Abstract
This chapter focuses on feminist literary theory and practices in their junction with other strands in the thought of modernity. I have looked at the encounter of feminism with postmodernism and psychoanalysis, referring to a range of issues, common to the three areas, and yet different in the specific reverberation they have in contemporary works of fiction by women. Re-reading as a practice of re-appropriation, the notion of deferral, the overcoming of a binary logic, the decline of the metaphysics of presence and of a stable subjectivity: these are some of the features common to such critical modes.
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Notes and References
J. Wicke and M. Ferguson (eds), Feminism and Postmodernism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 2. They speak of the need the one has for the other: ‘Feminist theory and practice … now require an understanding of the transformations of postmoder-nity, while a postmodern politics entails feminism as a cutting edge of its critique’ (p. 4).
M. Russo, the female grotesque: risk, excess and modernity (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 65.
See J. Flax, Thinking Fragments — Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 14.
G. C. Spivak, In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 107 and p. 268.
J. A. Flieger, ‘Entertaining the Ménage à Trois: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Literature’, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. by R. Feldstein and J. Roof (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 186. In this essay the author also stresses the many pitfalls that may be in store for a feminist literary critic (see pp. 188–9).
A. Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’, in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence -Selected Prose 1966–1978 (London: Virago, 1980), p. 35.
An Atlas of the Difficult World — Poems 1988–1991 (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1991), respectively pp. 3, 42, 44. For a perceptive insight on Eastern War Time, see Homi Bhabha, in ‘Unpacking my library … again’, in I. Chambers and L. Curti (eds), The Postcolonial Question — Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
B. Christian, Black Feminist Criticism — Perspectives on Black Women Writers (Oxford and New York, Pergamon Press, 1985), p. ix.
See C. Belsey and J. Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader — Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 1–20. They remind us that such forerunners as Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Q. D. Leavis had already looked at them, if not always with indulgent eyes.
J. Miller, Seductions — Studies in Reading and Culture (London: Virago, 1990), p. 6.
See O. Keny on, Women Novelists Today — A Survey of English Writing of the Seventies and the Eighties (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988), p. 12.
B. Guy-Shetfall, ‘Black Feminist Perspective on Transforming the Academy’, in Theorizing Black Feminisms, ed. by S. M. James and A. P. A. Busia (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 77.
T. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen 1985), p. 8. In A Literature of Their Own (London: Virago, 1991), Showalter had made a polemical attack against modernist writers who, in her opinion, have ignored female sensations, intimacy and physicality. Her critique of Woolf and of her idealisation of androgyny is very harsh: ‘Androgyny was the myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition … Full “femaleness” and full “maleness” were equally dangerous’ (pp. 264–6).
See M. L. Broe and A. Ingram (eds), Women’s Writing in Exile (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 5–6. Stein was racist and classist, Woolf an elitist; the feminist revision of the canon is guilty of the exclusion of those writers who use traditional forms.The book deals with the ‘elsewhere’ of those British writers -whether black and Asian immigrants, or white women coming from the ex-colonies like Doris Lessing, Christina Stead and Jean Rhys — for whom home is no more home than England: ‘exile is both at home and at Home’ (p. 7).
I. Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 134–5.
H. Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in H. Cixous and C. Clément, The Newly Born Woman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 90. All references in the text are to this edition.
Z. Fairbairns, S. Maitland, V. Miner, M. Roberts, M. Wandor, Tales I Tell My Mother — A Collection of Feminist Short Stories (London/West Nyack: The Journeyman Press, 1978). ‘I do not believe there is such a thing as a “feminist” language … Our language is in the use we make of it to call to the surface our submerged history and to express our feminist point of view on the world in which we live’, notes Wandor (p. 9), and Valerie Miner adds: These stories suggest that the personal is political, that narrative includes therapy and propaganda’ (p. 62).
bell hooks, ‘Writing Autobiography’, in R. R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl (eds), Feminisms — An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 1038.
Quoted in J. Taylor, ‘“Memoirs” was made of this’, in Notebooks, Memoirs, Archives — Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing, ed. by J. Taylor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 227. References from the novel are from The Memoirs of a Survivor (London: Picador, 1974).
‘[0]r with his pencil or with his stick or/or light light I mean/never there he will never/never anything/there/any more …’ (S. Beckett, Malone Dies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 144.
V. Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Dent, 1962), p. 242. As Gayatri Spivak says in her essay on the novel (‘an attempt to articulate a woman’s vision of a woman’), the appropriation of language by the woman artist, in contrast with the rationality of western philosophy, leads to the reunion with the mother. ‘To the Lighthouse reminds me that the womb is not an emptiness or a mystery, it is a place of production.’ (‘Unmaking and making in To the Lighthouse’, in In Other Worlds, p. 45).
R. Coward, ‘The True Story of How I Became My Own Person’, in Female Desire — Women’s Sexuality Today (London: Paladin, 1984), p. 185.
J. Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (London: Vintage, 1991), pp. 91–2.All references in the text are to this edition.
T. Morrison, Beloved (New York: Signet Books, 1987), p. 336. All references in the text are to this edition.
H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 17.
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© 1998 Lidia Curti
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Curti, L. (1998). Hybrid Fictions …. In: Female Stories, Female Bodies. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26207-6_4
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