Ecocriticism in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America

Abstract

The Birds of America is set in 1960s America and Paris and follows a 19-year-old boy's quest for common morality in a contemporary, industrial society. McCarthy published a series of essays which concentrating on the corrupting effect of Western Capitalist culture. She made a clear perspective of the society after the Vietnam War. McCarthy shares the views of the majority of liberal intellectuals about the countercultural movement and the efficacy of student protests. Mary McCarthy's ideas about nature and human existence in today's constantly changing world are represented in both her creative and critical works. Human beings can never be divorced from their surroundings, the culture they acquire, the language they speak, the people they know, and the natural forces that form them and their behavior and never be divorced from their surroundings and the culture they acquire, the language they speak, the people they know, and the natural forces that form them and their behavior. Capitalism is equated with contemporary industry, the devastation of nature, the massification of culture, and individual alienation in this passage. McCarthy's conflict between societal equality and individual expression are presented in her works. Mary McCarthy, as a writer, is brutally constrained by her own lived experience. McCarthy attempted to cram a running political, social, and ecological commentary into the confines of a book that cannot or will not support it in Birds of America. McCarthy in her novels she says about the problem connected to the loss of nature and the consequent moral crisis in society.