The Ecofeminst Ideas In The Temlpe Of My Familiar

Alice Walker ( 1944—) is an influential contemporary writer in Afro-American literature and her works are profound in themes. With different thematic choices, Walker greatly concerns about a lot of problems such as race, sex, religion, society and ecology in her writings career.Actually, her fourth novel The Temple of My Familiar,published in 1989,had typical and ultimate expressions. It was a collection of loosely related stories, a cascade of dreams and a stream of memories bound together by an intensely provocative expression of human affairs covering about 500,000 years. The Temple of My Familiar contained more characters than all of Walker's other novels combined. Instead of mostly describing the serious racial and sexual prejudice at the beginning of her writing career, Alice Walker in this novel preferred to combine sexual inequity with nature abuse closely, which provides much space for her ecofeminist ideas.This thesis is divided into five parts: the Introduction introduces Alice Walker, her works and the comments; Chapter One makes a general introduction to Ecofeminism and explores the source of the Alice Walker's ecofeminist ideas,Ecofeminism came from the social movements supporting both feminist and ecological theories in the 70s in twentieth century. As a matter of fact, it is an essential movement against the interconnection between discrimination of nature and women, which are derived from patriarchy;Chapter Two provides particular examples to demonstrate the double influence of patriarchal system on nature and women,and Walker clearly demonstrated the essential ecofeminist ideas that the exploitation of nature and oppressions of women are parallel forms of patriarchal system; Chapter Three analyzes the interconnection between men's destruction of nature and domination over women and exhibits Walker's concept of a harmonious world built with the harmonious relation between human beings and nature and harmony between men and women; the Conclusion briefly summarizes Walker's ecofeminist theme of The Temple of My Familiar.