摘 要

《菊花》是美国约翰·斯坦贝克最优秀的短篇小说之一，该小说成功塑造了一位内心渴望自由和表现却又备受社会和现实压迫的矛盾女性形象——伊莉莎。本文从生态女性主义视角入手，深入剖析《菊花》中所蕴含的生态女性主义思想， 揭示文中女性与自然的紧密关系，男性对女性和自然的压迫，以唤醒女性主义意识以及表达斯坦贝克对女性和自然的双重关注。

关键词 ：生态女性主义；压迫；伊莉莎 ；《菊花》

Contents

1. Introduction 1
2. Demonstration 2
   1. The harmony between women and nature 2
      1. Elisa’s intimacy with nature 3
      2. Elisa’s feminist consciousness 4
   2. Men’s domination and women’s oppression 6
      1. Men’s domination of nature 6
      2. Men’s domination of women 7
      3. Nature’s and women’s oppressed fate 9
   3. Causes for Elisa’s oppressed fate 10
      1. The destructive impact of industrialization 10
      2. The root cause: patriarchal dualistic thinking 11
3. Conclusion 12

Notes 13

Works Cited 14

Bibliography 15

An Analysis of Elisa’s Oppressed Fate in The Chrysanthemums

from the Perspective of Ecofeminism

Introduction

John Steinbeck is one of the most influential American writers in the 20th Century. Most of his works focus on demonstrating the workers in the bottom of society, performing their kind and pristine quality, creating “Steinbeck’s hero image”. John Steinbeck ’s novels have high attainments, which play an important role in the development of the late American literature especially in the western literature. There are representative works of the novel Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Chrysanthemums, Sweet Thursday and Travels with Charley: In Search of America etc. Steinbeck is good at portraying the image of women in different works to show sympathy for them and express the desire to wake up the female consciousness. The short story, The Chrysanthemums, is known as Steinbeck’s most successful works in the art of fiction model.

Ecofeminism, put forward by the French scholar- Francoise Fa ubonne, is a kind of social thought combined with feminism and ecology. It originates in the 1970s and was developed rapidly in the 1990s, which is an important genre in the third wave of the movement of feminism. Ecofeminism underlines the harmony of nature and the oppression of women as men’s domination of nature. Therefore, ecofeminism emphasizes not only on saving women but also saving nature.

The Chrysanthemums is an outstanding novel of Steinbeck, which is full of feministic consciousness. In the description of chrysanthemum, Steinbeck skillfully combines the nature with the fate of women together so as to explore the relationship between women and nature and the women’s oppressed fate. Since The Chrysanthemums was published, it has attracted extensive attention of scholars at home and abroad. Based on what have been searched via CNKI and other sources，the critics from different angles spring up to parse the novel, but the most majority

of scholars interested in analyzing it from the perspective of irony, symbolism and the narrative space and so on. However, analysis of Elisa’s oppressed fate from the perspective of ecofeminism in the novel is comparatively a new attempt to approach John Steinbeck.

Put specifically, this thesis will start from the perspective of ecofeminism to analyze the women’s oppressed fate, thus divided into three parts. The first part probes into the harmony between women and nature, including Elisa’s intimacy with nature and feminist consciousness. The second part turns to men’s domination and women’s oppression, thus showing the current situation of the nature and women. The third part focuses on the study and the causes for Elisa’s oppressed fate. In fact, both the background of industrialization and strong patriarchal dualistic thinking contribute to the tragic fate of the women in that era. Since women’s rights and environmental protection are the two big concerns of the world, our modern people are expected to build a harmonious world with co-existence of mankind and nature as well as the equality between men and women.

Demonstration

• 1. The harmony between women and nature

Ecofeminism believes that women and nature are unified. In an era when the American powers of commerce focused on the conquest of nature and people studied and penetrated nature’s mysteries by the cause-and-effect ways, Steinbeck developed a non-teleological approach, which emphasizes the feminine values of wholeness and the interdependence of ecological groups. A closer study at nature and the female character in The Chrysanthemums indicates that Steinbeck was advocating the feminine and the necessity of feminine values for a harmonious life.