Nature Beckons:An Eco-Feminist Reading of Pearl S. Buck's Portrait of a Marriage

This paper makes no attempt to typify the parallelism between human female situation and the predicament of nature which is one of the imperative points in ecofeminist discourse. Like feminism, ecofeminism also has various hues and incarnations. The dichotomy between essentialist and constructionist perspectives resonates in any attempt to read commonality between human and ecological situations. A constructionist point of view would sound more viable to unpack the fictive oeuvre of a writer who was once considered at par with Virginia Woolf as a feminist writer (Conn 1996:248). Nevertheless, multiple readings of Pearl S. Buck’s works are possible and it is interesting to read and detect essentialist streaks in a writer who fundamentally believes in women’s autotelic existence. This paper is an evidence of multiplicity of reading and plurality of meaning as viable possibilities, belying intentional fallacy as the only valid source of interpretation, since participation of readers is also important in the creation of meaning.