Sahityasetu

Abstract:

Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer is a novel which is steeped in the rich description of nature and environment in terms of ecological details that renders itself to be interpreted through an ecocritical lens. But what is significant is that the complex dynamics of interconnectedness, intersectionality and interanimation with nature is evinced through the three chief female characters of the novel that makes the readers curious about its ecofeminist possibilities. The three main female characters of the novel are much more interconnected to nature than the males of the novel who rather exhibit a thoroughly insensate attitude to nature. Thus the females in the novel respond to nature in an altogether different way from the males who indulge in exploitative environmental practices. It is these three female characters who resist the repression of the patriarchal practices that oppress not merely the nature in the novel but their essential feminine identity as well. While like the radical ecofeminists Kingsolver exalts nature and women’s association with nature, her celebration of the attributes of nature however is not uncritical like them. Thus, unlike the radical ecofeminists who are rather reluctant to understand ‘the logic of exclusion’ of the women in terms of the so-called superior attributes of the males and who therefore prefer to celebrate the attributes assigned to the nature and consequently to the females, Kingsolver in this novel steadfastly challenges and subverts the dichotomy of ‘emotional female’ and ‘rational male’ by making her female characters empowered with the attributes thought to be essentially male prerogatives, namely logic and reason. Her women are therefore the embodiments of the combined forces of nature and reason. It is against the backdrop of their logic, reason and deeper understanding of nature and ecology that the male characters appear all the more unfeeling, oppressive and exploitative. This paper would therefore attempt to explore the ecofeminist possibilities of the novel through close analysis of the activities of the novel’s male and female characters.

Key Words: Ecofeminism, environment, patriarchal ideology, resistance, logic, feminine identity.

Set against the backdrop of the lush vegetation of Virginia Mountain in Southern Appalachian region, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer (2001) has been rightly described as presenting “a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature and of nature itself” (qtd. from the authorized site of Barbara Kingsolver). A trained biologist that Barbara Kingsolver is, it is quite natural that in her novel she would dwell upon the description of the meticulous details of the world of flora and fauna- moss, fern, mushroom, chestnut, different birds and insects, herbivorous and carnivorous animals and so on. San Francisco Chronicle has cogently summed up the essence of the novel as “a blend of breathtaking artistry, encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world, attention to detail and ardent commitment to the supremacy of nature”. It is through this deliberate detailing that she portrays a world rich in biodiversity and simultaneously creates an environment consciousness in the mind of the readers. If Glotfelty in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and physical environment” (xix) and if Richard Kerridge in Writing the Environment asserts, “ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis” (5), Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer at once proves apt to be defined from ecocritical perspectives. But what is interesting is that in this novel the environmental consciousness is filtered and presented primarily through the three main female characters who come to share an intimate and integral bond with nature, think themselves to be an indispensable part of the nature and therefore come to respond to nature in an altogether different way from the otherwise indifferent males of the novel. The women in the novel present a better understanding of both the human and the non-human world because of which they can interact with them in much more a meaningful way. If the ecofeminists challenge the ‘androcentric dualism’, to borrow the words of Greg Garrard (26), the women in this novel challenge the biased patriarchal values and attitudes both to nature and women which are supposed to be the cause of oppression of the both. The novel spans “over the course of one humid summer as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside” (qtd. from the authorized site of Barbara Kingsolver) and within this span of narrative framework, the female characters are shown to share deep interconnectedness and interdependence with nature for which they prevent with steadfast resolution any assault to nature exercised by the insensate male characters of the novel. In the mould of interweaving narratives that is characteristically typical of Kingsolver, she presents the stories of three female characters- that of Denna Wolfe, Lusa Malouf and Nannie Rawley under the respective titles of “Predators”, “Moth Love” and “Old Chestnut”. This paper would analyze categorically, one by one, with close textual reference from the narratives of all these three women, how the ecofeminist concerns are reflected in the novel.

The ecofeminists necessarily try to challenge the ‘logic of domination’, the underlying ‘master model’ that relates women with such attributes as the material, the emotional, the particular, the body and so on which are pitted against the so-called superior attributes that the males come to present such as the non-material, the rational, the abstract and the mind. The radical ecofeminists like Sharon Doubiago, Charlene Spretnak et.al merely try to reverse the androcentric priority of reason over emotion by exalting nature and all the attributes of nature that are assigned to the women as well. For Sharon Doubiago, “ecology consciousness is traditional women consciousness” (qtd. in Garrard, 27). Greg Garrard however insightfully observes how this attitude actually leads to anti-scientism. Val Plumwood too complicates this position by asserting that mere differentiation of humans from nature or reason from emotion does not constitute the ‘problematic anthropo or androcentrism’. Garrard further notes in his book Ecocriticism that “the underlying model of mastery shared by these forms of oppression is based upon alienated differentiation and denied dependency” (28). Plumwood asserts in her work Feminism and the Mastery of Nature:

Nature, as the excluded and devalued contrast of reason, includes the emotions, the body, the passions, animality, the primitive or uncivilized, the non-human world, matter, physicality and sense experience, as well as the sphere of irrationality, of faith and of madness. In other words, nature includes everything that reason excludes. It is important to note this point because some ecofeminists have endorsed the association between women and nature without critically examining how the association is produced by exclusion. (20)

Val Plumwood therefore critiques the approach of the radical ecofeminists and the gendered reason/nature dualism. If indulgence in the concepts of ‘othering’ and ‘otherness’ is the way by which dominant patriarchal culture asserts its hegemony, Patrick Murphy in his work Literature, Nature and the Other: Ecofeminist Critiques shows how this hegemony degrades women’s agency and the subsequent ‘ecological interanimation’ or what Carol Adams and Gruen in their book Ecofeminism call ‘intersectionality’. Murphy observes:

If the recognition of otherness and the status of the other is applied only to women and/or the unconscious, for example, and the corollary notion of otherness, being another for others, is not recognized, then the ecological processes of interanimation- the ways in which humans and other entities develop, change, and learn through mutually influencing each other day to day, age by age-will go unacknowledged, and the notions of female autonomy that have been useful to women in thinking through the characteristics of their social oppression will end up complicitous with the traditional American, patriarchal beliefs in autonomy and individualism. (23)

Karen Warren in Ecofeminist Philosophy observes insightfully that “Ecofeminism is about the interconnections among all systems of unjustified human dominations” (2). The term ‘unjustified human dominations’ is of utmost significance because it necessarily includes the unjust domination of and by humans-that of the human-human and human-non-human domination. Greta Gaard in her article “Ecofeminism Revisited” says, “Ecofeminism emerged from the intersections of feminist research and the various movements for social justice and environmental health, explorations that uncovered the linked oppressions of gender, ecology, race, species and nation” (28). Barbara Kingsolver in her novel Prodigal Summer subverts the radical ecofeminists’ claims of uncritical celebration of attributes ascribed to nature and women by making her female characters much more rational and rational active than the other male characters. Kingsolver understands what Plumwood calls ‘logic of exclusion’ on which the binary division between the male/reason and female/nature is made. By empowering her female characters with logic, reason and rationality stemming from their professional knowledge and scholarship about the environment, Kingsolver offers a fitting rejoinder to the hegemonic patriarchal culture. Her female characters resist any attempt of oppression both to nature and the women. In this story of “the power of love and the forces of nature”, as Kate Figes defines in the daily ‘Independent’, the female characters are armed with resistance. Their intersectionality and interconnectedness with nature is integral and throughout the novel they play a significant role in maintaining what Murphy calls “ecological interanimation”.

That the novel unfolds against the Appalachian region is itself very significant. One of the major strands of ecofeminism is to study how the biosphere environment and ecology of a particular region influence both its human and non-human elements. A study of Appalachia reveals that the Appalachian region has long been a victim of environmental degradation exercised by capitalist and commercialist business models. Unlike the other mountainous regions of the United States, the South Appalachian region has been severely affected by exploitative environmental practices such as coal mining, indiscriminate extraction of natural resources and so on. It therefore presupposes that the South Appalachian region is a place rich in the beauty of natural landscape and natural resources. The novelists who set their fiction in the Appalachian region generally dwell upon two thematic preoccupations- depiction of the relationship of the characters with nature and endorsing a critical attitude towards the consumerist, patriarchal environmental practices. Both these two general preoccupations are evident in Kingsolver’s novel. Her novel does not specifically wage war on environmentally degrading practices of coal mining but on different detrimental, patriarchal biological practices that take toll on the bio-diverse world of the South Appalachian region. That she sets her novel in this region, is itself a plea to save the green, resourceful space of South Appalachia from the cruel, patriarchal environmental practices. Barbara Ellen Smith’s article “Beyond the Mountains: The Paradox of Women’s Place in Appalachian History” provides insight into the fact that apart from nature, the women of this region too suffer from marginalization, thereby substantiating South Appalachia as a specifically gendered space. In either coal-mining or clearing the lands it is always the male labour that is prioritized at the cost of the undervaluation of the labour of the women (5). This lopsided attitude is what the materialist or socialist ecofeminists criticize scathingly arguing that the sphere of production traditionally associated with the males cannot be thought to be independent of the sphere of reproduction associated with the females or of the sphere of nature’s economy on which both these spheres depend. Moreover they argue, as P. K. Nayar observes that the labour and productive capacities of both nature and women are harnessed to serve men (251). Barbara Ellen Smith meticulously observes that South Appalachia is a place where the women are robbed of their agency and are virtually relegated to insignificance. She therefore cogently comments that in this region “female agency … [is] literally inconceivable” (2). In this context of the traditional history of the Appalachian region, Kingsolver creates three female characters and assigns them the professional roles which are supposed to be exclusively male prerogatives.

The chapters entitled “Predators”, as has already been mentioned, relate the account of Denna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist and a reclusive forest ranger who comes to reside in Zebulon National Forest in Virginia-Kentucky border of South Appalachian region all by herself. She is especially interested in her job as a forest-ranger because it is here that she can find a scope of the practical application of her college dissertation on the protection of wildlife, especially the endangered and the extinct ones like the Coyotes. She devotes herself in the solitary ambience for the cause of the protection and security of the den of the Coyotes. She seems to luxuriate in the solitariness watching the forest from “her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin” when she is once caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, “a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured solitary life” (qtd. from the authorized site of Barbara Kingsolver). Eddie Bondo first sees her following curiously an unidentified track: “He would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path and how directly she scowled at the ground ahead of her” (43). He therefore comes to recognize her daring, undaunted spirit living all alone as a forest ranger in the solitary wood that at once subverts the traditional expected role of a woman. In the course of the chapters readers get ample instances of her intimate interconnectedness with nature. She revels in the proximity of nature with all its flora and fauna in this lone forest: “She loved the air after a hard rain and the way a forest of dripping leaves fills itself with a sibilant percussion that empties your head of words” (3). Eddie Bondo, the man with a gun, at once presents himself as an ideological antagonist of Denna as he is a hunter who has come with the decisive purpose of hunting the animals that Denna is desperate to protect- the Coyotes. Denna deems the flora and the fauna of the wood to be her kith and kin and hence needs not suffer from any insecurity to protect herself from the predators carrying the weapons as Eddie Bondo does. Hunting is a concept alien to her and so is carrying weapons. This becomes evident from her conversation with Eddie Bondo:

“I’m tracking”, she said quietly. “Two people make more than double the noise of one. If you’re a hunter I expect you’d know that already.”
“I don’t see your gun.”
“I don’t believe I’m carrying one. I believe we’re on National Forest land, inside of a game protection area where there’s no hunting.” (7)

She has even shunned the practice of using soap only because the predators associate the smell of the soap with that of the hunters which thereby hinders their easy movement in the forest. Though an intimate relationship develops between her and Eddie Bondo, she remains always aware of the aversion to the Coyotes of the western ranchers in general and that of Eddie Bondo in particular: “… it was may be the fiercest human-animal vendetta there was” (31). She knows that on these isolated mountains the Coyotes have the “strange combination of one protector and one enemy” (48). Denna’s ‘interanimation’ with nature, by contrast, accentuates the sense of Eddie’s alienation from nature. At times Denna even becomes seriously suspicious of Eddie’s purpose of staying with her for she feels that his purpose is only to cull information from her regarding the habitat of the Coyotes so that his hunting of them becomes easier. Out of her sincere concern for the Coyotes and serious misgivings regarding Eddie’s intention, she does not even hesitate to threaten Eddie:

“I want to tell you something”, she said holding his stare.
“You’re a good tracker, but I’m a better one. If you find any Coyote pups around here and kill them, I’ll put a bullet in your leg. Accidentally.”
“That’s true.” (184)

When Denna hears a sudden gunshot while sleeping, she wakes up at once, smells the intentional hand behind it, becomes desperate and even feels her murderous instincts rushing up towards Eddie. Her love for nature, all the plants and animals, is so genuine that when a moth becomes entrapped in the window curtain, she tenderly, carefully holds the moth and frees it or when a snake comes to take refuge in her cabin, she far from having any repulsive apprehension like Eddie, ensures a comfortable shelter for it. Denna becomes one with all the elements of nature as if they are her integral parts of existence and hence she comes to know about all the nooks and crannies of the forest of Zebulon County- she knows when in the still humid air the caterpillars would be coming to eat thousand leaves on their way to becoming Io and Luna moths. Because she is a professional biologist, she is enriched with scholastic knowledge about the details of the names of flora and fauna. She therefore recognizes the value of the preservation of extinct creations which Eddie cannot. She epitomizes reason and logic and thus subverts the patriarchal binary of rational male and emotional female. It is through her enriched logic and reason- an essential offshoot of her true knowledge about nature- that she attempts to make Eddie Bondo understand why killing a predator like Coyote leads to the disruption of the entire ecosystem:

“And what rule of the world says it’s a sin to kill a predator?”
“Simple math, Eddie Bondo, you know this stuff. One mosquito can make a bat happy for, what, fifteen seconds before it starts looking for another one. But one bat might eat two hundred mosquitoes in a night. Figure it out, where’s the gold standard here? Who has a bigger influence on other lives?” (181)

Denna attempts to prevent the oppression not merely towards the ecosystem exercised by exploitative patriarchal practices but towards her as well exercised by her husband. When the story opens, Denna is a divorced woman. As Eddie Bondo wants to know her name, she simply says it is Denna who is not “sure of the rest” (27). She further says “I’ve got one, but it’s my husband’s- was my husband’s” (27). Her comment presents a clear instance of patriarchal domination that she initially succumbed to. She reflects thoughtfully that her husband has “put his territorial mark” (28) on everything she owned and “then walked away” (28). Denna however refused to submit to the prolonged domination and desolation and hence took necessary actions when her inability to conform to the patriarchal expectations of her husband, accentuated his domination. With the desire of forging her own identity and living her life in her own terms lurking within her, she signed the divorce paper and resisted the imposition of oppressive patriarchal ideologies and beliefs on her. She can now, therefore, exult in being “just like the phoebes and wood thrushes” (260) as she always wanted to be.

The narrative of Lusa Landoswki, detailed under the chapters entitled “Moth Love”, gives the readers the glimpse of another empowered woman who resists the degradation of nature as she too, like Denna, shares an integral and intimate interconnectedness with nature. Lusa is a postdoctoral scholar of entomology turned a farmer’s wife who has met her husband Cole Widener when he came there in her university for a workshop on integrated pest management. By her marriage, she comes to reside in a farm in the Southern Appalachian region where she gets fascinated seeing different species of insects, specially the moths. It is here where her theoretical knowledge gets wedded to practical experience. Her knowledge and understanding of the life of the insects is clearly manifested in her rhapsody while seeing the moths as she enumerates their names with all their scientific details: “Actias luna. Hyalophora cecropia, Automeris io… silken creatures that bore the names of gods into Zebulon’s deep hollows and mountain slopes” (39). As an entomologist she delights in the possibility of identifying the mates of the insects through pheromones. As an earnest lover of nature, she comes to live nature in the small farm of Zebulon county: “She learned to tell time with her skin, as morning turned to afternoon and the mountain’s breath began to bear gently on the back of her neck… She had come to think of Zebulon as another man in her life, larger and steadier than any other companion she had known” (34). Lusa wants to develop a harmonious relationship both with the human and non-human lives and thus tries to brush aside any cause that may prove detrimental either to the natural or human world. When her husband dies and she comes to take charge of the farm, she negates her brother-in- law’s decision of planting tobacco in the farm as tobacco is supposed to be responsible for causing human cancer. Not only does she exhibit an environment-conscious spirit, she tries to instill this consciousness among her other family members as well, mostly the male ones who try to convince her about using productive but environmentally degrading methods of farming. With her steady logic and conscience, she tries to make her brothers-in-law understand the adverse effects of using chemical pesticides and focuses instead on biological pest control. She takes necessary advice from Ricky to purchase the goats from Mr. Garnett Walker so that she can raise the amount of money from farming and can use the goats for biological weed control: “Well, they’d keep the thistles and briars from taking over my hayfields” (158). Lusa exhibits her intensive knowledge about the world of the insects in her conversation with Crystal, a little girl who is the daughter of one of her sisters-in-law. She explains to her the scientific fact about why the birds avoid eating the caterpillars of monarch butterflies. Lusa along with other two chief female characters of the novel is empowered with comprehensive knowledge, scholasticism and reason which all the male characters of the novel lack. In her conversation with Crystal, when Lusa explains to her why grinding mill is now absent in most of the houses, she scathingly censures the mindless, unrestrained practices of capitalism and commercialism that have wreaked havoc on the environment:

“Why?”
“Because they can’t afford to grow grain anymore. It’s cheaper to buy bad stuff from a big farm than to grow good stuff on a little farm.”
“Why?”
…
“…that’s hard to answer. Because people want too much stuff, I guess, and won’t pay for quality.” (295)

Like Denna, Lusa too, gives a glimpse of her consciousness not merely regarding nature but regarding her identity as well which at times is stifled by the patriarchal ideas and which therefore she comes to resist vehemently. Lusa refuses to adopt her husband’s last name-a refusal that flouts the rural community’s patriarchal expectation at once. Her refusal to adopt her husband’s surname however does not stem from her aversion towards her husband’s family but because of her desire to maintain her eclectic identity of her combined Polish and Arab culture which she definitely takes pride in. Lusa’s desperate struggle to maintain her previous identity is confronted with strong challenge from the society as Lusa observes that wherever she goes she is always addressed and identified as Mrs. Widener and not by her own name. She complains time and again to Cole that none of Cole’s family cares at all to remember either her first or last name. This attitude on the part of Cole’s family members is indicative of their espousal of patriarchal beliefs which denies a woman her own individual identity. In this connection it is worthwhile to refer to Judith Butler’s observation in her essay “Imitation and Gender Subordination”: “Oppression works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable subjects…who are neither prohibited within the economy of law… Oppression works through the production of a domain of unthinkability and unnamed ability” (229). Oppression against Lusa is exercised through this ‘domain of unthinkability and unnamed ability’ which denies thinking of her as a subject having individual identity. Lusa’s self-assertion is evident when after her husband’s death, she declares the farm to be her own which she wishes to run on her own instead of running it through her brothers-in law. While Lusa’s sisters-in-law endorse essentially biased patriarchal attitudes and therefore deny Crystal her choice of so-called male dresses, Lusa gives Crystal her freedom of choice as she believes in keeping with the feminist thoughts that gender is a social construct.

The chapters entitled “Old Chestnuts” recount the narrative of Nannie Rawley, a proud grower of organic apple orchard, vis-à-vis her interaction with Garnett Walker III, a man who is opposed to any idea of organic farming and for whom “success without chemicals was impossible” (89). Nannie Rawley, according to him is therefore “a deluded old harpy in pigtails” (89) who does nothing but “concoct a fool set of opinions and paint them on a three-by-three plywood” (86). The square of plywood actually refers to Nannie’s request to Garnett Walker to plant a sign-board reading “No Spray Zone” in his property line. Rightly does Richard Magee in his article “The Aridity of Grace” identifies Garner as a “Toxic Man” (19) who remains “obstinately wedded to industrial agriculture and the modern chemical industrial complex that infuses large scale farming” (19). Garnett gets outraged to see that Nannie’s ban of herbicide in his land has given rise to the “swamp of weeds” (86) that has consumed the entire land. He thus comes to meet Nannie with the purpose of informing her that “it was her duty to keep her NO SPRAY ZONE, if she insisted on having such a thing” (87). The dichotomy between Nature as represented by Nannie and that of Culture represented by Garnett becomes overt in their feuding conversation:

… “One application of herbicide on my bank will not cause your apple trees or anybody else’s to drop off all their leaves.”
“Not to drop their leaves, no”, she’d admitted.
“But what if some inspector came tomorrow to spot-check for chemicals on my apples? I’d lose my certification.” (88)

Nannie perhaps became more averse to the use of the chemicals after the birth of her deformed child which she thought was caused by the chemicals. She even christened her child as Rachel Carson Rowley “after the lady scientist who cried wolf about DDT” (108). As she is enriched with the forces of logic and environmental consciousness, she tries to infuse them onto Garnett so as to prevent his environmentally degrading policies. As an instance of her support for animal rights activism and environmental awareness, she says that she is trying her best to save ten or fifteen kinds of salamanders in Zebulon that are supposed to be endangered species. Employing the same logic of Denna’s ‘simple maths’ (181), Nannie tries to make Garnett understand how the use of insecticides actually promotes the growth of the prey or the pest insects that he determines to destroy. She explains applying what she calls “Volterra principle” (281) that the insecticides kill both the predator and the prey insects alike but because of the high fertility of the pest insects, they multiply quickly in the absence of their natural enemies when insecticide is applied. Like Denna and Lusa, Nannie struggles to preserve both nature and her own individual entity, breaking apart the shackles of patriarchal values. Her fight for her identity and her own place in a seemingly patriarchal space is evinced in her relation to Denna’s father whom she refused to marry in spite of having a baby. She did not succumb to the pressures of the patriarchal society to make their relationship official. Nannie even subverts the patriarchal community’s views and expectations by managing her farm all by herself for which she remains grateful to her father who ensured that Nannie receives proper education to know the details of managing farms. It is from her educational background that she derives strength both financially and psychologically to fight the stereotypical ideologies of patriarchy. Interestingly it is Nannie’s ingenuity that sometimes she appropriates the patriarchal expectations only to subvert them more forcefully. When the rural community of Zebulon gossips about her choice of life, she simply silences them by flaunting her cooking skill which is supposed to be the predestined, assigned role of the women. The readers get to know that she has bribed Oda Black with apple pies as she did Garnett Walker when she sent him a letter containing her thoughts about nature which were of course ideologically opposed to him. Garnett in his counter- letter to Nannie gave vent to essentially anthropocentric ideas declaring that humans hold a more special and privileged authority in the world. It is an idea however which the deep ecologists criticize scathingly. If the deep ecologists believe, as P.K. Nayar observes, that our worldview, thinking, responses and actions are human-centric and therefore in order to ensure a safer planet we need to become eco or bio-centric (246), Nannie reflects the same deep ecological concerns asserting that humankind holds the same special place in the world as is held by a mocking bird or a salamander. She emphasizes the creation of a harmonious living condition for both the humans and the non-humans. Nannie in her response to Garnett’s letter echoes the comments made by Ynestra King in the article “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology”: “A healthy, balanced ecosystem, including human and non-human inhabitants, must maintain diversity… Biological simplification, i.e., the wiping out of whole species, corresponds to reducing human diversity into faceless workers or to the homogenization of taste and culture through mass consumer markets” (20).

Greg Garrard observes however that ecofeminism promotes environmental justice to a far greater degree than deep ecology. In this connection he comments in his book Ecocriticism that in ecofeminism, “The logic of domination is implicated in discrimination and oppression on grounds of race, sexual orientation and class as well as species and gender” (29). It is here that Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer leaves its unique signature as a distinct ecofeminist novel. Richard Magee rightly comments in his article “The Aridity of Grace” that in the novel the main female characters clearly represent nature while the men represent (agri)culture (18). He further observes:

Not only do the women represent nature, they represent different stages of nature. Denna is the primitive, maternal (by the end of the novel she discovers that she is pregnant, and primal earth goddess. Nannie Rawley is the old woman with the lifetime of natural folk wisdom stored up in her head. Lusa is the modern educated woman who uses her intelligence as well as her fierce determination and family attachments to become a more ecologically sensitive farmer than any of the men who farm around her could hope to be. (20)

The chief women characters in the novel defy the ‘logic of domination’ exercised either to them or to nature. They find the common grounds of interconnection between women and nature in their shared history of oppression perpetrated by the hegemonic patriarchal practices. It is the three women who dominate the narrative from the beginning to the end as they are empowered with knowledge of environmental consciousness, human and non-human rights and the basic logic of ratiocination. These are the forces through which they resist any kind of assault either to the identity of Mother Nature or to their essential identity of femininity. Ynestra King comments, “… we need a decentralized global movement that is founded on common interests yet celebrates diversity and opposes all forms of domination and violence. Potentially ecofeminism is such a movement” (20). In the novel Prodigal Summer, the readers come across the instances of the same movement of ecofeminism where the chief female characters promote the harmonious relationship between the world of non-humans and the world of the humans for their common interest and celebrate diversity in both these worlds in much more a positive way ensuring that this diversity is purged of domination on the grounds of superiority- a domination that is evinced in the practices of patriarchy. In a way the three main female characters of the novel flout the attributes of superiority assigned on patriarchy by incorporating and appropriating those attributes themselves.

Works Cited

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9. Murphy, Patrick D. Literature, Nature and Other. State University of New York Press, 1995.
10. Nayar, P.K. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Pearson, 2009.
11. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993.
12. Smith, Barbara Ellen. “Beyond the Mountains: The Paradox of Women’s Place in Appalachian History.” NWSA Journal, vol.11, no.3, 1999, pp. 1-17. Project Muse. Accessed 12 June 2020.
13. Warren, Karen. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.