An ecofeminist reading of Octavia Butler’s parable of the sower and parable of talents

Abstract

A multiple recipient of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, the African American writer Octavia Estelle Butler successfully employs the science fiction genre as a platform upon which she discusses contemporary issues such as climate change, gender and racial discrimination, and class conflict in a futuristic setting. Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) are two of her critically acclaimed speculative science fiction novels in which Butler employs many tenets of ecofeminism which uses gender as a vantage point to examine the conditions that cause and perpetuate the subordination of both women and nature. The Parable of the Sower comprises journal entries written by the protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina-a fifteen-year-old African American woman who has hyperempathy syndrome, which is a psychosomatic disorder that makes her experience other people’s feelings as her own. Events described in the novel begin in post-apocalyptic southern California, where the climate is warming, food is scarce, and violence and racial turmoil are rampant. When her community is eventually overrun, Lauren manages to escape with other survivors, disguising herself as a man. She gradually develops her own belief system called Earthseed which locates God in change, chaos, and uncertainty, and aims to prepare humankind to take root among the stars. Lauren ends up founding a utopian commune out in the woods with a couple of likeminded people who learn new and better forms of relating to each other and to the world around them. In the Parable of the Talents, the commune gets smashed and many, including children and Lauren’s husband, get killed. Both Earthseed novels reflect Butler’s view of humanity as inherently flawed by an innate tendency for hierarchical thinking which leads to intolerance and violence and is manifest in sexism, racism, and ethnocentricism that cause widespread suffering in the world. Like ecofeminists, Butler sees domination of the weak by the strong as a form of parasitism and offers a powerful critique of patriarchal society and its structures of domination. I would thus argue that the Earthseed novels are classic ecofeminist texts in their exploration of intersections of oppression and their visceral portrayal of connections between harmful practices that exploit the environment and social structures that oppress women among other groups. Drawing on theoretical debates in the field of ecofeminism, this chapter critically examines Octavia Butler’s treatment of spiritual and transformative ecofeminist ideas in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. © 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.