Eco-Feminism and Feminism in Prodigal Summer

Barbara Kingsolver is an active Eco-Feminist and likes to portray her ecofeminism in the books that she writes. One particular book that shows Ecofeminism is Prodigal Summer. Prodigal Summer portrays Ecofeminism by showing how feminist view nature, how Females can be farmers, and how each of the female characters have power over the male characters and end up helping them. In my opinion, all ecofeminism is a category under Feminism that deals with feminism in nature and so I decided to take a look at how Eco-Feminism and Feminism, in general, coincide within the book Prodigal Summer.

Ecofeminism is in short deals with females who want to stand up for nature rights. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Ecofeminism is “a movement or theory that applies feminist principles and ideas to ecological issues” (60). So, ecofeminism is basically females who have a love of nature and want to protect it.

The movement of Ecofeminism didn’t start until the 1980’s which is close to the height of the Feminist movement.

Barbara Kingsolver can be considered an Ecofeminism because of her love of nature and wanting to protect it. According to Kirstin Tassel, Barbara Kingsolver wrote Prodigal Summer because it “presented provocative alternatives, where female farmers assume a central role in the portrayal of a new, ecologically based agrarianism” (83). One of the places that Barbara lives on is a farm in the Appalachia and she runs it with the help of her husband. She knows what her characters are going through in her book and so it goes to say that the book may mirror her life some.

One example of ecofeminism in Prodigal Summer is how females view nature. A character that portrays this is Deanna for she protects a na...

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...lped heal his loneliness.

Another woman that comes to mind that stands up to a man and helps him is Deanna. She stands up to Eddie Bondo and helps him realize how precious nature is. He starts off as a hunter wanting to hunt illegal in a nature preserve which Deanna is a ranger of. While writing her thesis she asks Eddie to look over it so that he could realize how precious nature is and how each thing in nature is predator and prey. She tells him that, “Coyotes aren’t just predators, they’re also a prey species. Unlike the blue whale or the grizzly, they’re real used to being hunted. Their main predator before we came along was wolves. Which we eared from the map of America as fast as we could” (325). So by stating fact to him through her thesis paper that she had to write she shows him how nature is really like and how it should be preserved and protected.