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This article calls on two branches of third-wave feminist theory – ecofeminism and post-colonial feminism – to investigate human and nonhuman interrelations in Neil Gaiman’s young adult graphic novel, Stardust , illustrated by Charles Vess. Stardust follows Tristran Thorn on his journey into the land of Faerie in his attempt to capture and bring back a fallen star. Faerie is both a natural and exotic space and Tristran’s journey “to the East” transposes an Orientalist aesthetic onto its wild geography. Tristran, as would-be coloniser, views Faerie as a place of potentially inexhaustible natural resources. The star – as the imperialistic goal – is in fact a woman, which endows the wild space with further Oriental tropes, rendering it sensual, feminine and embodied. Tristran’s imperialistic impulse is thus associated with both a cultural impulse towards the domination of nature and a patriarchal impulse towards the oppression of women. Tristran’s increasing recognition of the star’s right to a fully realised selfhood sits uncomfortably with his initial imperialistic ambitions. As the novel progresses, the East becomes not, as it has been, a natural world ripe for colonial exploration and exploitation, but a place of positive intersubjective relations between humans and non-human nature. Initially both a real and illusory textual space resembling Edward Said’s “imaginative geography,” Faerie ultimately becomes a space to call “home,” in an overt critique of the nineteenth century boy’s adventure story with its implicit glorifi cation of empire. Thus, it is argued, Stardust’s ecofeminist counter-discourse calls for mutual equality in man’s relationship with both women and the environment, positing anthropocentric and androcentric thinking as in need of re-evaluation. Keywords: Neil Gaiman; ecocriticism; ecofeminism; orientalism; imperialism; post-colonialism; nature; indigenous peoples; graphic novels

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“The pale trees shook, although no wind blew, and it seemed to Tristran that they shook in anger”: “blind space” and ecofeminism in a post-colonial reading of Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s graphic novel Stardust (1998)