An Interpretation Of By The My Father's Smile From The Ecofeminst Perspective

The black woman writer Alice Walker, who is called"dark-skinned Virginia Woolf", is an outstanding representative of contemporary American woman literature and black literature. In her career of writing, she constantly explores and analyzes the black women's anguish and their road of seeking liberation under the heavy oppression of racism and sexism. She devotes her whole life to creating works in which she tries her best to find a place for the black women in the male world. However, in her later works, Walker's ecological consciousness gradually emerges. Not only does she care about the women issues, but also pays more attention to the ecological problems.By the Light of My Father's Smile is Walker's another masterpiece following The Color Purple. She once found a good way of"economic independence"for the heroine Celie in The Color Purple, but Walker finds out as long as the male-centered sex order doesn't change, even though women are economically independent, they are still just men's sexual objects, and women's bodies are just the things that men use. Walker thinks that only by subverting such a sex order and breaking the patriarchal dual-opposite thinking model, can women and nature radically obtain liberation from the oppression of men, and can the harmonious coexistence of the whole world be realized.This thesis aims at analyzing the novel from the eco-feminist perspective. It is composed by three parts: introduction, main body and conclusion. And the main content is as follows:The first part is introduction.The second part is the main body which consists of the following four chapters:The theory of eco-feminism and Alice Walker's ecological awareness are briefly introduced in Chapter One. Eco-feminism is a theoretical system covering a wide range, in which many kinds of views that disclose the interconnections between the oppression of women and other disadvantaged groups and that of nature are included. Eco-feminism calls for ending all forms of oppression and argues that women can't be liberated without the liberation of nature. This theory originated from France in 1970s, but flourished in the United States in 1990s. And Walker is one of the ecological feminists, too. She has an intense ecological awareness, which embodies in By the Light of My Father's Smile.Chapter Two discusses both women and nature have been reduced to the objects suffering from men's domination and persecution for a long time, and discloses the historical causes of the persecution. The analysis, which focuses on the eldest daughter Magdalena's corporal punishment by her father, reveals the quality of father's love to his daughter is the exercise of ownership in the name of love. Under this ownership, everything of daughter belongs to father, especially the right of sexual choice. With the influence of anthropocentrism, human beings have been invading and depredating nature without scruple. But the essence of anthropocentrism is just androcentrism, because women have been placed in the edge of society, and men are the chief criminal of invading nature. But what is supporting anthropocentrism and androcentrism which causes the crisis of humans'existence? The source is patriarchal ideology and its ruling logic over women and nature. The thinking model in patriarchal society is dual-opposite, namely either this or that. The history of oppression is traced back to the origin of western civilization, i.e. the Grecian and Hebrew cultural tradition. In Greece, women strictly abide by the Christian rules set up for them. They are deprived of the rights to speak and to vote, and are just regarded as men's accessories. The specialty of Walker's thoughts lies in that she not only reveals the patriarchal outlook caused extremely cruel persecution on women, but the oppressors------men also suffered serious spiritual damage. They gradually lost themselves in the patriarchal thinking model, and make huge holes emerge in their souls.Chapter Three analyzes several typical women's resistances to the persecution in the novel. Since men's rule over women is a kind of"sexual politics", women's resistance also expresses instinctively from the subversion of the"sexual politics". The subversive ways are Magdalena's abstinence from sex by eating too much and piercing on her body, and the lesbian love between Susannah and Pauline. After they recognized the quality of sex order in patriarchal society, they rejected any possible heterosexuality and completely cut off from the male world. But these women didn't obtain spiritual freedom from the resistances, and hurt themselves severely because of the distorted abstinence and misunderstandings in lesbian love instead. Walker ponders deeply over their ways of pursuing independence and liberation. She thinks the way that women simply refuse men to come into their world and enclose themselves in their own world cannot make women obtain a real sense of liberation. In the last chapter of the thesis, the way out of women and nature to get rid of oppression is found out, that is all women care about and cherish each other, and unite together to be a kind of overwhelming power to fight the oppression and control from the masculine world; human beings must regard nature as goddess, restore the ancient worship of nature goddess, return to nature, and respect nature, because nature is the mother of all creatures and our home without which we can't live; love and tolerance are the gist of womanism, and we should treat those who ever hurt us with love and tolerance. Facing the father's sincere penitence after his death, Walker advocates the daughter could re-accept her father, and the free feminine society should re-open to men. Men's return is not the copy of the patriarchal society, but is the establishing of new interpersonal relationships in the opportunities provided by lesbian love and the subverting of the existing unfair sex order. This relationship will mean men and women's return of souls, and will establish really multivariate, equal and reciprocal relationships.The interpretation of By the Light of My Father's Smile from the ecofeminist perspective provides a new way to research the novel, and meanwhile also hopes to arouse people's ecological awareness and pay more attention to the worsening environmental problem. The following points can be concluded from this thesis: under the guidance of love and tolerance, human beings should equally view everything in the world, and stop the steps of aggressing women and nature. And only in this way, can humans overthrow the patriarchal ideology and realize the equality and harmony between human and nature, men and women.