As Sweet As Honey and Beautiful As a Flower
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Sweet as honey and beautiful as a flower? An Ecofeminist Approach to Nature Symbolism in Rupi Kaur’s Poetry milk and honey and the sun and her flowers Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz vorgelegt von Eden GOLOB am Institut für Amerikanistik Begutachter: Univ.-Prof. Dr. M.A. Stefan Brandt Graz, 2020 2 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Professor Dr. Stefan Brandt for supporting me with his vast knowledge and expertise. Thank you for steering my research in the right direction and inspiring me to choose such a pioneering topic. I would like to thank my beloved sister Eva, for her emotional support and always believing in me. Thank you for always being there for me. Thank you to all my wonderful friends for their unfailing encouragement and uplifting words. Especially, I want to thank my fellow student and dear friend Anja for making my time at Uni special. Thank you for your advice and support. Finally, I want to thank my parents for their love, their patience and their support during my entire life. This accomplishment would not have been possible without you. I am so grateful to have you as my parents. 3 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 5 1 Literature and Feminist Theory ............................................................................................... 9 1.1 Defining Important Feminist Terms and Concepts ................................................................. 9 1.2 The Roots of Feminist Literary Criticism .............................................................................. 11 2 Women and Nature: The Ecofeminist Movement .................................................................. 16 2.1 Significant Ecofeminist Philosophies ................................................................................... 18 2.1.1 Conceptual Links between Women and Nature....................................................................... 20 2.1.2 Connecting Women and Nature through Symbolism .............................................................. 22 3 Feminist Ecocriticism: Intersection between Ecofeminism and Literary Criticism .................... 25 3.1 The Influence of Canadian Ecocriticism on Feminist Writings .............................................. 27 3.2 The Use of Gender- and Nature-related Language in Ecofeminist Poetry ............................. 30 3.3 Objecting and Oppressing Nature and the Female Body in Literature .................................. 32 4 The Rise of Ecofeminist Poetry in a Digitalized World ............................................................ 35 4.1 The Importance of Instagram for Rupi Kaur’s Poetry .......................................................... 37 4.2 Intersectional Representations of Women’s Experiences Online ......................................... 41 5 An Analysis of Nature Symbolism in Selected Poems by Rupi Kaur ......................................... 46 5.1 Value Dualism and Patriarchal Oppression ......................................................................... 47 5.2 Fighting Patriarchal Oppression in Romantic Relationships ................................................. 48 5.2.1 Emancipation from Patriarchy by Connecting Masculinity and Nature ................................... 54 5.3 Female Objectification and Rape in the sun and her flowers and milk and honey ................. 56 5.3.1 Breaking the Silence about Sexual Assault through Nature Symbolism ................................... 57 5.3.2 Reclaiming the Female Body after Rape .................................................................................. 60 5.4 Female Empowerment through Self-love in Rupi Kaur’s Poems ........................................... 63 5.4.1 The Support of Nature Symbolism in Healing from Trauma .................................................... 64 5.4.2 Reclaiming Nature to Support Female Empowerment ............................................................ 67 6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 70 7 Works Cited and Consulted ................................................................................................... 73 4 List of Abbreviations SF the sun and her flowers MH milk and honey 5 this is the recipe of life said my mother as she held me in her arms as i wept think of those flowers i plant in the garden each year they will teach you that people too must wilt fall root rise in order to bloom (Kaur.the sun and her flowers 2017: 114) Introduction This poem by Punjabi Canadian poet Rupi Kaur is part of her best-selling poetry collection the sun and her flowers (2017), her second poetry anthology after her literary debut milk and honey (2015). The life cycle of a flower symbolizes the experiences of the poet speaker in her book and therefore navigates readers through different life stages before eventually blossoming (cf. Imran 2018: 122). Nature symbols play a significant role and create a variety of different meanings in both of Rupi Kaur’s works. This thesis aims to take a closer look into Kaur’s texts and provides an insight into nature symbols in the poems and will ask the following questions: What is the function of nature symbolism in feminist poetry by Rupi Kaur? How and in what way do nature symbols contribute to the reinforcement/destruction of patriarchal structures within the texts? What is ‘value dualism’ and how does this ecofeminist concept influence Kaur’s poetry and do the nature symbols reinforce dualistic structures in a patriarchal society? Another question which will also briefly be discussed is how milk and honey (2015) and the sun and her flowers (2017) possibly affect readers and their critical thinking within a patriarchal society. Kaur’s poetry focusing on women’s experience initially had considerate success when posted on the social media platform Instagram. Subsequently, Kaur self-published her first poetry collection milk and honey at the end of 2014. After landing a book deal with the Canadian publisher Simon & Schuster, Kaur’s poetry has gained popularity among a broad readership and her books have spent more than two years on the New York Times Best Seller List with sales of more than 6.5 million books combined1 (cf. Islam 2020: 111; Roberts 2018, online). 1 According to the website of Andrew McMeel Publishing, an affiliated company of Simon & Schuster, more than 4.5 million copies of milk and honey have been sold since 2015. Further, Rupi Kaur’s second poetry collection the sun and her flowers has also sold more than 2 million copies in 2017 only. The former has been translated into 40 6 According to Lee, “Kaur’s popularity is […] unprecedented” (2019, online) and she is often referred to as the “best-selling Instapoet2 of all time” (Roberts 2018, online) with more than four million followers who also comprise a majority of her offline readers (cf. Pâquet 2019: 296). In 2018, poetry sales in selected book stores in Canada had almost doubled since the first publishing of milk and honey (cf. Roberts 2018, online). Kaur’s poetry is inherently activist and feminist as she primarily writes about the female experience3 in regard to oppression4, objectification, sexual violence as well as sexuality and female liberation from patriarchal norms. The poems highlight the inequality between genders and provide an insight into the female perspective (cf. Miller 2019, online). In addition, Kaur creates a new form of poetry by only using lowercase letters in her entire writing, because she argues that it produces a more “equal and […] symmetrical” (“Rupi Kaur Achieves another Bestseller Milestone”) poetry that is reminiscent of her Punjabi heritage as this language also lacks punctuation (cf. “Rupi Kaur Achieves another Bestseller Milestone”). Thus, this thesis purposely uses lowercase letters when referencing and citing Kaur’s texts. However, as Instapoetry is reshaping literature today, the main aims of this paper are to investigate this innovative form of poetry, emphasizing the unquestionable relevance of this emerging genre and demanding its unavoidable inclusion into literary criticism (cf. Pâquet 2019: 296). In this thesis I will investigate the nature symbolism in selected poems by Rupi Kaur and use an ecofeminist lens to question the message conveyed by nature symbols. The first section of this thesis will provide a background on feminist theory and discuss important terms and languages and has been in The New York Times Bestseller List for 77 consecutive weeks, while the latter has been translated into 25 languages and remained on The New York Times Trade Paperback List for more than 70 weeks (cf. “Rupi Kaur Achieves another Bestseller Milestone”; cf. Islam 2020:111). 2 Instapoets are a group of writers who start posting their poetry online and become largely successful in the process (cf. Walker in McQullian 2018: 18). The Instapoetry genre is often considered to have a strong focus on superficial issues and to be rather ephemeral. However, its importance cannot be ignored as it has a fundamental effect on literature and reading culture (cf. McQuillan 2018: 18). The concept of Instagram poetry will be thoroughly discussed later in this paper as it is of great importance for the deeper understanding of the poems. 3 In this