An Analysis Of Main Street From Eco-feminist Perspective

The eco-feminism appeared and developed in the mid-to late20th century, which is theproduct of the feminism and the ecology and committed to research on the environmentalissues and gender issues from the perspective of literary criticism in order to change the wayof humans’views and attitudes towards women and nature and accelerate the harmoniousdevelopment of relationship between natural world and human society, and the relationshipbetween men and women. From the perspectives of criticizing the dualism, the hierarchy, andso on in western modern worldview, the eco-feminists pointed out that the scientificworldview from the patriarchy resulted in the oppression on women and nature and how theoppression on women and nature closely linked with the patriarchy, which considered womenand nature as “others”, so eco-feminists considered that it was very necessary and importantto uproot the oppression on women and nature and to be acknowledged and recognized at thesame time. The eco-feminism pays more attention to achieving the harmony between womenand nature, women and men, nature and men, therefore, the relationship between women andnature, women and men, nature and human beings had become the focus of the conflicts andcontradictions between women and men, which also was the main clue of Lewis’ Main Street:the conflicts and contradictions between the people of the Gopher Prairie and the industrialsociety, between Carol and her husband, between women and men in the Gopher Prairie. Inthese conflicts, there lies a tremendous crisis: the crisis between men and women, betweenhuman beings and society and between human beings and nature.Under the directions of the critic theory and the principles of the eco-feminism, bymeans of Carol’s fighting against patriarchal oppression, her close to nature, and her pursuingself-realization, and her aims of deconstructing anthropocentrism and subverting patriarchalsystem, and from the perspectives of the relationship between women and men, human beingsand nature, and women and nature, this paper analyzed the root cause of all kinds of theconflicts and contradictions in Lewis’ Main Street. Through the analysis of the root cause ofall kinds of conflicts and contradictions, readers could know of the convergence of all thethoughts and ideas brought about by conquest of nature by men and the control of women bymen in the early period of the20thcentury. The Oppression of nature by the human society with men as the ruler is uniform with the oppression of women by men.The analysis of the root cause of the conflicts and contradictions could help peoplerealize and know that the progress of human civilization is at the price of destruction ofnature, that it is very important and significant to protect nature, to live in harmony with thenatural world, to advocate setting up an ideal world of harmonious coexistence of human andnature, men and women, and all other living things.