New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism 1847185339, 9781847185334

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New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism

New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism

Edited by

Andrea Campbell

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, Edited by Andrea Campbell This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Andrea Campbell and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-533-9, ISBN (13): 9781847185334

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... vii Andrea Campbell Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 My Body, My People, My Land: Healing the Bonds that are Broken in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms Bethany Fitzpatrick Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 15 The Aridity of Grace: Community and Ecofeminism in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams and Prodigal Summer Richard Magee Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 27 What Once Was Fluid Is Now Fixed: The Damming of the Columbia River Hilary L. Hawley Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 44 The Superfund Gothic: Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir Christine Flanagan Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 62 Coming Out of the Amnesia: Herstories and Earth Stories, and Jane Smiley’s Critique of Capitalist Ownership in A Thousand Acres Almila Ozdek Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 74 Silence as Resistance: an Ecofeminist Reading of Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” Rob Brault

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Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 90 Prophecy, Motherlessness, and the Lake: Postcolonial Ecofeminism and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru Laura Wright Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 108 Ecofeminism in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness Harry Sewlall Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 124 New Frontiers for Ecofeminism: Women, Nature and Globalization in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats Jennifer Ladino Bibliography............................................................................................ 148 Contributors............................................................................................. 150

INTRODUCTION ANDREA CAMPBELL

After an overwhelming response to a call for papers for a conference panel on ecofeminism and literature, this collection was born. Since that gathering in 2006, the number of academic panels centered around ecofeminist literary criticism continues to grow. Moreover, the field of ecofeminist literary criticism also continues to grow, touching on diverse literatures from more time periods and more works from other parts of the globe. After much hard work from each of the authors presented here, I am thrilled to be involved with their important ideas and the exciting new directions I see for ecofeminist literary criticism. An excellent definition of ecofeminism comes from Noël Sturgeon’s Ecofeminist Natures: “Ecofeminism is a movement that makes connections between environmentalisms and feminisms; more precisely, it articulates the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment.”1 Ecofeminism seeks to recognize the interconnectedness and battle these injustices; as Greta Gaard suggests: “More than a theory about feminism and environmentalism, or women and nature, as the name might imply, ecofeminism approaches the problems of environmental degradation and social injustice from the premise that how we treat nature and how we treat each other are inseparably linked.” 2 Emerging in the 1970s and gaining momentum throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, ecofeminism struggled to find its place. As theorists worked to articulate the complex connections between feminism and ecology, the environmental movement was slow to accept these intersections, revealing problems of sexism within environmentalism: “In a number of radical environmentalist contexts, feminists had to challenge both male leadership and patriarchal thinking in order to make room for a feminist analysis and presence.”3 Conflict occurred between ecofeminism and groups such as social and radical ecology, which fortunately exposed the need for the exploration of gender and the environment, allowing ecofeminism to expand. Though Lawrence Buell cites differences and conflicts between the fields of ecocriticism and ecofeminism, he credits ecofeminism as one

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of the catalysts “toward increasing acknowledgment of ecocultural complexity after an initial concentration now increasingly (though by no means universally) thought to have been too narrowly focused.”4 Yet as ecofeminism gains more recognition and acceptance, it has also gained more critics. A critique of the use of dualisms is one way theorists such as Val Plumwood have analyzed Western thought and views of culture and nature. Nature is seen in opposition to culture, and represents female, nonhuman characteristics while culture consists of male, human representations. A culture/nature dualism is closely related to the human/nonhuman dualism with women, animals and nature falling on the same side in each case. The problem with the dualism critique is that it is very limiting in its explanation of Western ideologies. While it is correct to argue that Western discourse describes women as closer to nature, the use of the culture/nature dualism means women would have to fall outside of culture. Obviously this is inaccurate as women live and participate substantially in the realm of culture. There is no room for negotiation between culture and nature when placed in opposition to one another. It is the same for the human/nonhuman dualism, which would mean humans possess no animal characteristics and women would possess no human characteristics. The system of dualisms can also be ineffective when discussing issues of class and race because it is so limiting. For instance, the dualism of White/Other leaves no room for discussing people who are both white and other. One half of identity must be ignored in order for bi-racial persons to fit the dualism. Therefore, when using a dualism as a critical tool, it is difficult to avoid reducing cultures, nature and peoples into boxes which reinforce Western ideologies instead of challenging them. It does not allow us to examine Western views of difference effectively. There are varying degrees of privilege in Western thought, and people are classified not only by gender but also by race, class, and sexuality. While binaries can be useful to initially identify privileged positions in Western culture, they leave no room for negotiation and/or resistance and therefore must be deconstructed. Such accusations of essentialism have been the main attack against ecofeminism. Many have accused ecofeminists of merely perpetuating patriarchal classifications by aligning women with nature. Critics argue that emphasizing connections between women and nature only reinforces notions of women being more “natural” and contradicts the work of feminists who dismantle such ideas. Moreover, ecofeminism has often been called a white, middle-class woman’s battle that excludes women of

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color, lesbians and non-Western women. Janis Birkeland addresses such accusations of essentialism and culture with what I believe to be a compelling argument: “The accusation that ecofeminism is essentialist, I believe, results from a Patriarchal way of thinking. That is, it presupposes the legitimacy of the Patriarchal construct that sees nature as separate from culture.”5 This point is crucial to ecofeminism’s legitimacy because critics such as Janet Biehl have failed to recognize how their problems with ecofeminism reinforce a Western dualism of culture/nature. Instead of critiquing Western ideologies in terms of dualisms, recognizing the interconnectedness of issues concerning race, class and gender allows ecofeminism to avoid essentialism and thus the inadvertent reinforcing of patriarchal constructs. It also allows us to discuss difference without over generalizing. Using a fluid spectrum that describes hierarchies of humans, animals, culture and nature rather than dualisms makes ecofeminism encompassing of more than just gender and nature and gives a stronger critique of oppressive ideologies. Over the past decade, I believe ecofeminism has made huge strides in this direction, expanding its focus beyond U.S. borders and recognizing its potential for political action. Ecofeminist literary criticism is also a growing field. In the introduction to their 1998 collection Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy write “Critics are beginning to make the insights of ecofeminism a component of literary criticism. They also are discovering a wide array of environmental literature by women being written at the same time as ecofeminist philosophy and criticism is being developed.”6 Some may ask why we need ecofeminist literary criticism when we already have the field of ecocriticism. Lawrence Buell helps to answer that question: “Just as feminism was moved by minority and ‘third world’ feminisms during the 1980s and 1990s toward autocritique of its prior focus on Western white middle-class concerns, so during the past decade some ecofeminists have been among the leaders in a broader initiative to push environmental criticism toward substantive engagement with issue of environmental welfare and equity of more pressing concern to the impoverished and socially marginalized: to landscapes of urbanization, racism, poverty, and toxification; and to the voices of witnesses and victims of environmental injustice.”7

As Buell points out, the emergence and revision of ecofeminist theory over the past decades pushed traditional ecocriticism to acknowledge other voices, and created a space in which those voices could begin to address

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those issues most relevant to their lived reality. The essays in this collection reveal this demand and offer insightful new ways of looking at literature. Building on the works of earlier ecofeminist critics, each author works to expand the boundaries of the field and make important connections across disciplines. Besides expanding the area of ecocriticism, these chapters also demonstrate the growing relationship between ecofeminism and environmental justice. While ecofeminism has been criticized for ignoring issues of race, the environmental justice movement has been criticized for ignoring issues of gender, so a merging of these two fields is beneficial to each and creates a stronger, more inclusive movement. Ecofemnist literary criticism allows us to explore the potential of such an alliance, as this collection demonstrates, both in the U.S. as well as beyond its borders, pushing the field to include more global concerns. This move is essential as related fields such as feminism and environmental justice move toward a more transnational approach. Shifting its focus to global concerns also keeps ecofeminist literary criticism from being confined to only “Western” issues. In the opening chapter, Bethany Fitzpatrick uses ecofeminist literary criticism to blur boundaries and reject binaries in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms. Chapter One reveals the possibilities for healing, not only personally, but also socially and environmentally through political action. It is this political understanding/action that brings communities together, refuting the idea of essential connections between women, Native Americans and nature. Richard Magee complicates the notion of “environmental awareness” and details the difficulties Barbara Kingsolver faces when trying to articulate this awareness. In Prodigal Summer and Animal Dreams, he argues that Kingsolver finds difficulty escaping the sentimental while trying to portray the personal as a part of environmental awareness. However, while these shortcomings are visible they are important because Kingsolver is attempting to “rewrite” the American West and must rely on a new rhetoric to do so. Her attempts help pave the way for a new environmental rhetoric. In Hilary Hawley’s "What Once Was Fluid Is Now Fixed” Val Plumwood's theory of rationalism and the alternative paradigm she proposes are employed in reading the decision to dam the Columbia River system at the expense of a thousands-year-old Native culture and the intimate connections many have forged with their home rivers. The chapter further addresses essentialist critiques of ecofeminism, focusing on the concepts of reciprocity and interdependence in the works of Elizabeth

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Woody and Kim Barnes, and illustrates how ecofeminist principles can be valuable in furthering the work of environmental justice. Like Chapter Three, Christine Flanagan’s “The Superfund Gothic” explores polluted land and polluted bodies, specifically in New Jersey. Susanne Antonetta breaks her silence about the damage being both to the environment and to herself and confronts the unreliability of language and myth. Through ecofeminism and the Gothic, the myth of the pastoral can be rearticulated, especially in a post-nuclear world. Almila Ozdek’s “Coming Out of the Amnesia” also addresses breaking silence and finding voice. A Thousand Acres gives voice to both women and the earth while critiquing capitalism and ownership, especially through the setting of the farm. Ecofeminist literary criticism allows readers to understand how voices, female in this book, can be silenced but can also resist that silence and challenge patriarchal systems. While Chapter Five attempts to break silences, Chapter Six addresses silence as a form of resistance in Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron”. By using ecofeminist literary criticism, Rob Brault complicates the traditional concept of wilderness, which makes room for new views and definitions. It is Sylvia’s silence that ultimately allows her to resist these traditional notions of nature and avoid exploitation through hierarchies. Jewett uses what is considered a typical “feminine” trait (silence) and turns it into a means of power for the young girl. “Prophecy, Motherlessness, and the Lake” introduces us to postcolonial ecofeminism, as seen in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru. Laura Wright expands our understanding of ecofeminism while simultaneously complicating its definition. Using a postcolonial lens, it becomes apparent that many of ecofeminism’s critiques stem from a Western/North American point of view. When we move outside of this realm, ecofeminism must expand its focus in order to include non-Western point of views and recognize the “double-bind” of being female and colonized. Harry Sewlall also engages with postcolonial ecofeminism by exposing the ecological impacts from social, political, and economic colonial decisions on modern-day South Africa. Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness illuminates these influences, especially through the character of Qukezwa. She challenges traditional ways of “knowing” and reiterates the value of indigenous knowledge and culture, which expands ecofeminism outside of the academic realm. The global possibilities for ecofeminist literary criticism are explored in the final chapter, “New Frontiers for Ecofeminism”. Using Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, Jennifer Ladino reveals issues of globalization, capitalism, environmental racism, and patriarchy to be common sources of

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the environmental hazards that threaten women and people of color. In order to combat such dangers, Ozeki’s novel creates the possibilities of global communities and political coalitions that are grounded locally. As the novel reveals, this is no easy task, yet the potential for such political action cannot be ignored. In 1998, Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy noted that “Ecofeminism is not a single master theory and its practitioners have different articulations of their social practice.”8 Ten years later, this statement couldn’t be more true. The branches of ecofeminism continue to expand and now include spiritual, social, radical, Marxist and queer ecofeminism, to name a few. Conference panels are popping up all over the country at a variety of academic gatherings. All of these help enrich our reading of literatures, both historical and contemporary, and offer readers not only alternative views but also possibilities for change. I believe ecofeminism is moving in exciting and important directions, beyond the borders of the United States and into a more global field, and as environmental politics continues to demand attention, ecofeminism will be a necessary component in the push for environmental justice worldwide. I would like to first thank each author in this collection for their hard work and patience throughout this process. I have learned something new from each chapter and know that many others will as well. Thanks are also due to Chelsey Waters, Marie Drews, and Hilary Hawley for their valuable input and editing. I also thank Noël Sturgeon for her strong support and encouragement not only with this project but also my graduate studies. And finally, thanks to all my friends and family, especially Simon Aebersold, for always believing in me and my work.

Notes 1

Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23. Greta Gaard, “Women, Water, Energy: An Ecofeminist Approach,” Organization and Environment 14, no. 2 (2001): 157-172. 3 Sturgeon, 31. 4 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 11. 5 Janis Birkeland, “Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice,” in Ecofeminism, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 22. 6 Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, “Introduction,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 5. 7 Buell, 111-112. 8 Gaard and Murphy, 2. 2

CHAPTER ONE MY BODY, MY PEOPLE, MY LAND: HEALING THE BONDS THAT ARE BROKEN IN LINDA HOGAN’S SOLAR STORMS BETHANY FITZPATRICK

“We were shaped out of this land by the hands of gods”.1

This is a reality that the young Native American woman, Angela Jenson (later called Angel), comes to learn and experience through her transformative journey from the foster homes of Oklahoma to the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada and farther north to the land of the Beautiful People. Solar Storms by Linda Hogan reveals the ways in which dominant Western patriarchal ideologies and a history of violent colonialism exploit and harm both women and the environment, and the ways in which women’s bodies and the land are inscribed with this history. Hogan’s narrative hinges upon a young woman’s journey to find her mother(s), an old woman’s journey home, a woman’s journey toward death, and a woman’s journey toward environmental justice. Through their immersion in, reverence toward, and understanding of nature, the women are empowered to struggle to protect the land, animals, plants and indigenous communities. They ultimately find strength and healing through a re-forging of the bonds between humanity and nature as well as a re-imagining of nature and of themselves and their roles as women. The journey of these women into the boundary waters, the Triage region between Minnesota and Canada, enables the women to transgress gender boundaries, as well as boundaries between self and nature, spirit and matter, space and time, and dreams and reality. This journey or bodily experience in nature allows the women to ultimately achieve healing and a re-integration into or the establishment of a real community of equals. Though this special association between women and nature as well as between Native Americans and nature has been used in problematic ways

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in the past, especially within dominant American cultural narratives, Hogan uses it in such a way as to create a new story of environmental justice, gender equality, and personal and community healing. Though her characters have bodily connections with nature, this is not the common Western association between women’s bodies and a degraded nature; it is rather a reconfiguring of nature, bodies, and the relationship between humans and the natural world. To use Stacy Alaimo’s terms from Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space, it is a “grounded immersion [in nature] rather than bodiless flight [from nature]”.2 Hogan presents the relationship between women and nature as a positive medium for personal healing, as well as for social and environmental change through a reconfiguration of the body and nature. Her narrative, especially the journey undertaken by the women and the healing they experience, offers an alternative worldview that challenges the dominant Western dualistic worldview, which separates and devalues women, bodies, and nature.. Hogan’s narrative blurs the boundaries between self and nature, the material and the spiritual, dreams and reality, as well as gender boundaries. She presents a new way of knowing and an alternative value system that through a rejection of binary oppositions recovers nature, women, and spirituality from the chasms of degradation and injustice. In Solar Storms, Hogan positions women (and men) as part of both nature and culture and effectively denies oppressive oppositional binaries. Furthermore, she positions women and Native Americans with nature in struggles for environmental, social, and political change based on women’s and Native American’s unique historical and social positions in relationship with nature, not on biological or essential connections. Hogan reconstructs and redefines gender, nature, and the body partly through a denial of value hierarchies and value dualisms, partly through a denial of dominant Western cultural narratives about women, nature, and women’s bodies, and partly through a re-conceptualization of nature as a dynamic agent.

Adam’s Rib When Angela Jenson arrives at Adam’s Rib at the age of seventeen, she is physically scarred and emotionally fragmented. She comes seeking her people, her history, and her mother. She describes herself as “a rootless teenager”3 and “the girl who never cried”4 When she arrives at the town of Adam’s Rib, she possesses only her plastic bags of clothes, the

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fifty dollar bills that her blood grandmother Agnes Iron sent her, her fake baby photo, what she calls her two “rooms” of anger and fear, and a history of violence that marks her skin. She arrives with the intention of reconstructing her past and salvaging some part of herself. When she enters silence and her fear, she takes the first step toward healing. In the beginning of her journey, Angel lives a two-dimensional life that is dominated by her anger and her fear. As Ellen L Arnold suggests in “Beginnings Are Everything: The Quest for Origins in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” Angel lives on the surface.5 When she breaks the mirror at the house of Agnes Iron and Agnes’s mother Dora Rouge, this symbolizes her willingness to go beyond the surface.6 It also symbolizes her internal brokenness and her willingness to confront that brokenness. When Angel first enters the town of Adam’s Rib, her own pain and emptiness are reflected back to her in the isolation and emptiness of the town, its history, the land, and the displacement of the women there. Furthermore, a direct correlation between the degradation of women and the degradation of the land and animals is established by the legend of the Abandoned Ones. Angel recalls: The First Women at Adam’s Rib had called themselves the Abandoned Ones…The first generation of the Abandoned Ones traveled down with French fur trappers who were seeking their fortunes from the land. When the land was worn out, the beaver and wolf gone, mostly dead, the men moved on to what hadn’t yet been destroyed, leaving their women and children behind, as if they too were used-up animals.7

The ways in which this brief story within the story is told, including the capitalization of “The First Women” and the “Abandoned Ones,” makes it seem as if it is a legendary story of systematic abuse of women and nature that has happened since time immemorial; this story of abuse is further reflected in Angel’s history and the story of her mother, Hannah Wing, and her blood grandmother, Loretta Wing. Yet, within this story we also see the first glimmers of the possibility for healing. The women build a community and take over the roles the men have abandoned: “The women eked out their livings in whatever ways they could, fishing or sewing. They brought in their own wood, and with their homely work-worn hands they patched their own houses …”.8 Angel too must learn these skills of survival and how to create a community for herself and to open herself up to the world in order to fill the emptiness within her due to her own abandonment and history.

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The House of No After Agnes and Dora-Rouge tell Angel what they can of her story, they send her to live on Fur Island with her step-grandmother, Bush, who cared for her until she was five. When Angel first moves to what she calls “the House of No” she is uncomfortable with Bush’s silences. She clings to boundaries and a worldview that holds self as separate from nature and from other people. In the House of No there are no clear boundaries between outside and inside and humans and nature. The vines creep inside the windows and grow along the walls, and Bush brings animal bones inside to reconstruct them. Angel is uncomfortable in this house, in this state of in-betweenness. She closes the windows and thinks, “I did not want the world to sneak in on me. Like the missionaries, I was threatened by its life and the way it resisted human efforts to control it”.9 At first Angel still clings to her “surfaces”, her pocket mirror and her twodimensional world view, but through Bush’s examples and silences, through Bush’s piecing together of her story, and ultimately through her journey into the boundary waters, Angel begins to allow the boundaries to blur, her vision to shift, and herself to merge with a multi-dimensional world of creation. As suggested by Roseanne Hoefel, Bush becomes Angel’s teacher and introduces her to “the older world” of knowledge.10 When Angel first meets Bush “she seemed rooted where she stood, at the boundary between land and water [,and]stood barefoot in that dark, newly exposed clay, as if she’d just been created by one of the gods who made us out of earth, as if she’d risen up like first woman, still and awed by creation”.11 Bush embodies the land and a way of knowledge that is felt and known in the body rather than arrived at through linear logic. Angel will eventually come to share and to understand this alternative embodied epistemology after hard work, long silences, and immersion in and merging with the natural world. Bush comes to represent to Angel a sort of goddess and mother figure, but Bush too has her flaws and her hidden scars. She feels deeply the loss of both Hannah and Angel and is in many ways alienated from the community of Adam’s Rib. The journey into the boundary waters transforms and heals her just as it awakens Angel into full consciousness of her place in the cosmos. Before Angel even learns all the stories of her past, her healing begins. Her old identity falls away. She thinks, “Now even my illusions began to drop away. I had created a past for myself and now, I knew, it was about to be dismantled, taken apart and rewoven…”.12 Even before Bush begins to help her to construct her past, a new sense of self begins

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emerging: “The sound of water lashing down filled me with such a longing, an ache in my chest I could not yet fathom, but now know as the animal heart yearning its way into being, pulled out of a song”.13 Ironically, becoming more animal like helps her to become more human. In this sense she begins to enter Donna Haraway’s “cyborg world” in which there is no clear separation between humans and animals.14 She begins to relinquish dualistic and hierarchical thinking. She no longer sees herself as superior to and separate from the rest of nature. She gives up on walls, closed windows, and boundaries and lets her interior world merge with the exterior world: “I lived inside water. There was no separation between us…I’d searched all my life for this older world that was lost to me, this world only my body remembered. In that moment I understood I was part of the same equation as birds and rain”.15 Angel comes to see her own broken past and fragmented self as part of something larger, “a great brokenness moving, trying to move toward wholeness”.16 She begins to sense a connection between her history, the land of felled trees and the “fragments of stories”.17 According to Hoefel, Angel “internalizes the reality that fragmentation is an inevitable feature of life”.18 She realizes it can lead to wholeness and is part of the process of creation. Yet, she cannot fully begin to recreate herself as a woman and a true human being until she can piece together the broken fragments of her past. The History of Loretta Wing, Hannah Wing, and Angel Wing Just as Angel comes to understand that ancestral knowledge and a connection to the land reside in her body at a deep cellular level, she also comes to understand how the scars of her body and soul were passed down from the bodies of her marked mother and grandmother. Historically, women had been violated by men and share a brutal history that parallels and is intricately linked with the degradation of nature. In Western cultures, women have been associated with a degraded nature that includes non-human nature, as well as emotions, the body, and basically everything that reason excludes, primarily because of women’s reproductive capabilities. Just as the marks of violence were written in scars on the bodies of herself, her mother, and her grandmother, the land too is etched with scars of poison, erosion, and the disappearance of animals and trees as well as the errant rivers that decimate the land and communities when the dams are built. When Angel’s grandmother Agnes tells Angel the beginning of her story, she links the beginning of her wounding and her displacement with the destruction of nature and the degradation of the tribal people by EuroAmerican “settlers”. She says, “What happened to you started long ago. It began around the time of the killing of the wolves. When people were

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starving…There wasn’t a single beaver that year. They’d killed them all. And they’d just logged the last of the pine forests”.19 She then tells the story of how Angel’s grandfather left Bush for Loretta Wing. But the real story is the one of Loretta and her embodiment of a history of violence and victimization that led to her inability to love or to care and how that history and inability to love were passed on to Hannah. The “curse” on Loretta came from her having witnessed the near genocide of her people, the Elk Islanders. Her body carried the almond odor of cyanide that white settlers had put out to poison the wolves presumably to “open up” the land for cattle and more white people. Loretta and her starving people had eaten the poisoned carcasses of the deer and somehow she had survived only to be beaten and raped by white men. Agnes explains, “That was how one day she became the one who hurt others. It was passed down”.20 Birgit Hans in “Water and Ice: Restoring Balance to the World in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms” explains that this heartbreaking tale reveals a “…EuroAmerican worldview [in which] the needs of man always supersede any other’s, and animals—whether wild or domesticated—are not considered to be on the same level of creation as man. Man is seen as the pinnacle of a hierarchically organized world “.21 Thus the degradation of land, animals, indigenous people, and women is exposed as intricately linked to a Western worldview that is hierarchical and patriarchal. The story of Hannah Wing’s life that Angel comes to hear and then finally to witness the end of is just as heartbreaking and is closely linked to her own mother’s and her people’s history of abuse and degradation. Hannah too bears the scars of violence and abuse on her body: “…her skin was a garment of scars. There were burns and incisions. Like someone had written on her. The signatures of torturers”.22 Her body is a space that has been invaded by the terrible forces of history: “…her life going backward to where time and history and genocide gather and move like a cloud above spilled oceans of blood. That little girl’s body was the place where all this met”.23 All of the horrors of her people’s past and the evils inflicted against them are centered in and written on the body of a woman, on and in the body of Hannah Wing. When Hannah dies in a dilapidated shack after having been stabbed by the man she lived with, Angel and Bush wrap her body in newspapers that contain the stories of war, death and other misery, “and the words merge with her scars, the legacies of conquest and genocide written doubly on her flesh”.24 Hannah’s own history of abuse and the abuse she inflicts on Angel and her other children are understood to be rooted in the abuse of her mother, the destruction of the land, and the systematic destruction of her people. This reveals the ways in which an ideology that degrades women also degrades nature and

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indigenous people and leads to a destruction that has terrible consequences that move back into the past and forward into the future. After having heard the heart-wrenching stories of her grandmother and her mother, Angel hears the terrible story of her own birth and how her mother had put her outside in a birch tree to die during the deathly cold of winter. She later learns that her mother had bit her face, causing the scars. Although Angel learns all of these horrifying details about her mother and her own past, she comes to a certain acceptance through the understanding gained from her grandmothers about history, destruction, and creation as well as her new sense of wholeness and connection. Angel comes to understand her brokenness and her mother’s as one in the same. She says, My beginning was Hannah’s beginning, one of broken lives, gone animals, trees felled and kindled. Our beginnings were intricately bound up in the history of the land…But it went even farther back than that, to the broken connections of people to the world and its many gods.25

She also comes to understand that her wounds and the wounds of the earth are the same. Arnold says, “ Angel makes a new relationship with the earth, in the recognition that her mother’s body, her own body, and the body of earth are the same”.26 Yet , in Hogan’s narrative the body is not solely represented as a passive site for the transcription of history and the inscription of victim-hood; it is primarily a site for knowledge, communication, and connection. This understanding of her embodiment of history as well as her embodiment of an older, more sacred connection with the world helps Angel to realize a new form of communication and a new epistemology.

A New Way of Knowing Through the teachings of her Grandmothers, water, plant dreams and an immersion in nature Angel learns to love, to forgive, to cry, to sleep, to heal and to honor her connections with the natural world. She discovers a new way of knowing that is, to again use Alaimo’s terms, a “grounded immersion” in nature and in the body or a form of embodied knowledge. For example, Angel feels her knowledge about plants arising from “the place in [her] body that knew absolute truth”.27 It doesn’t matter whether this place exists in the rational or logical sense, what matters is that this place can be imagined. If humans can imagine this connection or place then we can reinvent our relationship with nature and reconfigure the human body. Paradoxically this new epistemology is both an embodied

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knowledge and a merging with the natural world beyond the boundaries of the physical body. The body is both a source of knowledge and site for communication with the natural world. When Angel describes her plant dreaming, she says: There was a place inside the human that spoke with land, that entered dreaming…Field, forest, swamp. I knew how they breathed at night, and that they were linked to us in that breath. It was the oldest bond of survival…I remembered things I’d forgotten…the plants and I joined each other. They entangled me in their stems and vines and it was a beautiful entanglement.28

This form of communication through dreams, visions, and bodily knowledge is a different language and a different form of knowing. It’s what Hogan calls in her collection of essays, Dwellings: a Spiritual History of the Living World, a language of a “different yield”,29 a language that allows humanity “to step outside our emptiness and remember the strong currents that pass between humans and the rest of nature, currents that are the felt voice of land, heard in the cells of the body”.30 This language and way of knowing is a merging between humanity and nature and also a merging between dreams and reality, or a worldview in which dreams inform waking reality and the body is both a source and site for knowledge. In “Displacing Darwin and Descartes: The Bodily Transgressions of Fielding Burke, Octavia Butler, and Linda Hogan” Stacy Alaimo explains that “Hogan…rewrite[s] the body, not as a mute, passive, abject space that signifies the debased or inferior part of our natures, but as a place of liminality, connection, and knowledge” and that “[b]y inhabiting the corporeality and emphasizing embodied perspective,…Hogan e-race[s] the social Darwinist hierarchy of life forms and the Cartesian split between mind and body”.31 Though Alaimo is referring to Hogan’s poetry here, it seems particularly applicable to Solar Storms. Hogan rewrites both the female body and nature. Yet, this is not the same old story of indigenous people and women as somehow essentially closer to the earth. As Christa Grewe-Volpp explains, this is not a knowledge that is ethnocentric, nor is it a knowledge system that is gender specific. Rather, it is an epistemology available to all of humanity.32 Jim Tarter further contends in “Dreams of Earth: Place, Multiethnicity, and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms” that race and tribal ethnicity are largely unspecified and therefore this knowledge and communication with the natural world is not limited to a particular ethnicity.33 Rather it is a new story of humanity’s interconnectivity with the natural world and the ways in which that

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connection can be realized through silences, immersion in nature, and a reconceptualization of both the physical body and nature.

The Boundary Waters When the women enter the boundary waters they become completely immersed in a nature that, in their Native American and ecofeminist view, is “dynamic and aware”.34 To them and in the Native American worldview “ the earth is being, as all creatures are also being: aware, palpable, intelligent, alive”.35 Nature is neither exalted nor degraded. Nature is neither romanticized nor demonized. Instead nature is given agency and recognized as a partner in a contract or pact with humanity. Dora-Rouge makes a pact with water so that they can be assured safe passage through the tumultuous waters. In her youth, Agnes kills a bear to end its agony. She continues to sing bear songs and to learn bear medicine and ultimately contributes her flesh to wolves and wild animals. Bush reassembles the skeletons of animals with respect and honor and stands up at the “negotiation” meeting with the contractors and asks “Why are only white laws followed...What is the law if not the earth’s?”36 Angel learns to sense the feel of the land and becomes fully human. The women recognize nature as an agent, yet they don’t romanticize nature. Furthermore, though nature is seemingly anthropomorphized in several instances, it is still recognized on its own terms. As Grewe-Volpp explains, “Hogan does not perpetuate hierarchical dualism, because human capabilities are not the measure of all considerations…despite [nature’s] seeming anthropomorphism, it is not a subject in the human sense”.37 Perhaps the best example of nature as agent in Solar Storms is Wolverine. Wolverine is similar to the trickster god Coyote of the American Southwestern tribes. He is “the world as witty agent”.38 He plays jokes (ones that are often anything but funny) on humans and is thought to be responsible for unexplained mischief. Wolverine’s tracks are spotted when Hannah dies and when Tulik’s house is burnt down. Wolverine is recognized paradoxically as both a co-creator of the world and in many ways as a nemesis of humans: “…it was Mondi, Wolverine, who’d made the world and the sun and the moon…Wolverine wanted the people to leave, he wanted to starve them out of his territory, his world”.39 The Fat Eater’s understanding of the Wolverine as trickster god is a way in which the world is recognized as an agent that is beyond the control of humans and not always necessarily friendly toward human needs and desires. They, to use Haraway’s phrase, “give up mastery, but keeping searching for fidelity, knowing all the while [they] will be hoodwinked”.40

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The trickster figure is also another way in which dualism is broken down as nature is neither exalted nor demonized, neither absolutely good nor absolutely evil. When the women enter the boundary waters, they come to see themselves as taking part in the ongoing process of creation. They see themselves as part of nature, creation, and God. According to Allen, “the nonchristian tribal person assumes a place in creation that is dynamic, creative, and responsive”.41 Thus once the women assume this role they must act in order to co-create a livable world. Yet, in many ways within Hogan’s narrative, this Native American cosmogony and worldview are not presented as in strict opposition to Christianity, but as a rewriting of the stories of Christianity and blending of those stories with Native American stories.42 God’s power and perspective is shifted from “out there” to an embodiment in the land, animals and all of creation. According to Arnold: [I]n Hogan’s narrative…Creation is born of God’s desire, the word God speaks from loneliness speaks others into being…God inhabits the world…God’s identity is articulated within the processes of creation, processes born of the splitting of wholeness and the hunger for completion”.43

Thus the natural world is re-infused with spirit and the split between spirit and matter is healed. This re-infusion of spirit, as well as the rewriting of Christian mythology, is further explored and exemplified in Hogan’s poetry, especially in The Book of Medicines. When the women enter the boundary waters, they leave behind Western perceptions of time: “[t]he time we’d been teasing apart, unraveled. And now it began to unravel us as we entered a kind of timelessness. Wednesday was the last day we called by name…”.44 They enter a sort of timelessness which Allen calls ceremonial time in which there is no separation between themselves and their surroundings.45 Western perceptions of time are lost as are the boundaries between self and nature and even between one another: Everything merged and united. There were no sharp distinctions left between darkness and light. Water and air became the same thing, as did water and land in the marshy broth of creation…It was all one thing. The canoes were our bodies, our skin…The four of us became like one animal.46

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Again this exemplifies a Native American worldview as well as an ecofeminist view in that it is a rejection of duality and an embracing of the interconnectivity of creation. The women’s journey into nature is not a retreat into a sort of mythically rejuvenating nature as nature is sometimes seen by the mainstream Western worldview, nor is it a retreat from social and political responsibilities. It is (to once again use Alaimo’s terms) a “grounded immersion”47in nature. Metaphorically, their journey is an “undoing of the routes of explorers, taking apart the advance of commerce, narrowing down and distilling the truth of history”.48 Further, it is not a journey into nature and completely away from culture. Though the boundary waters in many ways exist apart from the dominant culture, nature is not separate from the culture of the Fat Eaters, and it is not without cultural significance for the women. Dora-Rouge recalls the traditional names of many of the islands and other places they pass on their journey. She also tells stories that have cultural significance that go along with those names. For example, she tells a story about “God Island” that has been renamed “Smith’s Island”by Euro-americans. These stories reveal the culture of the Fat Eaters as rooted in and inextricably linked with the landscape. Further, the pictures of the animals on the bluffs represent a cultural tie to the land rather than a separation from nature. Thus the women’s immersion in nature serves not as a retreat, but rather as a catalyst toward decisive political and social action as the pact between humanity and nature is intimately realized and experienced by the women. Through their immersion in nature, the women come to feel a strong sense of obligation to uphold their pact with nature. It is mostly this journey that enables them to find the strength and sense of themselves to resist the dam projects on behalf of the indigenous peoples, the animals, plants, and the rest of the natural world. Though nature is not represented as a space entirely apart from culture, it does serve as a space outside of the dominant culture that allows the women to cast aside or reinvent gender and to experience nature as (to use Alaimo’s terms) “undomesticated ground”. The women embark on a journey that the men at Adam’s Rib view as dangerous and perhaps a little crazy. Significantly, only women embark on this journey. They travel beyond the domestic and, like the Abandoned Ones, build their own makeshift community. They divide the labor according to their own terms rather than gender “norms”. Angel says: “We had our roles. Wood gathering was one of mine. And fire building. Bush and I set up tents, unrolled sleeping bags. Agnes cooked”.49 Though for the most part these women were

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already fiercely independent on many levels, this journey allows them to experience a re-conceptualization of themselves as women. Angel recalls: No longer were we the women who left Adam’s Rib…Those women would never have sung ancient songs at night so assuredly, or spoken to spirits that walked through forests and gave us their permission to enter…Now our arms were strong and we were articulate in the languages of land, water, animal, even in the harder languages of one another.50

The journey into the boundary waters allows the women to cultivate the leadership, strength, and confidence necessary to reintegrate into the community of Fat Eaters, as not only equals but as competent and dedicated leaders. This experience also allows the women to transform themselves and their people back into the Beautiful People.

Empowerment, Action and Community Through their experiences in nature the women gain confidence and leadership abilities as well as a sense of obligation and duty toward the natural world and their own culture. They see their resistance against the Hydro-Quebec Dam Projects as part of their pact with the animals, plants, and the rest of the natural world. As Tarter clarifies “for Angel [and the other women] it was not just an abstract issue they were protesting; the destruction of the land and animals is the destruction of the culture of the Cree and Inuit people…[T]hey do not live by standard dualism”.51 The novel demonstrates that Angel’s healing and the healing of the other women is personal, spiritual, and political. As Tarter says “[the healing and development] is only possible as part of a community, and that community includes the real, material land and all its creatures”.52Thus the women are re-integrated into the community at Two-Town as equals with the men in their community as well as with the non-human members of their community. Hogan achieves in dealing with the relationship between women and nature what Alaimo purports that feminism can achieve by recasting nature as feminist space; she does not represent nature as “an untainted, utterly female space outside of culture nor [does she] cast off bodies, matter, and nature as that which is forever debased”.53 Nature and the body are no longer static or in opposition to culture, but are instead represented as dynamic and conscious. As Alaimo explains, “if nature is no longer a repository of stasis and essentialism, no longer the mirror image of culture, then the female body need not be misogyny’s best resource”. 54 Thus in Hogan’s narrative nature is reinvented and both

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nature and the body are recovered from the degradation of Western dualistic thinking. Although it is demonstrated that women and indigenous people suffer incongruously from ecological devastation, most notably depicted through the parallel between Angel’s and her foremothers’ scarred bodies and the errant waters that scar the land when the dams are built, women and indigenous people are not presented simply as victims. Hogan’s emphasis is on the ways in which a reconfiguration of gender roles, and views towards bodies, matter and nature can lead to healing and serve as an impetus for social, environmental, and political change.

Notes 1

Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (New York: Scribner, 1995.) Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca: Cornell University P, 2000), 10. 3 Hogan, Solar Storms, 228. 4 Ibid., 26. 5 Ellen L Arnold, “Beginnings Are Everything: the Quest for Origins in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms” in Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame P, 2004),287. 6 Ibid., 289. 7 Hogan, Solar Storms, 28. 8 Ibid., 28. 9 Ibid., 70-71. 10 Roseanne Hoefel, “Narrative Choreography toward a New Cosmogony: The MedicineWay in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” Femspec 2, no. 2 (2001): 38. 11 Hogan, Solar Storms, 67. 12 Ibid.,74. 13 Ibid.,78. my emphasis. 14 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, ( New York: Routledge,1991),151-52. 15 Hogan, Solar Storms, 79. 16 Ibid., 85. 17 Ibid., 85. 18 Hoefel, “Narrative Choreography,” 38. 19 Hogan, Solar Storms, 37. 20 Ibid., 39. 21 Birgit Hans,“Water and Ice: Restoring Balance to the World in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” The North Dakota Quarterly 70, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 99. The emphasis here on man is mine, thus emphasizing the ways in which this world view relegates woman to a lesser status with the rest of nature. 22 Hogan, Solar Storms, 99. 23 Ibid., 101. 2

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Arnold, “ Beginnings are Everything,” 292. Hogan, Solar Storms, 96. 26 Arnold, “Beginnings Are Everything,” 291-92. 27 Hogan, Solar Storms, 170. 28 Ibid., 170-71. 29 Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995), 60. 30 Ibid. , 84. 31 Stacy Alaimo,“Displacing Darwin and Descartes: The Bodily Transgressions of Fielding Burke, Octavia Butler, and Linda Hogan,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 3, no. 1 (1996): 51. 32 Christa Grewe-Volpp,“The Ecological Indian vs. the Spiritually Corrupt White Man: The Function of Ethnocentric Notions in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,”Amerikastudien 47, no. 2 (2002): 279-280. 33 Jim Tarter, “Dreams of Earth: Place, Multiethnicity, and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” in Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism, ed. John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington (Salt Lake City: University of Utah P, 2000) , 128-131. 34 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 56. 35 Ibid. , 119. 36 Hogan, Solar Storms, 283. 37 Grewe-Volpp, “The Ecological Indian,” 277. 38 Donna, Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge,1991), 199. 39 Hogan, Solar Storms, 321-22. 40 Ibid. , 199. 41 Allen, The Sacred Hoop, 56-57. 42 Arnold, “Beginnings are Everything,” 296. 43 Ibid. , 297. 44 Hogan, Solar Storms, 170. 45 Allen, The Sacred Hoop, 149-50. 46 Hogan, Solar Storms, 177. 47 Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 10. 48 Hogan, Solar Storms, 176. 49 Ibid.,174. 50 Ibid., 193. 51 Tarter, “Dreams of Earth,” 142. 52 Ibid. , 142. 53 Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 10. 54 Ibid., 10. 25

CHAPTER TWO THE ARIDITY OF GRACE: COMMUNITY AND ECOFEMINISM IN BARBARA KINGSOLVER’S ANIMAL DREAMS AND PRODIGAL SUMMER RICHARD MAGEE

I have borrowed my title from an essay by Kathleen Norris called “The Grace of Aridity and Other Comedies.” Norris, in turn, has borrowed the phrase from Graham Greene’s novel, A Burnt-Out Case, about a man who is spiritually burnt-out but who inadvertently seems to find some sort of grace in an unlikely place. To Norris, people who live in places the “rest of the world considers God-forsaken” have achieved grace by loving the place because it is forsaken and by “recognizing and accepting what is there.”1 This acceptance constitutes a grace that frequently becomes lost in the excesses of American culture. The phrase has resonance for readers of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams, which is set in Grace, Arizona. The inhabitants of this town have achieved grace in Norris’s sense in that they are struggling to live in a forsaken landscape. They live in an arid community clinging to the river running through their town. Yet the very things that make the town seem inhospitable—the aridity, the problems with the river, the smallness—are the very things that provide a strong sense of community and connect the people to each other. The difficulty of living in the desert landscape also serves as a metaphor for Barbara Kingsolver’s approach to nature writing. In both Animal Dreams and her later novel Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver constructs narratives of community inhabited by characters with a vivid awareness of the natural world and the threats to that world; furthermore, both novels feature strong female characters who long for a more harmonious life within nature. The novels develop and present forthright ecofeminist themes, with the women in the texts representing ideals of

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ecologically sensitive living who seek to educate their communities about threats to the environment and the defenses against those threats. Kingsolver’s ecofeminist vision, however, is frequently complicated and contradictory; just as the desert landscape presents its inhabitants with numerous challenges, Kingsolver’s narratives of community, by their very structure and implicit concerns, undermine and complicate her agenda. The ecofeminism in Kingsolver’s novels is problematized by the necessarily conservative language and rhetorical tropes that Kingsolver uses to promote a radical agenda. The overall structure, the character types, and many of the tropes in both of her novels indicate the complexity of Kingsolver’s vision and the difficulties of incorporating a radical environmental awareness into modern American culture. In Prodigal Summer, Lusa and her husband, Cole, are arguing about the seemingly contradictory needs and concerns of farmers and environmentalists when the topic of a bee infestation at the local church comes up. Cole attacks Lusa’s urban background, saying that people like her get “sentimental in a place where nature’s already been dead for fifty years.”2 His point is that she cannot see the real problems that nature creates for rural communities, and that, as a consequence, she sentimentalizes nature. Cole’s accusation contributes two important concepts: First, he conceptualizes “nature” as something separate from the human. “Nature” is dead in the city. Second, he denigrates sentimentalism as a false way of looking at nature that does not or will not face the practical realities of daily life. I will come back to the first point later in my discussion, but for now, I wish to consider the implications of Cole’s criticism of sentimentalism, as it is particularly important in light of Kingsolver’s narrative structure. Both novels closely follow the structure and present many of the same themes found in nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. Suzanne Clark looks at the formal structure of sentimental literature in Sentimental Modernism, where she says that the “rhetorical stance [of the sentimental] is profoundly intertwined with the historical conflicts of middle-class culture.”3 The women who were writing these works, and the women and girls who were reading them, felt barred from many of the canonical conflicts: politics, war, and even to a certain extent the frontier. Therefore, the conflicts that were left—the home economy, relationships, the local community, and so on— became the fodder of their fictions. Because the concerns were largely personal and intimate rather than global, sentimental literature sought to “elicit feelings of empathy and concern.”4 Above all, the well-being of the immediate community and the characters who peopled the community established the aesthetic, rhetorical, and

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thematic structures of sentimental fiction. Kingsolver, though, while deploying the “narrative of community,”5 where the interactions and emotional lives of the characters are central, struggles to evade the constraints that the sentimental structure imposes while at the same time she needs to make use of the powerful emotional impact that the sentimental can create. Her novels are simultaneously validations of the characters’ vibrant emotional lives and strong refutations of much of “middle-class culture.” Thus, Kingsolver constructs a narrative with the sentimental tropes of family and domestic concerns that seeks to critique the sentimental tradition while also investing it with a radical social agenda. There are other similarities between Kingsolver’s fiction and the sentimental and domestic fiction of the nineteenth century, as Kingsolver clearly places Animal Dreams in the Harriet Beecher Stowe tradition of social justice. Kingsolver presents a scene with a modern-day parallel to the social upheaval and moral dilemmas of slavery in Stowe’s time. In an episode that illustrates the transformation of the sentimental in a selfaware, self-referential postmodern world, Codi remembers a dog that she and her sister Hallie had briefly cared for after the dog’s owners, refugees from El Salvador, were sent back. The two sisters take in the refugees and briefly care for the dog, acts of kindness consistent with the sentimental vision. When kindness becomes too much work, they back off, taking mental refuge in euphemisms like “Humane Society.” Significantly, Codi does not mention what happens to the mother and daughter, except that they have been returned to their place of persecution. The dog metonymically stands in for the whole group, and Codi realizes that she is not entirely capable of escaping her culpability even with soothing terms. Codi is able to stand back and assess her reaction to what is essentially a latter-day Fugitive Slave Act, and she notes with irony that society still readily provides her with a means to avoid her guilt. Her connection to the refugees is based on an emotional, sentimental appeal, just as much of the pathos of Stowe’s depiction of slavery is rooted in the same sort of appeal. The most important difference between Kingsolver’s indictment of American policy and Stowe’s critique of slavery is that Kingsolver more directly implicates the mass of American society. Despite Cole’s implicit claim in Prodigal Summer that the sentimental is weak or somehow flawed, such writing does present a formidable argumentative strategy by employing the readers’ emotions as a link between the textual world and the world the reader inhabits. This link also partly ameliorates one of the weaknesses that “traditional nature writing” holds for modern readers. As Lawrence Buell points out in Writing for an

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Endangered World, traditional nature writing, with its emphasis on the exemplary landscape, tends toward the “downplay if not the exclusion of social justice concerns.”6 When traditional nature writing extols the beauty of, for example, a Yosemite sunrise, it perpetuates the nature/culture divide by presenting a pristine landscape untouched by human hands as somehow the only model for environmental concern. Such thinking, moreover, elides the social realities of this model of environmental concern: that elites, usually white males, work for the preservation of exemplary landscapes while ignoring the problems facing a small, poor community in rural Arizona. In Prodigal Summer, all of the main female characters clearly represent nature, and the men represent (agri)culture, in the construct that Sherry Ortner contemplates and critiques.7 Not only do the women represent nature, they represent different stages of nature. Deanna is the primitive, maternal (by the end of the novel she discovers she is pregnant), and primal earth-goddess. Nannie Rawley is the old woman with the lifetime of natural folk wisdom stored up in her head. Lusa is the modern, educated woman who uses her intelligence as well as her fierce determination and family attachments to become a more ecologically sensitive farmer than any of the men who farm around her could hope to be. The symbolic weight that these three women carry points toward the difficulty Kingsolver faces in her attempt to construct an ecofeminist model. With no significant exceptions, the men in the novel remain obstinately wedded to industrial agriculture and the modern chemical industrial complex that infuses large-scale farming. The essentialist juxtaposition of caring earth mother with toxic man quickly becomes a parody of itself. Furthermore, the tension between these poles becomes untenable when the construct excludes men from the community until they can become enlightened enough to be reintegrated. The tensions in the novel between the opposing poles of ecofeminist and toxic man cannot be resolved, and Kingsolver’s characters find themselves feeling confused sympathy for their opponents. The ongoing argument over pesticide use between Nannie Rawley, the old woman organic farmer, and Garnett Walker III, the retired vocational agriculture teacher and strong proponent of agricultural chemical use, illustrates the oversimplification and instability of the female-nature/male-culture dichotomy. In virtually every scene with these two characters, Garnett is planning some assault on the pests of his gardens with ever stronger chemicals, and Nannie tries to set him straight. Finally they sit down so Nannie can explain the Volterra principle, which

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states that pesticide use kills both predator and prey insects, but, because of the quicker life cycle and greater fecundity of prey (or pest) insects, their population rebounds more quickly. As a result, overuse of pesticides can, in the long run, increase the number of pests because their natural enemies have been killed off more effectively. When Nannie finishes explaining this, Garnett says, “I didn’t find the fault in your thinking.”8 Rather than admit a biological principle that argues against pesticides makes sense, Toxic Man expresses his frustration that he cannot refute the argument. Their feud is further destabilized when the two begin to edge closer to a friendly accommodation, undermining the opposing terms. In Kingsolver’s construction of ecological themes, the human concerns are not ignored, but are presented as parallel to, and inseparable from, the concerns of non-human nature; unlike Cole’s implication that humans and nature are separate, Kingsolver asserts their interdependence. The central human concern is community, and this notion is developed by William Shutkin, an environmental lawyer and activist who writes about what he calls “civic environmentalism” in The Land that Could Be. He sees parallels between the “rise in economic and social inequality” and “the deterioration of the American environment, both built and undeveloped.”9 For Shutkin, the most important force for change is community-based environmental action.10 Furthermore, according to Buell, “contemporary ecopopulism” is most notable for the inclusion, even the leadership, of “nonelites” who emphasize community. The community mindedness creates an “‘anthropocentric’ emphasis on environmentalism as instrument of social justice as against an ‘ecocentric’ emphasis on caring for nature as a good in itself.”11 Shutkin and Buell both argue that modern environmentalism is headed toward an emphasis on human community and a turning away from a vision of nature as only something separate from humans. Buell also notes that many of the people leading the environmental justice movement are women and minority group members.12 In both of Kingsolver’s novels under discussion, the environmental movements are led by women. Kingsolver also complicates the notion of community, a concept that is central to sentimental texts, by challenging the power that the community insider has over the outsider and providing an avenue for the outsider to become integrated into the community. In the ecological framework of Prodigal Summer, the web of familial, economic, and emotional interconnections that make up the community symbolizes the larger web of environmental interconnections. Lusa, the widowed scientist turned farmer, stands at an important nexus of these interconnections, and the difficulties she both faces and creates illustrate the complicated and

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often contradictory nature of the terms “family” and “nature.” Lusa is an outsider, a non-native invader who, through marriage, inherits the family farm. She struggles to find acceptance in spite of her “foreign name,”13 fancy education, and unusual ideas about everything from pesticide use to goat farming. By showing her commitment to the land, refusing to give up and go back “where she belongs,” Lusa integrates herself into the Zebulon community. Lusa’s integration into the community finds a parallel in the honeysuckle plant that symbolizes her status as an outsider as well as her fight to become an insider. In the beginning of the novel, Lusa recalls an argument she and her husband had had about the invading plant and an article in the newspaper recommending a “stout chemical defoliant”14 to get rid of it. In this argument, Lusa plays the role of the condescending, sophisticated outsider to Cole’s self-mocking apotheosis of the hillbilly. Finally, at the end of their argument, Lusa says that “the world will not end if you let honeysuckle have the side of your barn.”15 Near the end of the novel, after Lusa has established her goat-raising business with the help of community labor and community knowledge (from Garnett Walker, Nannie’s nemesis), she sees the barn almost entirely lost beneath the luxuriant growth of honeysuckle. She wonders how she could have been “so sanctimonious about honeysuckle.”16 At that point she realizes that honeysuckle is not a native plant, but an exotic invasive species that has crowded out less aggressive native plants; she comes to the final realization that Cole’s “instincts about the plant had been right” and that she needs forgiveness for a “city person’s audacity.”17 In the honeysuckle, Lusa sees herself—a foreign invader crowding out the natives. In his investigation of Animal Dreams, David Cassuto points out that Kingsolver is attempting to present an alternative vision of western community, “predicated on an organicist, ecofeminist vision.”18 While he says that Kingsolver does not succeed in her attempts to “describe a new western reality,” we must take it as a noble failure arising from the juxtaposition of radical environmentalism with conservative sentimental rhetoric. The reason she fails, says Cassuto, is not because of any fatal flaw in her reasoning, but because of the newness of her vision. In Animal Dreams the environmental issue she confronts is western water use in a “post-Reclamation society.”19 This society is difficult to imagine because the intricate web of laws relating to water rights and the vision of proper water usage in the arid southwestern United States go back over a century; a challenge to this old vision is obviously facing a difficult battle. Cassuto notes that Kingsolver’s language itself adds to the difficulty because her ideas, “if actualized […] will topple the current power structure.”20 In

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Animal Dreams as well as in Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver must craft a new rhetoric to combat the power structure that is destroying the environment. When the language of nature—“mountain”—comes to mean “corporation,” and when the “modern farmer” really must be the “modern chemist,” the language that is left to criticize the structure becomes palpably weakened. The rhetorical tropes of sentimentalism, when yoked to an ecofeminist ideology, produce a language radically at odds with our expectations. The maternal didacticism of sentimentalism combines with ecofeminist tenets, resulting in women who speak in lectures and men who petulantly and ineffectually try to refute them. Kingsolver’s reliance on the mythic structure of the traditional American Western further complicates her attempts to challenge the status quo while operating from within that structure. Animal Dreams features many of the characters, the plot devices, and the setting of the Western, but each element challenges the tradition and breaks down the categories. As Naomi Jacobs points out, Codi, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, enters the town in the same manner as the lone gunslinger in the traditional Western, where she finds herself forced to confront the evil machinations of the black-hat bad guys (the appropriately named Black Mountain Mining Company). The categories, though, break down. Codi is not really an outsider, but is returning to and discovering her roots. The showdown with the mining company is not single combat but involves the community women rallying to save the town. Similarly, the ecofeminist categories become unstable as Codi must navigate both the matriarchal and patriarchal power structures to arrive at her understanding of home and environment. Codi’s path to understanding the environment similarly demolishes the simplistic matriarchal/patriarchal categories as she seeks spiritual guidance from her old boyfriend, Loyd. As Codi is teaching in Arizona, her sister, Hallie, is teaching in Nicaragua, and Codi wonders at her sister’s ability to put her life in danger for something she believes in. She asks Loyd what he would be willing to die for, and he says, “The land.” Codi misunderstands him, and thinks he means the reservation his family lives on, but he corrects her with disgust, saying he is not talking about property. Later, when Codi is watching some of Loyd’s family perform a rain dance, she speculates that prayer, and this dance in particular, are simply a “glorified attempt at a business transaction.”21 Loyd explains that the dance is more of an offering, and he uses the analogy of a houseguest leaving a note thanking the host to keep things “in balance.” Codi is taken by this idea and feels guilty for the “bluntly utilitarian” Anglo culture that fails to see the spiritual dimensions of the land, but can only see the

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resources to be taken. John Coates points out that modern western society consistently sees nature and people “primarily as commodities,” and that shifting the focus to see them otherwise would be a “fundamentally spiritual” shift.22 When Codi attempts to reject the materialistic thinking that makes nature a commodity, she is making a radically spiritual move. However, Kingsolver is not simply inverting an ecofeminist/matriarchal model by placing the words of spiritual wisdom in the mouth of a man. Loyd himself also breaks down the categories and shows the inherent instability of the male/female, culture/nature divide. Loyd is a man, but he shows a more visceral appreciation for and understanding of the land than Codi. He is “associated with both wild nature and domesticity.”23 As such, he clearly demonstrates feminine attributes. His name and heritage further destabilize the categories. From his father, Loyd gets his name, Peregrina, the significance of which becomes clear when he notes that on his father’s side, he is Navajo and Apache, both of which, he claims, are wanderers, people fond of peregrination. On his mother’s side, though, he is a Pueblo, who, he says, “are homebodies.”24 He carries the name of the wanderers, yet he identifies with the stability of the home-loving people of his mother. In this way, Loyd embodies neither and both masculine and feminine traits and ideals, and his understanding of the landscape is neither and both masculine and feminine. With Loyd’s guidance, Codi ponders the notion that all humans are God’s houseguests, and catalogs more of the environmental depredations in and around Grace. Not only was the Black Mountain mine poisoning the water, but it was also leaving behind huge contaminated piles of mine tailings. Another mining concern was destroying another mountain to obtain pumice to be used to manufacture stonewashed denim jeans. “To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests,” she thinks, “American enterprise must look arrogant beyond belief.”25 Codi’s epiphany signals an important turning point in the novel. Before this, her feelings for the environmental degradation had been characterized by an angry resentment that the scientific evidence was ignored, but her spiritual understanding provides her with a more powerful rhetorical tool to use. Ironically, her hard, “masculine,” and scientific approach is transformed into the soft, feminine, emotional approach only after Loyd teaches her. Codi’s activism pulls her toward ecofeminism, as it involves a group of the women of Grace known as the “Stitch and Bitch” club, but again, Kingsolver challenges the traditional gender roles. The strong matriarchal flavor of the group pervades all of their activities and informs the strategies they use to gain justice from the mining company that has been poisoning their water. Through the group’s dynamics, Kingsolver

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constructs an ecofeminist vision of community and ecological action. When the women gather to discuss the town’s future, they dismiss the men as being ineffectual or uninterested. The men, one woman notes, are too busy watching the football game to help plan a response to the mine’s actions—except that they all probably turned the station to the Miss America pageant as soon as the women left the house for the meeting. Another woman sums up the difference. The group discusses possible actions to take, including using dynamite to blow up the mine or the proposed dam, but this woman points out that they do not know how to use dynamite while the men do. When the women ponder explosive action, they are bending gender rules and acting in a more “masculine” fashion. The men, however, would be scared to use such drastic means, or would not see the need to resort to them; their passivity, traditionally a “feminine” trait, dramatically demonstrates the limitations of traditional gender labels. Echoing Codi’s sentiment about the frontier mentality, one woman says that the men “think the trees can die and we can just go somewhere else, and as long as we fry up the bacon for them in the same old pan, they think it would be… home.”26 The woman’s fears about the men’s ineffectuality emphasize the central issue that has galvanized the Stitch and Bitch club, which is that environmental degradation is ultimately about the degradation of the home. Although the men cannot take action, the women can, allowing Kingsolver to set up an ecofeminist dichotomy of nature and culture that she again complicates and deconstructs. The Stitch and Bitch club sets out to call attention to the plight of Grace, hoping to gain wider attention and thereby forcing the mining company to make reparations. A notable peculiarity of Grace is a large population of peacocks brought by the Spanish family that originally settled the town. The Stitch and Bitch women traditionally construct peacock-shaped piñatas for special occasions, and they decide to make dozens of the peacocks with a small history of the town and its problems with the mine attached, and then sell them in Tucson to raise funds for a legal challenge. When the group of small-town women appears in the city with the brightly colored piñatas, they capture enormous attention that eventually aids their victory over the mining company. In this case, the women do not simply represent nature but culture as well. Their piñatas are an old cultural tradition in the town, and the women are the guardians and teachers of the tradition. By using the piñatas to represent both the cultural traditions of the community and its environmental problems, the club also challenges the notion that nature and culture are discreet entities. Instead of separate, culture is rooted in the

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natural surroundings and is properly thought of as a product of the environment instead of a clashing ideal. Nature and culture are not necessarily mutually reinforcing ideals, though, as another of the women points out to Codi. The company that is causing so many problems for Grace is called Black Mountain, and Codi shortens the name to “the Mountain.” Her friend Viola curtly admonishes her: “Don’t call that company the Mountain,” she tells her because she does not want to associate the mining company with something natural and unmovable. Codi defensively replies that she had heard “the men call it that.” Here again, the men are unable to differentiate between natural (the mountain) and unnatural (the Black Mountain corporation), and they fail to understand the seriousness of the problem facing the town. Viola takes the important rhetorical stand of separating the exploitative practices of the company from natural processes, and thus makes the company an alien other or intruder that can be defeated. Codi, whose connections to the town are more troubled than Viola’s, is at first unable to recognize this important distinction and must defer to Viola’s matriarchal authority. Kathleen Norris suggests that when people fail to understand and appreciate their landscapes—for example, by building impractical mansions with huge lawns that strain the shallow aquifers—they have fallen from grace. The spiritual failings that lead to this fall from grace also contribute to a loss of the sacred within our everyday lives. When the sacred is lost, humans and nature become commodities with commercial worth obscuring any other intrinsic value. By the end of Animal Dreams, Codi has realized that she must take the responsibility for reclaiming her grace and fighting for the preservation of her home’s environment. As she ends her essay, Norris wonders whether the “right to life” is open only to those who can afford to pay for it. Water, she says, is necessary for life and is therefore sacred, but the inability to see it as other than a commodity represents another denial of grace. Through her involvement with the Stitch and Bitch club, Codi has found a way to save grace by saving Grace. Barbara Kingsolver’s ecofeminist narratives are firmly rooted in the earth her characters care so much about. The arid desert of Grace and the forested mountains of Zebulon are both, in some senses, marginal communities. Grace maintains a tenuous hold on life by clinging to the river that runs through the community, even if that river has been poisoned by the neglect and outright criminal behavior of outsiders. Zebulon, on the other hand, seems almost overwhelmed by nature’s fecundity, and the lush Appalachian forests are far, both metaphorically and in actual miles, from Grace, but the land nevertheless is equally poor and socially marginal to

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the larger moneyed concerns. It is in Grace, though, that Kingsolver’s environmental vision projects most clearly. The more precarious desert life and more varied community complicates the narrative to the point that Kingsolver’s ecofeminist approach falls apart, which in turn makes her narrative of the landscape richer and more interesting. It is as if Kingsolver also needs the complications of the God-forsaken to provide the necessary creative friction.

Notes 1

Kathleen Norris. “The Grace of Aridity and Other Comedies.” The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004. Ed. Philip Zaleski. (Boston: Houghton, 2004), 185. 2 Barbara Kingsolver. Prodigal Summer (New York: Harper, 2000), 45. 3 Suzanne Clark. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991), 2. 4 Joanne Dobson. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” American Literature 69, no. 2 (June 1997): 268. 5 I am taking the term “narrative of community” from Sandra Zagarell, who uses the phrase to define one of the key traits of sentimental literature. 6 Lawrence Buell. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U. S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) 230. 7 Sherry B. Ortner “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” Woman, Culture, and Society. Eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974) 67-87. 8 Kingsolver, Prodigal, 275. 9 William A. Shutkin. The Land that Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 3. 10 Shutkin, Land, 13-14. 11 Buell, Endangered, 33. 12 Ibid., 32. 13 Kingsolver, Prodigal, 71. 14 Ibid., 36. 15 Ibid., 45. 16 Ibid., 359. 17 Ibid., 360. 18 David N. Cassuto. Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Desert Southwest. (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2001), 97. 19 Ibid., 98. 20 Ibid., 98. 21 Barbara Kingsolver. Animal Dreams (New York: Harper, 1990), 239. 22 Coates, John. “From Ecology to Spirituality and Social Justice.” Currents: New Scholarship in the Human Services. 2004.

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http://www.fsw.ucalgary.ca/currents/articles/articles/coates/main.htm. June 1, 2004, 4, 2. 23 Jacobs, Naomi. “Barbara Kingsolver’s Anti-Western: ‘Unraveling the Myths’ in Animal Dreams.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture. 2.2 (Fall 2003). http://www.americanpopularculture.com/jounral/articles/fall_2003/jacobs.htm. March 8, 2006. 24 Kingsolver, Animal, 213. 25 Ibid., 240. 26 Ibid., 179, italics in original.

CHAPTER THREE WHAT ONCE WAS FLUID IS NOW FIXED: THE DAMMING OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER HILARY L. HAWLEY

Wyam—the longest continuously inhabited site of human habitation in the Northwest, possibly in the U.S.—was destroyed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on March 10, 1957, when the massive steel and concrete gates of The Dalles Dam closed and choked the downstream surge of the Columbia River. Six hours later and eight miles upstream, Wyam, the ageold fisheries and falls, was under water and lost forever.1

Wyam, another name for Celilo Falls and Celilo Village, endured for what some anthropologists estimate as 12,000 years on the middle Columbia River along the present-day Washington-Oregon border. But when the dam just downstream at The Dalles went on line in 1957, it disappeared in mere hours. The closing of the gates fixed the doom of Celilo Village and Falls. As Richard White notes in The Organic Machine, in the world that existed at places like Celilo before The Dalles Dam, “the human and the natural were tightly linked, but one did not determine the other.”2 The advent of the dams, however, enacted “a new energy regime, a new geography, and a new relationship between human labor and the energy of nature.”3 This regime privileged the political, the economic, and the technological uses of the river for a select group of stakeholders— predominantly white, middle- to upper-class male residents of the Northwest, including Washington, Oregon, and Idaho–while ignoring the cultural, environmental, and spiritual significance of the free-flowing waterway for people outside of that advantaged paradigm, women, working-class peoples, and Native peoples. Instead of acknowledging the unbreakable link between the human and the natural, the stakeholders who took control of the Columbia River and its tributaries linked power and energy, with devastating environmental and sociopolitical results.

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One of the many significant contributions of ecofeminist theory is its identification of such power relationships in human and natural relations. In Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Val Plumwood posits that rationalism is a “cult of reason that elevates to extreme supremacy a particularly narrow form of reason and correspondingly devalues the contrasted and reduced sphere of nature and embodiment.”4 Rationalism tends to sort ideas into polarized dualisms which, she argues, cut sympathy and identification with the other side. Thus, “dualism and rationalism function together as a system of ideas that justifies and naturalises domination of people and events by a privileged class identified with reason, who deserve to be in control and to be disproportionately rewarded.”5 Rationalism’s “monological logic” places its own brand of reason on one end of the spectrum, and thus banishes women, people of color, indigenous peoples, and nature to the other end.6 As will be shown in this chapter, economic rationalism has until now reigned supreme in decision making about the uses and values of the Columbia River. Despite the failures of this model over and over again throughout the West and the world, the dominant culture continues to place unabated faith in it. Plumwood explains, “[Economic rationalism] has very poor correctiveness, and it is ill-equipped to come to terms with its failures or to rethink its approaches in the light of them.”7 Thus, the need for resistant voices in literature and in other venues is clear, and ecofeminist theory provides us with a framework to explore that resistance. In order to interrogate the rationalist worldview that authorized and continues to support the dams, I employ Plumwood’s system of dualisms as first outlined in her seminal work Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, and I follow Greta Gaard in “building on the ecofeminist hypothesis that the position and treatment of women in Western culture is connected symbolically, psychologically, economically, and politically to the treatment of nature . . . [including] ways that the treatment of women and water is integrally connected to the treatment of indigenous people and the land itself.”8 Two Northwest writers, Elizabeth Woody and Kim Barnes, offer testimony of this connection when they write about the rationalist ideologies that not only dammed their rivers, but also exerted considerable influence over their lives, their home places, the salmon, and the larger cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Elizabeth Woody, a Navajo/Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama Indian, is a poet and visual artist and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon. On her mother’s side, Woody is descended from the river cultures of the middle Columbia. She works as Director of

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the Indigenous Leadership Program for the non-profit environmental organization, Ecotrust, in Portland, Oregon.9 Woody’s works, including her award-winning collection Hand into Stone (1990) and her book of poetry Luminaries of the Humble (1994), testify to the lasting damage wrought by The Dalles Dam at Celilo Falls and the devastation wrought on Native river cultures, on the salmon runs, and on her. Her writings, in fact, demonstrate many of the connections that ecofeminist theorists have established, including the links between domination of environment and domination of Native peoples, and the dangers of privileging rationalist over human and natural concerns. Elizabeth Woody’s work illustrates the centrality of the Columbia River to the River People. In “Wyam: Echo of Falling Water,”10 Woody explains not only the geographic significance, but the cultural, spiritual, and environmental significance of Wyam (another name for Celilo Falls). For over twelve thousand years, she writes, the cultures that gathered at Wyam used a system of governance that Woody translates as, “At the time of creation the Creator placed us in this land and gave us the voice of this land and that is our law.”11 These laws were passed down orally and were the basis for sustaining the environment and its people, to ensure renewal, abundance, and in particular, the return of the salmon, the nusoox.12 In the years since The Dalles Dam erased Celilo Falls and Village from the riverscape of the Columbia, Woody maintains, “few understand the political-cultural-spiritual lifeway that, at its core, concerned itself with the return of the salmon and the health of the ecosystem.”13 She explains how for centuries, the internal system of checks and balances, the honoring of natural laws, and the cultural and spiritual systems employed by the tribes came together in an “ancient, nondestructive process to promote health and prosperity for the land, families, and nonhuman beings” that inhabit the Columbia River Basin.14 Her work, then, calls for a more inclusive way of viewing the river, a view that, in part, does the work of ecofeminism in resolving the artificial divide between humans and nature. Woody draws attention to the interconnectedness of life and land for the River People and other Native peoples, or the way that nature cannot be separated from culture. Simon Ortiz further illuminates this inextricable relationship between land and people: “If anything is most vital, essential, and absolutely important in Native cultural philosophy, it is this concept of interdependence: the fact that without land there is no life, and without a responsible social and cultural outlook by humans, no life-sustaining land is possible.”15 Thus, in reading the words of Native writers like Woody, it is essential to understand that what is done to the land, the rivers, and the

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salmon is also done to the people themselves. There can be no separation, no claims to an action that affects one and not the other. Nor, continues Ortiz, should this realization be considered an “Indian cultural matter” only.16 Increasingly, it has become necessary for all of human culture to “turn its attention to this concept directly and to listen to those voices that speak for all the land and all the people.”17 Literature serves as one method, then, of establishing this connection. Cecelia Konchar Farr articulates the growing acknowledgement of this interdependence in her article “American Ecobiography,” especially in the relationship that the American self has to the American landscape. As early as Walden, she finds, nature writing and autobiography become intertwined. In the late twentieth century, though, Farr argues for the existence of a new genre where the two cannot be separated from one another. As she puts it, “With the rise of environmental consciousness and postmodern thinking, the borders between nature and self blur; indeed, both nature and self become contested territories. In ecobiographies, nature becomes us, and we begin to question who is constructing whom.”18 Writing about nature (“eco”) and writing about self (“ego”) becomes the same subject. This creates a deep, reverential connection to the land, but it also engenders a fierce, sometimes fearful protectiveness. In her terms, “eco and ego become inseparable – and neither is immune to change.”19 Kim Barnes is one such writer for whom eco and ego are inseparable. Kim Barnes, like Elizabeth Woody, speaks to the cultural, environmental, and spiritual significance of Northwest rivers. Barnes has spent her life in the Northwest. She was born in Lewiston, Idaho, and during her early childhood, she lived in logging camps on the Clearwater River.20 When the bottom fell out of the area’s logging industry in the mid-1960s and the construction of Dworshak Dam irrevocably altered the river and the landscape around it, she and her family were forced to move into Lewiston. That period in her life, as well as her family’s conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, formed the basis of her first memoir, In the Wilderness (1996), named as a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Much of her work focuses on the relationship between women and the Western landscape: examples include In the Wilderness; her essay “The Clearwater” from Written on Water (2001), an anthology of essays about Idaho rivers; and her co-edited anthology with Mary Clearman Blew titled Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers (1994). Barnes continues to work and write in the Northwest, living near her native Clearwater River and teaching as a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Idaho.

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Barnes writes extensively of the struggles brought on by her gender and class as she grew up on the Clearwater River, and metaphorically, she links these experiences to the exploitation of the river itself. As her memoir In the Wilderness illustrates, Kim Barnes’s life is inextricably enmeshed with the landscape of the Clearwater River. In her roles as writer and teacher, Barnes lets it be known that her use of that landscape as metaphor is a conscious decision: “The wilderness I speak of is both literal and figurative: the land itself, but also the spiritual and emotional wilderness that I found myself aswirl in as I came of age in the faith of my parents.”21 She partially explains her deep metaphorical and literal connection to rivers, the Clearwater in particular, when she says, “I want to trace all the streams that feed into the river that is my physical, emotional and spiritual existence.”22 Thus her work consciously seeks to return environmental, cultural, and spiritual concerns to the discussion of land use, and although Barnes does not identify herself as an ecofeminist, her writing is grounded in these shared concerns.

“Fixing” the River Before the introduction of the dams, the natural Columbia River system was fluid and alive, shaping and reshaping itself as needed and providing for groups such as the River People of the Middle Columbia: members of the Yakama, Umatilla, and Warm Springs Reservations, and the residents of Celilo Village. The boundaries of Celilo Village were also fluid, expanding and contracting according to seasonal rhythms and fluctuations in the area’s population. The construction of hydroelectric dams on the river, however, interrupted the state of balance between nature and civilization that these communities had previously achieved. What once was fluid is now fixed, what once was natural is now mechanized, and in the case of Celilo Village in particular, what once was present is now absent, as the backwaters created by The Dalles Dam erased the village from existence. The story of how Celilo Falls and Village were “fixed” by the The Dalles Dam—and thus erased—is a story that has been rewritten many times on the Columbia and its tributaries, on Edward Abbey’s Colorado River and other rivers of the West, and around the world. Even now, the story is being reinscribed on the Yangtze River in China; as this chapter is being written, the giant Three Gorges Dam nears completion. The technologically enhanced Columbia River, what White has termed an “organic machine,” is fixed. It is fixed in that the dams have imposed an artificial and semi-permanent shape and form on the river,

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turning “the mighty Columbia into a series of slack-water pools.”23 It is also fixed in the sense of manipulating or renovating the river such that, in the eyes of many users, the river now “works” for humans, providing hydropower, irrigation, flood control, and upriver navigation. Another more ominous meaning, one which reveals the extent of the dams’ failed relationship with nature, is that the river is fixed in the same sense that one might describe something dead—motionless, inflexible, and unchanging— a river that has ceased to follow its natural, vital rhythms. Ecofeminist theory helps to illuminate the dichotomous relationship between these concepts of fluidity and fixedness that arise in discussion of the Columbia waterway and their representation in the writing of Woody and Barnes. Carolyn Merchant, one of the first to posit a theory of ecofeminism, writes in The Death of Nature, “We must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that, by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women.”24 This world view, in which a rationalist, patriarchal, and scientific point of view is privileged, has its roots in Enlightenment thought. It also provides a framework for the distinctly American idea of Manifest Destiny that would come to bear on the building of the dams on the Columbia River system. Rationalist ideology values power and energy as desirable uses of a river, while devaluing the health of salmon and the environment, and Native cultures and religions. Building on the work of critics like Merchant, Sturgeon, Gaard, and Plumwood, I argue here that the concept of fixedness versus fluidity represents another example of the polarized dualisms on which rationalist thought turns, placing culture and reason at odds with nature, emphasizing the civilized over the primitive, and positioning production above reproduction.25 Part of the work of ecofeminism, then, is to attempt to resolve the split that these hierarchical dualisms force. By interrogating the narrow logic of rationalism, ecofeminist readings of the works by Woody and Barnes can make visible the inequalities that rationalism attempts to mask and ensure that women, indigenous peoples, and the non-human world have a voice in the decision-making process for the future of the Columbia. It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the dams on the Pacific Northwest, as their influence extends into the realms of the political, economic, technological, cultural, environmental, and spiritual. In A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia, Blaine Harden calls the dams, and Grand Coulee Dam in particular, an “eye-popping metaphor for Manifest Destiny. It was vaccine for the Great Depression and a club to whip Hitler, a dynamo to power the dawn of the atomic age and a fist to

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smash the monopolistic greed of private utilities, a magnet for industry and a fountainhead for irrigated agriculture.”26 The dams could only be these things, though, because a dominant rationalist world view obscured or ignored all the other things that they were at the same time: a concrete barrier between Native peoples and river culture, a machine instead of a wild river, and a death knell for the salmon. Because rationalism establishes its privilege through the subordination of all other aspects of social life, including any cultural, spiritual, or environmental issues, for members of the privileged class, there might have been controversy about how to go about developing the Columbia River, but there was never really a question about whether to develop it. In essence, the river’s fate was already fixed. To use Merchant’s terms, the rationalists were “reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living organism.”27 From the outset, it seems, the Columbia was considered more of an asset to be exploited or an adversary to be bested than a natural phenomenon. Plumwood elaborates, “The idea that the larger world is meaningless and that only the human, the controlled and the intended, can ever be meaningful is part of Enlightenment rationality.”28 In keeping with this logic, many of the issues surrounding water use and policy in the West centered on differing definitions of “waste” and “conservation.” To early Reclamation-era officials (and to many filling those same roles today), “waste” was letting water seep into the ground or rivers run to the ocean without being used to human benefit. Fluidity, in other words, was a wasteful concept. “Conservation,” the flip side of the coin, meant storing the water in reservoirs and canals, or fixing it, where it could await its best use for human ends. A statement made by Herbert Hoover in 1926 embodies this attitude: “True conservation of water is not the prevention of its use. Every drop of water that runs to the sea without yielding its full commercial returns to the nation is an economic waste.”29 Waste and conservation, to the economic rationalists, were reckoned in terms that privileged their view of nature and that discounted the definition of conservation we have today—one that would conserve river flow, for instance, in order to preserve the salmon population. A common theme was to speak of “harnessing” the horsepower of the Columbia, a description which stemmed from Wenatchee Daily World editor Rufus Woods’ 1918 reference to the potential power of “two million horses” at the site of Grand Coulee.30 As with the reference to harnessing a wild animal, rationalists often imagined an adversarial relationship with the river. “After centuries of turbulent playfulness during which it tantalizingly rolled tons of blue water past millions of arid acres

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gasping for moisture, the Columbia is being put to work,” claims one 1936 editorial from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.31 The Columbia was an antagonist to be conquered and dominated. Ultimately, the dammed Columbia would cease to be discussed in natural terms and begin to be spoken of as “a gigantic and useful servant of the nation.”32 The economic rationalists maintained that Grand Coulee Dam should be built to “harness and control every ounce of energy the Columbia river may produce . . . [to] make the industrial wheels go round for a good part of the nation’s work.”33 The river would be fixed in order to provide the hydropower, irrigation, flood control, and upriver navigation deemed necessary for the continued prosperity of the nation. Once the battle over Grand Coulee Dam had been fought and won, the dam boosters and builders met little resistance in their continued development of the river. With a staggering 400+ dams on the Columbia and its tributaries, they succeeded in creating a mechanistic, rationalist river with at least the illusion of control. The river had been fixed in the sense of making it useful, a tool for rationalist development and expansion.

Everyone Dissolved in the Fall If a fixed river is the opposite of a fluid one, as the dualistic hierarchy suggests, then the river is no longer natural, and thus much of its ability to provide and reproduce has been fixed as well. And if Grand Coulee is the dam that made the case for Columbia River development, then the loss of Celilo Falls and Village twenty years later illustrates the extent of the cultural, spiritual, and environmental devastation that a fixed Columbia can wreak. Elizabeth Woody’s work illustrates the vital relationship that River People had with the Columbia and Celilo Falls, and how the eventual construction of The Dalles Dam fixed the river, rendering this spot inflexible and lifeless. In critiquing a rationalist relationship with nature, it is easy to fall into the trap that many ecofeminists have encountered—offering an equally essentializing definition that assumes a closer, more “natural” relationship and, ironically, reinforcing the same dualisms that place women, indigenous peoples, and the environment apart from rationalist culture. Yet as Native American critics have shown, these relationships function on an awareness of environmental embeddedness that resolves the nature/culture split, not on a “natural” connection that they have more so than any other group. As Linda Robyn explains, “American Indian institutions originate within Native cultures in ways that associate policies

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with natural principles and natural laws defined by traditional cultural perspectives,”34 whereas a rationalist world view would separate these ideas. Winona LaDuke argues that sustainability in this and other regions did not depend on luck, but rather on a concept of reciprocity, which defined the relationship and responsibility between humans and the environment.35 Thus the relationship to environment should be understood as dependent on historical and social positions rather than on any claims of a biological or essential affinity. To illustrate, in “Translation of Blood Quantum,” Woody writes that in “giving Thanks and observances of the Natural laws of Creating by the Land . . . The Nusoox are as inseparable from the flow of these cycles.”36 By respecting the environment’s natural cycles in the creation of their laws rather than defining laws in opposition to or ignorance of their environmental situatedness, the River People ensured that their culture would thrive in continuous sustainability, which it did for several thousand years. One of the most devastating costs of a river fixed by so many dams is the precipitous decline of the wild salmon population. The economic rationalists did not stand to profit by the salmon as much as they would from hydropower and irrigation, so the possible extinction of the species was discounted or ignored. To Northwest indigenous cultures, however, the salmon were “a unifying and integral element.”37 As such, several of Woody’s works speak to the spiritual dimension of salmon, thereby inscribing the damage done to Native religions by their loss. Woody lists in turn each of the traditional foods in her poem “Shells on Stone”: water, roots, huckleberries, choke cherries, deer, elk, and “the salmon in the season of warm winds.”38 In “Wyam: Echo of Falling Water,” she calls these foods “part of the litany of praise to those things without which life wouldn’t be possible.”39 The interconnection of all things, including salmon and people, forms the basis of the Northwest tribes’ religion. The salmon are at once physical beings, sources of nourishment, and ambassadors of something more ethereal. To worship the salmon, then, is to recognize the vital link between nature and culture, animal and human, environment and existence. To build a dam that blocks or alters this connection is to participate in rationalism’s radical separation into dualisms, to deny dependence on the Other. Thus, dam-building becomes a killing act, both culturally and environmentally. Several of Woody’s poems revisit the day that Celilo Falls and Village disappeared behind the gates of The Dalles Dam. Her language in “Of Steps to Drowning,” for instance, reflects the fixing of Celilo’s doom, the death of the Village and the Falls. She envisions what those last six hours were like as she writes, “The losses are small sounds of moaning. /

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Bead necklaces of stone and shell / slide into the world of minnows. / Bones grasp at mosses and branch / to muddy the water for drowning.”40 As this stanza makes clear, not only were the falls themselves and their abundant fisheries lost underwater, but the homes and villages of a thousands-year-old culture were lost as well; despite the rationalists’ dualistic thinking, culture and nature are rarely truly separate realms. From small items such as necklaces to the very bones of their ancestors, the River People witnessed the loss of a livelihood, a home place and a connection to their past. She-Who-Watches, whose petroglyph remains carved and painted into the canyon wall above Celilo, witnessed the drowning of Celilo Falls and Village as well as the insidious destruction of a displaced people. As Woody writes in the poem “She-Who-Watches, The Names Are Prayer,” “There is Celilo, dispossessed, the village of neglect and bad structure.”41 The Falls are now only “faint rocks enrippled / in the placid lake of back waters.”42 The poem testifies to the pain and loss, “nude and raw,” and is filled with references to “drownings in The Dalles, hangings in jails and off-reservation suicide-towns.”43 The extent of the physical, environmental, cultural, and spiritual destruction is made clear in the final lines of the poem: “Celilo Falls sank unwillingly in the new trading / and everyone dissolved in the fall.”44 Where rationalist ideology would not mourn this severance of the connection between people and place, Woody demonstrates that the human and the natural cannot be extricated from one another. The effects are devastating. In “Waterways Endeavor to Translate Silence from Currents,” Woody again addresses the ways that rationalism has attempted to separate these elements and placed Native peoples and the river on the wrong side of a dualistic system. The Dalles Dam, that “stone with roots,” represents the “exchange of bones for sawdust, for silt, for worthless currency.”45 The series of images evokes the tradeoff that was made; in exchange for giving up their cultural heritage, their salmon, and their ancestral lands, Woody catalogs the worthless byproducts of the dominant group’s fortune. In sawdust, or the residue left over from logging, and silt, the choking, sandy soil that builds up behind dams, she describes their compensation for the loss as without value. To those who would bring up the cash settlement that the tribes received, Woody responds that it is equally valueless— alongside the physical, cultural, and spiritual losses, the money is meaningless. Their ancestors’ bones have been “vandalized and cataloged,” and this dam, spawned out of a lack of emotion, has etched “into destruction the scaffolds of abundance, rapids, falls, spawning beds, the echo of falling water.”46 The literal fishing places, as represented in the

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scaffolds, and the spawning beds of the salmon have been destroyed; so too have those intangible, spiritual elements, the character of the river in its rapids and falls and the sounds of the falling water, later referred to as “the nascent place of all the songs.”47 None of these tangible or intangible elements, she argues, can be replaced or made better by worthless currency. “In our genesis,” she writes, “the beginning of words meant that we would not be without land or relationships.”48 Words, arguably the basis of rationalist thought, were not meant to separate ideas from embeddedness in place. The destruction, finally, extends to the River People themselves. “Dislocated from one another, we are now flooded . . . . We suffocate in the backwater of decadence and fractious contempt.”49 The people are now victim to this same lack of emotion, “vacuity” as Woody terms it, and as such are both physically and emotionally detached from their home place. Ted Strong, a Yakama Indian, claims that along with the decline in salmon, “Indian people declined from sixty thousand to ten thousand” along the river.50 The decadence of rationalist ideology has left the River People suffocated and subject to “fractious contempt” if they persist in adhering to traditional ways. Yet even after all of the damning evidence compiled in this poem, Woody ends with a note of hope. The elegant swirl of water on the river’s surface, she tells us, is “a spiral that tells of a place that remains undisturbed.”51 After all that has been done to the river and its people, and despite the rationalists’ best efforts to the contrary, the spiral implies that a degree of fluidity still exists—that the river cannot be completely “fixed.”

I Have Known It Before the Dams, and After Kim Barnes’s writing also demonstrates an awareness of her cultural, environmental, and spiritual relationship with rivers, and the devastation that a “fixed” river engenders. Speaking of the Dworshak Dam on the Clearwater, she makes the connection explicit on more than one occasion: “I could not know what the dam would mean to my life any more than I could have foreseen . . . the physical and spiritual upheaval of the next two years. The cycle of the river would be broken. Salmon would die by the thousands, snouts abraded to bone from their attempts to break though the barrier.”52 Directly countering the rationalist goal of “fixing” the river for human use, Barnes calls the river “broken.” Barnes links her life to that of the Clearwater; thus, the fate of the salmon in this passage receives as much attention and foreshadowing as the events of her own life and the lives of loved ones. In another passage from “The Way Out,” Barnes

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employs a spawning metaphor for her spiritual quest: “I have come to understand how my being wrenched from the place of my childhood . . . threw me into chaos, how so much of my life since that time has been spent trying to get back.”53 Similar to the dam that frustrates the salmon on the Clearwater, a barrier has been erected between her and her home. Because of her physical, cultural, environmental, and spiritual connection to the fluid Clearwater, Barnes consciously rejects the dominant narrative of the dams. Her class and gender place her outside of the privileged group that subscribes to rationalist ideology, as does her intimate and complex connection to the Clearwater. Unlike the rationalists, who took what they wanted from nature while denying their embodied position within it, Barnes cannot separate eco from ego: the Clearwater is part of her identity. In her essay titled “The Clearwater” from Written on Water, Barnes makes this connection clear: “I am here in the river, half-in, half-out, a wader of two worlds. I smile. I wave. I am where nothing can reach me.”54 The Clearwater is Barnes’s home place, and she is spiritually and environmentally connected to the river: “Each hour I spend with my feet near water, I feel more deeply rooted; the farther I get away, the less sure I am of my place in the world. For each of us, there must be this one thing, and for me it is the river.”55 Fishing on the river with her husband and playing with her children on the shore, Barnes feels “a rush of gratitude, the joy of living only minutes from water, the same water I and my brother played in as children.”56 It is clear from these passages that Barnes feels a profound connection with this landscape of her childhood; thus the intensity of the betrayal she feels becomes more understandable when Dworshak Dam irrevocably alters this same landscape. Barnes brings her intimate knowledge of the Clearwater into her writing: “I have known it before the dams, and after.”57 In spite of, or perhaps because of the intimacy of her knowledge of the previously fluid Clearwater, she realizes that “I distrust this length of the river because it no longer moves of its own volition: Dworshak Dam controls a great part of it now. The North Fork, the river I once knew as a tree-lined stream the color of turquoise, now is a man-made reservoir covering over fifty miles of land that was first logged for its timber before being flooded.”58 Barnes bears witness to the Clearwater-that-was in this passage, a far cry from its current state: fixed, subdued, and slack. While rationalists have called the Columbia and its tributaries a “gigantic and useful servant of the nation,”59 to Barnes the river is something else:

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The river’s betrayal sometimes shames me, the way it carries on as though what it travels toward is not a state of near stasis, depositing sludge along miles of riprap dikes, piling its dross against the pylons and locks and turbines. It cannot rid itself of what it is given, cannot carry its silt and timber and ash to the mouth of the ocean where it can be broken down, taken to great depths, washed and sifted into sand and dirt. Instead, the silt falls from the slow current, depositing itself in great layers, narrowing the river’s channel. The river becomes murky, the flat color of pewter. The trout are replaced by bottom-feeders, lovers of warm water. Every year, the Corps of Engineers sponsors a trash-fish derby, paying the fishermen to catch and kill what their dams have spawned.60

The life-giving river is now near death. As such, Barnes’ language suggests that the Clearwater, the Columbia and its other tributaries are not so much servant as slave. The river cannot rid itself of the dams, and cannot cleanse itself, either. The sludge, silt, and dross buildup have clogged the river, and the river is dying as a result. Yet, knowing the river as intimately as she does, Barnes recognizes something that the architects of the fixed river do not. The artificial Clearwater, servant to humans, is more dangerous than the wild Clearwater, despite the claims to predictability and control. It is the illusion of human mastery and control over nature that one must watch out for; one knows to treat a wild river with caution and respect. On the wild river, Barnes understands “how water can become something grim, how it can rise and take and swirl and drown. How it can become something to fight against, something to resist. The dam on the North Fork [of the Clearwater], the largest of its kind, was not built for electricity or simple recreation, they say, but for flood control in Portland, four hundred miles west.”61 Yet even though water can be something to fight against, Barnes makes clear that it is also a force to be respected. Despite the rationalists’ claims, the wildness of the river is not wholly domesticated or erased, merely subdued for a time. In the 1996 spring melt, when high floods threatened the area surrounding the river, Barnes wrestles with her feelings about the destruction the floods caused: How can I cheer such destruction? For that is what I felt, an overwhelming sense of boosterism. I wanted the river to win in some essential way, wanted to see it rise up and lash out, pull down the dams and drain the reservoirs, ferry away the docks and cleanse itself of silt. I wanted it to show a god’s righteous anger, a larger reflection of my own frustration and resentment.62

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In response to the rationalists’ technological and environmental hubris, Barnes has a cause of her own to boost. After years of losses for the wild and untamed river, she hopes for a win, for such hubris to be chastised or reprimanded by “a god’s righteous anger.” In essence, Barnes cheers for a win in the adversarial contest that rationalists have established between themselves and nature. Because she, too, falls on the wrong side of the dualisms that economic rationalism has set up, and because eco is so intimately connected to ego, a win for the river is a win for her. Though Barnes may not have achieved a resolution with Dworshak, she has achieved some measure of resolution with the troubled times she addresses in In the Wilderness: “If I now find that my life is good . . . perhaps it is because, not in spite of, those things I would forget. This does not mean I’m without resentment and bitterness. It does mean I’ve come to see how nothing is simple, how a damned river reeks [sic] its own havoc.”63 Again, the river/dam metaphor is intimately connected to how Barnes thinks of herself and her life. Eco and ego cannot be separated: “I carry it all with me, in the quiet pools and strong currents of my being. I fill my hands with the black dirt left by the river’s birth. I believe that what I hold in my hands is memory: like the river, it takes what it touches, carrying it along until all that remains is the bed over which the water flows.”64

The Antithesis of Parts Barnes demonstrates in the previous passage an alternative to rationalist dualisms, an alternative paradigm that Val Plumwood describes as “communicative, making ownership out in the essentially narrative terms of naming and interpreting the land, of telling its story in ways that show a deep and loving acquaintance with it and a history of dialogical interaction.”65 Through their writing, Barnes and Woody take narrative ownership of place, exposing the failures of a rationalist world view in relation to their home rivers. Their “outsider” views to those of the rationalists chip away at the carefully constructed façade. At the same time, these writers model relationships with these rivers that acknowledge their cultural, environmental, and spiritual significance. Literature is not the only means of achieving this, but its subjective space and its possibility for imaginative transformation of lived reality provides one of the best methods for reintroducing the cultural, environmental, and spiritual elements to the discussion. The existence of this literature and the other modes of discourse defines the problems

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incurred by rationalist treatment of riverways and forces acknowledgement (if not espousal) of these counter-narratives in the mainstream media. As Woody and Barnes illustrate, a river cannot be fixed in the rationalist sense of making it work for some stakeholders without also fixing the doom of its vital, life-giving relationships, especially if some aspects of the river are privileged while others are obscured or ignored. Richard White observes that “in treating the Columbia as a machine we have literally and conceptually disassembled the river. It has become to its users a set of separate spaces and parts.”66 The problem with parceling out the elements of a river, with fixing roles and purposes, is that the natural elements cannot be separated from the technological, the environmental from the economic, the spiritual from the political. As David James Duncan has put it, “You can’t part out a great river, because it is both greater and other than its parts: its constancy and immensity of flow are a union, the antithesis of parts.”67 If part of the work of ecofeminism is to attempt to resolve the split that hierarchical dualisms force, to reunite those parts, the rationalist world view cannot and must not be the only voice that is heard. We cannot fix what is fluid; we cannot separate or deny that which must be whole.

Notes 1

Elizabeth Woody, “Wyam: Echo of Falling Water,” in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts (Portland, OR: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1994), 64. 2 Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 23. 3 Ibid., 29. 4 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. 5 Ibid., 17. 6 Ibid., 4. 7 Ibid., 24. 8 Greta Gaard, “Women, Water, Energy: An Ecofeminist Approach,” Organization and Environment 14, no. 2 (Jun 2001): 159. 9 “Elizabeth Woody,” in Native Wiki (Storytellers: Native American Authors Online, January 23, 2008), http://www.nativewiki.org/Elizabeth_Woody. 10 This essay originally appeared in Woody’s Hand into Stone. For references to this and other works from that collection, I use the versions from Seven Hands, Seven Hearts because it is more readily available. 11 Woody, “Wyam: Echo of Falling Water,” Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, 63. 12 Ibid., 63. 13 Ibid., 66. 14 Ibid., 67.

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15 Simon Ortiz, ed., Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), xii. 16 Ibid., xvii. 17 Ibid., xviii. 18 Cecelia Konchar Farr, “American Ecobiography,” in Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook, ed. Patrick D. Murphy (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 95. 19 Ibid., 96.

20

The Clearwater River is a major tributary of the Columbia River system, and thus it and the Dworshak Dam are considered part of the larger Columbia Basin hydroelectric project that is referenced in this chapter. 21

Robert L. Root, Jr., “Interview with Kim Barnes,” Fourth Genre 2, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 171. 22 Kim Barnes, “Why I Wrote In the Wilderness,” in Bold Type (Random House, 1997) http://release2-0.com/boldtype/0997/barnes/notebook.html. 23 Joseph Cone, A Common Fate: Endangered Salmon and the People of the Pacific Northwest (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1995), 32. 24 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), xvii. 25 Dualisms here are borrowed from Plumwood’s seminal work Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993). 26 Blaine Harden, A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia (New York: Norton, 1996), 79. 27 Merchant, xvii. 28 Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 7. 29 Robert Jerome Glennon, Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 13. 30 Rufus Woods, “Formulate Brand New Idea for Irrigation Grant, Adams, Franklin Counties, Covering Million Acres or More,” Wenatchee Daily World, July 18, 1918. 31 Grand Coulee World’s Greatest Power Project,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 26, 1936. 32 “Grand Coulee Dam Must Be Completed,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 10, 1937. 33 “On Threshold of Great Industrial Era,” Newport Miner, July 5, 1934. 34 Linda Robyn, “Indigenous Knowledge and Technology: Creating Environmental Justice in the Twenty-first Century,” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 198. 35 Ibid., 199. 36 Elizabeth Woody, “Translation of Blood Quantum,” in Luminaries of the Humble (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 103-104. 37 Janis Johnson, “Saving the Salmon, Saving the People: Environmental Justice and Columbia River Tribal Literatures,” in The Environmental Justice Reader:

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Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy, ed. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 266. 38 Woody, “Shells on Stone” in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, 47. 39 Woody, “Wyam: Echo of Falling Water,” Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, 64. 40 Woody, “Of Steps to Drowning,” Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, 74. 41 Woody, “She-Who-Watches, the Names Are Prayer,” Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, 76-77. 42 Ibid., 77. 43 Ibid., 77. 44 Ibid., 77. 45 Woody, “Waterways Endeavor to Translate Silence from Currents,” in Luminaries of the Humble, 97-98. 46 Ibid., 97-98. 47 Ibid., 98. 48 Ibid., 98. 49 Ibid., 98. 50 Cone, 142. 51 Woody, “Waterways Endeavor to Translate Silence from Currents,” 98. 52 Kim Barnes, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 121-122. [emphasis added] 53 Kim Barnes, “The Way Out,” in Bold Type (Random House, 1997), http://release2-0.com/boldtype/0997/barnes/essay.html. 54 Kim Barnes, “The Clearwater,” in Written On Water, ed. Mary Clearman Blew (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 2001), 10. 55 Ibid., 11. 56 Ibid., 9. 57 Ibid., 11. 58 Ibid., 12. 59 “Grand Coulee Dam Must…” 60 Barnes, “The Clearwater,” 12. 61 Ibid., 13. 62 Ibid., 14. 63 Barnes, “Why I Wrote…” 64 Barnes, In the Wilderness, 258. 65 Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 230. 66 White, The Organic Machine, 110. 67 David James Duncan, My Story as told by Water (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2001), 6.

CHAPTER FOUR THE SUPERFUND GOTHIC: SUSANNE ANTONETTA’S BODY TOXIC: AN ENVIRONMENTAL MEMOIR CHRISTINE FLANAGAN

Something is wrong. Something is always wrong …something is wrong in the sickroom of the body, & deep in the marrow cells are born deep in the marrow the cells learn to fight. ............... I remember, in high school, the Visible Woman, her clear plastic mapped with vein and muscle. How we admired her and dismissed her story, refusing all truths but our own truths… —From “Medicine” by Susanne Paola (a.k.a. Susanne Antonetta)1

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson describes the world of systemic insecticides as “surpassing the imaginings of the brothers Grimm…. It is a world where the enchanted forest of the fairy tale has become the poisonous forest … where an insect may die from vapors emanating from a plant it has never touched.”2 It is a dark world, cloaked in death by indirection. Causal relationships are blurred, explanation is elusive. Technology’s advance brings us from the age of insecticides into the postnuclear age, what Michael Pollan has called the “Superfund Gothic”3: an era marked by the harrowing toxicity of chemical, nuclear and industrial waste sluicing through idyllic rivers and pastoral landscapes. The landscape’s altered identity reflects a nation whose character has long been masked. Teresa Goddu proposes that

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American Gothic literature criticizes America’s national myth of new world innocence by voicing the cultural contradictions that undermine the nation’s claim to purity and equality. Showing how these contradictions contest and constitute national identity even as they are denied, the Gothic tells of the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it.4

The Superfund Gothic is the terrain explored in Susanne Antonetta’s ecofeminist text Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir,5 where she investigates family history and femininity alongside haunting seashore summers in New Jersey. Ten percent of our modern horrors, National Priority Sites—the EPA’s most toxic Superfund Sites—“live and leach in New Jersey” making this state “maybe the most toxic known spot in the world.”6 Here, critic Michael Pollan writes, “the simplest acts—washing the dishes, say, or mixing up a pitcher of Tang—take on a retrospective horror.”7 For Antonetta, New Jersey’s most shocking product is her body: “I have or have had one spectacular multiple pregnancy”8— quadruplets, “naturally occurring, a one-in-a-half-million chance”9—plus “a radiationinduced tumor, a double uterus, asthma, endometriosis, growths on the liver,” and ovaries removed.10 But Antonetta neither provides nor strives for the clarity of definitive explanation. Step inside the world of Body Toxic and you see the possibilities for ecofeminist literature to effect social, political, and environmental changes that reach beyond the boundaries of geography, gender, or genre. This chapter will explore how Antonetta shatters the illusion of pastoral literature. The Superfund Gothic has forever poisoned and altered her body, the larger family of women, and Mother Earth; and Antonetta’s memoir navigates the consequences of silence, proposing a remedy of rearticulation that is a hallmark of ecofeminist literature.

Shattering the Pastoral Illusion The story of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir begins in 1932, when Susanne Antonetta’s grandfather purchases property near the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey. There, the family builds two cottages where they will spend their summers swimming, fishing, and crabbing, immersed in and surrounded by the waters of Barnegat Bay. Barnegat Bay’s estuary system is fed by the inland rivers of the Pine Barrens, a region explored by John McPhee in The Pine Barrens (1967). Covering an area large as many of the western national parks, McPhee describes, this unassuming pine and oak forest is most notable, perhaps, for the invisible aquifer beneath it:

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Chapter Four The water of the Pine Barrens is soft and pure, and there is so much of it that, like the forest above it, it is an incongruity in place and time. In the sand under the pines is a reservoir of pure water that, in volume, is the equivalent of a lake seventy-five feet deep with a surface of a thousand square miles…and in the language of a hydrological report on the Pine Barrens prepared in 1966 for the United States Geological Survey, “it can be expected to be bacterially sterile, odorless, clear; its chemical purity approaches that of uncontaminated rain-water or melted glacier ice.”11

Water and images of New Jersey’s coastline fill Antonetta’s reminiscences: I loved to be there, loved the greens and blues and the sense of open space… Next to our house was a field of cattails, with maybe a red winged blackbird or two bobbing on a tassel. Smallish and spindly needled pines, white cedars here and there, ash; a sparse tree line and brackish water, so weedy it looked like a cauldron of wings.12

Antonetta’s descriptions evoke the transcendent beauty of the region, presenting a familiar picture of the American pastoral. In 1970, at 13, she writes in her diary, “I’ve been down the shore a week now. I just love it down here. Especially the lagoon in the back. It is beautiful. The grass is long there, and its [sic] bent to the side, so that from far away it looks like velvet.”13 For Antonetta, the American pastoral is a remedy to the modern world and directly connected to her family’s wish for peace and health. She remembers, “Our parents loved the future… They wanted to give their children the gift of open spaces. My father had seen his younger brother almost die of scarlet fever… He wanted us to be healthy. He took us to swim, or my mother did, every day.”14 This summer vacation home reflects the literary pastoral described by Glen A. Love: there is “a natural world, a green world, to which sophisticated urbanites withdraw in search of lessons of simplicity which only nature can teach.” But this pastoral image is, as Love says, in “dire need of reassessment.”15 Antonetta’s girlhood diaries begin to shift in tone and perspective, hinting at a dark undercurrent: There is also snake-grass, which is multi-colored green & gold. When the wind blows, it looks like gold is rippling through it. I love the snake-grass, but it makes me very sad. I remember the first time I ever went there, I was young & wearing shorts. Now the snake-grass has a very sharp tip, which will cut you if you don’t wear pants. I went through a patch of snake-grass, and came out with legs covered with innumerable tiny cuts. It was almost like it was saying, “go home—you don’t belong here.”16

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Ecocritic Norma Tilden proposes that landscapes “pretend to be blank, though beneath any place is everything that has ever happened there, most of which we would rather not hear about.”17 And John Paul Riquelme writes that “the Gothic is structurally and implicitly a negative version of pastoral because of its turn to foreign locales that are threatening and bizarre.”18 The adult Antonetta researches the landscape’s history and learns that her birth and early development coincides with Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corporation’s relocation to the Pine Barrens. On their 1,400 acre site, the company’s low buildings churned out commercial dyes and epoxy resins and plastics, and chemical waste byproducts. These last were disposed of in various ways: in 14,000 drums buried and stored in nonhazardous waste landfills lined with plastic wrap; in a pipeline that a former employee said led from one building straight into the woods, dumping cyanide in the ground; in liquid waste pumped in an underground pipeline built beneath Barnegat Bay into the Atlantic Ocean, a mile from a public beach.19

For thirty years, this same Ciba-Geigy pipeline transported nuclear and military waste from a nearby military base. The pipeline burst in 1984, and Ciba-Geigy was found responsible for “a poison plume a mile square and dozens of feet deep, containing ninety-five different chemicals.”20 Antonetta’s summer cottage was located four miles from Ciba-Geigy, and when Ciba-Geigy’s pipeline broke and her family was told to stop drinking the water, she writes that they “mostly ignored the warning, having decided long ago that shore water was therapeutic.”21 Glen A. Love writes about this exact type of “cosmic irony”22 in humanity’s oversimplification of the natural world and in our inability to understand—or our ignorance of—nature’s complex systems. The idyll of nature, the myth of the pastoral—Antonetta’s family desperately wishes for these comforts. Colin Fairweather proposes, however, that pastoral literature is significantly marked by a “refusal to confront.”23 Similarly, Teresa Goddu notes that Gothic literature is often considered to be “an escapist form.”24 Paradoxically, however, Fairweather suggests that pastoral literature also offers “a means of rearticulating, rather than abandoning, worldly concerns.”25 And Goddu argues that Gothic literature offers an opportunity for a kind of articulation, that the Gothic’s escapism is also “an integral part of a network of historical representation.”26 The Gothic “registers its culture’s contradictions, presenting a distorted, not a disengaged, version of reality.”27 The Gothic, like the pastoral, thereby doesn’t simply take us toward escape: “Gothic stories are intimately connected to the culture that

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produces them,” says Goddu.28 Ecofeminist literature has a particular affinity for this type of confrontation. In Antonetta’s writing, we see that shattering the myth of the pastoral allows her to fully illuminate the complex effects of the Superfund Gothic. Antonetta’s memoir takes readers into this world of rearticulation, revealing story after toxic story about New Jersey’s landscape. To the north of her family’s summer cottages was Denzer & Schafer X-Ray, whose business was to strip silver from negatives: The company used its septic system, illegally, to dispose of the stripping solutions. Denzer & Schafer did this for seven years, filling our aquifer with lead. Also arsenic, chromium and mercury; D & S left a total of fortyfour EPA-chronicled chemicals. The D & S plant was close to Potter’s Creek, where we crabbed and fished, on the Bayville Road, where we walked to pick berries and sassafras roots, and just to walk.29

Body Toxic is evidence that the American pastoral cannot exist in the age of such technological carelessness. Nor can the pastoral exist in the post-nuclear age. Ocean County, home to Barnegat Bay, is also home to the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant. Dating back to 1969, Oyster Creek is not only the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the United States, but, Antonetta writes, “It has released the most or second most (depending on who you talk to) nuclear fission materials of any plant in the country into the atmosphere—venting, for instance, 77 curies of iodine-131 and particulates during the seventies and eighties, when the industry average was one or two.”30 The Oyster Creek nuclear power plant is still operating in 2008, and, Antonetta remembers, it was “five miles upwind of our cottages, on my grandmother’s favorite gooseberry patch. We continued to pick there.”31 What Michael Pollan calls the Superfund Gothic has been called “toxic consciousness” by Cynthia Deitering in her review of 1980s fiction.32 She proposes that fiction writers of the 1980s “mirror a shift in our cultural identity—a shift from a culture defined by its production to a culture defined by its waste.”33 Antonetta’s memoir easily occupies a place in this changing cultural identity. Deitering says What I see as “toxic consciousness” in fiction reflects a fundamental shift in historical consciousness; for at some point during the Reagan-Bush decade, something happened, some boundary was crossed beyond which Americans perceived themselves differently in relation to the natural world and the ecosystems of the American Empire…we came to perceive, perhaps inchoately, our own complicity in postindustrial ecosystems, both personal and national, which are predicated on pollution and waste. My

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premise is that during the 1980s we began to perceive ourselves as inhabitants of a culture defined by its waste.34

When articulated, this change in consciousness, suggests Annette Kolodny, is what makes the modern American pastoral unique: Only in America has the entire process [of colonization] remained within historical memory, giving Americans the unique ability to see themselves as willful exploiters of the very land that once promised an escape from such necessities. With the pastoral impulse neither terminated nor repressed, the entire process—the dream and its betrayal, the consequent guilt and anger—in short, the knowledge of what we have done to our continent, continues even in this century, as Gary Snyder put it, “eating at the American heart like acid.”35

In the post-nuclear world, pastoral literature is at once an articulation of an idealized desire as well as a distortion of reality. Is there, really, any place left on earth where we can enjoy the ease and idyll promised by the pastoral? And why does that matter? Finally, is our understanding of the myth of the pastoral an irrelevant academic exercise when compared to understanding the effects this toxic landscape has on the female body? Memory’s idyllic snapshots will be overshadowed by the discovery of Antonetta’s own altered anatomy: infertility, and a double-chambered uterus that requires explanation.

The Female Body & Mother Earth Susanne Antonetta’s exploration of the landscape occurs precisely because the drastic effects of a poisoned landscape emerge from her body. “I have or have had one spectacular multiple pregnancy,” she writes in Body Toxic, “a miscarriage, a radiation-induced tumor, a double uterus, asthma, endometriosis, growths on the liver, other medical conditions.”36 Antonetta knows intuitively the end of this landscape’s story, but a world flooded with poisons has a defense in no precise cause. “I can know what hung in the water, nested in the soft tissues of the fish,” Antonetta writes. “I can’t look into the novel of my body and go to the end, where it tells what happened.”37 This recovery effort—to go beyond the pastoral ideal of Mother Earth as healer and to propose a remedy of rearticulation that must include Goddu’s Gothic “historical horrors” that shape our national identity—is a major goal of the ecofeminist project.38 Antonetta’s Body Toxic reflects this recovery effort, charting the radical poisoning of a landscape and her subsequent psychic and physical illness.

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As an ecofeminist text, Body Toxic illustrates Terry Field’s proposition that “ecofeminists are in an ideal position to accept the challenge of demonstrating how our, that is, women’s embodiment (normally associated with ‘nature’) and theorizing (considered to be a ‘cultural activity’) might be integrated in new and insightful ways.”39 But insight does not necessarily bring comfort. Watch how Antonetta’s narrative traces the epic recovery of her body: This is the story of a body. In the twenty-six years since I wrote this my ten trillion cells have replaced themselves three times, except the doled-out brain cells, which don’t replenish. In this period my thyroid cells, many of them, became something other than thyroid cells; their DNA altered, they lost their purpose, and began filling up my neck. The ovaries I had then are gone. I’ve grown lesions on my liver. My uterine lining has moved out and now resides in the pelvis. I take pills that stream into the brain the GABA and serotonin that isn’t naturally there. The DDT that tucked into my cells then has dissipated, though not its effects. I am rarely near Oyster Creek… Though there’s no way to end the generations of poisoning: the years my landscape poisoned me.40

As a teenager, Antonetta’s life takes a harrowing turn when she turns to drugs and drops out of high school. She wonders if she “compensated, maybe” for the landscape and poisoned herself: “I woke more than once from a heroin nod to find a cigarette burning into the thin skin of my palm.”41 A stint in a mental institution reveals a bipolar condition, which she struggles with for the rest of her life. As an adult, Antonetta wants to conceive children and discovers her altered feminine organs cannot support the children she so desires. Antonetta’s catalog of associations doesn’t supply answers. Ovaries removed, Antonetta will achieve motherhood via adoption; mental stability will be provided by drugs created by the same companies that littered the landscape where she swam. And Antonetta is not alone. Her family shares these bodily dysfunctions—dysfunctions which are much more severe in the community that lives in this environment year-round: In the seventies, eighties and nineties the Toms River/Beachwood area has been wracked by childhood cancers—particularly of the brain and nervous system—leukemias, breast cancers, many times higher than normal. My family was not. We’ve been wracked by infertility, tumors, organs malformed at birth and manic-depression.42

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Earth/body imagery allows Antonetta’s to investigate environmental history as it collides with memories of the family vacationing in their two summer cottages, where the family’s collective spirit respirated… as if they were a set of lungs. We came separately, injected onto the Garden State Parkway in our old Dodge Darts, dropping off at the Toms River exit, sliding above the poisonous plume and beside Denzer & Schafer and finally running together at our end-of-the-road spit where the DDT trucks did their slow and luxurious Uturns and fogged back to Bayville.43

Antonetta remembers the DDT trucks passing and crop dusters spraying overhead until 1972, when DDT’s commercial use was outlawed: “The smoke, lupine in color, hung in the air…It scorched our mouths and noses and at night we would sit together and eat food we could not taste.”44 By Antonetta’s calculations, DDT was sprayed as her expectant mother breathed the summer air, and, she thinks, “those trucks powdered me in the womb.”45 The men of Antonetta’s family sculpt a classic patriarchal structure, discounting women. Antonetta remembers, No wife of mine is going to work, my father said, and by extension no daughter. My father tells me on the phone that feminists (libbers) have caused our divorce rates. But there’s not really much of a women’s movement now, I tell him. “They started all this crap,” he insists.46

The natural world is similarly dismissed. The summertime environment, according to Antonetta’s grandfather, contains “Nothing.”47 Nature, to both family and industry, is a place of “nothingness”—where soil and air and water absorb everything without consequence. After the men of Antonetta’s family purchase the land, build summer cottages, and return to North Jersey for the work week—after Ciba-Geigy executives build an operations site on 1,400 acres in the Pine Barrens and return in fresh suits to their New York City headquarters—both toxins and women fall off the radar. The women find the benefits of freedom in the landscape, a limited freedom presented—literally—in parentheses in Antonetta’s memoir: (Every morning first thing my grandmother crossed the gravel road. As she crossed the road her spirit rose and kited out of her life. She threw off her cotton shift and the hydraulic system that was 1930s women’s underwear, and skinnydipped for a long time in Barnegat Bay. Still her children weren’t allowed to use the words “pregnant” or “God.”)48

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In her daily immersions, Antonetta’s grandmother will unknowingly lower her body into a poison pool of “nothing,” a baptism that will transform her (and her granddaughters) into the body toxic. Body Toxic as ecofeminist literature moves from the personal to the epic as Antonetta explores the ways in which women throughout history have inhaled and inherited the body toxic. Antonetta retells the Gothic fable of The Radium Girls, a name coined by newspapers (a cute, condescending name—as if they were a teenage girl band!) covering the true story of women’s first legal demands for workplace protection in 1927. Antonetta describes how the New Jersey company U.S. Radium protected male scientists from the effects of radiation with “lead screens, gloves and tongs”49 while the unprotected Radium Girls painted watch and clock dials with radium paint, to make them glow in the dark with an uncanny green phosphorescence. They used brushes made of hair and mixed their paint from water, radium powder, and some kind of glue. Every few minutes the brush ends splayed out and the women were told to point the ends with their lips. (It didn’t have any taste, and I didn’t know it was harmful.) The Radium Girls painted their nails sometimes with radium paint, playfully, and their teeth, to surprise their boyfriends with a lucid smile in the dark.50

Antonetta feels a strong affinity for these innocent, altered women. The story of the Radium Girls—like Antonetta’s story—directly contradicts Gloria Feman Orenstein’s concept of ecofeminist literature as “medicine stories,” literature whose “function it is to teach us lessons about healing.”51 Remember: this post-nuclear world offers no false escape. The fate of the Radium Girls? Those that survived to their court date, toothless, “too weak to raise their hands to take the oath,”52 won their lawsuit as the tides of poison rose in the waters of women everywhere. And so, while the archetype of Edenic Mother Earth exists in pastoral literature, the world of the Superfund Gothic presents another image: a neglected mother, a poisoned woman, defenseless in the face of environmental lawlessness. Antonetta leaves us with one final image illustrating the odd collision of the nuclear world and women’s bodies. In the first chapter of Body Toxic, Antonetta remembers the anticipation and arrival of menstruation— and, of course, Kotex: “the only permissible thing for a half-Catholic girl in New Jersey to use. The flowery little cases for your purse. The garter belt that held the napkins in place, a garish sexual sign that cradled its small white chastity belt.”53 Puberty brings the sense that “there was no way out” of the body; and her body “suddenly contracted, became painful

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and specific, and at the same time, weaker”54 in its departure from childhood. Later, as an infertile woman yearning for children, Antonetta learns that New Jersey’s nuclear power plants would transport waste using truckloads of Kotex. Nuclear plants were “alive and oozing,” according to Dale Bridenbaugh, a nuclear engineer who resigned from Barnegat Bay’s Oyster Creek Nuclear reactor. Bridenbaugh told newspapers that nuclear plants lined crates with Kotex to ship radioactive liquids. “What keeps a nuclear plant running is lots of Kotex, lots of masking tape, and lots of plastic bags,” Bridenbaugh said.55 And the reason for his resignation? “Nuclear power has become a technological monster,” he said, “and it is not clear who, if anyone, is in control.”56

The Consequences of Silence; The Possibilities of Rearticulation Whatever the classification—Superfund Gothic, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postmodern memoir—Body Toxic is a text that wrestles with language’s failures and language’s transcendent power. Silence and articulation take many forms throughout the book; each has tangible consequences in nature, the female body, and the larger world. From the first sentence of Body Toxic, Antonetta disposes with the notion that language communicates reliable information. When she does not know information, Antonetta identifies the silent source (who might have provided the facts), and fills in the narrative detail with questions. “In nineteen question-mark question-mark my silent grandfather came to the United States,” she writes.57 When he steps off the Ellis Island ferry, she imagines he is “horrified? disgruntled? unsurprised really? at the disappointing asphalt of New York.”58 Exactitude is unnecessary— perhaps even irrelevant—and Antonetta is unapologetic. Memory has gaps; silences are expected. This is a tale where Antonetta understands that the answers she seeks she will likely never find. Family communication reflects how language and silence create hierarchies. Antonetta remembers that her grandfather’s speech is “confined to the two boys”59 while her aunts instruct the young women “how to do our nails, lose at games, and withhold our opinions.”60 Language constructs gender roles. Away from women, Antonetta writes, My grandfather liked to bring out his bloody jacket from World War I, unwashed, sweet and rotten with its uncouth map of the human veins, and tell the boys about getting shot…and the jacket became like one of those sex books for kids, a handy anatomical reference. He encouraged them to handle it, know it, as you might help a boy understand the female body.61

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Antonetta remembers her grandfather most for his silence. “His corner of creation became defined by its exclusions, a kind of ontological vacuum.”62 Mark, Antonetta’s cousin, is “the family center…the oldest grandchild, nucleus to their electrons”63; he embodies the power of male language over female choice: I once asked his mother, my aunt Kathleen, why she’d never had another child and she said that when Mark got old enough to talk she asked him if she should and he said, “No.”64

Antonetta cultivates her own silence as a child, noting, “My mother bragged to her siblings that our neighbor thought she had only one child”65—her brother Chris. As a young girl, Antonetta keeps a diary, and she wants to keep its contents private, locking and hiding the small book. In Body Toxic, the diaries become public—Antonetta intersperses her adult narrative with excerpts from the diaries. She returns to the journal and finds that memory reflects language’s unreliability: Memory is a form of Lying. Autobiography is a literary form devoted to the ceremonial lie. A taxidermy. A pretense that the form of what’s dead can be preserved, made to lash and snarl still. When I found my diaries a decade ago I found chunks of the past preserved, viewed from the distance of a few hour’s worth of memory rather than fifteen year’s worth. Not only were my memories wrong, I found, but my memories of how I remember were wrong. I considered myself an exaggerator, someone who would embellish, turn a little cut into a severed hand. In fact, I minimized my old life, trying desperately to normalize. I recalled using heroin a dozen times, though I had used it regularly, daily, for more than a year.66

Discovering the extent of drug use—and the failed memory that accompanies it—allows Antonetta to chart her own silence, a war on the self. She writes, “As I got older, that silence grew harder to operate, a machine becoming heavier and heavier. I had to have help… Marijuana, Carbona cleaning fluid, ups, downs, ludes, hash, acid, heroin. I soon learned that when my own silence ran out more could be taken.”67 John Paul Riquelme, when discussing the Gothic tale Dracula, notes that Bram Stoker’s characters often keep diaries and journals “in an endeavor to record their experiences in a written form that confirms that they remain in control of their faculties and actions.”68 Antonetta’s diary, perhaps, reconstructs the lost teenage self: a young girl who maintains some semblance of control through years of drug use, mental illness, and

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environmental poisoning. But more powerfully, Antonetta’s use of the diary in the memoir’s nonlinear narrative structure—moving back and forth between the adult storyteller and the child diarist—underscores the tension between the real world and the pastoral illusion, between child’s innocence and adult awareness. The natural world, also, is marked by silence; the consequences of this silence are seen in the Superfund Gothic. “They poured sludges in the ground we drank from and the river we swam in,” Antonetta writes, “thinking we lived in two different dimensions”69—thinking that the dimension of nature held no path of communication or consequence to the human body. Christopher Manes notes that not only has nature evolved from an animistic presence—articulate nature, such as is seen in Native American and similar cultures—to a mute presence,70 but the effect of this silence is a lost environmental ethic. Mankind’s capacity for language, so it would seem, alters our hierarchy, and nature’s inability to speak allows for accelerated environmental degradation. But how might one connect the dots between nature’s silence and our lost environmental ethic? Like her grandfather’s “question-mark questionmark,” Antonetta seems sure that the rational—linear? logical?—causal relationships exist somewhere beyond reach. “Many people say you can’t make direct causal connections,” Antonetta said in a February 2002 interview. “Of course you can’t. You draw implications, but you can be wrong.”71 But an associative argument may be powerfully constructed— and Antonetta’s memoir is finally a triumph of the associative argument. Here’s one of Antonetta’s central associative arguments: Our toxic bodies and our toxic Earth, Antonetta proposes, are a direct consequence of war. War is the circumstance and event of failed communication. War is proof of the unreliability of language. As the teenage Antonetta spirals into silence and drops out of high school, across the bay—in the Pine Barrens—the U.S. government hires contractors at Boeing to create a Cold War air defense system, secretly placing missiles and planes in the forests of the Pine Barrens, “launch ready to intercept the Soviet bombers.”72 In 1960, Antonetta learns, a bunker catches fire and “the nuclear warhead dropped into the molten mass of the rest… Radioactive particles spread over the ground and the groundwater…About a pound of plutonium was left there, too radioactive to move.”73 It will be twelve years before public outcry forces the government to take protective action: they will install “a chainlink fence to protect civilians.”74 Language fails Antonetta here. This is a land that absorbs the water into an aquifer from which her family drinks. Later, in a

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2005 interview, a pragmatic Antonetta said, “I’m not sure what you can do with irony except name it.”75 Radioactive waste—imagined war and its industrial preparation—is the greatest threat to humans in the nuclear age. In the face of this environmental threat, Antonetta learns, language is fully unreliable. Radioactivity, Antonetta says, “is something that lives as close to forever as we can imagine. We’ve made immortality for our waste, which grows larger and more important and more alive.”76 What has emerged is a field of study known as “transeonic communication”—communication that will exist and express throughout the ages—and the effort to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to future generations. Antonetta discovers that at the proposed Yucca Mountain Waste Repository (along with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant already storing our country’s nuclear waste near Carlsbad, New Mexico), builders are posting signs picturing “a face that signifies, as much as any artist can make it obvious and universal, nausea.”77 The featured “billboard with the bald puking head” (see Fig. 41) warns visitors to “stay away until A.D. 12,000.”78 The environmental dangers we’ve created for the earth have left us in an unfathomable quandary, Antonetta seems to say, one that our current form of language cannot help solve. Language as expression and explanation seems inadequate in the postnuclear age; but, I wonder, don’t ecofeminist texts value assertion and articulation over silence? Aren’t ecofeminist texts—like those of Terry Tempest Williams—appropriating the interdependent concerns of sexism, militarism, and environmentalism? Antonetta’s memoir succeeds because language finally transcends its own unreliability to powerfully convey the consequences for us all: I don’t expect anyone to explain what’s wrong with me. No one can explain what’s wrong with anybody, I don’t think. Though I don’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude either: clusters of children with brain disorders, toxic plumes and clouds, radiation spewing in the air. Every vital system of my body disrupted: an arrhythmic heart, a seizing brain, severe allergies, useless reproductive organs. Either it’s Sodom and there is the wrath of God or it’s the wrath of man, which is thoughtless, foolish, and more lasting.79

The Superfund Gothic

Fig. 4-1 Yucca Mountain nuclear waste warning (Courtesy Cabinet Magazine)

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Colin Fairweather, when analyzing various forms of pastoral literature, reviews Shakespeare’s Richard II. Queen Isabel’s escape to the garden, he writes, illustrates the pastoral’s false promise, as she learns about the consequences of her husband’s actions from a gardener who enters: “Although the garden is geographically enclosed, it cannot escape the world it ostensibly eschews: locating the fallen within the unfallen, the gardener evokes a space in which worldly anxiety is reformulated rather than suspended.”80 In Body Toxic, Antonetta tells the story of her brother, Chris, who gets a summer job working for New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection. His job? Testing water samples for contamination: It turned out the man he replaced quit working four or five years ago though he kept coming in and getting paid… Chris wondered what they guy’d been doing with himself and opened cabinets and desk drawers to discover years of pornography: Hustlers, Playboys, Penthouses, sliding heaps of the stuff.81

Antonetta and her brother “create a history” for the incompetent DEP employee, but outside the DEP walls, she realizes, people are drinking these contaminated waters, “arcing it over ground coffee or mixing it with frozen juice.”82 Antonetta’s Body Toxic is finally a work that documents this lost history—environmental and human—of the Gothic’s “historical horrors”83 that create a full snapshot of our land’s identity, both nation and state. The reservoir that lies beneath New Jersey’s Pine Barrens near Antonetta’s former summer home is no longer pure and pristine. Since the publication of Body Toxic, this landscape is further haunted by everexpanding suburbia: clouded rainwater sheeting off impervious driveways, sidewalks, rooftops, and roads. Beyond the sprawl, New Jersey’s blueberry fields, cranberry bogs, and vast agricultural expanses bleed fertilizers into the sandy depths of the fragile aquifer. I drive these roads and think of Silent Spring. Carson tells the Greek myth of Medea, a sorceress whose husband, Jason, finds himself drawn to another woman. Medea presents this woman with a robe laced with subtle poison. A violent death follows.84 Medea has her successful, satisfying revenge: death cloaked by indirection. Carson compares Medea’s robe to the insidious effects of systemic insecticides poisoning the natural world. The years pass. Carson is hailed for her work for influencing public opinion about DDT and like chemicals. But who among us—save Antonetta— considers Jason’s poor bride, her vision of the beautiful robe, her ignorance of the poisons contained within?

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Notes 1

Susanne Paola (a.k.a. Susanne Antonetta), “Medicine,” Ploughshares 17.4 (Winter 1991-1992). Reprinted with permission of author. 2 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich: Fawcett Books, 1962), 39. 3 Michael Pollan, “Poison,” review of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, by Susanne Antonetta. New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2001, 7. 4 Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 10. 5 Susanne Antonetta, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (New York: Counterpoint Press, 2002). 6 Ibid., 21. 7 Pollan, 7. 8 Antonetta, 27. 9 Ibid.,112. 10 Ibid.,27-28. 11 John McPhee, The Pine Barrens (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1967), 13-14. 12 Antonetta, 13. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.,149. 15 Glen A. Love, “Revaluing Nature,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 231. 16 Antonetta, 13. 17 Norma Tilden, “Stratigraphies: Writing a Suspect Terrain.” Biography 25.1 (2002), 25. 18 John Paul Riquelme, “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.3(2000), 587. 19 Antonetta, 17. 20 Ibid.,17-18. 21 Ibid., 115. 22 Love, 230. 23 Colin Fairweather. “Inclusive and exclusive pastoral: Towards an anatomy of pastoral modes,” Studies in Philology 97.3 (Summer 2000), 276. 24 Goddu, 2. 25 Fairweather, 276. 26 Goddu, 2. 27 Ibid., 3. 28 Ibid., 2. 29 Antonetta, 18-19. 30 Ibid., 23. 31 Ibid., 24.

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32 Cynthia Deitering “The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction of the 1980s,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 196. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid.,197. 35 Annette Kolodny, “Unearthing Herstory,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 175. 36 Antonetta, 27-28. 37 Ibid., 27. 38 Some ecofeminist theorists celebrate the pastoral ideal of Mother Earth (linking femininity and motherhood) or, as with ecopsychologists like Mimi FarrellyHansen and Ellen Speert, associate nature with healing. Other ecofeminist writers—Terry Tempest Williams most notably—echo Antonetta’s unblinking concern over nature’s potential to be harmed and carry harm. I regret the scope of this paper doesn’t allow a full discussion of some of the major voices from each side of this debate. 39 Terry Field, “Is the Body Essential for Ecofeminism?” Organization and Environment 13 (2000), 39. 40 Antonetta, 186-187. 41 Ibid., 182. 42 Ibid., 27. 43 Ibid., 42. 44 Ibid., 135. 45 Ibid., 17. 46 Ibid., 233. 47 Ibid., 5. 48 Ibid., 11. 49 Ibid., 196. 50 Ibid., 195. 51 Gloria Feman Orenstein, “Artists as Healers: Envisioning Life-Giving Culture" in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990), 286. 52 Antonetta, 204. 53 Ibid., 22. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 24. 56 Ibid., 151. 57 Ibid., 3. 58 Ibid., 5. 59 Ibid., 36. 60 Ibid., 42. 61 Ibid., 36-37. 62 Ibid., 40.

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61

Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38. 65 Ibid., 44. 66 Ibid., 185. 67 Ibid., 44. 68 Riquelme, 589. 69 Antonetta, 61. 70 Christopher Manes, “Nature and Silence,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 17. 71 Candy Cooper, “Woman Looks Back at Her Toxic N.J. Youth.” The Record, February 20, 2002. 72 Antonetta, 10. 73 Ibid., 15. 74 Ibid. 75 Jana Siciliano, “Susanne Antonetta (Interview).” Bookreporter.com, July 27, 2001. 76 Antonetta, 209. 77 Ibid., 212. 78 Ibid., 222. 79 Ibid., 203. 80 Fairweather,276. 81 Antonetta, 32. 82 Ibid., 32. 83 Goddu, 10. 84 Carson, 39. 64

CHAPTER FIVE COMING OUT OF THE AMNESIA: HERSTORIES AND EARTH STORIES, AND JANE SMILEY’S CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST OWNERSHIP IN A THOUSAND ACRES ALMILA OZDEK

I was always aware, I think, of the water in the soil…1 I feel like there’s treacherous undercurrents all the time. I think I’m standing on solid ground, but then I discover that there’s something moving underneath it, shifting from place to place. There’s always some mystery.2

A Thousand Acres has been highly acclaimed for its skillful reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear from a feminist perspective. In an interview, Jane Smiley notes that in her novel she aims to uncover the reasons why Regan and Goneril were so angry with their father, and her decision to narrate the story from the point of view of Ginny Cook—the murderous Goneril of King Lear—allows her to give voice to the female stories that are silenced in the play.3 However, what makes this rewriting a work in its own right is the way that Smiley enhances the novel’s perspective by working it into a larger context: the paradigms of capitalist ownership that constitute the tenets of American identity. It is these paradigms that determine how the earth will be reshaped and how the bodies will be utilized to meet the increasing demands of an emerging nation. Smiley not only uncovers how these paradigms impact the body and earth, but also traces the “treacherous undercurrents” that lie under the seemingly solid grounds of patriarchal nation-making, thus giving voice to the silenced female stories as well as the silenced story of the earth.

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The Farm and the Patriarchal Nation-Making: The Grid System and the American Dream of Ownership William Conlogue, in his book Working the Garden, explains in what ways discussing cultural issues from the perspective of a farm text is functional and establishes an analogue between agriculture and literature: they are both shaped by and in turn shape the culture in which they evolve. Literature increases our understanding of the realities of the world, and “agriculture is a physical organization of the same reality—it bounds, arranges, and systematically transforms nature into something we can eat, wear, or otherwise utilize.”4 The way nature is transformed defines the character of a culture and its individuals, how they look at themselves and at the outer world.5 Furthering Conlogue’s analogy along this line, one can argue that earth functions like language: its dynamics may be determined by hegemonic policies and it may even act as the very tool that implements these policies. Nevertheless, it always possesses an uncontrollable potential for subversion, which makes it the target of oppression. It is the eye by which one gazes at one’s self and others; it is the space on which identity is constructed and deconstructed continuously. Much as it is the recipient of all external influences, it never loses its innate autonomy—the waters that no tiles can stop. Thus, the farm novel provides a very good perspective which enables it to “confront history, [since] it is the accumulation of past acts . . . the farm novel explores how local, regional, and national history has brought people and places to what they are.”6 Though the sequence of events in A Thousand Acres more or less follows that of King Lear, what is predominant in the novel is the way that Jane Smiley weaves into her rewriting an insightful critique of the repercussions of the American national agricultural politics on the land and on the individual. Providing the basic needs for human sustenance, the farm has always been the ground on which a country establishes its constitutive tenets, thus making it a space that is very actively political and decisive in the formation of a nation. Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance in 1785 sought the same purpose, as it politicized the land at the turn of history when capitalism was being established as one of the basic paradigms of this emerging nation.7 The system primarily aimed at giving the agricultural system a more American character: until the ordinance, the agricultural system in the States resembled the European Feudal System in which the farmers did not own their land but worked and paid to the landowner.8 The ordinance sought for a system that would change this tenure in favor of ownership, reflecting the motivation of a nation that

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wanted to liberate itself from its European heritage and establish a culture of its own. This motivation was certainly understandable; however, the rationale behind the grid system would also initiate the present industrial methods of American farming, and would turn nature into the victimized target of acts of ownership. As Conlogue observes, the grid system ignored the natural forms of the land in its mathematical remapping: it sought to establish a standard land unit, as it also “facilitated the easy exchange of farmland, and created an attitude towards the land that made it an abstraction rather than a concrete reality . . . A defining motif in A Thousand Acres, the grid is the exact measure of industrial agriculture’s unrestrained desire to monopolize nature.”9 The story of the transformation of Zebulon County from marsh to farming land echoes this new understanding of ownership introduced by the ordinance. The Davis family, Ginny’s great grandparents, move to Zebulon County from the western part of England. Uprooted, they want to establish themselves on stable grounds and make a history of their own, and they start this by reshaping the land. Zebulon County is under two feet of water part of the year and spongy for another quarter of the year, but the immigrant American family is undaunted by obstacles. After a generation of endless toiling and laying tile lines, the water that has been pervading for millennia finally withdraws. The American dream is now achieved: as the soil is tamed and recreated, it becomes the body on which national as well as individual histories can be inscribed, and it becomes the language that speaks of how much a man can achieve. Neil Nakadate notes how Jane Smiley has recognized that the relationship linking the American land, American culture and those who depend on both was problematic from the moment of America’s discovery by the Europeans.10 The disposition and eradication of indigenous peoples and the subsequent occupation and the “taming” of the land…anticipated the ownership of property as a condition of American identity. Smiley’s reading and teaching were revealing the subtext of American culture to be conquest, possession, and control.11

It is this problematic of ownership that sets A Thousand Acres to action, and the very first pages foretell the predominance of the theme of ownership, by the way they describe the setting and the characters. The Cook land of six hundred and forty acres lies at the intersection point between roads, between the highway that reaches out to the city and the river, and it is the center of the universe for the then-child Ginny. Ginny

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only finds it natural that this property, which is surrounded by the farms of the Clarks and the Ericsons, should expand and absorb the Ericson farm to cover the whole horizon that lies before the intersection. “Acreage and financing [being] facts as basic as name and gender in Zebulon County,”12 American families are defined on the basis of their ownership, which appropriates every other aspect of their identity as well as moralities. Much as the Ericson family is liked, they are never respected because they refuse to treat their land as a business, and instead choose to see it as part of a nurturing nature with which they identify themselves. The Clarks and the Cooks, on the other hand, are alienated from their reproductive soil, since they have turned it into an enterprise. Larry, the potent patriarch of the Cook family, is “not much for untamed nature….he’s deathly afraid of wasps and hornets. It’s a real phobia with him. He goes all white and his face starts twitching.”13 He runs over animals with his farming machines, unable to bear the existence of anything that he will not be able to tame and thus turn into an enterprise. For him, the catechism of the new Garden of Eden in the twentieth century is embedded in capitalist thinking. Larry, building his life on this catechism, defines as a farmer’s first duty to grow more food and second duty to buy more land; the signs of a good land are to have no debts and no standing water, and a good farmer is one who asks no favors.14 A farmer who cannot survive on his own means should not survive at all, and failure to prosper and progress is a sin in its own right. It is for this reason that the Cook and the Clark families do not question the immorality behind arguing over their kitchen table about who should get the Ericsons’ land when they finally lose the mortgage. The ethics of the Garden of Eden have radically shifted in the modern-day American farm, and they are now determined in terms of material conquest, possession, and control. This act of controlling and recreating nature in a paternalistic language of ownership runs parallel with the women’s objectification as another land that must be conquered, possessed, and reshaped. Annette Kolodny, in her article “Unearthing Herstory,” notes that America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy is “a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of land as essentially feminine.”15 While this fantasy seems to reflect a desire to be in a harmonious relationship with nature, the way nature is gendered reproduces the power relations and the patriarchal discourses of conquest in the making of the American nation. The fantasy recreates the hierarchical binary of man/woman and culture/nature, and establishes both woman and nature as the passive recipients of man’s acts of control. Man’s “experience” of nature is to subject it to his will, and reshape it in the image that he

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desires, just as woman is there to be conquered by man. As Kolodny goes on to observe, while other cultures have also positioned nature as subordinate, “only in America has the entire process remained within historical memory, giving Americans the unique ability to see themselves as the willful exploiters of the very land that once promised an escape from such necessities.”16 This creates a vocabulary of everyday reality,17 Kolodny notes, which constantly reproduces and institutionalizes the gendering of the land as feminine, and which relegates nature and woman to a position secondary to man. It is these relations that Smiley uncovers in her text, making A Thousand Acres an ecofeminist rewriting of the American nation-making. Tracing the family history of the Cooks over the generations, Smiley exposes the ways in which both the land and the female body are victimized by the paternalistic discourses of ownership and industrialization. The soil is poisoned with farming chemicals and so are the women’s bodies; as the land is tamed with the invasive methods of industrial agriculture, so are the women condemned to silence. This parallel subordination of the land and the female body as a nation-making strategy constitutes the main dramatic conflict of the novel, and it also establishes a vantage point from which Smiley deploys her political critique.

Finding a Female Language Ginny, as the narrator of the novel, stands at the center of this conflict. Throughout the novel, Ginny struggles to liberate herself from the language of ownership. But this is not easy as her horizon is defined by acreages and ownership, and it is this language that has been inscribed on her body and soul from her childhood onwards. Ginny also wants to cling to the delusive feeling of security she felt as a child when they were riding in their Buick, which was unseen among farmers then and therefore was another ostentation of ownership. Looking at the other farms and seeing that Cooks’ work was farther progressed, that the Cook buildings were in better condition, in short, that what they owned was more and better than what others owned, Ginny embeds herself in a false sense of immunity. Though she will have to acknowledge later on that they all had a very limited view of the world then and will ask herself quite often whether she had faced all the facts, for a long time she still chooses not to tear down the good appearances of her farming family. She knows that once the language of this paternal ownership disappears, their lives will have to change radically, and she will have to recreate herself outside the discourses of ownership within which she has until now defined herself.

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Larry, this seemingly omniscient patriarch, suffers the same paradox that Ginny does: having established for himself no identity other than ownership in his household, he exists only as long as he owns. He is not a caring, protective father or a loving husband, but he is the one who owns his wife and daughters as he owns his land. The discourse of ownership being the only space in which he can exist, his notion of self is fundamentally shaken when he incorporates his farm. Ironically, his intention in dividing the farm is none other than spreading the ownership more by avoiding heavy taxation. Larry, fully confident in his patriarchal supremacy, does not understand that a legal contract could change his privileged status, which is primordial for him. Therefore, his realization that he is no longer the owner completely destroys his sense of being, and he gradually goes mad. His madness reaches its climax in the lawsuit scene toward the end of the novel, since it is at this point that Larry’s hopes to reclaim his ownership are terminated. It is significant that Larry’s madness reaches its climax at the lawsuit scene, while King Lear’s madness reaches its climax in the storm scene. With such a shift, Smiley suggests another dynamic of the contemporary American life: the storm in King Lear is now replaced by the stormy trials at the courts, which have become the forces that determine the fate of individuals, as opposed to the natural forces of Lear’s time. From early on in the novel, Ginny is aware of the illusion, of the veiled fact that good appearances of the family are held at the cost of the individualities of its members, and the maintenance of paternal ownership is prioritized over everything else. And though both the society and her own weakness bind her within the image of the good, dutiful daughter, she still tries to establish a life away from the scrutiny of the paternal gaze. Her secret project of trying to get pregnant despite her three former miscarriages is her attempt to recreate her self and to celebrate the full potential of her body, which had been tamed to be predictable just like the land: One of the many profits of this private project, I thought at the time, was that it showed me a whole secret world, a way to have two lives, to be two selves. I felt larger and more various than I had in years, full of unknowns, and also of untapped possibilities. In fact, I was more hopeful after the two last miscarriages than I had been after the first.18

Yet Ginny is in a paradox here, repeating the patriarchal discourses in her very attempt to rebel against them. Much as she sees an assertion of subjectivity in these secret pregnancies, what she rather wants is acknowledgment by the society and by her father: she knows that she is

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blamed for failing to produce the next generation that would preserve the farm and that would go on inscribing and spreading the ownership of the family across lands. At this stage, she is still in the grip of the patriarchal culture that seeds guilt in the female, and not yet adequately equipped with a language and consciousness that would liberate her from this guilt. Jess appears in the novel as an alternative male figure who could offer Ginny a vent in this system. He seems very different from the other males of the farm in that he is liberal, vegetarian and supports organic farming. Moreover, he is also a victim of the American Grand Narratives, the very system of ownership extended to the larger plane of nation-making. Sent to Vietnam to fight in a war for a cause he does not understand, he is displaced by both his country and his family, and rebels against this victimization. In this respect, Jess seems to suggest that he will not be the tyrannical male figure who eradicates every story other than his own, and Ginny immediately identifies herself with him: she thinks of him all the time, watches every move he makes, believing that he knows all the things she has been waiting all her life to learn,19 and is finally sexually involved with him. Jess acknowledges her as a sexual being and praises her body, while the society reduces her sexuality to reproduction. This is a new stage for Ginny who could never touch her body without an intermediary washcloth, and she begins to think that through Jess, she will enjoy another private project that will bring out the potential in her. However, Jess eventually finds it easier to employ the prevalent paternalistic language than to rebel against it, as it gives him a privileged position. He confesses that he is too American to be content with a bowl and a robe, implying that he will soon repeat the politics of conquest, possession, and control. His involvement with both Ginny and Rose is indicative of his desire to access the language of ownership. As the female body is associated with the land, Jess’ relationship with the two women enables him to define and inscribe his masculine dominance over the land, and relocates him in the society from which, ironically, he had detached himself. It is the matrilinear heritage, the water that restlessly continues to move under the tamed soil, that Ginny needs to free herself from the patriarchal language and history. She turns to Edith, her grandmother and the first female ancestor in Zebulon County. But it is very hard to follow the traces of Edith’s story in the making of Zebulon County, as her only function in the process was to facilitate the exchange and expansion of land by virtue of marriage, without being able to retain an identity of her own:

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Edith was reputed to be a silent woman, who died herself in 1938 at the age of forty-three years old. My grandfather, a youthful fifty-nine by then, outlived her by eight more years. I used to wonder what she thought of him, if her reputed silence wasn’t due to temperament at all, but due to fear. She was surrounded by men she had known all her life, by the great plate of land they cherished. She didn’t drive a car. Possibly she had no money of her own. That detail went unrevealed by the stories.20

As the industrial farming methods silence soil, they also eradicate the body associated with it: all the women of Zebulon County die early because of the side-effects of the chemical methods, thus being literally and figuratively absented from life. Ginny remembers how the death of her mother had no effect on Larry, who went on “spreading himself more widely over the landscape. No aspect of his plans was undermined, put off, questioned.”21 Larry also hinders the mother from establishing a connection with her daughters, forcing her to take his side against them: “There’s only one side here,”22 he shouts at her one day when she attempts to protect Ginny from him. Larry uses the mother as an agent in implementing his dominance in the house. Being thus an extension of the father’s image, the mother is forced to employ an impersonal, mechanical attitude towards her daughters, and is absented from their memories as a female role-model. However, it will be another woman, Mary Livingstone, a minor yet significant character in the novel, who will imply to Ginny that her mother was not the unaffectionate, impersonal parent she thought her to be, but in fact was forced to behave the way she did. Ironically, Mary Livingstone is the person who took away her mother’s belongings after her death, eternally erasing her from the house: she, like the mother, is forced to become an agent of patriarchy in the victimization of the female. She tells Ginny about her mother’s dreams for her, how she hoped that Ginny would liberate herself from the farm and get a new life, and how she was worried about her because Ginny is not strong enough to stand up to Larry—what Mary Livingstone wants to imply here is Larry’s sexual abuse, but she cannot find in herself the courage to bring it out into the open. Ginny is surprised to hear all this, and maybe for the first time realizes that her mother had personal, motherly feelings for her. Still, she finds it hard to think about her mother: swimming in the pool, she tries to remember the female language associated with the water, but as industrial agriculture, the embodiment of American dream, has drained the ponds and replaced them with artificial pools, patriarchy in the farm has drained the female heritage.

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Bound by the dilemmas that patriarchy places her in, Ginny can define herself only in relation to a man, and she is visible in the house only if she complies with servitude: “My job remained what it had always been—to give him what he asked of me, and if he showed discontent, to try to find out what would please him.”23 This servitude erases all the language that she can use to assert her voice, and throws her into amnesia: “When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it.”24 As Ginny gradually realizes that the Grand Narrative of the American farm inscribes its history on the amnesia of the female, she wants to dig out the female narratives buried under the ground: in wanting to become her mother’s biographer and write a life for her, Ginny actually wants to write for herself a life that is liberated from the male gaze. But Ginny has not yet acquired the language that could undo this amnesia, and she turns to Rose for answers. Ginny yearns to be like Rose, who can retain a language of her own and thus can write a biography for their mother, while Ginny finds it hard to even think about her. In Rose’s biography, the mother is able to escape from the victimizing farm and she takes on an assumed name. She works as a waitress at a restaurant and lives in a house that belongs to her and not to the father or the husband; and one day, she will certainly come back to rescue her daughters. Ginny, unable to write such a narrative, identifies Rose with their mother and dreams that the mother would reincarnate in Rose and reestablish a matrilinear heritage. That is why, though Rose is involved with Jess toward the end of the novel and Ginny plans to poison her, she is never emotionally detached from her, and significantly, after she leaves Zebulon, she repeats the narrative Rose had written for their mother: she takes up a job as a waitress, rents a house of her own, and comes back for Pammy and Linda, whom she had always hoped were her own children. Rose, the daughter who does not care about keeping up the good appearances, gradually brings Ginny out of the amnesia she is buried in: she forces Ginny to remember Larry’s sexual abuse, which Ginny had suppressed and forgotten. Ginny rejects the idea of sexual abuse for a long time, since it is easier for her to be “Rose’s sympathetic supporter than her fellow victim,”25 and to cling to the comforting feeling of immunity. She is not yet strong enough to admit the extent of her victimization, but she is aware that if she can find out more about her mother, she can find out more about herself. She realizes that “Daddy’s departure opened up the possibility of finding my [her] mother,”26 and she finally finds the courage to go back to the mother’s closet in search of a female history. The closet, a typical symbol for vagina, does retain a history of the mother. The

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dresses hidden there reveal that the mother had an identity other than being a farmer’s wife: high-heeled shoes, hats, corsages, and skirts all suggest a femininity that was repressed under an apron after she married Larry. Rose and Ginny as kids love to play with their mother’s dresses in the hidden space of the closet; this limited space gives them the only opportunity to identify with a part of their mother’s self from which they have been estranged. It is in this sense significant that the mother, who makes sure that what is hers is hers and not the daughters’, allows the girls to play with the dresses as they like: she does not want her daughters to identify with her as a farmer’s wife, but suggests to them the possibility of a feminine self to be dug out of the closet. And Ginny, having now searched for her mother’s story, will be able to recover from her amnesia: after she leaves her mother’s closet, she begins to prepare a bed for Jess, in the bedroom where she used to sleep when she was a child. Lying in her old bed, where Jess would be lying down, the remembrance of Larry’s sexual abuse suddenly comes to her. She realizes how the “desperate limp inertia” came to dominate all her life, estranging her from her female body: “One thing Daddy took from me when he came to me in my room at night was the memory of my body.”27 There is a clear parallelism between Larry’s sexual abuse and his treatment of his land: he sees both as his possession on which he can exercise any act. As he abuses his daughters, he poisons his land with chemical farming products, and in each case, the goal is to erase the memory of his object in order to recreate it in the way he desires. This remembrance marks for Ginny the final stage of detachment from the farm and the family, and she deserts the house. The scene of desertion is a significant one: just as the memories of sexual abuse, which have been coiling in her psyche for a long time, suddenly come to the surface, her decision to leave the house is spontaneous. She leaves the potatoes boiling on the stove, takes some money from Ty, and walks out of the door: she no longer cares to keep up the good appearances of a farmer’s wife who never leaves any housework incomplete, and does not take recourse in the illusive feeling of security and immunity. When, after a couple of years, Ty comes to the city where Ginny settled to get a divorce and accuses Ginny of tearing apart the grand history of the farm, Ginny’s reply is significant in that it proves her realization of how, as females, they have been absented from this “grand” history: When ‘we’ bought the first tractor in the country, when ‘we’ built the big house, when ‘we’ had the crops sprayed from the air.…when ‘we’ got a hundred and seventy-two bushels an acre. I can remember all of that like

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Ironically, the farm that Larry appropriated to repeat the American politics of ownership becomes prey to the very mechanisms of these politics. The business in the farm is at stake because Ty cannot manage the farm on his own after the death of Rose’s husband, and he cannot find workers who would work on a daily payment, since “men who worked but did not own, were gone from the country by 1979,”29 as a consequence of the Land Ordinance. Marv Carson, who represents the American capitaloriented thinking, says at the court that “the idea of being debt-free is a very old-fashioned one.”30 Debt has become a fashionable attitude that keeps the American economy going, since it facilitates the exchange of ownership between hands. And finally, the farm becomes the object of this exchange. As the grid system removed the farmers who worked but did not own, the capital-oriented system removes the family business and the Cook farm is taken over by the Heartland Corporation, the representative of the new system of the expansion of capital. Ginny’s struggle has been to reach the water beneath the soil, to attain the mysterious currents within which flows the knowledge of her subjectivity. But when she dissolves this mystery, she will have to bear the pain of knowledge and see that remembering is harder than forgetting; the farm that she has absented will not absent itself from her memory and will be her inheritance. Molecules of all poisons that flow in her veins and that have penetrated her DNA, the memories of her dead babies that are revived whenever she sees children, the pain of Larry’s belt on her skin, the mother’s closet, the ponds, Rose, Jess, Ty…the farm that she has deserted continues to live within her. Thus, the novel leaves the reader with a tone that is pessimist if not desperate. That Linda and Pammy take after their parents and that Linda is interested in the food conglomeration leads the reader to infer that the whole cycle is going to be repeated on a larger level: this time not by the industrialized family farms, but by the nationwide agricultural companies such as the Heartland Corporation. The hope in Ginny’s acquisition of a female consciousness is thus maimed: the water has come to the surface,

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but is yet to face other barriers in a country that grows to possess the largest capital in the world.

Notes 1

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991), 16. Ibid., 104. 3 Schiff, James. “Contemporary Retellings.” Contemporary Fiction, Vol.39, No. 4 (Summer 1998): 367-381. Schiff quotes Jon Anderson from “Author Finds Ample Fodder in Rural Midwest” (Chicago Tribune: 24 November 1991: C1, C3). 4 William Conlogue, Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 5. 5 As Conlogue goes on to observe, there is a very strong correlation between the way the English language dominates the world and the American industrial agriculture dominates the world food production (Conlogue, 5). 6 Ibid., 20. 7 Ibid., 160-162. 8 U.S. Dept. of the Interior Bureau of Land Management http://www.blm.gov/, (accessed November 20, 2003). 9 Conlogue, 161. 10 Neil, Nakadate, Understanding Jane Smiley (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 157. 11 Ibid., 159. 12 Smiley, 4. 13 Ibid., 123. 14 Ibid., 45. 15 Kolodny, Annette. “Unearthing Herstory,” in the Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 171. 16 Ibid., 175. 17 Ibid., 176. 18 Smiley, 26. 19 Ibid., 69. 20 Ibid., 132-133. 21 Ibid., 136. 22 Ibid., 183. 23 Ibid., 115. 24 Ibid., 176. 25 Ibid., 230. 26 Ibid., 225. 27 Ibid., 280. 28 Ibid., 342-343. 29 Ibid., 309. 30 Ibid., 325. 2

CHAPTER SIX SILENCE AS RESISTANCE: AN ECOFEMINIST READING OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT’S “A WHITE HERON” ROB BRAULT

During the nineteenth century, many Americans’ attitudes shifted, from an assumption that wilderness was raw material to be transformed as expeditiously as possible, to a conviction that supposedly pristine wilderness areas ought to be preserved permanently. These ideas about wilderness still dominate mainstream environmentalism. Although these positive attitudes toward wilderness represented a step forward in terms of our understandings of the interactions between human and nonhuman nature, in light of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century understandings of ecology and feminism, these ideas of wilderness are too restrictive. An ecofeminist reading attempts to illustrate the limitations that contemporary readers must recognize and suggests alternatives to the views of wilderness as presented in traditional nature writing. Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” presents a conflict between Sylvia, who dwells in and belongs to a particular landscape, and a young ornithologist who spends his vacation bagging new birds for his collection, much as a modern tourist might brag of the destinations he has visited: been there, done that, got the tee-shirt. His desire to find and kill the white heron contrasts sharply with Sylvia’s relationship with the wild creatures of her home. Jewett’s images of a reciprocal relationship with the landscape emphasize that it depends on long term, practical experience with one’s locale. Unfortunately, these relationships can be destroyed by outsiders who seek to extract some value from the landscape while refusing to give anything back to the ecological and social communities that support them in their travels. The exploitation of class and gender

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hierarchies enables the exploitation of nonhuman nature. As an ecofeminist literary critic, I see “A White Heron” as a nineteenth-century alternative to the “wilderness preservation” paradigm that has dominated both traditional nature writing and mainstream environmentalism.1 In “A White Heron,” the ornithologist justifies his exploitation of Sylvia and her relationship with her home by classifying the heron as a rarity in that particular region, an artificial and arbitrary distinction that justifies killing the heron. Sylvia’s ultimate response to this attempted exploitation is resistance, and her power to resist the outsider’s exploitation lies in a particularly passive form of resistance – silence. The very silence that is originally “proper” behavior within the context of the gender and class distinctions of her time becomes her best means of resisting the hierarchy that objectifies both herself and the heron. Even as traditional nature writers2 praised wilderness as an escape from the industrial, materialist society of their day, they promoted the consumption of wilderness for aesthetic, spiritual, and recreational purposes. These views of wilderness, which have become immensely popular and continue to exert an enormous influence on contemporary debates about conflicting land uses, often destroyed the close relationships previous inhabitants enjoyed with the wild lands they viewed as “home.” For example, the first and most famous national parks in the United States, Yellowstone and Yosemite, both required military intervention to remove the indigenous peoples who lived there.3 As William Cronon explains, “The removal of Indians to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’— uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place—reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is.”4 In these and other examples of wilderness ‘preservation,’ indigenous peoples watched their homes become wilderness areas protected from them and protected for someone else, usually someone whose daily lifestyle necessitated the destruction of the wilderness they professed to love. “Ecofeminism” began as a grass-roots movement whose activists work to eliminate the oppression of women and nature. Many environmental activists have demonstrated how deforestation, desertification, famine, and the consumption and pollution of water sources impact women, children, and people of color far more than they impact those individuals (mostly affluent white males and their families) who most profit from those practices which degrade humanity’s habitat.5 In the view of Karen J. Warren and Jim Cheney, ecofeminist philosophy regards the domination of nature and the domination of women as inextricably linked at the theoretical level. They point out how “much of ecofeminist scholarship

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concerns the ethical nature of human relationships to the nonhuman natural world.”6 Although she does not use the term “ecofeminism,” Carolyn Merchant, a feminist historian, offers an ecological-feminist perspective on the scientific revolution: Feminist history in the broadest sense requires that we look at history with egalitarian eyes, seeing it anew from the viewpoint not only of women but also of social and racial groups and the natural environment, previously ignored as the underlying resources on which Western culture and its 7 progress have been built.

Examining literature with such “egalitarian eyes” is the goal of ecofeminist literary critics. According to Patrick Murphy, for a literary critic, an ecofeminist approach means questioning traditional literary standards based solely on “humanistic criteria” and exploring criteria that seek to recognize nonhuman value and interests.8 One particular area ecofeminist (and deconstructionist) critics interrogate is conceptual dichotomies that assume, explicitly or implicitly, that one half of the dichotomy is superior and deserves to dominate the other. Examples of such dichotomies include: male/female, culture/nature, intellectual/physical (sensual), scientific/spiritual, universal/particular, individual/community, and virgin/whore. In each of these instances, the first term is generally presumed to be better, perhaps because such a hierarchy justifies the actions and values of a patriarchal society. In “A White Heron,” the ornithologist embodies patriarchal assumptions of class and gender privilege. He views women as domestic workers, caretakers for his recreational needs and desires. His treatment of Sylvia and the white heron is an attempt to dominate and commodify nonhuman nature and woman as “natural resources,” and embodies an assumption that local, intimate, or instinctive knowledge (woman = nature) must serve the needs of universal, scientifically disciplined, or organized knowledge (man = culture). Thus, Sylvia and her relationships with and understandings of her fellow creatures have value only if they suit his acquisitive ends. The revelation of Sylvia’s relationship with the animals and plants of her home begins with her errand to fetch the family cow, who wears a large bell to aid her seekers, but has learned that “if one stood perfectly still it would not ring.” This lesson will become very important. Despite the cow’s skill in avoiding detection and in delaying the return homeward, she is still referred to as a “valued companion.” 9 Just as Sylvia values the cow and makes allowances for its waywardness, Mrs. Tilley, Sylvia’s grandmother, is “thankful ... that she had Sylvia, nowadays, to give such

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valuable assistance.” Also, she “suspected that Sylvia loitered occasionally on her own account; there never was such a child for straying about outof-doors since the world was made!”10 These parallels, between humannonhuman and grandmother-granddaughter, emphasize the sense that these ‘animals’ share a long-term relationship based on mutual dependence and tolerance. In the darkening woods, the “companions” adapt to each other, with “the cow taking slow steps and the child very fast ones” to stay together. As she walks along, Sylvia “listen[s] to the thrushes with a heart that beat fast with pleasure,” and Jewett builds on this sense of pleasure in the company of songbirds: “There was a stirring in the great boughs overhead. They were full of little birds and beasts that seemed to be wide awake, and going about their world, or else saying good-night to each other in sleepy twitters. Sylvia herself felt sleepy as she walked along.”11 Blurring the boundaries between the human and nonhuman, Jewett casts the birds in human, domestic images. There is a sense of Sylvia’s sharing in the daily patterns of life with the creatures that, like Sylvia and her grandmother, make their homes in this patch of forest. The experience is pleasant, and the darkness “made her feel as if she were a part of the gray shadows and the moving leaves.”12 This sense of domestic comfort, of sharing home, activities, and feelings, reappears several times as the story continues. Next comes the narrative hook, and the narrative shifts from past to present tense: “Suddenly this little woods-girl is horror-stricken to hear a clear whistle not very far away. Not a bird’s-whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a boy’s whistle, determined, and somewhat aggressive.”13 The comparison emphasizes the difference between the friendly bird in the woods and an aggressive boy Sylvia remembers from “the crowded manufacturing town” where she used to live,14 and it also sets up the sexual tension that will complicate, even threaten, Sylvia’s relationship with her home in the woods. While some men see whistling at women as a compliment, women often see the act as a form of aggression and objectification. This whistle introduces the ornithologist, whom Jewett first names, “The enemy.” Despite Sylvia’s fear, which should have been obvious from the way she abandons the cow and tries to hide in the bushes, the ornithologist addresses her in “a very cheerful and persuasive tone,”15 then falls in beside her as she continues with the cow. With the easy friendliness of someone who expects to be welcomed without question, the “stranger said kindly, ‘ ... I have lost my way, and need a friend very much. Don't be afraid,’ he added gallantly. ‘Speak up and tell me what your name is, and whether you think I can spend the night at your house,

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and go out gunning early in the morning’.”16 The stranger is cheerful, kind, and gallant, but Sylvia is still frightened of him. The prospect of his accompanying her to the farm alarms her, and she fears her grandmother’s reaction. The stranger asks again for Sylvia’s name, which she reluctantly supplies, but never names himself. This introduction sets a pattern whereby the man will demand more than he offers, with the blithe assumptions that his desires are beyond question and that women should be expected to provide for his recreational needs with cheerful alacrity. Jewett emphasizes the stranger’s status as an outsider when the trio reaches the farm, for Sylvia “knew by instinct that her grandmother did not comprehend the gravity of the situation. She must be mistaking the stranger for one of the farmer-lads of the region.”17 The man’s selfconfidence and insistence continue to dominate his behavior, and after planting his gun and game bag by the door, almost like a traveler depositing luggage in a room, he bluntly invites himself to spend the night: “‘Put me anywhere you like;’ he said. ‘I must be off early in the morning before day; but I am very hungry, indeed. You can give me some milk at any rate, that's plain’.” The man clearly assumes their hospitality will support him, and his own interests are all that concern him. He is “very hungry” and demands food, but he doesn’t offer to share the contents of his “lumpy game-bag.” 18 He points out her ability to provide milk and phrases his ‘request’ in a way that makes it impossible for Mrs. Tilley to refuse without seeming deliberately inhospitable, pre-empting any attempt by Mrs. Tilley to beg off because of insufficient means. Although Mrs. Tilley warns the man that “You might fare better if you went out to the main road a mile or so,” she insists that he is “welcome to what we’ve got,” and promptly sets out to milk the cow and in other ways provide for her sudden guest’s comfort.19 As his host describes her offerings, the ornithologist “listen[s] eagerly to the old woman's quaint talk, [and] he watche[s] Sylvia’s pale face and shining gray eyes with ever growing enthusiasm” as Mrs. Tilley tells of her family’s relationship to this tiny farm and the surrounding forest.20 Mrs. Tilley exclaims, “There ain't a foot o' ground she don't know her way over, and the wild creaturs [sic] counts her one o’ themselves.” The ornithologist’s selfish interest in this close relationship is apparent in his reaction to Mrs. Tilley’s revelation of Sylvia’s skills and of the loss of five of her six children: “The guest did not notice this hint of family sorrows in his eager interest in something else.” That something else is Sylvia’s intimate knowledge of birds, which is exactly what the outsider needs. He proudly informs his hosts that he is “making a collection of birds” and has “been at it ever since [he] was a boy.”21 The obvious implication here is

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that this pastime is a wholesome, vaguely scientific activity blessed with youthful enthusiasm; another connotation is that this man has never outgrown his immature need for a trophy. As Thoreau claims in Walden, although hunting was an ideal introduction to nonhuman nature, “No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature.”22 Perhaps this connection to the innocence of childhood and the word “collection” lead Mrs. Tilley to ask, doubtfully, “Do you cage ‘em up?” 23 since it is obvious that he does not hunt for food. The young man replies that “they’re stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them,” and that he has “shot or snared every one [him]self.”24 These are clearly trophies of the man’s skill in dominating nonhuman nature. As Aldo Leopold explains in A Sand County Almanac, “The trophy ... is a certificate. It attests that its owner has been somewhere and done something–that he has exercised skill, persistence, or discrimination in the age-old feat of overcoming, outwitting, or reducingto-possession.”25 It is this selfish desire to complete his collection that causes him to ignore the “hint of family sorrows” and focus on what he can get from Sylvia. He tells the women about his quest for the “little white heron ... with the hope of discovering that the rare bird was one of her acquaintances.”26 George Held identifies “the exploitation in the relationship: in exchange for supper and lodging, the guest provides merely the entertainment of a stranger to the isolated and his charm, while all the time plotting to use his hosts in his quest to collect the heron,”27 which will become the crowning achievement of his vacation. The mere name of the heron is not enough, for Sylvia is busy “watching a hop-toad in the narrow footpath” and fails to respond to his gambit. When he offers details about the bird’s appearance and nesting habits, however, Sylvia knows exactly what he is talking about: “Sylvia's heart gave a wild beat; she knew that strange white bird.”28 Even as Sylvia realizes she knows of the bird the ornithologist desires, he makes his offer: ten dollars to anyone who leads him to the heron’s nest.29 That this offer is significant to Sylvia is clear from her distraction from the animal she has been perusing: the hop toad. When the ornithologist talks about the heron by name, Sylvia ignores him and watches the toad. Once the idea of ten dollars enters her mind, she “still watche[s] the toad,” but she is “not divining, as she might have done at some calmer time, that the creature wished to get to its hole under the door-step, and was much hindered by the unusual spectators at that hour of the evening.”30 Once again, Jewett refers to the domestic needs of animals, but in this instance the sense of shared behaviors and feelings is missing. The first mention of trading an

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animal for money begins the emotional separation from nonhuman nature with which Sylvia will struggle at the story’s climax. As Louis Renza points out, ten dollars certainly won’t make Sylvia and her grandmother rich,31 but to Sylvia the amount represents unimaginable wealth: “No amount of thought, that night, could decide how many wished-for treasures the ten dollars, so lightly spoken of, would buy.”32 Whether the amount is significant or not, money obviously has a pernicious influence in the story. Held asserts, “the ornithologist introduces into a subsistence economy the instrumentality of money. Perhaps no other element of his determination to secure the heron as a specimen more bespeaks his alien presence at the farm and suggests the possibility of corruption from without than his proffer of the ten dollars.”33 Speaking from a Marxist-informed point of view, Renza points out that the ornithologist’s proclaimed desire “To ‘spend’ his ‘vacation’ searching for the heron suggests his ideological propensity to view others, Mrs. Tilley, Sylvia and even himself, in terms of capitalistic or abstract labor relationships.”34 While the ornithologist can easily specify his price, the determination of value will be much more challenging for Sylvia. On the following day, Sylvia and the ornithologist spend the day looking for birds. Even though she can’t “understand why he kill[s[ the very birds he seem[s] to like so much,” Sylvia is attracted to him. She “watche[s] the young man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so charming and delightful; the woman’s heart, asleep in the child, [is] vaguely thrilled by a dream of love.”35 The phrase “dream of love,” suggests that Sylvia is too innocent, too naive to understand love as anything more than a dream, an ideal. It is “Some premonition of that great power” rather than that power itself, which “stirred and swayed these young creatures who traversed the solemn woodlands with soft-footed silent care.” The hunt for the heron continues, with “the young man going first and Sylvia following, fascinated, a few steps behind, with her gray eyes dark with excitement.”36 Although he hopes that Sylvia knows of the heron’s nest, the man plays leader for the day, perhaps to convince her that he is worth having as a friend, that he deserves her assistance in his quest. This behavior illuminates some of the binary opposites that accompany a dichotomous view of the world: being male and having expertise as a bird-“collector” is clearly better than being female and having intimate local knowledge. Intimacy and female-ness are closer to nature, more physical, and less intellectual, less capable of doing what is rational, what is “right.” Sylvia’s meek acceptance of her subsidiary role is not merely a socially appropriate response for a girl in the nineteenth century, however.

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Rather, it creates the narrative possibility for Sylvia’s passive resistance against the expectations of the man who assumes she will help him. Sylvia “grieve[s] because the longed-for white heron [is] elusive”;37 so at some level, she wants the ornithologist to succeed. However, “she did not lead the guest, she only followed, and there was no such thing as speaking first. The sound of her own unquestioned voice would have terrified her—it was hard enough to answer yes or no when there was need of that.”38 As Held explains, Sylvia’s “socialization as a girl, ironically, saves her from revealing the bird and therefore betraying her world to this intruder. For if Sylvia were a boy, or if the element of romantic attraction were eliminated, she could quite readily speak up and take the lead.”39 Although Sylvia does not yet actually have the precise information that would allow her to lead the ornithologist to his quarry, as Held implies, her silence, which I agree is based on her sense of propriety, is crucial to the story, both for prolonging Sylvia’s conflict and for foreshadowing Sylvia’s eventual decision and her method of responding to the young man’s attempt to exploit her expertise for his own ends. Because of her familiarity with the forest around her home, Sylvia might discover the secret knowledge that is so important to the young man she admires: “What fancied triumph and delight and glory for the later morning when she could make known the secret! It was almost too real and too great for the childish heart to bear.”40 It wouldn’t be enough to know; the “triumph” would result from revealing her hard-won secrets to the ornithologist, who would reward her with his money and attention, possibly even his affection. That night, Sylvia resolves to climb a towering pine that overlooks the marsh where she had once seen the heron. Once again, Jewett emphasizes Sylvia’s close relationship with nonhuman nature by using avian imagery. The door to the house is left wide open all night, indicating the family’s sense of security from danger, and whippoorwills fly in and sing “upon the very step,” so that the boundary between human and nonhuman is not a barrier, but a threshold. Sylvia’s signal to depart comes when the whippoorwills cease their singing, and as she heads for the pine, she listens “with a sense of comfort and companionship to the drowsy twitter of a half-awakened bird, whose perch she had jarred in passing.”41 Once again, the human and the nonhuman live side by side, and the ideas of domesticity and wildness are not diametric opposites. Sylvia’s relationship with nonhuman nature is in danger, however, for Jewett warns of the approaching risks that accompany Sylvia’s decision to share her secret with the ornithologist: “Alas, if the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull little life should sweep

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away the satisfactions of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest!”42 The sentence is challenging to interpret because of its characterization of Sylvia’s life as dull but still offering satisfactions. In light of Sylvia’s dislike of her former life in the city, perhaps the excitement and allure of the “great wave of human interest” are the products of a naive imagination inspired by her “dream of love.” If she does share her secret with the ornithologist, he will undoubtedly kill the heron, give Sylvia the ten dollars, and then leave her, still in the forest, knowing she has betrayed the land’s intimate secrets to one who took what he wanted and then left. Sylvia climbs to the summit of the pine tree at dawn. Once again, the narrative voice shifts to present tense, but this time it also directly addresses the protagonist: Now look down again, Sylvia, where the green marsh is set among the shining birches and dark hemlocks; there where you saw the white heron once you will see him again; look, look! a white spot of him like a single floating feather comes up from the dead hemlock and grows larger, and rises, and comes close at last, and goes by the landmark pine with steady sweep of wing and outstretched slender neck and crested head. And wait! wait! do not move a foot or a finger little girl, do not send an arrow of light and consciousness from your two eager eyes, for the heron has perched on a pine bough not far beyond yours, and cries back to his mate on the nest and plumes his feathers for the new day!43

Despite the narrator’s explicit warning that Sylvia’s link to nonhuman nature will be lost if she chooses a relationship with the ornithologist rather than with the birds and trees of her home, the narrator still wants Sylvia to see the heron, to achieve her goal. In a sense, the narrator wants Sylvia to gain a “trophy” of a sort, in that she gains something that demonstrates her skill, determination, and specialized knowledge. At this point, nine-year-old Sylvia has accomplished a goal that has eluded the adult ornithologist for years—a better understanding of a rare and elusive species. As Sylvia finally sees the heron, the narrator admonishes her to maintain her invisibility—the heron must not know that she is there. She has reached a more intimate relationship with the birds of the forest than ever, but that intimacy depends on the heron’s ignorance of being observed. This is not mere voyeurism, but an intriguing puzzle in the relations between human and nonhuman nature. Field ecologists note that it is often difficult to observe a situation in the field without somehow altering that situation merely by being there. Animals act “natural” only when humans are not around or are not detectable. If the animals know the

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human is there, they react; they watch, they flee, they attack, they beg for food, etc. As close as Sylvia has come to the heron’s secret life, she can’t cross this divide; the heron must remain unaware of its observer, unconscious of its relationship with this gentle human. If she reveals her presence, Sylvia will end up altering the heron’s behavior, probably driving it away. The secret she desires must be taken by stealth; it can not be a conscious gift from the heron. As she climbs down the pine, Sylvia is already thinking of the response she will receive when she demonstrates her expertise, “[w]ondering over and over again what the stranger would say to her and what he would think when she told him how to find his way straight to the heron's nest.” Having gained the heron’s secret, Sylvia is eager for the approval she expects from the ornithologist; she fully intends to sell out the heron for the stranger’s ten dollars. Back at the farm, the ornithologist looks forward to acquiring the heron: “He was sure from the way the shy little girl looked once or twice yesterday that she had at least seen the white heron, and now she must really be made to tell.”44 This phrase, “must be made to tell,” emphasizes the outsider’s egocentric approach to interacting with nature (both human and nonhuman) and his willingness to violate both Sylvia’s intimacy with the forest and her sense of a possible intimacy with him. His own desire is the standard of value by which any “other,” any living entity outside of himself, is measured. The heron’s value is as a rarity for his collection, and Sylvia’s value is her ability to aid him in acquiring the bird. When Sylvia returns, the narrative shifts once again to the present tense. Bedraggled from her adventure in the pine, she stands before her grandmother and the stranger, and the ultimate decision is at hand. Sylvia knows the secret for which the man will pay, and “the splendid moment has come to speak of the dead hemlock-tree by the green marsh.”45 But then, despite the “appealing eyes” of the ornithologist, Sylvia does not say a word.46 Sylvia faces a wrenching choice between her sense of closeness with the heron and her attraction to the young man as well as to his money. In Sylvia’s mind, “He can make them rich with money; he has promised it, and they are poor now. He is so well worth making happy.”47 This first idea, that he can make her family rich, is obviously the perception of an inexperienced young girl; ten dollars seems like a huge amount, but it is not going to transform her family’s life. Readers can easily see that her expectations regarding wealth will not be met, and they can just as easily see that the next idea is equally ridiculous. Is the young man really worth making happy? What would be the outcome of Sylvia’s revelation? Surely

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Sylvia’s “dream of love” would end with the ornithologist killing the heron and taking its corpse back to his collection in the city. He is on vacation, which means his “real” life is back in the city. He certainly isn’t going to take a nine-year-old girl away from her grandmother, away from her family and back to a setting in which she remembers not really being alive. After exploiting Sylvia’s intimate relationship with the forest community that is her home, the man would undoubtedly abandon any supposed relationship with the girl he no longer needed after acquiring his true goal, the dead heron. Despite her belief in what the ornithologist offers, Sylvia “must keep silence!” On the previous day, she had kept her silence because of propriety, but this time, Sylvia must resist both the expectations of hospitality and her desire to please the attractive young man. Like Mistress Moolly, the cow, Sylvia has learned the power of silence. As long as she keeps absolutely still, the way she did in the summit of the pine tree, the heron’s secret place is safe from its seekers. The narrator asks the obvious question: “What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been nine years growing and now, when the great world for the first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird's sake?”48 The incredulous tone of this question, especially the clause, “when the great world ... puts out a hand to her,” reflects Sylvia’s naive perceptions about what she would receive in exchange for her secret. As formulated, the question makes the decision seem ridiculously easy: how could she give up all this for the sake of one bird? Although Sylvia is unable to critique and thereby resist the blandishments of the ornithologist, she knows, or feels, that there is much more at stake here than the life of one bird. As she struggles to reach out to the world she hopes the man represents, “The murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away.”49 When the narrator emphasizes Sylvia’s shared experience with the heron, the offer of ten dollars seems a woefully inadequate price for a fellow living creature. Sylvia knows that, at this moment, she holds power over the heron’s life; therefore, she feels responsible for that life. Sylvia’s feeling of attachment to the heron is the culmination of her escape from the city and her developing relationship with nonhuman nature. Her sense of closeness and relatedness is not limited to the heron; rather, her experience with the heron clarifies her relationship to the landscape with which she lives. Unlike traditional nature writers, Jewett describes this personal

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closeness to nature as an individual secret, rather than something that should be shared with readers so they can visit the same places. As long as she protects the heron’s secret, Sylvia can build on her newly strengthened intimacy with nonhuman nature. She can go back and climb the tree and see the land’s particular secrets. To sacrifice the bird for the values of the town means choosing the life of the city over her new and infinitely better life on the farm in the forest. This does not mean the decision is an easy one for Sylvia to make. Jewett tells us that Sylvia second-guesses herself for days afterward, but in a way that emphasizes the discrepancy between the narrator’s view and Sylvia’s view of the situation she faced. The narrator laments for “Dear loyalty, that suffered a sharp pang as the guest went away disappointed later in the day, that could have served and followed him as a dog loves!”50 Any relationship between Sylvia and the ornithologist based on her ability to help him acquire birds would have been a one-way, exploitative one, dedicated to fulfilling his desires at the expense of hers. She would have served as his bird-dog. Sylvia’s regret for her decision is based on an incomplete version of the ornithologist’s potential relationship with her. Although his introductory whistle had frightened her, “Many a night Sylvia heard the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path as she came home with the loitering cow.”51 This is not merely a case of a young girl overcoming her fear of boys, but a case of Sylvia forgetting how the ornithologist behaved when he was with her: “She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp report of his gun and the sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood.” Sylvia has forgotten this image, but the narrator keeps it fresh in the reader’s mind, here at the very end of the story. In the next line, after renewing the bloody image of birds falling before the man’s gun, the narrator asks, “Were the birds better friends than the hunter might have been,—who can tell?”52 The reader surely can; Sylvia’s sense of lost love reflects the naive dreams of a girl too innocent to realize how impossible such dreams would be in a patriarchal culture where the object of desire must be owned and controlled, reduced to an item in the admirer’s collection. Jewett knows why Sylvia chooses the way she does, even if Sylvia does not. Sylvia stands to gain very little from any relationship with the ornithologist, and his professed love of birds is only a possessive desire for them as trophies, testaments to his knowledge and skill. Although James Audubon killed hundreds of birds for the sake of educating the public about them, Jewett’s ornithologist never makes any mention of

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education, of the heron’s value to people’s understanding of nature. Even if he had, he still would have killed the heron to educate people about it. He might preserve the knowledge of the heron, but Sylvia’s action preserves the life of the heron itself. Instead of praising the bird and pleading with the public to take action to preserve it, Jewett has Sylvia preserve the bird through her silence. The heron was well known to science and to other ornithologists; its value to him lay in its rarity in that particular region and its elusiveness, the very qualities Jewett, through Sylvia, seeks to emphasize. Sylvia’s intimacy with the heron arises from their membership in a particular ecological community. The ornithologist is not, and has no desire to be, a member of this community. Jewett created a wild but inhabited land, where family members and friends form a community that interacts with its habitat, rather than exploiting it, in contrast to the ‘empty’ wilderness whose highest purpose is to provide aesthetic and spiritual rejuvenation and recreation for privileged males on vacation. While many nineteenth-century conservationists and preservationists, such as Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, and John Muir hoped for the imposition of laws which would force humans into a more reciprocal and sustainable relationship with the land by preserving wilderness areas, Jewett envisioned characters who preserved their homes by resisting the blandishments of outsiders who seek to exploit and commodify the nonhuman nature with which the inhabitants live. Sylvia’s efforts to preserve—her resistance through silence—contrast sharply with the preservationist efforts of conventional nature writing. Thoreau and Muir gave detailed directions with the expressed intent that readers might follow in their footsteps and so come to share the author’s appreciation of and desire to preserve wild places. Both Thoreau and Muir explicitly turned away from the idea of shooting birds in order to study them, but they still sought to preserve wild places by sharing their intimate knowledge with their readers. Because people who knew about the heron would want to come see it, its opportunity for the solitary nesting site it needs would have been destroyed. As Leopold argues in A Sand County Almanac, “all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”53 The heron couldn’t be fondled. In fact, the heron couldn’t even know Sylvia was there. Traditional nature writing and many mainstream environmentalists tend to treat human presence as anathema to true beauty when it comes to wild lands. Wilderness is defined by solitude, a place where humans are only brief visitors. In “A White Heron,” however, Jewett portrays a

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character who seeks to defend a place she considers beautiful, her home, the only place she has felt safe and alive. Sylvia knows the plants and animals around her home with much greater intimacy than can be gained by a visiting tourist. Thoreau and Muir promoted tourism to places they considered beautiful in the hope that visitors would join the cause of preservation. When Jewett’s ornithologist comes to visit, however, his appreciation for wild land and wild animals depends on consuming them somehow, owning them and taking them back home with him. The land’s human inhabitants deserve consideration only in terms of how they can enable his recreational goals. As the educated outsider, he seeks to impose his value system on a community in which he does not participate. He views the family that shelters him as eccentrics in the wilderness, a place that he defines in contrast—and as an antidote—to his real life in civilization. The ornithologist, and the patriarchal society that created him, define culture/civilization as superior to nature/culture, justifying a hierarchy of domination that destroys the reciprocal relationships developed through years of living interaction. Empowered by her superior local knowledge, but threatened by the exploitative relationship the ornithologist attempts to impose upon her, Sylvia’s only method of resistance is her silence, a tactic she learned from her experiences with the family cow and with the elusive, wild, and beautiful heron of the New England forest.

Notes 1

Mainstream environmentalism focuses on preserving wilderness and tends to ignore ways in which race, class, and gender are intertwined with ecological degradation. 2 By “nature writing,” I am referring to the traditional kind of writing represented in The Norton Book of Nature Writing, eds. Robert Finch and John Elder. As literary critics of nature writing Peter Fritzell (Nature Writing and America: Essays upon a Cultural Type), Patrick Murphy (Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques), and Lawrence Buell (The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture) have explained, traditional nature writing is nonfiction, usually a journal of an individual author’s contemplation of a particular natural setting and its flora and fauna. The author’s perspective is informed by some elements of natural history or biology, and the ultimate goal is a spiritual sense of transcendent enlightenment that enables the author to return to his or her home in town feeling better for this contact with nature. John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra, Henry Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Sigurd Olson’s The Singing Wilderness, and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are examples of this tradition.

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Mark Spence, “Dispossessing the Wilderness: Yosemite Indians and the National Park Ideal, 1864-1930,” Pacific Historical Review 65.1 (1996): 38-40, 52-53. 4 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 79. 5 Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information (New York: Random House, 1992), 79; Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), 21; Vendana Shiva, “The Impoverishment of the Environment: Women and Children Last,” In Ecofeminism, by Maria Mies and Vendana Shiva (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed, 1993), 72, 75, 77-8, 81; Maggie Jones and Wangari Maathai, “Greening the Desert: Women of Kenya Reclaim Land,” In Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, eds. Léonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland (London: Women’s Press, 1983), 112; Anita Anand, “Saving Trees, Saving Lives, Third World Women and the Issue of Survival,” In Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, eds. Léonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland (London: Women’s Press, 1983), 182-4. 6 Karen J. Warren and Jim Cheney, “Ecological Feminism and Ecosystem Ecology,” Hypatia 6.1 (Spring, 1991): 179-80. 7 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper, 1980), xvi. 8 Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1995), 25. 9 Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron,” In “A White Heron” and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 1. 10 Ibid., 3. 11 Ibid., 4 12 Ibid., 4-5 13 Ibid., 5. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Ibid., 5. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 7. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 8. 21 Ibid., 9 22 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Stephen Fender (New York: Oxford UP, 1997), 191, my emphasis. 23 Jewett, “A White Heron,” 10. 24 Ibid. 25 Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), 169. 26 Jewett, “A White Heron,” 10.

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27 George Held, “Heart to Heart with Nature: Ways of Looking at ‘A White Heron’,” In Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 61. 28 Jewett, A White Heron.” 10. 29 Ibid., 11 30 Ibid., 11-12. 31 Louis A. Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984), 58. 32 Jewett, “A White Heron,” 12. 33 Held, “Heart to Heart,” 63. 34 Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question, 50. 35 Jewett, “A White Heron,” 12. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Ibid., my emphasis. 38 Ibid. 39 Held, “Heart to Heart,” 64. 40 Jewett, “A White Heron,” 15. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 19. 44 Ibid., 20. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 21. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 21-22. 52 Ibid., 22. 53 Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 101.

CHAPTER SEVEN PROPHECY, MOTHERLESSNESS, AND THE LAKE: POSTCOLONIAL ECOFEMINISM AND FLORA NWAPA’S EFURU LAURA WRIGHT (For Gay Wilentz, 1950—2006)

I don’t think that I’m a radical feminist. I don’t even accept that I’m a feminist. I accept that I’m an ordinary woman who is writing about what she knows. I try to project the image of women positively. I attempt to correct our menfolks when they started writing, when they wrote little or less about women, where their female characters are prostitutes and ne’erdo-wells. I started writing to tell them that this is not so. When I do write about women in Nigeria, in Africa, I try to paint a positive picture about women because there are many women who are very, very positive in their thinking, who are very, very independent, and very, very industrious. —Flora Nwapa, in an interview with Marie Umeh

Nigerian novelist Flora Nwapa’s ambivalence toward ascribing to the moniker of “feminist,” as evidenced by her comments to Maire Uhmeh above, illustrates the often precarious and uncharted status of the first African female novelist to publish in English as she seeks to establish a position for herself within a predominantly African male literary canon. Despite her denial of a feminist identity, however, Nwapa’s novels, beginning with her first, Efuru (1966), focus primarily on the lives of women in precolonial and postcolonial Nigerian society. These women struggle to accommodate and make sense of the conflicting expectations and stresses of both the traditional Igbo village life in Oguta (Nwapa’s birthplace) and in the westernized, “modern” urban center of Lagos. As Gay Wilentz states, Nwapa’s characters face a pronounced dilemma: “on

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the one hand they are powerful figures in traditional culture . . . yet on the other they are bound to a system of male dominance that limits their choices.”1 The dilemma discussed by Wilentz is mirrored in Nwapa’s fiction, as she transcribes into her novels the oral form of the African dilemma tale, a narrative convention that poses a dialogic question at the end of the story, thereby inviting the audience to debate possible answers. The question at the end of Efuru, “why . . . did the women worship her?”2 allows the audience to consider the potential reasons why Efuru, a beautiful and successful woman, chooses to worship Uhamiri, the goddess of Oguta Lake, a deity that requires that her worshippers remain childless. Because having children was a woman’s primary goal in traditional Igbo society, the dilemma posed at the end of Efuru provides readers with no easy answer. In this essay, I contend that one way of answering the dilemma posed by Nwapa’s narrator is to pose an ecofeminst response that examines the taboos of the goddess, dictates that prohibit fishing on certain days and that require childlessness; by choosing to worship Uhamiri, Efuru practices, on an individual level, an ethic of population control and of resource conservation. Just as Wilentz claims that Nwapa functions as a primary “foremother of modern African women’s writings,”3 Efuru eschews traditional assumptions about Igbo motherhood to embrace instead a prototypical postcolonial ecofeminism available to her through the worship of Uhamiri. To date, only one forthcoming monograph study, Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Routledge 2008), theoretically links the postcolonial and the environmental in terms of literary analysis, and such a fact illustrates the newness of this field of inquiry. Within the past decade, there has been increased attention to the role of environmentalism in the postcolonial world, as evidenced by such socio-historical texts as William Beinart and Peter Coates’s Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (1995) and, more recently, Deane Curtin’s Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World (2005). Similarly, over the past several years, there has also been an international explosion of conferences and conference panels interested in submissions from literary scholars who work in the area of environmental postcolonial study. Some of the more recent include a panel at the 15th annual British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference titled “The Ecocritical Colonization of Postcolonialism” (February 24 and 25, 2006, in Savannah, GA) and the third annual South African Literature and Ecology Colloquium (October 6-8, 2006, at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa). Another conference, Re-Routing the Postcolonial, at the University of Northampton, UK, November 4-5, 2006,

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submitted a call for papers that engage with the ways that “global capitalism . . . which redefines culture as both production and commodification, helps reroute the debate on eco-environmental issues through a new model of geopolitics.” Finally, there will be a panel titled “Postcolonial Environments” at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in December of 2008. Publications that deal with the issues these conferences hope to address are sparse, but scholars like Graham Huggan—whose essay, “Greening Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives,” in Modern Fiction Studies (2004), is perhaps the best known among them—Cheryl Lousley, Jamie S. Scott, George B. Handley, and Seodial Deena, among others, are currently publishing journal articles in this area of study. Despite this encouraging and burgeoning production of postcolonial environmental scholarship, writing that deals with the specific nuances of a nascent postcolonial ecofeminism are more or less nonexistent, and I hope that this essay will prompt further dialogue on this topic. In order to provide a ecofeminist reading of a postcolonial novel like Efuru, it is first necessary to examine the assumptions that underlie the field of ecocriticism and ecofeminism as these entities have developed in the West and then to situate Nwapa’s novel both within and outside of the current ecofeminist discourse. In her essay, “Living Interconnections Between Animals and Nature,” Greta Gaard claims that the way that women and nature have been conceptualized in the West “has resulted in devaluing whatever is associated with women, emotion, animals, and nature, while simultaneously elevating in value those things associated with men, reason, humans, culture, and the mind.”4 Similarly, in “Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection Between Women and Animals,” Lori Gruen claims that “the categories ‘woman’ and ‘animal’ serve the same symbolic function in patriarchal society.”5 In both essays, as has been the case in most of the “second-wave” ecofeminist criticism written over the past two decades, the authors speak primarily of social constructions of femininity that are applicable only in Western contexts. The patriarchy of which Gruen speaks, for example, is that of the first world and, therefore, is unconcerned with the nuances and shadings of the multi-faceted implications of patriarchy in postcolonial societies. Ecofeminist readings of non-Western, postcolonial women’s narratives are complicated by the double-bind of colonial women’s status as both female and colonized subjects in conjunction with, as Huey-Li Li claims in “A Cross-Cultural Critique of Ecofeminism,” the fact that “the woman-nature affinity” discussed by such scholars as Gaard and Gruen, “while true of Western cultures, is not a cross cultural phenomenon.”6

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The reasons for the non-correspondence of which Li speaks are various. First, “nature” in North American environmental thinking has been constructed as “wilderness.” According to Deane Curtin in Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World, the North American concept of wilderness is the product of “the urban elite imagination”7 that, when exported to postcolonial contexts, has contributed to national parks and wildlife protection areas that have benefited some endangered species. Such strategies operate in part by providing an attractive option, according to William Beinart and Peter Coates in their study Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa, “for white environmental concern because they furnish a route out of the central conservationist mentality: how to enjoy the advantage of urban-industrial society while salvaging a modicum of nature.”8 The reality, of course, is that in places like Africa, that modicum is relegated to an area behind a fence, a place that provides the illusion, according to North American novelist and environmental writer Joy Williams, that “you have entered a portion of the earth that wild animals have retained possession of. The illusion here is that wild animals exist.”9 Furthermore, reading postcolonial landscapes through a Western lens that views the concept of environmentalism as preservation of some generality known as “wilderness” undermines an examination of the myth of an uninhabited, North American landscape as something other than the product of a colonially produced genocide. In actuality, for a North American wilderness to exist, the native peoples that cluttered the imaginary landscape first had to be eradicated. Because the genocide that shaped the demographic of the North American population has been largely absent from most formerly colonized countries, Western ideas about the postcolonial environment often focus on population control and on the role of third-world women in the maintenance of a sustainable population. According to Curtin, at the current political moment, strategies for third-world population control constitute another form of gender-specific colonization: Our thinking about population and the environment often assumes that we must adopt coercive and undemocratic means to stem the tide of the “unreasoning masses.” Since gender is a subtext of these approaches, coercive means are often thought of as especially applicable to women: effective control of population in the “real world” requires control of women’s bodies, against their wills if that’s what it takes.10

While such a stance arises primarily from the reality that people in the third world are reproducing at rates that seem outrageous to cultures that

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have achieved zero population growth (of which the U.S. is not one)—for example, the fertility rate in Nigeria is between six and seven children per mother11—at least in part, such a position also arises from Eurocentric feminist thinking dependent upon the premise that, in order for women to be fulfilled, they must be doing something other than raising children. And perhaps most significantly, the rhetoric of population control tends to focus on numbers, not on resources, and more often than not projects the blame for the depletion of resources away from the West. However, in “The Case Against Babies,” according to Joy Williams, “the argument that western countries . . . do not fuel the population crisis is, of course, fallacious” because, in terms of resources, “when an American couple stops spawning at two babies, it’s the same as an average East Indian couple stopping at sixty-six, or an Ethiopian couple drawing the line at one thousand.”12 In the context of the largely Western environmental debate surrounding resources, reproduction, and consumption, the concepts of motherhood and landscape, particularly within discussions of postcolonial cultures, are fraught with various complex implications for real women and fictional female characters in literature written by postcolonial female authors. The maternal symbolism is obvious in such totalizing Western constructions as “Mother Earth,” a concept that implies familial unity for all living beings that inhabit the planet, and the infantilizing rhetoric of “Mother Countries” responsible for theoretical civilization, enlightenment, and maintenance of the “children” that inhabited their colonies. As I stated previously, Lori Gruen claims that “woman” and “animal” serve the same symbolic function and render both women and animals items in an exchange economy that places only commodifiable value on the lives of animals. For the colonized subject, however, there are additional variables that we must take into account when examining the rhetorical slippage between the binary oppositions of woman/animal and man/culture, a slippage that makes sense in a context where male, female, and animal are considered the criteria that determine an individual’s position within a hierarchy dependent primarily on one’s species and secondarily on one’s sex. In the case of colonized peoples, however, such a hierarchy becomes more nuanced, particularly in terms of the female subject, as explicated by postcolonial feminist theorists. For example, in her now famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak claims “if, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern female is even more deeply in shadow,”13 and according to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, to ascribe an allencompassing and Western feminist category of “woman”

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to women in the third world colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks; in doing so, it ultimately robs them of their historical and political agency.14

Sara Suleri furthers this assertion when she says that “the coupling of postcolonial with woman . . . almost inevitably leads to the simplifications that underlie unthinking celebrations of oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for ‘the good.’”15 To further complicate matters, along with their rhetorical treatment as children, male colonial subjects were often emasculated – both literally and figuratively – by their colonizers and, therefore, rhetorically constructed as female. While the way that women and nature have been conceptualized in the West has devalued women, nature, animals, and emotion and simultaneously elevated reason, humans, culture, and the mind, ecofeminist readings of non-Western, postcolonial women’s narratives must be informed by an understanding of the double-bind that marks their subjects and authors as both female and colonized. The various binary oppositions highlighted above—woman/nature, man/culture, animal/human—are complicated in Nigerian novelist Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966), set in the 1940s in the Igbo village of Oguta. While colonization had occurred by the time the story takes place, its effects are peripheral to the “reality” depicted by Nwapa. Characters comment upon the white colonists, but their comments reflect a sort of curiosity about rather than a need to imitate or be fearful of Western behavior. The novel centers on the life of a “remarkable”16 young Igbo woman named Efuru and the implications for her as a motherless and childless woman in a society in which motherhood is the primary goal for women. Efuru is significant because, among other things, it is the first novel to have been published in English by an African woman, and when the novel was first published, Nwapa was accused of imitating the already established style of West African male authors like Chinua Achebe, Elechi Emadi, and Nkem Nwankwo. In actuality, however, Nwapa focuses on the element that her male counterparts tended to ignore: women’s roles in a traditional African and communal society. In the writing of the male authors listed above, according to Elleke Boehmer, a type of nationalistic male myth-making takes place that is absent from Nwapa’s more “female” version of reality.17 In the literature written by males after independence in various African countries, men are equals; nationalism is representative of patriarchy because it “favors singleness—one identity, one growth pattern, one birth and blood for all.”18 Male authors wrote about male equality, and the women in their texts tended to be largely symbolic.

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Efuru changed the presentation of African nationalism and male domination because it attempted, instead of reinforcing male cultural representations, to repossess, reinscribe, and recreate an African female mythology. According to Susan Z. Andrade, Nwapa’s writing has often been dismissed as trivial and “useful only for an understanding of domestic Igbo village life,” but Andrade argues that it is precisely because the novel focuses upon women’s experiences that it is valuable.19 As Gay Wilentz states in Binding Cultures, Nwapa’s novel not only focuses on women’s positions as wives and mothers, but also as instructors of cultural values.20 Unlike her male contemporaries who write about African male unity in the face of Western oppression, Nwapa concentrates on everyday life within women’s compounds. The female characters in Efuru speak for themselves and “press into Nwapa’s narrative as speakers, actors, decision makers, brokers of opinion and market prices and unofficial jurors in their communities.”21 In an agriculturally based society like the Igbo, children were considered contributions to the entire community, and women gained status through their ability to have children. According to Wilentz, “the culture says, [marriage] means nothing unless there are children to show for it;”22 therefore, motherhood was the primary goal for precolonial Igbo women because the maternal role allotted the greatest amount of status available to women. As a female-authored, postcolonial novel focused on mythologizing a non-maternal female role, I contend that Efuru fits into a tradition of postcolonial women’s literature that examines the role of women, cut off from their own mothers as well as their biological or adopted children, in relation to their environment, particularly the land and resources from which they have been alienated as a result of colonization. I will foreground a more detailed examination of Efuru with a brief analysis of this tradition in order to highlight some attributes that seem to characterize a specific kind of postcolonial ecofeminist text. For example, along with Efuru, New Zealand novelist Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1985) and South African novelist Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) depict a pronounced and pervasive absence of the maternal that simultaneously overdetermines the presence of a paternal, colonial paradigm. A postcolonial ecofeminist position allows one to argue that this maternal absence occurs because colonized female subjects do not have access to the same kinds of “celebrations” of a uniquely (and possibly essentializing) female interiority that ecofeminism traditionally calls for Western women to recognize, embrace, and elevate. All of the aforementioned works contain environmentally significant prophecies that allow the three female protagonists willingly—as opposed to rhetorically—to form a bond with the

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land from which they have been displaced as a result of the colonization. These works connect ecofeminism and postcolonialism through the trope of motherless daughters—Efuru, Kerewin, and Mandisa—who serve as protagonists in these texts, and in their contradictory status as childless mothers whose roles, like the authors that write them into being, is to give birth not to human infants, but to narratives that re-imagine, hybridize, and revise precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial environmental mythology. In The Bone People, Kerewin Holmes lives alone in a circular tower and maintains a kind of kinship with the sea—“I am . . . a tidal child stranded on land”23—but eschews contact with other humans until she meets a Maori man named Joe and his foundling child, Simon. The novel highlights the distinction between the environmentally conscious Maori and the technologically driven whites in New Zealand as characters seek a way through the physical and psychological violence of New Zealand’s colonial history. Kerewin ultimately obtains a precolonial sensibility by becoming a part of the prophecies of “the old ones” from whom she learns how to care for the land. Mother to Mother, a fictionalized series of letters from the mother of a black South African murderer to the mother of the white American woman he kills, works to resurrect the historical and environmentally devastating Xhosa Cattle Killing of 1856-57 during which a young girl prophesied the end of colonial rule and a return to a precolonial utopia, if the Xhosa slaughtered all of their animals. After over 400,000 cattle were slaughtered and the prophecies remained unfulfilled, mass starvation resulted. Magona’s work is testament to the latent truth of the prophecy while it also illustrates the lack of retributive productivity inherent in acts of murder—of either animals or humans—as both of the narrative’s mothers are rendered childless, one through murder and the other through estrangement. In the context of such re-envisioning, these characters challenge traditional understandings of motherhood as a biologically determined imperative for women, in favor of a conceptual, self-determined, highly intellectualized notion of motherhood that situates the maternal between various cultural determinants (the colonizing, the colonized, the precolonial, for example) as opposed to outside of the Western, patriarchal narrative of colonial history. All three female protagonists are both motherless and theoretically or literally childless, and these representations allow for a redefined and self-determined conception of the maternal that subverts conventional understandings of ecofeminist theory in that these depictions break celebratory connections between motherhood, female sexuality, and environmental fecundity: Mandisa is a virgin when she conceives her son Mxolisi, Kerewin remains a virgin throughout The Bone

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People, and Efuru is called to worship the goddess Uhamiri, a deity that denies children to her followers and forbids them from sleeping with their husbands on certain days of the week. Furthermore, Efuru’s mother has died “five years”24 before the narrative begins, and Efuru’s only daughter, Ogonim, dies in infancy. Kerewin is self-estranged from her mother, but despite her initial characterization of him as an “it” and “ratbag child”25 she does adopt the foundling Simon Gillayley. Mandisa’s mother banishes her to Gungululu “where children are named according to the spaces between years of rain”26 to live with her maternal grandmother, and Mandisa’s own son Mxolisi, of whom she claims “nothing my son does surprises me anymore. Not after . . . his unreasonably implanting himself inside me . . . totally destroying the me I was,”27 becomes estranged from her after he commits murder. In turn, Mandisa reaches out to her “SisterMother,”28 the mother of the white, American girl murdered by Mxolisi. *** In order to illustrate the feminist and environmental thrust of works like those I discuss briefly above, I would like to focus more closely on Nwapa’s Efuru and the ways that the title character’s socially sanctioned defiance of traditional female norms allows her to function as a postcolonial, ecofeminist prototype. Efuru is a woman whose childlessness and adherence to the taboos of Uhamiri, one of which is to avoid fishing on Orie day29 and to discourage others from fishing as well, situates her within an historical moment out of which will arise both the rhetoric of population control and the need for conservation of Oguta Lake and its resources. The sets of conflicting role expectations – the maternal and the conservationist – create conflict within Efuru, who is unable as of yet to see the value of the non-maternal option. In order to explore this situation more fully, I want to put forth the dilemma posed by the narrator at the end of the novel: Efuru slept soundly that night. She dreamt of the woman of the lake, her beauty, her long hair and her riches. She had lived for ages at the bottom of the lake. She was as old as the lake itself. . . . She gave women beauty and wealth but she had no child. She had never experienced the joy of motherhood. Why then did the women worship her?30

Efuru questions why women worship Uhamiri, even as her dream seems to be symbolic of her desire to embrace a role other than the one that her culture has chosen for her, that of wife and mother. She cannot, however, understand or see how the role of childless woman could be valuable. Her

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ability to reason does not provide an answer to her dilemma, and she is even surprised that she is capable of logical thought because “she thought it unusual for women to be logical. Usually intuition did their reasoning for them.”31 For Efuru, the roles of women and men are too concrete to be reasonably challenged, and rationality in a woman makes as little sense to her as childlessness does. Furthermore, the goddess Uhamiri presents a similar dilemma for scholars who want to read the goddess as purely Igbo. She is often considered, according to Ifi Amadiume, “a postcolonial temptress Goddess, contextualized in capitalist materialism,”32 but I contend that if we read Uhamiri in terms of her environmental implications for future worshippers, she actually serves a very anti-capitalist cause in that her dictates deter destruction and consumption of natural resources. Even though worshipping Uhamiri allows Efuru to fulfill “an alternative, woman-centered function in the society,”33 her desire to be traditional keeps her from coming to terms with her situation. Bill Ashcroft sees Efuru’s desire to be traditional and her reluctance to follow Uhamiri as a threat to “the text’s manifest assertion of female independence.”34 It would appear, however, that the very fact that Efuru has the option of worshipping a female deity would argue for a form of female independence that is denied to Western women by virtue of Christianity. Christianity does not abide overt goddess worship and therefore does away with a specific women’s outlet, for, “as history reveals, with the colonization and Christianization of Igboland, women were excluded from participating as priests.”35 Efuru’s ability to choose to worship Uhamiri is a testament to the degree of independence women enjoyed in traditional Igbo society. Without Uhamiri’s influence as a valid deity, Efuru’s identity crisis as a childless woman would be much more profound. However, as Oladele Taiwo points out, even though Nwapa uses Uhamiri to show that “the happiness of a virtuous woman like Efuru should not depend entirely on her ability to have a child,”36 it is clear that her childlessness is still the cause of most of her grief. Taiwo comments that “Efuru may derive other benefits from her attachment to Uhamiri, but not the kind that can save her marriage from collapse.”37 Indeed, Efuru’s childlessness and the death of her only daughter do seem to be at the root of both of her marital failures. In spite of the fact that Efuru is able to find an acceptable place in her Igbo society, she is partly able to do so because she has resources that other traditional women are denied. As Theodora Akachi Ezeigbo states, “if a childless woman is wealthy, her situation is not as tragic or helpless as her other sisters in the traditional society nor in post-colonial and modern society.”38

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In terms of colonial, environmental, and historical context, Efuru is set in the Igbo village of Oguta in the 1940s, approximately mid-way between the Igbo Women’s War of 1929 and the discovery of oil in Nigeria in 1956. The novel focuses primarily on the cultural implications of the title character’s childlessness in a traditionally matrilineal society that is, in the fictional Nigeria of Efuru, peripherally influenced by white intrusion. Nwapa published the novel in 1966, three years after Nigerian independence from Britain and a year before the beginning of the Biafran Civil War that claimed the lives of over one million Nigerians, and her work has been criticized for not addressing the colonial infrastructure that led to the Biafran crisis. However, Efuru is consciously concerned with a different kind of history, an Igbo woman’s history, and, I would argue, a perhaps unconscious ethos of environmental preservation inherent in the novel’s dual focus on the social acceptance of a childless Igbo woman and that woman’s specific connection, via her worship of Uhamiri, to Oguta lake, an ecosystem generally associated with “the spirit of women’s collective solidarity”39 in Igbo culture. Bodies of water, in the form of rivers and lakes, play a vital role not only in terms of subsistence but also in terms of Igbo religious beliefs that often associate lakes with goddesses and rivers with gods, and during the twentieth century, environmental devastation of such entities as a result of oil drilling has been one of Nigeria’s main concerns. Nigerian writers and activists have been at the forefront of the movement to stem the environmental devastation, often suffering horrific consequences. In 1995, for example, Ogoni writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed for protesting Shell Oil’s environmental devastation of the Niger River Delta. Before he was hanged, Saro-Wiwa stated, “the ecological war that the Company has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the Company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished.”40 According to the World Lake Database, Oguta Lake is located within the equatorial rainforest belt, but “most of the rain forest has been replaced by oil palm plantations especially around the lake.” The lake functions as a major source of drinking water and of fish, but the water and ecosystems within the lake are currently endangered by the fact that the lake is used as a septic pool for domestic sewage and because local people dredge sand from the lake to use in construction. Most significant in terms of this study, however, is the International Lake Environment Committee Foundation for Sustainable Management of World Lakes and Reservoirs’ assertion that despite the implementation of recent environmental protection laws, their enforcement has been a problem because neither the

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enforcement agents nor the citizens are sufficiently educated with regard to environmental protection of the lake. However, according to the Committee, “traditional rules of the local community are concerned with the lake’s environment and kept by the residents, particularly by the worshipers of the Lake Goddess and her priests.”41 Because she is chosen, via a prophetic dream, to be a follower of the goddess of the lake, Efuru is allowed an alternate, socially visible existence as a capitalist; she works as a trader and farmer, and such a social position, in many ways, runs counter to Igbo cultural expectations. Within a communal and matrilineal culture, women gained status and property by having children that contributed to the well-being of the entire society and were harshly criticized for not having children. For example, when her only child, a daughter that she has with her shiftless first husband Adizua, dies early in the novel, Efuru is blamed. One of the village women asks, “in what ways have you offended our ancestors?”42 Later, Efuru marries a second husband, Gilbert, but fails to have any more children. The village women again function as her fiercest critics claiming, “a woman, a wife, for that matter, should not look glamorous all the time, and not fulfill the important function she is made to fulfill.”43 The village gossip Omirima says to Gilbert’s mother, “your daughter-in-law is good, but she is childless. She is beautiful but we cannot eat beauty. She is wealthy, but riches cannot go on errands for us.”44 Such continual use of the pronouns “we” and “our” in the above examples and elsewhere throughout the novel point to the communal nature of Igbo society, a culture in which women—literal mothers as well as what Ifi Amadiume refers to as the “matriarchal umbrella”45—alternately protect women and girls from patriarchal domination and enforce such seemingly sexist practices as “the bath” (female circumcision) while vocally criticizing their fellow women’s inability to reproduce. Efuru is considered beautiful, but her beauty is held against her by the village women when she does not have children. Not only is Efuru denied certain aspects of personhood because she is unable to fulfill the role of mother, she is also denied her womanhood because to her neighbors, she “was a man since she could not reproduce.”46 As is the case of women under Western patriarchal dictates, it is the women who enforce various elements of Igbo patriarchy. While Igbo women are able to exert power in certain situations where their equality is challenged—as in, for example, the effective female uprising that constituted the Igbo Women’s War—in the novel, they do not challenge their marital status and, in fact, perpetuate their own subordination. According to Nancy Topping Bazin, “those who exert this pressure [to have children as soon as possible] on behalf of the

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patriarchy are female;”47 as the village gossip Omirima says, Efuru “is childless. She is beautiful but we cannot eat beauty.”48 To complicate matters further, Efuru’s female peers first criticize her childlessness, but they alternately later feel threatened by her pregnancy: when Efuru is pregnant with Ogonim, “women were jealous of her beauty.”49 After Ogonim’s death, Efuru’s situation as a childless woman is not as bleak as it may appear because, even though she acts contrary to convention in many ways, she is still accepted within the traditional framework of Igbo life as a worshipper of Uhamiri. Women obtain power in Igbo society through a system in which gender is separated from sex roles. For example, as Efuru makes clear, women are allowed to worship Uhamiri, a goddess who “blesses the community with fish and fresh water and brings them wealth and beauty”50 yet requires that her followers be childless. Therefore, worshipping Uhamiri allows Efuru to reclaim her femaleness, her beauty, and her very personhood in spite of her childlessness. In a culture where women’s roles are defined by their ability to produce children for the community, such an option implies that certain patriarchal dictates can be transcended, at least by certain women. Efuru’s own mother dies prior to the events that take place in the novel, but her rhetorical presence is felt throughout the work. When Efuru tells her father of her dream of Uhamiri, he says to her, “You are like your mother, my daughter, that’s why I love you more than all my children,”51 and when Gilbert accuses Efuru of adultery, she replies, “my mother was not an adulterous woman, neither was her mother, why should I be different?”52 Just as women function as women’s fiercest critics of other women’s childlessness in the novel, mothers, literal and communal, are alternately blamed and revered for the behavior of their own as well as the community’s daughters. When a girl is an undesirable bride at one point in the narrative, it is because “her mother is a bad woman;”53 conversely, when “girls gave deaf ears to their mothers’ warnings”54 in a story told by Eneke, spirits capture them. According to Ifi Amadiume, “in addition to their biological mothers, women were . . . provided with a social mother to support them throughout their adult lives,”55 and such a system of support is apparent particularly in Efuru’s relationship with Anjanupu, the sister of Adizua’s mother, who defends Efuru throughout the novel, despite Efuru’s estrangement from Anjanupu’s nephew. Such a framework of female support, Amadiume’s “matriarchal umbrella,” was severely compromised because ritual and tradition were banned during the colonial period, and I contend that the pivotal role of Uhamiri, read negatively by Amadiume as “a mirage of modernity”56 and “a hybrid, a mulatto, stemming from a colonially derived desire for ‘whiteness’ by colonized African natives”57

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within the narrative points to the need for a new female identity within the text, particularly a powerful, female protector of a most valuable natural resource, Oguta Lake. At its core, Nwapa’s novel is about the quest for the Igbo maternal symbolically manifest in Oguta Lake, as religious beliefs, the environment, and women’s roles are compromised by white influence. In her first dream of Uhamiri, Efuru claims, I go to the bottom of the lake and . . . I saw an elegant woman, very beautiful, combing her long black hair with a golden comb. When she saw me, she stopped combing her hair and smiled at me and asked me to come in. I went in. She offered me kola, I refused to take, she laughed and did not persuade me. She beckoned me to follow her. I followed her like a woman possessed.58

As I stated earlier, the presentation of this deity elicits concern from critics who view Uhamiri as a product of colonial influence. Chimalum Nwankwo, for example, is critical of Nwapa’s depiction of the female divinity, claiming that “Uhamiri, the goddess of stability and supposedly unstoppered kindness, is for devotees, like deities everywhere, inexplicably ineffectual.”59 According to Amadiume, this depiction of Uhamiri, also called “Mammy Water” in her various incarnations, is “European and not African. She is without family or children and is totally outside any social system;”60 furthermore, “white women, capitalist goods, and Western power become unattainable objects of desire that are represented in [Mammy Water], whose images efface those of indigenous African matriarchs.”61 However, such criticism seems in direct conflict with another of Nwankwo’s assertions that “the historical markers for [colonial] trauma are unfortunately absent”62 in Nwapa’s narrative, and Susan Z. Andrade’s claim that Nwapa’s depiction of the water goddess is free from Western influence: “that Efuru’s life appears to have no contact with Europe . . . means that the narrative’s prototype of female power is Igbo—a powerful statement in the face of a post-world-war feminism that implied the global liberation of women would begin in the ‘West.’”63 Such contradictory claims point to the difficulty of historians and literary critics alike to adequately position Uhamiri within Igbo culture. Oguta Lake functions, both within Nwapa’s novel and in Igbo life, as not only a source of water, but of sustenance, of transportation, and of recreation in an area prone to drought. After Efuru has been called to worship the goddess, two men paddle to the shrine of Uhamiri and comment about the white women who swim in the lake. One says, “what beats me is their idleness. How can they leave the comfort of their homes in the big towns and come to swim all day in the lake?”64 The contrast

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between the sloth of the whites and the industry of the native Africans is a theme that runs through the entire narrative and contradicts the European tendency to describe colonial subjects as comparatively lazy. Idleness as a way of life is in direct conflict with traditional Igbo culture where “the ideology of hard work and resourcefulness was highly valued among women, and in most cases a girl’s (and her mother’s) ability to excel in this area determined her chances of marriage.”65 While the Igbo women recognize that the lives of European women are unfulfilling, they are not yet forced by the colonizers to accept these standards of uselessness themselves. In another inversion, this time of the colonial Christian myth of a benevolent god figure whose care for his children extended to native Africans via their colonial enlighteners, the other man claims that “our woman of the lake is the kindest of women . . . . She is very understanding. She knows that the white people are strangers to our land, that’s why she is lenient with them.”66 As a hybrid deity, both Western and African, Uhamiri disrupts readings of Nwapa’s novel as unconcerned with Western influence; certainly, the title character of the work, as a motherless and childless woman who is called to worship this deity, to keep a jar of lake water in her room, to help stabilize the fish population by eschewing fishing on certain days, and to prosper through agriculture and trade, represents one option for Igbo women (or at least for a particular and “remarkable” Igbo woman) to maintain a connection to her homeland, even as that land’s natural resources in the form of palm oil, zinc, and iron ore, were being depleted through colonial trade. The novel ends with the dilemma that I quoted earlier, and such dilemmas are characteristic of oral African literature. The dilemma is dialogic, inviting the reader to enter the narrative and participate in the debate posed by the narrator. The narrator says of Efuru’s final dream of Uhamiri, “she was happy, she was wealthy. She was beautiful. She gave women beauty and wealth but she had no child. She had never experienced the joy of motherhood. Why then did the women worship her?”67 Much has been written about the narrative’s final question. The worship of Uhamiri contradicts the Igbo cosmological belief that, according to Emmanuel Edeh, “the power of production is the only true power a being has. . . . The Earth has her native power of fertility by which she produces . . . . The Earth, because of its fertility, is the archetype of all forms of maternity.”68 To worship Uhamiri is at once to embrace certain aspects of Western culture but also to be environmentally responsible in ways that allow Nwapa, through the character of Efuru and her counterpart the lake goddess, to speak prophetically about Nigerian environmental crises during the twentieth century and beyond. The balance that Uhamiri asks

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her worshippers to strike between the excesses of capitalism and the religious proscriptions of Igbo culture is mediated by two dictates: childlessness and conservation of resources in the face of colonial environmental exploitation; as I stated earlier, one of Uhamiri’s taboos is that her worshippers must not fish on Orie day and must encourage others not to fish on those days as well. Such a policy would certainly have direct implications for reducing over-fishing of the lake and would promote the environmental consciousness that the worshippers of Uhamiri – in the present day context – seem, according to the International Lake Environment Committee’s report, uniquely inclined to champion. Uhamiri is a hybrid goddess, implicated in capitalist exchange and demanding the observance of her taboos, but such hybridity is necessary in terms of female myth-making, narrative reclamation, and environmental survival.

Notes 1

Gay Wilentz, “Flora Nwapa,” in Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, eds. Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander (Detriot: Gale, 1993), 179. 2 Flora Nwapa, Efuru (Oxford: Heinemann, 1966), 221. 3 Wilentz, 183. 4 Greta Gaard, “Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature,” in Ecofeminism, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993), 5. 5 Lori Gruen, “Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection Between Women and Animals,” in Ecofeminism, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993), 61. 6 Huey-Li Li, “A Cross-Cultural Critique of Ecofeminism,” in Ecofeminism, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993), 288. 7 Deane Curtin, Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 5. 8 William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), 93. 9 Joy Williams, “Safariland,” in Ill Nature (New York: Vintage, 2001), 27. 10 Curtin, 75. 11 Ibid., 95. 12 Joy Williams, “The Case Against Babies,” in Ill Nature (New York: Vintage, 2001), 88. 13 Giayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 83. 14 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 213.

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15 Sara Suleri, “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 246. 16 Nwapa, 7. 17 Elleke Boehmer, “Stories of Women and Mothers: Gender and Nationalism in the Early Fiction of Flora Nwapa,” in Motherlands: Black Women's Writing From Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s P, 1991), 7. 18 Ibid. 19 Susan Z. Andrade, ”Rewriting History, Motherhood and Rebellion: Naming an African Women’s Literary Tradition,” Research in African Literatures 21.1 (1990): 97. 20 Gay Wilentz, Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), 10. 21 Boehmer, 12. 22 Wilentz, Binding, 11. 23 Keri Hulme, The Bone People (New York: Penguin, 1986), 89. 24 Nwapa, 8. 25 Hulme, 19. 26 Magona, 99. 27 Ibid., 88. 28 Ibid., 198. 29 Nwapa, 192. 30 Ibid., 221. 31 Ibid., 165. 32 Ifi Amadiume, “Bodies, Choices, Globalizing National Enchantments: African Matriarchs and Mammy Water,” Meridians 2.2 (2002): 49. 33 Wilentz, Binding, 17. 34 W. D. Ashcroft, ”Intersecting Marginalities: Post-Colonialism and Feminism,” Kunapipi 11.2 (1989): 105. 35 Theodora Akachi Ezeigbo, “Traditional Women’s Institutions in Igbo Society: Implications for the Igbo Female Writer,” African Languages and Cultures 3.2 (1990): 157. 36 Oladele Taiwo, Female Novelists of Modern Africa (New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc., 1984), 52. 37 Ibid., 51. 38 Ezeigbo, 157. 39 Amadiume, 52. 40 Cindy Baxter, Paul Horsman, and Steve Kretzmann, “Ken Saro-Wiwa and Eight Ogoni People Executed: Blood on Shell’s Hands,” 10 Nov. 1995. Greenpeace Archive, 9 Mar. 2006. . 41 International Lake Environment Committee Foundation for sustainable management of world lakes and reservoirs, World Lakes Database, 12 Dec. 2005. 21 Jan. 2006 . 42 Nwapa, 72.

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Ibid., 138. Ibid., 163. 45 Amadiume, 43. 46 Nwapa, 24. 47 Nancy Topping Bazin, “Weight of Custom, Signs of Change: Feminism in the Literature of African Women,” World Literature Written in English 25.2 (1985): 185. 48 Nwapa, 163. 49 Ibid., 28. 50 Ibid., 15. 51 Ibid., 150. 52 Ibid., 219. 53 Ibid., 160. 54 Ibid., 106. 55 Amadiume, 46. 56 Ibid., 49. 57 Ibid., 53. 58 Nwapa, 146. 59 Chimalum Nwankwo, “The Igbo Word in Flora Nwapa’s Craft,” Research in African Literatures 26.2 (1995): 49. 60 Amadiume, 53. 61 Ibid., 63. 62 Nwankwo, 49. 63 Andrade, 98-99. 64 Nwapa, 202. 65 Ezeigbo, 154. 66 Nwapa, 202. 67 Ibid., 221. 68 Emmanuel M. P. Edeh, Towards an Igbo Metaphysics (New Orleans: Loyola UP, 1985), 44. 44

CHAPTER EIGHT ECOFEMINISM IN ZAKES MDA’S THE HEART OF REDNESS HARRY SEWLALL

Ecological awareness, then, will arise only when we combine our rational knowledge with an intuition for the nonlinear nature of our environment. Such intuitive wisdom is characteristic of traditional, nonliterate cultures, especially of American Indian cultures, in which life was organized around a highly refined awareness of the environment. – Capra, The Turning Point.1 There is no unmediated way of existing in harmony with nature, and there never has been. Once we make human decisions on how to exist in our surroundings, we are already involved in sociocultural (and again, theoretical) modes of thought. – Bennett, The ISLE Reader.2

Introduction TIME magazine reporter Donald Morrison, writing on the state of South African fiction ten years after the country attained democracy, places Zakes Mda, a well-known dramaturge, among the vanguard of novelists such as Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, and André Brink.3 Mda spends his time between the United States, where he is a professor of creative writing at Ohio University, and South Africa, where he combines his interest in film-making and painting with beekeeping. The Heart of Redness (2000), his third work of fiction and by critical consensus the most ambitious of the three, is a historicist novel, juxtaposing the past and the present against a backdrop of realism and magic realism. It won the Sunday Times Fiction Award (a prestigious South African award), as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Africa region, in 2001.

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In the opening paragraphs of Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton sententiously proclaims of the land: “Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.”4 The land as a primordial symbol in humankind’s struggle for survival finds a deep resonance in the South African literary imaginary. As a trope of possession and dispossession, colonization and oppression, it has been explored in the works of writers as diverse from one another as Paton and Mda, and Coetzee and Gordimer. Mda’s novel, The Heart of Redness, is very much about society and its relationship to the land. While the main theme of the novel derives its impetus from the episode involving the prophetess Nongqawuse, and the tragic episode of the Cattle-Killing in the Eastern Cape in 1857,5 its secondary theme is energized by the dialectic between the demands of metropolitan culture on the environment and the ecological injunction to “guard it [and] care for it” in the quasireligious tone of Paton. Linked to the nineteenth-century catastrophic event which older history books refer to as the “national suicide of the amaXhosa” is the modern-day debate of their descendants over the development of the pristine real estate of Qolorha-by-Sea. Just as the ancestors were locked in a self-destructive, ideological struggle with the British almost 150 years ago—a struggle emanating directly from the political issue of land possession—the post-apartheid generation is implacably split over the future of the seaside paradise. This dynamic is enacted through the conflict between two sets of families, namely, the Believers, who are descendants of the followers of the prophetess Nongqawuse, and the Unbelievers, those who did not believe in her tragic prophecies. The Believers, not in favour of the modernization of the seaside village of Qolorha-by-Sea, oppose the building of a casino and a holiday resort, whilst their old enemies, the Unbelievers, support the idea. Mediating between these two opposing groups are Camagu, a modern-day intellectual, and his consort Qukezwa, who may be viewed as the quintessential ecofeminist in the text. Focusing on the character of Qukezwa, this essay proposes to explore the tensions in the novel occasioned by the historical clash of ecological ideologies, juxtaposed with the exigencies of metropolitan life on the present generation. In presenting a revisionist reading of the nineteenth-century Cattle-Killing, Mda also recuperates the nature-culture dialectic to demonstrate how binaristic responses to this debate can be reconciled by the recognition of the need for a symbiotic balance between nature and culture on the one hand, and modernity and tradition on the other. In his poem, “God’s Grandeur,” composed in the latter part of the

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nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes passionately about the depredations of Western society’s materialism on the resources of the earth. Lamenting that “[g]enerations have trod, have trod, have trod” upon this earth, to the extent that “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; /And wears man’s smudge,” Hopkins ends his poem on an optimistic note, affirming his undying faith in “the Holy Ghost” to regenerate the environment.6 More than a century after Hopkins’s assertion that “nature is never spent,” we, living at the dawn of the twenty-first century, cannot take much solace from Hopkins’s reassuring theophany. As newspaper columnist Jonathan Fowler proclaims, we confront the frightening prospect of “using up the Earth faster than it can regenerate.”7 According to a report by the World Wildlife Fund, on which Fowler bases his article, “[w]e are running up an ecological debt which we won’t be able to pay off unless governments restore the balance between consumption of natural resources and the Earth’s ability to renew them”.8 The countries which leave huge ecological footprints are those that are the biggest consumers of non-renewable natural resources, namely the United States, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Sweden, with China and India in tow.

The Land Question in South Africa In 1992, the Association of University English Teachers of Southern Africa (AUETSA) themed its annual conference “Literature, Nature and the Land: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Environment.” At this milestone academic gathering at the University of Zululand, one of the delegates, Ivan Rabinowitz, stated, In order to explore the intersections of literature, nature and the environment, we shall have to theorize a genuinely post-colonial version of cartographic semiosis, the study of the relation between the act of mapping and the negotiation of territory and identity. Our pure and timeless texts will have to be read as cultural signs which point to a narrative of possession, appropriation and epistemic aggression; our maps, including our maps of time and the material body, will have to be reinterpreted as hybrid texts and as forms of cultural inscription.9

Whether Mda’s The Heart of Redness will prove to be a timeless text is for history to determine. But hybrid it certainly is, and it fits the bill as a postcolonial literary document which satirically explores, amongst other issues, the epistemic aggression of the early colonization of South Africa, particularly the Eastern Cape region, and the ecological implications of

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this event on the present generation of protagonists in The Heart of Redness. The history of the Cattle-Killing, which were prompted by the prophetess Nongqawuse, has been well documented in South African historical texts. In recent times, the story of Nongqawuse has been viewed from alternative standpoints, both historically and fictionally. J. B. Peires, the South African academic who undertook the first book-length study of the Cattle-Killing, has attempted to answer why the Xhosas in the late nineteenth century were prepared to listen to a prophetess: The Cattle-Killing cannot be divorced from the colonial situation which was imposed on the Xhosa in 1847 by Sir Harry Smith. Although it has been necessary in this history to examine the personal role of Sir George Grey in detail, it should be remembered that the essential objectives of Grey were identical to those of Smith and of colonial rule generally: to destroy the political and economic independence of the Xhosa . . . to make their land and labour available to the white settlers, and to reshape their religious and cultural institutions on European and Christian models.10

Peires further draws attention to the fact that the idea of cattle-killing was widespread before Nongqawuse started to speak. The existent religious belief was a curious mix of the Christian notion of resurrection, a belief popularized by the prophet Nxele before 1820, and Xhosa cosmology, according to which the dead do not die. So, Nongqawuse’s ideas were not original after all. The logical conclusion was therefore that the sick cattle, once destroyed, would be resurrected. In Mda’s novel, “lungsickness” is thought to have originated in Europe: “It was brought to the land of the amaXhosa nation by Friesland bulls that came in a Dutch ship two years earlier, in 1853. Therefore even the best of the isiXhosa doctors did not know how to cure lungsickness.”11 A decade before Peires’ historical account of the cattle-killings, the narrator-protagonist of one of Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s short fictional works presents a dialectical view of the Nongquase [sic] story in one of his reflections as he journeys to the Transkei, the newly created bantustan of the apartheid government: “In order to understand my interpretation of past and present events in relation to each other, I think it is necessary to review the tale I heard from my instructional voices.”12 Matshoba depicts Nongqawuse as a young, idealistic maiden who dreams of the emancipation of her downtrodden people. In Matshoba’s highly polemical rendering, the land policy of the British government was continued by the Nationalist Government’s enactment of the Natives Land Act of 1913. According to Anne McClintock, through the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936,

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“a scant 13 percent of the most arid and broken land was allocated to black South Africans, though they comprise 75 percent of the people”.13 In a similar way, Zakes Mda’s revisionist reading of this tragic event presents both sides of the story so that neither the Believers nor the Unbelievers are essentialized.14 In the novel, this double-voiced perspective is provided by the character of Camagu, “the hybrid, mimic man”15 who has obtained a doctorate in communications in the United States and is neither a Believer nor an Unbeliever: “‘What I am saying is that it is wrong to dismiss those who believed in Nongqawuse as foolish . . . [h]er prophecies arose out of the spiritual and material anguish of the amaXhosa nation.’”16 Bhonco, who is the link between his unbelieving ancestors and the new generation of Unbelievers like his daughter, Xoliswa, represents the forward push of modernization in the village of Qolorha-by-Sea. Although Bhonco is pleased to hear Mr. Smith, one of the white entrepreneurs, outline his wonderful vision of a resort with merry-go-rounds, jet-skiing, and a roller coaster over the sea, he is not quite happy about one aspect of the globalization of his village: “But I am suspicious of this matter of riding the waves. The new people that were prophesied by the false prophet, Nongqawuse, were supposed to come riding on the waves too.”17 This reminder of the disastrous past, when wondrous things were prophesied for the salvation of the Xhosa nation, resonates ironically with the promises of an equally wondrous future for Qolorha-by-Sea. But not everyone is enamoured of the idea of a bustling seaside resort where people will ride waves the way “civilized people do in advanced countries and even here in South Africa, in cities like Durban and Cape Town.”18 Not least of all Camagu, who questions the benefit of such “wonderful things”19 for the local people. He points out that the children of Qolorha-by-Sea are too poor to enjoy such facilities, which will be monopolized “only by rich people who will come here and pollute our rivers and our ocean.”20 To these reservations, Zim, a Believer and an inveterate enemy of the descendants of the Unbelievers, adds his voice: “‘This son of Cesane [Camagu] is right. They will destroy our trees and the plants of our forefathers for nothing.’”21 Camagu, who is the mediating voice between the Believers and the Unbelievers, and who, to use a theoretical construct of Homi Bhabha, occupies the zone of the “liminal space, in-between the designations of identity,”22 is not totally opposed to the idea of developing the potential of Qolorha-by-Sea, but his vision is an ecocritically ethical one: “‘[the] promotion of the kind of tourism that will benefit the people, that will not destroy indigenous forests, that will not bring hordes of people who will pollute the rivers and drive away the birds.’ ”23 Challenged by Bhonco’s daughter, Xoliswa Ximiya, who asks

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how he would stop civilization, Camagu shouts: “‘How I will stop you? I will tell you how I will stop you! I will have this village declared a national heritage site. Then no one will touch it. The wonders of Nongqawuse that led to the cattle-killing movement of the amaXhosa happened here. On that basis, this can be declared a national heritage site!’”24 Xoliswa is the local school principal whose intense desire to break away from backwardness, symbolized by the “redness” in the title of the book, takes her finally to the city of Pretoria where she lands the highprofile job of a deputy director in the national Department of Education. Once fancied by the villagers as the lover of Camagu, she leaves Qolorha when Camagu turns his attention to the young and voluptuous Qukezwa. David Attwell suggests that in Camagu’s quest for his cultural self, “the choices before him are modelled by Qukezwa and Xoliswa.”25 With Xoliswa now gone from the village, it is in and through Qukezwa that Camagu finds his new interstitial identity, a condition which, according to Michael Titlestad and Mike Kissack, “embodies a persuasive postdialectical (post-anti-apartheid) mode of secular intellectual politics.”26 Qukezwa is the descendant of Twin, the Believer, who married a woman also named Qukezwa. When Xoliswa confronts Camagu about his relationship with the “child” Qukezwa, who is pregnant by Camagu through a miraculous, asexual conception, Camagu’s rejoinder is, “Where you see darkness, witchcraft, heathens and barbarians, she sees song and dance and laughter and beauty.”27 If Xoliswa in her person embodies the attributes of the modern feminist, or as one villager comments, “‘[she] is a man in a woman’s body,’”28 then Qukezwa represents a feminist of a different mould—the ecofeminist.

Qukezwa, the Quintessential Ecofeminist An enigmatic figure who shaves her head in the manner of her father Zim, a Believer, Qukezwa thrusts herself into the gaze of the villagers (and ours) when she appears at the traditional court on the egregious charge of vandalizing trees. Camagu, who attends the proceedings, is mystified by her alleged conduct, as she was also opposed to the destruction of the natural environment of Qolorha in order to make way for the casino resort. What adds to his bewilderment is that she simply cut down the trees and left them there, not even using them as fuel. By Xhosa tradition, her father ought to have been charged with his young daughter’s crime, but Qukezwa insists on answering the charges herself. Dressed in her red blanket, which is perceived by the Unbelievers as the mark of her

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backwardness and so-called barbarism, Qukezwa demurely but defiantly proclaims her guilt: “‘I cut the trees, and I shall cut them again.’”29 The court notes that this girl has in the past cut down the inkberry tree because it is poisonous. It is for this very reason that she has cut down the recent spate of trees, as she testifies in her defense: ‘The trees that I destroyed are as harmful as the inkberry. They are the lantana and wattle trees. They come from other countries . . . from Central America, from Australia . . . to suffocate our trees. They are dangerous trees that need to be destroyed. . . . Just like the umga, the seed of the wattle tree is helped by fire. The seed can lie there for ten years, but when fire comes it grows. And it uses all the water. Nothing can grow under the wattle tree. It is an enemy since we do not have enough water in this country.’ (The Heart of Redness 248-249)

Surprised by her uncanny knowledge, the elders nod in agreement, even if they do not condone what she has done. One of them muses on the source of her wisdom for such a slip of a girl who, at her age, should be focusing on “‘red ochre and other matters of good grooming and beauty.’”30 The hearing is interrupted when everybody rushes off to extinguish a house on fire. What emerges at the village trial of Qukezwa is that the indigenous people of this land have always had their own laws to protect the environment. While Qukezwa’s actions are considered criminal because there are no laws proscribing wattle trees, there are traditional laws in place which allow the destruction of noxious weeds and plants, such as the mimosa. Not only that, we also learn during the court deliberations that only the previous week some boys had been punished by the same court for killing the red-winged starling31 or the isomi bird, regarded as being holy: ‘It is a sin to kill isomi. Yes, boys love its delicious meat that tastes like chicken. But from the time we were young we were taught never to kill isomi. We ate these birds only when they died on their own. We watched them living together in huge colonies in the forest or flying in big flocks of thousands. . . . These are sacred birds. If an isomi flies into your house your family will be blessed. Isomi is a living Christ on earth. If you kill isomi you will be followed by misfortune in every direction you go. When we punish boys for killing red-winged starlings, we are teaching them about life. We are saving them from future misfortune.’ (The Heart of Redness 249-250)

These traditional laws may be rooted in superstition, or even religious injunction, but they effectively legislate on matters of conservation. In the

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aforementioned extract, the preponderance of the plural pronoun “we” encodes a communal proprietorship over the ecology of the land. The purpose of punishing the boys is not to hurt them but to educate them about their future. What is foregrounded in this extract is the imperative for ecological education, without which the future of any nation, no matter how sophisticated, would be doomed. William Beinart draws attention to the potential of humans to endanger their environment if left to their own devices: “All human societies, from metropolitan industrial Britain to the Easter Islands, have had the capacity to destroy the natural resources on which they depend.”32 If metaphors are carriers of ideology, as C. A. Bowers33 proposes, then the encoding of religious and ecological metaphors in the language of the Xhosa reflects an epistemology that is at odds with established Western belief. The melding of Christian faith, as personified by the figure of Christ and symbolized by the anthropomorphized isomi bird, with what may be regarded as superstitious belief in luck and misfortune, suggests a syncretism that accommodates the timeless wisdom of the elders and the abiding faith of the colonizers. Such hybridity of faiths allows the Xhosas to accept ancestor worship along with the Christian notion of the Resurrection of Christ. The prophecy of Nongqawuse is accepted as an outcome of this chiliastic doctrine. Opposed to the syncretism of the indigenous Xhosa society is the Western dialectical tendency to think in terms of binary categories of us/them, true/false, superiority/inferiority, salvation/perdition, right/wrong and culture/nature. Such categories of thinking, or “root metaphors,” can be “traced directly back to Enlightenment thinkers” for their “fundamental legitimation,” according to Bowers.34 In such an anthropocentric universe where man’s rationality is the measure of all things, the environment is seen as instrumental to society’s need. Thus, the appropriation of the land—its conquest and taming to the needs of humans—becomes the predominant trope of Enlightenment thought. This in turn gives rise to the nature/culture dichotomy, which posits “culture” as civilization, and nature—usually personified as a woman—as unruly and primitive. As a corollary to this, the owners of uncultivated land were regarded as savages, a view thematized in the words of Sir George Grey in The Heart of Redness when he capitalizes on the tragic consequences of Nongqawuse’s prophecy: The advance of Christian civilization will sweep away ancient races. Antique laws and customs will moulder into oblivion . . . The strongholds of murder and superstition shall be cleansed . . . as the gospel is preached among ignorant and savage men. The ruder languages shall disappear, and the tongue of England alone shall be heard all around. So you see, my

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The novel abounds in the kind of rhetoric and irony invested in this extract. Western religious doctrine is constantly juxtaposed with indigenous belief systems to show the supernatural elements of both systems of cosmology. No one system is privileged over the other. Grey’s arrogant claim about “Christian civilization” is satirically undercut by the refrain “they who have murdered the son of their own god!”35—something that the Xhosa find incredulous. Religion and language have always been strong semiotic markers of the Other, hence Grey’s policy of proselytizing and Anglicizing the Xhosa. In this regard, Leon de Kock postulates that the policy of the colonizers in reducing the language of the Xhosa to “a written orthography” was to translate the Bible “into the semiology of a previous oral culture.”36 Lance van Sittert, who describes the Cape Eastern frontier of the late nineteenth century as a “cultural transition zone,”populated by huntergatherers, pastoralists, farmers and European colonists, writes, Scorched earth was an integral part of the military campaigns which levered Africans off their land, and pushed the colonial boundary steadily northwards. In their wake, the land was converted to private property and seeded with European settlers, stock and crops.37

In Mda’s novel, the governor Sir George Cathcart, frustrated like his predecessor Sir Harry Smith in being unable to quell the Xhosa insurrection, “order[s] his soldiers to go on a rampage and burn amaXhosa fields and kill amaXhosa cattle wherever they [come] across them.”38 His successor, Sir George Grey, whom the indigenes refer to not by name but by the mocking sobriquet “The Man Who Named Ten Rivers,” completes the task begun by his predecessors. At the end of the novel, he is heard, filtered through the narrative voice, proclaiming his great achievement, “‘Finally I have pacified Xhosaland!’”39 While he perceives his land policy of penetrating Xhosa land to settle whites as a victory, the ecological and human toll on the region is incalculable: Pacified homesteads are in ruins. Pacified men register themselves as pacified labourers in the emerging towns. Pacified men in their emaciated thousands. Pacified women remain to tend the soil and build pacified families. When pacified men return, their homesteads have been moved elsewhere, and crammed into tiny pacified villages. The pacified fields have become rich settler farmlands. (The Heart of Redness 312)

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This stylized passage encapsulates, in rhetorical terms, the ambivalent nature of conquest in the name of progress. It would be true to say that such settlements ushered in the kind of progress that makes South Africa today the mighty engine of commerce and industry on the continent of Africa. It would also be true to say that the deleterious impact of such progress on the indigenes is felt even to this day in the Eastern Cape, which is rated the poorest and most underdeveloped province in the country, its political woes not least of all exacerbated by corrupt governance—a fact acknowledged by Mda in the novel. The extract cited above testifies to the destruction of the ecological relationship between the people of the region and their land, and the evils of the migrant labor system as a consequence of it. The migrant labor system was one of the cornerstones of the white apartheid government which ruled South Africa from 1948 until the democratic elections of April 1994. In order to keep the urban areas free of black people, hostels were created in the cities for male migrant laborers. Their families, who lived in the rural areas, were not allowed to join them in the cities which were kept “white” by night. The men visited their families once a year, during Christmas. Much of South Africa’s social ills of today can be attributed to the migrant labor system which disrupted normal family lives.

Ecofeminism Problematized Earlier, I posited the notion of Qukezwa as being an ecofeminist. Cheryll Glotfelty40 defines “ecofeminism” as a hybrid label to describe a theoretical discourse in which the theme is the link between the oppression of women and the domination of nature. But the term “ecofeminism” is itself in danger of becoming hierarchical and essentialized if one takes the feminist movement as rooted in the Western psyche as being anti-men and pro-nature. Michael M. Bell points out some of the problems associated with the term “ecofeminism.” Apart from perpetuating the “dichotomy between men and women as well as the negative stereotypes of women as irrational, as controlled by their bodies, and as best suited for the domestic realm,”41 the term also suggests that Western societies are more patriarchal than Eastern ones, and this is manifestly not true. Eastern societies, and even African ones—Zimbabwe being a good example—have demonstrated their patriarchal dominance over nature. Bell advocates a middle position, avoiding such dualisms and recognizing “the gray areas and the interactiveness and interdependence of our categories.”42 The sub-continent of India has witnessed the most sustained struggles by women environmental activists who have opposed the male-dominated

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interests of commerce and trade in their country. Long before Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winner for her first-ever novel The God of Small Things, made environmental issues a cause célèbre, Indian rural women had been at the forefront in protecting their natural resources from what Robert J. C. Young terms “men [...] ideologically colonized by the shortterm commercial values of the market place.”43 The earliest example of resistance by peasants to the deforestation of their land goes back to the 1940s, when Mira Behn, a devotee of Gandhi, established an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas to focus on the problem of deforestation and the planting of non-indigenous cash crops such as the pine tree. Like the kind of intuitive ecological awareness shown by Qukezwa in Mda’s The Heart of Redness, the women “possessed repositories of intimate knowledge both of husbandry and of the medicinal and nutritional value of a wide variety of plants.”44 A case in which both men and women were involved in protecting their environment, which finds a resonance in Mda’s novel, is that of the tree-hugging, or Chipko movement which began in 1972-3 in northwest India when the local people successfully protested against the sale of 300 ash trees to commerce. According to Young, men and women gave up their lives in the struggle.45 The Chipko movement opposed the government’s forestation plan to plant non-indigenous trees such as the eucalyptus, which produces no water-conserving humus and destroys the food system. Alfred W. Crosby proposes that European expansion was not only facilitated by military superiority, but also by “a biological, an ecological, component.”46 Such colonization of public land by an invading force or by the central government acts to the detriment of the local people. In Mda’s novel, Qukezwa’s seemingly reckless act of cutting down “foreign trees . . . not the trees of our forefathers”47 is a protest against such invasion by what Crosby has termed “portmanteau biota,”48 a collective term for the organisms that Europeans took with them to the lands they colonized. Qukezwa’s actions, which stem from ancestral wisdom, register a strong message to those governments that exploit planet Earth without regard to the consequences of their actions. Qukezwa’s stance is vindicated by the present-day situation in South Africa where the legacy of portmanteau biota is costing the country millions of rands. According to a newspaper report, “exotic plants and weeds are destroying our grazing and farming lands, forests, nature and game reserves. The government spends half a billion rand a year on fighting this scourge, but it is far from winning the battle.”49 This exotic biota ranges from trees such as the black wattle and the red river gum, to shrubs such as bugweed, triffid, and lantana. The Department of Water and Forestry claims that these alien plants are drying

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up rivers and streams and robbing indigenous plants of water and causing them to die. The case against Qukezwa for cutting down foreign trees eventually “fizzles out” because the elders of the village apparently “have more important things to deal with.”50 The battle over the immediate future of Qolorha-by-Sea is won by Camagu, Qukezwa, and the Believers. Camagu’s plan for a cooperative society which harvests the sea and manufactures isiXhosa attire and jewelry finally triumphs when a court order from the government department of arts, culture and heritage puts a stop to the building of the casino and declares Qolorha-by-Sea a “national heritage.”51 But for how long can Qolorha-by-Sea resist globalization by foreign agents? The answer to this question comes unequivocally toward the end of the novel when Camagu drives back to Qolorha-by-Sea after visiting Dalton at a hospital in East London. Dalton, incidentally, is recovering from a vicious attack by the frustrated Unbeliever, Bhonco, who still harbors a grudge against Dalton and his settler forebears for cutting off his ancestor’s head during one of the many wars between the settlers and the Xhosas over natural resources in the Eastern Cape. That greed and the exigencies of survival will eventually impact on the ecology of the area, as it did during the time of Sir Harry Smith and Sir George Grey, is inevitable: As he drives back home he sees wattle trees along the road. Qukezwa taught him that these are enemy trees. All along the way he cannot see any of the indigenous trees that grow in abundance in Qolorha. Those who want to preserve indigenous plants and birds have won the day there. At least for now. But for how long? The whole country is ruled by greed. Everyone wants to have his or her snout in the trough. Sooner or later the powers that be may decide, in the name of the people, that it is good for the people to have a gambling complex at Qolorha-by-Sea. (The Heart of Redness 319)

One of the problems with a term such as “ecofeminism” is that it conjures up the stereotype of the intellectually emancipated woman who takes a stance against the depredations of the environment by an exploitative patriarchal society. In this respect, we are reminded of environmental activists such as Arundhati Roy and Wangari Maathai, who received a PhD in veterinary medicine from the University of Nairobi. In Mda’s novel, the figure of the young Qukezwa stands out in stark contrast to intellectuals such as Xoliswa, the local school principal and her former teacher, and the American-educated Camagu. She represents the inbetween, liminal status of a woman who clings to her Xhosa traditions, embracing the “heart of redness” as suggested by the title of the novel, yet

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exhibiting deep resources of indigenous knowledge about her environment. That a PhD graduate in the person of Camagu can benefit from her intuitive wisdom is a telling point which endorses the ecological dimension of the novel by forging a nexus with women environmental activists in both the developed and developing world.

Conclusion In 2004, Wangari Maathai, who started the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya in 1977,52 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This was the first time in the history of the Nobel Prize that this ultimate accolade for peace was awarded to an African woman, and to an environmental campaigner to boot. When asked by TIME magazine’s Stephan Faris, “What’s the world’s biggest challenge?” she replied, “The environment. We are sharing our resources in a very inequitable way. . . . And that is partly the reason why we have conflict.”53 Conflict over natural resources is very much at the centre of Mda’s novel The Heart of Redness, which spans several generations in the life of the Xhosas in the Eastern Cape—from the frontier wars between the British and the Xhosas in the late nineteenth century, to the present-day crisis over the fate of the fictional seaside resort of Qolorha-by-Sea. The historical past, which saw several frontier wars fought between the indigenous blacks and settler whites arising out of uneven ecological power relations, is linked to the present through the descendant of the prophetess Nongqawuse, Qukezwa, whose character is conceived in mythopoeic terms. While her pregnancy through an act of Immaculate Conception may be regarded as one of several instances of magic realism in the novel, its obvious allusion to the Virgin Mary is startling in its conceit. Just as the Biblical prototype is a challenge to the non-believing intellect, Mda's fictional creation defies human rationality, which insists on the authority of empirical evidence for ontological truth. The mythopoeic aura that Qukezwa's character is invested with, challenges the reader to ponder the nature of arcane knowledge and ancestral wisdom regarding the ecology. In reading Mda's The Heart of Redness from an ecofeminist perspective afforded by the character of Qukezwa, this essay has explored how the social, political, and economic decisions taken by humans in South Africa's colonial past have impacted on the ecological dynamics of contemporary South Africa, especially the Eastern Cape province which is regarded as the poorest of the nine provinces that make up the country. Investing the character of Qukezwa with a mythopoeic aura has a deep historical resonance. As a descendant of the nineteenth-century prophetess

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Nongqawuse, who misguidedly presided over the most tragic episode in the history of the Xhosa nation, namely, the Cattle-Killing of the 1850s, Qukezwa is a symbol of resistance to the colonial exploitation of the Eastern Cape. Her opposition to the presence of foreign biota, introduced by the colonialists, is staged not in militaristic terms, but in ecological terms.

Notes 1

Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (London: Flamingo, 1983 [1982], 25). 2 Michael Bennett, “From Wide Open Spaces to Metropolitan Places,” in The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003, ed. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2003), 300. 3 Donald Morrison, “Still Enough Wrongs to Write,” TIME, 14 November 2005. 4 Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958 [1944]), 7. 5 Nongqawuse had prophesied that if the Xhosas destroyed their cattle, their ancestors would arise on an appointed day and help drive the white colonists into the sea. Historians Davenport and Saunders aver that the slaughtering of their livestock was “in the expectation of the resurrection of ancestral spirits, accompanied by the provision of food from heaven” (South Africa: A Modern History, 5th Edition, London: Macmillan, 2000 [1977], 142). 6 Robert Bridges, ed., The Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Hertsfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994 [1918, 1930]), 2. 7 Jonathan Fowler, “We Are Using Up Earth Faster Than It Can Regenerate,” The Sunday Independent (Johannesburg), October 24, 2004. 8 9

Ibid.

Ivan Rabinowitz, “Under Western Words: The Postcolonial Landslide,” in Literature, Nature and the Land: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Environment, ed. Nigel Bell and Meg Cowper-Lewis (Ngoye, Zululand: University of Zululand, 1992), 23. 10 Jeff B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-1857 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press), 312-313. 11 Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55. 12 Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Call Me Not a Man (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979), 164. 13 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), 324. 14 Johan U. Jacobs, “Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness: The Novel as Umngqokolo,” Kunapipi 24, no. 1 & 2: 232. 15 Harry Sewlall, “Deconstructing Empire in Joseph Conrad and Zakes Mda,” Journal of Literary Studies 19, no.3 & 4: 342. 16 Mda, 283.

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Ibid., 230. Ibid., 231. 19 Ibid., 231. 20 Ibid., 231. 21 Ibid., 231. 22 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 4. 23 Mda, 232. 24 Ibid., 233. 25 David Attwell, “The Experimental Turn in Black South African Fiction,” in South Africa in the Global Imaginary, ed. Leon de Kock, Louise Bethlehem and Sonja Laden (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2004), 173. 26 Michael Titlestad and Mike Kissack, “The Foot does not Sniff,” Journal of Literary Studies 19, no.3 & 4: 268. 27 Mda, The Heart of Redness (Oxford: O.U.P., 2000), 219. 28 Ibid., 302. 29 Ibid., 247. 30 Ibid., 249. 31 Ibid., 249. 32 William Beinart, “South African Environmental History in the African Context,” in South African Environmental History: Cases & Comparisons, ed. Stephen Dovers, Ruth Edgecombe and Bill Guest (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2002), 223. 33 C.A. Bowers, Critical Essays on Education, Modernity, and the Recovery of the Ecological Imperative (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 22-23. 34 Ibid., 25. 35 Mda, 268. 36 Leon de Kock, Civilizing Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), 65. 37 Lance van Sittert, “‘Our Irrepressible Fellow Colonist’: The Biological Invasion of Prickly Pear (Opuntia ficus-indica) in the Eastern Cape, c. 1890–c. 1910,” in South African Environmental History: Cases & Comparisons, ed. Stephen Dovers, Ruth Edgecombe and Bill Guest (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2002), 142. 38 Mda, 25. 39 Ibid., 312. 40 Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xxiv. 41 Michael M. Bell, An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press, 1998), 170. 42 Ibid., 171. 43 Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 102. 44 Ibid., 102. 45 Ibid., 102. 18

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46 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7. 47 Mda, 248. 48 Crosby, 270. 49 Chris Makhaye, “Alien Plants are Sapping our Land,” Sunday Tribune (South Africa), 16 January, 2005. 50 Mda, 280. 51 Ibid., 311. 52 Young, 107. 53 Stephan Faris, “10 Questions for Wangari Maathai,” TIME, 18 October 2004.

CHAPTER NINE NEW FRONTIERS FOR ECOFEMINISM: WOMEN, NATURE AND GLOBALIZATION IN RUTH L. OZEKI’S MY YEAR OF MEATS JENNIFER LADINO

The American romance with the frontier is far from over, although its nature has changed in recent decades. As Patricia Limerick points out, “the American frontiering spirit, sometime in the last century, picked itself up and made a definitive relocation—from territorial expansion to technological and commercial expansion.”1 In colloquial use, Limerick notes, today’s “pioneer” might be yesterday’s “savage”2—provided he is innovative or forward-thinking—and “the frontier” can signify cyberspace as easily as untamed wilderness. Even scholars, who are surely acquainted with the term’s violent history, often find the rhetoric of the frontier seductive. According to Frederick Buell, the global economy has become a “new frontier for American business and society.”3 Multiculturalism, information technology, and even environmental problems—all of which, Buell says, enable American economic and political hegemony—are some of the realms within which this “new frontier” is being reconstructed.4 Today’s frontier is more than an imaginary geopolitical landscape or a rhetorical play on words, though; it is a powerful ideological force that underscores globalization’s economic and social policies. Heather Eaton argues that, in a very material sense, “economic globalization appeals to an ideal of adventure, entrepreneurship, and superiority” and reifies the perception of homogenous nations competing on a level playing field from which profit may be “plucked by the adventurous.”5 Clearly, the U.S. benefits from this Turneresque notion of the global economy as a “frontier of capital exchange.”6 However, despite the assurance with which this economic frontier asserts itself as natural, the “reconstitution of U.S. cultural nationalism in an interesting, new, ‘postnational’ form” that Buell

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laments is not the inevitable byproduct of today’s literary or cultural texts, even those in which the frontier is a prominent trope.7 This essay examines Ruth L. Ozeki’s first novel, My Year of Meats, as an articulation of alternate possibilities to the totalizing vision of the American frontiering spirit put forth by Buell and others. In Ozeki’s text, where Wal-Mart emerges as “the capitalist equivalent of the wide-open spaces and endless horizons of the American geographical frontier,” the politics of global capitalism are made visible in their overlapping effects on women and nature.8 Asking readers to consider how environmental hazards are unevenly distributed across landscapes and populations, the novel traces these problems to common sources: exploitative capitalism, unchecked globalization, patriarchal ideologies, environmental racism, and media representations of a homogenous national culture, marketed abroad as “authentic” Americanness. Extending conversations about political economy, social justice and the fate of nonhuman nature in a globalizing world, My Year of Meats transgresses narrative, national, and theoretical frontiers in order to imagine new stories on which ecofeminism might be based. Broadly speaking, ecofeminism is a diverse political and intellectual movement with various strands, tied together by a shared concern for addressing the ideological and material connections between the domination of nature and the domination of women.9 Ecofeminists approach this central concern from a range of political perspectives; as Eaton explains, ecofeminists can be “liberal, Marxist, socialist, cultural, radical, postmodernist, or ecowomanist.”10 Wherever they locate themselves politically, most ecofeminists work to contest patriarchal dualisms and to challenge ecological destruction. In its early stages, ecofeminism tended to privilege white, Western, middle-class women’s issues at the expense of others.11 However, ecofeminists have been paying increasing attention to so-called developing countries and tackling issues like cultural imperialism, the feminization of poverty, global agribusiness, and war. In keeping with the vast scope and complexity of these issues, contemporary ecofeminism is a diffuse movement, and its participants—including theologians, philosophers, literary critics, geographers, activists, and historians, among others—reflect a “robust theoretical pluralism.”12 I come to ecofeminism as a literary critic, one who is committed to a methodology that “allow[s] the literature to critique the theory” and even to generate theories of its own.13 My work shares a premise with Eaton and others: ecofeminism must grapple with globalization if it is to be a viable movement. Early theories of ecofeminism that recommend “emancipatory strategies”—like “remything nature” or “re-eroticizing

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human relationships with a ‘bodied’ landscape”—are alluring, but they will not be effective unless conjoined with a critique of globalization.14 By examining My Year of Meats alongside ecofeminist theories, I hope to foreground some of the economic and ethical concerns surrounding globalization with which ecofeminists currently struggle. This novel also offers a snapshot of the uneven terrain of ecofeminism, which wants to at once celebrate and challenge connections between women and nature. Some ecofeminists have identified a theoretical dichotomy within the movement: there are either “affinity” ecofeminists—those who believe in an inherent affinity between women and nature—or social ecofeminists, who see gender, along with women’s connection to nature, as socially constructed.15 Noël Sturgeon describes this tension as “the conflict between the critique of the patriarchal connection between women and nature and the desire for that very connection.”16 Ozeki’s novel is notable, in part, because of how it negotiates this apparent disjuncture. While her text certainly condemns the oppressive work of patriarchy, it also entertains a desire to connect women and nature in its renegotiations of the category of motherhood, which occupies a tenuous position at the nexus of ecofeminism’s distinct branches. More specifically, I will show that My Year of Meats can be read as an example of what Carolyn Merchant has labeled socialist ecofeminism, whose principle goal is to “reverse the priorities of capitalism, subordinating production to sustainable forms of reproduction and ecology.”17 Yet, even as it inverts the production-reproduction hierarchy that governs global capitalism, the text refuses to entirely disavow affinity ecofeminism in favor of socialist. Rather, the novel recuperates and reinvents the former within the latter: women’s desires to be mothers— arguably an “affinity” strategy for linking women and nature—are invoked from a socialist ecofeminist standpoint that acknowledges the power of global economic forces to shape these desires even while celebrating reproduction as a challenge to the unsustainable priorities that drive production. The negotiation of these ecofeminist perspectives takes place within a framework of postmodern conceptions of language, identity and nature—a framework that privileges networks and hybridity, rather than hierarchies or binaries, and so complicates standard dichotomies (like men/women, nature/culture, and rural/urban) in provocative ways. Through its reinventions of American nature narratives, most notably that of the frontier, and its critical reflections on production and reproduction as global enterprises that are simultaneously postnatural and quintessentially

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natural, this novel implicitly theorizes strategies for today’s ecofeminists. Refusing to situate any one identity category as the “ultimate ecofeminist,” the novel imagines heterogeneous coalitions of women working together to critique patriarchal hegemony and to uphold sustainable reproduction and ecology as viable alternatives to late capitalist frontiering.18 Although some scholars of Ozeki’s work have mentioned “the inextricable link between men and domination” that negatively affects women and nature, there has not yet been a thorough consideration of how an ecofeminist perspective enhances our understanding of this text.19 Monica Chiu’s influential article credits My Year of Meats with exposing the meat industry as run by irresponsible and abusive men. However, Chiu (who is heavily influenced by Buell’s argument) ultimately sees a “redomestication” of Ozeki’s female characters within a patriarchal system of dominance powered by American hegemony. To the contrary, I read Ozeki’s novel as exposing and contesting precisely what Chiu suggests it (re)naturalizes: “the work of multiple/transnational constructions and their agents on women and minorities.”20 In my view, Ozeki’s female characters’ embodiment of “the work of patriarchy” occupies the core of the book’s political project. In another recent article on My Year of Meats, Shameem Black recognizes that the “collaborative worlds of media and meat take their greatest toll upon the lives of women, specifically at the charged sites of their sexuality and fertility.”21 Black’s work is among the most insightful scholarship on this novel; however, her “cosmofeminist framework” forecloses engagement with the local geographies that are so important to the text insofar as it seeks “conversations that extend far beyond the geographic axis of the novel.”22 The impetus to move “far beyond” geography neglects a crucial component of Ozeki’s fiction: its nature. This novel clearly shows how global forces play out in local environments in complex ways. Rural towns are implicated as complicit in the forces of production and consumption that operate globally to export American hegemony and, at the same time, identified as capable of challenging such exportation. Since nature—not only women’s bodies but also the particular, local geographies that are the other “charged sites” at which global capitalism makes its mark—is central to this novel, only an ecofeminist reading can fully account for the local roots and the global reach of its politics. My goals, then, are twofold: I will read My Year of Meats through the lens of ecofeminism and, conversely, read ecofeminism through the lens of Ozeki’s novel. In other words, I hope to contribute a fresh reading of My Year of Meats to critical conversations about Ozeki while demonstrating

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how her fiction extends theories of ecofeminism, primarily by engaging globalization. Even as her novel illustrates core paradoxes and conflicts within ecofeminism itself, it offers an invigorating model for contemporary ecofeminist literary and political trends. Contesting the highly masculinized frontier ideology that persists domestically, in the U.S., and globally, in capitalism’s ruthless conquest of new geographies and markets, Ozeki formulates instead a new socialist ecofeminist ideal— an ideal that starts with an American society that lives up to its proclamations of socially just communities, appreciation of diversity, and sustainable treatment of nonhuman nature.

“She doesn’t have to be a wife at all, you know”: Ecofeminism’s Postnatural Mothers The formulation of this ecofeminist ideal begins, strangely, with a TV show: “My American Wife!,” a Japanese program sponsored by an American meat export business called BEEF-EX. Jane Takagi-Little, the novel’s feisty narrator, is a Japanese American documentarian who is hired to film “My American Wife!” The official goal of the show is to offer Japanese housewives the chance to “feel the hearty sense of warmth, of comfort, of hearth and home—the traditional family values symbolized by red meat in rural America.”23 Armed with the slogan “Meat is the message,” Jane initially believes she might “use wives to sell meat in the service of a Larger Truth.”24 But, in the process of filming in and traveling around the U.S., Jane uncovers the unethical, even illegal, practices of the meat industry and its harmful effects on local communities, where both nature and human bodies—especially female bodies—are being physically harmed by global capitalism.25 In particular, Jane learns that the synthetic estrogen hormone DES, which was used indiscriminately on cattle at the same time that it was prescribed for pregnant women to prevent miscarriages and premature births, is still in use.26 If meat is the message, then it is also the medium through which Jane understands that women are treated like pieces of meat in material as well as metaphorical ways. The producers of “My American Wife!” want Jane to provide “authentic” American subjects, defined as “sufficiently exotic and yet reassuringly familiar,” and demonstrative of “wholesome values”; however, it soon becomes apparent that the network will not air “deformities… (Like race. Or poverty. Or clubfeet.).”27 Realizing that “authenticity” is mandated by “market studies,” Jane gradually disavows her role as “a cultural pimp, selling off the vast illusion of America” to Japan, and begins making shows she feels are more honest.28 Meanwhile,

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BEEF-EX’s strategy of covering up the realities of race, class, poverty, disability, tragedy and sickness backfires: the more perfect the families, the less authentic they seem to their Japanese audience. Embodying audience reaction is the novel’s other protagonist and Jane’s literary double: Akiko Ueno, the Japanese wife of Joichi (“John”) Ueno, the ad agency’s head marketer and Jane’s boss. Akiko—and arguably, Ozeki’s readers—want to see families whose so-called “deformities” are revealed. Akiko’s growing independence mirrors Jane’s increasing political awareness, and their paths cross repeatedly during the year the novel chronicles—first through technology, and ultimately on American soil. Each “month” of the novel’s year is framed by an excerpt from Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, a literary move that highlights the power of stories, especially when women are telling them.29 A bold woman who “overstepped her bounds” when she dared to “speak men’s Japanese [and] to be different,” Shonagon opens each chapter and motivates Ozeki’s female protagonists.30 Specifically, The Pillow Book provides a model for Akiko’s own poetic endeavors as well as inspiration for Jane’s side project: a documentary exposé about the meat industry, which she hopes will educate “some girl in the next millennium” by countering the “miasma of misinformation about culture and race.”31 Jane pinpoints one source of her own misinformation when she returns to her hometown of Quam, Minnesota, and tracks down Frye’s Grammar School Geography (1902), a book she had checked out from the local library and read as a young girl. As an adult, she is appalled by the hierarchical oppositions the book presents as fact. But it is not the obvious dichotomy of “man versus woman” that bothers her most; rather, “it’s man versus life. Man’s REASON, his industries and commerce, versus the entire natural world.”32 It is Jane’s project—and Ozeki’s—to explore the often destructive conflation of woman and life in a world where industries and commerce reign. With Shonagon’s brave prose as antecedent, Jane pursues a classic ecofeminist goal: writing “new stories [that] honor, rather than fear, women’s biological particularity while simultaneously affirming women as subjects and makers of history.”33 While Jane uses “My American Wife!” and, ultimately, her documentary, as mediums for her “new stories,” Akiko writes her own stories in the form of diaries and lists (à la Shonagon), poems, and eventually, faxes. Reading My Year of Meats is a multimedia experience of sorts; Ozeki includes lists, letters, poems, journal entries, written proposals for the show’s episodes, and even business memos and faxes as “texts” to be read alongside the novel’s prose. This formal deconstruction of the novel as literary genre mirrors its critique of authenticity and its

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broader skepticism towards “truth.” Subjectivity, for instance, is understood in the novel as “socially and discursively constructed, multiply organized, and constantly shifting”—an understanding that enables Ozeki to disavow binary conceptions of race, class, gender, and sexuality.34 Jane frequently reminds readers of her mixed ethnicity (her father was from Minnesota; her mother is Japanese), and the novel celebrates racial, cultural and natural hybridity rather than categorical purity. National identity is similarly complicated. When a preacher in Harmony, Mississippi, tells his congregation that the world is “really…just made up of countries, which are made up of states, which are made up of towns, which are made up of communities, which are made up of neighbors, which are made up of families, and so on,” he emphasizes that nations are really imaginary compilations of various smaller-scale units.35 Such fragmentation unravels the myth of America as a cohesive, homogenous country and accentuates the book’s focus on diverse communities and makeshift families. We meet characters like the Beaudroux, a Southern white couple who adopts a dozen homeless children from Korea and Brazil. These politically astute children form a coalition with their African American peers and lobby to have a racist Civil War memorial removed from their town square. Underscoring these hybrid characters and families is a conception of nonhuman nature as itself hybrid, a combination of the exotic and the indigenous that can cross national boundaries with increasing ease. Bearing the marks of capitalist production, Ozeki’s natures are postnatural: revised, reworked, and remade by human impact. Kudzu, for instance, is a symbolic postnatural plant, originally imported from Japan and “praised for its versatility, hardiness, and speed of growth,” but now lamented for those very qualities and seen as only “metaphorically” useful, a symbol of the “invasive weed” of Japanese industry in the South.36 Cattle are also cast as nature-culture hybrids; the dictionary definitions Ozeki provides at the novel’s end pun on “livestock” as, by definition, conjoined with capitalism.37 As the kudzu example reminds us, exporting American culture is not a one-way street; Japanese culture is also being imported. The two cultures merge in troubling ways when they unite under the influence of the American frontier ideology. Early in the novel, Jane’s Japanese camera crew, Suzuki and Oh, buy air guns at Wal-Mart that they use to shoot holes in posters of naked women, and Joichi Ueno embodies the violence and hyper-masculinity of the frontier, even embracing the nickname “John” to evoke the Western film actor, John Wayne. However, cultures do not always come together to embrace such aggressive customs. Cultural boundary blurring often refuses to replicate global capitalism’s violent

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tendencies. Most notably, Jane (who identifies herself as “racially ‘half’”) is able to “make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes” all the more effectively due to her “doubled” status.38 The novel’s social constructivist conceptions of identity, nation and nature (including both people and animals) enable it to dismantle the hierarchical social relationships enforced by the swaggering John Uenos of the world. The “new stories” told in My Year of Meats invite readings that adhere to Karla Armbruster’s mandate for ecofeminist literary critics to “offer a perspective that complicates cultural conceptions of human identity and of human relationships with nonhuman nature instead of relying on unproblematized visions of continuity or difference.”39 One ironic example of such complication is BEEF-EX’s emphasis on wives as heads of families, which inadvertently promotes the very “heterarchical and matrifocal societies” many ecofeminists praise in opposition to patriarchal models.40 Jane exploits the fact that wives are the stars of this show, and she tells subversive stories about creative forms of childbearing, as both “a privileged site of female desire” and “a place where different forms of local and global power jockey for control.”41 Indeed, as a site that has “both empowered feminist moral authority and reinforced the constricting perception that women are defined by their reproductive abilities”—a paradox that echoes ecofeminism’s own internal tensions— motherhood is a useful place to begin untangling this novel’s narrative and ideological threads.42 In her frequent celebration of motherhood and the desire to bear children, Ozeki seems to align herself with affinity ecofeminists who celebrate an essential connection between women and nature—in this case, manifested in the “natural” desire to become a mother. Whether they are dedicated feminists, family-centered lesbians, buxom ex-strippers, or dutiful wives, all of Ozeki’s female characters want children. It is tempting, then, to associate Ozeki’s work with the branch of ecofeminism that suggests “women are biologically close to nature in that their reproductive characteristics (menstrual cycles, lactation, birth) keep them in touch with natural rhythms.”43 While this form of ecofeminism risks essentializing women and reinforcing patriarchal conceptions of women as “natural” childbearers, it is important to remember that “most ecofeminists consider the connections between women and nature to be based in theory and in conceptual frameworks rather than in essence.”44 It is these “conceptual frameworks” rather than an essential femininity that Ozeki describes and exploits. As I’ve suggested, Ozeki might be deemed a socialist ecofeminist insofar as she is invested in protesting “assaults on women’s reproductive

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health” and theorizing these assaults “in the broader context of the relations between reproduction and production.”45 However, her socialist ethic draws upon an affinity-based conception of motherhood, strategically deploying a desire for reproduction in order to boost her larger critique of global capitalism. By supplanting images of obedient wives with images of creative mothers and unconventional families, Jane directs audiences toward the recognition that “the language of childbirth allows women to imagine new global futures relative to harmful global actors” as well as “to reshape the media through which they understand their lives.”46 Reinventing motherhood in ways that are ultimately progressive, My Year of Meats depicts postnatural mothers who determine their families, and define their responsibilities to those families, within today’s postnational context. The families that seem most “authentic” to Akiko (and arguably generate the most readerly affection) hinge on children conceived through nontraditional means: adoption, accidental pregnancy, artificial insemination, even rape. These forms of conception temper any impulse to read the novel as equating femininity with motherhood by celebrating pregnancy’s “naturalness.” Between Jane’s deformed uterus—which is literally shaped by the DES her mother took while pregnant—international adoption practices, sperm and egg banking, and other new reproductive technologies, getting pregnant is less “natural” than ever. These new technologies mean that kinship is defined unconventionally rather than in traditional or heteronormative terms. More and more unfettered by their historical classification as “close to nature,” women’s bodies become potential sites of resistance to global capitalism. However, if postnatural mothers have more options for creating families according to their own visions, then the means of achieving these visions remain largely directed by global capitalism, with its racialized socioeconomic priorities. One nontraditional family Jane encounters is headed by Lara and Dyann, a biracial lesbian couple with two young daughters—one conceived and birthed by each of the women in conjunction with a sperm donor—who live in Northampton, Massachusetts. This couple’s experience of motherhood raises the issue of “shopping for sperm” and the ways in which this relatively new reproductive industry is particularly racialized. Readers are told, along with Jane, that “there just isn’t a big market for black sperm.”47 Lara and Dyann theorize this as both a cultural and an economic issue, speculating that “only whites are obsessed with their progeny…Or have the cash to buy it if they ain’t got it.”48 Their discussion highlights the ways in which reproductive processes confront the socioeconomic logics of production at

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every turn and reminds readers that “reproduction and ecology are both subordinate to production” in our contemporary capitalist regime.49 Lara and Dyann also happen to be vegetarians who are well-informed about the meat industry’s unethical practices, and Jane’s visit with this family spearheads her desire to learn more about this industry as well. Although she feels guilty for not telling the vegetarian couple about BEEF-EX’s sponsorship, Jane is very enthusiastic about the episode she films with them, suspecting it “could even effect social change.”50 Indeed, Akiko credits this particular episode when she faxes Jane to express some profound realizations about her marriage and her sexuality: “I do not know if I am Lesbian since I cannot imagine this condition, but I know I never want marriage and with my deep heart I am not ‘John’s’ wife.”51 Seeing this episode spurs Akiko into action. Despite her husband’s physical and verbal abuse, Akiko controls her ability to get pregnant by not eating, which eliminates her menstruation. When she conceives (after “John” rapes her), she takes charge of her pregnancy and her future by leaving him for the U.S. For Akiko, pregnancy is a way of overcoming an unhealthy environment by claiming ownership of her body. Likewise, when Jane becomes pregnant, she realizes “with shocking clarity that [her] pregnancy [is] no longer contingent” on Sloan, her intermittent, long-distance lover and the father of the child that Jane eventually miscarries.52 Although Jane’s uterus has been deformed by her mother’s intake of synthetic chemicals (and so is “toxic” in that sense) and Akiko’s abusive marriage is an equally toxic environment, both women are able to choose motherhood on their own terms: Akiko, through leaving “John,” and Jane, through considering adoption, with or without Sloan. Like many of the mothers she encounters, Jane’s decision to have her baby is not linked to an ideal of a heteronormative family. Motherhood need not be underwritten by a traditional support structure, either in the form of a heterosexual partner or even any partner at all. Through these and other women—including Lara and Dyann—Ozeki recommends a view of maternity that recasts pregnancy as agency, not obligation. Ozeki’s subversion of the traditional categories within which pregnancy is supposed to occur effectively complicates gender essentialism. New possibilities for motherhood suggest new possibilities for wifehood as well. As Akiko’s nurse, Tomoko, says of Akiko’s unborn daughter: “She doesn’t have to be a wife at all, you know….”53 Rather than predicating femininity on either marriage or motherhood, the novel posits pregnancy as a woman’s reproductive and individual right—a choice, rather than a responsibility. The novel supplants the category of

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wife with a revised version of motherhood, in which traditional family models, conventional gender roles and heteronormative structures are replaced with an ideal of transnational, transcultural communities organized around matriarchal families. In these examples and numerous other places in the text, which I continue to investigate in the next section, women’s bodies become crucial sites for negotiating identity, kinship, sexuality, race, disability, and nationality. Ozeki’s characters’ bodies are active agents in her fiction, and Ozeki should be added to the growing list of women authors who “invoke the body not as a mute, passive space that signifies the inferior part of our natures but as a place of vibrant connection, historical memory, and knowledge.”54 New reproductive technologies enable women to have more control over their bodies and to generate new kinds of family models in which women are at the helm. At the same time, these technologies are subject to the logics and byproducts of global capitalism; as such, reproductive strategies—and socialist ecofeminism more broadly—are somewhat complicit with the system they challenge. As postnatural environments, women’s bodies are locations at which these conflicts play out, as well as locations from which they might be contested.

“Regional Corners”: Ecofeminism’s Global Localities In their recent anthology Geomodernisms, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel argue for a “locational approach” to modernity based on the premise that the apparently local settings featured in many modernist texts should be understood in more worldly terms: “their horizon is global and their voicing is refracted through the local-global dialectic.”55 Similarly, Ozeki’s postmodern characters live lives of “globalized privacy,” in which seemingly personal issues cannot be separated from the politics of global capitalism.56 In an interview printed at the end of the novel as part of the “Penguin Reader’s Guide,” Ozeki describes how economic and ideological forces play out at various scales, including the global, the national, and the bodily. Accordingly, her fiction understands life as “part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman’s fallopian tube.”57 In My Year of Meats, women’s bodies are particularly fraught sites of globalized privacy insofar as they bear the disproportionate effects of global capitalism. While men are also harmed by DES and the illegal practices of the meat industry, their investment in these power structures generally limits their ability to undertake social action. The novel’s men

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and women support Eaton’s point that women are better able to identify “the ways in which social relations have an adverse impact on the natural world than are men from their superordinate position.”58 The women in Ozeki’s text are better equipped to detect and combat the ideologies of individualism, frontier justice, and competitive capitalism that enable unethical and harmful practices to continue. Along with women’s bodies, small American towns emerge as fruitful sites for analysis. These global-localities are recognized as conduits for large-scale forces like sexism, imperialism and racism as well as, potentially, sites of resistance to those forces. Jane harvests many such sites as she travels around the U.S. during her year of meats. The “regional corners” she visits retain only a trace of their distinctive local culture; there is “precious little culture left,” and what has survived is “mostly of the ‘Ye Olde’ variety.”59 Nostalgically, she laments the “lost authenticity…that embarrasses the sham of here and now.”60 By disrupting pastoral ideals of simple, rural towns inhabited by quaint, close-knit communities, Jane’s research aids in the novel’s critique of the powerful illusion that is America. Small towns are anything but simple, precisely because these rural environments so frequently bear the marks of capitalist exploitation, and local communities find themselves contending with daunting global forces. While phrases like “lost authenticity” and “regional corners” evoke nostalgia for pastoral towns, any frontier nostalgia readers might feel is disrupted as Jane discovers the “macabre underbelly of small-town America”: its poverty, racism and violence.61 These environments are reminders of the failure of the U.S. to live up to its self-proclaimed exceptionalism: “all that remains of our pioneering aspirations are the confused and self-conscious simulacra of relic culture.”62 Ozeki ties the cattle industry’s decision to ignore government bans of DES to two “inalienable rights” in the U.S.: “cheap meat” and the right to make one’s own laws, or “frontier justice.”63 These domestic priorities are linked to global market forces insofar as both promote efficiency; farmers can “process animals on an assembly line, like cars or computer chips.”64 Ueno further explicates this link when he acknowledges that BEEF-EX is “just a bunch of cowboys pretending to be international traders.”65 Given the dominance of these “pioneering aspirations” and the ideology of individual rights that accompanies them, is it not surprisingly that the America Jane finds as she “trace[s] beef’s capitalist trail” is one in which genuine respect for diversity remains an ideal, and whiteness and masculinity still dominate.66 By exposing American myths as false fronts for a global market, the novel foregrounds the harsh domestic realities and

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the ways in which these are then served up for a global community. Jane argues that violence is so deeply embedded in American culture that it “has become the culture, what’s left of local color.”67 The U.S. is a country where “guns, race, meat, and Manifest Destiny” are connected in their promotion of “violent, dehumanized activity” of the sort Jane ultimately critiques.68 By situating women—especially Japanese housewives, who are marketed “dehumanized” meat products—as the primary victims of such violence, Ozeki traces the exportation of destructive domestic ideologies abroad. Nonhuman nature is enlisted in the service of such marketing, as the show’s producers look for “distinctive geographical features and scenic appeal” when choosing locations.69 However, Jane finds that the primary way most rural communities know nature is not aesthetically but through labor. The Martinez family of Texas, one of the first families Jane films, seems to be a classic American dream story of the bootstraps variety. Having recently emigrated from Mexico to Abilene, Texas—where Alberto (the father) promptly “lost his left hand to a hay bailer”—the Martinezes’ experience speaks to issues concerning migration, labor and citizenship.70 Ozeki’s language in describing their “success” subtly gestures towards these issues: they had “worked hard in the field” and “in factory jobs” and finally “scraped up the money” for their small house.71 From a socialist ecofeminist perspective, the Martinez family calls into question the sustainability of capitalism’s emphasis on production and reminds us that the local always bears traces of the global. Alberto’s lost hand is a symbol of the often less-than-ideal and sometimes dangerous working conditions of migrant workers in the U.S. Moreover, in a country where racism is a dominant force, the Martinezes cannot simply become “American” any more than Alberto can recover his hand. Even Jane describes Bobby Martinez, who was born in the U.S., as “a little Mexican boy shyly offering his American Supper to the nation of Japan.”72 While the Martinez family “sells” in Japan (their Beefy Burritos symbolize “their hard-earned American lifestyle”), they plant the seed for Jane’s interrogation of American authenticity and its global marketing.73 The families Jane documents become increasingly less conventional, and more overtly tied to the political economy. The Dawes family is poor, African American, and living in a Mississippi border town called Harmony; they have never had a white visitor to their church, and they cannot afford the red meat Jane’s show is supposed to market. Male residents of Harmony suffer the consequences of environmental racism when the chicken “parts” they could afford to buy from the local meat packing plant contain hormones that result in higher voices and breast

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enlargement. In case readers miss the reference to these effects, Jane articulates the economy’s racist dimensions in no uncertain terms. Ueno overrules Jane’s decision to broadcast this family—presumably because of the demands of their American sponsors, but really because the family is black and poor—and tells Jane that “‘My American Wife!’ is for Japanese people, not for Koreans or black peoples.” She is quick to call him a “racist bastard,” and so foreground late capitalism’s ability to develop and target niche markets according to racialized criteria.74 In Quarry, Indiana, a “blighted postcapitalist landscape” with fewer than a thousand residents, Jane meets another family that has experienced the impact of global capitalism at a bodily scale: the Bukowskys.75 Fifteen-year-old Christina Bukowsky was paralyzed and rendered comatose after being hit by a Wal-Mart truck. At the time of the accident, Eleanor Bukowsky had taken a job at Wal-Mart to compensate for her husband’s unemployment; like many others in Quarry, he “had been laid off at the mine.”76 As the uneven effects of globalization play out in this local environment, the town’s “underemployed population” rallies around the injured Christina.77 The town is renamed “Hope” in honor of Christina’s miraculous recovery, and compassion emerges as a “natural resource” that can be “min[ed] and market[ed] to America.”78 In a text so concerned with how the U.S. markets itself to others, the phrase “to America” suggests that compassion and community need to be “sold” domestically before this nation can be held up as a model of democracy. Eleanor leads the charge in catalyzing this small town community to action, gaining media attention and, as a result, a fair settlement from WalMart. Christina herself also has a powerful ability to inspire others— including Suzuki and Oh, who change dramatically following their visit with the Bukowskys.79 Significantly, the emphasis on Christina’s appearance reifies a “madonna” image of the beautiful white woman. With shiny, blonde hair “like a mutable golden corona” and “the eyes of an angel” (blue, of course), she is the epitome of “grace.”80 In upholding such stereotypes of women even as it condemns ruthless capitalism, the Bukowsky family reminds us that ecofeminist political critique is always exercised from a complicitous standpoint.81 Jane’s predicament is similarly compromised. As an employee of BEEF-EX, Jane is to some extent invested in global capitalism. However, her “doubled” status enables her to reappropriate global media. She uses the funds, property and resources of BEEF-EX to create a documentary about the industry’s unethical practices, ultimately critiquing the industry, the nation, and the dual exploitation of nature and humans.

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Jane’s trip to Colorado represents the culmination of her education, provides fodder for her documentary, and solidifies the novel’s political project for readers. With the help of her final family, the Dunns, Jane capitalizes on “‘Wild West’ stories” and “preconceptions of America’s ‘Big Rugged Nature’” to create an exposé of the cattle industry that contests the marketing of the American frontier abroad.82 The Dunns inhabit the quintessentially Western landscape of Colorado, but it is an environment compromised by a history of uranium and plutonium plants as well as a tradition of irresponsible cattle production. An apparent “desertification” marks the end of “beef’s capitalist trail”—or rather, its origin: the Dunns’ feedlot.83 Ironically, some of the most “desolate” parts of this region have been conserved, and some “landscapes hide underground bunkers, but on the surface they are rich with flora and fauna that have flourished.”84 Even nature can be unwittingly complicitous with global capitalism’s forces—unless people look closely to reveal the impact of those forces on particular environments. Although the Dunns’ feedlot “look[s] like an island,” Jane soon links it to “the larger picture” of the global meat industry.85 Here, Jane uncovers the illegal use of DES in cattle and the detrimental effects of hormones on the Dunns’ five-year-old girl, Rose, and her older half-brother, Gale, who are exposed to the hormones on a daily basis. Jane condemns the cattle industry’s production processes as unnatural by invoking an ideal of a nature that precedes the capitalist economy. For instance, challenging the notion that hormone use makes beef production more efficient, Ozeki notes that such “precision” is “antithetical to the randomness of living things.”86 On a visit to a slaughterhouse near the Dunns’, Jane hears “the death screams of a slaughtered lamb (exactly like the cry of a human baby).”87 In Jane’s version of the “Wild West,” the connections between environmental destruction, military history, unethical animal treatment and damaged human bodies become clear for the reader. If Shonagon is the novel’s literary heroine and Lara and Dyann are the novel’s intellectual heroines—after all, they introduce Jane to the prospect of researching the meat industry—then Bunny Dunn’s activism caps this genealogy of heroic women. Bunny is an easy wife to pitch to Ueno. An attractive, white, ex-stripper who drives a purple sedan, dotes on her seventy-two-year-old husband, John, and flaunts her large breasts (which John calls “Nature’s Bounty”), she appears to be the “ideal American Wife,” and an unlikely ally for Jane.88 However, Bunny makes the difficult decision to cast aside personal embarrassment and years of denial in order to allow Jane and her crew to shoot intimate footage of Rose’s body, which is developing prematurely due to hormone exposure. With

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Bunny’s help, Jane is able to complete her documentary and present “the larger picture” of this industry to viewers, and to readers. Due to the economic pressures of the market—where “profit’s so small these days you gotta deal in volume”—the Dunns have heretofore been compelled to play “faux dumb,” even while their unethical practices harm their own bodies.89 Jane defines “faux dumb” as the paralysis that results from an overwhelming amount of information and “bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live.” She suggests this state of mind is our “collective norm.”90 This willful ignorance is linked with racism, specifically when one of the “cowboys” injecting cattle with drugs comments that “it’s a darn shame, wasting all that good American meat on a bunch of gooks.”91 Although some of America’s small-town residents are community-minded, good-hearted, tolerant folks, many still fear racial difference and even consider non-white bodies to be racially interchangeable. For instance, when “shooting scenery in a remote part of Montana,” Jane and her crew find themselves in jail for being suspected “as a band of Mexican terrorists.”92 Ozeki uncovers this racism’s grounding in frontier ideology: the sheriff explains, “y’know…engineer prob’ly just got the news confused with some old TV western.” Oddly enough, it is this frontier setting—particularly a cemetery where Jane whispers “the beautiful names of…dead pioneer children”— that inspires her to want to continue her own pregnancy.93 Jane also craves meat during her pregnancy, even though, ethically, she wants nothing to do with the industry. In effect, Ozeki suggests that both women and men participate in the very ideologies that end up harming them. Sometimes this participation occurs without their knowledge—as when Jane’s mother took the DES that her doctor prescribed—and other times it is a result of being “faux dumb.” Male characters are particularly prone to this state of mind.94 For instance, although John Dunn is wary of hormone use at their family’s feedlot, Gale persuades him to look the other way. Even when Gale’s voice begins cracking (signaling the effects of hormone exposure), he is able to ignore it, and convince others to do the same, rather than face financial losses. Ultimately, women motivate men to replace competitive frontiering and unfettered consumption with compassion, cooperation and sustainable models of (re)production.95 By the novel’s end, Jane’s documentary has helped instigate a healthy “controversy over reliability in television and the power of corporate sponsorship to determine content and truth.”96 Rather than disavowing truth altogether, this documentary tells its own “truth,” functioning as a socialist ecofeminist exposé in which America’s

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women, poor and people of color suffer the disproportionate effects of capitalist production. Through engaging the complex dynamics between gender, nature and global capitalism, Jane interrogates the transnational flows in which nature has become increasing imbricated with capital and engages the ways in which a more traditionally understood frontier culture, formulated in rural areas, still thrives in some regions of the country—where residents feel their “homes must be defended by deadly force from people who look different.”97 Indeed, while race (like “truth”) can be “measured only in everdiminishing approximations,” the novel does not fully collapse racial distinctions; it recognizes their continuing circulation in a world where environmental racism persists.98 My Year of Meats debunks the ways in which the historically entrenched frontier myth governs both local and global political economies by excavating the racial bedrock that underlies both. That is, just as Middle America can be a bastion of white supremacy that fears “people who look different,” global capitalism can be a tool for marketing such supremacy abroad. By showing how heterogeneous families are situated within local and global politics, Ozeki critiques extant realities: the persistence of racist frontier justice in some rural towns; the willful ignorance of “faux dumb” Americans concerning the harmful effects of their labor on the environment (or even on their own loved ones); the ruthless bottom line of corporate profit at the expense of human and natural health; and the disproportionate impacts of capitalism’s negative byproducts on women, minorities and people of color.

Cosmopolitan Ecofeminists: Local Communities and Global Ethics Ozeki’s novel combats late capitalism’s remarkable ability to deterritorialize with its own reterritorializations, which locate and measure capitalism’s harmful effects on individual bodies, communities and environments.99 The families Jane documents all display the uneven effects of capitalism and the ways in which this political economy is embedded in cultural identities. Although the critique is primarily grounded in two first-world countries—the U.S. and Japan—there is good reason for that geopolitical focus. As Mary Mellor reminds us, “there is an analysis at the heart of Western ecofeminism that can be seen as having a global applicability, since it focuses on the model of Western society that is being projected across the world in the process of globalization.”100 American hegemony is central to the novel precisely because it is the driving force behind so many of the problems the novel identifies—that is,

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because “so many of the problems besetting women worldwide emerge from, or are reinforced by, the practices of American institutions.”101 While some critics read Ozeki’s emphasis on the U.S. as a reification of its hegemony,102 I would argue that My Year of Meats uncovers the specific ways in which this hegemony has become more complex in a postnational and postnatural world. For instance, Jane’s self-proclaimed status as a cultural “go-between” situates her as a cosmopolitan figure of the sort Buell claims is often invoked to “help enhance U.S. cultural status and power.”103 Yet, her angry assertion of national identity at the novel’s start (“I…am…a…fucking…AMERICAN!”) does not deter her from redirecting that anger at her homeland.104 To the contrary, Ozeki’s novel adheres to Oscar V. Campomanes’ mandate to acknowledge that the U.S., “the country with which Asian Americans seek to affiliate by birth and circumstance has been, and continues to be, a major imperialist player on the global scene.”105 In fact, references to the first Gulf War bookend the novel, setting the stage for Jane’s journey into Middle America during a time of “Gulf War Fever” and, at the end, reminding readers that this war is one of many troubling international events that “slip through the cracks, untold, out of history.”106 These and other references indicate that this exposé of the meat industry is only a starting point for larger critiques of the U.S.’s role in the world. Ozeki does more than critique global capitalism, though; she also leaves readers with an ecofeminist ideal, formulated most clearly at the novel’s end. Akiko’s journey to the U.S. is the catalyst for the construction of a new community of ecofeminists—a network of mothers—that helps combat the injustices Jane uncovers. When Akiko discovers she is pregnant and decides to leave “John,” she finds that Jane, the Beaudroux, and Lara and Dyann—the “strong women so determined to have their family against all odds” that initially inspired her—are all ready to assist her.107 Living alone and content in a Northampton apartment, Akiko realizes she is “done with [‘John’], once and for all” and can begin building her “happy life.”108 While Akiko does seek happiness in the U.S.—and so risks reifying America as a land of democratic freedom, tolerance and opportunity— what she finds there not so simple. The answer to Akiko’s question— “where can I go to live my happy life…?”—is not a place at all.109 Or rather, it is not a nation. It is a diffuse network of relationships, and women are its core members. By envisioning communities where healthy relationships cross economic, raced and gendered boundaries, Ozeki imagines new stories of solidarity and generosity rooted in small towns, even while confronting the socioeconomic obstacles such towns often

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face. Ozeki’s ideal is one in which women work together to support each other, and to formulate a sustainable community based on privileging responsible reproduction over capitalist production. Both ideal and real, the America in My Year of Meats fails to live up to its promises yet maintains the potential to realize impressive forms of community. In a globalized world where “there are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong,” new political coalitions must emerge across lines of nation, race, class, gender, sexuality and disability to look for answers to complex problems.110 Ozeki’s readers are asked to imagine ecofeminist alliances based on compassion, grounded in local environments, and premised on respect for women and nature as more than natural resources. This ideal, the novel suggests, just might help to combat the forces that are “definitely wrong” in this world.

Notes 1

Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 88. 2 I refer here to Limerick’s observation that the term “pioneer” and other “metaphors and analogies of conquest and colonialism” are now frequently applied to people previously deemed “savage” by the colonists, including African Americans and American Indians (91-93). 3 Frederick Buell, “Nationalist Postnationalisms: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary American Culture,” American Quarterly 50, no. 3 (September 1998): 559. 4 Buell is not alone in suggesting that capitalism has colonized nonhuman nature (always that last frontier) along with human culture and subjectivity. For instance, although Frederic Jameson does not use the f-word, he conjures the frontier in his influential sketch of late capitalism as so far-reaching and all-powerful that it has invaded even the “precapitalist enclaves [of] Nature and the Unconscious.” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 49. 5 Heather Eaton, “Can Ecofeminism Withstand Corporate Globalization?” in Ecofeminism & Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion, ed. Heather Eaton & Lois Ann Lorentzen (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 25. 6 Ibid., 25. 7 Buell, 551. 8 Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats (New York: Penguin, 1998), 35. 9 Although I only have space for a very brief sketch here, many of the texts I cite provide more thorough overviews of ecofeminism. See especially Diamond and Orenstein (1990); Warren (1997); Gaard and Murphy (1998); Eaton and Lorentzen (2003); and Merchant (2005).

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Heather Eaton and Lois Ann Lorentzen, “Introduction” in Ecofeminism & Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion, ed. Heather Eaton & Lois Ann Lorentzen (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 3. 11 Mary Mellor, “Gender and the Environment,” in Ecofeminism & Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion, ed. Heather Eaton & Lois Ann Lorentzen (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 16. 12 Lois Ann Lorentzen, “Indigenous Feet: Ecofeminism, Globalization, and the Case of Chiapas,” in Ecofeminism & Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion, ed. Heather Eaton & Lois Ann Lorentzen (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 59. 13 Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, “Introduction,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 8. 14 Gretchen Legler, “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism,” in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 230. 15 Mellor, 17. Carolyn Merchant defines these categories differently in “Ecofeminism,” Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 2005), where she distinguishes between social and socialist ecofeminisms, among other types (205-212). 16 Noël Sturgeon, “The Nature of Race: Discourses of Racial Difference in Ecofeminism,” in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 269, my emphasis. 17 Merchant, 210. 18 Sturgeon notes that, in the U.S., the figure of the Native American—depicted as “the ultimate ecofeminist”—often mitigates or even elides the conflict between affinity and social ecofeminisms (269). The tendency to romanticize American Indians usually stems from the strand(s) of ecofeminist thought concerned with spirituality—what Merchant might call cultural ecofeminism (201-205). 19 Monica Chiu, “Postnational Globalization and (En)Gendered Meat Production in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 12, no. 1 (April 2001): 113. 20 Chiu, 102. 21 Shameem Black, “Fertile Cosmofeminism: Ruth L. Ozeki and Transnational Reproduction,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 5, no. 1 (2004): 227. 22 Ibid., 250. 23 Ozeki, 8. 24 Ibid., 27. 25 Ozeki’s use of disabled bodies demands engagement by disability studies scholars. For one discussion of disability in literature—with an eye towards interrogating how disability is used symbolically in literary texts—see Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 26 In her bibliography at the end of the book, Ozeki recommends several websites with information about DES, including http://www.desaction.org/. This site

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explains that DES was prescribed to millions of women, primarily between 1938 and 1971. In the novel, Ozeki writes that today, despite its illegality, “95 percent of feedlot cattle in the U.S. still receive some form of growth-promoting hormone or pharmaceutical in feed supplements” (126). 27 Ozeki, 13, 57. 28 Ibid., 13, 9. 29 Written during the Heian dynasty in imperial Japan (c. 1000 C.E.), Shonagon’s text describes court life in a unique poetic-prose style known as zuihitsu, literally meaning “following the brush.” According to The Bedford Anthology of World Literature, ed. Paul Davis et al (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), Shonagon is “usually counted among the greatest Japanese prose stylists” (1059). 30 Ozeki, 14-15. 31 Ibid., 27. 32 Ibid., 154, emphasis in original. 33 Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), xi. 34 Karla Armbruster, “‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’: A Call for Boundary-Crossing in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 106. 35 Ozeki, 112. 36 Ozeki, 77. 37 Ozeki, 365-6. Her definitions illustrate the mutual constitution of these categories. Cattle can refer to “people in the mass” and also function as “stock” in the capitalist sense of “an accumulated stock of…wealth.” Stock, in turn, can mean “the first of a line of descent” as well as “any of the major subdivisions of the human race.” 38 Ozeki, 9, 360, 176. Jane also capitalizes on “the Asian-American Woman thing,” an identity category she says renders her “reliable, loyal, smart but nonthreatening” from the perspective of “the average American” (157). 39 Armbruster, 99. 40 Gaard, 2. 41 Black, 235. 42 Ibid., 235. 43 Sturgeon, 264. 44 Eaton, 3. 45 Merchant, 212. 46 Black, 244. In regards to “media,” Black argues that by “pairing the hypermodernity of My Year of Meats with [Shonagon’s text], Ozeki reminds us that language and literature have circulated globally far longer than television” or film media (245). 47 Ozeki, 174. 48 Ibid., 175. 49 Merchant, 210. 50 Ibid., 179.

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Ibid., 214. Ozeki, 190. 53 Ozeki, 318. 54 Stacy Alaimo, “‘Skin Dreaming’: The Bodily Transgressions of Fielding Burke, Octavia Butler, and Linda Hogan,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 126. 55 Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3. 56 Ibid., 2. 57 “A Conversation with Ruth Ozeki,” My Year of Meats (New York: Penguin, 1998), 8. 58 Eaton, 19. 59 Ozeki, 347. 60 Ibid., 66, 56. 61 Ibid., 90. 62 Ibid., 57. 63 Ibid., 126. 64 Ibid., 125. 65 Ibid., 194. 66 Chiu, 104. 67 Ozeki, 89. 68 Ibid., 89. 69 Ibid., 56. 70 Ibid., 58. 71 Ibid., 58. 72 Ibid., 61, my emphasis. 73 Ibid., 58. 74 Ibid., 119. 75 Ibid., 137. 76 Ibid., 132. 77 Ibid., 133. 78 Ibid., 135-6. 79 It is partly Christina’s otherworldly beauty that facilitates their change. But it is also the inspirational community of the town; Jane is clear that the “visit to Hope had changed them” (139). More than that, their gradual exposure to unconventional American families sparks greater awareness. 80 Ibid., 137-8. 81 Linda Hutcheon describes postmodernism in similar terms as “complicitous critique”—it remains situated within both capitalism and humanism, with their patriarchal underpinnings. The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 13. 82 Ibid., 231. 83 Ibid., 248, 84 Ibid., 247. 52

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Ibid., 127, 254. Ibid., 254. 87 Ibid., 207. 88 Ibid., 252-3. 89 Ibid., 263. 90 Ibid., 334. 91 Ibid., 267. 92 Ibid., 189. Interestingly, Jane incorrectly assumes that Suzuki and Oh see white bodies as interchangeable when she thinks they don’t recognize her lover, Sloan, who disguises himself when he meets her in various towns. 93 Ibid., 193. 94 While Ozeki might be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about Japanese (and Japanese American) men, I would argue her critiques are based not on nationality, which she deconstructs throughout the novel, but rather on the extent of these characters’ complicity within the global economic system. Early in the novel, Ueno, Suzuki, and Oh each reveal their economic priorities through misogyny, and their consumption of material goods is linked to the consumption or abuse of women’s bodies. For instance, Ueno’s preoccupation with the show’s market success is directly linked to his treatment of Akiko; his violence towards her increases alongside his anxiety about the show. Suzuki exhibits “a passion for Jack Daniel’s, Wal-Mart, and American hard-core pornography” (33). 95 The one exception to this might be Dave, the driver who escorts Jane and her crew around Colorado. Dave is extremely knowledgeable about the meat industry and its damaging environmental impacts, and he shares that knowledge with Jane. However, he has little hope for political activism, claiming that all of his knowledge “doesn’t help one bit. Nobody is going to do anything about it, and then slowly, bit by bit, it will be too late” (251). 96 Ozeki, 358. 97 Ibid., 89. 98 Ibid., 176. 99 Following geographers like Neil Smith and David Harvey, I use the term “deterritorialize” to indicate capitalism’s ability to annihilate space, largely through new technologies. “Reterritorialization” refers to the ways in which local, fixed space continues to be important for capitalism to self-propagate and generate new desires. 100 Mellor, 16. 101 Black, 249. 102 For instance, Chiu insists that an “invisible, national (read: multicultural) ideology…reconstitutes the very localized, national framework that [the novel] initially attempts to subvert” (101). 103 Ozeki, 9; Buell, 559. Oscar V. Campomanes, too, worries that “narrations of U.S. nation formation and the peculiar forms of U.S. global power might at once recruit and displace Asian Americanists into the bracing possibilities of either a necessary cosmopolitanism or…an effective ‘domestication.’” Oscar V. 86

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Campomanes, “New Formations of Asian American Studies and the Question of U.S. Imperialism,” positions 5, vol. 2 (1997): 527. 104 Ozeki, 11. 105 Campomanes, 533. 106 Ozeki, 11, 360. 107 Ibid., 181. 108 Ibid., 346. 109 Ibid., 343. 110 Ibid., 327.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Alaimo, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986. Antonetta, Susanne. Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. New York: Counterpoint Press, 2002. Barnes, Kim. In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. —. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Carr, Glynis, ed. New Essays in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2000. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Curtin, Deane. Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Diamond, Irene and Gloria Feman Orenstein. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990. Eaton, Heather and Lois Ann Lorentzen. Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Gaard, Greta. Ecofeminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Gaard, Greta and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocritcism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Hogan, Linda. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner, 1995. Jewett, Sarah Orne. “A White Heron” and Other Stories. Boston:

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Houghton Mifflin, 1886. Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal Dreams. New York: Harper, 1990. —. Prodigal Summer. New York: Harper, 2000. Mda, Zakes. The Heart of Redness. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature. New York: HarperCollins, 1980. Nasta, Susheila, ed. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing From Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. London: The Women’s P, 1991. Nwapa, Flora. Efuru. Oxford: Heinemann, 1966. Ozeki, Ruth. My Year of Meats. New York: Penguin Group, 1998. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993. —. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2002. Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991. Sturgeon, Noël. Ecofeminist Natures. New York: Routledge, 1997. Warren, Karen J. ed. Ecofeminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminist Philosophy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Warren, Karen J. ed. Ecological Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1994. Woody, Elizabeth. Seven Hands, Seven Hearts. Portland: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1994.

CONTRIBUTORS

Rob Brault attended Macalester College in Saint Paul and graduated in 1984 with a B.A. in English and a minor in biology. His first career was teaching high school English. He earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota in 2000, specializing in ecofeminist literary criticism of nineteenth-century American literature. He currently teaches literature and composition at Winona State University in southeast Minnesota. Andrea Campbell received her B.A. in English from the University of Redlands and her M.A. in English Literature from Washington State University. She is currently completing her doctoral work at Washington State University with an emphasis in ecofeminist literary criticism and women writers. Christine Flanagan, M.F.A., is a playwright, essayist, and fiction writer who teaches writing and literature at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Bethany Fitzpatrick has a M.A. in English from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Hilary L. Hawley is the Blackburn Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Washington State University, where she teaches courses in American literature, environmental literature, and American Studies. She is currently revising her book-length project on the rhetoric of dam-building on the Columbia River and how the literature of environmental justice responds to such rhetorics. Jennifer Ladino earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2006, and she is now an Assistant Professor of English at Creighton University. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, American Indian literatures, and green cultural studies. She is currently at work on a book project that traces a genealogy of nostalgia for nature in American literature and culture since 1890.

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Richard Magee studied English at U.C. Berkeley and Fordham University. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he teaches courses in American literature, sentimental literature, and nature writing. Almila Ozdek got her B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from Istanbul University, Turkey, and completed her Ph.D. at the George Washington University. She is currently working on a book project that examines the function of myths in the making of nations and national histories. Harry Sewlall is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the North-West University (Mafikeng Campus), South Africa. He has published journal articles on a wide range of subjects, but mainly Zakes Mda and Joseph Conrad, both in South Africa and internationally. He has presented several papers in North America, the last one titled “Elvis Presley: A Postmodern, Semiological Text” which he read at a Rock ‘n Roll session organized by the Mid-atlantic Popular American Culture Association in Philadelphia, November 2007. Laura Wright is an Assistant Professor of postcolonial literature in the English department at Western Carolina University. Her book Writing “Out of All the Camps”: J.M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement was published by Routledge Press in 2006. She has published work in Ariel, Mosaic, the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her second book, “‘Wilderness into Civilized Shapes’: Reading the Postcolonial Environment,” which is under contract with SUNY Press.