‘The Inner Geography of Home’: the ecofeminist ethics of Daphne Marlatt’s Taken

This essay examines the imprints of a feminist ethics in Daphne Marlatt’s novel Taken, a text that, drawing on the materiality/maternality of language, rethinks the (female) subject’s relation to territory, place and space, and puts forward a form of maternalism defined at the junction between feminism and ecology. Tracing lines of comparison and action between the two, ecofeminism could be defined as «feminism taken to its logical conclusion, because it theorizes the interrelations among self, societies, and nature» (Birkeland 1993, 17-18). My analysis will try to elucidate some of the implications contained in Marlatt’s radical proposal. Against a cartography of war, occupation, and violence, Marlatt’s text offers an escape by the landscape, a geography of the female body, maternalism, and the body’s fusion with the environment.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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