The Concurrence of Women and Nature in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: A Cultural Ecofeminist Reading

Mohammadi, Nahid; Kalantari, Anis

doi:10.22051/lghor.2019.24214.1095

Document Type : Research article

Authors

Nahid Mohammadi ¹
Anis Kalantari ²

¹ Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature Department, Alzahra University

² MSc Student of English Literature, Alzahra University

https://doi.org/10.22051/lghor.2019.24214.1095

Abstract

The oppression of women, as the subordinate second sex, and the exploitation of the environment have been the focus of most ecofeminist studies. In this study, the authors will discuss the patriarchal injustice suppressing women and the environment in an 18^th-century literary text, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1719). Through the prism of cultural ecofeminism, this article makes an effort to illustrate the formation and also interrelatedness of two main long-held cultural dichotomies: the sexist-oriented privilege of male over female and the anthropocentric privilege of human over nonhuman in the microcosmic literary scope of the 18^th-century English literature. From this regard, the feminist-oriented ecological issues will be discussed according to Val Plumwood’s distinction of cultural ecofeminism. Within this theoretical framework, we try to demonstrate how the elements of a patriarchal system shape all feminine subjectivities. The present article also shows how Nature herself, as an objection to the patriarchal culture, acts as the major supporter of women throughout The Rape of the Lock.

Keywords

20.1001.1.2588350.2019.3.1.1.1

References

Birkeland, J. (1993). Ecofeminism: Linking theory and practice. In G. Gaard (Ed.), Ecofeminism: women, animals, nature (pp. 13-59). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Bowerbank, S. (2005). Speaking for nature: Women and ecologies of early modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Boyle, R. (1996). A free enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature. In E. B. Davis & M. Hunter (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bushnell, R. (2003). Green desire: Imagining early modern English gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Buzard, J. (1993). The Beaten track: European tourism, literature, and ways to ‘culture’ 1800-1918. Victorian Review, 11(2), 77-9.

Cameron, D. (1992). Feminism and linguistic theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Clark, T. (2011) The Cambridge introduction to literature and the environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collard, A. & Contrucci, J. (1989). Rape of the wild. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Cranston, M. (1994). The Romantic movement. Massachusetts, MA: Blackwell.

Eaton, H. & Lorentzen, L.A. (Eds.). (2003). Ecofeminism and globalization: exploring culture, context, and religion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Fuss, D. (1989). Essentially speaking: Feminism, nature, and difference. New York: Routledge.

Gaard, G. (Ed.). (1993). Ecofeminism: Women, animals, nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Gilpin, W. (1972). On picturesque beauty: Essays on picturesque beauty. London: R. Blamire.

Griffin, S. (1982). Made from this earth: An anthology of writings. New York: Harper & Row.

Hazarika, K. (2012). Social status of women in the 18^th-century English society as reflected in a dictionary of the English language of Dr. Johnson. IJCAES Special Issue on Basic, Applied & Social Sciences, 2, 352-355. Doi:10.1.1.303.1903

Hill, B. (1984). Eighteenth-century women: An anthology. London: George Allen & Unwin Publishers Ltd.

Kerrigan, J. (1998). Earth writing: Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson. Essays in Criticism. 48(2), 144-168.

Ling, C. (2014). Ecological criticism based on social gender: The basic principles of Ecofeminism. Higher Education of Social Science, 7(1), 67-72.

Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Merrens, R. (1996). A nature of ‘infinite sense and reason’: Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophy and the ‘noise’ of a feminized nature. Women’s Studies, 25(5), 421–438.

Milton, J. (2003). Paradise lost: The major work. In S. Orgel & J. Goldberg (Eds.), Oxford world classics: John Milton (355-618). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mulvey, L. (1998). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (Eds.), Literary theory: An anthology (pp. 57-68). Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.

Munroe, J. & Laroche R. (Eds.). (2011). Ecofeminism approaches to early modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Parham, J. (2010). Green man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian ecological imagination. New York: Rodopi.

Phillips, B. (2004). The rape of mother earth in seventeenth-century English poetry: An ecofeminist interpretation. Atlantis, 26(1), 49-60.

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge.

Plumwood, V. (1992). Feminism and ecofeminism: Beyond the dualistic assumptions of women, men, and nature. The Ecologist, 22(1), 8-13.

Pope, A. (2004). The rape of the lock. London: Sovereign Sanctuary Press.

Rao, S. (2010). Belinda’s weapons of femininity in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. Magnificat: a Journal of Undergraduate Nonfiction. Retrieved from https://www.commons.marymount.e Greta Gaard du/magnificat/belindas-weapons-of-femininity-in-popes-the-rape-of-the-lock.

Salma, U. (2011). Woman and the empire in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: A reading. Transnational Literature, 4(1).

Retrieved from http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html.

Sandilands, C. (1999). The good-natured feminist: Ecofeminism and the quest for democracy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Snyder, W. C. (1992). Mother nature’s other natures: Landscape in women’s writing, 1770-1830. Women’s Studies, 21(2), 143-62.

Storey, G. (2017). Belinda, Thalestris, Clarissa,… Queen Anne? Failures of female agency in The Rape of the Lock. The Midwest Quarterly, 58(2), 203-219.

Tillotson, G. (Ed.). (1962). The rape of the lock and other poems. New York: Routledge.

Twine, T. R. (2001). Ecofeminism in process. Retrieved from www.ecofem.org/journal.

Tosh, J. (1999). A man’s place: Masculinity and the middle-class home in Victorian England. London: Yale University Press.

Weaver, C. (1985). Parallels between new paradigms in science and in reading and literarytheories: An essay review. Research in the Teaching of English, 19(3), 298-316.

Westfall, C. (1998). The negative images of women in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. Knox College Common Room: The Knox College Online Journal of Literary Criticism, 2(2), 1-4. Retrieved from http://departments.knox.edu/engdept/CommonRoom/The_Common_Room_Home.html.

Journal of Language Horizons

The Concurrence of Women and Nature in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: A Cultural Ecofeminist Reading

References

References

Volume 3, Issue 1 - Serial Number 5
January 2019
Pages 9-20

The Concurrence of Women and Nature in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: A Cultural Ecofeminist Reading

References

References

Volume 3, Issue 1 - Serial Number 5January 2019Pages 9-20

Volume 3, Issue 1 - Serial Number 5
January 2019
Pages 9-20