LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 26:2 February 2026
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Women Don't Speak, the Land Remembers: Gender and Ecological Loss in The Orchard Keeper

Sivakami. S and
Dr. A. Kavitha

Abstract

The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965 by Cormac McCarthy, is frequently interpreted as a regional bildungsroman or as a story about Appalachian outlawry. It provides an interesting yet under-researched intersection of gendered silence, ecological decline, and environmental injustice. The paper posits that the landscape of the novel, especially the contaminated spray-pit, the rotting orchard and the militarised government tank, serve as archival places which recalls what its human community, and especially its women, are incapable of or unwilling to say. There are female figures such as Mildred Rattner, whose agency is limited and whose voices are silenced, a reflection of the exploitation of the land by industrial incursion and underground economies. The research explores how the logic of patriarchy and extractivism intersect, making women as well as nature inactive, expendable landscapes, through the prism of an ecofeminist approach based on the works of Karen Warren and Val Plumwood. Land becomes symbolic: soil, water and trees testify to buried trauma, unmentioned grief and systemic neglect. McCarthy looks to the modern issues in environmental justice, particularly, the morality of memory, the politics of disposability, and the displacement of silenced bodies, both human and nonhuman. The paper concludes that The Orchard Keeper is not just a Southern Gothic artefact but a prophetic reflection on the fact that gendered oppression and ecological violence are inseparable.

Keywords:gendered silence, ecological memory, patriarchy, ecological loss, toxic landscapes, female erasure, slow violence, interconnected oppressions, nonhuman narration

Introduction

The Orchard Keeper is a novel that is frequently placed among Southern Gothic or regionalist textual traditions, yet, and perhaps most importantly, it provides an interesting location upon which ecofeminist research may be founded. The novel is set in the rugged terrain of rural Tennessee in the period between the World Wars. It follows the intertwining lives of the orphaned boy John Wesley Rattner, the bootlegger Marion Sylder and the old man Arthur Ownby, who is reclusive and lives a life of quiet violence. What is particularly lacking in the discourse on the novel is the long-term analysis of the ways gendered silence and ecological degradation interact. This paper contends that in The Orchard Keeper, the silence of women, whether of narration, marginalisation, or erasure of symbols, is likened to the gradual erosion of the natural world; the land itself becomes the repository of unspeakable trauma, of that which human speech, particularly female voice, is unable to express.

The portrayal of women by McCarthy is quite pathetic. The mother of John Wesley, Mildred Rattner, is represented solely by fragmented memory and household habits, her mourning is privatised and her power is restrained (McCarthy 42-43). Other female characters, the unnamed wife of Sylder, Mrs. Tipton, are moved to the background, limited to practical utterances or to outbursts of emotion lacking narrative control. This obliteration reflects the so-called “logic of domination,” in which the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature can be traced back to the same logic of hierarchical thinking that places reason above emotion, culture above nature and male above female (Warren 22). This logic can be seen in McCarthy's Red Branch, not merely in the dynamics between the characters, but also in the physical shift to the industrial, the dead orchard, and the government tank that is built on Red Mountain. All of these indicate an advancing industrial order that re-places the ecological balance and communal memory.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Sivakami. S
Ph.d Research Scholar
Department of English
Pachaiyappa's College (Affiliated to Madras University)
Chennai -30
srssiva1990@gmail.com
&
Dr. A. Kavitha
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Pachaiyappa's College (Affiliated to Madras University)
Chennai -30
kavithaloganathan7@gmail.com

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