Reta’s Project of Re-Embedding Norah in Her ‘Natural’ Body and in Nonhuman Nature in Carol Shields’s Unless

In Carol Shields's novel Unless, the protagonist, Reta Winters, a writer who has her roots in the seventies’ feminist and environmental movements, realizes ecofeminism’s entrapment in a cycle of partial failure and her own share of the responsibility for it. She is, in the new millennium, devastated: Presumably unwashed and with nits in her hair, her daughter Norah sits on a street corner in protest against patriarchy’s construction of both women and nonhuman nature as dirty, mindless bodies, or matter, which serves to justify a policy of domination, sanitation, and exploitation. It will be argued that Reta must ponder her own role as a woman writer in perpetuating this construct and write a counternarrative in which Norah represents an ecofeminist future: Norah emerges as a prototype of a new generation of ecofeminists who shall reclaim their ‘natural’ bodies and reconnect with nonhuman nature, their environmental care ethics replacing a policy of domination. Yet Reta’s counternarrative remains abortive as suggestive of the writer’s and her society’s wavering commitment to ecofeminism.