Resistance And Return

Linda Hogan(1947-),a contemporary Chickasaw poet,novelist,essayist and playwright,is widely considered to be one of the most prolific and influential Native American women writers in current American literary world.Mean Spirit,her first novel,was published in 1990 and became the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year.Since its publication,Mean Spirit has received lots of critical attention worldwide.Many critics and scholars have studied it from diverse theoretical perspectives,including postcolonialism,ecocriticism and so on,but there are no interpretations on the novel from the perspective of postcolonial ecofeminism.Based on the previous researches,this thesis attempts to carry out a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit by employing the postcolonial ecofeminist theories.This thesis analyses the criticism of white colonization in Mean Spirit,which results in environmental destruction,the suffering of the Osage Indians and the tribal women in particular,who are doubly suppressed by both colonizing and patriarchal power.Unlike white colonists’ ambition of subduing nature and women,Osage Indians,guided by their traditional ecological wisdom,revere their tribal land and coexist with animals.In the novel,Linda Hogan interweaves the fate of women and nature and emphasizes the close relationship between them.Mean Spirit not only demonstrates that the reconstruction of tribal beliefs is achieved through the resistance to colonizing power and the adherence to indigenous culture,but also highlights Indian women’s important role in maintaining the relationship between human beings and nature and returning to their spiritual home.Through the interpretation of Mean Spirit from the perspective of postcolonial ecofeminism,this thesis finds that the novel not merely exposes white people’s oppression of nature,women and the Indians,and more importantly conveys Linda Hogan’s belief in the subversion of anthropocentrism,patriarchy and white supremacy by returning to tribal cultures and spirituality.