Home is (Mother) Earth: Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver

Abstract

If the fiction and autobiographical writings of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing reveal a nostalgic preoccupation with the idealized or fantasized lost mother and the lost landscape of home that is associated with her, a number of narratives by contemporary American women writers complicate those preoccupations in diverse ways. Nostalgia, whether “lying” (in Lessing’s terms) or the trace of “enduring” memories (in Woolf’s), represents a saturated emotional private history as it perpetuates and, over time, may eventually resolve the process of mourning. In its literary representations, nostalgia thus functions as a means of rendering and figuratively repairing the lost past by transmuting its pain. The narratives discussed in this section—Displacements of/from Home—were authored by writers a generation or two younger than Woolf or Lessing—their figurative daughters and even granddaughters. Each novel constructs the central character’s longing for belonging in relation to particular places or figures in the past that continue to color her understanding of herself. In Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990), The Bean Trees (1988), and Pigs in Heaven (1993), and in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1992), the female protagonists find themselves either far from what they regard as home or longing for a home/land or language from which they have been estranged. The expression of nostalgia suggests that the effort to “fix” the past continues to influence and shape women’s recent fiction.