ABSTRACT: Twentieth-century author Gwendolyn Brooks’s fiction and poetry have been much studied by feminist and race-studies scholars, but her work has only recently begun to receive attention by ecocritical scholars. This essay intervenes at this intersection of feminist, race, and ecocritical studies by examining Brooks’s 1953 novella Maud Martha through a Black ecocritical lens to demonstrate how her protagonist, Maud, utilizes nature as a survival tactic. Analysis of the novel’s houseplants, roots, and air reveals how domestic practices like gardening reconnect African Americans to nature and reaffirm their humanity in an inhospitably segregated environment. Maud uses nature physically and linguistically to gird herself against the racist and misogynist onslaughts she experiences and to find avenues for hope that make the daily lives of mid-century African Americans more bearable.
ABSTRACT: Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893), Russia's foremost female poet of the nineteenth century, was trilingual in Russian, German, and French and translated between these languages in all directions. This essay applies a feminist critical lens to Pavlova's French translation of Friedrich Schiller's drama Die Jungfrau von Orleans ( The Maid of Orleans , 1801), which was published in Paris in 1839 under the title Jeanne d'Arc . By recasting Schiller's blank-verse play in rhymed alexandrines, Pavlova asserted her own poetic authority over the text of her male "rival." At the same time, she modified the wording of the source text to express her personal view of the plot, countering Schiller's androcentric glorification of Joan of Arc by drawing attention to her plight as a victim of patriarchy. Pavlova also composed a hymn of her own to Joan of Arc, which challenged Schiller more overtly, and she turned her translation of Schiller's programmatic poem "Das Mädchen von Orleans" into an expression of sympathy for the play's heroine. If Schiller's stated goal was to rescue Joan of Arc from Voltaire's enlightenment mockery, Pavlova intended to rescue her from Schiller's romantic idealization with an empathetic perspective motivated by female solidarity.
