Radical Homemaking in Contemporary American Environmental Fiction

Ursula K. Heise in ‘Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies’ critiques ‘the portrayal of multicultural and sometimes transnational nuclear families as the narrative solution to environmental and political problems’ (Heise, 2008: 383). This essay places Heise’s critique of the ‘ecological family romance’ in conversation with three other ecological domestic fictions: T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012). Heise’s critique and Shannon Hayes’ Radical Homemakers (2010) frame my close readings of the novels’ interconnected themes of radical homemaking, transnationalism, and environmentalism. My reading of the novels highlights their shared use of marginalized, racially-other characters to develop their entwined romantic and environmental plots (Lalitha in Freedom, several minor characters in A Friend of the Earth, and Ovid in Flight Behavior) and their use of sentimental deaths, especially of key female characters (Lalitha in Freedom, Sierra in A Friend of the Earth, and Dellarobia’s uncertain fate in Flight Behavior). By adopting the sentimental, domestic romance plot for ecological aims, the three novels highlight how environmental aims get stymied when cultural and ecological diversity are relegated to the margins. They also suggest that more is gained than lost through their use of ecological allegory. While the fictions do not offer solutions, they do push their readers to confront the Anthropocene’s ecological realities and their radical domestic-environmental politics.

Loại tài liệu:

Article - Bài báo

Tác giả:

Kristin J. Jacobson

Đề mục:

American Literary

Nhà xuất bản:

Open Library of Humanities

Ngày xuất bản:

2018

Số trang/ tờ:

Định dạng:

pdf

Định danh tư liệu:

https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.31

Nguồn gốc:

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings; Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018, Pages 1-33

Liên kết:

ISSN 2045-5224

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