- Nilufar Abdi
Ecofeminism in Nicola Davies and Laura Carlin's The Promise
Nicola Davies is an award-winning English writer and zoologist who has published more than 50 books for children including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her work has been published in more than 10 different languages and she has won major awards in the UK, the US, France, Italy, and Germany. The Promise was originally published by Walker Books Ltd in 2013 followed by the illustrated edition published by Candlewick Press, also in 2013. It is illustrated by Laura Carlin, an award-winning ceramicist and illustrator of many children's books who has been voted one of the 50 most influential creatives under 30 years of age by the Art Director's Club of America. Carlin's beautiful and reminiscent illustrations, in a combination of watercolor, pastel, and crayon, bring to life Davies' moving and magical story.
The Promise is mainly about the power of nature. The story revolves around a young girl who is asked to make a promise. The girl lives alone in a crowded and polluted city. She turns out to be a thief and her behavior is not a socially accepted one. One day, she tries to grab a woman’s bag on the street but the woman states that she will give her the bag only if the girl promises to plant the acorns inside the bag. The girl accepts without hesitation since the only thing she thinks about is the bag, money, and food. After a while, the girl feels something like an epiphany and begins planting the seeds. As time goes by, everywhere is full of trees and flowers, so green and beautiful. Suddenly, another girl tries to grab her bag as our main character herself did long ago. As the other woman said before her, she also says that she will drop the bag only if this young girl promises to plant the seeds inside, and the legacy of planting seeds is passed on.
Due to the major theme of this story, the power of nature, and the critical role of female characters, I decided to analyze the text and the pictures with an ecofeminist approach. Since the relationship between women, the young character, and nature evolves gradually, I recognized that the book does not tend to represent conventional hegemonic ideas nor does it want the reader to be faced with them. That is to say, it does not support the idea of a society that privileges culture and civilization over nature, and it elevates nature to achieve its goals, and does the same for the women and children as its second citizens. For my analysis, I rely on Karen. J. Warren whose definition of ecofeminism made me think of it as a practical, and not just theoretical, approach by which we can surely raise our awareness and hope for greater changes concerning the environment and the world. Ecofeminism's core idea -- "it's all connected" -- helps us gain insight into further aspects of this concept. Based on this theory, the "otherness" that children, women, and nature experience is because of the rationalization by the patriarchy by which the “others” are given marginal roles and positions at work, home, and society. Additionally, children's sense of alienation, despair, and confusion is caused by the double-bind characteristics of childhood in modern and postmodern societies. They are asked to assume adults' responsibilities that they have not chosen for themselves while being excluded from political and social participation. Eventually, their conditions indicate that children, women, racial and ethnic minorities, other oppressed groups, and elements of nonhuman nature experience oppression. The Promise demonstrates this "otherness" by separating the major character, the young girl, from the rest of society in different ways. First, she is alone. No information is given about where she lives or whether she has a family. To highlight that, she does not even have a name. She must undergo difficulties in a society where modern life is appreciated and nature has been vastly ignored.
The story vividly shows how nature is excluded from this part of the world: "Nothing grew. Everything was broken. No one ever smiled." With the growth of industrialization and machine life, the environment is increasingly under the control of human beings as they consume the resources of nature. But the result does not seem to be satisfying as everyone is mean and hard and ugly." The story demonstrates the condition of humanity as "The people had grown as mean and hard and ugly as their city, and I was mean and hard and ugly, too." The story, also, reveals the tragic consequences of such domination through gloomy dark pictures along with the text. As Catriona Sandilands states in Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment, nature has always been considered the observant of all problems related to civilization; however, nature is interconnected and all-inclusive (117). Patriarchal culture is mainly focused on individuals and categorizing members of society. Sandilands concludes that capitalism is unsustainable, but nature is intrinsically stable (117).
Accordingly, the story manifests the stability and pervasiveness of nature in comparison to modern and industrial life. The bag in the woman's hand is all that matters at first to the young girl. While profit is the major concern in modern societies, it is not long-lasting in comparison with nature. As the young girl begins to keep her promise, things start to change gradually but constantly in contrast to people who “scowled and scuttled to their homes like cockroaches." The girl says:
I pushed aside the mean and hard and ugly, and I planted, planted, planted… Nothing changed at first… but slowly, slowly shoots of green began to show… TREES! first here and there, then everywhere.
The gloomy dark illustrations are now replaced with vivid and colorful ones. Also, in terms of size, they occupy most parts of the pages and surround people in the streets. Even the clothes are now colorful and it implies that human characters, animals, and nature are now in line with each other and are components of one whole concept, which is nature. In other words, as the natural world was ignored and oppressed by the people who only pursued their personal gain, children and women were neglected, too. The people of the city were extremely acculturated and faded in the context of city life, but the woman and her acorns shed light into the darkness. These ideas are beautifully shown through the illustrations. They show this journey through colors along with brief narrative lines that avoid over-explanations and create a sense of cohesion by which the audience is engrossed in the story and their imagination.
Ecofeminism aims to erase all the borderlines by presenting an unbiased and more open-minded viewpoint through which everyone can have a better understanding of oneself and, in a larger scope, of the world. The Promise demonstrates the blurring of borderlines as it deals with nature and the environment and their relationship with human beings, specifically women and girls. In the early pages, brick walls and wire fences are bold and even the city has a grid-like appearance, while little by little as time goes by and as the characters evolve, we can see the changes. The book critiques the authority of humans in so-called civilized modern cities through both text and image. Additionally, the events and characters play significant roles in changing and challenging such issues. Nature, which has been totally ignored at first, revives throughout the story by the woman carrying the bag and later, the girl. The binaries of culture/nature and adults/children are evident in how the text highlights the roles of women, children, and nature. The story paves the way for a better understanding of the role of women and children, as well as nature, through its impressive poetic language and thoughtful illustrations, which are done in mixed media. By using various colors related to the content and typographical art, Carlin creates a sense of harmony and clarity that takes the story forward. The ending of the book is also so promising because it shows the continuation of the challenge initiated by the female characters of the story.
The Promise is the journey of women/girls oppressed by industrial society and their transformation through engagement with nature throughout the story. Nature is not spiritualized in this story but rather affirmed as a long-lost relationship with female characters that is revived at the end. Through this amendment, the woman carrying the bag and the young girl free themselves from the dominant roles they have been given by society. Since women, children, and nature are considered to be underprivileged in binary opposition to the dominant patriarchal adult society, they belong by association to the same group. That is to say, these groups are given less attention, are oppressed, even ignored in some cases, and are denied equal rights by their opponents such as men, adults, and culture. This gap is mostly caused by not having a holistic point of view about the world and its elements. In other words, the modern world tends to subjugate each group and one way it does this is by oppressing nature. The narrative affirms that women and girls have a closer connection to nature without any intention to destroy or misuse it. Although they are drowned in industrial life, they have a closer connection to nature and as a result, they can recover the natural world while men and society in general largely do not. The Promise confirms its circular narrative by ending where it began—with a promise. The story starts with despair but ends with hope since the girl states that she is sure what is going to happen in the future:
And last night in a lonely alley, a young thief fought me for my sack of acorns. I smiled and made the old bargain, knowing how a heart can change, knowing that my planting will go on.
At this point, when the thief appears the beginning atmosphere is repeated. However, after she leaves, the last two pages are covered with astonishing colorful illustrations of flowers and plants which convey the stability of nature. The big change, empowered by nature and done by the woman carrying a bag and the young girl making the promise highlights the major ideas of ecofeminism by which I analyzed this story, demonstrating the significant need to conserve the natural world and the role of women and girls in carrying on nature’s legacy.
Endnote: Since this article is just a part of my M.A. thesis, more than 50 books, articles, and papers were selected from a 250-book bibliography to help me through this journey. The works cited include but are not limited to:
Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Cuomo, Chris. "On Ecofeminist Philosophy." Ethics and the Environment, vol. 7, no. 2, 2002, pp. 1–11.
Davies, Nicola. The Promise. Walker Books Ltd, 2013.
Glazebrook, Trish. "Karen Warren's Ecofeminism." Ethics and the Environment, vol. 7, no. 2, 2002, pp. 12–26.
Sandilands, Catriona. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. The University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature. Indiana Univ. Press, 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: I am Nilufar Abdi, and I was born in Iran. I got a B.A. degree in English Language and Literature from Kashan University, and I continued studying the same field at Yazd University where I took an interest in children's literature, specifically picturebooks, thanks to one of my brilliant professors. My thesis, subsequently titled "The Role of Nature and Environment in Children's Literature: A Comparative Reading of Selected English and Persian Works" is a detailed study of texts and images in six picturebooks including The Promise.