Christina Lambert

In view of Wendell Berry's engagement with marriage as a metaphor for our relationship with the land, this paper considers how Jayber Crow's "strange marriage" draws attention to the imagination's role in relational and ecological healing. Berry's novel, Jayber Crow , demonstrates the transformation of Jayber's imagination from a self-fulfilling, objectifying gaze to a vision that fosters faithfulness in the world, resulting in his imagined marriage vow. Jayber's transformed imagination models the fruits of a whole imagination that encompasses grief, imagines a creational covenant, and, as the Mad Farmer says, practices resurrection.

This essay examines the character of Mother in E. L. Doctorow's 1975 novel, Ragtime, through the lens of the literature that sits on her nightstand: an antisuffragist text by Molly Elliot Seawell and a pamphlet about family limitation by Margaret Sanger. Mother's character stands with one foot in the world of radical feminism and another in the milieu of antisuffragists. This context reframes her interactions with marginalized figures in the narrative and undermines her supposedly happy ending. Reading Mother in view of these texts makes her a dynamic character in the novel, revealing her inner life and agency.

This article examines The Bondwoman's Narrative, a slave narrative written in the 1850s and attributed to Hannah Crafts, from an ecofeminist perspective to explore the relationship between the human and nonhuman in the text. Drawing upon the growing field of African American environmental criticism, it analyzes the ways in which language reveals sympathy between the narrator and the nonhuman world in their mutual oppression while also challenging the dehumanizing effects of this link. In this reading, the much-criticized final scene describing Hannah's home becomes the means for Hannah to express her agency and personhood, symbolizing her distinction from the "wildness" that men have used to exploit her and other marginalized women in the text. Ultimately, Hannah's expression of justice comes in the form of a house. Analyzing The Bondwoman's Narrative in light of a contemporary lens like ecofeminism reinterprets the text's ending but also contributes an essential perspective to ecofeminism, illustrating the need to diversify the textual analyses that underpin theoretical lenses.

This study of water in Jayber Crow helps illuminate the eschatological vision of Wendell Berry and shows how love for the earth can also manifest itself in a love for heaven, not by disdaining the earth but by embracing its sacramentality. Jayber's life is shaped by the river that runs through his story and influences him physically and spiritually. It is the river that guides him home, moves him to the camp house, shows him the beauty of living alongside of nature, baptizes him, and teaches him how to articulate his hope. Seen in this light, Jayber Crow acts as a clarion call for preserving sacramental realities such as water. This reading dwells in the intersection of blue-ecocriticism, ecotheology, and sacramental theology, showing how Jayber's story weaves together the spiritual and physical significance of water and teaches us that in order to heal our ecological relationships, we must heal our sacramental imaginations.