War, Nature and Resilience: Eco-Critical Poetics of Selected Texts by Anthony Doerr
Keywords:
war, nature, gender, feminism, ecology, environment, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, spiritual ecofeminism, starhawk, anthony doerrAbstract
All the Light We Cannot See (2014) and The Shell Collector Short Stories (2011) by Anthony Doerr depicts each gender's eco-consciousness in relation to their interaction with the environment. This paper puts forward the contention that Anthony Doerr expresses his spiritual ecofeminist philosophy through his writings and portrays his women more interconnected with nature than men. His female characters are involved in deeds of nurture and subsiding of war and show a better tendency to conserve nature. Their interconnectedness with nature results in nature favoring their well-being and survival. The male characters are portrayed as perpetrators of environmental injustice and eco-crisis and hence, nature does not favor the well-being of male characters. This paper discusses selected texts by Anthony Doerr in the light of spiritual ecofeminist theory by Starhawk. It employs Blue Criticism, Critical Animal Studies, Green Criticism, environmental injustice and eco-crisis as sub-theories to deconstruct the impact of each gender on its surroundings. The text is deconstructed to demonstrate that the text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings rather than a unified, logical whole. In Anthony Doerr's ecological realm, women are much closer to nature than men. Therefore, Anthony Doerr, through his literary texts, reveals that the resilience and survival of women in the selected texts is a metaphor for the resilience of Mother Earth.