Analysis Of Prodigal Summer By Barbara Kingsolver

Fighting for change drives the advancement of social issues. If people fight tooth and nail they can make changes. Although, there are people and groups that ultimately hurt a cause then help it. The novel “Prodigal Summer” by Barbara Kingsolver is said to have both feminist and environmental movement ideas and themes. The novel is about the lives of three characters, Deanna, Lusa, and Garnett. Deanna and Lusa both get involved with men in their lives and both are older than them. Although the environmental themes help the movement, it is not as big as the feminist movement. The novel does more damage to the feminist movement than it does trying to help. The overall impact of the novel is weakened by how she portrays the feminist themes, and …show more content…
Kingsolver tried to implement her passion for this movement, but ultimately hurt the impact of the novel and the feminist movement as a whole. The movement tries to make both genders more equal, but a problem the movement has are the members themselves. Sally Haslanger says, “Feminists disagree about what sexism consists in, and what exactly ought to be done about it; they disagree about what it means to be a woman or a man and what social and political implications gender has or should have.”(Sally Haslanger, Stanford University). Some members go as far as saying all men are evil. Kingsolver does not go that far, but she portrays men in a bad light. Kingsolver wrote, “Mr. Walker, is it my imagination, or do you really think your chestnuts are more important than my apples? Just because you’re a man and I’m a woman?”(273). Instead of making the characters equal, she makes the men in this novel flawed and undeveloped. Another goal of the feminist movement is to fix the objectification of women. Kingsolver does not help that side at all. In the entire story, both Lusa and Deanna are objectified by how the men around them all want to sleep with them. Deanna, throughout the story, is constantly sleeping with Eddie Bondo. Lusa, when she meets Cole, sleeps with him for three days straight. Kingsolver wrote, “Her Euclid apartment had seemed to suit him so well that he delayed his departure for two days after the seminar’s end. They hardly left her bed, in fact, and she had to call her lab to claim sudden illness.”(38). After Cole’s death, her nephew in law, Rickie, starts falling for her and trying to make moves. The feminist movement tries to show that women are not just objects of lust, but have talents and interests and should be taken seriously as equals. Kingsolver’s novel does not portray this idea well by how unrepresented the men are in the