The Feminine Principle in Princess Mononoke: Prince Ashitaka’s Ecofeminist Stance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67436/llilj.2018v8i2.%25pKeywords:
Ecofeminism, feminine principle – shakti – Prakriti, masculine principle – purusha, Maldevelopment, hierarchical dualisms, ontology of domination, Cartesian binaries.Abstract
Vandana Shiva, in her essay “Women in Nature,” the third chapter of her book Staying
Alive: Women, Ecology, and Survival in India, emphasizes upon the importance of the
feminine principle in the process of the much needed regeneration and rejuvenation of
the debilitating quality of Nature and Environment. “At one level, nature is symbolized
as the embodiment of the feminine principle, and at another, she is nurtured by the
feminine to produce life and provide sustenance” (Shiva 37). The importance that she
sets to the feminine principle in ecofeminist politics is clearly evident and it is the
intention of this paper to argue for an acknowledgment of the existence of this principle
in the male protagonist, Prince Ashitaka, of Hayao Miyazaki directed film Princess
Mononoke, a fantasy-anime film released in 1997. Through a recovery of the most
revolutionary aspects of Shiva’s arguments in the aforementioned essay in the first part
of this paper, we will then seek to understand Ashitaka’s feminine principle in the
contrasting light of the “Maldevelopment” model embodied by Lady Eboshi, and the
“Bad Mother Nature” (to use Wendi Sierra and others’ terminology) model embodied
by San, the original name of the eponymous heroine of the film.
