An Interpretation of Natural Images in A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the Perspective of Ecofeminism

Abstract

Ecofeminism introduced in 1974 by Françoise d’Eaubonne links ecological and gender-equality issues together. It exposes an intimate connection between women and nature, and addresses the parallels between the patriarchal logic of male power over female and humans’ domination over nature. This new approach in literary-criticism takes anthropocentrism and androcentrism as the roots of human-nature and male-female dualism respectively. Moreover, “Shakespeare Plus”, a new researching trend in Shakespeare criticism, involves three important topics of “the Domestic” “Subject-Object” and “Knowledge-Making” that ecofeminism concerns in re-examining Shakespeare’s works. This paper focuses on many natural images in A Midsummer Night’s Dream directly or indirectly related to humans especially female characters to reveal how anthropocentrism and androcentrism affect mankind-nature and male-female relationships and interpret ecofeminist thoughts revealed in them from the subjects of “the Domestic” “Subject-Object Relations” and “Knowledge-Making”. The findings, for one thing, show that affected by androcentrism and anthropocentrism humans think male-female and human-nature relationships dualistically without understanding the world in a comprehensive, equal and diversified way; for another, humans, nonhuman natural objects and other things not known or predictable yet, are interrelated. Therefore, only tolerance and equality are given to this plural world, can harmony be realized in human-nature and male-female relations.