Spacing the Female Self: Tracing Heterotopias

Abstract

This autobiographical extract from Walkerdine’s influential book Schoolgirl Fictions starts from ‘our present’, as all genealogies should do, and gives us a sense of a surprising continuity. Genealogy is not only about discontinuities, but also about unexpected continuities. Nonetheless, this powerful description of Walkerdine’s desire to get away from a familiar local environment and come to the ‘big city’ to become a teacher was not something I had expected to read from a woman educator towards the turning of the millennium. I had thought these were mainly concerns of the nineteenth-century ‘pioneers’, who were attempting to get away from the enclosed space of home, as recounted in the following autobiographical extracts:

Next Saturday I am going to Leicester; I am not sure whether I shall like it; but I do know I shall like it better than being at home. (Collet, unpublished, p. 2)

My mother ran away from home to become a teacher because she was tired of being kept in and made to do tapestry work by her mother […] My mother was an ardent and active suffragette […] she was of course one of the first members of NUWT. (Kean, 1990, p. 4)

Always I have loved to be out […] I wanted independence, I pined to spread my wing…and this year I got liberty, got it as exceedingly, got it in full measure. (Maynard, unpublished chapter 1, p. 13, chapter 9, p. 237)

What do I want? Freedom, opportunity, education, varied experience […] I have glimpsed the possibility of spiritual adventure […] there is a fugitive radiance that must be followed; there are thoughts to be captured. (Corke, 1975, pp. 96, 148)

After nearly ten years’ absence, I began in a few weeks to feel very much out of my element at home […] I grew sadder every day as I grew poorer [….] In vain my father talked of patience and rest. I was determined to fight for my own living, and be a burden to no one. (Smith, 1892, pp. 170, 179)

When I left school I wanted to go out, to go to London, to leave home. I wanted to be a teacher because I was afraid. I went to Goldsmith’s because my teacher told me that it was the best training college in the country. It was also in London. To leave home for London when everyone in my family had always been local, got married and had children. To get out yes [emphasis added]. (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 83)