After the Fire, New Ways to Make a Soul: Family Abolition and Ecological Imaginaries in Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Solitude”

Abstract

The work of Anita Desai and Ursula K. Le Guin – key figures in Anglophone Indian literature and American speculative fiction respectively – variously invite feminist readings. They often push against prescribed gender roles, which, in turn, allows them to question traditional family structures. In this essay, I compare them specifically through an analysis of two texts focused on the intersections of violence, coercion and care within the family – Desai’s Fire on the Mountain (1977) and Le Guin’s short story “Solitude” (1994). I juxtapose these two texts as critiques of the institution of the family, variously combining reflections on family abolition and ecofeminism. This specific theoretical pairing serves to highlight how both texts force the reader to rethink kinship in non-proprietary terms; how they emphasize the possibility of establishing connections beyond the boundaries of the family unit, including with nonhuman subjects; and how, in both stories, explorations of family abolition, whether successful or not, are interwoven with ecological imaginaries.