‘But as a Form in Wax’: An Ecofeminist Reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Carolyn Merchant’s 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution is widely considered to be one of the founding texts—if not the foundational text—for the articulation of ecofeminism in the

U.S. academy. Ecofeminism, at its most fundamental, can be defined as “a range of perspectives that consider the links between the social organisation of gender and the ways in which societies are organised with respect to ‘nature.’” At the heart of ecofeminism, as propounded by Merchant, lies the link between the domination of women and the domination of nature which is underpinned by the world view of a science

that reconceptualises reality as a machine rather than a living organism. Merchant relates a history of the ways in which nature has been anthropomorphised as female throughout Western and non-Western cultures, expounding the patriarchal mind-set in which "like wild chaotic nature, women needed to be subdued and kept in their place."