Loving the alien. Ecofeminism, animals, and Anna Maria Ortese’s poetics of otherness

Serenella Iovino

doi:10.14198/fem.2013.22.10

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze how literary imagination can be used as a tool for theoretically exploring the notions of vulnerability, and human/nonhuman relationships in the framework of feminist ecocriticism. In particular, I examine how a precise literary genre, namely, magical realism, can function as a diffracting lens to make the hybridizations and the overlapping of human, nonhuman, and gendered bodies, visible through narrative strategies that facilitate our affective response. Building my theoretical discourse mostly on feminist animal studies, material ecocriticism, and posthumanism, I consider the work of the Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese (1914- 1998) and her creaturely poetics of otherness, as exemplified in particular by her novel The Iguana.

Highlights

Opening her book Creaturely Poetics with a quote from Simone Weil (“the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful, because vulnerability is a mark of existence”), the British interspecies ethicist and literary scholar Anat Pick observes how difficult it is to speak “strictly” about the human or “the animal.”2 It is common wisdom, she notes, that “the distinctions between humans and animals are conceptually and materially indecisive” and “a site of contestation.”3 Still, in the modern age, the “human-animal distinction constitutes an arena in which relations of power operate in their exemplary purity.”4
Ecofeminism has advocated for the dismantling of the “intersectional oppressions”5 which encapsulate women, nonhuman animals, “non-normative humans,”6 and whatever subject has been marked as
Arguing that “We have never been human,” Donna Haraway, for example, has convincingly emphasized that “becoming with” the nonhuman is “a practice of becoming worldly.”10 Human genomes, Haraway reminds us, “can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all.”

Summary

Introduction

Opening her book Creaturely Poetics with a quote from Simone Weil (“the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful, because vulnerability is a mark of existence”), the British interspecies ethicist and literary scholar Anat Pick observes how difficult it is to speak “strictly” about the human or “the animal.” It is common wisdom, she notes, that “the distinctions between humans and animals are conceptually and materially indecisive” and “a site of contestation.” Still, in the modern age, the “human-animal distinction constitutes an arena in which relations of power operate in their exemplary purity (that is, operate with the fewest of material obstacles).”. Nonhuman, master and slave; and the dualism between public and private (where the sphere of private is that of the iguana’s semi-reclusion, relegated to live in a dark cubbyhole under the kitchen’s stairs and forced to behave as if she were invisible); between subject and object (her identity is a sheer function of her utility); rationality and animality (her masters speak “of animality as necessarily distinguished by its lack of that highest good called the Soul”49); universality and singularity (a weird individual, Estrellita is theoretically as well as morally anti-taxonomical, and there are no universal categories in which she could be understood, “assumed” and “redeemed” from her ontological solitude); of civilized and primitive and of culture and nature (Estrellita is illiterate and her language is extremely poor, especially compared to her master’s poetic aspirations); of freedom and necessity (after having been repudiated, Estrellita becomes an “animated instrument,” almost a mere mechanism) Among these patterns of mastery, social oppression plays a fundamental role. Like “those poor souls who dwell in night,” he can see the both the human in a little Iguana and the divine in the luminous innocence of a dead white butterfly

Conclusions

Findings

Bibliographic References