Parker, Cynthia Ann 1827?-1864

The malaise of patriarchy : Spanish women's voices in the realist novel by Cynthia Ann Parker( Book )

2 editions published in 1997 in English and held by 3 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

This dissertation explores the possibility of finding what might be considered an ecofeminist tradition in four novels written by Spanish women writers between 1849 and 1950. These novels are La gaviota (1849), by Cecilia Bohl de Faber; La madre naturaleza (1878), by Emilia Pardo Bazan; La esfinge maragata (1913), by Concha Espina; and Viento del norte (1950), by Elena Quiroga. I believe that this tradition might be considered ecofeminist in the sense that these writers may be found to link the patriarchal objectification of women to men's desire to transcend or escape from the "natural world," writing from a common stance of resistance to this instrumentalization as well as alternative visions of living with or within the "natural world." By "natural world" I mean the spaces outside the urban and domestic spaces of patriarchal civilization, whether of woods, fields, and plains, animals or women. Incompletely subdued women have often been placed by this civilization and its representatives in the same category as uncultivated vegetation and undomesticated animals, and completely subdued ones into that of acceptable, serviceable objects. Ecofeminism considers such placement of women in nature not as an insult but as an opportunity to act outside customary strictures with the freedom of the outsider, and question the treatment of animals and women as objects rather than subjects. Margaret Homans, in Bearing the Word, suggests that the Lacanian explanation for the different psychosexual conformation of males and females may explain why many women appear to view and appreciate literal reality in a way different from that of men: while men use language in a way that values the figurative and the symbolic more highly than the literal, women often prefer to respect literal reality, meaning the concrete world of things and sentient beings with their own subjectivity, meaning their own thoughts, feelings, and desire to live without pain. Homans believes that the structure of the absent referent, or the concrete thing or being that is transmuted into a symbol by the language of men constructed by the patriarchy, is often distasteful to women because of their own painful experience of being subjects too often objectified by patriarchal systems. I propose to interrogate these texts in order to ascertain whether a latent ecofeminist ethic may be found in these texts written by women shaped by a strongly patriarchal society, whether a voice of protest as well as that of the expected obedient conformity may be found. This rehabilitation of literal reality and the absent referent is a concept key to ecofeminism and to my thesis, and I intend to analyze this strategy in the context of each of these texts

Indian captive by Cynthia Ann Parker( Book )

in English and held by 1 WorldCat member library worldwide