ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the intersection of ecofeminism with literary criticism, with specific attention to the role of gender in stories about talking animals. Höing discusses numerous literary examples, with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows considered as a paradigmatic example. Talking animal stories are shown to perpetuate patriarchal understandings of the superiority of men over women and humans over nature. Those understandings exhibit what the ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood refers to as a logic of the master or logic of colonization.
