ABSTRACT
An unlikely narrative to carry an ecofeminist undercurrent is The Sparrow, a 1996 speculative fiction novel by Mary Doria Russell. With its primarily male cast of characters, its pressing spiritual concerns of a Jesuit space mission to another planet, and the far too close encounter between humans and Rakhati inhabitants, the text seems preoccupied with the religious, not the ecological. But the subtext reveals an edenic world turned demonic for the book’s central human. As I will argue, the abstract female becomes embodied, literally and prophetically, in the animal/human species of the Runa. These people are shockingly consumed by the planet’s second cognizant species, the predatory Jana’ata, in this horrifying story of tragic errors that link environment and gender.
In many ways, the ecology of the planet reinforces the stereotypes of human gender. The lovely countryside where the humans live with the feminized Runa is in stark contrast to the masculinized trade city of Gayjur, the home of the Jana’ata, a deceptively similar species that, like the Runa, cuts across the boundary between humans and other animals. The foreign earthlings completely misinterpret the relationship between these two economically interdependent groups, the novel’s sly emblems of human gender typing.
The Sparrow demands that the reader consider in a wholly transformative way the nature of the human versus that of the animal and the intertwining of gender in those definitions. Russell does the unthinkable in having us emotionally participate in the consumption of fellow mammals, whom we have learned to think of as people. The book is, at its heart, a profoundly moving exploration of the essence of the human animal as well as, more subtly, the force and limitations of our notions of gender.
