Literature and Ecofeminism

Abstract

Ecofeminism aims to establish a community ecology that is sustainable for both human and nonhuman beings, deconstructing the oppressor/oppressed identities that are prevalent in patriarchal society. Anticipating this proposition of ecofeminism, Mary Austin, a woman who became everything-a nature writer, a playwright, a poet, a short-story writer, a novelist, as well as a social activist-inspired many other women of her generation as well as those in the contemporary world, laying the foundations of ecofeminism. She rejected the nineteenth-century middleclass conventions of True Womanhood and embraced the twentieth-century New Womanhood, feminism, and environmentalism, serving as a link between the centuries. She embroiled herself in activism for the Owens Valley water during the California Water Wars (1902-07), a series of controversies between the city of Los Angeles and the farmers of the valley about the acquisition of water rights of Owens Valley. With a view to portraying such an eventful chapter in American history and disseminating her ecofeminist land ethic, Austin wrote her 1917 novel The Ford, blending her female identity as an activist with her literary talents. As a proto-ecofeminist, she depicts in The Ford how land speculation deprives people of their most essential need, water. 1 Suggesting a harmonious relationship between rivers and their beneficiaries, she questions ownership to the land-as she criticizes the patriarchal hegemony over women-and proposes to utilize rivers to make a living, yet being aware of the possibilities and limits of the landscape. All in all, with The Ford, she hints at what occurs when this fragile understanding is broken, and how the abuse of the river leads to the destruction of ecological parameters. Born in 1868 in Carlinville, Illinois, as Mary Hunter, Mary Austin (1868-1934) graduated from college in 1888. Her mother, a widowed woman, decided to move her family to the West, where they established a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley in California. John P. O'Grady (1993, 123-125) views Mary Austin as a "reluctant pilgrim," who moved from a Midwestern town to the Southwest with her mother and brother against her will. The wild western wilderness, for her, was nothing like the green landscapes of the East, and definitely contradicted the virtues of the Cult of True Womanhood-piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Austin took the opportunity to design her own fate, which opposed social norms. In 1891, she married Stafford Wallace Austin, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, and lived in Inyo and Mary Austin's proto-ecofeminist land ethic 41 Independent Counties. She poured her love and care for the land and its people into The Land of Little Rain (1903), a collection of short essays that discusses the Mojave Desert and its importance to indigenous peoples. Evoking an earlier version of ecofeminist spirituality, she gave life to the desert, viewing it as feminine, seductive, and bountiful, while calling for environmental conservation and the ...