An Ecofeminist Reading Of Alice Walker's Poetry And Essays

Alice Walker is one of the most important contemporary African-American novelists, poets, essayists and influential women writers in American literature. Her earlier works, mostly her novels tend more to mirror things as they are-racial and sexual discrimination, oppressions, and tragedies. In her recent works (after 1988), especially in her poetry and essays, however, Walker addresses the questions of nature in addition to questions of race and gender and illustrates the close link between the three. She recognizes that the control and domination over women, and the exploitation of nature (the environment) are parallel forms of male domination. Clearly Walker takes an ecofeminist stance. Ecofeminism is a movement working against the interconnected oppressions of gender, race, class and nature. These interconnected oppressions are due to patriarchal structures which justify their dominance through categorical or dualistic hierarchies: heaven/earth, mind/body, male/female, human/animal, spirit/matter, culture/nature, white/non-white.This thesis discusses Walker's poetry and essays from an ecofeminist perspective. Some ecofeminist ideas are analyzed through categorization of such themes or motifs as Eros, Activism and Pantheism in Walker's poetry and essays. This thesis also evaluates Walker's poetry and essays through the lens of ecofeminist and points out that her poetry and essays reveals her ecocentric world view that everything is interconnected, that the animate and inanimate world are on the same moral plane, and that there is no hierarchy or dominance, thus all which makes her work so central to Environmental Ethics. Whatever the ultimate literary judgment on her work might be, it has to be said that Walker has caught something of the Zeitgeist, the World-Spirit of the present age, and given it voice and contributed a lot to ecofeminist literature.