Mothers in arms: Towards an ecofeminist reading of the Georgics Event as iCalendar

(Classics and Ancient History)

07 May 2019

4pm

Venue: Room 220, Te Puna Aronui / Humanities Building (206-220)

Contact info: Alecia Bland

Contact email: alecia.bland@auckland.ac.nz

Dr Robert Cowan | University of Sydney

Since the term was coined by d’Aubonne almost 45 years ago, ecofeminism’s interrogation of the objectifying equivalence constructed between nature and the feminine has made a considerable impact in many disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, not least literary criticism.

This paper will investigate the possibilities for an ecofeminist reading of the Georgics, but also the ways in which the complexity both of the poem’s ecological and its gender politics can contribute to enriching the methodological basis of ecofeminism itself.

The figure of the mother is a pervasive one in the Georgics, climaxing in the complex depiction of Cyrene in the Aristaeus. Various animal mothers flock book three — ugly brood-cow, metamorphosed Io, lustful lioness, wind-impregnated mares — while book two is overgrown with plant-mothers ominously overshadowing and failing to recognize, or be recognized by, their offspring.

Underlying them all is the feminised, maternalised earth, whose slippage between land and woman becomes almost explicit when Italy is apostrophised as magna parens frugum…magna uirum. On one level, the emphasis is on controlling and repressing the feminised earth and its equally feminised flora and fauna, limiting their role to reproduction and a strictly regulated form of reproduction at that, precisely the construct which an ecofeminist reading would identify and challenge.

However, such a reading is complicated by the poem’s construction of nature as a military force against which the farmer with his arma is at war. This conventionally masculine imagery problematizes the equation of nature and the feminine, or war and the masculine, or both. An ecofeminist reading of the Georgics can be seen to acknowledge and problematise the poem’s own patriarchal constructs.