Carol Shields’ın İyilik’inde, Reta’nın Norah’yı Yeniden ‘Doğal’ Bedenine ve Doğaya Yerleştirme Projesi

Year 2025, Volume: 5 Issue: 1, 12 - 24, 25.05.2025

Esra Melikoğlu

https://doi.org/10.62352/ideas.1585550

Abstract

Carol Shields’ın İyilik adlı romanında, kökleri yetmişli yılların feminist ve çevreci hareketlerine uzanan kadın yazar Reta Winters, ekofeminizmin kısmi başarısızlık döngüsüne hapsolduğunu ve bu durumdan kendisinin de sorumlu olduğunun farkına varır. Yeni yüzyılda alt üst olur: yıkanmayı bıraktığını ve saçında bit olduğunu düşündüğü kızı Norah bir sokak köşesinde oturup ataerkinin hem kadınları hem de doğayı pis ve akılsız bedenler veya madde olarak tanımlamayarak ataerkinin her ikisine de hükmetmesini ve sömürmesini haklı kılmasını protesto eder. Bu makalede, Reta’nın bir kadın yazar olarak hem bu söylemin yeniden üretilmesindeki rolünü irdelemek hem de Norah’nın ekofeminist geleceği temsil ettiği bir karşı anlatı yazmak zorunda olduğu savunulacaktır. Bu anlatıda Norah, ‘doğal’ bedenlerini geri alacak ve doğayla bağ kuracak yeni kuşak ekofeministin prototipi olarak sunulur. Benimsedikleri ilgi etiği de doğaya hükmetme politikasının yerini alacaktır. Ancak Reta anlatısını tamamlamaz. Bu da kendisinin ve toplumun ekofeminizme karşı kararsız tutumunu gösterir.

Keywords

Carol Shields , İyilik , Beden , Ekofeminizm

Ethical Statement

The author of this article confirms that this research does not require a research ethics committee approval.

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Carol Shields , Unless , body , ecofeminism

Ethical Statement

The author of this article confirms that this research does not require a research ethics committee approval.

References

• Ash, Juliet. Dress Behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality. I. B. Tauris, 2010, pp. 107–138.
• Bashford, Alison. Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
• Bordo, Susan. “Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body.” Feminist Theory and the Body, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 246–257.
• Boyd, Shelley. Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and their Literary Gardens. McGill-Queens University Press, 2013.
• ---. “Shields’s Guerilla Gardeners: Sowing Seeds of Defiance and Care.” The Worlds of Carol Shields, edited by David Staines, University of Ottawa Press, pp. 177–196.
• Campbell, Stu. Mulch It! A Practical Guide to Using Mulch in the Garden and Landscape. Storey Publishing, 2001.
• “Chitin.” Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/chitin. Accessed 23 May 2024.
• Christ, Carol P. “Rethinking Theology and Nature.” Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Sierra Club Books, 1990, pp. 58–69.
• Cusk, Rachel. “My Heart Is Broken.” Review of Unless, by Carol Shields. New Statesman, 29 Apr. 2002, pp. 47–48.
• D’Eaubonne, Françoise. “Feminism or Death.” New French Feminisms: An Anthology, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, Schocken Books, 1981, pp. 64–67.
• Floyd, Janet. Writing the Pioneer Woman. University of Missouri Press, 2002.
• Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Anansi, 1995.
• Gilmore, Stephanie. “Thinking about Feminist Coalitions.” Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, edited by Gilmore, University of Illinois Press, 2008, pp. 1–18.
• Hartmann, Simone Birgitt. “Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives on Ecocriticism in a Canadian Context: Toward a ‘Situated’ Literary Theory and Practice of Ecofeminist and Environmental Justice.” Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 87–109.
• Heath, Tim. “Narrative Pragmatism in Carol Shields’s Unless.” The Worlds of Carol Shields, edited by David Staines. University of Ottawa Press, 2014, pp. 61–80.
• Howells, Carol Ann. “All That Below-the-Surface Stuff: Carol Shields’s Conversational Modes.” The Worlds of Carol Shields, edited by David Staines. University of Ottawa Press, 2014, pp. 35–52.
• Mayo Clinic. “Diseases and Conditions: Head Lice.” 1998–2024, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/head-lice/symptoms-causes/syc-20356180. Accessed 23 May 2024.
• Merchant, Carolyn. Earthcare: Women and the Environment. Routledge, 1995.
• Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. Zed Books, 1998.
• Plumwood, Val. “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 1, 1991, pp. 3–27. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb00206.x.
• Rosenthal, Caroline. New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban. Camden House, 2011.
• Shields, Carol. Unless. Fourth Estate, 2002.
• Shildrick, Margrit, and Janet Price. “Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction.” Feminist Theory and the Body, edited by Price and Shildrick, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 1–14.
• Stovel, Norah Foster. “Written in Women’s Ink: French Translation and Canada Female Power in Carol Shields’s Unless.” Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Critical Studies, vol. 3, no. 1–2, 2013, pp. 219–241. doi:10.33776/candb.v3i1-2.3043.
• Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
• Whitacker, Elizabeth. The Trouble with Human Nature: Health, Conflict, and Difference in Biocultural Perspective. Routledge, 2017.