Ecofeminism in Mary Shelley, Margaret Fuller, and Zora Neale Hurston: Looking Back to Look Forward

• In Event: Literature and Politics in Modern and Contemporary Thought

Abstract

The rise of fascism is waging a backlash and assault on four distinct yet interrelated targets: progressive advances in feminism, queer rights, civil rights, and environmentalism (broadly understood). My paper seeks to better understand today’s backlash by looking back to Mary Shelley, Margaret Fuller, and Zora Neale Hurston as early ecofeminists who crafted distinctive forms of writing designed to reveal and combat patriarchy, racism, and environmentally destructive anthropocentrism. These authors, each in their own way, experienced backlash in their day; and their texts (with their distinctive context, form and content) limn the logic of backlash and how to work against it—all in the context of the confluence of nature, women, and other marginalized people such as Blacks and Indigenous peoples as sites of patriarchal oppression. In response to backlash, we find in their works: resistance to patriarchy expressed via storied landscapes; acknowledgement of the interdependent relation between humans and the more-than-human; opposition to hyper masculine individuality and androcentrism; and refusal to male, extractive capitalism. I also reflect on my method, namely, employing fiction and creative non-fiction as environmental political theory texts. Their work expresses veracity as the reader is drawn into their texts and invited to act. Mainly, however, I argue that looking back to these ecofeminists equips us to better challenge contemporary forms of backlash.

Author

• Mark Cladis, Brown University