Ecocriticism and Women Writers by Justyna Kostkowska (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ecocriticism and Women Writers by Justyna Kostkowska Dan Wylie Justyna Kostkowska, Ecocriticism and Women Writers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 189 pp. Ecofeminism has emerged as one of the most astringent voices calling for fundamental changes of attitude in the face of our growing environmental crisis. Though ecofeminists argue amongst themselves, most accept the premise that women and nature have inseparably been oppressed and damaged by patriarchal structures and discourses, especially, but not exclusively, in the technologized West. Ecofeminists aim, as Justyna Kostkowska footnotes in this intriguing scholarly study, “at dislodging the patriarchal system, with its emphasis on objectivity, order and hierarchy of knowledge, as well as its Cartesian assumption that the world is knowable by the human intellect, which is superior to nature” (168). A central emphasis, obviously, is the mainstream feminist struggle against male gender domination as well as against what Adrienne Rich famously called “compulsory heterosexuality” that marginalizes other sexual orientations. This is the particular slant of Kostkowska’s Ecocriticism and Women Writers, a study that hopes to contribute (in Karen Warren’s words) to “the creation of a world in which difference does not breed domination” (qtd. 169). Kostkowska, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, has produced a sophisticated and eclectically argued study of three interestingly [End Page 396] interlinked women writers: Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) has of late attracted growing ecocritical attention for her complex, fluid, and integrative descriptions of the natural world. Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959), a novelist and essayist possibly still best-admired for her early novellas The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989), has explicitly acknowledged her debt to Woolf both as thinker and stylist, and has commented on her contemporary, Ali Smith (b. 1962). All three, Kostkowska suggests, “believe in challenging the reader to discover multiple and complex layers of the text’s meaning, and in the reader’s inclusion in the creative process through active participation.” They do this by modelling (a favourite trope of Kostkowska’s) “a better world by revising traditional formal structures: dispersing the single (anthropocentric) narrative point of view into multiple but equal voices; emphasizing the world’s interconnectedness through structural repetition; using metaphors converging the human and nonhuman to debunk the assumption of difference and superiority, and the me/not-me, inside/outside distinctions” (165). To illustrate her thesis, Kostkowska has chosen to focus on three of Woolf’s still startlingly experimental novels, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, and The Waves. But she begins with an earlier (1917) story, “Kew Gardens,” a step into “the unchartered [sic] territory of modernist and even postmodern experiment” (14; that error is just one of a number in the book, including “Ecocritism” on the hardback front cover: oops). To the existing critical discourse on the defiance of normative exclusions in “Kew Gardens” Kostkowska adds the ecological — the story includes, albeit briefly, the imagined perspective of a snail (foreshadowing the dog’s-eye perspective presented in Flush). She quotes Woolf’s own rumination on “seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking suddenly ‘This is Earth life’ . . . & I myself an evolved kind of hare” (16). This sense of the underpinning continuity between human and non-human nature is exemplified in Septimus Smith’s bench vision in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf achieves, in Kostkowska’s view, a number of at least proto-ecofeminist aims. She presents, particularly in Jacob’s Room and The Waves, an imagined sense of ecosystems operant beyond human presence (recurring, of course, in the “Time Passes” section in To the Lighthouse): we are not central to the “multiverse” (Kostkowska 20). Furthermore, Woolf disrupts the monologic, dominant narrative voice of the traditional patriarchal novel, developing her signature technique of sliding from one voice and locus to another, most of them feminine, if not overtly feminist. Kostkowska takes this a step further. She views the text not only as an “ecosystem” in itself, but as linguistically and experientially integrated with the world and with the participatory reader. The very “difficulty” of the modernist experiment makes demands on the reader that are necessarily creative, dialogic, and therefore, in Kostkowska’s scheme, ecological. This particular aspect dominates the...