Reta’s Project of Re-Embedding Norah in Her ‘Natural’ Body and in Nonhuman Nature in Carol Shields’s Unless

Authors : Esra Melikoğlu

Pages : 12-24

Doi:10.62352/ideas.1585550

View : 96 | Download : 109

Publication Date : 2025-05-25

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :In Carol Shields\\\'s novel Unless, the protagonist, Reta Winters, a writer who has her roots in the seventies’ feminist and environmental movements, realizes ecofeminism’s entrapment in a cycle of partial failure and her own share of the responsibility for it. She is, in the new millennium, devastated: Presumably unwashed and with nits in her hair, her daughter Norah sits on a street corner in protest against patriarchy’s construction of both women and nonhuman nature as dirty, mindless bodies, or matter, which serves to justify a policy of domination, sanitation, and exploitation. It will be argued that Reta must ponder her own role as a woman writer in perpetuating this construct and write a counternarrative in which Norah represents an ecofeminist future: Norah emerges as a prototype of a new generation of ecofeminists who shall reclaim their ‘natural’ bodies and reconnect with nonhuman nature, their environmental care ethics replacing a policy of domination. Yet Reta’s counternarrative remains abortive as suggestive of the writer’s and her society’s wavering commitment to ecofeminism.
Keywords : Carol Shields, İyilik, Beden, Ekofeminizm

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