After the Fall: Ecofeminist Ethics in the Face of Environmental Collapse in 'The Handmaid's Tale' and 'The Road'

Abstract

This article explores the conflicting ecofeminist ethical positions regarding environmental collapse that are presented in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). This article offers a comparative ecofeminist analysis, drawing on the work of Val Plumwood, Karen Warren and Carolyn Merchant, to show that Atwood's novel has both captured the failure of the top-down restoration projects of patriarchy, and provided hope for grassroots, collective resistance, based on an ethic of care. McCarthy's novel, on the other hand, is a post-apocalyptic survivalism in the absence of a fertile environment, which exposes human ethical systems to be maintained by a paternalistic ethic of "carrying the fire. In this analysis, it is shown that ecofeminist ethics needs an environment for it to thrive. The Handmaid's Tale offers hope for resistance through memory, community, and a return to nature, while The Road offers a philosophy of suspension which ultimately is unsustainable without a larger ecological framework. Both novels are important warnings of today's environmental problems, and Atwood's novel has a more promising prospect for ecofeminist hope because it forcefully reminds readers of the interdependence of human communities and a healthy environment. The institutional breakdown in Gilead and the individual survival in McCarthy's wasteland are poles of thought about the possibility of moral life in an environment of environmental collapse – and are of great interest to the theoretician of resistance, gender and the future of human-nature relations.