A Study Of Alice Walker’s Eco-feminism In The Temple Of My Familiar

As an important contemporary Afro-American female writer, Alice Walker has a great influence in American literary history. She has won several awards for her works, especially The Color Purple in 1983 which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her works have various themes and she usually combines race and sex to describe black women’s extremely difficult life in patriarchal society, which becomes a prominent characteristic. Walker firstly created “womanism” in her In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens in 1983. From then on, critics employed this word to analyze race and gender discrimination in her works.However, in her recent works(especially published a fter 1988), Walker not only touches upon racial and sexual prejudice, but also closely combines race and sex with nature. She realizes that the main cause of the domination of nature, women and the colored people is fundamentally the same, i.e., male domination or patriarchy. These works demonstrate her eco-feminist ideas in various aspects. This thesis tries to analyze her novel The Temple of My Familiar through the theory of eco-feminism.The thesis is divided into three parts. Chapter one focuses on Alice Walker, her life experience as a black woman, and the novel The Temple of My Familiar, including its content and clues, and recent researches at home and abroad. Chapter one will give a brief introduction to a new theory—eco-feminism. Eco-feminism is an ethic criticism in nature which combines the ecologism and feminism to conduct literature criticism from dual perspectives of environment and gender. It suggests that the nature and female have been in the spotlight again from an oblivious corner. The transformation from the “absence” to the “existence” indicates that the literature research has been expanded not only to the other half of human, but more importantly, to the nature which is independent from the human society. Chapter two will explain men’s oppression on women and nature and reveal human’s prejudice towards nature. And she also described the impact of this treatment. This thesis closely combines women and nature to explore the roots of the discrimination and oppression. In western culture, people believe that human are the centre of the universe. They think that the anthropocentric opinions lead to the patriarchal system. Chapter three reveals that Walker tries to achieve harmony between women and nature, men and women, human and nature. She tries to break the traditional power structure under the sexual and racial oppression. Readers could analyze the novel from the perspective of eco-feminism criticism. And they could have a better understanding about women’s subordinate status under the patriarchal society. Also, we may realize how urgent and important it is to establish a harmonious relationship between human and nature as the world is endangered by various ecological crises.