Women and Nature : An Ecofeminist Perspective in Contemporary Literature

Women and Nature : An Ecofeminist Perspective in Contemporary Literature Dr. Seema Surin* This paper explores the ecofeminist perspective in contemporary literature, examining how women writers connect the domination of nature to the domination of women within patriarchal and colonial structures of power. Building on the foundational theory of ecofeminism as articulated by Vandana Shiva, Carolyn Merchant, Val Plumwood, and Karen Warren, the paper contends that contemporary literary texts do more than draw a metaphorical parallel between women and the earth; they reveal a shared logic of exploitation grounded in dualistic thinking that separates culture from nature and reason from body, assigning women and the natural world to the devalued side of each pair. Through close reading of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, and Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction, as well as the activist-literary tradition associated with the Chipko movement, the paper traces how contemporary writers reimagine women not as passive victims of ecological and patriarchal violence but as custodians of ecological knowledge and agents of environmental resistance. The paper concludes that ecofeminist literature offers a vital, intersectional framework for grasping the entangled crises of gender inequality and environmental degradation in the contemporary world. *Assistant Professor, Department of English, S. S. Memorial College, Ranchi University, Ranchi, Email: [email protected]