Eco-feminist Interpretation Of The Island

The Island, famous English novelist Victor Hislop’s first long novel, is a good example to study with ecofeminist perspective. After publishing the book, she rises to fame overnight. On the surface, it is Alexis’identity-seeking story from her mother Sofia’s past experience. Actually it tells Sofia’s self-discovery story. Tracing family history, she re-examines and gradually accepts herself by getting strength and spiritual healing from nature, and finally escaping from the spiritual "island" and accomplishing personal improvement and perfection.This novel connects nature and the twin sisters’destiny with leprosy. It reveals female’s identity anxiety and plight under patriarchal system and marginalized groups’alienation and suffering in mainstream society. It explores the mass discrimination to lepers, human moral dilemma and their inner experience of self-awakening and self-reshaping. With the family stories, Hislop expresses her wish that natural, social and human spiritual ecology should live in harmony. In this novel, the author not only focuses on female’s destiny, but also pays close attention to the marginalized people and ravaged nature. The ample female, natural and cultural images in the novel reveal Hislop’s ecofeminist consciousness and the interrelated closeness between women and nature, social and mental ecology.Applying Yestra King’s ecofeminist theory, this writer discusses similarity between female and nature, social chaos and its influence, and human spiritual malaise in this thesis. The writer shows how women overcome their anxiety and reconstruct self-identity in patriarchal society and how the marginalized lepers get rid of ethical dilemma and integrate into the mainstream society, and how the balance between body and mind, society and nature is achieved.Up to now there is few academic paper about The Island, so this thesis attempts to explore the following issues from ecofeminist perspective. First, by analyzing the female-natural images and their symbolic meanings in the novel, the author tries to explain the similarity between female destiny and ecological environment. Second, since human misbehavior causes the destruction of natural ecology and social chaos, human spiritual ecology also suffers negative consequences. By studying the dilemma of nature, female and marginalized outcasts, the author attempts to reveal human estrangement from nature, fellow partners and society and the alienation between mainstream society and marginalized people. Third, exploring the end of the novel which depicts marginalized peoples’return to nature and mainstream society, the author hopes that human, nature and society could coexist harmoniously.The writer believes that marginalized groups should be studied so as to dismantle center and margin, break the inequality of gender, economy, society and culture, and construct female identity and cultural recognition. While in ecofemnist literary studies, domestic scholars mainly lay particular emphasis on the study of nature, female and post-colonial issues. In view of above-mentioned reasons, this thesis extends our concerns to other marginal group such as lepers to examine our moral dilemma. It helps expand the research scope of ecofeminist literary study.Surveying the relationships between human, nature and society in The Island from ecological, feminist and cultural perspectives, the author of this thesis aims to uncover human dominance over nature, oppression of women and the spiritual alienation of marginalized group caused by dark social ecology, power politics, hegemony ideology as well as the irrational phenomena in the so-called "normal" world, hoping people rethink how to balance the relationship between nature and human beings, male and female.