Shakespeare and the Ecofeminist Killjoy: Disruptive Women and Untamed Nature in Early Modern England

Abstract

This dissertation enters into conversation with the timely and expanding corpus of ecocritical responses to William Shakespeare’s plays to examine the ways in which the early modern period lay what Amitav Ghosh refers to as the ‘literary grid of forms and conventions’ that continues to shape narratives of gendered interaction with and responsibility toward climate. In particular, this work offers an original lens through which to reflect upon the inherited stories which underpin climate crises as it reads Shakespeare’s comedies and romances for the presence of ecofeminist killjoys. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s figure of the ‘feminist killjoy’ in her texts The Promise of Happiness and The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, the term ecofeminist killjoy describes a person whose gendered relationship to the environment disrupts the promise of a future happiness derived from the reinforcement of normative re-productive exploitation of both environments and women. Examining Shakespeare’s plays and their wider cultural contexts, this dissertation considers how the early modern ecofeminist killjoy’s knowledge of and stories of proximity to nature productively disrupt directional and teleological orientations toward normative reproductive futurity. Broadly defining the first chapter’s focus as girlhood/puberty, the second as motherhood, and the third as old age, this dissertation focuses on anxieties concerning young women’s sexual agency in Twelfth Night, Pericles, and The Two Noble Kinsmen; the dangers of maternal minds and bodies in Cymbeline, All’s Well That Ends Well, and The Winter’s Tale; and the disruptive potential of elderly women’s storytelling in The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest as lenses through which to understand herbal recipes, witchcraft, and fairylore respectively. This three-chapter organization emphasizes how within the assumed ability to reproduce, the act of reproducing, and the distance from expectations of reproduction emerge distinct but related opportunities for transgression of normative scripts and promises, destabilizing the foundation of inherited narratives which continue to stymie contemporary responses to climate apocalypse.