Challenging Hierarchical Relationships in American and Egyptian Drama: A Comparative Ecofeminist Reading in Two Representative Plays (Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale and Salwa Bakr’s Hulm al-Sinin) | ||||
| مجلة وادي النيل للدراسات والبحوث الإنسانية والاجتماعية والتربويه | ||||
| Volume 44, Issue 44, October 2024, Page 85-132 PDF (747.69 K) | ||||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/jwadi.2024.387203 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Usama Nabih Raslan | ||||
| Associate Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Archaeology and Languages, Matrouh University, Egypt | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| The current paper attempts a comparative reading of two plays by the Franco-British American playwright, Timberlake Wertenbaker (1951) and the Egyptian woman writer, Salwa Bakr (1949), in the light of critical ecological feminism. These two plays are, seriatim, The Love of the Nightingale (1996) and Hulm al-Sinin (2002 [Dream of Years]), which are set against the concept of ‘up-down relationships’, propagated by the two leading exponents of patriarchal feminism, Val Plumwood and Karen Warren. Both Plumwood and Warren reflect a concern about such a logic of domination, based on suspect values, dualities and presupposes, whose inevitable result is nothing but the oppression of the natural world. Women, in particular, are the ones who fall prey to the subordination of one group over another, within a single society. That is why ecofeminist advocates always think about, even act on behalf of the environment culturally, ethically, and, of course, naturally, with a view to creating a balanced justice instead of male sovereignty, while preserving the spiritual nature of the social habitat at the same time. In this theoretical framework comes the present comparative reading of the two aforementioned plays, with the aim of understanding the reactions of different cultures towards ideologies regulating relations between men and women, especially in patriarchal societies in the Arab East. How does Wertenbaker address the ecofeminist issue thematically and technically? How does she look at her characters and coordinate relations among them? What is her final vision about male-female relationships? Does Egyptian Bakr agree or disagree with her American counterpart? And how? What are her ways to do that? This is just a set of intersecting, connected questions that the reading at hand will try to answer. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Timberlake Wertenbaker; Salwa Bakr; The Love of the Nightingale; Dream of Years; ecofeminism; Karen Warren; Val Plumwood; hierarchical relationships; oppression | ||||
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