Ecopsychology in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: Mapping the Human - Nature Relationship Through Speculative Fiction
摘要
Literature traces the footsteps of time across history and civilization. Literary imagination unveils the shadow of truth which is beneath the glare of opinion. Margaret Atwood, a contemporary Canadian author and two-time Booker Prize winner, published the MaddAddam trilogy in the early twenty-first century. The trilogy, comprising Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, belongs to the tradition of speculative fiction. Though taken together as a volume, each text stands independently, especially Oryx and Crake, the first installment, which was published in 2003. Atwood’s narrative presents a stark dystopia by juxtaposing two temporal dimensions, the world before and after a bioengineered apocalypse. The engineered pandemic that caused the apocalypse is referred to metaphorically as the “waterless flood” in The Year of the Flood. The apocalypse emerges from a range of sequences including unchecked corporate power, technocratic overreach, and ecological disregard. In Oryx and Crake, the population are depicted not merely as a victim but as the major architects of their own downfall. This study foregrounds a nuanced question beyond the ecocritical approach that how ecological disruption affects human psychology. The study traces how the two realms, the environmental welfare and the human psychological health, are intertwined. In the fiction, these two realms form a complex matrix that ultimately led to catastrophe. Using the theoretical lens of ecopsychology, the study examines how Atwood constructs this ecological-psychological relationship, urging a re-evaluation of human responsibility in the Anthropocene.