An Ecofeminist Reading Of Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry

As one of the most significant and influential poetesses of American poetry in the 20 th century, Elizabeth Bishop and her works are attracting more and more scholars’ attention at home and abroad. She is a successor as well as a transcendental of American traditional poetry writing who used refined and accurate words, making poetry natural and full of abundant lively images. Bishop spent most of her lifetime travelling, and this very special experience had a strong effect on the content and writing style of her poetry. She is the author of 9 poetry collections in all which had brought her more than 20 awards and honors: she used to be the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1949-1950; in 1956 she won Pulitzer Prize by North &South and A Cold Spring, while The Complete Poems and Geography III respectively won for her National Book Award in 1970 and Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Bishop is not a prolific poet; however, she has poured her lifetime experience and wisdom in over 100 poems, including her reasonable meditation to relationship between human and nature and human themselves.This paper aims to interpret Bishop’s poetry from the ecofeminist perspective whose essence is clearly and profoundly embodied in her works. The main body of this paper will be divided into 3 chapters. Chapter one focuses on the exploration of the relationship between human and nature. In anthology North & South and Questions of Travel, there are descriptions and depictions of native and exotic natural scenery. Bishop earnestly paid attention to the living condition of human and many times showed her wish to live harmoniously with nature. She expressed the theme of human’s coming back to and be one with nature in some of her poems. Chapter two emphasizes female consciousness. Bishop in many works showed her complaints and opposition to patriarchy, praised women and pursues female value. By analyzing representative works “Rooster”, “Songs for a Colored Singer”, “The Colder the Air” and so on, this chapter will display how Bishop described the domination of men over women and finally achieved the unity between them. Chapter three involves the idea of racial equality. Ecofeminists oppose to all forms of oppression, thus opposing to racial discrimination. As a white middle class woman, while it was hard to get rid of her identity and racial consciousness, Bishop in her poems did not show much of her superiority over other races, and the relationship between master and servant was not the relationship of control and being controlled. This to some extent exhibits the idea of racial equality, which is advocated by ecofeminism.In the three chapters, the method of content analysis and literature analysis will be employed. Even though author tries to refer to as many and qualified documents as possible to accurately grasp the connotation of ecofeminism embodied in her poetry, this paper still has its limitation. Besides poetry Bishop also composes prose and letters in which ecofeminism is also pervaded. But this paper confines study only in her poetry. Among her over 100 poems author of this paper just intensively analyzes some representative works. We can get an extension in the amount of her works in later study.