She Has Gone to Seed: The Ecofeminist Landscape in Richard Powers’ The Overstory

• Kayla Kruse West ^[1]
  1. [1] Texas Woman's University

     Texas Woman's University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Hélice, ISSN-e 1887-2905, Vol. 9, Nº. 1, 2023, págs. 69-82
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Ejemplar
• Resumen

  • Patricia Westerford prefers to talk to trees. In fact, as a child, her favourite stories were the ones where the people turned into trees. To Patricia, trees speak her language.

    They speak a language of escape and freedom from the boundaries of human-centered language. In The Overstory, Richard Powers suggests that the relationship between nature and humanity, while broken, is repairable by learning a new language of communication.

    Powers grounds this conversation with a specific character — Dr. Patricia Westerford, a dendrologist with a hearing disability — and her discoveries about communication among trees.

    Plant Patty becomes a bridge between a world that we think we know and reality. However, as the text suggests, we know very little. This article focuses on specific moments where Patricia transforms her communicative practices with nature in order to free herself from the confines of patriarchal scientific inquiry. The sentient nature of trees decenters the experience of the characters and places them in a landscape where they are subordinate to natural spaces. Drawing on interdisciplinary research in ecofeminism, rhetoric, and philosophy, this article argues that such transformation alters the hierarchy to create a post-anthropocentric landscape.