t pretend that you are a Japanese” (Chen 2004, 283). Ayako’s daughter Shizuko also confronts discrimination because of her mixed ethnicity. She feels very lonely, especially so after her father is executed in the 228 incident. Ayako, who constantly worries that Shizuko (Lin Fen-­fang) will be sexually harassed and otherwise abused in school, forces Shizuko to abandon her schooling to work in a barber’s shop. Longing for love, Shizuko falls in love with the young Chinese soldier despite her mother’s strong opposition to the Chinese “foreigner.” He belongs to a highly privileged, post-­1950s population of Chinese newcomers. Many of this population believe that they are socially, ethnically, racially, and culturally superior to and more sophisticated than older Taiwanese people of either Han Chinese or indigenous Taiwanese descent. Shizuko internalizes that prejudice. She is attracted to the mainland Chinese youth because he is a “pure” Han Chinese and speaks perfect Mandarin. She is enchanted by his gentle manner and “perfect” Mandarin accent. When her mother Ayako learns of her love for the Chinese soldier, she locks Shizuko in a room for three days and nights. Shizuko breaks a window in the room and escapes from the house by crawling across the roof (158).

Cyborg-goddesses, Indios, Mazu’s Body-guards   135 Similar to the character of Indios in Hogan’s narrative, Shizuko gives up her family and country for a privileged patriarchal “outsider-­insider,” or for an individual who represents the colonizer who becomes the legitimate “indigene” of the places he or she inhabits. Shizuko’s husband pays her back with domestic violence and countless betrayals. He returns to China and only comes to Taiwan when he is poor and ill. He seeks Shizuko only in these times because she never refuses him care. A Taiwanese woman of mixed Han Chinese, Japanese, and indigenous Taiwanese descent, Shizuko embodied ecofeminist principles of embracing the land she lived in, accepting and respecting the people who came before her to that land, and embracing transindigenous and transethnic values when she married someone who was of a different ethnicity. In return, she is treated as if she is stupid for doing so. At one point in the narrative, her daughter asks her, “Why don’t you live your own life? Why do you carry my father’s problems on your shoulders?” (Chen 2004, 140). The narrator, daughter of Shizuko and granddaughter of Ayako, represents the lives of many women under patriarchal institutions. They internalize the values of those institutions. Many become mouthpieces for the language-­lords, landlords, and gender-­lords that those institutions favor. However, the narrator moves away from those values. Slowly, she comes to value her female and ethnic cyborg identity, one that her father and others dismissively compare to a “broken,” “tainted,” and “cracked” piece of porcelain. She begins to critically identify and question the patriarchal and ethnocentric values that she once embraced. The single-­most important figure for the narrator in addition to her mother and grandmother is Mazu, one of the three most loved gods in Taiwan, and loved equally by her mother and grandmother. She learns to recognize and appreciate ecofeminist values based on her learning about the goddess Mazu. When Han Chinese people migrated to Taiwan over a period of several hundred years, they brought with them their gods and goddesses. One of those was the ancestor of Mazu. Today, Taiwanese worship Mazu, a sea goddess who protects them when they are out at sea fishing and a rain and agricultural goddess who looks after their farming communities (Liou 2014, 261). The narrator’s great-­uncle (her mother’s uncle and Ayako’s lover), once carved a statue of Mazu and her two body-­guards and gave the sculptures to Ayako. When the narrator travels to Europe, she takes the amulets of the two body-­guards with her. In the narrative, it is implied that the figures of Mazu’s two body-­guards are Ayako’s husband and lover, and that Ayako is “Mazu.” Perhaps, also, they represent Ayako’s daughter and granddaughter, for although the relationship between the three women is a difficult one, undermined by the racist and ethnocentric prejudices that they have internalized, Mazu represents their ability to overcome and respect difference in the face of tremendous racial, ethnic, and geopolitical prejudice. Mazu represents a force that especially speaks for the ties between the female and the environment, ties that ecofeminists emphasize. Those connections often are broken by dominant patriarchal, hierarchical powers. When the narrator

136   P.I.-M. Huang returns to her maternal grandmother’s old house in Taichung, all of the trees have gone except for a single ancient banyan tree. Her aunt tells her that her grandmother insisted on protecting the banyan tree at the time of a Mazu procession. The tree and the house, which are what are left of the old neighborhood, stand for the continuation of resistance to development that seems to want to completely shut out, destroy, or incarcerate the nonhuman world. As Liou notes, in Chen’s novel Mazu is a metaphor for the connections between women that cross political, cultural, and ethnic barriers (2014, 261). It also is a metaphor for the connections between women and environmental thinking and action. Indeed, the popular worship of Mazu in Taiwan has played an important role in Taiwan’s environmental movement. A landmark victory for that movement refers to a protest in the 1980s, the decade that gave birth to Taiwan’s modern environmental movement. It concerns the U.S. company Du Pont, which had set up factories in central Taiwan in 1986. Environmentalists staged a protest in opposition to the Du Pont plant. On August 17, 1986, the protestors were blocked by the police. In response, the protestors moved to a local Mazu temple, where they gave speeches and drew large crowds in support of their activism. Both the protestors and those who gathered to listen to the protestors’ arguments against the Du Pont company comprised many ordinary Taiwanese people. Those who attended were persuaded by the protestors’ arguments and more people gathered at the protest site. The massive protest finally ended on March 12, 1987, when Du Pont announced that it would close down its factories in Taiwan (Chang 2008, 192). More recently, in Kong Liao, a small remote fishing village on the northern coast of Taiwan, protests by worshippers of Mazu, who are in a sense “mainstream” environmental activists in Taiwan, have been objecting to the government’s plans to complete Taiwan’s controversial fourth nuclear power plant. These local people, their local knowledges about Taiwan, and their local histories are key to mounting successful campaigns against the nuclear industry and other industries in Taiwan that are anti-­environmental. Mazu is particularly relevant to this issue because she has many different, or “cyborg,” forms in Taiwan. Hsun Chang, a renowned Mazu scholar, a research fellow at Taiwan’s prestigious institute, Academia Sinica, analyzes various local indigenizations of Mazu. Differently from Kuang-­ying, goddess of mercy, which is the most popular deity in Taiwan in addition to Mazu and the Earth god, Mazu is a less “universalized” goddess and a more various, indigenized, and local deity that is critically materially or environmentally shaped by the different regions of Taiwan where people worship her (2008, 8). That is to say, she is a more corporealized, materialized, or “embodied” goddess than other deities in Taiwan. In comparison with the relationships that define other deities and their worshippers, the relationship between Mazu and her worshippers is also more like that of a relative than a deity (Chang 2008, 8). Her typically dark-­skinned face also symbolizes her closeness to her people, who light candles near her face and, in a symbolic sense, turn her skin dark with their desire to see and be near to her (9).

Cyborg-goddesses, Indios, Mazu’s Body-guards   137 Also differently from the worship of other deities, in many processions, in which Mazu is carried by ordinary Taiwanese on the streets in the form of an effigy, worshippers press their bodies on the ground under her chariot to receive her blessings. In the final sentence of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway says, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (1985, 181). In the East, differently from in the West, many local deities are not understood or related to in immaterial or so-­ called spiritual or transcendental terms. Constructions and conceptualizations of them are more embodied, corporeal, material than the constructions and conceptualizations that one finds in counterparts to them in the West. This is especially true of Mazu. Asian studies scholar Sheng-­mei Ma provides one of the most exciting descriptions of a Mazu procession. Unused to the sound of the firecrackers, when he arrives close to the big crowds of people, he trips, falling flat down on the street (2015, 48). Limping and trying to catch up to the place in the procession where people carry an effigy of Mazu, he is overwhelmed by the sea of devotees who reach out their hands to touch the sedan chair of Mazu (49). He waits in the long line to “perform the ultimate obeisance” of crawling under Mazu’s sedan chair so that her form might pass over his prostrate form. He writes: Once curled up in a fetal position, I was unto myself, strangely uncoiled by the utter humiliation and self-­abjection, awaiting her sedan chair to pass over. It was very quiet with my face down to the pavement, all noise somehow muffled, chaos receding. (49) Then “she came,” Ma writes. “I dared not touch her, she touched me, twice with the front and back drape of her chair” (49). Her touch was like that of “a mother [who] waves a fan over her child, humming a lullaby, the fan tip, drowsily, scraping, tickling the child’s back” (49). The “act of crouching to forgo oneself ” before Mazu, as Ma writes, helped him to transgress the boundary between materialism and transcendentalism (49). That kind of act questions or makes less rigid the dividing line between material and transcendental actions as well as beliefs. Haraway’s cyborg and “natureculture” are concepts that are very useful for addressing deity worship in the East such as the worship of Mazu in Taiwan, a deity that is understood in both material and conceptual, human and other-­thanhuman, and cultural and natural terms. The worship of her has increased since the time, during the Ching dynastic period, when more than 400 temples were built in Taiwan in her honor. Today, there are more than 800 temples built in her honor, and one of the biggest annual festivals in Taiwan is devoted to her. In 2014, on March 23, the date of Mazu’s birth, more than 1.5 million people participated in the Mazu festival and procession. That number represents about 5 percent of the population of Taiwan. The procession is a pilgrimage that covers a distance of 300 kilometers. Worshippers gather at the Jenn Lann Temple (鎮瀾宮) in the town of Dajia (大甲), in Taichung County (臺中縣) at 10 p.m. From there they walk to

138   P.I.-M. Huang 26 townships in central Taiwan. Many of the organizers are vegetarians, and one of the main ancillary activities is the preparation of vegetarian meals for the people who take part in the procession. This work, and almost all of the work that the organizers and other participants commit to and carry out for the entire week, is work that is freely given and undertaken. The participants receive no holiday pay, no hourly wage for their labor. They are not medically or otherwise insured against a mishap. There is very little government support of the procession activities, or of the thousands of other similar activities—smaller but no less significant—that Mazu worshippers organize for their communities. They represent what is most needed in our world today, yet they are the least institutionalized or institutionally supported. Middle-­class, industrialized, and secularized, Taiwanese are embarrassed of deity worship in Taiwan except when it takes the form of a public holiday celebrated much like Christmas is celebrated in the United States and other countries in the West. They do not consider that they perform a deity worship of such gods of modern culture as nuclear power plants, naphtha cracker plants, coal plants, and the computer industry. These gods and their many smaller gods (cars, domestic products that are made with toxic metals, plastic bags, and oil-­based products) have critically compromised the coastal regions, mountains, rivers, and plains in Taiwan. There are signs that Taiwan’s most privileged urban industrialized middle classes are changing their attitudes. Many are recognizing that preserving and respecting deity worship of Mazu can be used and already is being used to strengthen values of community and foster greater awareness of environmental rights, animal rights, and women’s rights. As ecofeminists Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy point out in their early and groundbreaking collection of essays entitled Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, “feminist attention to the concept of the ‘other’ ” is one of the most important characteristics of ecofeminism (1998, 5). That kind of attention is important for scholars of religion, theology, and deity worship, disciplinary areas that are seeing a comeback in recent decades after a time of considerable suspicion and derision among secular thinkers and the academic world as a whole. Distinguished ecofeminist thinkers such as Alaimo and Hekman, Gaard, and Haraway draw attention to that interest in their arguments about the various kinds of patriarchal and speciesist beliefs that continue to be social foundations for many people. Ecofeminism speaks more for what all beings and objects in the world share more than for what distinguishes them and for what can be used against them in order to subordinate them. It speaks for more-­than-human realities and materialities and a belief in more-­than-human agencies. Indios is a rewriting of Medea by Linda Hogan that stands for recognizing and paying more attention to the cyborg or trans-­species, transethnic, and transgeneric bonds between humans and nonhumans, humans and environments, and humans and gods. Jade Chen’s Mazu’s Body-­guards also represents, in the portrait of Mazu and her avatars, a cyborg-­goddess, or a both more-­than-human and human, cyborg being-­thing.

Cyborg-goddesses, Indios, Mazu’s Body-guards   139

References Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2008. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1–19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chang, Hsun. 2008. Mazu: Search for Faith (媽祖:信仰的追尋). Taipei: Boyyoung Publisher (台北:博揚文化公司). Chen, Jade Y. (Chen, Yu-­hui) (陳玉慧). 2004. Mazu’s Body-­guards (海神家族). Taipei: Ink Literary Monthly Publishing, Co., Ltd. (台北:印刻文學出版社). Gaard, Greta. 2010. “New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a Feminist Ecocriticism.” ISLE, 17(4): 643–665. Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. 1998. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna J. 1985. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 157–187. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hogan, Linda. 2012. Indios. San Antonio, TX: Wings Press. Latimer, Joanna, and Maria Miele. 2013. “Naturecultures? Science, Affect and the Non-­ human.” Theory, Culture & Society, 30(7/8): 5–31. Retrieved August 7, 2017, from http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/30/7-8/5. DOI: 10.1177/0263276413502088. Liou, Liang-­ya (劉亮雅). 2014. Belated Postcoloniality: Post-­Martial Law Taiwanese Fiction (遲來的後殖民:再論解嚴以來台灣小說). Taipei: National Taiwan University Press (台北:台大出版中心). Ma, Sheng-­mei. 2015. “Mazu’s Touch, Taiwan Nezha and Crying.” In The Last Isle: Contemporary Film, Culture and Trauma in Global Taiwan. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Sturgeon, Noël. 2009. Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

10 Wolves, singing trees, and replicants Ecofeminist readings of contemporary Spanish novels Carmen Flys Junquera Spain is not known for either a strong environmentalist tradition or a feminist one, and much less an ecofeminist consciousness.1 Environmental historian Joaquin Fernández in his book Ecologismo Español (1999) claims that the Civil War marked a fracture between any previous incipient Spanish activism and that real consciousness only started in the 1970s, together with democracy and the “Spanish miracle” (economic boom). An early study by Josep Vicent Marqués, Ecologia y lucha de clases (1978), illustrates the leftist, Marxist influence in most initial environmental movements, clearly linked to social injustice. Environmental impact became an issue only as the result of rising urban speculation and massive construction, which threatened the entire coast together with the uncontrolled growth of cities and highways. And as such, most debates and writing dealing with these issues are closely tied to social and economic problems rather than with the preservation of wilderness agenda which resonates so strongly in the United States. Even if environmental awareness did grow at the end of the twentieth century, the humanities and arts in Spain were largely disconnected from this trend. There have been very few ecocritical studies of Spanish literature until recently.2 In the journal Ixquic (2000), critics Jorge Paredes and Benjamin McLean assert that environmental literature in Spanish could only come from Mesoamerica and was virtually impossible in the Iberian Peninsula, given its strong Judeo-­Christian tradition, and the importance of humanism, rationalism, capitalism, and positivism which made the culture insensitive to the environment (2000, 25). However, things are changing. Environmental concerns now appear frequently in literary texts, though it is true that the financial and economic crisis has obscured some, privileging social issues and the increasing economic gap. Nevertheless, in the early twenty-first century with the progressive first legislature of Rodriguez Zapatero (2004–08) some feminist issues came front stage, such as the increase of maternity leave (to be shared with fathers), non-­privileging the order of surnames (traditionally first the father and then the mother),3 strong action to reduce gender violence,4 open debates on gender bias in language, and more egalitarian electoral lists. However, ecofeminism, as such, is still relegated to small academic circles and to philosophy departments. Major Spanish ecofeminists are Celia Amorós and Alicia Puleo. Puleo published a major philosophical ecofeminist study, Ecofeminismo

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   141 para otro mundo possible [Ecofeminism for another possible world] in 2011. In Puleo’s last edited book, Ecologia y género en diálogo interdisciplinar [Ecology and gender in interdisciplinary dialogue] (2015), she has brought together authors from multiple disciplines to highlight the dialogue between ecofeminist philosophy and economics, medicine, activism, literature, and the arts. In 2013, the journal Femenismo/s devoted a special issue to ecofeminism, both from a philosophical and literary point of view. At the same time, the twenty-first century has brought a surge of writing, mostly by women, which can be read, to differing degrees, from an ecofeminist lens. Issues of environmental justice and the logic of domination appear together with literary strategies focusing on how to improve our relationship with earth others. An early precursor could be Juan Cobos Wilkins’ novel, El Corazón de la tierra [The heart of the earth] (2001).5 This chapter will focus on three Spanish women writers: well-­known and widely read journalist and novelist Rosa Montero Gayo (1951–); famous young adult novelist Laura Gallego García (1977–); and an unknown biologist and secondary school teacher, Concha López Llamas (1955–). Their novels belong to very different genres, none of which have been popular nor abundant in traditional Spanish literature: Montero’s only science fiction novels, Lágrimas en la lluvia [Tears in rain]6 (2011) and its sequel El peso del corazón [Weight of the heart] (2015); Gallego’s feminist fantasy for young adults, Donde los árboles cantan [Where the trees sing] (2011), and López Llamas’ realistic nature writing novel, Beatriz y la loba [Beatriz and the she-­wolf] (2015). The choice of three very different authors and genres is deliberate as it will highlight the scope of ecofiction being written in the last five years. This chapter will primarily use ecofeminist ideology from Val Plumwood and Karen Warren. One issue that almost all ecofeminists agree on, according to Warren, are the “interconnections among the unjustified dominations of women, other human Others and non-­human nature” (2000, 43). This parallel oppression is clearly seen in the three7 narratives I am analyzing, most clearly in Beatriz and the She-­Wolf.8 This novel highlights most blatantly the parallel oppression of women and nature. Moreover, the novel is focused on three types of domination and violence: against women, against wolves, and against traditional cultures (language and lifestyle). In this novel, López Llamas clearly and repeatedly makes the point of the parallel violence and oppression of women, wolves, and rural lifestyles. For López Llamas, domestic violence against women is rooted in a similar logic as hatred against wolves (and other species) and against traditional lore. The narrative revolves around a young woman, Beatriz, who has recently lost her mother, job, and home, and who rather hastily marries a young man, Santiago. Santiago takes her to his village, where she becomes almost a recluse as he continuously checks up on her through phone calls while he is travelling (transporting wine all over the country). Bored, yet afraid to incur his wrath when he comes home, she decides to secretly explore his childhood home, locally named the “wolf den,”9 which he had insinuated could become a rural lodging for

142   C. Flys Junquera tourists. There she meets his great uncle Manuel and learns about rural traditions and language and about Santiago’s difficult adolescence under the abusive figure of his grandfather. His grandfather, Severino, who abused his wife, introduced Santiago to hunting and to an irrational hatred of wolves. Manuel becomes the only friend for Beatriz and she takes great joy in learning rural customs and noting words which are becoming extinct. Her project of the rural hotel is aimed at keeping rural knowledge and lore alive. When she learns of Severino and Santiago’s hatred of wolves, she feels empathy for the wolves:  by empathizing with that species, she could distance herself from Santiago, although she denied that to herself and justified the desire to know more about them because they were the most representative animal of those hills, who seemed to call her by name.10 Therefore, hidden from Santiago, she begins to read about wolves and tries to track them in the woods to observe them. The structure of the novel reinforces this parallel oppression. All the chapters, except for one centered on Santiago, alternate their focus on the two female protagonists, Beatriz and Oak, the she-­wolf. At the end of the novel, the last chapter shares the focus on both Beatriz and Oak as they meet. Oak had also become an orphan, losing family, home, and habitat, when an “upright animal” (the term used to designate humans from the wolves’ perspective) catches her brother in a trap and she runs and hides. The novel alternates the parallel narratives of the two females, using a slightly different font for each. However, chapter titles do not signal the focus, which is only perceived on reading. While the reader learns of Beatriz’s life and feelings, the reader also learns about Oak’s difficult survival as a young pup growing into adolescence without the guidance of parents, both in hunting and wolf social skills. For example, the text tells us that Beatriz’s mother chose silence to avoid attracting the attention of her husband, who abused her, and “that [silence] was picked up by her daughter.”11 Likewise, when Oak is alone in the forest, we find a similar description and she listens to the howl of other wolves and remains hidden and silent.12 The parallel is often made explicit, such as: The greed with which Santiago took his wife, the minute he entered the house, can only be compared to that of a wolf, hungry for weeks, who after taking stock of each body part of his prey, then abandons himself to sleep.13 True to the nature writing tradition, Beatriz finds solace, inspiration, and renewed strength in nature. The natural “wildness” liberates her from social constraints. As she becomes increasingly more autonomous, she lies and listens and admits that she “admires the pride of the wolves that protect their territory, even though so many have hunted them down and denigrated them.” She compares wolves and women as the locus where unsatisfied and insecure men could

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   143 exercise their aggressiveness and lack of trust in others. She hopes that by “looking into a wolf ’s eyes, she might find some of that strength and pride.”14 While the chapters focusing on Beatriz trace the progressive abuse she suffers and her attempts to reaffirm her own potential, the chapters on Oak do the same. Moreover, the novel teaches the reader much about wolf behavior.15 The support of Manuel and his teachings about rural culture are parallel to the instructions that Vecio, an old lone wolf who teams up with Oak, gives her on her social behavior and hunting tactics. All the wolves have proper names and distinct personalities, emphasizing the social structure of wolves but also placing them at the same level as the human animals, Beatriz, Manuel, Lucia, and Santiago. For López Llamas, the violence exerted over wolves is also parallel to the progressive extinction of rural traditions. A reality in much of Spain, small villages have lost their population, reduced to old people. Most of the homes have been abandoned and there are no children or young adults. The villages only regain a semblance of their past during the summer holidays, and particularly during the local festivities which take place in almost all of Spain during August and September, associated with harvest festivals. Then the village is full of life, if only for a few weeks. Here Manuel’s role is essential, as Beatriz learns the local dialect and customs and forges ahead with her project of a rural hotel, which would not only give her a goal in life but also help preserve local customs and knowledge, much of which has valuable ecological content. In Laura Gallego’s young adult fantasy, Where the Trees Sing,16 the parallel domination of women and nature is clear but perhaps not as forceful, as the novel takes us to a kind of medieval romance, where male dominance is to be expected. However, the protagonist and heroine of this feminist novel is clearly Viana, a young woman. In the story, Viana belongs to a noble family but very early on she lost her mother. The novel begins with the winter solstice festival in the Royal Court, where the diverse characters are introduced and the threat of invasion by the barbarians is mentioned. Through conversation the reader learns that marriages are arranged, though Viana has no objection since she is in love with her future husband. When the barbarians do, in effect, conquer the kingdom, killing most of the nobles and men, their first act is to gather all the noblewomen and marry them off to prominent warriors, who are given both a bride and the land, to legitimize the new rule through their children. They show no mercy in their treatment of the women, who are only prizes for the military conquest. Likewise, the barbarians overrun the land, pillaging crops and livestock. Viana, with the aid of her servant, an older and wise woman, avoids being raped by her husband, and thus an unwanted pregnancy, by drugging him. When she is found out, she defends herself and kills him, having to escape to the woods. Here, her helplessness as a delicate noblewoman condemns her if it weren’t for the rescue by Lobo,17 an old friend of the dead king who had been banished because of marriage rivalry and for warning the king of the barbarian threat. Lobo not only teaches Viana but brings out her self-­confidence and independence. Because of her folly and altruism, she learns of the secret that protects the barbarians. But

144   C. Flys Junquera throughout the novel, the oppression of women, the poor, and nature is obvious, albeit expected because of the setting of the novel. Finally, in Rosa Montero’s Bruna Husky story, the oppression of women is less obvious, but that of the poor, or human-­alien others and nature, is clearer. As Karen Warren states, an ecofeminist ethic is “anti-­naturist, anti-­sexist, anti-­ racist, anti-­classist (and so forth, for all other ‘isms’ of social domination)” (1996, 32). Bruna Husky is a combat android, usually referred to as a replicant, who, after serving her term for the company, is licensed and becomes a detective. In the futuristic Madrid of 2109, there is no outright gender discrimination and, “[l]ike most humans and technohumans, Bruna was more or less bisexual; only a few individuals were exclusively heterosexual or homosexual” (TR, 101). However, on one of the floating space platforms, the Kingdom of Labari, where much of the second novel takes place, women are clearly oppressed. Bruna, who travels there on a mission, has difficulty understanding that she cannot speak face to face with the men, that all quarters, schools, and sports are segregated by gender, and that married women have their feet loosely bound together with elaborately embroidered hobbles, according to wealth and status, to ensure small dainty steps walking behind their husbands. Replicants are also prohibited in Labari, unless travelling on a United Nations of the Earth mission. Nevertheless, in both novels the oppression of the poor or those othered is clear. Nature, as generally understood, barely exists as most plants and animals have become extinct. The novels, however, do abound in the use of animal symbolism.18 There are some remains of the centuries-­old Madrid park, “El Retiro,” “traditional gardens, dusty and withering in the drought” (WH, 23), but most people prefer the new lung-­parks, where the “artificial trees were much more efficient at exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen than natural ones” (WH, 23). Ironically these artificial parks were the equivalent of “natural spaces,” with signs calling for silence:  “This is an ecological, pure space. Please respect the peaceful environment.” Lung-­parks were the only urban spaces where there was a ban on the installation of public screens, which blasted the airspace everywhere else with stupid images uploaded by citizens. (WH, 23) Since there are no birds, people attend virtual exhibits where holograms present the extinct flora and fauna. Bruna’s difficult relationship with her memorist19 usually takes place either at the zoo or at these exhibits, where her focus is divided between the social behavior of gorillas and the crucial information Paul is giving her. The traditional (and current) symbol of Madrid is a bear and a strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo). The statue can be found at the central Plaza del Sol and on the coat of arms of the city.20 In 2109, bears and strawberry trees have become extinct and the new symbol has shifted to a polar bear. In the zoo, there is a large pool with a replicant polar bear, an exact genetic copy of the last polar bear to live, again providing a fascination and attraction for Bruna.

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   145 Another clear example of othering is the fact that, even though the Constitution of the “United States of the Earth” in 2098 declared all technohumans and aliens as sentient and therefore deserving of human rights, Bruna often comments on how replicants are disdained by most humans. Although by 2109 all committees have established parity of humans and technohumans, sexual relationships between them had been considered miscegenation until recently and now “they were simply frowned upon—except, of course, when it came to the ancient and venerable practice of prostitution” (TR, 16). Moreover, replicants cannot have children, and they can rarely legally adopt children, only “a sick child or one with some problem—because of the early use-­by date of replicants prevented them from garnering the points necessary for a normal adoption” (TR, 18). Even now, when calling the Samaritans for emergency health care for a dying replicant, Bruna shows anger as once again, the privileging of humans becomes clear: “ ‘Human or technohuman?’ Again the fury, again the rage. ‘That question is anticonstitutional, as you well know’ … Everyone knew that they prioritized humans…” (TR, 7–8). In fact, the plot of the first novel is based on a terrorist cell from Cosmos, the other Floating Platform, which alters memory implants for replicants, inducing them to kill other replicants and then humans, to heighten this hatred and end all replicants. In addition, there are also aliens in Madrid, who suffer clear discrimination by humans and by many replicants. Similarly, the poor suffer oppression. The air of Madrid is highly polluted and living in the clean-­air zones implies payment of very high taxes. The novel brings in environmental refugees, who illegally enter the clean zone—separated by high fences of “reinforced plexiglass, with very thick armour plating—maybe 2.6 centimeters” (WH, 1)—with their children so they can breathe clean air. These so-­called “moths” ran: the risk of living clandestinely in Clean Air Zones they couldn’t afford, it was for fear of the undeniable harm pollution cause to children. They illegally abandoned their contaminated cities with permanently gray skies and appeared, just like moths, attracted by the sunlight and the oxygen, only for the vast majority of them to go up in flames, because the tax police were incredibly efficient. (TR, 179) Public employees, such as “[m]agistrates, like doctors, police and other socially necessary professionals, were posted to the Dirty Air Sectors on double salary, and for no longer than a year, to prevent any health repercussions” (TR, 57). We also encounter “billboard-­people”—people who carried “screens on [their] chest and back [that] played the company’s damned commercials on a perpetual loop” (TR, 27). These “billboard-­people were only allowed to take off their outfits for nine hours a day” and in return they got a meager salary but could get “free air as well” (TR, 27). These people are condemned to walking the streets since few bars or cafeterias will tolerate them. In the second novel, Weight of the Heart, Bruna enters the contaminated zone, where masses of refugees try to assault the

146   C. Flys Junquera electrified fence (WH, 4),21 and ends up rescuing and adopting a feisty little girl who is trying to enter the clean-­air zone. Montero makes a strong critique of sexism when we learn that Gabi, the sick ten-­year-old Russian orphan, was not only suffering from severe radiation contamination, but had scars from a previous rape. In this way, Montero links the exploitation of the poor and women to violence.22 Therefore, the novels touch on most kinds of domination and exclusion, allowing Bruna to work through them and change many of her initial attitudes. However, the parallel dominations of women, poor, and nature are not the more interesting ecofeminist aspects of these novels, in my opinion, rather the multiple examples of an ethics of care and the literary strategies these writers employ to endow earth others with respect and moral consideration, much as in Val Plumwood’s “counter-­hegemonic strategies” (2002, 194). Karen Warren’s seventh characteristic of an ecofeminist ethic is that ecofeminism “makes a central place for values of care, love, friendship, trust, and appropriate reciprocity” (1996, 33). Warren emphasizes the importance of being in relationships with others. Marilyn Frye refers to this as the gaze of a “loving eye” which is non-­invasive, and one which knows “the complexity of the other as something which will forever present new things to be known” (1983, 66–72). Plumwood, in her chapter “Towards a dialogical interspecies ethics” in Environmental Culture (2002), suggests that we need a counter-­hegemonic methodology in order to decenter the human within the human/nature dualism, rather than try to bring more species into the “similar to human” category. She rejects the “studying down” method to find what parts of nature qualify for our ethical consideration. She asks herself if it would not be more productive to “study up” and determine if humans are “good enough” for ethically rich relationships (2002, 168). She argues that our anthropocentric prejudices are “obstacles to interspecies justice and which prevent us from relating to earth others as fully and ethically” as we should (2002, 168). Therefore, she sets out to find a variety of “contextually specific ethics” which could be applied to an interspecies relationship. She suggests some strategies to come to know nature in less biased ways and acknowledge our embeddedness in nature. In the closing of this chapter she sums up a series of “counter-­hegemonic” stances which would help us move from a monological and reductionist conception of the human self to a more dialogical conception, which would facilitate the development of richer relationships with earth others (2002, 194–195) and eventually change the cultural paradigm that our western civilization has developed. Plumwood begins suggesting that we recognize and emphasize the continuity and similarity between the human and non-­human, accepting our animality while at the same time embracing differences, by regarding earth others as “other nations” in a non-­hierarchical way. Many of Plumwood’s stances are those of a communicative openness. She emphasizes being attentive and listening to the other, inviting communication, seeing the other as potentially an intentional and communicative being. Together with this is a stance of generosity and willingness to share or redistribute resources, negotiate the relationship, and be attentive

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   147 to the complexity of the other. These stances coincide with Frye’s “loving eye” and Warren’s emphasis on giving importance to values of love, care, reciprocity, and relationships. In the remainder of this chapter, my objective is to analyze how these Spanish writers “study up” humans and view others as deserving of care and ethical consideration, despite their differences. In Beatriz and the She-­wolf, the title and structure of the novel places both Beatriz and Oak on the same plane, dispelling any hierarchical domination. The reader is invited to empathize with both woman and wolf and understand their parallel plights. By naming all the wolves and showing their social structures and habits, wolves are raised in our eyes. Beatriz often identifies with Oak, further reinforcing this relationship. For example, Chapters 4 and 5 [“Lone wolves” and “San Pedro festivities”] both end in similar terms: Oak has met Vecio and they seal a pact, sleeping together as a show of trust, as does Beatriz, who meets Santiago, and “as animals” lick each other and fall asleep.23 Both are victims of Santiago’s abuse and both try to learn about the other. As Beatriz explores the slopes, she imitates the wolves, choosing dawn or dusk in order not to be seen.24 López Llamas does not create a false relationship. She does not fictionalize an impossible friendship. The relationship is created as Beatriz reads and learns about wolves and then actively hikes the forest looking for wolf scat and prints. When she does find them, she keeps her distance. Her only goal is to observe and learn and try to find her own self-­esteem. On the other hand, Oak clearly avoids Beatriz, but at the same time observes that “upright” animal with the flaming red hair that does not take a menacing stance but simply bathes in the river and stretches in the fields. One could say that Oak is “studying up” Beatriz, as she observes her. When a male upright animal appears, both females hide behind the bushes.25 The relationship does develop into an unspoken understanding at the end, when the author does poetic justice. Santiago has captured Navia, one of Oak’s pups. Oak and her small pack (her mate, Cedric, Vecio, and all the pups) are trying to find her. They trace the scent to a storage building where Santiago is hiding and where he has many wolf pelts from the wolves he has tortured and killed. At that moment, Beatriz had just discovered what Santiago is hiding. When the wolves are studying how to enter, Beatriz and Oak look at each other in the eyes and each one experiences something, an imperceptible recognition.26 Beatriz opens the gate and the wolves enter, attack Santiago and rescue Navia. Beatriz, when the wolves have left, now liberated from her abuser, calls the police to report the discovery of her husband’s illegal hunts and his death. The novel seems to suggest that by returning to nature, women and animals gain the strength to rebel and shake off their parallel domination. Thus, in the novel we see Beatriz acknowledging the complexity of the wolves and establishing a visual and empathic communication with Oak. Clearly Beatriz realizes that the interests of the wolves are not hers, except for this one final case of poetic justice. But she, with her “loving eye,” is willing to negotiate their shared space, recognize their intelligence and needs. On the other hand, Beatriz also shows interest and respect for old Manuel and his traditional rural culture. She does not assume an arrogant position of superiority, as a city girl,

148   C. Flys Junquera and takes authentic joy in learning the rural traditions and dialect. Many ecocritics turn to indigenous wisdom as a guide for adopting more respectful attitudes towards nature. In Spain, as in most of Europe, it would be difficult to find indigenous peoples (there are some exceptions in the Canary Islands); however, the closest we could probably find are rural cultures. While they can’t be assimilated to indigenous peoples, particularly with regards to their belief systems because of the overall predominance of Christianity, some rural communities (such as in the Sierra de la Cabrera within the Galician Massif, where the novel takes place, or in the Iberian Chain with areas of lower population density than Lapland) have had little contact with the city and modernity and have kept pre-­industrial lifestyles up to the mid-­1970s. Beatriz’s respect for old wisdom, foods, and lifestyles is another way of a non-­hierarchical and open stance. In Laura Gallego’s fantasy, Where the Trees Sing, we see other interesting aspects. On the one hand, as previously mentioned, Viana cannot stand by any injustice and often foolishly charges, in a very quixotic way, to undo any wrongs, getting herself and others into trouble. While she, under Lobo’s guidance, learns to live in the forest and learns all about the flora and fauna, she initially doesn’t pay too much attention. When Lobo banishes her from the growing number of rebel camp followers, Viana decides to enter the forbidden heart of the woods in search of a legend. This becomes a life-­changing experience and her attitude shifts. She encounters a young man fallen in a river, who remembers nothing and does not know how to speak, survive, nor has any social manners. Viana sets out to teach him, regardless of his strange appearance—a greenish tint to his hair and mottled brown skin. With patience, she learns to communicate with Uri, both the little language he learns and his facial and body language. Because of an injury, Viana is forced to return to camp, where everyone looks strangely on Uri, although he is tolerated because of Viana. Eventually she falls in love with this strange youth, being blind to what he really is even though there are numerous hints: Uri had told her “my people … don’t feel this way. Don’t feel this—he tried to explain, hitting his chest with his hand.—You can’t love? But that … But then … Why can you?—I am different.”27 Later when Uri leads her into the forest, he seems at home—“I come from the forest. There are my people”28—and the trees open way for them and create protective barriers. Finally, Uri leads her to a grove where the wind in the trees sings and the leaves and branches dance to their song. Uri shows her the secret of the barbarians: the sap of the tree heals wounds and the leader has become invincible since he uses the sap to protect himself. The barbarians are now collecting all the sap for the final battle, and the trees are dying. Viana and Uri return to inform Lobo, and Uri is kidnapped. When she finds Lobo and tells him, insisting they save Uri, a sorcerer laughs at her foolishness for having fallen in love with a tree: “She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and counted to three and assumed she had to accept the impossible. Uri was not a person. Uri was a tree. And all the parts suddenly connected.”29 Indeed, when the barbarians are defeated and Uri is rescued, he says good-­bye to Viana and he begins his metamorphosis into a tree again.30 Viana hugged him all night, and by sunrise, he had

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   149 become once again a singing tree, one who had become human in order to save his people. Viana acknowledges his gift of love by remaining in her courtyard, where she would spend the evenings sitting under the tree and singing. As the months passed, Viana gave birth to twins to which she gave no explanations. The children grow up playing in the tree, who witnessed their games and lives. Viana never married; she sat by the tree every evening and died among its roots, where her son buried her. Viana’s heirs kept the tree in the courtyard, even when it died, and it became part of the family’s coat of arms. Obviously, the story has a romantic ending appropriate for a fantasy tale. However, Uri never becomes “prince charming”—rather the opposite. He had become human to save his people and when his mission had ended, he returned to his natural state, a tree. But Viana’s attitude is what is interesting. Despite realizing the fact that her lover is a tree, she doesn’t reject him. She has learned about the complexity of earth others, their sentience and intentionality, and she accepts it. Uri had shown her other life forms, and she had seen them, but only because they had shown themselves to her voluntarily.31 During their trip in the heart of the forest, she learns to see the other beings, noting their individuation and character. Thus, the novel stresses the intentionality and complexity of the earth others and shows Viana accepting that fact and rejecting any notion of human superiority. Viana sorrowfully accepts that Uri’s space and needs are different and that she really can’t keep him to herself as a human. There is a clear negotiation and mutual respect. Viana shows a loving eye to all oppressed people and to earth others, once she can leave behind her fear. And she is willing to accept that reality. In the case of the Bruna Husky narrative, the story carries many layers. The narrative has the usual trappings of science fiction, such as advanced technology: moveable sidewalks throughout the city, taxis with no driver, and watches with computers that have personal identification, GPS, make economic transactions, download files, and so forth.32 Teletransportation to other planets is a reality, but regulated as excessive frequency causes physical mutations, and there are space shuttles to the “floating platforms” where alternative societies live. It is also a clear meditation on death, since replicants only live ten years and Bruna is continuously counting down the years, months, and days she has left. Humans live much longer, and thanks to plastic surgery, never look old. Signs of ageing are socially reprehensible. The narratives also address individuality and genetic engineering, not only with the technohumans, but also when Bruna discovers Clara, a clone of herself. The first novel also questions the writing and re-­writing of history, as the archives are sabotaged and many aspects re-­written to include racist attitudes towards technohumans. What is understood by the concept of progress and capitalism is also questioned33 and there are frequents allusions to many current social issues. For example, the topic of a privatized health insurance34 is central, where only the rich have full coverage, while the poor either have very limited or no coverage. The story also has multiple references to climate change. Madrid has no water and vapor is used for showers because water is much too expensive. Madrid

150   C. Flys Junquera experiences occasional abrupt polar episodes yearly, “with one or two days of heavy snowfalls, howling gales, and plummeting temperatures that in Madrid could easily reach minus four degrees Fahrenheit” (TR, 288), and what most surprises Bruna is: people’s lack of foresight; there were at least two polar crises each year, but people lived as if they were a one-­off occurrence, something abnormal that would never happen again. And so, every time a cold snap arrived, supplies of the thermal articles sold out. (TR, 288) Already mentioned are the privatization of breathable air and the extinction of animal species. While nuclear energy had been banned in 2059, discovering that the little girl, Gabi, has suffered severe radiation sets Bruna off on the case. As to be expected, certain parts of the earth have hidden nuclear cemeteries that are leaking radiation, and the Kingdom of Labari runs on nuclear energy, which is commercialized illegally. The series also offers a comment on the nature/culture dualism, where culture-­technology has almost completely substituted nature, as most food is synthetic, as are the remaining trees, and obviously the replicants themselves. The background of the events are a prolonged political and financial crisis due in part to “global warming, submerging about 14 percent of the Earth’s surface, inundating the most fertile coasts of the planet, provoking mass migrations, famine, disease, and violent confrontations that end the lives of about two billion people” (WH, 315). From an ecofeminist point of view, the more interesting aspect is the learning process that Bruna undertakes towards an ethics of care. Bruna presents a continuous dialog with herself and with the diverse situations she is in, where she engages in debates about her feelings and ethics, much as Bakhtin’s dialogic and chronotopic relationships, as discussed by Murphy (1991, 45). Initially, Bruna is a rather aggressive loner, as many replicants, “solitary beings, islands inhabited by a single castaway in the midst of a motley sea of people” (TR, 18), refusing to engage in caring relationships since her lover, Merlin, died of massive organ destruction (the death of technohumans after ten years). Most people in her society are loners, to the degree that a new profession has arisen, that of tactiles. When Bruna goes to her “psyche-­guide” to renew her license, he requires that she visit a tactile:  What? A touchy-­feely, a tactile? No way! … Going to a tactile was an embarrassment. Old folks abandoned by everyone went to a tactile … tactiles were for humans, for their wretched, loud mouth needs, for their broken and confused emotions. For their sly sentimentality… (WH, 17) Bruna is highly suspicious of any emotional outbursts and avoids contact. She is physically disgusted when in a drunken and drugged spree she wakes up realizing that she just had sex with an alien, an Omaá (called bichos [bugs]).

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   151 She had slept with a bicho. She felt like throwing up. But had she really slept with a bicho? What she meant was, had she…? Merely exploring the idea in her head turned her legs to jelly. (TR, 113) Eventually, as Maio tries to find refuge with her, she struggles to ignore his strange physical appearance (his skin is translucent and one can see all his organs) and appreciate his musical talent, finding him a place with fellow musicians. Likewise, at the beginning of Tears in Rain, she is left with an intelligent talking alien pet, a bubi, commonly known as “greedy-­guts” since they chew on everything. She kicks him around, refusing to build a relationship despite her instinctive reactions:  The animal leaped up into her arms; Bruna felt his warm breath on her neck. Embarrassed and annoyed, she removed the bubi and put him on the floor. All she needed was to become attached to a creature she was going to get rid of right away. (TR, 207) However, the pet is so warm, loyal, and persistent that she opens up and accepts his presence, caring for him, “ ‘Bartolo good,’ whispered the greedy-­guts in Bruna’s ear, his voice still choked. Okay. Okay! The android resigned herself. She’d keep the bubi—for now” (TR, 400). Later “[a]stonished, Bruna realized that this absurd alien creature had just saved their lives” (WH, 93). She ends up defending him—“‘He’s not a stupid bicho. He’s Bartolo,’ she said to her own amazement”—and accepting their mutual relationship: “He was her bubi” (WH, 95). Her relationships with humans are similarly distanced. Nevertheless, she feels strangely attracted to the replicant polar bear, Melba, manufactured using genes from the last polar bear on earth, and now floating in an indoor climatized pool. The androgynous spiritual tattooist, Natvel, tells her that her animal spirit is that of a bear, something Bruna had unconsciously known, and  Bruna pressed her palms up against the glass, sensing the weight and push of the water, the turbulent power of that other life. And for an instant, she was herself next to the bear, the two of them floating in the blue of time. (TR, 405) A clear example of Bruna realizing herself as “individual-­in-the-­world,” participating in the formation of the other, discussed by Murphy (1991, 45). However, although Bruna experiences discrimination against technohumans and aliens—as Chi, leader of the RRM says that they were “a secondary species and third-­class citizens”—Bruna is able to realize that it is part of a larger scale of oppression: “But she felt that the discrimination against reps encompassed a greater discrimination—that of the powerful against the wretched” (TR, 48). Bruna undertakes

152   C. Flys Junquera the risky trip to Labari when she is promised full medical coverage for Gabi, since her own insurance would not cover the girl. Although Bruna Husky, as her name indicates, is not only strong but rather gruff with a menacing aspect, reluctant to show any emotional attachment, she does begin to care for the emotionally scarred child, precisely through narrative—being cajoled into having to invent a story as a promise to Gabi, Bruna begins to sort out her own feelings and relationships, forcing her to come to terms with ethical issues and find a solution.35 Her favorite hangout is Oli’s bar, the one place where androids and humans, aliens and mutants came together: “This mélange was a trademark of the establishment, a collateral effect of the expansiveness in both body and spirit of Oli, who shared her magnanimity with all beings” (TR, 80). Thus, the two novels constitute one long learning process, from an aggressive and lonely Bruna to a very caring person, accepting humans, aliens, and replicants. She learns to adopt a more open stance and be willing to listen, pay attention, and recognize the interests and values of those othered, even when they do not coincide with her own. These novels also present multiple voices and different perspectives, what McDowell would call a Bahktinian dialogics (1996). In Beatriz and the She-­ wolf, the author attempts to imagine and represent what the wolf perception of humans might be. Oak refers to humans as “upright animals” and to the shepherds’ dogs as humiliated traitors. She describes what we would consider as a pastoral scene, as one of domination, of humans over dogs and these over sheep.36 Another interesting perspective is how the wolves perceive the road, as a row of lights advancing at great speed over a uniform dead piece of land.37 While López Llamas undoubtedly focuses on two females, Beatriz and Oak, her novel is not overly simplistic. She makes an effort to understand, though not justify, Santiago. She goes to lengths to describe his childhood, abandoned by his parents who migrated to France, taking only their daughter and leaving Santiago in the hands of his abusive grandfather. At the same time, Santiago’s cousin, Teresa, defends him, ignorant of details, and explains away things as being part of the family or local tradition. Manuel, Beatriz’s main support, has difficulty in realizing what is happening, as does Beatriz’s friend, Lucía. The novel thus presents different human and non-­human perspectives in a polyphony of voices that encompass the complexity of the lives intertwined in the area. Similarly, in Where the Trees Sing, Gallego presents the perspectives of the humans, mainly those who have been conquered but have different opinions on how to rebel. In fact, the one person who made Viana suffer the most, her fiancée who sold out to the barbarians, is given a voice to justify that he did it to save his mother and sister, and Viana forgives him. But more interestingly is the perspective of the singing trees and the other creatures of the forest who mistrust Viana until she is capable of changing her attitude and respecting them. While only Uri learns to speak, the other creatures of the forest have a “language” among themselves and do manage some communication with Viana, when she is ready to listen. One could also say that they observe and “study up” Viana to see if she is deserving of their contact. As far as the Bruna Husky narrative, we clearly hear the voices of the different peoples of that society, particularly those

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   153 who have been othered, and who teach Bruna to see other perspectives and even accept herself and her illegally cloned other. So, while each novel has a clear protagonist and the narratives are focalized on the protagonist, the authors allow other voices and viewpoints to enter in dialog with the main voice. The protagonists change throughout the stories, significantly enriching their relationships with other human others and non-­human others. And these changes are a result of adopting counter-­hegemonic strategies. Beatriz and the She-­wolf can clearly be considered an ecofeminist novel, despite the fact that the author had never heard of ecofeminism when she wrote the novel.38 The other novels have significant ecofeminist aspects, without being wholly so. Rosa Montero has expressed her concern over climate change indirectly in previous works. In her realist novel, Instrucciones para salvar el mundo [Instructions to save the world] (2008), the characters are always commenting on the unseasonal warmth of Madrid, of flash storms and so forth, but the environmental concern is limited to that. However, following the title of the novel, the salvation of the world lies in caring human relationships and relational identities, and as such, is consistent with ecofeminist philosophies, as Warren highlights. In these recent science fiction novels, as mentioned, nature has virtually disappeared, but the importance of caring relationships focuses the plots. In the case of Laura Gallego, even though the novel is fantasy, the twist of perspective, placing non-­human others in the same plane as the protagonist, certainly responds to Plumwood’s counter-­hegemonic strategies. Beatriz and the She-­wolf clearly responds to environmental issues. López Llamas is currently working on a collection of short stories addressing the specific issues regarding wolves in the different parts of Spain, such as debates with shepherds, species extinction, and so forth. In Rosa Montero, who is currently working on the third novel of the series, the bias of Spanish environmentalism strongly linked to social issues and critical of capitalism is patent. Regardless of the different emphases in these three writers, what remains clear is that Spanish literature is changing and is beginning to address environmental issues and, knowingly or not, ecofeminist ones.

Notes   1 The research for this chapter was made possible by the funded project: “Environmental humanities. Strategies for ecological empathy and the transition towards sustainable societies; Subproject 2: “Stories for Change”. Ref: HAR2015–67472-C2–2-R (MINECO/FEDER).   2 See Pratt and Gordon (1998), Carretero González (2000), Pérez Abad (2000), Henriquez (1997), and Prádanos (2012, 2013) for earlier ecocritical studies of Spanish literature; see Flys Junquera and Raquejo Grado (2016) for a current overview of environmentalism in Spanish literature and art and the last issue of Ecozon@ on “South Atlantic Ecocriticism” Vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 2017).   3 Traditionally Spaniards carry their father’s surname followed by the mother’s; but the first one is the more significant (persons are alphabetized by the first one) and it is the one to be carried to the next generation. Often people only use the first if it is unique enough. The law has recently abolished the automatic preference for the father’s surname.

154   C. Flys Junquera   4 Although statistics support the fact that domestic violence is not very high, comparatively speaking, in Spain, public consciousness is very high; see: http://nytlive. nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/11/09/tens-­of-thousands-­take-to-­madrids-streets­to-protest-­violence-against-­women/.   5 For an ecocritical and ecofeminist reading of this novel, see Flys Junquera (2012).   6 The title of the novel Tears in Rain is an explicit homage to the film Blade Runner.   7 I will often refer to three narratives since the two novels by Rosa Montero are one and the same story. Also, since both novels are about the same detective, Bruna Husky, I will at times use that reference to not have to repeat both titles. Nevertheless, I will cite each one by title in specific references.   8 I will be using the following abbreviations to simplify citations, privileging the English translation of the novel in order to facilitate recognition for the reader: Beatriz y la loba [Beatriz and the She-­wolf] (BSW), Donde los árboles cantan [Where the Trees Sing] (WTS). Montero’s novels have been translated to English so I will use the English version to facilitate reading. These novels will be abbreviated as Tears in Rain (TR) and Weight of the Heart (WH). The other novels have not been translated to English, so all translations are my own. I will use paraphrases and translations and provide the original text in Spanish in a footnote. In the case of Laura Gallego, the book is an e-­book and no pages are provided, only location numbers.   9 “la guarida del lobo” (BSW, 144). 10

Poniéndose del lado de aquella especie, se desvinculaba de Santiago, pero eso se lo negaba a sí misma y justificaba su afán de conocer las andanzas del lobo por ser el animal más representativo de aquellos montes, desde donde comenzaba a sentir que la llamaban por su nombre. (BSW, 160)

11 “[Rosa e]ligió el silencio en su hogar para pasar desapercibida y contagió de aquella actitud a su retoño” (BSW, 37). 12 “[Oak] acostumbrada a pasar desapercibida, su cerebro bloqueó las cuerdas vocals” (BSW, 42). 13

La avidez con la que Santiago tomaba a su mujer, nada más entrar en casa, solo era equiparable a la de un lobo hambriento de varias semanas que, tras dar cuenta de cada parte del cuerpo de su presa, se abandonara a un sueño reparador. (BSW, 121)

14

Animales que defendían su espacio en el mundo, por el hecho de ser; que campeaban por aquellas tierras, sintiéndose con derecho a hacerlo, el que ellos se habían concedido a pesar de que otros seres se empeñaran en someterlos, adiestrarlos, denigrarlos o exterminarlos. Seres como Severino, como Santiago, como tantos otros humanos que habían hecho del lobo y de la mujer el locus donde desarrollar la agresividad, expresión de insatisfacción eterna, de desconfianza sembradas en el otro, de miedos atávicos, de inseguridad en si mismo. Por eso, Beatriz deseaba encontrarse con aquellos animales indómitos. Verlos, aunque se quedara sin habla: buscar sus ojos para encontrar su fuerza, su orgullo de ser. (BSW, 244)

15 The novel has multiple references at the end from scientific studies on wolves. 16 The title is inspired by Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, as the prologue of the novel indicates. 17 It is interesting to note that Lobo means wolf in Spanish, and the banished noble indeed acts as a lone wolf, teaming up with young Viana and teaching her how to live in the wild—much as Vecio teaches Oak in Beatriz and the She-­wolf. 18 See Irene Sanz Alonso (2017) for a study of this.

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   155 19 Replicants are not allowed to know who wrote their memories, but Pablo Nopal, one of the most famous memorists, confesses to Bruna that he used his own life and memories to write hers, something which sets her aside as being more complex than most technohumans. 20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Madrid. 21 Here Montero is evoking the continuous assaults on the fence in Melilla, separating the Spanish city from Morocco, or the other many walls built to keep the poor out, all over the world. 22 For more on this aspect of the novel as well as the corporatization of basic resources, see Leone (2017). 23 “La alianza se había sellado con un sueño de confianza mutua. Entre lobos, eso era sagrado” (BSW, 48); “Hambrientos, cada cual lamía y devoraba la piel al descubierto del otro…. Las primeras luces del alba se filtraban a través de las ventanas.…” (BSW, 60). 24 “Beatriz había aprendido que, para dar una vuelta por el monte sin ser vista, debía hacerlo al amanecer o al anochecer, como los lobos” (BSW, 217). 25

Las dos le detectaron a la vez y se cubrieron cada una a su manera para no ser vistas. La hembra erguida eligió el salgueral, situado a unos pasos de donde ella estaba, rio abajo. Mientras, la joven loba conservó su posición en el retamar que la venia cobijando desde el principio. (BSW, 231–232)

26

Fue así como Beatriz, a medio camino entre niña embelesada y mujer aterrada, se topó de frente con la mirada de Oak, mientras esta apoyaba sus patas sobre la pared tras la que ella se escondía. Sus pupilas se fundieron en el orificio abierto en la fachada, punto de mira de la joven. El encuentro fue minúsculo, casi imaginado, de no ser por lo que cada hembra acabada de experimentar en los más recóndito de su ser, capaz de devolverle el aliento vital a Beatriz y de bloquear el impulso iniciado por Oak para acceder al tejado desvencijado de la casa que servía de refugio a la joven, y desde allí abordar el del pajar donde Navia se encontraba. Las dos se habían reconocido. (BSW, 306–307)

27 “Mi gente … no siente esto. No siente así—trató de explicar, golpeándose el pecho con la mano. –¿No podíes amar? Pero eso … Pero entonces … ¿por qué tú sí?—Yo soy distinto” (WTS, loc. 3786). 28 “Vengo del bosque. Allí está mi gente” (WTS, loc. 3793). 29 “Cerró los ojos, inspiró profundamente, contó hasta tres y asumió que tendría que acepar lo imposible. Que Uri no era una persona. Que era un árbol. Y todas las piezas encajaron de golpe” (WTS, loc. 4860). 30 “Su piel se volvió más oscura y rugosa y el cabello comenzó a crecerle hacia arriba de forma desordenada. Sus pies se hundieron en la tierra, sus brazos se alzaron hacia el cielo, buscando la vivificante luz del sol” (WTS, loc. 5620). 31 “la chica no podría haber visto nada si ellos no se hubieran mostrado antes sus ojos voluntariamente” (WTS, loc. 4352). 32 Note that the novel came out in 2011 and Apple’s smartwatch came out a year later. 33 See Leone (2017) for more on this. 34 Spaniards used to have universal health coverage—something which changed in 2012 with the economic crisis—and this remains a politically sensitive and debated topic. 35 See Jim Cheney (1987) on the importance of narrative for this purpose. 36

Oak nunca había visto una escena de dominación similar. Sus posibles presas se sometían, sin levantar la cabeza de la hierba de la pradera, a las órdenes que los canidos expresaban mediante persecuciones decididas; responsabilidad, en último

156   C. Flys Junquera grado, del animal erguido que, con piedras lanzadas al aire y sonidos poderosos que salían de su garganta, les indicaba hacia donde debían dirigirlas. (BSW, 117) 37 “Una hilera de luces, como caídas desde lo alto, se desplazaba a gran velocidad sobre una franja de tierra de un gris uniforme, desprovista de vida” (BSW, 82). 38 Personal comment. The author, since hearing about ecofeminism, is reading and working on it.

References Carretero González, Margarita. 2000. “El ‘ecologismo reaccionario’ de José María de Pereda en Peñas arriba.” Ixquic, 2: 96–112. Cheney, Jim. 1987. “Eco-­Feminism and Deep Ecology.” Environmental Ethics, 9: 115–145. Ecozon@. 2017. “South Atlantic Ecocriticism.” Ecozon@, 8(1, Spring). www.ecozona.eu Férnandez, Joaquín. 1999. El Ecologismo español. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Flys Junquera, Carmen. 2012. “Blanca Bosco’s ‘Loving Eye’: An Ecocritical Approach to Juan Cobos Wilkin’s El corazón de la tierra.” In Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism, edited by Timo Müller and Michael Sauter, 171–187. Heidelberg. Flys Junquera, Carmen, and Tonia Raquejo Grado. 2016. “The Environment in Literature and the Arts in Spain.” In Ethics of Life. Contemporary Iberian Debates, edited by Kata Beilin and William Viestenz, 3–33. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. “In and Out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love.” In The Politics of Reality. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press. Gallego, Laura. 2011. Donde los árboles cantan. Madrid: SM. Kindle e-­book. Henriquez, Marrero. 1997. Documentación y Lirismo en la Narrativa de Ignacio Aldecoa. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Kerslake, Lorraine, and Terry Gifford, eds. 2013. Special Issue: “Ecofeminismo/s: mujeres y naturaleza.” Feminismo/s, 22. Leone, Maryanne. 2017. “Trans-­species Collaborations in Response to Social, Economic, and Environmental Violence in Rosa Montero’s Lágrimas en la Lluvia and El peso del corazón.” Ecozon@, 8(1, Spring): 61–78. López Llamas, Concha. 2015. Beatriz y la loba. Madrid: Ediciones, Bohodon. Marqués, Josep Vincent. 1978. Ecología y lucha de clases. Madrid: Ediciones Zero. McDowell, Michael. 1996. “The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight.” In The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Glotfelty and Fromm, 371–391. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Montero, Rosa. 2008. Instrucciones para salvar el mundo. Madrid: Alfaguara. Montero, Rosa. 2011. Lágrimas en la lluvia. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Kindle e-­book. Montero, Rosa. 2012. Tears in Rain. Trans. Lilit Zekulin Thwaites. AmazonCrossing. Montero, Rosa. 2015. El Peso del corazón. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Kindle e-­book. Montero, Rosa. 2016. Weight of the Heart. Trans. Lilit Zekulin Thwaites. AmazonCrossing. Murphy, Patrick D. 1991. “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics.” In Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic, edited by Dale M. Bauer, and S. Jaret McKinstry, 39–56. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Paredes, Jorge, and Benjamín McLean. 2000. “Hacia una tipología de la literatura ecologista en el mundo hispano.” Ixquic, 2: 1–37. Pérez Abad, Miguel. 2000. “Miguel Delibes: ¿el primer verde? Una lectura ecocrítica de su obra.” Ixquic, 2: 124–146.

Wolves, singing trees, and replicants   157 Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Prádanos, Luis. 2012. “Decrecimiento o barbarie: ecocrítica y capitalismo global en la novela futurista española reciente.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 3(2): 74–92. Prádanos, Luis. 2013. “Toward a Euro-­Mediterranean Socioenvironmental Perspective: The Case for a Spanish Ecocriticism.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 4(2): 30–48. Pratt, Dale, and Barbara Gordon. 1998. “The Environment and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­Century Spanish Literature.” In Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook, edited by Patrick D. Murphy, 248–256. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Puleo, Alicia. 2011. Ecofeminismo. Para otro mundo posible. Valencia: Cátedra. Puleo, Alicia, ed. 2015. Ecología y género en dialogo interdisciplinar. Madrid: Plaza y Valdes. Sanz Alonso, Irene. 2017. “Human and Nonhuman Intersections in Rosa Montero’s Bruna Husky Novels.” Science Fiction Studies, 44(2): 326–330. Warren, Karen J. 1996. “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism.” In Ecological Feminist Philosophies, edited by Karen J. Warren, 19–41. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Warren, Karen. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

11 Ecofeminist moorings in globalized India Literary discourse and interpretations Swapna Gopinath, Sony Jalarajan Raj, and Soumya Jose Ecofeminism is a practical movement for social change arising out of the struggles of women to sustain themselves, their families, and their communities. These struggles are waged against the “mal-­development” and environmental degradation caused by patriarchal societies, multinational corporations, and global capitalism. They are waged for environmental balance, heterarchical and matrifocal societies, the continuance of indigenous cultures, and economic values and programs based on subsistence and sustainability. (Gaard and Murphy 1998, 2)

India, oft-­cited and celebrated as the land of spirituality, speaks of its complex and deep-­rooted insights into the relationship between humans and their environment through its various texts. Ecological concerns repeatedly surface in the ancient texts and destruction of nature is believed to precede the day of Apocalypse. Nature and the female energy are linked, both respected and treated with awe and often venerated, especially in matrilineal societies. Indian experience of colonialism and the exposure to rationalistic utilitarianism initiated changes in perception and large-­scale exploitation of the Other—be it the subaltern, women, non-­human beings, or nature. The tendency to exploit and suppress the weak has been ingrained in the Indian soil by the colonial power. The centrality of the male and a society built upon a hierarchical structure of power normalized oppression and suppression. Even before ecofeminism started formulating itself as a theoretical discourse, ecofeminist activism lodged its presence in the Indian soil. The overwhelming participation of women who belong to the lower strata of society make the movements to conserve the environment more effective. Women writers have portrayed these deep connections between woman and nature in texts that highlight them in a sensitive manner. Among dystopic visions of modernity, they stand out for the poignancy and sensitivity in their portrayal of these harmonious relationships. Indian society shares a unique relationship with its environment, and the texts from ancient India bear testimony to this bond, which was once considered divine. Hindu puranas speak of ecological destruction portending an apocalypse. Kurma Purana says: “then greed and passion arose again everywhere, inevitably,

Ecofeminist moorings in globalized India   159 due to the predestined purpose of the Treta (Third) age. And people seized the rivers, fields, mountains, clumps of trees and herbs, overcoming them by strength.” Cyclical patterns of life and death are repeatedly narrated with emphasis on destruction of nature being linked to destruction of life. The Mahabharata depicts such a destruction:  At the end of the Eon the population increases.… At the end of time all men—there is no doubt—will be omnivorous barbarians.… All people will be naturally cruel … without concern they will destroy parks and trees and the lives of living will be ruined in the world. A vision of doom is repeatedly mentioned as a consequence of dharma losing significance in society. “We … notice in the Hindu texts a close correlation between dharma (righteousness, duty, justice; from dharma, or that which sustains) and the ravaging of Earth. When dharma declines, human beings despoil nature” (Narayanan 2001, 181). Hindu sacred texts venerate elements of nature and ascribe holiness to primal forces beyond the control of the ancient Indian. “Hindu sacred texts starting with the Vedas (c.1750–600 bce) speak extensively about the sanctity of the earth, the rivers and the mountains” (Narayanan 2001, 182). Earth is revered in Hindu tradition and veneration to all living beings is exhorted. Untamable resources of nature are ascribed purity and divinity and rituals are built around them. The prevalence of the Siva-­Sakti image, of the harmonious blend of the male and female, challenges the notion of binaries and establishes the omnipotent presence of a universe in harmony with nature and the transcendent god thus transforms itself into a single source of energy. Puranas have several passages dedicated to the cause of the environment. Matsya Puranam has a tale where Goddess Parvathi says thus: “One large reservoir of water is worth ten wells. One son is like ten reservoirs and one tree is equal to ten sons. (Dasaputra, Samodruma). This is my standard and I will protect the universe to safeguard it”. Similar references are found in VarahaPurana and Vishnu Dharmottara, and the Dharmashastras condemned the act of destroying the ecology. Ancient India incorporated lessons of preserving the environment in its religious texts and the weaving of these insights into the rituals and ceremonies of the community has helped the humanity to have a harmonious relationship with nature resulting in the least infringements upon the natural habitat. But the ideological framework which sought to sustain life through preserving nature began to crumple under the rising hegemonic patriarchal power. With male supremacy, equations began to change, and women, once venerated for their reproductive ability, began to get marginalized. The semiotics of this new discourse affected the bondage man had with nature as well.  Though Motherhood is highly honored in Hindu kinship systems, it seems this honor is based on her self-­negation, the ability to endure privations for the family, the willingness to give sustenance, no matter what the sacrifice, with no thought of her own needs. … Whether it is Bhumidevi or a

160   S. Gopinath et al. Bharatmata or a sacred grove, the expectation is that the sacred site will bless, nurture, purify or perform any other supportive material act without any requirement for sustenance in return. (Sherma 2000, 97) Western philosophical discourses that seeped into the Indian thought processes post-­colonization accelerated this attitudinal change. A shift in focus was initiated from the oral traditions carried across generations in a community to the holy texts, written and preserved by the elite castes. Hindu religious treatises began to establish themselves as fundamental texts, and their custodians consolidated their positions in the hierarchy of power. Colonization of the Indian mind erased the ecological concerns of an earlier time and replaced it with ideologies that placed man at the center of the universe. This resulted in bountiful nature getting displaced from its place of veneration and relegated to a subservient position. Women, by virtue of their reproductive capacity, were also marginalized in this process. This attitude is reflected in the constitutional provisions, post-­ independence. Environment has not been given its due position in the constitution. It was later added as the 42nd amendment in 1976. Act 48A was inserted, which stated: “The state shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wild life of the country.” The binaries of nature and culture which captured the essence of ecofeminism to some extent is detectable in the words of major Indian ecofeminist activists. Vandana Shiva is among them.  The vast and powerful yet sublime and caring nurturer as against the puny and insignificant yet callous and cruel destroyer. The binaries are built to foreground the ecofeminist concerns but often they are subtle and polymorphous. Fluidity of these concepts like right and wrong confuses mankind. Since the age of Enlightenment and the colonization of the world, the White Man’s concept of emancipation, of freedom and equality, is based on dominance over nature, and other people and territories. The division between nature and culture, or civilization, is integral to this understanding. From the early women’s movement up to the present, a large section of women has accepted the strategy of catching-­up with men as the main path to emancipation. This implied that women must overcome within themselves what had been defined as “nature,” because, in this discourse, women were put on the side of nature, whereas men were seen as the representatives of culture. (Mies and Shiva 1993, 65) But major ideological displacements in social institutions demanded novel understandings of altered circumstances. Globalization and postmodernism, with their ideologies of consumption and commodification, demanded more complex readings. Ecofeminism thus grew beyond binaries to perceive the dynamic power centers that demand a flexible and dynamic perception.

Ecofeminist moorings in globalized India   161 Indian ecofeminist concerns strongly rooted in a deeply spiritual tradition date back to pre-­Vedic times, and social structures were built around a respectful communion with nature in all its magnificence. While colonial discourses ruptured this connection with the environment, women and other marginalized groups in the community still cherished the delicate ecological balance with awe and devotion. Nature as a repository of wisdom and life was still venerated and regarded as their source for sustenance by the Others, while the hegemonic forces swept aside such concerns. India experienced grassroots environmentalism even before ecofeminism gathered momentum around the world. The Chipko (tree-­hugging) Movement witnessed the presence of women in large numbers and their concern for the environment surprised many: The state’s increasing commercialization and underdevelopment of the Garhwal region was instrumental in the conceptualization of this movement, where local women were affected by state-­level decisions such as granting private contractors harvest rights for the trees to manufacture cricket bats. (Chanda 2014, 33–35) Significant contributions to the cause from various activists like Vandana Shiva helped to foreground the issue. Shiva used the platform to highlight the Indian context of assigning divinity to nature and preserving life through propagating the values of ancient India. The next major movement was Narmada Bachao Andolan (1985), led by Medha Padkar. It was against the dam that was to be built across Narmada, which would lead to the displacement of a large section of the tribal population. It captured the attention of the nation and led to debates on the feasibility of constructing dams as a sign of modernity as well as raised concerns about the marginalized community of the tribal people. Medha Padkar brought to the attention of the world the destructive nature of large dams as well as the sociocultural loss along with immense destruction to the ecology of the land. The magnitude of the displacement threatening the indigenous communities of the area was repeatedly reported by Padkar. Along with Padkar, Arundhati Roy lent her voice to the cause. She constantly airs her concerns about the nation turning away from the multidimensional nature of exploitation of natural resources as well as the othering of minorities.  Another major movement which created a furor was that to save the Western Ghats in 1988, which alerted the nation to the delicate balance of the ecosystem. This was followed by several others spearheaded by women activists diligently contesting destructive human forces, be it the nation or multinational corporations. Although the national identity forged prior to independence built itself around the conceptual framework of a spiritual India, the connection with a nature considered divine was ruptured against the tide of modernity. Social and community reformisms and the expansion of the state’s infrastructural power from the mid-­19th to the 20th centuries, and the expansion

162   S. Gopinath et al. of the rationality of nationalist development since the mid-­20th century— which crucially shaped the “modern” in this context—had ensured that most conceptions of the good life in this society were instrumental and functional to the imperatives of production and development. The languages of reform and development were deeply gendered—gender was, and still is, deeply implicated in the process of making individuals governable. If male individuals were assigned the task of “conquering Nature” for production, female individuals were directed into the space of the home and assigned “active domesticity.” (Devika 2010, 752) Women, conditioned to enact the role of nurturer, remain alert and conscious to the rampant destruction and abuse of the environment, which they understand as an essential component for survival. Their acute sensitivity to the environment in which they live, be it rural or urban, equips them to sense intuitively calamities that can result from disturbances in the delicate ecological structures. The roles and duties assigned to them are socially created and their identities are culturally constructed, but it also prepares them to foresee disasters that arise from human indifference and callousness. In Shashi Deshpande’s novels, female heroes return to their native homes, leaving their husbands at home, suggesting a return to nature, which will give them the security and courage to challenge norms and values established by a society patronized by patriarchy. They struggle against these ideologies that stifle their natural selves and the return encourages them to resist and challenge. Their anguish is so deep that there is no anger left but only an uncanny silence. In That Long Silence (Deshpande 1988), the protagonist Jaya’s decision to explore her creative self takes her closer to her authentic self. These heroes withdraw from the stifling surroundings for introspection and resultant self-­ realization. Their journey is towards their true identities. Patriarchy opposes and challenges the woman’s quest for introspection and her journey towards her real natural self. Jaya in That Long Silence has abandoned her name, her anger, and her tantrums, and marriage has altered her personality. Deshpande’s women withdraw in order to draw succor for their struggles with the social environment. They always return, but their retreat to nature reveals their deep-­felt realization of the springs of life hidden within the woman in communion with her inner self.  Sarah Joseph’s Kunjimathu presents another face of womanhood. She represents the woman-­nurturer who communicates with the fish and fowl and holds a strong will to challenge the destructive forces of development. Despite Kumaran’s betrayal, Kunjimathu survives as a strong resisting energy that offers to combat any infringements on their land and water. Even when her fish is killed by a strong chemical, endosulphan, she refuses to surrender. The destruction of her land and her fish turns “her into a Mahakali” (Joseph 2011, 170), who will avenge the injustice. Institutions of female exploitation transform themselves as instruments of exploitation of nature as well. Marriage as the foundation for families and

Ecofeminist moorings in globalized India   163 societies emerges as a tool for exploitation. Arundhati Roy speaks about such physical and verbal abuse by Ammu’s father, a socially respectable etymologist.  He (father) was charming and urbane with visitors, and stopped just short of fawning if they happened to be white. He donated money to orphanages and leprosy clinics. He worked hard on his public profile as a sophisticated, generous moral man. But alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak of vicious cunning. They were beaten, humiliated and then made to suffer the envy of friends and relations for having such a wonderful husband and father.  (Roy 1997, 178) In Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Jemubhai, the anglicized Indian, with impeccable manners borrowed from his colonial masters, symbolizes the elite hegemonic minority that unscrupulously exploits the resources as well as the voiceless majority. His ill-­treatment of his wife and his alienation from the world around him completes his identity as a modern Indian embedded in a web of power hierarchies typical of a postmodern social structure. Sarita of The Dark Holds No Terror escapes from her abusive husband, Manu, who rapes her at night and faces her without qualms during the day. In the age of globalization, families evolve as micro units of oppression of women and destruction of nature. Commodification of human relations has led to the corrosion of values and nurture is pushed to the periphery. Anita Desai is another novelist who portrayed women characters as introspective, sensitive, and sometimes almost eccentric in challenging the accepted social structures. They retreat from the conventionally patterned society and relationships and her characters long for a communion with their inner natural selves. In Fire on the Mountain, Nanda Kaul “asked to be left to the pines and cicadas alone. She wanted no one and nothing else” (Desai 1997, 3). Desai’s female heroes are alienated beings, attuned to their innate consciousness and therefore feel rootless and alone in the social interactions. Monisha, the protagonist in Voices in the City, is lonely and feels detached from the joint family in which she lives. She is intelligent and well read, hence the angst over being distanced from nature. Nanda in Fire on the Mountain departs on a journey of self-­exile, and Sita of Where Shall We Go this Summer? withdraws into herself. Raka, Nanda’s granddaughter, prefers “to be left alone to pursue her own secret life amongst the rocks and pines of Kasauli” (Desai 1977, 48). For her, rejecting social life is “so natural, instinctive and effortless” (Desai 1977, 30). Monisha in Voices in the City says: “I think what separates me from this family is the fact that not one of them ever sleeps out under the stars at night. They have indoor minds, starless and darkles” (Desai 1965, 139). Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-­winning novel, The God of Small Things, captures the harmonious blend of nature and the other in all its complexities. The novel travels from an early period of an interconnected existence of man and nature to a later phase of commodification and neo-­colonization that has further

164   S. Gopinath et al. complicated the delicate relationship. The novel explores and unravels the green wet lands on the banks of Meenachal, and Aiymanam, the village, presents a striking visual image as a land rich in foliage and natural habitation. It speaks of the god of small things, the young subaltern, the lower caste Parava, who leads a bunch of other marginalized individuals, Ammu, her young twins, and the nature around them. They are the voiceless tangled in the world of sophistication, hypocrisy, and deceit. They communicate with one another without words and share their angst of living below the social structures. The God of Small Things is an intricately structured novel with nature and its infinite dynamic transformations woven into it with precision. Social constructs of civilization interfere and often disrupt the deep passions and simple pleasures which are enjoyed by people living in the periphery. Ammu and her twins are reluctantly accepted by the community that fails to comprehend life in its mesmeric infinite possibilities. Ammu belongs to an orthodox Christian family bound by traditions in Aiyamanam, near the river Meenachal. She defies conventions and marries a Bengali Hindu, who reveals himself to be an alcoholic. After her twins are born she deserts him and returns to her ancestral house, where she is unwillingly accepted. Ammu’s brother Chacko jokingly says: “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours” (Roy 1997, 57). In their community, married women can lay no claim on their ancestral property. The cruel subjugation of the female population by denying them economic independence acts as a deterring factor in asserting their independence. The God of Small Things has transgressions and transcendence as themes. Ammu and her twins transgress and trespass the rules and customs ascribed by culture. Such transgressions are normalized in the presence of nature and their close affinity to the primordial harmony of nature is vividly described in the novel. Ammu’s children Estha and Rahel share her spirit and passions for life. They are fascinated by the elements of nature and their curiosity leads them towards their destiny of separation and angst. Chacko sees them sleeping next to his bed.  A hot twin and a cold one. He and She. We and Us.… They dreamed of their river. Of the coconut trees that bent into it and watched, with coconut eyes, the boats slide by. Upstream in the mornings. Downstream in the evenings.… It was warm, the water. Greygreen. Like rippled silk. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it. (Roy 1997, 122) In Gift in Green, Kunjimathu assimilates this understanding of life in its totality and the interconnected webs of energy. “The rising of the full moon churned her womanhood” (Joseph 2011, 192), and her passions were in harmony with the ebb and flow of life in the natural habitat around her. Innumerable references to the life-­giving nourishing quality of water is mentioned in Gift in Green. “Water knows everything and forgets nothing” (Joseph 2011, 21). The storyteller narrates the story of life and says: “For God is life, and

Ecofeminist moorings in globalized India   165 life, water” (Joseph 2011, 12). In an interview to The Hindu, Sarah Joseph said: “At one level, the novel deals with the socio-­political aspects of human right to water. At another, it is an attempt to explore man’s spiritual connection with water” (Santhosh 2011). The image of the mother-­nurturer abounds in the novel. Water is the signifier of maternal love and sacrifice and the reverence due to one’s mother is to be accorded to nature. Dinakaran’s death is poignantly described. “In the lap of his mother he lay. The mother’s lap: from time immemorial, the final resting place for the burden of every sacrifice and the refuge of every innocent person broken and bruised by the depravity of man” (Joseph 2011, 347). But the qualities of this element of nature are aplenty. It is peace to an anguished soul, like Kayal, the abused child of Geethanjali. Aathi is that primordial space where darkness and water thrives in silence. The inhabitants of the land cohabit with this powerful presence and have learned to respect the vibrant yet still life around them. This empowers and strengthens them and provides them with a primitive force to survive against all odds. The novel thus narrates this tale of resistance against the localized powers of globalization. The grand narrative of development and modernization has been abandoned by the novelist. She chose to speak of the liminal voices that accumulate their power from nature and emerge as protectors of their land and water. Ammu (The God) as a woman challenges the structure of binaries that characterized the colonial discourses. She shares stories from classics with her children, insists upon following the rules of decorum but places herself at the fringes of this civilized community. She communicates with the wild unpredictable river Meenachal and nurtures her passion for Velutha, the paravan who symbolizes the strength and vigor of the river. Baby Kochamma, while condemning the affair between Ammu and Velutha, exclaims: “How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a particular smell, these paravas?” (Roy 1997, 78) She shudders at the thought and grimaces “like a child being force-­fed spinach” (Roy 1997, 78). Ammu calls it the smell of the river (335) and is entranced by it. Apart from Ammu, other characters, such as her twins and the subaltern Velutha, also defy categorization. Velutha, as a victim, exposes the caste-­infested Indian society and its oppressive patterns of existence where political, economic, and cultural discourses conspire to maintain the rigid hierarchy. He is dangerous, since he thinks and has gained a little education. His clandestine affair with Ammu is an act of resistance against the whole social order, and Marxist leaders as well as the local police destroy him to reinstate social harmony. But Velutha perceives the inherent strength of nature and imbibes it within him, which also challenges the power centers. Roy writes: “Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor destroy” (Roy 1997, 308). Voices from the periphery are silenced thus throughout history and the twins lost their innocence witnessing this act of suppression and brutal injustice. “(It) was a clinical demonstration … of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure, order, complete monopoly” (Roy 1997, 309).

166   S. Gopinath et al. Roy captured the immense transformation the river and the land underwent in a few years. Forces of capitalism and the neo-­colonialism wiped away traces of concern for the delicate ecological system and new equations were written. Productivity, where preservation became an obsolete terminology, was embraced and Rahel returns to her homeland to witness the depletion of the river and its contaminated corrupt form. “Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed” (Roy 1997, 124). The river is merely “a thin ribbon of thick water.… Its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea. Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying-­flowers” (Roy 1997, 124). Globalization with its consumerism and neoliberal policies altered the Indian identity. The decline in status of stylized elite art forms such as Kathakali (a form of classical Indian dance) is also a consequence of these permutations in the social structures. In The God of Small Things, Kathakali artists are delineated in their pathetic plight. “In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell” (Roy 1997, 230). India as a nation shifted allegiances and a capitalistic wealth-­driven society emerged as the hegemonic community. The hierarchy was a complex one, with caste, gender, and class thriving in various forms and adapting themselves to the altered sensibilities. History House, which belonged to Kari Sayippu and had been long abandoned, was now reclaimed with a history of its own. It closed its doors on Aiymanam and was advertised as a tourist attraction. Roy elaborates on the developments in the estate, focusing on the development of the property into a tourist destination maintaining globally accepted standards of luxury. Histories are carved out of nothingness, cultural markers are created, and the writer ironically adds: “History and Literature enlisted by commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests as they stepped off the boat” (Roy 1997, 126). The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai addresses major challenges posed by development along the lines of modern city states across the world. Globalizing patterns of growth are accompanied by large-­scale destruction and degradation of the environment: In order to accommodate the population boom, the government had recently passed legislation that allowed an extra story to be built on each home in Darjeeling; the weight of more concrete pressing downward had spurred the town’s lopsided descent and caused more landslides than ever. (Desai 2006, 196–197) As King points out:  Ecofeminism is all about connectedness and wholeness of theory and practice. We see the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors … and the threat of nuclear annihilation by the military warriors as feminist concerns. It is the same masculinist mentality which would deny us

Ecofeminist moorings in globalized India   167 our right to our own bodies and our own sexuality and which depends on multiple systems of dominance and state power to have its way. (King 1983, 10) Gift in Green is a tale of Aathi, a land that had as its inhabitants people who believed in sustainable development, discerned the delicate ecological web of life, and preserved the precious balance in nature. Aathi is surrounded by water and mangroves and life has not lost its purity and innocence. Into their midst comes Kumaran, the native who had failed to grapple the meaning of existence, and his return portends danger since he symbolizes the evils of modernity. The novelist Sarah Joseph creates a world in all its complexities, where corruption, exploitation, and wealth justify and rationalize destruction and depletion of resources. His plan is to turn the temple into a pilgrimage center where sacred spaces get converted into hot spots where profanity can thrive in the form of commerce and trade. The bridge that Kumaran struggles to build becomes the path towards irrational, blind development that fails to look beyond the greed and treachery of man. In India, class-, caste-, and gender-­based subordination and subjugation are closely interlinked with the massive destruction of the environment. Development indices also point to the environmental destruction and abuse of women. Ecofeminism, in this context, becomes a practice, an ideology that facilitates a deeper understanding of the innate androcentric behavior patterns of man and its connection with the destruction and exploitation of nature. Women writers over the decades have written extensively on this kinship between man, woman, and nature, and the composite patterns of subjugation and desecration of woman and nature by the man wielding authority over both. Globalization, with its manifold and multipronged impact on human existence at various levels of community living, has a major influence on thought processes and representations as well. Ecofeminist writing in the age of globalization in India expresses grave concerns over the exploitative nature of multinational conglomerates and the large-­scale destruction of marginalized, silenced communities, including women and dalits, and their deep affinity to environment that borders on being a spiritual communion. Literature produced in various parts of India by women writers share this agony of alienation and loss and laments the callous indifference of an ignorant majority. But ecofeminist concerns receive considerable attention from the community which instils optimism in the writers to some extent. “Ecofeminism … (no doubt) is becoming conspicuous as women and men resist the waste, injustice and cultural impoverishment of global capitalism while attempting to preserve indigenous lifeways or create new, sustainable ones” (Carr 2000, 15).

References Carr, Glynis. 2000. New Essays in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Chanda, Priyanka. 2014. “Ecofeminism in Indian English Fiction.” International Journal of Educational Research and Technology, 33–35.

168   S. Gopinath et al. Desai, Anita. 1965. Voices in the City: A Novel. London: P. Owen. Desai, Anita. 1977. Fire on the Mountain. New York: Harper & Row. Desai, Anita. 1982. Where Shall We Go This Summer? Delhi: Orient Paperbacks. Desai, Kiran. 2006. The Inheritance of Loss. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Deshpande, Shashi. 1988. That Long Silence. London: Virago. Deshpande, Shashi. 1990. The Dark Holds No Terrors. New York: Europa Editions. Devika, J. 2010. “Caregiver vs. Citizen? Reflections on Ecofeminism from Kerala State, India.” Man In India, 89(4): 751–769. Dimmitt, Cornelia. 1978. Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Purāṇas. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Gaard, Greta Claire, and Patrick D. Murphy. 1998. “Introduction.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Joseph, Sarah. 2011. Gift in Green. Translated by Valson Thampu. India: HarperCollins Publishers India Pvt. King, Y. 1983. “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology.” In Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, edited by J. Plant.  Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. 1993. Ecofeminism. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publications. Narayanan, Vasudha. 2011. “Water, Wood, and Wisdom: Ecological Perspectives from the Hindu Traditions.” Daedalus, 130(40): 179–206. Rao, Manisha. 2012. “Ecofeminism at the Crossroads in India: A Review.” DEP, 20. Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. New York: Random House. Santhosh, K. 2011. “Water of Love Seeps through.” The Hindu. July 3, 2011. Retrieved September 9, 2015, from www.thehindu.com/todays-­paper/tp-­national/tp-­kerala/water-­ of-love-­seeps-through/article2157429.ece Sherma, Ritu Dasgupta. 2000. “Sacred Immanence.” In Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India, edited by Nelson, Lance E. New Delhi: DK Printworld. The Matsya Puranam. 1916. Allahabad: Pāninī Office, Bhuvaneśwari Āśrama, Bahadurganj

12 The vocation of healing The poetry of Malika Ndlovu Deirdre Byrne

The Cape Town-­based South African poet, Malika Ndlovu, refers to herself as an “applied arts practitioner,” saying that she  strategically and intentionally employ[s] a variety of artistic media (creative writing, written and performance poetry, theatre, sound/vocals, multi-­media presentation/production) for the purposes of psycho-­emotional healing, for the creative processing of trauma, grief, conflict resolution and navigation of significant growth or change cycles within the life of individuals and groups. (Byrne 2016) Ndlovu’s various creative endeavors testify to her commitment to healing. One of her workshops is called “WORD WELL: therapeutic creative writing sessions” and “encourage[s] participants to explore their biographical journeys as a treasure hunt, a medicine walk, a mission of discovery/recovery and adventure.” Another is “SINGING OVER THE BONES: Storytelling for Personal and Community Healing.” While her commitment to healing through art is well known, Ndlovu’s poetry is not widely acknowledged, and Barbara Boswell is the only commentator to take note of the relationship between her work and environmental themes.1 Further, many of her creative projects are ephemeral, taking the form of workshops and performances: and printed poetry forms only a small part of her endeavors. In addition, as Nicole Anae argues in this volume, there is a tendency in white-­ dominated cultural and textual studies to silence the voices of black writers—a tendency that must be actively resisted. As a result of all these factors, Ndlovu’s contribution to South African poetry is not valued as, I believe, it deserves. My chapter will address this gap in critical responses to her work. I discern a powerful connection between Ndlovu’s writing and ecofeminism, and in what follows, I will demonstrate that this link is most clearly expressed in the healing agenda of her work. First, though, it is necessary to examine how ecofeminism, as a complex body of scholarly thought, conceptualizes healing. Françoise d’Eaubonne is credited with inventing the term “ecoféminisme” out of her realization that “women have historically been wedded to other people and nature through a social imperative requiring caring and consideration and that this acculturation in caretaking persists” (Gates 1998, 17). Although

170   D. Byrne ecofeminist thinking has moved considerably beyond this early prolegomenon, two features of d’Eaubonne’s thought are still pertinent. The first is an emphasis on womanhood as socio-­historically constructed, rather than natural or given, in d’Eaubonne’s recognition of “a social imperative requiring caring.” The second is that there is an enduring “acculturation in caretaking.” Later ecofeminist theorists, such as Susan Griffin, agree that there is a demand for women to adopt a nurturing position towards others in preference to other subject positions, and that this places them in a defined and confined position that is similar to the way nonhuman nature has traditionally been perceived. Douglas A. Vakoch (2012, 4–5) explains how later ecofeminist theorists have built on d’Eaubonne’s initial term to expand the range of ecofeminism: According to cultural ecofeminism, there is an innate connection between women and nature…. 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. Vakoch uses the epithet “rationalist” for non-­essentialist ecofeminist approaches. In my discussion, I will demonstrate that Ndlovu reveals some aspects of cultural ecofeminism in her valorization of the inherent connection between women and nature. Recent ecofeminist philosophy has shifted its emphasis on healing away from imagining and representing women as healers to concern for healing the damage that has been sustained both by women and by nonhuman nature. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy define this concern as follows: “Ecofeminism is a practical movement for social change arising out of the struggles of women to sustain themselves, their families, and their communities” (1998, 2). D’Eaubonne’s interest in how women are constructed as healers, as well as Gaard and Murphy’s perception of the need for change in the way patriarchal society relates to women and nonhuman nature as “others,” provide important points of connection between ecofeminist literary criticism and Ndlovu’s work. Gaard and Murphy explain how ecofeminism intersects with literary criticism: We can relate ecofeminist principles and interpretation to existing literary study by building on feminist attention to the concept of the “other.” This concept is prevalent in literary study as a result of the influence of psychoanalytic theory and feminist critique. But the “other” must be rethought through grounding it in physical being. (1998, 5) Ndlovu portrays the physical being of the “other” as wounded, yet possessing the capacity for wholeness, and as powerfully gendered—female. These “others” are at the center of Ndlovu’s creative projects, such as “And the Word Was Woman” and “WEAVE: Women’s Education and Artistic Voice Expression” (2008, 88). Women’s embodiment is registered in poems such as “A Woman’s Path,” where the geophysical lineaments of Tradouws Pass are equated with a woman’s body, and the rain that washes down the pass is metaphorically

The vocation of healing   171 associated with a woman’s blood—both menstrual and in childbirth—a “growing river of red” (2008, 13) that brings life to the land. Similarly to Izabel Brandão’s response in this volume to Jackie Kay’s poetic evocation of Saartjie Baartman, Ndlovu’s poem resists and subverts “the … expansion of the oppressive imposition of patriarchal and imperialist society towards nature and its dominated creatures” (Brandão, this volume) in the association between women and nature. Ndlovu’s ethic of healing does not have the same confining overtones as d’Eaubonne’s view of women’s socially prescribed role of nurturing. A large part of Ndlovu’s art is aimed at empowering women so that they can use art to heal experiences of trauma within the South African socio-­political “body.” To this end, she uses ritual, bodily movement, music, and narrative to craft a multimodal2 experience of art and language (Byrne 2016). Nature plays an important part in these healing interventions: the poet recognizes that medical practitioners often prescribe exposure to nature for victims of trauma and says that applied arts practitioners would make the same recommendation (2016). Aspects of the nonhuman natural world are used as the basis for what Vivian Marcow-­Speiser, in her foreword to Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh, calls “mythical themes” (Ndlovu 2008, 9). The poems evoke the poet as a shaman, drawing on elemental energies (fire, water, air, and earth) and dialectically synthesizing opposites in the creative act. Ndlovu’s vision of the poet as a healer demonstrates a sustained association between creativity and the elements (fire, water, earth, and air). This ancient association draws on the historical and mythological roots of human understandings of creativity. In my view, Ndlovu draws on what Gayatri Spivak refers to as “strategic essentialism” in some of her poems in order to convey the urgency of the need for individual, social, and political healing. “Strategic essentialism” is one of Spivak’s most celebrated scholarly interventions, and may be defined as a strategy that embraces “the ways in which … gendered subjectivity can be mobilized as part of a political strategy” (Morton 2007, 126). Ndlovu is a well-­known South African performance poet, and has been commissioned to write poems for several occasions in honor of dispossessed South African minorities, including Art for Humanity’s Women for Children Project, “a South African writer and visual artists [sic] collaborative project centred on children’s rights” (Ndlovu 2008, 15). In addition, she has founded a number of South African women’s writing groups, such as “And The Word Was Woman Ensemble, a Cape Town based woman poets’ group” (Ndlovu 2008, 23) and the “original poetry and music production Womantide” (Ndlovu 2008, 40). As these projects indicate, there is a distinct emphasis on womanhood and poetry in her work. Before exploring the resonances of these poems, I will briefly explain the South African relevance of an emphasis on gender and the nonhuman natural world.

Gender and nature in South Africa South Africa has a vivid and painful history of the conjunction of environmental and gender exploitation in the mining industry. The country derives most of its wealth from mining precious and industrial minerals, especially gold. In 2013 it

172   D. Byrne was estimated that the mining industry was worth “$2.5 trillion, with the mining sector contributing 18% of GDP and over 50% in foreign exchange earnings. The sector brings in an annual income exceeding R330 billion and accounts for 20% of all investment in the country” (KPMG 2013). The migrant labor system under apartheid (1948–94) and post-­apartheid has meant that many thousands of men left families behind them in the rural areas when they went to work on the mines. They would visit their wives and families infrequently, with various deleterious consequences for family life, including alcoholism, infidelity, HIV and other STIs, and children growing up with absent fathers. The system of migrant labor and its unfortunate consequences are described in a number of texts, such as Families Divided: The Impact of Migrant Labour in Lesotho (Murray 1981), Charles van Onselen’s Randlords and Rotgut, 1886–1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Capitalism, with Special Reference to Black Mineworkers in the Transvaal Republic (1976), Zakes Mda’s novel The Madonna of Excelsior (2007) and Darrell Roodt’s film Yesterday (2004). Texts such as these ensure that the history of the South African mining industry is writ large in the South African national psyche. It is a history of the twinned exploitation of the land, which has been eviscerated, and the gendered exploitation of the all-­male migrant labor population, their wives, and children. The enormous role of the mining industry in shaping the South African collective unconscious cannot be overestimated and has ensured that imperial dominance of the environment has worn the face of gender and racial oppression. Within this context, there has been no sustained opportunity to develop a coherent movement for environmental change. For example, the country’s Green Party has not managed to garner significant support; in fact, they did not even raise the required amount to contest the 2014 national election (Jordan 2014). The overall impact of environmental activism in South Africa is fairly slight, with corruption and the consequences of inequality receiving the highest priorities on the national political agenda. In addition to the specific intersection of land and gender abuse in the South African mining industry, the country does not have a history of actively promo­ ting gender equality and many women are held in low esteem as being “naturally” inferior to men. The still-­patriarchal nature of many gendered interactions in South Africa is often rationalized on the grounds that women are essentially domestic or maternal, thus reinforcing the exact stereotypes that feminism has worked to destabilize and subvert. These stereotypes are probably at least partly to blame for the extraordinarily high rate of gender-­based violence in South Africa, where, the Law Commission estimates, there are as many as 1.7 million rapes a year, even though only approximately 54,000 victims lay charges because of the unsympathetic treatment they often receive (Smith 2015). In addition, the national rate for young people (15–24-year-­olds) who are not in employment, education, or training is much higher for young women (34.5 percent) than for young men (29.9 percent) (Statistics South Africa 2014). This means that a significant proportion of South African women are not making any

The vocation of healing   173 contribution to the economy or seeking to do so by means of education. One means of addressing these different inequalities lies in the empowerment of women, and in order to achieve this, poets such as Ndlovu adopt, at times, an essentialist stance towards women. Women in South Africa, possibly more than in other countries, are a heterogeneous group covering a wide range of professions, cultures, and classes, and are further riven by racial divisions, not least the legacy of the apartheid past, which pitted black and white members of the society against one another. Ndlovu thematizes these divisions in her creative work, most notably in her début collection Born in Africa But (2000). In view of these complexities, Ndlovu has created a strategic alliance between South African women from diverse social groups in poems such as “And the Word was Woman,” “Girl Child,” and “Fire Tongue.” A strategic commonality among women, who are all, though to varying degrees, positioned as inferior by patriarchal practices such as gender violence, enables Ndlovu to write about idealized visions of womanhood in lines such as “and the word was woman,” which subvert phallocentric associations of women with the body or emotion instead of with logos. By writing in this way, Ndlovu attempts to administer healing to the traumatized collective female psyche of South Africa.

But is Ndlovu an ecofeminist poet? It is a truism that ecofeminists foreground the way both nature and women have been seen as lesser second terms in hierarchical binaries at the core of western thought and civilization, such as culture/nature, man/woman, and human/animal. Further, they try to bring about social and philosophical change by interrogating and subverting the systems of thought, discourse, and power which position women and nature as neglected second terms in these binaries. Within these general boundaries, there are a number of ecofeminist positions, usually with differing levels of emphasis on the various components of an ecofeminist analysis. As many theorists have recognized, women are connected to nature in ways that go beyond their shared propensity for nurturing. For example, they share resistance to domination, portrayed in Ursula Le Guin’s poetry as immutable wildness3 and in Griffin’s writing through the resonant metaphor of a female lion’s roar (1984, 105), which, in its distance from linguistic precision, articulates anger, resentment, and a refusal to be analyzed by the male scientists (mouthpieces for patriarchal thinking) which would take her apart to locate the source of the roar. Val Plumwood’s sensible overview, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), offers a well-­balanced overview of “four tectonic plates of domination theory—those concerned with the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature” (1993, 1) and sets out to provide “a better theory” (1993, 2) to silence accusations that ecofeminism is theoretically weak. In Plumwood’s opening insistence on the intersection of a plurality of three axes of domination and identity lies, in my opinion, the most productive branch of ecofeminist thinking: one that emphasizes

174   D. Byrne intersection and complexity rather than focusing on a single form of oppression, and also, following Murphy, employs dialogics rather than dualism to address difference. Murphy asserts: “A dialogic method can recognize that the most fundamental human relationships are not resolvable through dialectical synthesis: humanity/nature, ignorance/knowledge, male/female, emotion/intellect, conscious/ unconscious” (1991, 148). Murphy treads a complex line between homogenizing difference (which is the same as subsuming it into a dominant concept or identity) and hierarchizing it. In this way, he goes on, “A dialogical orientation reinforces the ecofeminist recognition of interdependence and the natural necessity of diversity” (1991, 149). Karla Armbruster, in similar vein, proposes that poststructuralist insights into the shifting nature of identity and domination can be productively combined with ecofeminist insights into the interlocking nature of these axes (1998), and it is this approach that I will adopt in exploring Ndlovu’s poetry. Armbruster (1998, 106) mentions four criteria for ecofeminist literary theory and criticism to keep in view when choosing texts to explore. Two of these are particularly relevant for Ndlovu’s creative project: – Does the text convey a sense of the human subject as socially and discursively constructed, multiply organized, and constantly shifting? … – Does the text avoid reinscribing dualisms and hierarchical notions of difference? In my view, Ndlovu’s poetry exhibits both of these qualities: her vision of the human subject is shaped by the awareness of multiple axes of organization along race, class, and gender lines; and she actively works against dualities and hierarchies of difference, especially in the arena of gender. In addition, she draws on several strands of ecofeminism. First, she frequently connects women and nature, as Boswell notes. Second, she draws on the tradition of ecofeminist writing as resistance to male and colonial domination. Finally, while at times the archetypal resonances she creates between women and natural elements may be seen as essentialist, her writing conforms to Armbruster’s two criteria cited above with regard to the constantly shifting, always-­provisional, and multiply inflected nature of identity, nature, and forms of domination.

Strategically essentialist The first section of Born in Africa But (Ndlovu’s first collection of poetry) is entitled “Initiation” and is narratively linked by the story, told in italics between the six poems, of an unnamed “riverchild.” By drawing an analogy between a river and a woman’s life trajectory, Ndlovu draws on well-­ established feminine archetypes. The first italicized section informs the reader: “To all these different people, this river was an immortal mother who blessed and nourished their lives…. She, the carrier of ancestral stories, the keeper of sacred messages, feeding the treasures of the past into the present ” (2000, 9,

The vocation of healing   175 original emphasis). Equating the river with the maternal, as Ndlovu does when she calls it “an immortal mother who blessed and nourished [human] lives,” draws on traditional associations between femininity and fluidity, with the attendant meanings of being easily influenced and even passive. It also evokes female fecundity. Ndlovu is aware of all these meanings, and her maternal river does more than fertilize crops: by transporting stories, she fertilizes the imagination. As the italicized sections unfold, we learn that the mother-­river has a human “riverchild” who is receptive to the stories carried by the river. This child is a girl, as though to reinforce the capacity of the archetypal feminine imagination to embrace literary creativity. Her bond with the river—and, by extension, with the rest of the natural world—is intuitive and immediate. However, as she grows, so do “her responsibilities.” Ndlovu does not need to expand on these as “this business of womanhood is a heavy burden” (Dangarembga 2004, 16), encompassing responsibility for the well-­being of her family, and these duties take her away from the river. When she returns to the river-­mother, she is reminded that “she was a part of the river and the river would always be a part of her” (2000, 15), a realization that enables her to “nourish” her children “with these stories.” This deceptively simple-­looking parable encodes powerful ecofeminist insights. The insistence that the river­ child and the mother-­river interpenetrate one another reminds the reader of the intimate connection between humanity and nonhuman nature, while the riverchild’s nourishing her children on stories accentuates the role of imaginative narrative in producing well-­rounded offspring. A critic might consider that this parable draws on essentialist or stereotypical associations between women, fluidity, and maternity, to which one might reply that “Riverchild” is a deliberately and deceptively simple parable, designed to offset the complex poems that it weaves together and also to make far-­reaching points about the life-­giving properties of emplaced narrative. Ndlovu has written several other poems that draw on mythical, apparently essentialist visions of nature and/or womanhood in the service of healing. In “And the Word was Woman,” Ndlovu writes (2008, 23): Everywhere And in everything — In the universe outside and within I hear the word echoing In the temple of my body At the centre of the circle At the foundation of the world At the essence of the melody Out of the sacred silence I hear the word echoing And the word will be And the word is And the word always was Woman

176   D. Byrne These lines draw upon an archetypal vision of language as feminine, which has been articulated by Hélène Cixous in “Sorties” (1994, 42): … today, writing is woman’s. That is not a provocation, it means that woman admits that there is an other…. Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me—the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live—that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who? … which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. Both Cixous and Ndlovu use the strategy of reversal powerfully to subvert established dichotomies, such as the gendered dichotomy between language and feeling, which has traditionally opposed “masculine” language and “feminine” emotion. In this poem Ndlovu claims women’s right to speak, not from an oversimplified standpoint of oppression, but against a centuries-­old convention that has silenced them and still, within many South African cultural traditions, seeks to do so. The poet’s vision encompasses “the universe,” suggesting that it embraces the whole of non-­human nature, but this is not located externally to the speaking subject: rather, it is to be found both outside and within the poet-­ speaker, who is also located in a foundational, central space “At the centre of the circle/At the foundation of the world.” Through a subtle invocation of the cadence of Genesis 1 (“And God said …”), Ndlovu here challenges the purported masculinity, not only of creativity, but of divinity as well, suggesting that it should be gendered as feminine. In another poem, “A Woman’s Path,” Ndlovu writes about “Tradouws Pass,” which she glosses as follows: Although the pass was renamed to Southey Pass (after a former Colonial Secretary), the indigenous Khoi San people kept referring to it as Tradouws Pass (from taras, a woman and daos, a poort) and that is the name by which it is known today. (2008, 13, original emphasis) Here Ndlovu makes a firm but subtle point about the inappropriateness of colonial names for South African natural phenomena, and identifies the spirit of emplacement in the pass as feminine, having previously called it “majestic” (2008, 13). The poem begins with the mythical figure of an archetypal woman, associated with darkness and the moon, that is, with yin qualities that are the opposite of light and rationality: shards of light penetrate her shroud solitary silhouette standing on a dark mound waiting for her moon

The vocation of healing   177 In this ambiguous, shadowy atmosphere, the poem follows the woman’s path over the pass, accompanied by rain. The poem refers to the rain as “cleansing” and equates it with blood (“the growing river of red”), which refers both to women’s propensity to bleed and to the violence that has characterized South African history. The poem ends: she follows her heart-­breath-beat and feet they know the way they will not stop not until the dark descends again when time will play her trick of dejavu (2008, 13) The poem combines popular notions of African women as rain-­makers with a profound sense of emplacement, which Casey (1997, 242) defines as follows: “Just as a place is animated by the living bodies that are in it, a lived place animates these same bodies as they become implaced there.” Casey’s observation, like Ndlovu’s poem, emphasizes the mutual influence of place and people. In Ndlovu’s case, though, an added layer of meaning is added by representing the spirit of the pass as a woman, thus gendering the landscape as well as the figure of its ultimate healer. The essentializing tendency of “And the Word was Woman” is also evident in “Girl Child,” which Ndlovu wrote for Art for Humanity’s Women for Children Project. The poem is a paean to an essentialized girl child, whom Ndlovu describes, drawing on nature, as a “wild virgin flower” and enjoins to: Trust that as you shed skin Lose parts of yourself to threatening winds These seasons of sorrow will change You were destined to be here In this moment In this place In this body In this time You are the fountain source The life force Of all that is woman Shining in her fullness With her innate resilience Bearing miraculous fruit (2008, 15) Several significant points emerge from a close reading of this poem. First, Ndlovu’s description of the girl child as a “wild virgin flower” is not necessarily

178   D. Byrne essentialist, but mobilizes wildness and resistance as part of girl children’s being. This is salutary in South Africa, where child marriage is all too common (UNICEF reports that in 2015, 6 percent of girls were married by the age of 18 (Girls Not Brides 2015)). In this context, and bearing in mind the alarming population explosion in Africa, a woman’s virginity takes on added significance. Ndlovu undoubtedly has this in mind when she writes that a girl child in Africa “more than her brother/Suffers the scorching of a dominant Sun” in a context “Where innocence and youth/Is harvested with brutality” (2008, 14). These images conjoin Africa’s famously sunny climate with gendered images of male domination in a way that simplistically depicts masculinity as harsh or brutal, but may be justified in the climate of rampant gender-­based violence. Later in the poem Ndlovu encourages the girl child to “Open your petals with courage/ Under Moon’s glow,” evoking conventional, maybe stereotypical associations of the moon with femininity. While these lines evoke a conventional, gendered opposition between Sun and Moon, Ndlovu actually undoes the hierarchy that these images conventionally encode. These associations may be read as encouraging girls and women to develop their talents and natures in secret, away from public scrutiny, in a way that may work against the public agenda of women’s liberation, especially from abuses such as child marriage. Significantly, Ndlovu does not racialize the girl child to whom she addresses the poem (or any other person in her writing). This strategy enables her to participate in what Anae (this volume, p. 85) calls “re-­think[ing] the means by which race politics defines the level to which living human beings not only afford one another moral consideration but see and feel their natural world and the nonhuman beings within as collectively significant.” Finally, this poem, along with “A Woman’s Path,” inscribes women as part of what Julia Tofantšuk identifies as Karen Warren’s ecofeminist vision of “ecosystem as a process that also includes the human component” (this volume, p. 70), where humans are integral parts of the natural world, instead of separated from it. Ndlovu, in the same inclusive manner as Warren, sees women as crucial parts of the solution to ecological and social alienation. Another poem where Ndlovu demonstrates her solidarity with women who are in abusive relationships is entitled “Next Door.” The evocative title draws on what Njabulo Ndebele refers to as “Rediscovery of the Ordinary” (1994), in his resonant focus on oppression as a quality of ordinary South African life. The phrase “next door” implies that emotional abuse in intimate relationships takes place daily, in dwellings close to ordinary people. The poem’s 24 lines are divided into couplets, each describing “he” and “she” in the relationship. The first couplet reads: “He enters/She falls” and the poem delineates, through a series of alarming verbs, the increasing levels of abuse meted out by the man to the woman until the final chilling “She dies/He lives” (Ndlovu 2000, 42). The fact of having “he” begin and end the poem typographically suggests that the man is the driving force in the relationship, encircling the woman until she can no longer escape, and that he has emotionally drained her of life in order to sustain his own life.

The vocation of healing   179 Elements from the natural world abound in other poems by Ndlovu as well. Just as “A Woman’s Path” depicts the spirit of Tradouws Pass as an elemental woman who brings rain and healing to the land, “Fire Tongue” depicts fire, a symbol of destruction and recreation, as appropriate for a woman poet in the following lines: Set alight Burnt at the stake Resting on a floating pyre Borne of love, passion desire Now turning to the ash Of her beloved (2008, 71) The poem plays with diverse meanings of “tongue” (a language and the shape of a flame) as well as the various symbolic meanings of fire. The association between women and fire recalls the pyre of sati or widow-­sacrifice (Spivak 2010, 2,201) and is combined with the image of fire as an alchemical force which may turn dross into gold, and in the case of the woman poet, may enable her to be “Truth teller/Soothsayer/Mystic/Psychic/Visionary” (Ndlovu 2008, 70). There is also the connotation that the woman poet may, by acting as a soothsayer, bring about the salutary destruction of the social order in which she lives, in order to bring about a new and more egalitarian one. In this poem, Ndlovu does not specify what kind of social change she would like to see: rather, she takes it for granted that human society needs to change and that the woman poet’s “fire tongue” can describe, and in so doing help to bring about, such a change.

Specificities of oppression In “Born in Africa But” (the titular poem of Ndlovu’s first collection), she explores a specific form of oppression associated with “coloured”4 South African identity. This poem meets Armbruster’s requirement that a text for ecofeminist literary criticism should “convey a sense of the human subject as socially and discursively constructed, multiply organized, and constantly shifting” (1998, 106). It also demonstrates the discursive and social interconnections between different discursive regimes, challenging the colonial hierarchy between cultures. In an interview with Sam Umukoro, Ndlovu speaks disparagingly of “the so-­ called coloured identity that I was dumped with and adopted” (2015). Ndlovu is not alone in her ambivalence towards “coloured” identity: fellow writer Zoë Wicomb’s essay “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa” (1998) also associates “mixed race” with shame and inferiority, not as innate features, but as important aspects of the social construction of “coloured” existence. Mixed racial ancestry makes Ndlovu, like many South Africans in the post-­apartheid era, a liminal person, with attributes of both “black” and “white” identity, but finally, belonging to neither racial group. The poem subverts the

180   D. Byrne easy, taken-­for-granted association between Africans and the continent in which they live by reflecting on the effect of colonial ideology on Ndlovu’s experience of land. She exposes these complexities through a delicate balance between “a designated cultivated patch” and “the indigenous tree” (2000, 11). Her liminal and provisional identity has arisen as a result of the polarity of the “cultivated patch,” which harks back to Africa’s colonization, and “the indigenous tree.” Between these two polarities, she prefers “the indigenous tree” of Africa, which recalls the mythological tree of life and can encompass diverse branches and roots. The poem ends as Ndlovu designs a new African identity for herself. In recognition of the provisionality of all boundaries, this identity is not confined to the African continent, but stretches “before and beyond” so that she can encompass an entire cosmos as she “unfold[s] the sacred map” and proclaims “a universe awakens in me” (2000, 11). The semantic field of “patch,” “tree,” and “universe” alert the reader to the importance of environmental and contextual considerations, but also illuminate a neo-­Romantic privileging of the interior world over the exterior, consonant with Ndlovu’s project of healing individuals and communities through applied art. The poem ends on a note of celebration of Ndlovu’s poetic capacity for resilience and for transcending the specificities of her own oppression as “coloured.” Ndlovu also portrays the shifting nature of the human subject in her tribute5 poem “Lydia in the Wind.” Written as a tribute to Lydia “Ou Tamaletjie” Williams, who was born a slave in the nineteenth century, the poem links Lydia’s spirit to the wind, which is archetypally associated with Cape Town in the form of the relentless, unforgiving South-­easter. For Ndlovu, this wind is a wounded witness she will not be still not until we are listening are we listening will we recognise her circling the crevice between two worlds our reality and hers howling around this empty plot this hole in our history … this wind is a haunted woman she is wild with rememberings (Ndlovu 2008, 153) In this complex poem, Ndlovu endows a natural element—the wind—with gender and with the human power of speech. The wind is portrayed as the spirit of Lydia, a woman, who was probably treated worse than her male counterparts and was susceptible to rape and gender-­based violence from her master. It is also significant that the poem bestows the power and responsibility of healing on a historical woman whose task is to find relief “when all our

The vocation of healing   181 ghosts are put to rest/when their stories are re-­collected.” The wind/Lydia’s nature as a “wounded witness” refers to the testimony of trauma suffered by South African slaves (brought, predominantly from Malaysia and other African countries, to work as manual laborers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). The wind is a shaman, crossing boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, as well as “our reality and hers” (life and death; the present and the past; democracy and enslavement). Its desire, and Lydia’s, is to tell the story of slavery, bringing past injustice to “the light of consciousness.” We, who must perforce listen to the narrative of the relentless howling wind, are the amnesiac post-­apartheid South African nation, who have wilfully forgotten the mistreatment of others that laid the foundation of our past. The poem is situated in the present, but looks back to the past, when women like Lydia were wounded by systemic injustice. Only when the full weight of trauma occasioned by slavery has been acknowledged can “the path/of recovery” be found. Only then, Ndlovu suggests, can we fully understand “you am I/through you am I” (2008, 153). These closing lines evoke the slogan of Ubuntu: “a person is a person through others,” but also insist on connection between people who were forcefully separated by apartheid, and now need to recognize “you am I” in a shared past, present, and future. “Lydia in the Wind” transcends binary oppositions and hierarchical dualisms, taking the polarity between the self and the non-­self (“I” and “you”) as prototypical of the racial, gender, class, and ethnic divisions that remain entrenched in South Africa more than 20 years after democracy. By attending to women and to nonhuman natural elements, Ndlovu implies, South Africa may lay its ghosts to rest and achieve socio-­spiritual healing.

Conclusion In my view, Ndlovu’s poetry articulates a unique and steadfast project of resolving conflicts and transcending power hierarchies between mind and body, nature and culture, men and women, colonizer and colonized. In this way her writing is strikingly different from the work of other South African writers, such as Zakes Mda and J.M. Coetzee, whose attention is focused more on the damaging vestiges of colonialism than on healing these (as discussed by Laura Wright, 2010). Ndlovu harnesses two strategies in the service of her vision of healing through poetry. The first is a strategic deployment of essentialism. Growing from a belief that the maladies that plague South African society are ancient and archetypal, Ndlovu draws on images of the poet as an alchemical healer who can summon mythical resources. Some of these resources include the mythical associations between women and creativity, women and nurturing, and women as bearers of memory. Although these connotations may appear essentialist, I believe Ndlovu uses them to provide women, and particularly black women, with a voice in a society which has historically denied it to them. Ndlovu’s second poetic strategy is to insist on corporeality and connection, as she does in the concrete poem “Spinal Secrets” (2008, 37–39), where the spine is physically evoked as the

182   D. Byrne poem winds down the page, uniting the imaginative and the embodied archives. “Spinal Secrets,” like many of Ndlovu’s poems, ends by evoking wholeness: for every life a single storyline a yearning for home certainly mine (Ndlovu 2008, 39) The “home” Ndlovu evokes here is neither material nor geophysical, but a spiritual condition of wholeness, in which the body, the other, and historical context are all given a place as necessary parts of the individual’s, and society’s, well-­ being. In poems such as these, the political interests of feminism, Ndlovu’s vision of the healing power of creativity, and her environmental themes come together to create a significant corpus of ecofeminist poetry.

Notes 1 Like my chapter, Boswell’s (2011) article also focuses on ecofeminism. Boswell, however, links Ndlovu’s poetry to “African ecofeminism,” arguing that there is a specific brand of ecofeminism that has been promulgated in Africa. For my purposes, African ecofeminism is too narrow, and I prefer to focus on global ecofeminism, specifically its North American manifestations, in this chapter. 2 My use of the term “multimodal” draws on Brian Street’s (2012) understanding of the connection between literacy and multimodality. 3 See, for example, Earthsea Revisioned (Le Guin 1993, 22) and the poem “Read at the Award Dinner,” which exhorts the reader to avoid recognizing women artists because of their familiarity with dangerous wild animals (Le Guin 1999, 11). 4 “Coloured” describes the phenomenon of mixed racial ancestry. It was associated, under apartheid, with miscegenation and thus carried a heavy weight of opprobrium. 5 The third section of Ndlovu’s second collection of poetry, Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh, comprises “Tributes” to particular South African individuals who have inspired her.

References Armbruster, Karla. 1998. “ ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’: A Call for Boundary-­Crossing in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, 97–122. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

The vocation of healing   183 Boswell, Barbara. 2011. “Re-­Memory and an African Ecofeminist Poetic of Healing in Malika Ndlovu’s Poetry.” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 16(2): 32–41. Accessed July 5, 2015. doi: 10.1080/18125441.2011.631826. Byrne, Deirdre. 2016. “An Interview with Malika Ndlovu.” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 21(2): 104–109. Casey, Edward S. 1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1994. The Hélène Cixous Reader. Edited by Susan Sellers. London: Routledge. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. 2004. Nervous Conditions. London: Ayebia Clarke Publishing. Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. 1998. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gates, Barbara T. 1998. “A Root of Ecofeminism: Ecoféminisme.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, 15–22. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Girls not brides. 2015. Retrieved August 16, 2015, from www.girlsnotbrides.org/child-­ marriage/south-­africa/. Griffin, Susan. 1984. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. London: The Women’s Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 2006. Their Eyes Were Watching God. London: Virago Press. Jordan, Bobby. 2014. “Green Will Not be Voters’ Favourite.” Retrieved August 6, 2015, from www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2014/03/25/green-­will-not-­be-voters-­favourite. KPMG. 2013. “The Role of Mining in the South African Economy.” Retrieved August 6, 2015, from www.sablog.kpmg.co.za/2013/12/role-­mining-south-­african-economy/. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1993. Earthsea Revisioned. Cambridge, MA: Children’s Literature New England. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1999. Sixty Odd: New Poems. Boston & London: Shambhala. Mda, Zakes. 2007. The Madonna of Excelsior. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Morton, Stephen. 2007. Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press. Murphy, Patrick D. 1991. “Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice.” Hypatia, 6(1): 146–161. Murray, Colin. 1981. Families Divided: The Impact of Migrant Labour in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ndebele, Njabulo. 1994. The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ndlovu, Malika. 2000. Born in Africa But. Cape Town: Educall. Ndlovu, Malika. 2008. Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh. Mowbray: LoTsha Publications. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Roodt, Darrell (dir.). 2004. Yesterday. Smith, Charlene. 2015. “Rape Has Become a Way of Life in South Africa.” Retrieved August 23, 2015, from www.hst.org.za/news/rape-­has-become-­way-life-­south-africa. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2010. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 2197–2208. London: WW Norton & Company. Statistics South Africa. 2014. “Yearly Archives: 2014.” Stats SA. Retrieved November 13, 2017, from www.statssa.gov.za/?m=2014. Street, Brian V. 2012. “Literacy and Multimodality.” STIS Lecture: Inter-­Disciplinary Seminars O Laboratório SEMIOTEC, da FALE/UFMG Faculdade de Letras, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. 

184   D. Byrne Umukoro, Sam. 2015. “Malika Ndlovu—African Queen of Words.” Retrieved August 28, 2015, from www.africainterviews.com/malika-­ndlovu/. Vakoch, Douglas A. 2012. Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature. Lanham: Lexington Books. Van Onselen, Charles. 1976. “Randlords and Rotgut, 1886-1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Cap­ italism, with Special Reference to Black Mineworkers in the Transvaal Republic.” History Workshop, 2: 33–89. Wicomb, Zoë. 1998. “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa.” In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, 91–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Laura. 2010. “Wilderness into Civilized Shapes”: Reading the Postcolonial Environment. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.

13 Grace Nichols and Jackie Kay’s corporeal Black Venus Feminist ecocritical realignments Izabel F.O. Brandão

“the body has its own rhythm … in correspondence with the outer universe.” (D.H. Lawrence)1

The early 1990s introduced me to the poetry of the Caribbean Grace Nichols, and since then part of my research time has been dedicated to delve into her poetics of the body, a theme which is one of the cores of her work.2 Recently I came across a poem by the Scottish Jackie Kay, whose focus is also on the body, and curiously both poets addressed the same woman from a different but dialogical way. The poems are “Thoughts Drifting through the Fat Black Woman’s Head While Having a Bubble Bath” (Nichols 1984), and “The Hottentot Venus” (Kay 1991, in Kay 2007). The woman is the South African Sartjie Baartman (1789?–1815). Her voice is heard (re)telling her story, making herself visible for the contemporary reader in these poems. The poets’ views of the body of this black woman are alternative yet complementary, especially when read from a feminist ecocritical perspective. Here the body can be addressed as a “cultural text” (Bordo 1993, 288), a part of nature that discloses not only society’s contradictions, but also allows the poets to reweave this connection through images that although portraying a long story of oppression, show ways of escaping from it.3 Thus considering that women’s bodies belong to a “relational ontology” (Gaard, Estok, and Oppermann 2013, 8), the poems show a discursive perception of the resisting body of the represented woman. My reading of them is interdisciplinary and follows both feminism and feminist ecocriticism. In this sense, women’s bodies can be viewed as “complex sites of ideological, ecological, and discursive power relations whereby we are encouraged to rethinking the materiality of bodies interconnected with their discursive formations” (Oppermann 2013, 77). Sartjie Baartman, the “Black Venus,” the “Hottentot Venus,” the Steatopygous woman, has become a name to remember for different reasons. Born in South Africa, among the Khoisan people, she was taken to London in 1810, and had her life turned upside down because of her unusual body, considering the European standard. Locked in a cage she was exhibited in freak shows to a

186   I.F.O. Brandão public who behaved outrageously towards her, humiliating and downgrading her. Her body became what can be defined as a “commodity” for those who exploited her. Taken to France, she became an object of scientific study, and when she died at the age of 26, her body was modelled in plaster, and had parts of it preserved for the sake of research. Sartjie Baartman’s body was only returned to her African origins in 2002, after Nelson Mandela negotiated with François Mitterrand the terms for the return to her country.4 Books have been written about Sartjie Baartman’s life; films have been made; poems have been written about this unique woman—all of them to pay some sort of homage to her. The poems about this woman chosen for analysis in this chapter aim to discuss the different ways the technology of gender5 works as far as the body is concerned. Jackie Kay’s “Hottentot Venus” was published later than Nichols’ “Thoughts Drifting through the Fat Black Woman’s Head while Having a Bubble Bath,” but it will be examined first because of the relevance of its graphic dimension which plays with Baartman’s body image almost as though it were a photograph. The second poem will be read through its ironic discourse whose symbolic dimension discloses the damage women’s bodies may be subject to. Kay’s poem was written in 1991, and is in the collection Darling, published in 2007. Here the Scottish poet gives voice to Sartjie Baartman so that she can tell her own story, moving, as it were, from her death towards her past life while still in South Africa, reporting the events which culminated in her public exhibition in London. Underlying the humiliating human display of the South African woman is a discussion that clearly situates the notion of Western—global— dualisms, along the same lines as put by Monique LaRocque (2012, 94), who, resorting to Val Plumwood’s theorizing, points to this “long-­standing tradition” as associated with the oppression of nature, as well as of women, and “characterized by a logical structure of otherness and negation, where the undesirable other is made inferior and is subjugated” (original italics). Such is also the case of Baartman, who is forced out of her country, but whose part in her own oppression has to be examined critically. Such an analysis is made possible by the poem’s language, for it helps to understand the idea of collaboration6 between oppressor and oppressed, in that Kay’s Baartman accepts the terms of her coming to England, as she mimics the colonizer’s language before coming to Europe: They asked me in my own bush tongue If I wanted to be exhibited in this fashion I said the English words I’d heard them say often. Money. Freedom.… And yet, such an acceptance is not naïve: “only an overly simplistic view of subjectivity can claim that any human being is completely innocent of complicity in dominant ideologies” (Armbruster 1998, 102). So, Kay might be calling attention to a re-­examination of Baartman as a victim, along the lines of what Donna

Nichols and Kay’s corporeal Black Venus   187 Haraway says as regards such power ideologies, which means that “the positioning of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-­examination” (quoted in Armbruster 1998, 102). Hence the reader has to hear Baartman’s voice with an edge of irony, to be understood as a counterdiscourse, for the oppressor only knows how to deal with others by means of buying their conscience and appealing to such a collaboration. Furthermore, here it is also implicit what Theresa Burriss (this volume), in her chapter on novelist Ann Pancake, defines as “humanity,” following Val Plumwood: such a definition depends “on the presence of the ‘not-­human’: the uncivilized, the animal and the animalistic. European justification for invasion and colonization proceeded from this basis, understanding non-­European lands and the people as ‘spaces’ ‘unused, underused or empty’ ” (Burriss this volume, p. 106). The Hottentot Venus, as one might guess, lacks the very condition of the human that would place her South African “humanity” along the European colonizer who “bought” her. Kay refers in the poem to her “Boer keeper,” a clear association of the woman and the caged animal she is to become in London. Irony is also present in her being called after a goddess’s name, long known for her sexual license. But more than that, the irony here has to be seen within the context of oppositionality referred to by Hutcheon (2005), because the reader already knows for a fact that, in Baartman’s future, there is no freedom. Instead all she has is the maintenance of her body within the constraints of a society that will never accept her differentness. Thus she ironically accepts to exchange her “freedom” by a cage where her “Boer keeper” “could still walk [her], dance/hold his stick to [her].” Her body becomes a “site of abuse” (Romero 2013, 166) in which woman and animal are likened and to be seen as interchangeable: a spectacle in which human and animal are downgraded and humiliated by the “civilized” European public. Such a derogatory association informs the oppressive charge channeled for both disempowered beings.7 Hence, the irrationality associated with animals finds here an expansion of the oppressive imposition of patriarchal and imperialist society towards nature and its dominated creatures. One cannot forget the notion of women’s double colonization here either. The body of Kay’s “Hottentot Venus” is also within the notion of the female grotesque, which Russo (1986) associates with three forms in whose contexts women are involved: pregnant, ageing, and irregular. The latter form defines the Scottish poet’s woman, because of the concept of normality which is current in Western—global—society.8 Butler’s definition of norm is also helpful here, for it is associated with the social practices that normalize life: they are usually implicit, and unreadable, but whose effects are clear and dramatic, not to say destructive, especially for those who are outside the norm (Butler 2004). This is a paradox, for it is the norm that defines what is excluded. In this sense Baartman’s is a paradoxical (and grotesque) body too. The poem unveils such ideas as the poet gradually dresses the African woman with different bodies: first, in a plaster one molded from a corpse: it reveals her irregular “genitals and anus,” her “anomalous buttocks”; her life sucked out “till the last sigh left my body,” a white body as one might suppose, as shown in the

188   I.F.O. Brandão first line. The second appears in the closing stanza which shows Baartman wearing another body, as she is forced to dress a “thin skin coloured dress,” which somehow approximates her to the identity of the English woman, the white lady who “poked her parasol into my privates,” and whose cold look expressed through her “stone eyes,” is denied by her “English squeal of surprise at my size.” This “new” body can be read along the lines of Bakhtin’s transgressive body whose limits are transposed so that a new one can begin. It belongs to a technology of gender produced for the purpose of survival inside the oppressive context Baartman had to get along with. This body is also present in Nichols’ poem, as we shall see. Baartman’s new body allows her to wear an identity mask which destitutes her of her African origins, and makes her lose her sense of belonging: her own country, “a dream now. Or maybe it did not exist.” The last drop is the loss of her own name: from Sartjie Baartman she becomes “Sarah Bateman”: “Like an English woman. A great actress,” as attests the last line of the poem. So, no country, no language, no body (nobody)—indeed “a cartoon,” an actress: “A great actress.” Her new body—grotesque and doublecoated—reveals the extent of the pain caused to this woman, and yet the poem also shows a feminist (re)construction of Saartjie Baartman as she literally embodies the persona (mask) the oppressor wants her to have for the sake of survival. This can be read as an act of resistance. Kay’s representation of Baartman indicates that she is to be seen inside and outside gender, as argued by de Lauretis (1987), a woman whose black body is framed as “ugly, deformed, a cartoon,” by a society she does not belong to, and whose definition of human does not include blacks. Unless this person fits (or is framed) in a new identity, such as Baartman, who becomes Sarah Bateman, wearing her English skin (dress) and acting within this context. Her transformation, in this case, is to be read as an act of survival. The English mask fits her perfectly. Grace Nichols’ poem, “Thoughts Drifting through the Fat Black Woman’s Head While Having a Bubble Bath,” on the other hand, deals with Baartman’s body in a totally different way. Nichols’ Baartman is also given voice, but the lines of the poem reveal no name, which may be an indication that some kind of universality can be associated with this woman. The poem is part of the collection The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, published in 1984, a book that deals with “a longer history of representing the black female body” (Lawson Welsh 2007, 40). The long title indicates an unusual use of language in that it works as a headline, somehow summarizing the content of the poem, as in a newspaper’s lead,9 telling (more or less) what to expect from what is to come. The rest of the poem is quite “slim”: the verses are short, words are repeated as to demarcate the content, as well as Nichols’ ironical turns. The main image of this poem is conveyed by the use of the word “Steatopygous,” which starts and ends the poem, in two stanzas that are exactly the same:

Nichols and Kay’s corporeal Black Venus   189 Steatopygous sky Steatopygous sea Steatopygous waves Steatopygous me This word means the “excessive development of fat on the buttocks, especially of Hottentot [or the Khoi-­Khoi people of southern Africa] woman.”10 Nichols’ use of “steatopygous” is a rehabilitating appropriation of the word. Hence, the addressing of the woman’s steatopygous body, although it carries the “pain of history” it is also used as a positive term of self-­identification, as the fat black woman realizes in her own body a history of representing the black female form. This is what Michel Foucault would term an example of reverse-­discourse. (Lawson Welsh 2007, 41) However, “rehabilitating” the word is clearly not enough: its repetitive use (eight times in two stanzas of four lines) indicates that this woman is not just fat; her fatness is part of the process of engendering a “counter-­technology” discourse in order to defend a political position by means of the use of irony. In this sense the poem can be associated with the “emancipatory strategies” that feminist ecocriticism readings make possible, as Murphy (1991) argues. It is definitely one of those “hopeful ecological narratives” (Vakoch 2012, 3) for what its subversive language does to a once sad and distorted story, such as Baartman’s. Nichols’ ironic edge (following Hutcheon 2005) is crucial for the understanding of her questioning history and its oppressive discourse towards women who, like Sartjie Baartman, have been dislocated from their countries (be it in South Africa or anywhere else in the world) in order to live in places where their identity meant nothing for the oppressor. In Nichols’ poem nothing is said literally, but the playful lines disclose the historical/anthropological/religious distortion which was behind the show: O how I long to place my foot on the head of anthropology to swig my breasts in the face of history to scrub my back with the dogma of theology The penultimate verse is also ironical with the cosmetic industry (more technology to control and oppress women)—since “her” soap (she is fat, she is black) does not sell, she would want to learn how to be commercially viable: “O how I long…/to put my soap/in the slimming industry’s/ profitsome spoke.” And she does all this having a bubble bath… Nichols’ sense of irony—her liberatory strategy—is disclosed as we, as readers, see her fat black woman place herself in the seat of “normality,”

190   I.F.O. Brandão rebelling against the social/cultural discourses of power that impose body standards upon women. De Lauretis (1987, 18) argues that such discourses “produce, promote, and ‘implant’ representations of gender.” The fat black woman’s body is alien to the social and cultural context which does not admit models/patterns extraneous to its Western (white and slim)—global—bodily pattern, as also illustrated by Kay’s poem. Hutcheon’s view of irony points to the idea of intention behind the ironist’s language. Considering Nichols’ poem, the persona/ ironist’s “intention” seems to appear in the unveiling of a critical positioning which is opposed to the standardization of bodies. My own perception as a reader is that “way beyond” Nichols’ criticism expressed in the poem’s language, there is a claim to the existence of other cultures whose body standards are different from the Western—global—standard (Brandão 2005, 115). This perception was confirmed in an interview with the poet (Brandão 2011).11 In Nichols’ own words: For me [the fat black woman] doesn’t represent just fatness per se but rather a largeness of spirit, a generosity of being and a sense of unbounded freedom. I doubt that I would have written The Fat Black Woman’s Poems had I remained in Guyana, for example, because that obsession with body-­ size doesn’t really exist. So she does come out of a particular cultural matrix which sees in a negative light the very two characteristics that she embodies. Namely fatness and blackness. (My italics) This claim also shows that despite the pattern—fat or slim—of different cultures, there is a political protest engendered in the body which works as a sharp criticism of society. Nichols’ discursive protest—her resistance, that is—occurs in other poems as well. The subversive use of humor is what makes her poetry sharply located within the idea of gender resistance, as a counter-­discourse, because language is used subversively, both in the sense argued by Butler (1990)—the same language that oppresses can free the subject—as well as in the sense posed by Hutcheon (2005), since the discourse of irony is absorptive. This can be seen in Nichols’ poems related to the black fat woman, as she appropriates from the dominant discourse in order to express her humorous criticism.12 This fat black woman having a bubble bath is a “trickster figure watching from the sidelines, as different values refuse and deny her” (Wisker 2000, 293). Her irony works as resistance, for it subverts oppressive ideologies in order to be affirmative in relation to life.13 It is as Butler points out in Gender Trouble: “The power of language to work on bodies is both the cause of sexual oppression and the way beyond that oppression” (1990, 158). The poet’s coming to the rescue of the “Steatopygous woman” by means of irony calls attention to resistance in the sense that within the patriarchal/Western—global—arena acts such as the fat black woman who has a bubble bath serves to combat the prohibition of the insertion of women who do not conform to the standard, as already pointed out. The ironical body of a fat and black woman such as this is like a thorn in the

Nichols and Kay’s corporeal Black Venus   191 flesh, a ghost reminding us as readers (at least) that the world is not so round as it looks. The patriarchal world is at permanent war with those who do not fit in. Considering Mary Russo’s claim for a reappropriation (realignment) of Bakhtin’s grotesque realism as regards the female grotesque body, here in association with Nichols’ fat and black woman, it is possible to say that this body is not an “exaggeration.” The Hottentot woman, with her excessive buttocks (considering the European pattern) simply addresses a real body, a body that does not conform to the aesthetic normative pattern of Western—global— society. This bodily metaphor exposes an essentially political use of irony, in the terms already presented. This kind of poem belongs to Nichols’ poetics of resistance expressed in the body, against its confinement within the “dictatorship of the silhouette” (Zozzoli 2005) or the pattern “fashion-­beauty” (Bordo 1989, 1993, Sawicki 1994), that destitutes the “excessive” bodies, such as the fat black woman’s with its extra elements, such as pubic and armpit hair (Brandão 2005). This woman’s body is subversive and grotesque, and represents a “second revelation of the world” (Bakhtin 1984, 84) that builds another body (like Kay’s Hottentot Venus), for “(when a body transgresses its limits…[,] a new one begins)” (Bakhtin 1984, 320). This character who is “larger than life,” and “challenges all pre-­conceived notions of what a heroine should be” (Funck 1996, 3),14 lives in a world that is not located in the medieval era any more, and yet such a world is as perverse as the Rabelaisian, in its oppression towards ex-­centric beings who inhabit the social margins of our cities. According to de Lauretis, the margins also produce another technology of gender, and its effects “are rather at the ‘local’ level of resistances, in subjectivity and self-­representation” (1987, 18–19). Nichols produces a “counter-­technology” of gender as regards her women, for they escape the pattern of Western—global—(white and slim) Woman, and introduce another concept of woman who is outside the scope of regularity (Butler 2004). Her woman is black, fat, and does not care. For the sake of conclusion I would like to stress the dialogical context of Kay and Nichols’ poems. By resorting to Saartjie Baartman as a theme, both poets made the story of this nineteenth-­century woman visible, updating it, and at the same time making it possible a rehabilitating reading of an experience which has always been told before through a patriarchal viewpoint. The poems—as well as the other artistic manifestations of Saartjie Baartman’s life, with her excessive and ex-­centric body—show, in the language of today, simply a woman who belonged to another cultural standard, different from the “global” norm and oppression. Hence I consider that being the body a place where one is; a place that is a “socially constructed location, an act of place-­and-identity co-­creation that takes time, energy, and commitment” (Gaard 2010, 16), it can certainly be associated with Gaard’s argument of the body as a “moral agent” (2010, 14). If we understand the body as a kind of “home,” such a place belongs to the subjective discursivity of the poetic Saartjie Baartman created by both Kay and Nichols (Brandão 2015). Finally these poets rehabilitate the South African woman, and this is certainly a political act that we have to acknowledge and pay

192   I.F.O. Brandão our due respects. The Black Venus, the Hottentot Venus, has, as Ophelia (Kordecki this volume, p. 22) been both an “icon” and a “victim”; yet she is now out of the oppressive frame she was put to by imperialism. Both poems follow Huggan and Tiffin’s perspective which is brought by Theresa Burriss (this volume, p. 106): they “right” the “wrongs that have been done” in Baartman’s past. Nichols and Kay’s poems are liberatory and emancipatory, and they help us view the world more positively without losing our critical sense.

Notes   1 See Lawrence’s Kangaroo (2002, 261).   2 See Brandão (1998, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2009, 2011).   3 In a forthcoming chapter of a study about Brazilian women poets, I return to this same argument because of its relevance to the analysis of the body in contemporary poems. See Lockwood’s Afterword in Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature (Vakoch. 2012) for an explanation of the difference between “domination” and “oppression.” The poems deal with both perceptions.   4 See Ferreira and Hamblin (2010) for a historical reading about the ambiguity in the face of alterity, and how a perverse approximation of the notion of monster with blacks and with women was made possible. This has generated scientific conceptual distortions about the body considered as foreign to the European culture. Such a body was supposedly “closer” to nature, therefore considered as “natural.” The argument fosters the idea of the patriarchal social construction that uses science for controlling border subjects such as women, black people, and monsters, transforming them into commodities. Paradoxically, there is an exclusion through their inclusion, for “in their ugliness, disproportion and disorder, the monster is the other of the civilized [subject]” (815, my translation). Hence, in order to exclude the Hottentot Venus, she is “included” as a commodity to be exhibited, and thus to legitimate the vision of the European as “normal,” “beautiful,” etc. Saartjie Baartman is judged both from the moral point of view as well as biological, political, and historical, according to the authors.   5 My understanding of the technology of gender here follows Teresa de Lauretis’s theorizing, present in her The Technology of Gender (1987), in that it encompasses not only the ideology(ies) that produce(s) docile bodies (after Foucault), but also the institutions and practices that engender the subject, be it male or female. See de Lauretis (1987, 2007); see Foucault (1978, 1979, 1983, 2002). See also my “The Body as a Poetics of Resistance” (2005, 2006a).   6 The question of collaboration between oppressor and oppressed is also present in some of Nichols’ poems in that the use of irony leads to a criticism of women who can also be deemed as responsible for the materialization of such an oppressive ideology, when they (we) allow being coerced by it. Feminists such as Donna Haraway (1991) and ecofeminist Karla Armbruster (1998) propose a critical re-­examination of many women’s collaborationism in their own oppression and acceptance, as well as perpetuation, of such models. Gifford (1995, 160), in his analysis of Nichols, argues about “the way that ‘fat’ acts out as a complementary social stigma in an all-­white society to being ‘black’ in a racist mixed-­race society.” Thus, it seems to me that the fat black body of resistance finds more power in this subversion of established standards. See also Brandão (2005, 2006a).   7 Diana Villanueva Romero (2013), in her “Savage Beauty,” addresses the possibility of empowerment in the association of women and animals in fashion campaigns. But here such empowerment does not exist, for both human and animal are downgraded and dominated.

Nichols and Kay’s corporeal Black Venus   193   8 Foucault’s concept of “abnormality” (2002) considers the deviation in relation to the norm. Deviation leads to exclusion (Albuquerque 2011, 27). Russo’s notion of the irregular body is here too.   9 The word “lead” in the press jargon refers to the opening of a traditional issue. Six basic questions have to be answered: what, who, when, where, how, and why. See www.atalhocomunicacao.com.br/dicionario-­publicitario-jornalistico/ (accessed July 16, 2012). 10 As quoted by Lawson Welsh (2007, 40), from The Concise Oxford Dictionary. 11 This interview with Nichols (2011) was part of my post-­doctoral project, carried out at Federal University of Minas Gerais (2010–2011) and is still unpublished. In my article about the body as a poetics of resistance (2005, 115), I refer to her poetic perception of the existence of other body standards that are socially ignored and marginalized. 12 See “Watching Miss World,” in which she appropriates the notion of a beauty contest to allow her fat black woman to win. In “Thoughts Drifting…,” the appropriation is disclosed in the notion of a bubble bath and a black woman occupying the place of a white Western woman. 13 As she says in one of her poems: “I must devote/ sometime to the/ joy of living” (Nichols 1983, 36). 14 Funck (1996) is here referring to Susan Swan, Angela Carter, and Jeannette Winterson, but her argument suits Nichols’ fat black woman with a slight difference, which I have already discussed in my article on Nichols’ Picasso I want my face back, published in 2011.

References Albuquerque, Fátima Machado de. 2011. “Gênero como lugar de exclusão: reflexões iniciais dobre o caso das travestis em Maceió.” In Gênero e outros lugares: poéticas e espaços interdisciplinares, edited by Izabel Brandão and Fátima Albuquerque, 25–40. Maceió: Edufal. Armbruster, Karla. 1998. “ ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?’ A Call for Boundary-­Crossing in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, 97–122. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolski. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bauer, Dale M. 1988. Feminist Dialogics—a Theory of a Failed Community. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bauer, Dale M., and Jaret S. McKinstry, eds. 1991. Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bordo, Susan. 1989. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault.” In Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo, 13–33. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: Berkeley University Press. Brandão, Izabel. 2015. “Lugares heterotópicos e a constituição de corpos fronteiriços e identidades transitórias na narrativa de autoras contemporâneas.” In Espaço e gênero na literatura brasileira contemporânea, edited by Regina Dalcastagnè and Virgínia Maria Vasconcelos Leal, 133–152. Porto Alegre: Zouk.

194   I.F.O. Brandão Brandão, Izabel. 2011. Interview with Grace Nichols, Brazil. April 11 (unpublished). Brandão, Izabel. 2009. “O lugar dos mitos arcaicos na costura do contemporâneo: o olhar da Cariwoma de Grace Nichols, em Startling the Flying Fish.” In Gênero, identidade e hibridismo cultural: enfoques possíveis, edited by Sandra Sacramento, 213–225 Ilhéus: Editus. Brandão, Izabel. 2006a. “Grace Nichols and the Body as a Poetics of Resistance.” Englishes—Letterature Inglesi Contemporane. Roma: Pagine. Brandão, Izabel. 2006b. “O corpo como travessia: o canto da resistência de Grace Nichols.” In Entre o estético e político—a mulher nas literaturas de línguas estrangeiras, edited by Maria da Conceição Monteiro and Teresa de Oliveira Lima, 163–176. Florianó­polis: Editora Mulheres. Brandão, Izabel. 2005. “Grace Nichols e o corpo como poética da resistência.” In O corpo em revista—olhares interdisciplinares, edited by Izabel Brandão, 99–121. Maceió: Edufal. Brandão, Izabel. 1998. “Grace Nichols: apologia à anti-­mulher.” In Oro Obirin—Lélia Gonzalez—I Prêmio Literário e Ensaístico sobre a Condição da Mulher Negra, edited by Andréia Lisboa de Souza, Criola e Conceição Evaristo, 70–77. Rio de Janeiro: Criola. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble—the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. De Lauretis, Teresa. 2007. Figures of Resistance—Essays in Feminist Theory. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. The Technology of Gender. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Escudero, Maite. 2010. “Race, Gender and Performance in Grace Nichols The Fat Black Woman’s Poems.” In Journal of International Women’s Studies. Retrieved November 24, 2010, from www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/may0/escuerdo.  Ferreira, Jonatas, and Hamlin, Cinthia. 2010. “Mulheres, negros e outros monstros: um ensaio sobre corpos não civilizados.” Estudos Feministas, 18(3): 811–836, setembro-­ dezembro. Foucault, Michel. 2002. Os anormais. Translated by Eduardo Brandão. São Paulo: Martins Fontes. Foucault, Michel. 1983. Vigiar e Punir: história da violência nas prisões. Translated by Ligia M. Vassallo. Petrópolis: Vozes. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Microfísica do Poder. Translated by Marcelo Marques Damião. São Paulo: Edições Graal Ltda. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: An Introduction. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Funck, Susana B. 2002. “Descolonizando a Sexualidade Feminina: As Marionetes e as Vampiras de Angela Carter.” In Gênero e Representação em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa, edited by Ana Lúcia Gazzola, Constância Lima Duarte, and Sandra Goulart Almeida, 45–51. Belo Horizonte: UFMG. Funck, Susana B. 2001–2002. “Three Big Women: The Re-­Narration of ‘Woman’ as a Grotesque Body.” In Estudos Anglo-­Americanos, 147–157. S.J. Rio Preto: UNESP, n. 25–26. Funck, Susana B. 1997. “Apropriações do Grotesco e do Picaresco em Susan Swan e Aritha Van Herk.” In Recortes Transculturais, edited by Eurídice Figueiredo and Eloína P. Santos, 115–132. Niterói, RJ: Eduff/Abecan.

Nichols and Kay’s corporeal Black Venus   195 Funck, Susana B. 1996. “O Grotesco Feminino em Susan Swan, Angela Carter e Jeanette Winterson.” 270–272. In XI Encontro Nacional da ANPOLL, João Pessoa. Boletim do GT A Mulher na Literatura 6. Natal, RN. Gaard, Greta. 2010. “New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Eco­ criticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 17(4): 643–665. Gaard, Greta, Estok, Simon C., and Serpill Oppermann, eds. 2013. International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism. New York, London: Routledge. Gaard, Greta, Estok, Simon C., and Serpill Oppermann, eds. 2010. “New Directions for Ecofeminism. Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism.” ISLE- Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 0: 1–23. DOI: 10.1093/isle/isq108. Gifford, Terry. 1995. Green Voices—Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Holmes, Rachel. 2007. The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman (Born 1789—Buried 2002). London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Hutcheon, Linda. 2005. Irony’s Edge. London and New York: Routledge. Kay, Jackie. 2007. Darling. London: Bloodaxe. LaRocque, Monique M. 2012. “Decadent Desire. The Dream of Disembodiment in J.K. Huysman’s A Rebours.” In Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women and Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, 93–104. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lawrence, D.H. 2002. Kangaroo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawson Welsh, Sarah. 2007. Grace Nichols. Horndon: Northcote House Publishers. Lerna, Nina E. 2003. Gender and Technology: A Reader. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levy, Tatiana Salém. 2007. A chave de casa. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Lockwood, Jeffrey. 2012. “Afterword: Revolution: Does Ecofeminism Reject or Reflect Traditional Morality?” In Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, 123–135. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Murphy, Patrick D. 1991. “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics.” In Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic, edited by Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry, 39–56. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nichols, Grace. 1984. The Fat Black Woman’s Poems. London: Virago. Nichols, Grace. 1983. I is a Long Memoried Woman. London: Karnak Books. Oppermann, Serpill. 2013. “Feminist Ecocriticism: The New Ecofeminist Criticism.” Feminismo/s, 22: 65–88, diciembre. Romero, Diana Villanueva. 2013. “ ‘Savage Beauty’: Representations of Women as Animals in Petas’s Campaigns and Alexander McQueen’s Fashion Shows.” Feminismo/s, 22: 147–175, diciembre. Russo, Mary. 1986. “Female Grotesque: Carnival and Theory.” In Feminist Studies/ Critical Studies, edited by Teresa de Lauretis, 213–229. Bloomington, IN: Bloomington University Press. Sawicki, Jana. 1994. “Foucault, Feminism, and the Question of Identity”. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting, 286–313. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Seixas, Heloisa. 2003. Pérolas absolutas. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Vakoch, Douglas A., ed. 2012. Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women and Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

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Afterword: Ecofeminism through Literary Activism, Hybridity, Connections, and Caring Anna Bedford

This collection of remarkable and disparate essays offers wonderful insight into ecofeminist readings of world literature and their importance. In this Afterword I’d like to focus on three crucial aspects of ecofeminist literary criticism, exemplified by this collection, and important for further work in the field. First, activism. Ecofeminism can never only be an academic discourse. Its roots are in lived experiences, and harsh ones at that—in struggles for survival, and care, for both human and nonhuman. The grassroots activism of ecofeminism is necessarily part of this political and philosophical movement’s identity and purpose. At the same time, one can recognize that nothing is really “only” academic. Our ideologies shape our material experiences—the way women and nature are treated cannot be divorced from the way they are conceptualized. Suggestions that academia is an ivory tower secluded from the practical or “real world” fail to recognize these connections. Learning does not take place in a vacuum; classrooms are not spaces removed from a “real world” that happens elsewhere, and it would be dangerous to think so. This is one more binary to be challenged by ecofeminism. The academic can be and should be part of activist interventions. Thus I’d like to suggest here—as I believe these essays do—that writing, academic writing, and specifically literary theory can be a form of activism, and ought to be if it is ecofeminist. Second, I highlight the ethic of care that several of these authors find important in their ecofeminist criticism. I will suggest that, as Karen Warren (2000) claimed, caring relationships can be modelled on traditionally—though not essentially—female interactions and roles. An ethic of care in our interactions with each other and the world around us is necessary to counter the relationships of subjugation, domination, and exploitation that are integral to patriarchal and colonial forces in contemporary society. Finally, I want to draw important connections that so many pieces in this collection point to, either implicitly or explicitly. So frequently in ecofeminist discourses we talk about relationships and the importance of connections, and we use metaphors such as (re)weaving (Diamond and Orenstein 1990). We must not forget the connections in our political, philosophical, and academic work, too. Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey’s book, Ecofeminism in Dialogue (2017), does the important work of making such connections. I have argued therein that:

198   A. Bedford though ecofeminism makes women central to its analysis in ways postcolonialism is not necessarily committed to, both are committed to the decolonization of land and nature, and so an allegiance between postcolonial and ecofeminist discourses and politics yields useful strategies and possibilities. (Bedford 2017) In Literature and Ecofeminism: Intersectional and International Voices, many authors practice simultaneously postcolonial and ecofeminist readings, and recognize the two are intricately intertwined in their challenges to the domination and acquisition of land and Others. They also identify common strategies and motifs that are mobilized to break down binaries, distinctions, and hierarchical separations; hybridity being a central such strategy.

Writing as activism In her Foreword, Greta Gaard identifies some unifying threads through this collection, the first being water. There are many facets of environmental devastation demanding the urgent attention of writers and activists alike, but water—its scarcity, its pollution, its privatization, and battles for control of it are some of the primary contemporary concerns. Water is, indeed, a timely focus. In recent years, climate change has caused dams across the world to dry up—in Botswana, which has faced repeated drought, the most severe in recent decades being in response to the 2015–2016 El-Nino, when people struggled to buy water and transport it from boreholes in the capital of Gaborone; in South Africa, where 2015 was the driest year in over a century (Fox et al. 2016); in Australia, during its “Millennial drought,” amongst several others—droughts that have occurred alongside flooding in the country; and the island of Cyprus suffered years of droughts and had to import water from Greece before desalination plants were built. In Canada there have been numerous water crises within First Nations communities.1 In 2017, data from the Canadian government suggested there were approximately 150 drinking water advisories in First Nations communities in Canada and that 71 were long-term (McDiarmid 2017). In the United States, a water crisis in Flint, Michigan, beginning in 2014, saw city water contaminated with bacteria, lead, and disinfectants. Frequently, in the West especially, these problems are part of broader patterns of environmental racism, whereby racial – and frequently impoverished – minorities experience the effects of environmental toxins and scarcity of natural resources at a disproportionate rate. As water and other environmental crises become increasingly widespread, recurrent, and extreme, they are in need of sustained, critical attention, including literary attention, that affords them a “mirror and a lamp,” as Gaard quotes M.H. Abrams arguing this is literature’s purpose (p. xvi). In Chapter 3, Emine Geçgil analyzes Mary Austin’s The Ford, a narrative with the overt topic of contested water rights and the consequences of privatization. In this novel, Geçgil suggests that Austin is “blending her female

Afterword   199 identity as an activist with her literary talents” (p. 40). Indeed, it is possible to see in the work of so many writers, especially ecofeminist ones, and in the work of ecofeminist critics, too, a blending of activism and literature, the possibility of writing as activism. In Chapter 7, Theresa Burriss finds such an approach to writing in Ann Pancake’s Appalachian fiction pulls together ecofeminist and postcolonial imperatives in the novels. “Pancake unflinchingly write[s] the wrongs,” Burriss argues, just as postcolonial ecocritics Huggan and Tiffin have called for the writing of imperial wrongs as part of the process of righting them (p. 106). This is a technique of bearing witness that is a tool of the oppressed, and produces a counter-­narrative to the official History (writ large) that is written by the victor, by the powerful, which today increasingly means by the wealthy. One example from many writers employing such a strategy is Carolyn Forché, a human rights advocate and poet, who edited an anthology detailing human experiences of war, torture, occupation, and imprisonment in the twentieth century, which she titled, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-­Century Poetry of Witness. Geçgil writes, “Austin states that the novel, as a form, should be concerned with human struggle,” (p. 46), and so perhaps a literary focus for ecofeminist activists must be to concern themselves with not only the human struggle but bear witness to and write/right the nonhuman, too.

An ethic of care In his Introduction to this collection, Patrick Murphy touches upon the need to avoid “any essentialist representations of women as inherently closer to nature,” (p. 4) for charges of essentialism certainly plagued ecofeminism in its earliest days. Karl Zuelke’s examination of essentialist tropes in Chapter 8 demonstrates how tragic they can be. So, one must carefully articulate that any “closeness” to nature that lends itself to ecofeminism is not an inherent or essential one, but a product of our societies—in particular, I believe, women’s material practices and roles as carers. The ecofeminist movement began in many places as a grassroots response to the effects of capitalism and colonialism upon ecosystems and communities, as Gopinath, Raj, and Jose demonstrate of India (Chapter 10). Leaders of early ecofeminist interventions were poor women not by chance but because they were the first groups affected by environmental degradation.2 For example, the famous Chipko movement of local women in a village in India, who, feeling the impact of hardships arising from deforestation—walking further for water, experiencing deteriorating soil quality, and difficulty in raising livestock— formed protective circles around the trees, and hugged them (thus the name “chipko,” meaning “embrace”). Women also account for the majority of the world’s farmers, and so women are most impacted by the capitalist transformation of land from subsistence farming to cash crops. Being the people responsible for farming, for collecting firewood, for raising livestock, collecting drinking water, and feeding children, women’s material conditions often draw them to

200   A. Bedford environmental action, and from the personal to political. As Gopinath, Raj, and Jose argue: Women, conditioned to enact the role of nurturer, remain alert and conscious to the rampant destruction and abuse of the environment, which they understand as an essential component for survival […] The roles and duties assigned to them are socially created and their identities are culturally constructed, but it also prepares them to foresee disasters that arise from human indifference and callousness. (p. 162) I would also argue that the practices of caring and nurturing that are part of women’s lives not only make them attune to the abuse of the environment as part of their concern for the survival of those they care for, but that the inculcation of caring means that women are likely to extend an ethic of care to nonhuman others as well. In environmentalism as well as feminism, all over the world, we see that the personal is political, and often a way to political activism. In particular women, who are overwhelmingly most likely to be responsible for child-­raising, can come to radical activism and protest through their caring for the next generation and the world that generation will live in. This is not to dismiss the patriarchal and oppressive nature of Motherhood as institution, as argued by feminist critics such as Adrienne Rich (1976), but to recognize, as I believe she does in her discussions of motherhood as experience, the potential for mothering and caring as an experience that, rather than domesticating can be radicalizing, and can itself become an activist practice and intervention. Motherhood has also been a pathway to political literature by women—to write the political through the domestic. For example, Lisa Yaszek describes “maternalist politics” in 1950s peace activism by women, who wrote treatises against nuclear war by showing its impact upon families, through their “housewife” fiction (2004). The threat of environmental disasters looms large. “Maternalist politics” are often now directed towards environmental threats by mothers who see their children suffering from air pollution, from water pollution, and from the effects of nuclear activity: the mother activists, known as the South Bohemian Mothers, coalescing around anti-­nuclear and environmental issues in post-­Communist Czech Republic (Adams and Shriver 2011); the mothers who discovered their school was built beside a toxic dump in Love Canal, New York, in the 1970s; the mothers mobilizing in Japan since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011; and so many others. In her articulation of an ethic of care, Warren cites the feminized practices of mothering, friendship, and nursing as models for treating nonhuman others (2000, 113). In Chapter 5, Julia Tofantšuk discusses the “ethic of care” that Karen Warren made central to her vision of ecofeminism. In her analysis of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novels, Tofantšuk claims to identify “a truly ecological/ ecofeminist angle, differentiating between anthropocentric possession and caring

Afterword   201 ‘encounter’ ” (p. 77). Caring encounters, Tofantšuk shows, can be found in the interactions between individual characters and “place” and the earth. In Chapter 12, Deirdre Byrne reminds us that a “ ‘social imperative’ ” of caring and caretaking is at the heart of the earliest definitions of ecofeminism (p. 169). Among the enduring features of d’Eaubonne’s vision of ecofeminism, Byrne argues: “The first is an emphasis on womanhood as socio-­historically constructed rather than natural or given, in d’Eaubonne’s recognition of ‘a social imperative requiring caring.’ The second is that there is an enduring ‘acculturation in caretaking’ ” (p. 170). Thus we are reminded that in its origins, ecofeminism emphasized an ethic of care, forged from women’s experiences of caretaking. Byrne suggests women and their writing, the creative process itself, can be healing forces. In her essay, Byrne identifies ecofeminism in the texts of South African poet Malika Ndlovu that is, she claims, “most clearly expressed in the healing agenda of her work” (p. 169). However, not all ecofeminists agree with the efficacy of an “ethic of care.” Canadian ecofeminist Sherilyn MacGregor argues against “the rooting of public ethics in private values like care,” and calls for metaphors that don’t connect the work to be done so clearly to women (2006, 225). Again, the historic charges of essentialism require us to stress that these practices of caring and of mothering, as discussed above, are not essential biological roles but social practices of women and feminized traits. Val Plumwood has also, convincingly, cautioned us against privatization of ethics and responsibility, which is something we must consider when we seek to base practices on models of what have often been private and female relationships. That is to say that we need a deliberately public ethic of care, not one that is relegated to the domestic sphere or as women’s responsibility. Caring may be found in feminized practices such as mothering and nursing but it should be extended to all relationships and practiced by men and others, in our public, not just personal, relationships. In Calley Hornbuckle’s essay on ecological sensibility (Chapter 2), she protests, after Vandana Shiva, that the scientific treatment of nature is part of a “patriarchal project” that is also exclusionary in failing to “respect nature’s processes and interconnectedness as science” (Shiva, quoted by Hornbuckle, p. 28). Thus Hornbuckle suggests to us an apt example of the kind of patriarchal relationships to which caring should be extended. Instead, “modern reductionist science,” as Shiva terms it, has eschewed ethical considerations and excluded both nature’s processes as science, and women as practitioners. Donna Haraway details the exclusionary nature of Western science, and its treatment of non-­human Others in Modest_ Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (1997), where she examines the kinds of bodies invested with enough “neutrality” and universality—that is, those bodies able to be invisible and escaped from—to be qualified as scientific witnesses. Grace Dillon (2007) has also argued that Western conceptions of science as techno-­science exclude traditional ecological knowledges, and those who practice it. Dillon makes the case for “conjuring” as science, and “conjure stories” as science fiction (2014). As Jane Donawerth noted in Frankenstein’s Daughters (1997), masculine science treats

202   A. Bedford women as objects of study rather than participants, and the very presence of women as scientists in literature makes them utopian stories.3 Through literature we can imagine the possibilities for feminist, ecofeminist, and postcolonial science—one that includes women and nature as more than objects of study, and offers scientific interactions that don’t preclude caring. One of the poems Hornbuckle analyzes in Chapter 2 is Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition.” Within the poem, Hornbuckle describes, “a subject lined up for scientific experimentation, the mouse pleads his case in the name of kindred sense” (p. 30). The mouse’s plea is one for ethical consideration and, in fact, an ethic of care from the scientists. Written in 1773, this poem offers an experimental object in the position of narrating subject. Hornbuckle’s reading of the poem suggests that “death in the name of scientific research” is exploitation and “abusive power.” The mouse argues it is “part of an interconnected whole” and their destruction is “fraternal desecration” (p. 32). The fraternal echoes again in Hornbuckle’s description of Julia Saunders’ argument that the poem “calls upon Priestly’s ‘scientific fraternity’ to consider the wider ethical ramifications of the speculation that all matter is interrelated and shared” (p. 32). Though the poem predates Haraway’s Modest Witness (1997) by two centuries, the two make similar calls for what Hornbuckle identifies as “ecological sensibility” and for ethical science. Haraway’s depiction of the real Oncomouse, a trademarked mouse deliberately developed with the gene for cancer, similarly cries out for an ethic of care within science: Oncomouse™ is my sibling, and more properly, male or female, s/he is my sister. […] Although her promise is decidedly secular, s/he is a figure in the sense developed within Christian realism: S/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our mortality in a powerful, historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of salvation—a “cure for cancer”. Whether I agree to her existence and use or not, s/he suffers physically, repeatedly, and profoundly, that I and my sisters may live. In the experimental way of life, she is the experiment. S/he also suffers that we, that is, those interpellated into this ubiquitous story, might inhabit the multi-­billion dollar quest narrative of the search for the “cure for cancer.” (1997, 79) Haraway’s insistence on kinship and especially sisterhood stands as an ecofeminist alternative that extends Warren’s ethic of care to non-­personal, and non-­ domestic relationships, to scientific relationships, and it reiterates d’Eaubonne’s “social imperative” of caring. Sisterhood might be the solution to “fraternal desecration” by a “scientific fraternity.” Caring, suggests Haraway, like the authors in this collection, may be the solution to the patriarchal abuse of Others.

Ecofeminism and postcolonialism The inverse of an ethic of care, as Tofantšuk notes, is possession. Opposition to the various forms of possession of an Other is at the heart of ecofeminism and

Afterword   203 also anti-­colonialism—whether it is a racial Other, a sexual Other, or a nonhuman Other. For postcolonialists, as well as ecofeminists, nature, natural resources, and land itself are often what are at stake in violent quests for possession. Ecofeminism demonstrates repeatedly how land is tied to the conceptualization and treatment of women, and how the feminizing of land facilitates its colonial and patriarchal possession. For example, in her study of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in Chapter 4, Etienne Terblanche draws the parallels between rape and “earth-­rape.” Through careful close reading and intertextual analyses, Terblanche argues that within The Waste Land we can find the rape of Philomela, violence against women, and, as other critics have claimed, a warning of violence against the earth, its own rape and desertification. Carmen Flys Junquera also identifies parallels between the treatment of women, land, and animals in her analysis of texts by three Spanish writers in Chapter 10, “Wolves, Singing Trees, and Replicants,” in which questions of Otherness and postcolonial themes also abound. For example, in a novel by Laura Gallego Garcia, Flys Junquera notes the violent possession of land and of women is part of conquest, thus the conquering and distribution of brides and land are concomitant. Flys Junquera also identifies the violence done to and imminent extinction of local, rural traditions, where the fate of small villages, their traditions, knowledges, and dialects mirrors that of the fate of the wolves in Gallego’s novel. Furthermore, she argues that rural cultures in Europe are somewhat analogous to indigenous ones (p. 148) and that the knowledges offer ways to interact with nature. Through another contemporary text by Spanish author Rosa Montero Gayo, Flys Junquera identifies a futuristic depiction of an emerging crisis of environmental refugees, when in the novel the earth is divided into contaminated and clean zones, and air has been privatized in much the same way as water, with similar consequences for access. In this novel, human–alien relationships are used to prompt questions of Otherness, as in much science fiction. For Flys Junquera, the most important aspects of these Spanish novels that raise ecofeminist and environmental questions are the examples they, like others discussed in this collection, offer of ways forward through practices of care. Lesley Kordecki similarly draws a parallel between the earth and women’s bodies in her ecofeminist reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Chapter 1. In it she presents a particularly powerful image for us of two men, Hamlet and Laertes, fighting each other the grave and body of Ophelia, “perhaps crushing her bones,” even as they protest their love (p. 21). It is such a distillation of patriarchal and colonial violence—men fighting over a woman’s body, over a piece of land they feel most entitled to (in this case the grave) and the women that are tied to it. Capitalist and colonial societies, while simultaneously exploiting the land, and protecting the wealthy, rely upon the exploitation of certain bodies—likely those most vulnerable and devalued, and marked as such by their race, class, gender, postcoloniality. As such, capitalism and colonialism are necessary targets for ecofeminist action and critique. There are numerous examples of how women’s bodies, and particularly the colonial bodies of non-­white women, are used as cheap or free labor for the global

204   A. Bedford corporate market (Mies 1981, 1986, Mohanty 2003), and like the environment, these bodies are treated as natural resources that can be exploited for political and financial profit—that is to say, treated as a means for profit and as if they have only instrumental value rather than intrinsic worth (Merchant 1980, 1992, Warren 2000). In this way, the landscape that is exploited by colonialism and patriarchy includes the expanded definition of land articulated by Cherrie Moraga, who writes:  Land is more than rocks and trees, land is also the factories where we work, the water our children drink, and the housing project where we live. For women, lesbians, and gay men, land is that physical mass called our bodies. (1993, p. 173) Of course, the association of women’s bodies with the land needn’t, however, be a negative one. Moraga suggests the land is our bodies—thus to distance ourselves would be an impossible task, but ecofeminists would argue it’s not a desirable one anyway. What we need instead is a better appreciation for and treatment of the land. In her essay on Zora Neale Hurston (Chapter 6), Nicole Anae opens with a powerful and joyful vision of Hurston’s black female body as land. In fact, the depiction of joyful, excessive, unbounded female bodies, and in particular black female bodies, can be a means to resist the cultural appropriation and demands for conformity, as Izabel Brandão also argues in her reading of Grace Nichols and Jackie Kay’s “corporeal Black Venus” in Chapter 13.

Shared strategies: hybridity Burriss, in Chapter 7, suggests “writing wrongs” as a shared strategy for ecofeminist and postcolonial writers alike, which is an important approach to literature, as already discussed. Though Burriss’s focus is on Appalachia, Patrick Murphy identifies it as an example of internal colonization (pp. 4–5).4 Huang notes in his essay (Chapter 9) that ecofeminist projects are explicitly and necessarily invested in postcolonial work. He writes: Echoing Gaard’s comments, Noël Sturgeon observes that ecofeminism, more so than any other area of ecocriticism, focuses not only on minority writers and artists but also on environmental issues as those mostly affect women and other minority populations such as “people of color … poor people, Global South people,” and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people. (p. 128) In terms of strategies, in addition to bearing witness and writing of colonial, patriarchal, and ecofeminist violence, ecofeminism shares with postcolonialism a mobilization of hybridity. Hybridity has been an important part of postcolonialism theory and literature, advocated by Homi Bhabha as a means to represent

Afterword   205 and understand complex and contrary postcolonial relationships. It also counters narratives of purity authenticity that have been used to invalidate postcolonial cultures and identities. In Chapter 8, Karl Zuelke critiques the cultural appropriation of Native American Indian culture, and, in Chapter 11, Gopinath, Raj, and Jose highlight the intersection of capitalism with colonialism through the depiction of the native artist’s desperate turn to tourism. Hybridity challenges the possible delineation between self and Other, between purity and inauthenticity, and between human and “nature.” Therefore, in finding postcolonialism and ecofeminism very much aligned in their purposes to challenge the domination of women, land, and Others, it is perhaps not surprising to discover that postcolonial tools such as hybridity are crucial, too, in ecofeminist work. Several of the authors collected here highlight hybridity in their analyses. Kordecki shows us, in Chapter 1, how this approach is deployed in Suzanne Lummis’s rewriting of Ophelia as a mermaid. As a hybrid creature, says Kordecki, she “displays the deconstruction of essentialist categories of human and animal” (p. 19). Tofantšuk, in Chapter 5, similarly argues for the hybrid, or as she puts it, the ambiguous, which she identifies in Baba Yaga, a character from Slavonic/Russian folklore. Asserts Tofantšuk, “a possible alternative to dualism is ambiguity,” and it is her “ambiguous, borderline position” that makes Baba Yaga “a perfect ecofeminist character” (p. 81). Peter I-­min Huang also makes hybridity as a postcolonial and ecofeminist strategy the focus of his analysis, in Chapter 9, where he analyses two (re)writings of Medea, mythical Western figure, and granddaughter of the Greek God Helios, and Mazu, “an indigenized goddess” worshiped in Taiwan (p. 130). These are both hybrid figures that link colonial, patriarchal, and environmental suffering through their stories. In clashes of cultural forces these female figures that Huang links to Haraway’s cyborg embody resistance to the multiple and linked dominations of imperialism and patriarchy. The cyborg, Huang argues, can be found in these two stories as trans-indigenous, trans-subjective, and trans-ethnic identity, which stands opposite to the identity that strives to accrete, amass, centralize, and hierarchically order power. It embodies shared and porous forms of power. In Chapter 6, Nicole Anae illustrates how the work of Zora Neale Hurston suggests anti-­speciesism by negotiating and crossing boundaries between human and animal, stressing, in particular, their “affinities,” and challenging paradigms of thought that erect hierarchies and mutually exclusive concepts of human/animal that Carol Adams identified as “definition of negation” (p. 91). In particular, Anae seeks to show how Hurston argues for the extension of moral consideration to animals. Clearly ecofeminist in her approach, Anae mobilizes the postcolonial too, centering the black female body, with which she opens her essay, and connection to the environment. Anae argues that Hurston offers “narrative possibilities to effectively blend the cultural and the environmental with broader pressing questions about social justice, racial inequality and the interconnectedness of people of color (and minorities) with the natural environment” (p. 84). Hybridity is yet again important in breaking down boundaries and “definitions of negation,” and in Hurston’s work Anae finds it in the characters who straddle the boundary between human and

206   A. Bedford animal—for example, the therianthropic forms of Judy and Uncle Monday in “Uncle Monday,” and other black folklore Hurston collects and writes. Anae, quoting Avlamis, argues that “Theriomorphy—the shapeshifting from human to nonhuman—‘performs a metanarrative function. It embodies the very hybrid aesthetic of the beast fable that combines the animal as a defamiliarizing figuration and the human as the allegorised common ground of experience’ ” (p. 91). Such a hybrid aesthetic is clearly at work in deconstructing the Other through defamiliarization and commonality, be it racial other, nonhuman other, the female that is always other, or, the combination of all three.

Conclusion In her foreword, Greta Gaard identifies “nourishing relationships” and “life-­ sustaining connections,” which she cites as forms of “resilience” (p. xvii). It is likely that the relationships she imagines are those that embody what Warren calls an “ethic of care.” Caring and nourishing relationships are, I believe, as primary to ecofeminist projects now as they were when d’Eaubonne included a “‘social imperative requiring caring’ ” (p. 169) within that first articulation of an écoféminisme in 1974, and when Karen Warren first advocated for an ecofeminist ethic of care. The work within this new collection suggests nourishing and nurturing are as important to ecofeminist work as ever. The important new work being done by ecofeminists today involves nourishing relationships and making connections at a meta level, too. Increasingly it becomes clear that ecofeminism is aligning itself with postcolonialism, as part of its shared objective of eliminating hierarchical dominations and the paradigms of thought behind them. This collection is particularly rich as a result of the cross-­pollination of postcolonialism and ecofeminism, for the recommitment to activism and to caring, and for the disparate approaches to literature by scholars from across the world. Ecofeminism, as the authors collected here demonstrate, is dynamic, powerful, and exciting, and perhaps more important to our world than ever.

Notes 1 The Cree First Nations community of Kashechewan, in Northern Ontario, underwent two evacuations due to floods in 2005, and a quarter of the community was airlifted in October 2005 due to health problems stemming from issues with their water treatment plant, E. Coli levels, and contaminated drinking water (CBC News 2006). 2 Although Gopinath, Raj, and Jose, in their essay in this collection, point to the power of poor women within the environmental movement, it must also be recognized that a significant obstacle facing environmental care is that the most privileged and powerful in a capitalist society—and thus those most able to effect change—are the same people most insulated from the consequences of the destruction (for the same reasons that poor and non-­white women are the first to feel its effects). To follow the theme of water outlined by Gaard, we can consider a recent example in the United States. In 2015 and 2016, Flint, Michigan, became a household name synonymous with water pollution, negligence of administrators, and, most likely, criminal corruption. According to 2014 data, the town of Flint has a median household income of $24,679, a per capita income of $14,527 (U.S.

Afterword   207 Census Bureau). There are more people in Flint without health insurance than there are with bachelor’s degrees, and 41.6 percent live in poverty, according to federal rates. Meanwhile the largest owner of private water in Michigan is the multinational corporation, Nestle, which continues to bottle water in Michigan, for a permitting fee, while thousands of residents are unable to drink their water. Many activists have noted that the Michigan spokesperson for Nestle is married to the Governor’s chief of staff. In situations of water scarcity and other consequences of climate change or environmental degradation, those with the monetary resources to purchase bottled water—perhaps even to profit from other people’s purchases of bottled water!—to buy organic food, and to live in less polluted areas, can insulate themselves from the effects of environmental destruction … temporarily. In this respect we can see how, just as practices of caring can make women more attuned and “closer” to the environment, some people—the wealthy, the white, and male, in particular—can appear distanced from nature. 3 For an ecofeminist reading of alternative science in science fiction, see Bedford (2011, 2015, 2017). 4 Native American reservations and the treatment of the people and environment on such land is one of the most egregious examples of internal colonization. Native land is often also the site of drilling and, more recently, fracking. To return to the example of water, although Flint, Michigan, deserves the national attention and scrutiny it receives in the US—as a health crisis and for the narrative of entangled politics, power, and environmental resources, it is not an uncommon narrative, even within North America. In fact, two-­thirds of First Nation communities in Canada had a drinking water advisory between 2004 and 2014, according to a CBC investigation (Levasseur and Marcoux 2015), a statistic that points, again, to the importance of considering anti-­colonialism as an integral part of ecofeminist work. The Neskantaga First Nation in Ontario has been without potable water, under a boil water advisory, for over 20 years. Children in Neskantaga also suffer from sores on their skin, but have limited access to medical care and diagnosis, and the community reports problems since a water treatment plant was installed in 1993 (CBC News 2015). There are clearly parallels to the Kashechewan First Nation in Ontario, who experienced contaminated water from a treatment plant and was under a boil water order from 2003 to 2005. In Kashechewan, people also suffered from sores, scabies, and impetigo, and the community made news when the Canadian government evacuated 60 percent of the population after discovering E. coli in the drinking water in October 2005. In 2015 Isadore Day, chair of the Assembly of First Nations Health Committee, announced, “our First Nations communities are dying because of the poor water conditions in their communities” (CBC News 2015).

References Adams, Alison E., and Thomas E. Shriver. 2011. “Collective Identity and Gendered Activism in the Czech Environmental Movement: The South Bohemian Mothers’ Struggle Against Nuclear Power.” In Critical Aspects of Gender in Conflict Resolution, Peacebuilding and Social Movements, edited by Anna Christine Snyder and Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe, 163–190. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Bedford, Anna. 2011. “Reluctant Travelers: Vonarburg’s Postcolonial, Posthuman Voyagers.” FemSpec 11(2): 68–82. Bedford, Anna. 2015. “Survival in the Post-Apocalypse: Ecofeminism in MaddAddam.” In Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses, edited by Karma Waltonen. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bedford, Anna. 2017. “Ecofeminist, Post-­Colonial, and Anti-­Capitalist Possibilities in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring.” In Ecofeminism in Dialogue, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

208   A. Bedford Bhabha, Homi. 1995. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. CBC News. 2006. “Kashechewan: Water Crisis in Northern Ontario.” CBC News: Aboriginal Canadians. CBC News. 2015. “Neskantaga First Nation Demands Action on 20-Year Boil-­Water Advisory.” CBC News: Aboriginal. Diamond, Irene, and Gloria F. Orenstein, eds. 1990. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Dillon, G.L. 2007. “Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Nalo Hopkinson’s Ceremonial Worlds.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 18(1): 23–41. Dillon, G.L. 2014. “Haint Stories Rooted in Conjure Science: Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire.” In Black and Brown Planets, edited by Isiah Lavender. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Donawerth, Jane. 1997. Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Forché, Carolyn. 1993. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-­Century Poetry of Witness. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Fox, Coleen A., et al. 2016. “ ‘You Kill the Dam, You Are Killing a Part of Me’: Dam Removal and the Environmental Politics of River Restoration.” Geoforum, 70: 93–104. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_ Onco­Mouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. Levasseur, Joanne, and Jacques Marcoux. 2015. “Bad Water: ‘Third World’ Conditions on First Nations in Canada.” CBC News. MacGregor, Sherilyn. 2006. Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press. McDiarmid, Margo. 2017. “Indigenous Water Solutions: 2 Steps Forward, 1 Step Back.” CBC News: Politics. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Merchant, Carolyn. 1992. Radical Ecology. New York: Routledge. Mies, Maria. 1981. “Dynamics of Sexual Division of Labour and Capital Accumulation: Women Lace Workers of Narsapur.” Economic and Political Weekly, 16(10): 487–500. Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women and the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moraga, Cherrie. 1993. The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry. Boston: South End Press. Plumwood, Val. 1995. “Has Democracy Failed Ecology? An Ecofeminist Perspective.” Environmental Politics, 4(4): 134–168. Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience. London: Virago. Warren, Karen. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Yaszek, Lisa. 2004. “Stories ‘That Only a Mother’ Could Write: Midcentury Peace Activism, Maternalist Politics, and Judith Merril’s Early Fiction.” NWSA Journal, 16(2): 70–97.

Index

Abrams, M.H. xvi, 198 activism xvi–xvii, 1, 40–42, 136, 140, 172, 197–200 Adams, Carol J. 85, 90–94, 205 African-American 4, 8, 68, 90–91, 94, 128 Agriculture 44, 46–47, 51, 135 Alaimo, Stacy 49–51, 129–130 androcentrism 49–52, 167; see also anthropocentrism animal studies 19 animals 29–31, 44, 80–81, 85–96, 123–125, 131–132, 152, 187 anthropocentrism 2, 16, 35, 48, 77, 87, 115, 146, 200 anthropology 4, 86–88, 92–96, 129, 189 Appalachia x, xvi–xvii, 4, 99–106, 199, 204 assault xvii, 6, 55–56, 63, 110, 145 Austin, Mary 2–3, 40–52, 79, 81, 198–199 autonomy 72, 142 Bacon, Francis 27–29 Barbauld, Anna Letitia 2–3, 24–37, 202 Beauvoir, Simone de 69 binary 4, 63, 68, 70, 82, 104, 181, 197 biodiversity 5; see also extinction biological 33, 42, 50, 115, 141, 201 Blade Runner 154n6 Butler, Judith 187, 190 California 2, 40–42, 44 capitalism xvi–xvii, 45–48, 79, 102, 119, 166–167, 199, 203–204 care 70–72, 79, 81, 109, 145–147, 197, 199–202 career 49–50, 115, 126 Carson, Rachel 100 Cartesian 27, 29 chaos 14, 137

Chen, Jade xvi–xvii, 5, 130, 133, 134–136, 138 class xvi–xvii, 87, 96, 129, 166; middle 25, 40, 43, 72, 77, 138; see also capitalism conservation 41–44, 48 contradiction 4, 185 culture xvi–xvii, 58, 63, 115, 124–126, 190, 204; folk 87–88, 90–91, 94–96; nature and 24–25, 70, 73–77, 81–82, 100, 130, 137–138, 160; rural 143, 147–148; Western 9–11, 59, 118 d’Eaubonne, Françoise 169–171, 201, 202, 206 deconstruction 19, 40, 117, 125, 128, 205 democracy 140, 181 Derrida, Jacques 19, 64 Descartes, René 28, 34; see also Cartesian development 43–46, 51–52, 65, 68–70, 105–106, 161–162, 165–167, 189 dialectic 69, 171, 174 dialogue 141; see also dialectic dichotomies 24, 29, 37, 73–74, 81, 176 diversity 6, 103, 174 domination 28–31, 36, 116, 143–147, 173–174, 198, 205–206; logic of xvii, 6, 31, 69, 141 dualism 24, 29, 68–69, 80–82, 146, 174, 186, 205; see also binary; dichotomies; hierarchy; intersectionality ecocriticism 8, 10, 68, 70, 106, 128–129, 185, 189, 204 ecodocumentary xvii ecofeminism 1–2, 40, 46, 71, 95, 102, 115–116, 140–141, 166–167; see also d’Eaubonne, Françoise; logic of domination; patriarchy

210   Index ecology 25, 37, 40, 84, 96, 115, 159, 161 economics xvi, 43–44, 50–51, 102, 134, 140–141, 165; see also capitalism education 51, 78, 93, 172–173 egalitarian 2–3, 24–27, 37, 49, 58, 140, 179 Eliot, T.S. 3, 8, 54–66, 74, 202 emotion 4–5, 30–34, 69, 108–109, 152, 176, 178 empowerment 7, 165, 173, 192n7 environmental humanities xx, 153n1 environmentalism 40, 95–96, 153, 161, 200 essence 10, 28, 34, 68, 160, 175 essentialism 5, 7, 70, 100, 116–117, 171, 181, 199 ethics xvii, 26, 87, 146, 201; see also care; partnership existential xx, 112 experience 32–36, 57–58, 61–62, 90–91, 94–95, 130, 171, 197, 200 extinction 143, 150, 153 feminine 3, 13, 27, 41–42, 49, 119, 174–176 feminism 1, 10, 40, 70, 72, 81, 115, 128–129; see also dualism; ecofeminism Foucault, Michel 68, 81, 189, 192n5, 193n8 Gaard, Greta xvi, 1, 46, 93, 102–103, 115–116, 128, 191 gender xvi–xvii, 27, 86, 95–96, 115, 140–141, 171–181, 190–191; see also feminism; intersectionality; queer; sex; transgender Global South 128, 204 globalization 7, 160, 163, 165–167 God 13, 27, 73, 76, 80–81, 86, 109, 123, 164 Goddess 5–6, 16, 25, 116, 130, 135–138, 159, 187 Griffin, Susan 170, 173 Haraway, Donna 5–6, 128–130, 137–138, 187 Heidegger, Martin 64 hierarchy 3, 7, 29, 80, 102–103, 160, 165–166, 178–179 Hogan, Linda xvi–xvii, 5, 128, 130–132, 135, 138 holistic 2–3, 24, 28, 70 hooks, bell 107 Hurston, Zora Neale 4, 49, 84–96, 204, 205–206

independence 7, 41, 44, 47, 50, 143, 160–161, 164 India 116–126, 158–163, 166–167 interdependence 174 intersectionality xvi, xix–xxi, 68, 85, 94, 172–174, 198 intersubjectivity 32–34; see also subjectivity intimate 47, 56, 65, 90, 100–101, 175, 178 justice 37, 84, 92, 99–100, 141, 146–148, 205 Kay, Jackie 7–8, 171, 185–192, 204 language 10–11, 14–18, 25, 65, 179, 188–191; body 148; patriarchal 61; sign 22 linguistic 59, 69, 121, 129, 173 literary criticism 8, 50, 68, 170, 179, 197 literature 10, 62, 68, 84–86, 95, 107, 201, 204 Maathai, Wangari xvi masculine 27, 29, 41, 94, 130, 176, 201 mastery 27, 107 materialism 129, 137 Matthiessen, Peter 5, 115–127 mechanistic 55, 74 Medea 5, 130–131, 138, 205 media 169 Merchant, Carolyn 24, 27–28, 115 metaphor xvii, 17–18, 66, 85–86, 92, 119, 173, 197, 201 mirror xvi, 56, 60, 62, 76, 84, 119, 198 mother 11–13, 49–50, 69, 132–136, 165, 175 motherhood 42, 100, 159, 200–201 myth 5, 7, 86, 102, 121, 130–133, 175–176, 180–181 Narmada Bachao Andolan 161 nature 121–127, 129, 141–144, 158–167, 171–177, 199–204; see also culture, nature and Ndlovu, Malika xvi, 7, 169–182, 201 New Mexico 41–42 Nichols, Grace 7–8, 185–192, 204 normative 87, 191 nuclear 5, 101, 136, 138, 150, 166, 200 ontology 58, 68, 129, 185 organic 28, 70, 74, 82, 206n1

Index   211 Pancake, Ann 4–5, 99–113, 187, 199 partnership xix patriarchy 8, 22, 43, 57, 69–70, 104–105, 118, 162 philosophy 1–2, 25, 31–34, 70, 140–141, 160 plants 15–16, 18, 85, 110, 125, 132; power 101–103, 138 Plumwood, Val 10, 24, 27, 31, 68–70, 106, 146, 173, 186–187 politics 28–29, 51–52, 96, 200; race 85, 87, 92–93, 178 postcolonial xvi, 5–6, 80, 105–106, 133, 198, 202–206 posthumanist 128 postmodern 107, 160, 163 poststructuralist 128–129, 174 power 6, 26–29, 32, 80, 86, 93–96, 158–161, 165, 185; see also domination; hierarchy queer xvii race 35, 42–43, 80, 84–87, 91–93, 115, 132, 178–179; see also class; racism racism 85, 87, 93, 96 rape xvii, 59, 66, 69, 71, 146, 163, 172, 180 rationality 31–32, 82, 162, 176 reason 24–29, 69, 76, 82, 100–101, 106; see also rationality reciprocity 60, 146–147 revolution 27, 30, 101, 127 rights 7, 36, 130, 138, 161, 171; animal 138; human 145, 199; water 2, 40–41, 44–45, 198 romantic 2, 10, 18, 24, 36–37, 42, 79, 129, 180 Roy, Arundhati xvi, 7, 161, 163–166 science 24–30, 65, 77, 115, 201–202 science fiction 6, 141, 149, 153, 201

sex xix, 12–15, 56–57, 60, 119–126, 144–146; see also sexism sexism xx, 5–6, 9, 49, 54, 62, 96; see also racism Shakespeare, William 1–2, 9–18, 20–21, 58, 70, 203 Shiva, Vandana xvi, 28–29, 160–161, 201 slavery 31, 37, 120, 181; see also race society 7, 51–52, 72, 100, 158–159, 162–163, 181–182; patriarchal 40, 170, 187; Western 10, 191 South Africa xvi–xvii, 7–8, 169, 171–181, 185–187, 191, 198, 201 Spain 140, 143, 148, 153 speciesism xx, 85–87, 91, 93, 95–96, 205 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 171, 179; see also subaltern Sturgeon, Noël 128, 204 Subaltern 158, 164–165 subjectivity 2, 8, 24, 36, 171, 186, 191, 205 survival xvii, 6, 27, 162, 188, 197, 199–200 Taiwan 5, 130, 133–138, 205 technology 3, 69, 76–77, 104, 128, 149–150, 186–191 transgender 128, 204 truth 25–29, 37, 64, 179 universal 136, 188, 201 universe 35, 132, 159–160, 175–176, 180, 185 vegetarian 138 Warner, Sylvia Townsend 3–4, 49, 68, 71–82, 200 Warren, Karen 24, 31, 68–71, 79, 144, 146–147, 178, 197, 202–206 wild see wilderness wilderness 40, 49, 71, 116, 126, 140