Ecofeminist Themes in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping

Abstract

his recently published book The Environmental Imagination. Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Lawrence Buell names the following as the most important developments the American letters this century: a series of intellectual movements of American minority cultures and the conception of writing and reading as gendered pursuits.1 the act of writing T h e Environmental Imagination, he acknowledges a third development: the growing concern for the natural environment and the debate around its representation literature. Buell points out that in literary history since World War 11, the resurgence of environmental writing is as important as the rise of magical realism.z Like many other critics, he recognizes nature as an oppressed and silent class, need of spokespersons, and sees it as doubly otherized, under the double domination of society and science. But how does a writer go about representing nature, if the experience of representation is so different from experiencing nature itself? Nature exposes us to an exterior landscape, whereas order to write about it, we must turn inward. How can mimetic description of nature be achieved and made appealing an age so critical of realism as ours? In American literature, the main cannonical forms of environmental uriting are the wilderness romance and the lyrical meditation on a lurni-