ABSTRACT
Ursula K. Le Guin is well-known for her ecofeminist vision in Always Coming Home (1986). The text depicts a peaceful community, the Kesh, living in a gender-egalitarian harmony with their non-human natural environment following a devastating war. In this chapter, I examine traces of Le Guin’s imaginative engagement with ecofeminism. I demonstrate that the ideas that would coalesce into fully fledged ecofeminist creativity are present, though less prominently, in her early Hainish fiction (Rocannon’s World, City of Illusions, Planet of Exile, and The Word for World Is Forest).
Although the four novels that make up Le Guin’s early Hainish fiction all tell tales of male heroes rescuing alien planets, Le Guin twists this stock plot to subtly ecofeminist ends. The relationship between the Angyar and their windsteeds in Rocannon’s World is not one of subservience but of symbiosis. Similarly, Rolery’s knowledge of the weather in Planet of Exile enables her to assist her husband and their communities to survive both the Gaal invasion and the devastating cold. Falk’s quest in City of Illusions is directed by significant women whom he meets. And The Word for World Is Forest, undoubtedly the best-known of Le Guin’s early environmentally activist texts, pits a human against a forest-dwelling Athshean in a conflict between what Le Guin would later call “yang” and “yin,” the masculine attributes of aggression and conquest and the feminine attributes of non-aggressive cooperation. My contrapuntal reading of these early works demonstrates that Le Guin has always paid attention in an ecofeminist manner to relationships between humans and non-human nature.
