Beyond the Human and the Patriarchal: Ecofeminism and Animal Ethics in Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This paper examines the ways Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, synthesizes feminist and environmental thought to mount a coordinated critique of species hierarchies and patriarchal structures. Narrated through the singular perspective of Janina Duszejko—an elderly woman who advocates for animals and imagines their demand for justice—the novel compels a re-evaluation of moral responsibility beyond the human. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of “companion species,” Cary Wolfe’s critique of speciesism, and ecofeminist insights from Vandana Shiva and Carolyn Merchant, this study argues that Tokarczuk constructs an ethical counter-narrative grounded in care, interdependence, and gender-aware epistemology. The novel’s persistent attention to hunting, animal suffering, and environmental degradation exposes how anthropocentric and androcentric worldviews mutually reinforce systems of domination. Janina’s position as an aging woman and social outsider becomes a site of epistemological resistance, where empathy and relationality contest detached, patriarchal rationality. Through an ecofeminist and multispecies critical lens, this article contends that Tokarczuk imagines a form of justice rooted in mutual respect rather than control. Ultimately, it situates Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead within the expanding fields of feminist ecocriticism and animal studies, demonstrating how narrative fiction can articulate the new ethical frameworks urgently needed in an age of ecological crisis.