Space-Oriented Characters: An Eco-critical Study of the Movie Pear Tree

Practicing Ecocriticism, this research attempts to study a movie, Pear Tree, by Dariush MehrJui, adapted from the short story by Goli Taraghi with the same name. Ecocriticism tries to highlight the interrelations between culture and nature in literary texts. This approach tends to analyze texts by studying the importance of the environment in them. In other words, the subject of this approach is surveying the importance of the space in the process of signification. In the movie Pear Tree characters have close relation with the nature or urban spaces, while in the story the main character is mostly drowned in his thoughts. In this study, we try to find the connection between the characters and the space, the conflict between the past and the present, time and space’s gender, and the function of memory. The contradiction between nature (feminine) and culture (masculine) is what actually gives meaning to both texts. The characters cannot be analyzed without considering their relation to the nature (Damavand Garden) or urban places.