Nature and Women : The Representation of Abuse and Resistance in Eric Barnes's Above the ether (2019) and The city where we once lived (2018)
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Date
2025
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Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou
Abstract
This dissertation aims to explore how Western thought has positioned nature and women as subordinate to man and reason. It discusses the effects of binary oppositions and humans’ exploitation and oppression, which manifest in environmental degradation and systemic gender inequality. It attempts to examine the agency of nature and women, to highlight their resistance against male domination and oppression. It investigates the interconnected abuse of nature and the discrimination of women as well as the possibility of their resistance in Eric Barnes’s Above the ether (2019) and The city where we once lived (2018). Therefore, this dissertation offers an ecofeminist perspective. To attain our objective, we rely on Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the mastery of nature (1993) and “Nature in the active voice” (2009). The first chapter delves into the excessive abuse of the natural and the dehumanization of women. It demonstrates that humans live in a post-apocalyptic world, as they grapple with climate change and pollution. It also shows that the father’s wife, the doctor’s wife, the stranger, female teenagers, the missing woman, and the female commissioner are the main female characters who are discriminated in both novels. The second chapter focuses on the resistance of nature and women. Through our analysis, we reached the following findings. Barnes’s novels depict how nature and women are portrayed as passive and instrumentalised. Hence, both nature and women are abused, exploited and discriminated in the narratives. Additionally, both some plants and women are active agents, who resist male oppression and abuse. In both literary texts, the forms of resistance are shown through dandelions, ivy and vines. Similarly, the investor, the doctor’s wife, the missing woman and female scavengers are the main female characters who symbolize resistance.
Description
54p. ; (+CD-Rom)
Keywords
Abuse, oppression, resistance, nature, plants, women
Citation
LITERATURE AND INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES