| "Re-enactments of Ecofeminist Themes" looks at Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, and Flight Behavior ---bundled together because of their chronological closeness and their display of the mature Kingsolver's craft---through the prismatic lens of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism seems a particularly apt interlocutor of those novels in that it conjoins Kingsolver's ecological fervor and her feminist convictions. Accommodating an ecofeminist critique, Kingsolver also pushes against it, perusing, parsing, interrogating, and challenging some of is most salient and widely-agreed-upon tenets.;One predictable ecofeminist tenet is that asserting a resonance between men's treatment of women and their treatment of the natural environment. Kingsolver resists the narrowing and condensing of that resonance to causality or reciprocity supported by the binary oppositions of men/women and culture/nature. She acknowledges only, it appears, such linkages as time and space and human agency.;In engaging other ecofeminist tenets, Kingsolver anticipates her larger project: not to undermine but to unearth and shed light on the overarching tenet insistent upon the interconnectedness of all life. For Kingsolver, that interconnectedness, even interdependence, embodied in ecosystems embracing plants, animals, and humans, is axiomatic, but she extends the feminist claim to include abiotic entities and phenomena.;Most radical of Kingsolver's revisionary moves, though, is her questioning of a too blithe accepting of interconnectedness as always inevitable and consistently salubrious. Rather, the author depicts it as---sometimes, variously---uncomfortable, constraining, anguishing, debilitating, lethal. Thus change must be risked or undertaken or endured. Among humans, disconnection may be dictated, ultimately, by death; the breaking of bonds may, alternatively, be chosen. Concomitantly, new bonds---often unconventional but frequently gratifying---may be forged. Darwin's evolutionary protocol, writ large in Prodigal Summer, may be understood, in a sense, as an analogous process.;Kingsolver's artistry emulates the implicit interconnectedness of ecosystems, threading together, imbricating, setting into patterns narrative structures and strategies, characters, plots, ideas, images, and rhetorical flourishes and devices. Of critical importance, however, are Kingsolver's lines of blunt inquiry about the viability, vitality, and value of any specific instance of plant, animal, human, or abiotic interconnectedness. In effect, Kingsolver generously produces and astutely directs re-enactments of ecofeminist themes. |
