LAND ETHIC IN NADINE GORDIMER’S THE CONSERVATIONIST
NADINE GORDIMER’IN THE CONSERVATIONIST ROMANINDA TOPRAK ETİĞİ

Author : Seda ARIKAN
Number of pages : 457-469

Abstract

Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel-prize winner South African writer, examines the life of a rich white businessman living in South Africa in her novel The Conservationist (1974). The protagonist of the novel, Mehring, who wants to make a change in his life, buys a farm as a consequence of his search for a meaning in life. Though he knows nothing about to run a farm, he tries to make a connection with his land in which the corpse of a black man is found later on. The burial and reappearance of the body represent the buried problematics in Mehring’s mind in particular and South African colonized society in general. To dig the source of those problems, Gordimer depicts the relation between the colonizer man and the landscape using the relationship between Mehring and his land.This study aims to analyze The Conservationist in terms of land ethic that is first named by Aldo Leopold. As a part of environmental movement, land ethic aims to talk about an ethical view to human’s relation with land including its animals and plants as its habitat. This ecologic-based ethical approach is related to the criticism of colonization in Gordimer’s novel in many ways. As a criticism of consumption of South Africa, Gordimer gives her ideas on how human being should treat the land besides the people living on it. Problematizing the issues such as liberalism, utilitarianism, and ecology, The Conservationist, includes the idea of land ethic, which can be accepted as a global solution to the problems of colonization of social, cultural, economic, and environmental structures. This study will reveal the reflections of this idea in the novel.

Keywords

Ecology, Land Ethic, Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist.

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