“The Real World”: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism

Summary

Thank you, Vara, for that very generous introduction. It's an honor and a pleasure to be giving the closing keynote for this wonderful conference. Th ank you, Kristin, for inviting me to give this talk. Everyone, please join me in thanking Kristin for all the work she did to organize this 20th annual conference and congratulating her on its success!

I titled this talk “the real world” because Woolf uses the phrase to describe what she tries to capture in words. I also chose this title because I believe that real oak trees—to go back to an opening exchange at this conference—are more important than our words. But our words can help determine whether oak trees survive.

As ecofeminism teaches us, whether oak trees survive also has much to do with whether we, as a species, confront and do away with the misogyny and male dominance that mark most if not all of our societies.

So what might be the relationship of Woolf 's thought to ecofeminism? Woolf is undoubtedly a formative thinker in the history of feminism in Western civilization. But can Woolf offer insights and approaches useful to us as we grapple with the ecological crisis of the 21st century and the ways that patriarchal gender ideology and arrangements contribute to human destruction of environments and species?

You see from these opening questions that, for this presentation and the discussion I hope will follow, I am not so much interested in using ecological feminism and ecological literary criticism to analyze Woolf 's literary works. Rather I am asking how Woolf can help us today in our quest to develop the non–anthropocentric and non–androcentric understandings of the world necessary to changing human behavior towards the otherthan– human world. Can Woolf be a guide or at least a helpful fellow hiker on the trail as we learn to live in ecologically responsible ways?

I believe that the solution to our global and local environmental crises lies in changing our modes of thinking and therefore our actions. We need a paradigm shift that decenters both man and homo sapiens.