Lucy as an Ecofeminist in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy

Abstract

This essay discusses Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy(1990) from an ecofeminist perspective in terms of cultural, historical, and ecological implications in the status and plights of women. Using Ecological tropes and with a cultural and environmental awareness, Kincaid addresses the violent history of colonialism and postcolonial experiences of disapora and migration in a developmental process of a Caribbean daughter-narrator. Growing up in a metropolitan city as a self-exiled daughter of color, Lucy raises a critical voice against the hypocrisy of white middle-class humanitarian environmentalists and liberal feminists. At the same time, she criticizes the (post)colonial education through which she went on her Caribbean home island. It is patriarchal, capitalistic, and racist, instead conducive to self-development and respect for the female body, in which women of color internalize their communal duties and responsibilities which their patriarchal societies or metropolitan colonial masters have imposed upon them. Observing both black women on a third-world island and white women in a metropolitan city, not only does she reveal patriarchal and colonial dominance over nature and women, but also Lucy comes to understand differences in terms of the female body and realize that the self/other relation must be based on equal ontological status rather than patriarchal hierarchy as ecofeminsts such as Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy argue. Eventually, by leaving her mothers' (Annie's and Mariah's) homes built on patriarchal familial values, Lucy sets out a continuous and lifelong process to create her own home and better life.