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 There is a sense in which the zombie-apocalypse genre feels well trodden. Scenes 
of crumbling cities, makeshift weapons, tenacious survivors, and hoards of rotting undead 
have journeyed deep into the cultural consciousness of the Western world; and, similar to 
the myths of ancient Greece, zombie narratives—and indeed apocalypse narratives in a 
broader sense—are often a conservative holdout in a relatively more progressive culture, 
particularly in relation to issues of gender. The patterns are old, beginning with some of the 
earliest apocalyptic texts in the Western world. Mary Wilson Carpenter, in her studies on 
the Book of Revelation, even asks whether or not a feminist apocalypse is a “textual/sexual 
impossibility given not only the existence but the canonized status” of Revelation and its 

patriarchal gender dynamics (111).

 However, a new trend has risen in the zombie genre, one in which undead literature 

has begun to investigate its more conservative habits. One such investigative book is M.R. 

Carey’s 2014 novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. Set in a post-apocalyptic world of military 

bases, wild anarchists, and a zombifying fungal infection, The Girl with All the Gifts has all 

the trappings of any other run-of-the-mill zombie-apocalypse novel. However, Carey’s novel, 

as one cover declares, is “the most original thriller you will read all year,” firmly setting itself 

apart from other zombie-apocalypse novels; this separation is partly by virtue of its main 

character: not the stereotypical action hero, but rather a sweet little girl named Melanie 

who loves reading Greek myths, spending time with her teacher Miss Justineau, and eating 

human flesh. Melanie is a zombie, a “hungry,” though she doesn’t know it at first, and after

On Fungi, Future, and Feminism:
An Ecofeminist Analysis of M.R. Carey’s 

The Girl with All the Gifts

This paper examines M.R. Carey’s fascinating zombie novel, The Girl with All the Gifts.

While scholars question whether or not a female-oriented apocalypse narrative can exist, as the 

genre is essentially rooted in imbalanced gender dynamics of ancient texts, this paper uses an

ecofeminist critique to posit that the zombie apocalypse represented by Carey is a challenge 

toward the patriarchal values running rampant in the genre. This ecofeminist critique, while 

superficially offering a comforting message about female empowerment, actually offers a 

serious warning in regards to the insidious patriarchal structures that facilitate apocalypses. 

by Leah Heim, Ball State University 



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the military base she lives on is attacked, she must travel with her beloved teacher Miss 

Justineau to safety, avoiding the lethal curiosity of the scientist Dr. Caldwell, struggling to 

control her cravings for flesh, and learning what it means to be a cognizant, human-like 

hungry in a world of animosity and distrust.

 While one must recognize that the zombie genre has challenged these conservative 

values before (George Romero’s hallmark 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead depends upon 

strong metaphors of racial unease and othering), Carey’s novel creates an entire world in 

which conservative—specifically, patriarchal—values are constantly called into question. 

While this novel’s subjects of post-apocalypse, zombie infection, and environmental disaster 

might at first seem hopelessly disparate in an analytical sense, my investigation reveals a 

common ground in which these large ideas can take root—ecofeminism. Carey’s novel, in a 

way, is an attempt to craft a zombie narrative that breaks away from the conservative, 

patriarchal values running rampant in the genre, and it does this by way of a strong 

ecofeminist critique, ecofeminism here being the idea that the oppression of women and 

the oppression of nature are connected within patriarchal systems. While the outlook of 

the ecofeminist critique may not always be optimistic, it effectively serves as a refutation 

of and a warning against the patriarchal structures that brought the novel’s world to the 

apocalypse.

PROGRESSIVE, CONSERVATIVE, ZOMBIE: 

THE UNDEAD BODY POLITICK

 To label M.R. Carey’s book as an ecofeminist novel is a decision that may find little 

intellectual sympathy in the present cultural moment, for indeed the term “ecofeminist” 

itself has fallen out of grace in the eye of third-wave feminism. While the juncture of 

feminism and environmental studies certainly still continues into the postmodern age, 

ecofeminism by name has become the subject of much derision. As researcher and activist 

Greta Gaard claims, “After the charges of gender essentialism—accurately leveled at 

cultural feminism, a branch of thought in both feminist and ecofeminist theory—most 

feminists working on the intersections of feminism and the environment thought it better to 

rename their approach to distinguish it from essentialist feminists and thereby gain a wider 

audience” (27). It is this “gender essentialism” that vilifies ecofeminism with third-wave, 

postmodern feminism, as ecofeminism’s history of ascribing a universal truth to the female 

sex—specifically, the idea that women inherently share a closer bond with nature than 

men—grates heavily against postmodernity’s insistence upon subjective truth—specifically,



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in feminism’s case, the idea that each human being of any sex or gender is an individual with 

his/her/their own truth, a truth which cannot be covered under umbrella statements like 

“women inherently do this” or “men inherently do that.”

 Gaard recognizes this contention, and she condemns ecofeminism’s former 

gender essentialism, saying that it “[discredits] ecofeminism’s diversity of arguments and 

standpoints”(31) and “[marginalizes] feminism’s relevance” (32). However, she also casts 

doubt upon thought that would condemn ecofeminism to obsolescence, saying that certain 

types of backlash to ecofeminism is “antifeminist” (41). Essentially, Gaard calls for a 

revitalization of ecofeminist thought, minus the gender essentialism, because “an 

intersectional ecological-feminist approach frames” contemporary issues of resource 

disparity, healthcare access, and many other forms of worldwide inequality “in such a way 

that people can recognize common cause across boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, 

species, age, ability, nation—and affords a basis for engaged theory, education, and 

activism” (44).

 While such a discussion about ecofeminism might appear to be a digression from 

inquiries into The Girl with All the Gifts, it is through an ecofeminist approach that the book 

breaks away from the zombie genre’s conservatism; therefore, to defend such a theory is to 

defend the validity of the novel’s feminist approach to apocalypse. This paper does not 

operate under the gender essentialist assumption that all women share a connection to 

nature that is closer than that between nature and men, an assumption that Gaard firmly 

disapproves. Rather, this paper operates under the Gaard-approved and third-wave 

feminist-friendly assertion that, in patriarchies, the oppression of women and the 

oppression of nature share a common cause—the patriarchal habit of domination. This 

paper will call such a mentality ecofeminism.

 Here, another aside must be made: while the zombie genre has conservative 

traditions, it would be a mistake to label it as a mouthpiece for any one ideology or political 

position. While conservative traditions are strong and most obvious, counter-currents 

do indeed run beneath the surface, as counter-cultures thrive beneath their oppressive 

mainstreams. This should not be surprising. According to Jeffery Jerome Cohen, a 

prominent scholar of monster theory, “the monstrous body is pure culture,” existing “as an 

embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place” (4). The monster 

of the zombie is no different, except perhaps for the fact that the monstrous body of the 

zombie isn’t only pure culture; it is an immensely broad reflection of pure culture. Stephanie 

Boluk and Wylie Lenz, in their introduction to Generation Zombie, claim that the zombie is 



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“a privileged object of cultural studies,” one with a “far more flexible metaphoricity” than 

other monsters of the Western world (12). Throughout its literary career, the zombie has 

been everything: a Haitian slave created by a witch doctor, a lurching night walker in 

capitalist America, a disease-stricken cannibal with super strength and speed, etc. The 

zombie exists in “low culture” forms like comics and in “high culture” forms like the Jane 

Austen-inspired Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). The horrifying mob sameness of the 

zombie hoard in Night of the Living Dead can be a critique on communism or on capitalism, 

depending on the reading. In this vein, Boluk and Lenz affirm such a thematic universality 

by saying that zombies are used as “vehicles for expressing anxieties surrounding class, race, 

gender, and sexuality;” in other words, zombies have the honor of being locales of terror for 

just about everything (12).

 The conservative nature of zombie literature becomes most apparent when the genre 

borrows conventions from its cousin and literary partner-in-crime—the well-loved tradition 

of post-apocalyptic narratives. The appearance of the zombie regularly, if not implicitly, 

occurs in tandem with themes of societal collapse and of civilization’s end, and civilization’s 

end is seldom associated with the type of world that upholds progressive ideals. Specifically, 

societal collapse often marks a return to patriarchal paradigms that social structures have 

presumably tamed heretofore. Violence and power are once again the measure of worth. 

Most importantly in the conversation about ecofeminism, “the problematic position of sex, 

and particularly of women’s sexuality, is an enduring feature of apocalyptic discourse” 

(Berger 11). James Berger, in his book After the End, even goes so far as to say that “there is 

an important strand of apocalyptic imagining that seeks to destroy the world expressly in 

order to eliminate female sexuality” (11). In this sense, Berger’s statements are reminiscent 

of Carpenter’s: both acknowledge the misogyny present in apocalyptic culture. It is this 

misogyny that The Girl with All the Gifts must face while establishing itself as an ecofeminist 

piece.

 So why is it that zombie culture and post-apocalyptic narratives find so much 

common ground thematically? The easiest answer is that patterns found in the threat of 

an imagined, fictional zombie outbreak closely mirror patterns that would appear during a 

serious apocalyptic scenario. Zombies wreak havoc on the power of governmental systems, 

causing societal breakdown; zombies create unstable food lines; zombies drive rooted 

human beings out of their comfortable homes and into urban and natural wildernesses. How 

different are these zombie-related hazards from the dangers posed by real apocalyptic 

situations like civil war, foreign invasion, climate change, or epidemic?



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 The last threat of this list is perhaps the apocalyptic scenario most closely related to

the narrative of zombie outbreak. While Boluk and Lenz profess that “the zombie threat did 

not always rely on anxiety generated by viral outbreak,” much of the undead literature in the 

past century has indeed reflected that anxiety (3). This fear becomes most blatant in more 

modern iterations of the zombie. As Boluk and Lenz say, “While lumbering, Romero-style 

zombies effectively tapped into mid-twentieth-century contagion paranoia, the apocalyptic 

terror of the living dead was replaced in films such as 28 Days Later (2002) and Resident 

Evil (2002) with a more explicitly biological model of viral infection” (6). In other words, 

zombies that were once mere metaphors for plague became plague themselves, and with this 

evolution of zombie as supernatural to zombie as natural, the zombie-apocalypse narrative 

became readily positioned to question its more conservative values. The genre itself was 

primed for an ideological transformation—or, more thematically appropriate, an ideological 

mutation. The Girl with All the Gifts, with its heavy ecofeminist subtexts, stands inevitably as 

the culmination of these shifts and the offspring of this mutation.

BIOPUNK: THE ECOFEMINIST CONNECTION

 How does a zombie plague begin? How does any apocalyptic plague begin? With 

human technology so advanced as to stifle the apocalyptic glory of our species’ old 

microbiological boogeymen, there seems to be only a few options left for the diligent 

authors of zombie and plague literatures: one, have the plague be an ancient or unfamiliar 

disease (risen perhaps from the melting permafrost in Siberia) to which our modern human 

bodies have absolutely no resistance; or two, have the plague be a vicious mutation of one of 

humanity’s familiar, formerly contained diseases. 

 It is with this second plague option that the ecofeminist tendencies of zombie

 literature become most apparent. It should come as no surprise that humanity has long 

used natural frameworks to inflict harm upon itself, and plague is a well-loved weapon of 

this tradition: invading Europeans gave smallpox blankets to indigenous peoples in order to 

weaken their societies, and medieval history shows examples of invading armies hurling 

severed heads over castle walls in order to inflict disease upon the besieged people. In 

modern times, however, the ability of humanity to manipulate the natural framework of 

disease has reached shocking and terrifying levels. With the advent of biotechnology, 

humanity now has the power to create its final, ultimate microbiological boogeyman: a 

plague strong and vicious enough to wipe out all human life on the Earth. Why humanity 

would do this to itself is a matter for philosophy, but it is an incontestable fact that such 



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apocalyptic power has been created and employed before, as evidenced by the United States’ 

use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just as atomic technology became a 

twentieth-century bogey, so has biotechnology become a twenty-first-century bogey. It just 

has yet to be used—publicly, at least.

 Zombie literature of recent years expertly taps into this anxiety toward 

biotechnology. In the chapter “9/11 and the Wasted Lives of Posthuman Zombies” in his 

book Biopunk Dystopias, Lars Schmeink claims that

 whereas most zombies of the twentieth century were what Kevin Boon has termed 

 either “zombie drones” (the Haitian zombie) or “zombie ghouls” (Romero’s creation),  

 many new millennial zombies such as those discussed here fall into the category of 

 the ‘bio zombie’ . . . who turn into zombies through some biological agent (virus, 

 bacteria, disease, chemical) and are thus a variant of biopunk’s representation of 

 genetics as potentially reality-changing scientific progress. (207)

Biopunk, in the sense that Shmeink uses the term, is a particular type of science fiction 

that imagines the world reworked under the premise of advances in biotechnology (just as 

biopunk’s cousin, steampunk, reimagines the world reworked under the premise of advances 

in Victorian-era steam technology). In the above excerpt, he clearly tracks the progression of 

the zombie from its more supernatural origins to its modern, scientifically based iteration. 

His chapter additionally discusses the films Resident Evil and 28 Days Later, both of which 

have a genetically-engineered virus as the cause of zombiism; the fungal infection in The Girl 

with All the Gifts is also implicitly stated as having been genetically engineered. By labeling 

the modern zombie as biopunk, Schmeink acknowledges the zombie genre as a vessel for 

expressing anxieties about modern biotechnology; in essence, the zombie genre has become 

a troubled rumination on what happens when humanity manipulates nature and produces 

far-reaching, unintended consequences.

 And, according to the ecofeminst premise described previously, where there is the 

manipulation of nature, there is the manipulation of women. Because of the modern zombie 

genre’s decision to make zombiism the result of genetically-engineered plagues, it has 

opened itself to the full range of ecofeminist criticism.

 Under this context, it is easy to read ecofeminism into any zombie literature that 

uses genetically engineered plagues to explain the appearance of the zombie itself. Such a 

reading, however, doesn’t necessarily make any particular novel an ecofeminst text. What, 

then, sets The Girl with All the Gifts apart from other works within the genre? Essentially, it is 

not merely its conductivity for ecofeminist criticism that makes it an ecofeminist piece; 



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rather, it is the text’s use of these ecofeminist themes that sets the book up for such a

conversation.

LET’S DESTROY THE WORLD, 

OR HAPPY ECOFEMINISM

  Post-apocalyptic literature, including that of zombie apocalypse, has a longstanding 

custom of being demonstratively punitive; that is, writers of the genre often make examples 

of their imagined humanity by depicting the terror and sorrow that could be unleashed 

if a particular immoral societal bugaboo is allowed to snowball. “The study of the post 

apocalypse,” Berger says, “is a study of what disappears and what remains, and of how the 

remainder has been transformed” (7). Authors can make large statements about morality by 

choosing who or what survives the apocalypse. For example, in the Book of Revelation, what 

disappears is all that Christianity deems evil, and what remains are the beloved people of 

God; and this remainder has been transformed into perfect humanity, united forever in bliss 

with the Creator. While the Book of Revelation gathers a wide variation of opinions to itself, 

in one line of thinking, God destroys the world because humanity has become too evil to 

permit its further propagation; by this refinement through holy wrath, the text clearly shows 

what it perceives as evil and what it perceives as good.

 So too can The Girl with All the Gifts be read as such a moral winnowing. For the

beginning portion of the book, the action happens at a military base called Hotel Echo, 

where scientists are conducting experiments on highly-functioning child zombies—zombies 

here being called “hungries”—in order to find a cure that will save the human population. 

Melanie is one of these child hungries, living out her life in a predictable pattern of nights 

spent alone in her cell, her weekly feedings, and her daily classes, one of which is taught by 

her favorite teacher, who she loves with near-adoration—Miss Justineau. One eventful day, 

Dr. Caldwell, the lead scientist at the base, takes Melanie into her laboratory and intends to 

dissect her; while Miss Justineau is making an attempt to rescue Melanie from Dr. Caldwell, 

a group of anarchists called “junkers” attacks the military base, using hungries as a siege 

weapon. Melanie, Miss Justineau, Dr. Caldwell, experienced soldier Sergeant Parks, and 

young soldier Private Gallagher all survive the attack and start toward Beacon, a large 

military base where they hope to find safety. But to find safety, they must cross a wasteland 

of junkers and hungries. Under this plot framework, Carey begins to insert criticism on the 

militarized world that humanity has created for itself, a world that, while nominally 

necessary for survival, has not functioned in the wisest or the most humane ways. At first, 



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the critiques come very subtly. For example, while journeying through the wasteland, 

Sergeant Parks contemplates some of the ways in which authorities tried to contain the 

zombie during the early days of societal collapse:

  In the first days and weeks after the Breakdown, the UK government, like a whole lot 

            of others, thought they could contain the infection by locking down the civilian 

            population. Not surprisingly, this didn’t stop people running like rats when they                

 saw what was happening. Thousands, maybe millions, tried to get out of London   

 along the north-south arteries, the A1 and the M1. The authorities responded 

 ruthlessly, first with military roadblocks and then with targeted airstrikes. (Carey 167) 

 While this is a fairly bleak recollection, Sergeant Parks’ reflections don’t offer much 

judgment; these, for him, seem to be sad but necessary measures the government took in 

an effort to contain the worst of the zombie plague. Not every character possesses the same 

mentality toward these actions, however; later in the novel, Miss Justineau, who has spent 

much of the novel defending Melanie’s personhood to the rest of the survival party, 

unashamedly offers her opinions on the government’s past actions:

 They’re moving now through a burn shadow, another artifact of the Breakdown. 

 Before the government fell apart entirely, it passed a whole series of badly 

 thought-out emergency orders, one of which involved chemical incendiaries sprayed  

 from helicopter gunships to created cauterised [sic] zones that were guaranteed free  

 from hungries. Uninfected civilians were warned in advance by sirens and looped  

 messages, but a lot of them died anyway, because they weren’t free to move when the 

 choppers flew in. The hungries, though, they ran ahead of the flame-throwers like  

 roaches when the light goes on . . . It’s more than twenty years on, and still nothing  

 grows here, not even the hardiest and most bad-ass of weeds. Nature’s way of saying  

 she’s not stupid enough to be caught like that twice over . . . Parks hears [Melanie]   

 asking Justineau what happened here. Justineau makes heavy weather of the 

 question, even though it’s an easy one. We couldn’t kill the hungries, so we killed 

 ourselves. That was always our favourite [sic] party trick. (Carey 239-240)

This passage, while long, offers much insight into how ecofeminist themes are being 

handled in Carey’s novel. For one, Miss Justineau is completely disapproving of the 

violence that the military used in the early days of societal collapse; to her, it seems to be an 

extension of the suspicious, hateful tendencies that characterized human relationships on

the societal level before the Breakdown. This militarized world is something she completely 

damns. Interestingly enough, it is not only the human that this militarized world has 



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destroyed in this passage: the violence has also destroyed wide swaths of nature, so that even 

weeds are no longer able to grow in these sites of destruction. While nature and humanity 

are often seen as separate entities, this passage delineates clear connections between the 

abolition of one and the abolition of the other.

 Further ecofeminist themes are developed when Carey chooses to gender nature as 

female. The feminization of nature is something that ecofeminists have long found 

problematic, as Cynthia Belmont details in her article, “Ecofeminism and the Natural 

Disaster Heroine”: “Disaster films often envision nature as female, as a mother—in this 

case, not a loving one who deserves our love in return, but rather an alienated adversary in 

a battle of good and evil” (358). As such, disaster narratives in which nature is considered 

female can be interpreted as metaphors in which the female is hated, feared, and ultimately 

mastered. The most shockingly misogynistic disaster-narrative metaphor that Belmont 

describes is that of the destruction of the Earth-threatening asteroid (which is at one point 

gendered as female) in Armageddon (1998):

 The asteroid is drilled and implanted with a phallic nuclear warhead (which is at 

 one point mounted by a crew member who spent his last night on Earth in a strip  

 joint and who says, upon being disciplined, “I just wanted to feel the power between  

 my legs”), and the drilling scenes are characterized by passionate resistance on the  

 part of the asteroid. In one scene, the men are struggling to bore into a composite  

 of iron and a recalcitrant mystery-metal never seen on Earth; the asteroid protests by  

 roaring angrily, howling like an animal in pain, shooting hot gas at them through   

 vents as they plunge nearer the core, and showering them with flying debris once  

 they reach it. The drillers’ victory is sweetened by the asteroid’s putting up a good  

 fight. (360)

This scene—while easily characterized as noble on a literal level—is, when taken in the 

context of the asteroid as feminine, an alarming metaphor of rape. And what’s more, “nature 

is a ‘bitch’ because she is angry at us for attempting to master her” (Belmont 359).

 The Girl with All the Gifts, while it seems to originally play into these misogynistic 

trends offered by the traditional natural-disaster narrative (for the zombie-plague narrative 

is essentially a natural-disaster narrative), turns the trope on its head. The militarized world, 

which rests upon that patriarchal habit of domination, and the zombie plague, which comes 

under the jurisdiction of feminized nature, are at war, and the female is winning. Not only is 

feminized nature slowly destroying the military complex; it is also pointing out the 

fundamental flaws of this patriarchal system by showing how quickly it turns to massacring



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the innocent as soon as pressure is applied.

 In this vein, the end of The Girl with All the Gifts is the most telling development in 

this particular ecofeminist reading. Upon having found a group of intelligent hungries like 

herself and having learned that these intelligent hungries were second generation, produced 

by the mating of first generation hungries, Melanie convinces Sergeant Parks to set the 

seedpods of the zombie fungus ablaze. The seedpods, which can only release their spores 

under the heat of flame, erupt, and humanity, in the sense of Homo sapiens sapiens, ends. 

Mother Nature wins.

 Melanie’s justification for this decision is telling: by releasing the fungus, she has 

sacrificed the current generation of humanity for the next generation—the intelligent 

hungries who will be produced by their zombified parents. This, in a paradoxical way, was 

the only way to save humanity. In her own words:

  If you keep shooting [the hungries] and cutting them up into pieces and throwing  

 them into pits, nobody will be left to make a new world. Your people and the junker

  people will keep killing each other, and you’ll both kill the hungries wherever you  

 find them, and in the end the world will be empty. This way is better . . .  the children  

 will grow up, and they won’t be the old kind of people but they won’t be hungries . . .   

 They’ll be the next people. The ones who make everything okay again. (399)

 Melanie ushers in the next wave of humanity, and she has high hopes for a more 

peaceful, utopian world. The only way humanity has hope, in the end, is by abandoning 

patriarchal systems of militarized violence and by allowing feminized nature to win and 

have her way. We can further see the ecofeminist implications of this circumstance in the 

final scene of the novel: Miss Justineau, the only survivor from old humanity, comes before a 

classroom of formerly feral, intelligent child hungries—which Melanie has rounded up and 

which she now leads—and begins to teach the children the alphabet. With such an ending, 

The Girl with All the Gifts potentially marks itself as an incredibly empowering ecofeminist 

piece: women destroy the world’s violent patriarchal structures, and women recreate the 

world’s structures anew.

 However, while it would be easy and pleasant to end the ecofeminist conversation on 

an empowering note, such a discussion does not take all angles into account, particularly 

where the main character, Melanie, is involved. Apart from being the protagonist, Melanie 

is arguably the most interesting person in the entire novel—an object of attraction and 

disgust, of affection and terror. And, sadly, once the character of Melanie is fully analyzed, 

the ecofeminist reading becomes less of an inspiration and more of a horror story.



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THE WORLD HAS ALREADY ENDED, 

OR PESSIMISTIC ECOFEMINISM

  The study of Melanie’s character best begins with a discussion about James Berger’s 

conception of how time works in post-apocalyptic narratives. According to Berger, the genre 

is a place where “[t]emporal sequence becomes confused” (6). He goes on to say that 

“[a]pocalyptic writing takes us after the end, shows the signs prefiguring the end, the 

moment of obliteration, and the aftermath. The writer and the reader must be in both places 

at once, imagining the post-apocalyptic world and then paradoxically ‘remembering the 

world as it was, as it is’” (6). A great example of this temporality bending, Berger claims, is 

the Terminator movie series, in which “[e]very action before the apocalypse is simultaneously 

an action after the apocalypse” (6). When John Connor’s father embarks on a mission from 

the future to save Sarah Connor, he makes love to her and conceives John Connor, without 

whom the human race is doomed. Such a situation clearly shows the dependency that the 

post-apocalypse has on the pre-apocalypse. 

 Berger’s argument about the temporality of the post-apocalypse goes further, 

however: “The narrative logic of apocalyptic writing is that post-apocalypse precede [sic] the 

apocalypse. This is also the logic of prophecy. The events envisioned have already occurred, 

have as good as occurred. Once the prophecy is uttered, all the rest is post-apocalypse” 

(6). What this means in relation to this paper is that in many apocalyptic narratives the 

prophecy of the apocalypse, in a way, is the beginning of the post-apocalypse, for once the 

prophecy is uttered, the world is effectively destroyed. The prophecy sets the world on a 

certain trajectory, and though the actual death wrought by the apocalyptic event in question 

has not yet occurred, humanity is as hopeless as it will be after the apocalypse: the same 

panic, pain, and despondency exist on both sides of doomsday. 

 In perfect relation to Berger’s theories are the writings of Rebekah Sheldon in her 

book The Child to Come. In the book, Sheldon claims that “the future is the provenance of 

the child,” and that the child is “freighted with expectations and anxieties about the future” 

after having been “tethered to a future that can no longer be taken for granted” (3). Most 

tellingly, Sheldon calls the child a societal resource and analyzes the “figurative and literal

uses to which we put her in an age riven between unprecedented technoscientific control 

and equally unprecedented ecological disaster” (2-3). Essentially, Sheldon emphasizes the 

massive symbolic currency that the image of the child possesses in discussions about 

science, the environment, and the future.

 For an ecofeminist reading of Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, both Berger and 



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Sheldon’s theories are indispensable. If the child represents anxiety over the environmental 

conditions of the future, as Sheldon says, then in some ways the child is a prophecy. And if 

the prophecy has been spoken, then according to Berger, the events that the prophecy 

foretells have already occurred. This has far-reaching implications for The Girl with All the 

Gifts, in particular in the character of Melanie, a child zombie: she is a subconscious 

reflection of environmental dread, a prophecy of doom for humanity’s future. With this 

in mind, the character of Melanie becomes a central point of interest for an ecofeminist 

critique of The Girl with All the Gifts.

 It is hard to think of a way in which Melanie could be a more appropriate symbolic 

manifestation of environmental dread. While the earlier ecofeminist analysis of the text 

compared the zombie plague to feminized nature, there is another way of approaching the 

plague analytically—as a feminized nature invaded by patriarchal systems and manipulated 

for their own benefit. After all, this zombie plague was genetically engineered, and 

ecofeminist theory posits that the domination over nature is an extension of the patriarchal 

habits of domination existing in modern society. What, then, is the decision of Melanie in 

the end? What is the victory of nature over humanity? Instead of an empowering dissolution 

of patriarchal structures and establishment of female community, the victory of nature 

represents the sweeping power of these patriarchal structures: Melanie, who is infected by a 

patriarchally manipulated plague, unleashes the patriarchally manipulated plague onto the 

world, dooming the original, feminized nature—of which humanity is often unwillingly and 

unknowingly a part—to deep, permanent change. And this permanent change, while being 

presented hopefully on Melanie’s part, is ambiguous at best. Yes, the second-generation 

hungries will continue humanity, but innumerable human lives have been lost because of it. 

And yes, the second-generation hungries will continue humanity, but what will the nature 

of this continuation be? Will these hungries reproduce? If so, what will the population eat, 

now that there are no more humans? Melanie eats wild animal flesh, but can there possibly 

be enough animal flesh to go around? Will these undead denizens be immortal? Immortality 

is, after all, a mixed bag.

 This pessimistic narrative about patriarchally modified nature finds a parallel in the

behaviors of women throughout the novel. The most obvious example of this comes from Dr. 

Caldwell, a female scientist who wants to kill Melanie and run experiments on her in order 

to find a cure for the zombie plague. To make Dr. Caldwell a female emphasizes two very 

important points: one, that men and patriarchy are not synonyms; and two, that women can 

be carriers of patriarchal habits just as easily as men. With this in mind, it is important once 



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more to turn attention back to the character of Melanie. In the beginning of the novel, 

the girl writes a story that expresses her willingness to fight and kill monsters to save 

Miss Justineau if the need arose; while fighting and killing monsters to save a loved one is 

admirable in a way, there are heavy patriarchal subtexts in such a narrative. 

 Such subtexts carry through to the end of the novel, where Melanie has become the 

leader of the group of second-generation hungries; she becomes this leader not through 

generosity or diplomacy, but rather through killing these hungries’ former leader and 

scaring the rest of them into submission. Were these actions necessary? Perhaps, but that 

does not make them any less violent. Melanie has established her leadership through the 

same patriarchal habit of domination. Like Melanie brings the patriarchally manipulated 

zombie plague into the new world, so too does she carry certain habits of patriarchy with 

her, therefore casting the end’s inspiring female leadership into serious doubt: perhaps the 

female leadership will resume patriarchal habits; it just won’t be called patriarchy. Perhaps 

the evils of the old system will merely get a female paint job and continue on as usual.

 What is Melanie, then, as a representative of cultural anxiety? As a character, she is 

lovable, but as a symbol, she is horrific. She is Berger’s prophecy of post-apocalypse, and 

that prophecy is one which proclaims that humanity and nature both have already become 

too affected by unhealthy patriarchal habits to ever live in a world without them. She is 

Sheldon’s future child, and that future is one with irreparable scarring inflicted by the 

manipulation of nature and by the forces of violence. Melanie is inconceivably durable 

radioactive waste. Melanie is the suspicion and fear that insists upon human competition 

instead of human cooperation. While Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts seems at first to have 

created an inspiring vision of a more progressive apocalypse, the experiment becomes a 

pessimistic rumination on whether or not such an apocalypse could potentially occur. 

However, even these pessimistic ruminations are important conversations in the novel’s 

ecofeminist critique, as they serve as negative examples of our potential future world and 

offer a startling wake-up call.

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS: 

AN ECOFEMINIST CALL TO ACTION

  To repeat a quote by Greta Gaard: “An intersectional ecological-feminist approach 

frames” contemporary issues of resource disparity, healthcare access, and many other forms 

of worldwide inequality “in such a way that people can recognize common cause across 

boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, species, age, ability, nation—and affords a basis 



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for engaged theory, education, and activism” (44). 

 It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a unified theory in any field of study. This 

is ridiculously true for the humanities. Finding connections between large ideas like race, 

class, gender, sexuality, species, age, ability, and nation would daunt even the most eager of 

scholars. The theory of ecofeminism, however, claims to perform this task. In the way 

Marxism posits that inequalities are an issue of class, ecofeminism claims that inequalities 

are an issue of patriarchy. There are certain groups that would label such mentality as 

so-called “feminazism.” Why denounce men as the cause of all the world’s problems?

 However, patriarchy is not men, and men are not patriarchy, and this is not a blame 

game. Ecofeminism only finds a pattern of oppression, and ecofeminism “affords a basis for 

engaged theory, education, and activism” (Gaard 44). This is good news. But it comes with a 

heavy sense of responsibility: if such a unified theory about inequality exists, then scholars 

and activists must begin to use that theory for change. 

 And change is vital, as illustrated by The Girl with All the Gifts. While Carey’s novel 

begins as an experiment to create a more progressive apocalypse, its story is essentially a 

demonstration of how patriarchal constructs collapse in on themselves again, and again, and 

again, harming and killing human beings with every structural tremor. This is demonstrated 

through the character of Melanie, who represents a dire prophecy about what could happen 

to humanity if such constructs are not abolished. Under ecofeminist analysis, which 

superficially offers inspiration while really offering unease, the text becomes a severe 

warning about the dangers of the patriarchal habits of domination over both nature and 

women. For if the threats posed to modern civilization are to be overcome, they will not be 

overcome by domination. Rather, they will be overcome by collaboration: males working 

with females, and humanity working with nature.



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WORKS CITED

Belmont, Cynthia. “Ecofeminism and the Natural Disaster Heroine.” Women’s 

 Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 36, no. 5, July 2007, pp. 349-372. 

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Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. University of Minnesota   

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Boluk, Stephanie, and Wylie Lenz. Introduction. Generation Zombie, edited by Stephanie   

 Boluk and Wylie Lenz, Mcfarland, 2011, pp. 1-17.

Carey, M.R. The Girl with All the Gifts. Orbit, 2014.

Carpenter, Mary Wilson. “Representing Apocalypse: Sexual Politics and the Violence of   

 Revelation.” Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the    

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Cohen, Jeffery Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press,   

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Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a  

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Schmeink, Lars. “9/11 and the Wasted Lives of Posthuman Zombies.” Biopunk Dystopias:   

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Sheldon, Rebekah. The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe. University of   

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