An ecofeminist reading of Beth Yahp's the Crocodile Fury

Abstract

An increasing acknowledgment of the fact that within patriarchy, the categories of "woman" and "animal" serve the same symbolic function, since they are both placed as the submissive "other" to masculine power, has led to a re-examination of a range of texts that highlight and connect gender concerns with the sorry plight of the non-human. As the ecofeminist Lori Gruen emphasises in her article, "Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection between Women and Animals," this connection between women and animals is "not to be understood as a 'natural' connection - one that suggests that women and animals are essentially similar - but rather a constructed connection that has been created by the patriarchy as a means of oppression" (Gruen 61). In this chapter, I examine Beth Yahp's The Crocodile Fury. In this narrative, the "non-human" and the "woman" are entangled in interesting ways that shed light on the use and misuse of both. Furthermore, therianthropism, namely, humans represented as animals, is a strong theme, which the allegorical nature of the narrative helps open up. I argue that the text manages to combine postcolonial concerns with postmodernist stylistics in order to make a case for the non-human Other.