Entangled Vitality and Female Resilience in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver’s novels are notable for their explorations of multispecies entanglement, which highlights the interdependence of living things and challenges the notion of individualistic and solitary human agency. Karen Barad’s concept of intra-actions recognizes that change is brought about not simply by the interactions of individual agents but through the ongoing processes of energy flows and the entangled relationships of matters. Human and nonhuman entities are no longer conceived as separate or discrete, but rather as co-constituted in relation to each other. Such an entangled dynamic is also discussed by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble. For Haraway, the binaries of subject/object and nature/culture are only constructed to support human exceptionalism. Planetary existence, human and nonhuman, depends on relationships of “becoming-with,” which entail “response-ability” and “sympoiesis.” As such, entanglement has profound ecological implications as it encompasses the responsiveness of the ecosystem, our shared environmental responsibility, and the co-creation of the more-than-human world. With an academic background in biology and a deep appreciation for the ecological web of life, Barbara Kingsolver is well aware of the multifaceted dependencies between humans and the natural world. Her novels often reflect this understanding through their profuse depictions of multispecies communities and the delicate balance of ecosystems, as well as the influences of human actions on the natural environment. Both Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior can be regarded as ecological novels that highlight the vitality of multispecies entanglement. The idea of intra-action is dramatized as energy flows that serve as connectivity and encounter in Prodigal Summer and climate change and its consequences in Flight Behavior. Entrapment and loneliness are merely constructions of the individualistic human mind. In Kingsolver’s novels, the entangled vitality of being is intertwined with women’s self-realization. As exemplified by the two novels, the notion of entanglement enables women’s empowerment as it challenges the patriarchal logic of objectifying nature and confining women to the body and immanence. Feminist critique of patriarchal cultural discourses recognizes how the association of women with nature via the body and female gender roles as wives and mothers is a way of subordinating women. By relegating nature to an inferior position in relation to culture, women are equated with nature—devalued to functions of procreation, seen as unpredictable, and difficult to understand. However, the binaries are undermined as the human condition is actually embodied and entangled rather than reductively intellectual and individualistic. Men and women both live in nature, which is an “entangled bank”—as Darwin puts it—creative and ever-evolving. This chapter argues that in Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior, through realizing and embracing multispecies existence, the female protagonists find empowerment in their relationships with nature, enabling them to see life as a process of adaptability and resilient growth that can lead to open possibilities.