Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing 303128092X, 9783031280924

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING

Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing Edited by Gina Wisker Leanne Bibby · Heidi Yeandle

Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing Series Editors

Gina Wisker International Ctr for Higher Ed Mgmt University of Bath Cambridge, UK Denise deCaires Narain University of Sussex Brighton, UK

This monograph series aims to showcase late twentieth and twenty-first century work of contemporary women, trans and non-binary writers in literary criticism. The ‘women’ in our title advocates for work specifically on women’s writing in a world of cultural and critical production that can still too easily slide into patriarchal criteria for what constitutes ‘worthy’ literature. This vision for the series is avowedly feminist although we do not require submissions to identify as such and we actively encourage submissions that engage directly with different definitions of ‘feminism’. Our series does make the claim for a continuing imperative to promote work by women authors; it remains essential for our field to make space for this body of literary criticism. Further, our series makes a claim that serious inquiry on late twentieth and twenty-first century women’s writing contributes to a necessary, emerging and exciting research area in literary studies.

Gina Wisker  •  Leanne Bibby Heidi Yeandle Editors

Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing

Editors Gina Wisker University of Bath Bath, UK University of Brighton Brighton, UK

Leanne Bibby School of Social Sciences Humanities and Law Teesside University Middlesbrough, UK

Heidi Yeandle Swansea University Swansea, UK

ISSN 2523-8140     ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing ISBN 978-3-031-28092-4    ISBN 978-3-031-28093-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is for Leanne’s daughter April Rose and Heidi’s son Arthur, both of whom were born as we prepared this collection. As Gina once said, we created a nursery as well as a book, and we’re prouder of them all than we can ever express.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Writing Back and Looking Forward  1 Gina Wisker and Leanne Bibby 2 Haunting  Relationships, Dark Visions, Personal Dangers and Encounters with Strangers in Gothic Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield (1920), Shirley Jackson (1946), Daphne du Maurier (1952), and Alice Munro (2012) 11 Gina Wisker 3 (Dis)continuing  the Mother-daughter Dyad in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? Working Back Through Our Mothers 47 Caleb Sivyer 4 ‘You’ll  be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at all.’ Facts, Fictions, and Anachronism and Realism in Contemporary Women’s Historical Novels 73 Leanne Bibby 5 A  Feminist Genealogy: L’Écriture Féminine, The Youngest Doll, and Contemporary Puerto Rican Women Writers 93 Melissa R. Sande

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6 The  Smallest Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson in Close Quarters111 Shareena Z. Hamzah-Osbourne 7 “They  are not only one; they’re two, and three, and four”: Building a Trauma Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing139 Laura Dawkins 8 ‘Ageing  and Care in Contemporary Women’s Writing: Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby’ 165 Katsura Sako 9 (Re)Writing  the Future/Disavowing the Past: Reading Feminism(s) in The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale189 Adele Jones Index215

Notes on Contributors

Leanne Bibby  is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University. Her research examines the intersections between literary writing and historical narrative. She has served as Secretary on the Executive Committee of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association. Her book A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women – Fictions, Histories, Myths was published in 2022 by Palgrave. Laura Dawkins  is Professor of English at Murray State University. Her articles on American literature have appeared in Callaloo, South Atlantic Review, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory,  and  49th  Parallel, among other journals, as well as in seven edited collections, including Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement, Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, and  The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader. Shareena Z. Hamzah-Osbourne   is an Honorary Research Associate at Swansea University and was a Research Fellow with the Florence Mockeridge Fellowship Group. She has taught English in Malaysia, Iran, and the UK.  Her book entitled  Jeanette Winterson’s Narratives of Desire: Rethinking Fetishism was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Adele Jones  is a tutor at Swansea University in English Literature and at the Centre for Academic Success. Her research interests include neo-­ Victorianism,  hauntedness, the work of Sarah Waters, and psychoanalytic theory.

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Katsura Sako  is an Associate Professor of English at Keio University, Japan. She has research interests in post-war/contemporary British literature, gender and literary/cultural gerontology. She is a co-author of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics (Routledge, 2019) and a co-editor of Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness and Care (Routledge, 2021). She has published in journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing, Women: A Cultural Review and Feminist Review. Melissa R. Sande  is the Dean of Humanities at Union County College, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Quarterly Horse, The Researcher, and Papers on Language and Literature. She is the co-editor of  Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the AltRight, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Caleb Sivyer  is Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he teaches undergraduate and foundation year modules on a wide range of subjects including myths and fairy tales, political and cultural theory, and contemporary literature. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Cardiff University, with a thesis on the intersection of gender and visuality in selected works by Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter. He also has a background in philosophy, holding a BA in philosophy from the University of Kent. His research interests include contemporary literature, women’s writing, gender and sexuality, literary and cultural theory, fairy tales, and philosophy. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on Angela Carter, as well as articles on other writers, including J.G. Ballard and Alison Bechdel. He is the co-founder (along with Marie Mulvey-­ Roberts and Charlotte Crofts) of the Angela Carter Society and he runs a website devoted to the life and works of Angela Carter (www.angelacarteronline.com) which has a thriving online community. Gina  Wisker  is an Associate professor in the International Centre for Higher Education Management, University of Bath and Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher Education University of Brighton. Gina also teaches literature for the Open University. Her research and teaching interests are in contemporary women’s writing, Gothic writing, horror and postcolonial writing and she has published prolifically on these topics. Heidi Yeandle  is based at Swansea University, and has numerous publications related to Angela Carter including Angela Carter and Western Philosophy (2017).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Writing Back and Looking Forward Gina Wisker and Leanne Bibby

This book is one of the first to examine the connections and conversations between women writers from the twentieth century and the twenty-first century. The essays here consider the ways in which twenty-first-century women writers look back and respond to their predecessors within the field of contemporary women’s writing. In addition to looking back to the foundations of contemporary women’s writing, the book looks forward and considers how this category may be defined in future decades. When approaching the literary writing of the twenty-first century and its relationship to that of the twentieth century, of course we are confronted with the moving target that is ‘the contemporary’ itself. This concept takes on new significance when we focus on women’s writing because of the G. Wisker University of Bath, Bath, UK University of Brighton, Brighton, UK L. Bibby (*) School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_1

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crucial, late-twentieth-century feminist critical project of establishing, describing and celebrating, to borrow Elaine Showalter’s resonant title of her 1999 study, ‘a literature of their own’1 for women. Writing about the relationships between women’s writings is an always-vital political project with a rich history, and it is ongoing. We contend that establishing and delineating the contemporary is, for women writers, another ongoing political project to which this collection of essays aims, in part, to contribute. The very notion of ‘the contemporary’ has its own lifespan. The Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, whose 10th anniversary conference in 2015 provided a starting point for some of the thinking and work published in this book, defines ‘contemporary’ writing as that published after the 1970s.2 Other, previous definitions of contemporary writing have begun variously in 1945, the 1970s, the 1990s, after the September 11 2001 terror attacks and after the 2008 global financial crisis.3 There are compelling cases to make for all of these, although changing definitions of the contemporary and their evident relationship to periodisation remind us of those definitions’ political nature. The very existence of the contemporary indicates a perceived need to establish each cultural product’s proximity to the present moment and its distance from certain historical events. Definitions of the contemporary, then, do indeed have a lifespan, and are also intrinsically concerned with the legacies of certain pasts—and a variety of understandings is, we feel, a positive thing. In summarising changing definitions of the contemporary, Emily Hyde and Sarah Wasserman recognise the need, confirmed in the literature on the topic (in which there is little consensus), to ‘dispel any neat sense of period’: ‘Rather than focusing on how the period is defined, our sense is that the term marks not only the objects scholars elect to study but also the methods they deem most effective in studying them. Together, the objects critics select and how they read them define the period as it unfolds.’4 This attitude is in keeping with the sentiments expressed in this collection, which seeks to look at the different ways in which women authors have understood the influences and pressures on the contemporary moment. In their 2008 introduction to a special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review on contemporary women’s writing, feminist scholars Lucie Armitt, Mary Joannou and Paulina Palmer reflect on the meanings of the contemporary for women authors specifically, and in terms of the ‘objects’ studied and the methods determined most appropriate to study

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them. They note the ‘symbiosis between women’s writing and academia’,5 a symbiosis we might imagine to be under some strain at the present moment of politicised pressures on the arts and humanities in universities. These authors also point out that certain feminist writers, such as Michèle Roberts, were employed as academics following experience in feminist publishing and activism, and brought an awareness of ‘the politicised impact of writing within the marketplace’ to complement awareness of its role in the academy.6 In recent decades and especially since the expansion of higher education in the UK, women authors have certainly become simultaneously involved both in defining what contemporary literature is as academics and commentators, and in producing it, while women’s novels populate both bestseller lists and university reading lists in large numbers. This situation, in which literary writing often makes clear its reflections on past works and the porous relationships between academia and literary and popular culture, is certainly part of what characterises contemporary women’s writing. This range of complex relationships is, again, something to be embraced, in our view. This collection provides occasion to re-evaluate what the contemporary means for women writers because many of the twentieth-century texts studied in these essays, including the work of Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Rosario Ferre have been and still are considered decidedly contemporary. Furthermore, it is far from correct or fair to frame these works as being surpassed by those of a ‘new’ generation of writers, and that is not what this collection seeks to do. Again, these essays instead draw out some of the various forms of relationship and conversation between texts. Women authors do not necessarily seek to join a ‘lineage’ of their predecessors, but can speak back to other women’s writing in many more lateral ways. The works discussed here engage, directly or metafictionally, with non-literary forms, popular literature, and the cultural forms of activism. There is a need to think in entirely new ways about periodisation as new ways of understanding feminist history emerge along with new global perspectives, as environmental pressures intensify and as renewed attacks on women’s rights are mounted around the world; these are all reasons to question conventional ideas about literary lineages, networks and influences beyond patriarchal or otherwise narrow models. For example, when we consider the ‘legacies’ of twentieth-century women’s writing, there is a need to reconsider the familial metaphors such as ‘lineage’ often used to characterise these and which hark back partly to Virginia Woolf’s suggestion in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that ‘we

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think back through our mothers if we are women’.7 Literary criticism of women’s writing often makes reference to its place in perceived lineages of writers and their work. The matrilineal metaphor is compelling, but no longer adequate. Contemporary women’s writing, as the essays in this collection suggest, take a view of the contemporary moment that looks forward as well as back. To be a woman author, it seems, is to contemplate different forms of time and the in-between spaces of history and culture. Julia Kristeva, in her essay ‘Women’s Time,’ describes ‘the response that human groupings, united in space and time, have given not to the problems of the PRODUCTION of material goods (i.e., the domain of the economy and of the human relationships it implies, politics, etc.) but, rather, to those of REPRODUCTION, survival of the species, life and death, the body, sex, and symbol.’8 A feminist ‘inquiry on time’, Kristeva’s essay contends presciently, is useful because of ‘that time which the feminist movement both inherits and modifies.’ Kristeva’s analysis of different types of temporality, taking into account the particular status of feminine subjectivity, is only one way in which feminist thinking has acknowledged that such subjectivity is itself ‘a problem with respect to a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history.’9 Seen through a feminist lens, it is possible to see the legacies and lifespans of women’s writing as much more multifarious. The ‘lifespans’ of women’s writing are as complex to study as its legacies. Here, we confront another measure of time, and a disarmingly physical one: a life. Our decision to invite work for this book that examines the continuities between twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing is a reminder of the length of a human lifespan and that, sooner than we perhaps think, legacies are all that we have left. A lifespan is a substantial period of history and at the same time, can be seen in starkly human terms. Contemporary women’s writing is not ‘newness’ in isolation; nor is it separable from its own recent and human past. Gina Wisker’s chapter ‘Haunting relationships, dark visions, personal dangers and encounters with strangers in Gothic short stories by Katherine Mansfield (1920), Shirley Jackson (1946), Daphne du Maurier (1952), and Alice Munro (2012)’ considers some of the key Gothic writings of these four authors precisely in terms of their confrontation with womanhood, subjectivity, life, death and time itself. Wisker draws out the startling conversations between their Gothic short stories, in terms of their use of defamiliarization and the figure of the often male, ambivalent or

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dangerous stranger. The chapter situates these four women authors, more commonly read in separate contexts and categories such as Modernism (Mansfield) and the Gothic generally (Jackson and du Maurier), in the development of a vital, feminist ‘everyday Gothic.’ Despite the seeming temptation to read the short stories’ vulnerable, compromised women protagonists as culpable somehow in their own danger, Wisker’s readings view the women as embracing the possibilities and hope inherent in moments of uncertainty, only to find that their societies’ patriarchal promises of romantic, domestic or otherwise personal fulfilment are mere masks upon the emptiness and perils of daily life. The legacies of Mansfield, du Maurier and Jackson in the twentieth century for Munro in the twenty-­ first are ones that makes new critical space for consideration of, as Wisker explains, the ‘everyday’ horror of patriarchal culture and its literary features of ‘displacement, undermining of comfortable narratives, complacencies, relationships, certainties about self, reality, time, place, and particularly identity.’ Caleb Sivyer’s chapter ‘(Dis)continuing the mother-daughter dyad in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? Working Back Through Our Mothers’ offers crucial new responses to matrilineal metaphors in feminist criticism through the work of an important author. Sivyer poses the title of Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic (that is, ‘auto-bio-graphic’) novel in different forms to consider biological, literary and therapeutic forms of ‘mother’-hood. This book is, Sivyer argues, ‘about continuity and difference, lineage and innovation’—a text that manages the complexities of time, memory and meaning-making through the familiar metaphor of motherhood. A highlight of this chapter is its compelling reading of literary mothers, providing evidence of the deliberateness with which women writers respond both to literary predecessors and the idea itself of literary mothers. Sivyer finds that the women writers referenced in the book function in several ways: by representing to Bechdel previous generations of women writers who were successful in the face of patriarchal constraints, by demonstrating the ways in which writing can be therapeutic, and by embodying a concern with distinctly female voices in the context of masculine literary conventions. By looking back at this multiplicity of mother figures and writing back to them, Bechdel, in Sivyer’s reading, is able to move forward through her writing. In ‘“You will be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at all.” Facts, Fictions, and Anachronism and Realism in Contemporary Women’s Historical Novels’, Leanne Bibby looks at the hugely popular genre of

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historical romance and its critical marginalisation. Specifically, Bibby considers the novels of Deryn Lake and Suzannah Dunn, and their portrayals of doomed Tudor queens Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. Following the romantic historical novels of the late twentieth-­century, Bibby argues, Dunn’s more self-conscious Tudor fictions intensify Lake’s deliberately inventive, provocative but always knowledgeable use of historical facts, myths and legends side-by-side. This demands re-­consideration of twentyfirst-century historical fictions such as Dunn’s that bridge many assumed gaps between popular and literary fictions, with important implications for novels marketed and perceived in limiting terms as ‘women’s fiction.’ Bibby uses Hayden White’s notion of ‘the practical past’ to contend that Lake, Dunn and other women authors including Hilary Mantel help to question the boundaries between professional historiography and literary appropriations of historical narrative. In her chapter ‘A Feminist Genealogy: L’Écriture Féminine, The Youngest Doll, and Contemporary Puerto Rican Women Writers’, Melissa Sande argues against progressive narratives of literary history in favour of ‘forged space’ for new writing and identities with a focus on the woman authors of Puerto Rico. As part of this compelling reading, Sande embraces French feminist theorisations of women’s language, desire, and mother-daughter genealogies as part of understanding the complex relationships between the past and present. L’écriture féminine, Sande argues, makes women the possessors of their own discourse, a reminder of the persistent power of this late twentieth-century framework for reading women’s cultural production. This chapter breaks vital ground in reading conversations between women’s writing across geographical distances. Shareena Hamzah contributes to studies of Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson in her chapter ‘The Smallest Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson in Close Quarters’ by arguing that both are, in comparable ways, writers at the forefront of shifts in thinking about women’s writing itself. Hamzah’s critique provides parameters for thinking of Woolf and Winterson as part of the same literary lifespan between modernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism. At its most fundamental, Hamzah suggests, writing is the exercise of a type of freedom, and this chapter points back to some of the many ways in which Woolf indicated feminist concerns that were then addressed more directly by Winterson, taking as a starting point the ‘places of refuge’ for reading and writing that these authors described—‘a room of one’s own’ for Woolf and the outdoor toilet for Winterson. The ‘close quarters’ of the chapter’s

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title refers in part to these spaces of refuge and also to the linguistic spaces that make up these authors’ works’ close and ambivalent relationship to each other. Hamzah’s chapter contributes to ongoing debates about these authors and literary feminism by emphasising their uneasy yet key relationships to literary movements in general, and indicating the parameters of wider debates on ‘influence, inheritance and (dis)continuity’ between authors. Conventional understandings of such movements and categories, as at other points in this collection, do not map easily onto women’s writings when these writings speak to each other as intimately as Winterson’s speak to Woolf’s. Laura Dawkins, in her chapter ‘“They are not only one; they’re two, and three, and four”: Building a Trauma Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing’, carries out an insightful new reading of Morrison’s peerless neo-slave novel by reading its legacies and parallels in Gyasi’s acclaimed historical novel. Here, Dawkins frames both books as commentaries on the intergenerational and transatlantic trauma caused by slavery and colonialism. Gyasi’s character Akua is read as a counterpart of Morrison’s Sethe to demonstrate this intergenerational impact on African as well as African American mothers. Especially striking in this chapter is Dawkins’s use of the notion of ‘rememory’ and the various ways in which these texts make it possible to remember the almost unimaginable horrors of slavery. As Dawkins explains, ‘In Homegoing, as in Beloved, “passing on” traumatic memory through storytelling both strengthens communal bonds and enables survivors to gain narrative control over an “unspeakable” past.’ Legacies between stories as between historical narratives are never simply about lineage and inheritance, as women’s neo-slave narratives remind us. Katsura Sako’s chapter ‘Ageing and Care in Contemporary Women’s Writing: Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby’ approaches the question of lifespans directly in its consideration of ageing and care in these novels. Lessing and Drabble, as Sako explains, are representative of writers publishing into the twenty-­ first century who started writing ‘in the post-war period or in the sixties and seventies.’ Lessing, Sako argues, broke new ground by writing about ageing and care in the 1980s, a project in which Drabble then participated in the 2010s. Thus, the chapter address literal legacies and lifespans, human and literary, while at the same time critiquing ‘the linear progressive model of time that marginalises women’s care, and those older and less able’ in the first place. This chapter addresses time itself in vital ways

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for the study of contemporary women’s writing, gathering together key feminist scholarship on the ways in which hegemonic clock time marginalises women, their lives and their work. Sako argues compellingly that clock time cannot capture certain important forms of feminine experience. Sako offers new readings of intergenerational relationships and the ethics of care in the work of Lessing and Drabble, and speaks to the concerns of this whole volume by suggesting that life ‘is an ongoing search for, and revision of, meanings and stories.’ In the context of resisting narratives that rely on linear, progressive understandings of time, such revision can be powerful indeed. Adele Jones’s chapter ‘(Re)Writing the Future/Disavowing the Past: Reading Feminism(s) in The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale’ offers a timely reading of two feminist visions of the future in order to examine notions of ‘friendship, mentorship and collaboration’ between Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman, in the case of some of their most popular and critically contentious works. Like Hamzah, Jones refreshes discussions of canonically feminist works and feminist theory by arguing that the relationship between these texts has ‘converged to both mirror and inform a particular moment within feminism and within contemporary women’s writing’, a moment that is about questioning contemporary discomfort with certain aspects of feminist history, and confronting anxieties about feminism’s future. Jones reads the The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power in view of the contemporary feminist movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp, in the context of which The Power has been read and The Handmaid’s Tale adapted into a hugely popular TV series. Importantly, Jones expands on these authors’ own complex, self-confessed relationship to feminism, like Hamzah in her discussion of Woolf and Winterson, and the sometimes ironic conversations between their texts. As women’s writing speaks as directly as ever to feminist activism, looking in imaginative ways backwards as well as forwards, Jones’s chapter provides a welcome reassessment of the meanings of feminist ‘waves’ now through these novelists’ work. Current debates around women’s writing, as these chapters demonstrate, move quickly and are entrenched in popular discourses around, for example, sexual violence, structural inequalities and the perceived value of cultural products by women. Furthermore, such debates have the power to respond to and lead change in thinking and expression. Meanwhile, publishing of women’s writing and the study of these works are vibrant and energising, and this is reflected in the themes of the texts covered in

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the following chapters. This collection demonstrates and underlines the idea that the contemporary, the ‘now’ of women’s writing, is also about its recent pasts—the legacies left to it by other texts and authors—and its already-unfolding futures. There is also a need to continually remake these pasts and futures. Both the legacies of past forms of women’s writing and the lifespans of current ones are about understanding the limitations of patriarchal understandings of time, kinship, literary canons, political movements and relationships between subjects. In this way, women’s literary writing can formulate productive new ways to discuss identities, politics and power in all its forms. These essays clarify the vibrant legacies of women’s writing and underline the idea that contemporary women’s writings’ lifespans are, finally and hopefully, what we make them.

Notes 1. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2. ‘About the CWWA,’ The Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, accessed September 21 2021, http://thecwwa.org 3. Emily Hyde and Sarah Wasserman, ‘The Contemporary,’ Literature Compass 14, no. 9 (2017): 2. 4. Hyde and Wasserman, ‘The Contemporary,’ 3. 5. Lucie Armitt, Mary Joannou and Paulina Palmer, ‘Introduction: Contemporary Women’s Writing,’ Women: A Cultural Review 19, no. 1 (2008): 2. 6. Armitt, Joannou and Palmer, ‘Introduction: Contemporary Women’s Writing,’ 1. 7. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, in A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, ed. Michele Barrett (London: Penguin, 2000), 69. 8. Julia Kristeva, Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, ‘Women’s Time,’ Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 14. 9. Kristeva, Jardine and Blake, ‘Women’s Time,’ 17.

Works Cited Armitt, Lucie, Mary Joannou and Paulina Palmer ‘Introduction: Contemporary Women’s Writing.’ Women: A Cultural Review 19, no. 1 (2008): 1-4. Hyde, Emily and Sarah Wasserman. ‘The Contemporary.’ Literature Compass 14, no. 9 (2017): 1-19.

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Kristeva, Julia, Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, ‘Women’s Time,’ Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 13-35. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas. Edited by Michele Barrett. London: Penguin, 2000.

CHAPTER 2

Haunting Relationships, Dark Visions, Personal Dangers and Encounters with Strangers in Gothic Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield (1920), Shirley Jackson (1946), Daphne du Maurier (1952), and Alice Munro (2012) Gina Wisker

Katherine Mansfield’s sharply observed, hypersensitive, cruel, often dark versions and visions of women’s interior lives reveal first a tentative, misinterpreted, dissociated hold on a version of “reality” and the self, and then expose the duplicity of relationships. These are both ideal/ised ostensibly romantic connections (“Poison,” 1920)1 and seemingly everyday encounters (“The Little Governess,” 1915),2 which can turn sour, threatening, undermining dreams about women’s lives, youth, and relationships, as in “Her First Ball” (1921).3 Caught up in their own fantasies, reveries,

G. Wisker (*) University of Bath, Bath, UK University of Brighton, Brighton, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_2

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self-delusion, her often young, female, characters are hyper-sensitive, mistaken and vulnerable. This chapter argues that defamiliarization, a favourite function of the Gothic, is central to the literary legacies and lifespans of Mansfield’s writing through the work of other women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Defamiliarization, in Mansfield’s short stories, is the means through which complacency is punctured, the comfortable everyday threatened, and the often romanticised stories by which people direct and cushion their lives emptied out4,5. Strangers who introduce the dangerous and exciting unknown are often catalysts in this process of undermining dreams, threatening women’s ontological security. Misreading of interactions, misinterpretation of relationships and dangerous liaisons are familiar traits in the work of women writers who consciously or less consciously form part of Mansfield’s literary legacy. Daphne du Maurier’s short stories regularly feature problematic or endangered, distracted, sometimes obsessional women, for example in “Fairy Tale” (1980),6 “The Lover” (1961),7 “The Blue Lenses” (1960),8 “Escape” (2011),9 “The Limpet” (2011)10 and “Kiss Me Again, Stranger, 1953).11 Many of Shirley Jackson’s women, Like Mansfield’s and du Maurier’s, also inhabit confused, liminal unstable worlds. They feel trapped and unreal, victims of the actual insecure fickleness of their investment in fixities of narratives, place and identity. For one, in “The Pillar of Salt” (1948),12 staying in a New York apartment disorients her sense of location and reality; for another in “The Beautiful Stranger” (1946),13 her own home and husband become confused with those belonging to other people. Easily fooled, another woman fruitlessly awaits her supposed husband to be and the planned wedding in “The Daemon Lover” (1949)14 only to realise he has lied and left her. Jackson’s women like Mansfield’s, du Maurier’s and also Alice Munro’s, are often self-delusional, their investments in certain comfortable or romantic narratives undercut, revealed as social fictions, and their seeming securities emptied out by deceitful men or their own unreliable fantasies. The fourth woman author of short stories considered here, Nobel Prize winning (2013) Alice Munro, combines the domestic everyday and the uncanny in her work. Her women characters are usually stuck in small rural towns around Lake Huron in Ontario, and are likely to invest in fragile relationships, unrealisable hopes and dreams. Some challenge conventions and then suffer, most frequently from the actions of men who betray or abandon them at their most vulnerable as in “Leaving Maverley” (2012),15 “Amundsen” (2012),16 “Corrie” (2012)17 and “Train” (2012).18

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Munro’s stories emphasise life’s emptiness, loss, misinterpretations, and for women, a social entrapment in bleak, small towns, suffering restricted lives, cut off by the cold and distance, let down by their own hopes and fantasies. The relationship between the everyday lives of women, and the disturbances and dismay expressed through Gothic defamiliarisation in the short stories of these four influential women writers is explored here through their tales of encounters with strangers, focusing mainly on: Katherine Mansfield’s “Her First Ball” (1921);19 Shirley Jackson’s “The Beautiful Stranger” (1946)20 and “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”21 (2010); Daphne du Maurier’s “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” (1952)22 and “The Alibi” (1959)23 and Alice Munro’s “To Reach Japan” (2012).24 The entry of a stranger into a seemingly calm place or ordinary life is a moment of potential, of desire. It offers an opportunity for excitement, change, romance, escape. However, the stranger and the moment can also defamiliarize the seemingly reliable if mundane everyday, and open up an existential abyss of the strange, disorientating, destabilising, ultimately destroying everything one believes one knows about oneself, about others, and the world.

Women’s Gothic When considering women’s Gothic, Susanne Becker sees the “writing and re-writing of female texts haunting one another: around the interrogative texture of romantic love and female desire, of gender construction between le propre and the monstrous-feminine, of the (contextualising) dynamics of domestic horror”.25 Gothic texts by women leave traces in the works of those influenced by them, who follow them, undermining conventional fictions of romance, marriage and domesticity. Katy Shaw’s Hauntology (2018)26 also explores the ways in which earlier influential texts haunt and repeat in newer work. This haunting and questioning lie at the heart of the Gothic fiction of twentieth and twenty first century women writers Mansfield, du Maurier, Jackson and Munro and lurk in influences that overtly or silently leak between them. Each works with the social stabilities and values perpetuated in women’s fictions and, as we move on through the writing lives of the four women considered here, with the ways in which these notional stabilities have already been problematised and exposed as socially constructed fictions, which Angela Carter labels “the fictions of my femininity” (1983, 122).27 Readings of these four authors as comfortably conformist, nostalgic, or as somehow rewarding with a

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conventional ending found in popular romances with a smattering of Gothic daring are, on closer scrutiny, proved to be partial, rather lazy readings. A significant feminist journal long ago sent me a six page rejection letter for commenting that Katherine Mansfield pointed out women’s collusion in their own entrapment and limited worldviews when she wrote: I feel that I do not realise what women in the future will be capable of achieving—They truly, as yet, have never had their chance. Talk of our enlightened days and our emancipated country—pure nonsense. We are firmly held in self-fashioned chains of slavery yet. Now I see that they are self-fashioned and must be self-removed.28

These self-fashioned chains are evident in the often dangerous, collusive delusions in which women engage in the work of all four writers, where they subsequently are cheated, let down, led on (and in some other stories, even murdered). The Gothic in the work of these four writers is not that of bodice-rippers or Hollywood romance; rather, it exposes the socially-engineered, uncritically-ingested promises of being rescued from one’s mundane self, and uncritically loved and cared for. We are reminded, perhaps, of the (deadly) irony of Shirley Jackson’s Eleanor Vance’s fantasy “journeys end in lovers’ meeting” (The Haunting of Hill House, 1959).29 Earlier, I commented that “Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (1998)30 revived the appreciation of Daphne du Maurier as a Gothic writer and in so doing overturned the established version of female Gothic as offering resolutions and a happy ending”.31 Du Maurier’s women’s Gothic also undercuts relationships and domestic securities but unlike Angela Carter’s carnivalesque, ultimately celebratory work, she makes no suggestions about ways out or ways forward. Alice Munro’s “accessible, moving stories explore human relationships through ordinary, everyday events”32, as described by the British Council’s Literature website. However, the Gothic qualities of Munro’s work also sit alongside the everyday, undercutting its complacent comforts. The women in her stories often have split-selves, are imprisoned in fantasy views of situations which are ultimately undermined and proven to be unrewarding. Escapes into potential relationships or from the bleak isolation and small-mindedness of small town life dissipate into nothing. Her women are stuck. Munro acknowledges the influence of Gothic writer Joyce Carol

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Oates and while her work leans less towards the fantastic than that of Oates, her stories are equally painful, finely-observed tales of obsessions and frustrated passions, the stuff of rural and domestic life with a sour, Gothic turn. All four women use the tight, taut world of the short story, the influence of locations and a single (probably) delusional point of view to explore ontological insecurities, duplicitous relationships, misread situations and personal dangers. Each deals with a form of Gothic horror and danger in the everyday lives of women, expressed either through the ways in which the selfish, single-minded tunnel vision of controlling men delineates, undermines, destroys the lives of and worth of these women, or through their inhabiting their own dissociated vision and version of life. In the short stories of each writer we see movement in and out of unstable, often dangerous world views based in fixation and misinterpretation. The women in their stories are often trapped in social narratives of what women should be, need and want. They suffer increasing ontological insecurities, delusions, fear of being alone, ignored and unseen, and fear of being in social spaces with others. Theirs are terrifying, disorienting experiences of moving through the everyday, testifying to the huge gulf they feel between what’s defined as normal behaviour and what is experienced, whether understood, managed, or not. Each is a writer of their age and location(s). Katherine Mansfield and Du Maurier travelled a great deal, Mansfield around Europe, between New Zealand and the UK; Du Maurier in Europe, the UK, and the Middle East. Shirley Jackson travelled only within the US, and wrote from home where she was considered a housewife, while Alice Munro mostly focuses on the vast areas of Canada, and particularly her native Ontario with its remote small towns. All four writers destabilise what seems dependable: connections between self and the shared world, and any security, comfort and fixities in relationships. In the hands of Katherine Mansfield, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Alice Munro, no norms can be relied upon. Each displays the destabilisation which is a characteristic of what Chris Baldick defines as the traditional Gothic: for the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a sense of a fearful inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an effect of sickening descent into disintegration.33

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Baldick’s understanding of the effects produced by the Gothic reminds us of philosophical questionings concerning the stability and security of identity, time, space, and everyday shared reality as explored through the philosophical work of early twentieth century phenomenologists Husserl (1913)34 and Merleau Ponty (1945)35 and also existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (La Nausée, 1938)36. In each iteration of these explorations of the relationship between the self, the world and the sense impressions which we receive from our interactions with the world and other living beings, shared markers such as gestures and words either are or become unfixed, unstable. As a result, misinterpretation of the intentions of others, and one’s own secure identity and position in the (now unstable) world are all called into question. As I noted when considering Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938- as is Sartre’s novel)37 and several short stories, everything is insecure: Feeling disorientated and terrified, the self can force interpretations on the versions of the world it receives with a view to making sense of it and to constructing stories about the relationship between self and world, things, or words. Delusions can follow, such as are suffered by several of Du Maurier’s characters.”38

Freud, Existentialism and Phenomenology In an important illumination of defamiliarization as a process, Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche,39 definitions of the uncanny emphasise the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar (the opposite of homely or heimlich), rather than simply mysterious. Interest in Hoffman’s “The Sandman” (1816)40 introduces the issues of doubles, objects which come to life/are seen as human (Olympia), the vulnerability and unreliability of your eyes, a relationship between eyes and castration, and the link between the uncanny and taboo. For Freud, the uncanny locates strangeness in the ordinary. This aligns a sense of the uncanny with disorientation made up of the variously constructed relationship between words and things, labels and things/people, notions of self and world, a lack of clear categories, ‘norms’, the everyday, the stories by which we interpret the world and people, events, creatures, ourselves—all are constructed, transient, invested in the real but not of themselves solidly real. This disturbance of the everyday casts us into a liminal space of insecurity and existential doubt about self and the real, and the potential for disruption.

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The influence of the varying ways in which phenomenologists, including Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and then existentialism as developed by Sartre (peaking for me in Nausea, 1938)41 variously disturb and make claims for the relationships between the world, the word and the self, subject and object, names of things and experience of them and the narratives by which we make sense of them, to my mind informs the destabilisation of comfortable, fixed reality in the work of all four but particularly in the cases of Jackson’s wives stuck in New  York apartments and Daphne du Maurier’s predatory men who lack insight or care in “The Alibi” (1959)42, as well as her women who inhabit unreal worlds. The sense of defamiliarization, disorientation, and the gap between words and things, lived experience, subjectivity and the world of labels and interactions runs throughout these works—as does the disturbance of the Gothic, which punctures familiarity and complacency and renders its experience dangerous and unstable. The characteristics of the Gothic and the disorientations and instabilities of words and identities which I earlier applied to the work of du Maurier can equally illuminate that of Mansfield, Jackson and Munro when we explore the ways in which the catalyst of the strange, and particularly of the behaviour of a stranger, destabilises the ontological securities of their women characters. Outsiders and strangers are disruptive to ostensible order, whether they seem to blend in or deliberately question, undermine and expose that often dull routine or that comfortable complacency. In writing of the disruption and questioning of the Beat poets (contemporaries of Jackson, and Munro and on the edge of du Maurier’s period of writing), Colin Wilson notes: “What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality. […] the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable […] world of the bourgeois […]. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. … The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos […]; in spite of this, truth must be told, chaos must be faced.”43

Albert Camus, contemporary of Sartre, wrote in L’ Étranger (1942)44 (commonly referred to as ‘The Outsider’) of the absurdity of a murder charge leading to punishment of death for Merseult, a stranger or outsider unable to read a community and misread by them, and Jian Farmouhand (2021)45 in identifying as outsiders both the Beat poets. Charles Bukowski, himself, like Jackson, influenced by Hollywood films, notes of Beat writing that it is driven by “This idea of facing chaos and making sense of it, and

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of the truth being told at all costs.”46 The kind of truth exposed by the intrusion of an outsider, a stranger into the lives of the women in Mansfield, du Maurier, Jackson and Munro reveals a dangerous emptiness at the heart of their dull or naively fanciful lives. This is women’s Gothic, in which the house, home and marriage offer promise but are also perhaps only filled with instability, the unsafe, and empty or controlling, deadly relationships. Each author undermines what they reveal to be the tentative securities of felt, lived, everyday reality, and women’s interior lives, revealing any relationship to a shared reality, any version of a safe story to be a tenuous, deceitful and often dangerous gap or trap. They each intermix a form of existential insecurity, the revelation of inner, only constructed and tentatively-­shared links between self and objects, self and any shared world. Freud’s “the unheimlich”47 thus underlines the importance of defamiliarization along with the disturbances of complacency and security of identity, reality, relationships, particularly the domestic and romantic, which are key characteristics of the Gothic. Shirley Jackson’s work is distinctly more Gothic than that of the other three writers, although each shares similar concerns. She uses the language, narrative trajectory, imagery of Gothic and Gothic Horror, while she expresses everyday delusions, imprisonments, infringements, inner disturbance and the unreality of any relationship or life-guiding narrative, as well as doubts about the solidity of identity and relationships within a shared, definable world. In both fiction and life, change triggers potentially exciting or threatening disruption and both strange surroundings and the stranger are catalysts for new opportunities. Change of surroundings offers exciting new perspectives, or dangerous disorientation, and the entrance of a stranger into the assuredly safe and familiar, taken-for-granted routine within the complacent everyday is a moment of potential. For each writer considered here, entering a strange place and meeting a stranger opens up a liminal space, acting as catalyst for transformative experiences which, more often than not, are negative and destructive.

Katherine Mansfield (1921) The teenage years are perhaps especially vulnerable ones since all is in flux. In “Her First Ball” (1921)48 the first story I ever read by Mansfield, young Leila goes with friends to her first ball. Her exuberance and naivete leave her excited and overwhelmed with the people, the music, whirled round

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with dancing and endearingly awkward in her social interactions, and intrigued that all conversations start with discussing the floor and offering silly responses such as ‘it’s slippery’. Leila is giddy with the joy and potential of the dance and with her own youth. However, this delight in the liminality of the new place and new moment is undermined. Her next partner appears, a stranger, a wheezing, small, fat, old man with the odd button missing, and she takes pity on him, agreeing to dance. He is a regular, and says has been doing this for thirty years, i.e. twelve years before she was born. She’s kindly, innocent, tolerant, safe in her youth and beauty and then he punctures it all: Leila looked at his bald head, and she felt quite sorry for him. ‘I think it’s marvellous to be still going on,’ she said kindly. ‘Kind little lady,’ said the fat man, and he pressed her a little closer, and hummed a bar of the waltz. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you can’t hope to last anything like as long as that. No-o,’ said the fat man, ‘long before that you’ll be sitting up there on the stage, looking on, in your nice black velvet. And these pretty arms will have turned into little short fat ones, and you’ll beat time with such a different kind of fan—a black bony one.49

All her beauty and youth are stripped away. This cruel stranger punctures her self confidence and her sense of the value of her own youth. His role resembles that of the mean, old, uninvited fairy in “Sleeping Beauty” (1812)50 who curses the baby princess to prick her finger and die (converted by the fairy godmother into sleeping for 100 years). As he points out, women have a short shelf life. Mansfield’s young women are often almost giddy with their childlike trust and desire for everything to be wonderful. Like Bertha in “Bliss” (1918),51 highly strung (compared to a fine fiddle) and hyper-sensitive (but largely naively unaware of infidelities and disappointments), these women are excited, blinkered, believing themselves safe, unaware of cold realities and deliberate cruelties, their vulnerability threatened by intrusions into their personal envelope of youth and joy but equally somehow culpable in their naivety. Lone traveller in a foreign land, the girl in “The Little Governess” (1915),52 is delusional in refusing or being unable to recognise the predatory old man on the train as just that. Rather naïve, unused to travelling and over sensitive as she is, she is constantly projecting versions of him as a friendly old uncle, unable to see the parallel storyline reading which can be sensed in traces, hesitancies, words out of place and

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in the imagery. This predatory stranger flatters her and appears friendly but the reader picks up the danger signals she misses. She invests in his friendly attention, and agrees to get off the train with him. In so doing, she puts herself in great danger of physical attack of some sort, but the real loss is of her once possible job, her reputation, and her sense of self-­ control, self-preservation, security. This recalls Leila’s (“Her First Ball”, 1921)53 naïve bubble of her own influence and safety, produced from nothing more than her female youthfulness, and lost when revealed as only a tentative, temporary delusion. Much later, Alice Munro’s ‘To Reach Japan’ (2012)54 similarly uses the liminal space, time and place of a train journey, here as an adventure for a wayward wife seeking the unknown, but bringing real danger to her child, and playing out the excitement of the unfamiliar and transitory, the comfort and threat of strangers. For Katherine Mansfield’s characters, the lone young governess travelling on a train, Bertha, and Leila, with their childlike inabilities to read a new situation, the intentions of a stranger renders them vulnerable, their fanciful and unrealistic versions of their own position and of life around them makes them prey to manipulative men (or women), who know how to encourage fantasies, feed and then destroy them. Bertha misunderstands her beautiful friend Pearl’s relationship with her own husband until she observes them together while the sexual flowering of Pearl set against Bertha’s self-absorbed hyper-sensitivity is embodied in the fabulous full flowering of the cherry tree outside in the moonlight. Leila’s youthful joy and generosity are cut off, deadened, and the little governess misreads the old man’s intentions, wandering off with him and ruining her reputation. Each woman’s safe fantasy world is punctured, devalued, emptied out by the deceit of an ostensible friend (or a husband) and by the damage of a real stranger. These women are caught up in their own worlds and in some cases the disorientation and gap between perceived reality, self and the world, internalised, insouciance and a parallel reading of what is going on makes them physically, socially and psychologically vulnerable. Perhaps their versions of shared and communicative reality is a next step on from the largely male, authorised and authored versions of (women’s) hysteria, especially as depicted in the 19th century, but it also builds on Woolf’s women characters: Mrs Dalloway (1925)55 and Mrs Ramsay (To the Lighthouse, 1927),56 whose rich inner lives enable them to think on multiple levels and experience multiple realities while attempting to behave in a fashion which will

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draw little attention to the dominance of their inner over their outer worlds . What is unseen, the inner subjective world, is for them the real, authentic, lived world. There is a gulf between the two, nonetheless. Links and missed links between inner and outer worlds are enabled in Woolf through stream of consciousness and through a mix of dissociation, fantasy and doubts about shared reality in the work of Katherine Mansfield, du Maurier, Jackson and Munro in whose writing these dissociations and gaps are indicators of (sometimes culpable) vulnerability.

Mansfield, Women’s Gothic and Gothic Horror Katherine Mansfield uses characteristics of the literary Gothic rather than of Gothic horror. She will defamiliarise, disrupt and reduce complacency and calm, but there are only a few elements of the supernatural e.g. in “A Suburban Fairy Tale” (1924),57 a changeling story as argued in an issue of the Katherine Mansfield journal which focused on her use of the Gothic.58 The strangeness is likely to be located in one’s perception of the world rather than the invasion and concrete actions of others, objects and places around them. In all four authors’ work, some of the women characters are innocent, misled, or deliberately ignorant, or else they are confused, unable to see what is happening around and to them. At the heart of these tales there is constant misinterpretation, a gap between words and meanings, between the shared world and interpretations of it. Katherine Mansfield’s work is either a sensed or an acknowledged influence on the three writers who followed her and are considered here. The link between her work and that of Daphne du Maurier’s, however, is more recognised, and begins with contiguity.

Influences—Mansfield and du Maurier Daphne du Maurier was born in a grand house in Regent’s Park, London, and from her comments, and the memory of Mansfield observing her and her sisters playing when they all lived in London, we know she was influenced by Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield watched the du Maurier children at play in Hampstead, and du Maurier wishes she’d spoken with her and her sisters since she sensed a direct influence of Mansfield’s on her own work. This influence on du Maurier’s writing is clear from comments in du Maurier’s letters:

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I’ve been reading ‘Bliss’ etc, by Katherine Mansfield. The stories are too wonderful […] and some of them leave one with a kind of hopeless feeling. [A] sort of feeling that life is merely repetition, and love monotony. Oh, it’s not really that but a kind of helpless pity for the dreariness of other people’s lives. […] There is one story called ‘The Dill Pickle’. Oh God! and another— I’ve forgotten the name—about a poor woman—So dreary, hopeless, pathetic, But wonderful, and wonderfully written.59

While she sees Mansfield’s focus on dreary lives and lives less written about, often also a concern of du Maurier’s, there are also similarities in their treatment of that gap between inner experience and the outer world of people, objects, things, names, the demarcations of and the management and labelling of life as experienced in the often dreary, and actually quite liminal and even dangerous worlds their women inhabit. There is a common expression of this instability, and of the threat in the everyday, across the work of Mansfield and du Maurier. In “Apples and Pears: Symbolism and Influence in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Apple Tree’ and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’”60 Setara Pracha reinforces the link we know a little of between Mansfield and du Maurier: Mansfield died in 1923 when du Maurier was only sixteen, but she was a significant influence on du Maurier, who commented that ‘[s]urely Katherine Mansfield would not have been so easily discouraged?’, when trying to overcome the difficulties of living as a writer.61

In this we sense that du Maurier is not only taking literary inspiration from Mansfield, but also using her as a model for living. Aged twenty-one, du Maurier writes to her governess Maud Whaddell (known in the du Maurier family as Tod) that: I met someone who used to know Katherine Mansfield very well, and apparently K.M. used to live at Hampstead at one time and told this friend how terribly interested she was in the du Maurier children and that she longed to talk to us, and used to watch us for hours playing about on the heath. […] Isn’t it wonderful Tod? Probably when Madam and I used to dash about as Red Indians and schoolboys, Katherine Mansfield watched us. If only she’d spoken to us. It’s so odd because she honestly is quite my favourite writer, and I’ve always felt how sympathetic she must have been. I’m sure I should never have started writing stories if I hadn’t her example before me.62

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Pracha notes that in the current du Maurier revival “Mansfield’s influence on style and symbolism in du Maurier’s writing is crucial,” mentioning “the importance of the liminal in modernist texts.”63 We easily sense Mansfield’s influence in du Maurier’s stories, since both writers, like the US author Edith Wharton (for example in The Custom of the Country, 1913),64 equally satirise the pretentious rich and would-be bourgeoisie, some of whom have a misplaced sense of their own brilliance or artistic gifts, such as the embarrassingly bad artist and would-be murderer in du Maurier’s “The Alibi” (1959).65 Claire Drewery recognizes this as an example of the modernist focus on the “inner life, fragmentation, ambiguity, epiphany, and the relationship between the individual and society”.66 More generally, Dominic Head’s67 work on the modernist short story sees constraints on women’s lives as characteristics of representations of women in this period. This liminality, misreading of social experiences and the position of the self within them, the marginalization and accompanying dissociation in processing experience continues into the short stories of Shirley Jackson and Alice Munro. None of the four considered here are writers of successful escapist fantasies; rather, as Pracha characterizes du Maurier, each is “a writer of failed escape attempts. Like Mansfield, du Maurier recognises marriage as a potentially dangerous trap rather than an escape to greater freedoms.”68 Specifically regarding marriage, Head notes: “[m]arriage, far from being the promised state of fulfilment, is presented as destructive of the female”.69 Later, Jackson’s Hollywood influenced characters also seek romantic interludes, true love and marriage, but fantasise about potential lovers’ meetings (The Haunting of Hill House, 1959),70 are tricked by unscrupulous men, confused by potential husbands or lovers (“The Daemon Lover”, 1949)71 and equally confused about who their husbands are and where their homes might be (“Stranger”,1946).72 The promises of secure places which confer safety and romance, and secure relationships which also confer safety and identity are undermined as the women become knocked off course in following traditional narrative trajectories from the haunting romances of the nineteenth century and from their popular cultural replays in Hollywood films. Alice Munro’s women also live stuck lives in stuck places but some invest in fantasies of escape, and some in the hope of a lover taking them away from all of this. Short stories by all four authors undermine conventional romantic fantasies and fictions, the safe-­ loved-­secure parallel universes these women imagine they live in or will live in. This undermining is both a characteristic of women’s lives as Head

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notes of modernist work73, but it is also a familiar characteristic of the literary Gothic in which for women safe places, relationship identities and securities (family, home, money, respectability) are shown as dangerously complacent fictions. These fictions are then emptied out so that their instability and outdatedness are enacted in and vehicled by the instabilities of their sense of reality and identity, the dislocations and the defamiliarizations of their worldviews and their lived experiences, the puncturing of their socially-inherited narratives of secure identity and happy ever afters with the love of their lives who might (especially with Munro’s tales) have taken them away from all this. My main interest in Mansfield, du Maurier, Jackson and Munro is in their everyday Gothic, in the insidious undermining of the security of both the seeming normality of life, the narratives by which we construct and interpret our worlds, and the security in what is defined and labelled as real and trustworthy. In this third thought, du Maurier’s work takes us into a world which reminds us of existentialism and phenomenology in its fundamental questioning of the relationships between categories, words, proxies, and felt, lived, seen, perceived reality. Familiar faces, behaviours, places, the trustworthiness of continuities between time and place are all undermined. Furthermore, some of her stories cast us into parallel times where events can be perceived but not fully engaged with in historical moments, for example in The House on the Strand (1969).74 The defamiliarization of time and place and a parallel world are an exciting lure, a promise but also a threat. Both the stories with which people make sense of their everyday lives and events and the exciting disruptive strangeness which they seek are revealed as dangerous. Each is fuelled by self-­deception. In du Maurier’s work, words, seemingly solid identity, dependable behaviours, are all upset. Trusted relationships dissolve into doubt, boredom and ontological insecurity. On deliberately or accidentally entering the unknown, the liminal, her characters slip off ties and habits and bring danger to others and to themselves. In “The Alibi” (1959)75 the perspective is not that of the object or victim but of the stranger themselves. Here is a self-absorbed dull manager with delusions of talent and power, who fancies himself as an exciting outsider and randomly enters the life and influences the deaths of an unsuspecting impoverished woman and her children. Vacuous self-­absorption is accompanied by amoral reification of others, seen initially when, crossing the Embankment, he looks at his wife and other people and sees them as merely:

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minute, dangling puppets manipulated by a string. The very steps they took were jerking, lopsided, a horrible imitation of the real thing (“The Alibi”, 1959)76

This moment of existential disorientation (even dread) is a catalyst for his sudden change from a seemingly dull, ordinary husband, to a potential killer. He disrupts his own mundane life by semi-planning a random murder and becomes the dangerous stranger in the subsistence existence of a near-destitute young Eastern European immigrant woman and her child when he enters their lives on a whim, turning randomly into number 8 Boulting Street, a drab house in a poor quarter of London. Here he responds to her assumption about his reasons for seeking lodgings by colluding in the fiction that he needs somewhere to be his artist’s studio, and he then deludes himself he is an artist. This investment in the fiction of his talent embroils him further and further in the lives of the young woman and her son, and increasingly removes him from respectable, dull routines in his job in the office and his respectable, dull routines at home, which in turn sets up suspicion among those who ‘know’ him that he has an alternative life. The young woman gives him a bundle to dispose of, but so bound up is he in his fictive life and his new decision to leave the ‘studio’ and move on, he neither cares that the removal of his rent will leave her destitute, nor does he think to check on the contents of the bundle before he finally finds somewhere to throw it away. It is a dead baby, and the woman then kills herself and her son. Seeing his paintings, near the end of the story, his wife comments that they are worthless, talentless, just ‘daubs’. He is a destructive stranger to himself and more so to those whose lives he unwittingly wrecks. Not complicated enough to suffer real existential angst, estrangement from himself, others and the world, rather he fancies himself dangerous, interesting, talented and ends up unwittingly culpable in the deaths of both the mother and her young son, embracing a label of murderer to make his life meaningful. Less direct is the influence of Mansfield and du Maurier on US Shirley Jackson, Gothic writer of The Haunting of Hill House (1959)77 and many short stories including “Louisa Please Come Home” (1960),78 and “The Beautiful Stranger” (1946),79 whose women characters are caught in their own dissociated fictionalised worlds, involved in theft and identity theft, or misreading signals and questioning reality, often to dangerous effects and outcomes. I do not know now of direct influence of Mansfield or du Maurier on Shirley Jackson but I examine them now because the affinities

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are too clear to be accidents. Jackson’s stories are more overtly Gothic than either Mansfield’s or du Maurier’s, more likely to shift that continuum towards potential ghostly presences (usually projections from insecurities or obsessions) but each engage folklore, the supernatural or the insecure natural, the understandable real and the naively-invented normal.

Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson, Gothic Horror Daphne du Maurier’s and Shirley Jackson’s Gothic horror is not that of the weird and monstrous (Lovecraft, Stoker—vampires, werewolves, zombies); instead, it is of the human and the natural world and of dissociation and defamiliarization in the everyday. Du Maurier’s work is socially, historically and politically situated (around World War II, the thirties, forties, fifties and their concerns)—partying in the face of impending war (Rebecca, 1938),80 social deprivation and immigration (“The Alibi” 195981) fear of invasion (“The Birds,” 1952).82 As women’s Gothic horror, it focuses on relationships, families, couples, power, self-delusions, the body, and entrapping narratives, especially of romance and domestic security. It expresses the uncanny in the everyday: the unheimleich—horror as disruption of the everyday. Du Maurier’s characters live in liminal spaces where relationships, norms and everyday experiences between individuals, the world, creatures, events and time are all tentative, transient and untrustworthy, about to dissolve. So her characters (women in particular) often seem, like Woolf’s and some of Mansfield’s and Shirley Jackson’s, to be hyper sensitive, dissociated from solid realities, narratives, interpretations of what is real and trustworthy. Du Maurier also undermines grand narratives, defamiliarizing the trajectory and the matched beliefs in which we invest, so with Rebecca (1938)83 the narrative begins at the end—and the narrative of romance, leading to domestic security and bliss dissolves into the instability of homelessness, a life of mutual pretence with a murderer. Alison Light notes that “Daphne du Maurier’s writing is not powerful because it successfully conveys a conservative vision but because of the pleasure it takes in undermining its own beliefs. Du Maurier’s writing suggests that conservatism has its own divisions, its own buried desires, and that it has its own unconscious, its craving which cannot be satisfied and its conflicts which cannot be resolved”.84 In my own previous writing on du Maurier, I concurred with Light as follows:

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I find her constantly undermining securities of family, romance, consistent identity, time and place, safety, civilised behaviour, the expected. There is always a dialectic between the safe and explicable, and the wayward and inexplicable.85

Du Maurier’s Gothic horror builds on destabilised established narratives, domestic harmony, everyday normality and the stability of named things, presences, time, place—it is Freudian and existential at its core. Names and naming, meaning, narrative ways of pinning down and sense making float away from the people, events and places, the objects, the trajectories. Du Maurier wishes both to confirm to conventional beliefs and behaviours and to deconstruct them, testing their limits, questioning received interpretations and securities whether of behaviour in the natural world, or of the stability of body, time and space. The strength of what lingers beyond any restoration of order is deeply disturbing, but attests to the tenuousness of all boundaries and natural laws. Clairvoyance, spirit transfer, animals and nature unleashing uncontrollable powers, transgressive sexuality influencing beyond the grave, these troubling existences refuse the comforting closure of conventional popular fictional narrative forms. The confirmation of fissures in what we consider trustworthy, stable and ordinary links Daphne du Maurier’s horror very clearly with the interventions and underminings of the status quo found in contemporary women’s horror writing.86 Short stories by Katherine Mansfield, du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Alice Munro all scrutinise and utterly undermine any beliefs about harmonious coupledom, the security of relationships, betrothal, marriages, the dependability of family members, the trustworthiness of everyday relationships and domestic securities, revealing investment in these to be whimsical, short-sighted, and potentially destructive of stability and thus dangerous. Each uses the figure of a stranger to act as catalyst in this undermining, and such a guise lures or jolts others into a sense of false security concerning identity, normality and safety. While the figure of the stranger is usually not the focaliser, but the catalyst for disorientation and vulnerability, in du Mauriers’ “The Alibi” he is the focaliser and so as readers, like the victims, we are trapped inside his warped fictionalising. If these were straightforward crime authors, there would be an expectation of invasion, physical violence, of murder and then of detection. Instead, they show the insidious and interminable damage couples do to each other, children to parents to children, and people do become ill and even die as

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a consequence, but without a murder, detection or capture, there is no restitution and peace, just the sense in the end of destabilisation and dissolution.

Shirley Jackson Self-delusion operates in Mansfield’s and du Maurier’s stories as it does in tales by Jackson. Marriages in Jackson’s work are delusional and self-­ destructive, her woman characters hyper-sensitive and yet unable to read the intentions and meanings in the actions of others, rendering them, like so many of Katherine Mansfield’s and du Maurier’s characters, somewhat at sea, floating, untethered to names, spaces, values, narrative trajectories, connections of words and norms to things and relationships. These are tales of dissolution and tentative unsatisfied approaches to a form of involvement in the real, with fear of engagements, of going out, loss of the relationships and stabilities of time and place. Many of Shirley Jackson’s women also inhabit confused, liminal, unstable worlds. They feel trapped and unreal, victims of the actual insecure fickleness of their investment in fixities of narratives, place and identity. Some are disoriented when staying in New York apartments (“The Pillar of Salt”, 1948),87 some easily fooled, emptied out by deceitful men (“The Daemon Lover”); or, just as destabilising, but not as victims, they are instead agents of disturbance, and interfere with a sense of security in identity and home when they use their social skills to ignore barriers of place, identity and ownership, in taking over others’ apartments and possessions. Shirley Jackson, long underestimated as a writer of the everyday Gothic of married life and families, described as a housewife and criticised for publishing in women’s magazines, in fact exposes the inner disorientated lives of the trapped wives of the 1950s. As Angela Hague comments: By focusing on her female characters’ isolation, loneliness, and fragmenting identities, their simultaneous inability to relate to the world outside themselves or to function autonomously, and their confrontation with an inner emptiness that often results in mental illness, Jackson displays in pathological terms the position of many women in the 1950s.88

Mrs Ellis in du Maurier’s “Split Second” (1952),89 dies crossing the road, hit by a van, but in the seconds after that split second, returns as a ghostly presence to her own home, years ahead. She is of course displaced

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in the family who only half sense her. A similar displacement and disorientation of the house, home and family is seen in Jackson’s tale “The Beautiful Stranger”90 of a wife expecting her husband coming home and contemplating greeting him but instead considers that she is in fact greeting a total stranger while another wife goes out but cannot re-find her home. These dissociated moments undermine any relationship between self and the world, between words and things, the sensed and the imagined, the relived interior state, the gap between these on the one hand, rendering them floating—they can question and escape, it is exhilarating, and on the other hand vulnerable because nothing is fixed, reconcilable or behaving normally. In Shirley Jackson’s story “Louisa, Please Come Home” (1960)91 a young woman leaves home. Her identity is initially tied up with her suitcase and her coat. Each year her mother pleads for her return on the radio, so she plans to return and even re-meets her brother, but over the years he has brought several potential Louisas back home. The family refuse to recognise her or take notice of her (correct) answers to their wicked, specific questions about bridesmaid’s dress colour, etc and insist she was younger. Returned, she is unrecognised, and this produces a bizarre sense of displacement: “‘You look like a nice girl; try to imagine your own mother –’ I tried to imagine my own mother; I looked straight at her.”92

In “The Beautiful Stranger” (1946),93 a wife picking up her husband from the train station after a business trip suddenly realises or imagines that he is in fact a stranger—but decides to collude in this façade or delusion, believing he joins in the game of adopting her husband John’s tics and behavioural traits but avoiding other habits for example mixing her a cocktail. It’s amusing, flirty, scary. When she goes out and returns to the house the disorientation is complete—having felt her husband was someone colluding, pretending to be him, and quite enjoying this, she now cannot recognise the house: She turned and started for the house, and then hesitated; surely she had come too far? This is not possible, she thought, this cannot be; surely our house was white? The evening was very dark, and she could see only the houses going in rows, with more rows beyond them and more rows beyond that, and somewhere a house which was hers, with the beautiful stranger inside, and she lost out here.94

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Whether in constrained New Hampshire or constrained New  York, Shirley Jackson’s characters—her women—are defined by their social position and the fantasies and restrictions of their lives as wives or spinsters. There is a focus on women and their attempts or not at lives around, beyond, and instead of that with their husbands. In “The Pillar of Salt” (1948),95 the couple Brad and Margaret go for two weeks to the apartment in New  York that belongs to their friends from New Hampshire, who have gone away. This is a tale of disintegration and defamiliarization, of the essential crisis we find in Sartre, and the slipping away from a firm reality we have in the world. They race about in a taxi and are overwhelmed by the tall buildings and the bustling street. Their apartment, that of a friend, is initially reassuringly filled with the furniture and pictures of their life back home. All is well but also not well, as increasingly, even over such a short period, Margaret becomes utterly disorientated, lacking time and space. The first major issue is the party taking place at the top of the apartment block, described as a little rickety. In a constrained dance with strangers, Margaret feels hemmed in, and the open and shut window emphasises the constraint. When she leans out of this window she sees someone below telling her the house is on fire. There is chaos in New York City, it seems, imminent danger of drinks, fights and fires and breakdowns, which are ignored by its partying, purchasing inhabitants. It seems that no one can be warned—Margaret is in a different space, and whether the fire is not in that house itself, it was a danger. Danger, imminent and always there, then begins to define her, as she becomes more hesitant about everyday things. The layout of things, places and safety which are never usually questioned are undermined by the constant numbers of people, the bustle and the defamiliarization of everything. In the day, Margaret chooses to stay alone in the apartment. This leads to breakdown: going out, she is unable to cross the road, as the lights seem to change constantly, the markers of normality and definition, i.e. ‘walk/don’t walk’, are muddled and too fast, and decisions too close. She keeps retreating to the coffee shop and then eventually calls her husband to come and get her, as crossing the road is impossible. The norms of time, space, control and understanding have been dissolved. Anything is possible but mostly it is bad, unstable things, and this is not that unfamiliar to women stuck, then, in the captive housewife role going a little mad without reason, but also to anyone who has stepped outside the roller coaster of behaviours deemed normal. Men are often absent, or somewhat removed even when actually present, spoken

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of, but rarely speaking, going in and out of a house where the wife is at home with dinner on the way, or with children to sort out. Meeting others is essential but a bit of a trial. We only hear of rather than meet the romantic stranger who approached, wooed, won and lives with the lonely, recently bereaved spinster now ‘Mrs Smith’ in “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”96. This is a troubling tale of two newly-wed middle aged strangers among strangers. The ill-matched couple move into a poorer neighbourhood after a brief courtship and wedding but ‘Mrs Smith’ is clearly a pseudonym and she is only ever seen on her own. Even the short-lived honeymoon seems to be hers alone. As she hesitantly buys some small amounts of food, she tells a tale that she might be going away for the weekend, as if she was the one inventing a cover story for an inevitable ending, of which she will actually be the victim. The shopkeepers look at her with concern and it emerges they and the neighbours, including one Mrs Jones, think ‘Mr Smith’ is a serial killer, not least because Mrs Smith admits that they married and immediately made wills. Although Mrs Jones warns her that his face is in the newspaper and they even seem to be circling a discussion about his usual disposal of previous wives, ‘Mrs Smith’s’ response is a kind of lethargy. After her father’s death, she had no one and no future plans. Nothing. Mrs Smith is a timorous fatality waiting to happen, covering up her own impending demise. But we never know the inevitable ending. The tale, like her life, is emptied out. In many of the stories by all four authors, women’s lives are directionless, null, disposable. Like life itself, nothing is explicit, everything a confusion of threatening and unstable, the dull, the emptied out. The people, mostly the women, are used, confused, side-lined, undermined, tricked and endangered in all of these tales. There are potential deaths or threats of death. In du Maurier’s “The Alibi” (1959)97 the impoverished young European and possibly Jewish immigrant woman, Ana Kaufman, and her children die. The title of Jackson’s “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”98 emphasises that it is just one person’s honeymoon, and the others? Their endings could just as soon be a poisoning or complete dissolution of self and the sense of a shared reality.

Alice Munro Alice Munro’s short stories are rich with the claustrophobia and deceit, the lost opportunities and the dull emptiness of the everyday familiar world of small town, rural Ontario. Women age as they maintain various

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unexciting, seemingly stable relationships or possible relationships, until the man leaves—and then there is nothing. There are no future opportunities for change since so little that is unusual occurs. Everyday routine and complacency are a wad of numbing dullness while, alternatively, the opportunity of a stranger or an escape is something rich with potential and hope. In Lives of Girls and Women (1971)99 and Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)100 women in small towns are dominated by outdated beliefs and limited visions. As Ron Hansen notes of Munro’s work: there is no writer quite as good at illustrating the foibles of love, the confusions and frustrations of life or the inner cruelty and treachery that can be revealed in the slightest gestures and changes of tone. Reckless passion and impulsiveness are as common in these stories as hopelessness or a vague discontent.101

In talking of “Canadian Gothic” Le Drew identifies characteristics that “include the concept of ‘North,’ or ‘Northernness’, the binary opposition of wilderness/civilization, monstrous histories, post-colonial hauntings, and a permeating sense of spatial and cultural disorientation”. Faye Hammill (2003,102 2013103) defines several characteristics and I noted earlier that for Hammill, and other critics modern Canadian Gothic texts are regional, prairie Gothic beginning 1920s with Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925) followed by episodes in the work of Margaret Laurence, tales of small town incarceration in vast open spaces, cut off, where isolation, and limited mind-sets threaten women in particular given their dependency.104

Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson defined “Southern Ontario Gothic” as “a subgenre marked by a focus on the repressions and claustrophobic terrors of small towns surrounded by bleak landscapes”.105 It does seem that “Atwood was thinking here of, among others, the whole lives are condensed into a handful of pages”.106 Women who challenge conventions suffer as a result. However, amongst the dull, the limited and denied, the strange is never faraway: While tea party guests listen to children playing the piano inside , outside parents make pacts with wild people in coming of age tales e.g. ‘Images’ in which a young girl and her father meet an axe wielding recluse in the woods, sometimes replaying adult versions of fairy stories showing threats, promises and the strange are all around.107

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In the work of all four writers considered in this chapter, the arrival of a stranger is a moment of excitement, fantasy, promise, a catalyst for change perhaps, but then is frequently no more than a moment for disorientation and potential dissolution. For Greta, the newly successful but little-known writer in Alice Munro’s ‘To Reach Japan’ (2012)108 strangers at a party, and others on a long cross-continental train journey offer and represent the excitement of being recognised, being seen as different, the opportunity to speak about different interests and conjure up possible futures. Greta is invited to a party in an unfamiliar neighbourhood and, disorientated, she is intrigued by and vulnerable to those she meets there. It was not at all the kind of neighborhood she had expected. She was beginning to wonder if she had got the street wrong, and was not unhappy to think that. She could go back to the bus stop where there was a bench. She could slip off her shoes and settle down for the long solitary ride home. […] She was greeted by a woman who seemed to have been expecting somebody else. Greeted was the wrong word—the woman opened the door and Greta said that this must be where they were having the party. “What does it look like?” the woman said, and leaned on the doorframe. The way was barred till she—Greta—said, “May I come in?” and then there was a movement that seemed to cause considerable pain. She didn’t ask Greta to follow her but Greta did anyway. Nobody spoke to her or noticed her.109

The location is strange, the people strange and her responses both socially adventurous and hesitant. Everything is disorientating. At this party she meets a journalist and once back in her quiet home, becomes fixated on thoughts of him, constantly reminded of him: “there was hardly a day when she didn’t think of him. It was like having the very same dream the minute you fell asleep.”110 When she decides to travel across the vastness of Canada from Vancouver to Toronto, Greta becomes adventurous and takes this travel opportunity as one for an illicit meeting at the journey’s end, recalling, for me at least, Shirley Jackson’s Eleanor and her “journeys end in lovers meeting”111, a journey which for Eleanor ends in death. The end of this train journey offers a multitude of possibilities for other futures for Greta and her daughter, Katy. They meet many exciting, transient, temporary companions on this long train journey. As the landscape goes by and home recedes, new people enter and leave the train, getting onto and then out of their lives,

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speaking and singing, presenting fleeting examples of different life options, some exciting, restless, unfixed. In this constantly moving context, the destabilisation, adventure, excitement and danger of the new dominate and they listen excitedly to the tales of lively, exciting temporary fellow travellers and ‘reading readiness’ actors, Laurie and Greg, their free, young lives contrasting with Greta’s life of responsibilities (particularly, for the safety of her daughter). Still, as it emerges, this safety is the last thing on her mind. The two young strangers are like an unfixed part of the speeding train with its potential for difference, for constant newness and change: Greg was loose, and stopping off in Saskatoon. His family was there. They were both quite beautiful, Greta thought. Tall, limber, almost unnaturally lean, he with crinkly dark hair, she black-haired and sleek as a Madonna.112

Swept up in the new freedom which Greg represents, Greta forgets where her daughter is, panics and searches frantically for her, imagining the worst: She got control of herself and tried to think where the train had stopped, or whether it had been stopped, during the time she had been with Greg. While it was stopped, if it had been stopped, could a kidnapper have got on the train and somehow made off with Katy? # She stood in the aisle, trying to think what she had to do to stop the train.113

Greta, panicking, feeling guilty, both exonerates herself and blames herself, dramatically presenting a mixed picture of devotion to motherly duty and neglect fuelled by careless excitement, by her heady embrace of the excitingly strange. Her personal testimony is a contradictory mix of guilt, defensiveness and honesty: All of her waking time for these hundreds of miles had been devoted to Katy. She knew that such devotion on her part had never shown itself before. It was true that she had cared for the child, dressed her, fed her, talked to her, during those hours when they were together and Peter was at work. But Greta had other things to do around the house then, and her attention had been spasmodic, her tenderness often tactical.

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And not just because of the housework. Other thoughts had crowded the child out. Even before the useless, exhausting, idiotic preoccupation with the man in Toronto, there was the other work, the work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.114

She feels both guilty and hard done by. These are the contradictions of the housewife who tries to balance the creative with the responsibly mundane. Housework and her own poetry have taken all her time and attention and yet, although she does not mention it, this adventurous journey, this leap of freedom into the strange is what really makes her excited, fearful, guilty. For Greta this is a personal turmoil and for readers it indicates the terror of choosing the strange or the stranger, because anything can happen, perhaps something wonderful, but often it seems, as suggested by all four authors covered here, what does happen instead is often something dull or terrible. The journey and the plan Greta barely mentions have dominated her, she has thought little of Katy, and now her child seems in peril, in the context of the strange, at the hands of strangers, perhaps. But she is found. Greta steps off the train into the arms of the man she met at the party and who she had secretly arranged to be there as she arrived in Toronto. Her moment of excitement is realised at the end of a journey of newness, difference, the exciting and the frightening strange. However, the exhilaration and the potential of the new with this near stranger are undercut by her rather careless link with Greg and her dangerous lack of responsibility for Katy which led up to the new man greeting her in Toronto. Munro leaves the story’s ending blank: someone…took hold of Greta, and kissed her for the first time, in a determined and celebratory way. Harris. First a shock, then a tumbling in Greta’s insides, an immense settling. She was trying to hang on to Katy but at this moment the child pulled away and got her hand free. She didn’t try to escape. She just stood waiting for whatever had to come next.115

Munro’s story demonstrates that strangers are part of the opportunity within an escape fantasy. They can be transient and undependable, or represent real escape, real potential for change laced with the piquancies of the unknown and danger.

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Conclusion Katherine Mansfield, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Alice Munro splice the Gothic with Freud and some existentialism in their stories of the exciting potential or the destructive, dangerous intrusion of the stranger and the strange into the lives of women. Their stories reveal the instabilities of identity, of the domestic, romance, relationships, and of the relationships between words and things, between our constructions and narratives of life and our real lives. Often side-lined, undermined, unseen, shut out, in work by all four writers, women in particular are exposed as vulnerable and/or without strict direction, tied into the limitations of the mundane or else endangered if freed from the social, ethical stringencies and controls of shared reality. The strange and the effect of a stranger entering their worlds disrupts everything, offers much and usually leaves the women with nothing or less than nothing. The arrival of a stranger is a moment of joyful potential within relationships, and marriage appears to be a new start in works by each of these writers, whose women characters exude excessive joy, develop stories of successful futures, potential and personal investment only to face a rude awakening, ruin of reputation, their obvious vulnerability seen as culpability, and finally, desolation. In work by all four authors, the women’s responses to the imagined and hoped-for strange or stranger is often one of over-excitement. They are full of plans and dreams, excessively joyous, like a firework display lasting less than a night: costly, showy, transient. Characteristics of the Gothic render the entrapments of relationships, of family roles and dreams, of grand houses or any kind of meagre home as unreal, unsafe. For all four, their Gothic and existential domestic horror builds on destabilising established narratives, domestic harmony, everyday normality and the stability of names, things, presences, time, place. Each deals with displacement, undermining of comfortable narratives, complacencies, relationships, certainties about self, reality, time, place, and particularly identity, the real, and the promised safety of marriage and families. In often manipulated or manipulative, destructively random liminal space, our taken-for-granted certainties and the stories by which we manage our lives are revealed by the intrusion of a stranger or the strange, to be fragile, wayward, delusional. In work by Katherine Mansfield, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Alice Munro such disruptions and intrusions of strangers rarely result in fabulous dreams come true: rather they lead to a loss of reputation, security, future and often loss of life. These commonalities

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characterise them as key women authors of the Gothic and also the remarkable legacies between their works, whose lifespan into the twentieth century appears assured.

Notes 1. Katherine Mansfield, “Poison” (1920), Something Childish and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1924). 2. Katherine Mansfield, “The Little Governess” (1915), Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated) (E.  Sussex: Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition, 2012). 3. Katherine Mansfield, “Her First Ball” (1921), The Garden Party and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). 4. Gina Wisker, Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 5. Fred Botting, Gothic. The New Critical Idiom (London/New York: Routledge, 1996). 6. Daphne Du Maurier, “Fairy Tale”, The Rendezvous and Other Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980). 7. Daphne Du Maurier, “The Lover”, The Lover and Other Stories (London: Ace Books, 1961). 8. Daphne Du Maurier, “The Blue Lenses”, The Breaking Point (New York: Victor Gollancz, 1959). 9. Daphne Du Maurier, “Escape”, The Doll: Short Stories (London: Virago, 2011). 10. Daphne Du Maurier, “The Limpet”, The Doll: Short Stories (London: Virago, 2011). 11. Daphne Du Maurier, “Kiss Me Again, Stranger”, Kiss Me Again, Stranger: A Collection of Eight Stories, Long and Short (New York: Doubleday, 1953). 12. Shirley Jackson, “The Pillar of Salt.” Mademoiselle, 1948. 13. Shirley Jackson, “The Beautiful Stranger”, 1946, Dark Tales (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2017). 14. Shirley Jackson, “The Demon Lover”, The Lottery and Other Stories, (New York: Farrar Straus, 1949). 15. Alice Munro, “Leaving Maverley”, Dear Life (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012). 16. Munro, “Amundsen”, Dear Life, 2012. 17. Munro, “Corrie”, Dear Life, 2012. 18. Munro, “Train”, Dear Life, 2012. 19. Mansfield, “Her First Ball”, 1921. 20. Jackson, “The Beautiful Stranger,” 1946.

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21. Shirley Jackson, “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”, Novels and Stories, ed. Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Library of America, 2010). 22. Du Maurier, “Kiss Me Again, Stranger”, 1953. 23. Du Maurier, “The Alibi”, The Breaking Point, London: Gollancz, 1959. 24. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, Dear Life, 2012. 25. Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 68. 26. Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 27. Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line.” In On Gender and Writing, ed. Micheline Wandor (London Pandora, 1983). 28. Entry from the notebooks and diaries of Katherine Mansfield, dated Sunday night, May 1908. In The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Wellington: Constable and Company Limited, 1933). 29. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (New York: Viking, 1959). 30. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 31. Gina Wisker, Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 11. 32. British Council Literature: https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/ alice-­munro 33. Chris Baldick, “Introduction,” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), xii-xiv. 34. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1913). 35. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945). 36. Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1938). 37. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938). 38. Gina Wisker, “Undermining the Everyday: Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic Horror”, The Enduring Appeal of Daphne Du Maurier's Fiction, “‘Adieu Sagesse’, or Troubled Identities in Du Maurier's Fiction”, 19, no. 52 (2021), https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.13590 at https://journals. openedition.org/lisa/13590?lang=en 39. Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), 1919, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003). 40. E.T.A.  Hoffman, “The Sandman”, The Night Pieces (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1816). 41. Sartre, Nausea, 1938. 42. Du Maurier, “The Alibi”, 1959.

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43. Colin Wilson, The Outsider: An Inquiry into the Nature of the Sickness of Mankind in the Mid-Twentieth Century (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1956), republished with a new “Introduction” (London: Picador, 1978.) 44. Albert Camus, L’ Étranger (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1942). 45. J. C. Farhoumand, “Cinephilia and the Outsider: Filmic Influence in the Literature of Charles Bukowski and the Beats”. Thesis submitted to the University of Brighton for the award of PhD, 2021, p. 86. 46. Farhoumand, “Cinephilia”, 2021, p. 86. 47. Freud, Das Unheimliche, 1919, 2003. 48. Mansfield, “Her First Ball”, 1921. 49. Mansfield, “Her First Ball”, 1921. 50. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, “Little Briar-Rose, The Story of Sleeping Beauty”, Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) (1812). 51. Katherine Mansfield, “Bliss”, 1918, Bliss and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1920). 52. Mansfield, “The Little Governess” (1915). 53. Mansfield, “Her First Ball, 1921. 54. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, Dear Life, 2012. 55. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Hogarth Press, 1925). 56. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1927). 57. Katherine Mansfield, “A Suburban Fairytale”, Something Childish and Other Stories (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1924). 58. Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber, Susan Reid, Gina Wisker, “Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic”, Katherine Mansfield Studies 4, Katherine Mansfield Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 59. Daphne Du Maurier, Letter to Maud Whaddell, 4 February, 1924, 4-6. 60. Setara Pracha, “Apples and Pears: Symbolism and Influence in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Apple Tree’ and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’”, Katherine Mansfield and Psychology, eds. Clare Hanson, Gerri Kimber and W. Todd Marti (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 61. Pracha, “Apples and Pears”, 2016. 62. Du Maurier, Letter, 4 February, 1924, 4-6. 63. Pracha, “Apples and Pears,” 2016. 64. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913). 65. Daphne Du Maurier, “The Alibi”, The Breaking Point (New York: Victor Gollancz, 1959). 66. Clare Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 8.

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67. Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 68. Pracha, “Apples and Pears,” 2016, 15. 69. Head, The Modernist Short Story, 2009, p. 123. 70. Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, 1959. 71. Jackson, “The Demon Lover”, 1949. 72. Jackson, “The Beautiful Stranger,” 1946. 73. Head, The Modernist Short Story, 2009. 74. Daphne Du Maurier, The House on the Strand (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969). 75. Du Maurier, “The Alibi”, 1959. 76. Du Maurier, “The Alibi”, 1959. 77. Jackson, Haunting of Hill House, 1959. 78. Shirley Jackson, “Louisa, Please Come Home", 1960, Dark Tales (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2017). 79. Jackson, “The Beautiful Stranger,” 1946. 80. Du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938. 81. Du Maurier, “The Alibi” 1959. 82. Daphne Du Maurier, “The Birds”, The Apple Tree (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952). 83. Du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938. 84. Alison Light, Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 158. 85. Gina Wisker, “Undermining the Everyday: Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic Horror”, The Enduring Appeal of Daphne Du Maurier's Fiction, “‘Adieu Sagesse’, or Troubled Identities in Du Maurier's Fiction”, 19, no. 52 (2021), https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.13590 at https://journals. openedition.org/lisa/13590?lang=en 86. Gina Wisker, “Don't Look Now! The Compulsions and Revelations of Daphne du Maurier's Horror Writing”, Journal of Gender Studies, 8, no. 1 (1999): 19-33. 87. Jackson, “The Pillar of Salt”, 1948. 88. Angela Hague, “‘A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times’: Reassessing Shirley Jackson”, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2005, 26, no. 2 (2005): 73-96, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137397 89. Daphne Du Maurier, “Split Second”, The Apple Tree (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952). 90. Jackson, “The Beautiful Stranger,” 1946. 91. Jackson, “Louisa, Please Come Home", 1960. 92. Jackson, “Louisa, Please Come Home", 1960, 27. 93. Jackson, “The Beautiful Stranger,” 1946. 94. Jackson, “The Beautiful Stranger,” 1946.

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95. Jackson, “The Pillar of Salt”, 1948. 96. Jackson, “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”, 2010. 97. Du Maurier, “The Alibi”, 1959. 98. Jackson, “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”, 2010. 99. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (Whitby, Ontario: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971). 100. Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978). 101. Ron Hansen, “Book World: ‘Dear Life,’ by Alice Munro”, the Washington Post, 19 November, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-­world-­dear-­life-­by-­alice-­munro/2012/11/19/1ba1 224c-­2dc3-­11e2-­beb2-­4b4cf5087636_story.html 102. Faye Hamill, “‘Death by Nature’: Margaret Atwood’s Haunted Forests”, Gothic Studies, 5, No. 2 (2003): 47-63. 103. Faye Hamill, “Canadian Gothic”, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2013). 104. Gina Wisker, Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fictions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2016). 105. Hamill, “Canadian Gothic”, 2013. 106. Kakutani, “Recalling Lives Altered”, 2012. 107. Aamer Hussein, “Dear Life, by Alice Munro”, Independent, 24 November, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/ books/reviews/dear-­life-­by-­alice-­munro-­8343865.html 108. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, 2012. 109. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, 2012, 8. 110. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, 2012, 16. 111. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (New York: Viking, 1959). 112. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, 2012, 18. 113. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, 2012, 24. 114. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, 2012, 28. 115. Munro, “To Reach Japan”, 2012, 29-30.

Works Cited Becker, Susanne. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Botting, Fred. Gothic. The New Critical Idiom. London/New York: Routledge, 1996. da Sousa Correa, Delia; Kimber, Gerri; Reid, Susan; Wisker, Gina. “Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic.” Katherine Mansfield Studies 4, Katherine Mansfield Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

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Drewery, Clare. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 8. Du Maurier, Daphne letter to Maud Whaddell, 4 February 1924, pp.  4-6. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011a), p. 8. Du Maurier, Daphne. “And Now to God The Father.” The Bystander, May 15, 1929. Du Maurier, Daphne “Fairy Tale.” The Rendezvous and Other Stories. London: Victor Gollancz, 1980. Du Maurier, Daphne. Letter to Maud Whaddell, 4 February 1924. 4-6. Du Maurier, Daphne. Letter to Maud Whaddell. Special Collections, Exeter Archives, The University of Exeter. Packet labelled ‘Letters to Tod 1920–1930’, EUL MS 206 add.1, 19 June 1928. 2-4. Du Maurier, Daphne. “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” (Kiss Me Again, Stranger: A Collection of Eight Stories, Long and Short. New York: Doubleday, 1953. Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. London: Victor Gollancz, 1938. Du Maurier, Daphne. “Split Second.” The Apple Tree. London: Victor Gollancz, 1952a. Du Maurier, Daphne “The Alibi.” The Breaking Point. New  York: Victor Gollancz, 1959a. Du Maurier, Daphne. “The Birds.” The Apple Tree. London: Victor Gollancz, 1952b. Du Maurier, Daphne. “The Blue Lenses.” The Breaking Point. New York: Victor Gollancz, 1959b. Du Maurier, Daphne “The Doll.” The Doll: Short Stories. London: Virago, 2011b. Du Maurier, Daphne “Escape.” The Doll: Short Stories. London: Virago, 2011c. Du Maurier, Daphne. The House on the Strand. London: Victor Gollancz, 1969. Du Maurier, Daphne “The Limpet.” The Doll: Short Stories. London: Virago, 2011d. 186. Du Maurier, Daphne “The Lover.” The Lover and Other Stories. London: Ace Books, 1961. Du Maurier, Daphne “The Pool.” The Breaking Point. New  York: Victor Gollancz, 1959c. Farhoumand, J. C. “Cinephilia and the Outsider: Filmic Influence in the Literature of Charles Bukowski and the Beats”. Thesis submitted to the University of Brighton for the award of PhD, 2021, 86. Freud, Sigmund. Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), 1919. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2003. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Briar-Rose, The Story of Sleeping Beauty.” Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). Hague, Angela. “‘A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times’: Reassessing Shirley Jackson”, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2005, 26, no. 2 (2005): 73-96, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/4137397

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Hamill, Faye “‘Death by Nature’: Margaret Atwood's Haunted Forests”, Gothic Studies, 5, No. 2, (2003): 47-63. Hamill, Faye “Canadian Gothic.” The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2013). Hansen, Ron. “Book World: ‘Dear Life,’ by Alice Munro”, the Washington Post, 19 November, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/ books/book-­world-­dear-­life-­by-­alice-­munro/2012/11/19/1ba1224c-­2dc3-­ 11e2-­beb2-­4b4cf5087636_story.html. Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hoffman, E.T.A. “The Sandman”. The Night Pieces. Berlin, Realschulbuchhandlung, 1816. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Hussein, Aamer. “Dear Life, by Alice Munro”, Independent, 24 November, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/books/reviews/dear-­ life-­by-­alice-­munro-­8343865.html Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1913. Jackson, Shirley. “Louisa, Please Come Home.” 1960. Dark Tales. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2017a. Jackson, Shirley. “The Beautiful Stranger,” 1946. Dark Tales. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2017b. Jackson, Shirley. “The Demon Lover.” The Lottery and Other Stories. New York: Farrar Straus, 1949. Jackson, S. The Haunting of Hill House in Shirley Jackson novels and stories. New York: The Library Of America 2010, [1959]. Jackson, Shirley. “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith.” Dark Tales. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2017c. Jackson, Shirley. “The Pillar of Salt.” Mademoiselle, 1948. Light, Alison. Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991. 158. Mansfield, Katherine. “Bliss.” (1918a) Bliss and Other Stories. London: Constable, 1920. Mansfield, Katherine. “Her First Ball.” (1921). The Garden Party and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922. Mansfield, Katherine. “Poison.” (1920). Something Childish and Other Stories. London: Constable, 1924. Mansfield, Katherine. “Prelude.” (1918b) Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated). E. Sussex: Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

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Mansfield, Katherine. “The Little Governess.” (1915). Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated). E.  Sussex: Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition, 2012. Mansfield, Katherine. “A Suburban Fairytale.” Something Childish and Other Stories. London: Constable and Company Limited, 1924. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945. Munro, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. Whitby, Ontario: Ryerson Press, 1968. Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. Whitby, Ontario: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971. Munro, Alice. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978. Munro, Alice. The Moons of Jupiter. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1982. Munro, Alice. Friend of My Youth. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. Munro, Alice. Too Much Happiness. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009. Munro, Alice. “Amundsen.” Dear Life. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012a. Munro, Alice. “Corrie.” Dear Life. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012b. Munro, Alice. “Leaving Maverley.” Dear Life. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012c. Munro, Alice. “To Reach Japan.” Dear Life. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012d. Munro, Alice. “Train.” Dear Life. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012e. Pracha, Setara. “Apples and Pears: Symbolism and Influence in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Apple Tree.” Katherine Mansfield and Psychology. Eds. Clare Hanson, Gerri Kimber, and W. Todd Marti. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016a. Pracha, Setara. “Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’.” Katherine Mansfield and Psychology. Eds. Clare Hanson, Gerri Kimber, and W. Todd Marti. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016b. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1938. Shaw, Katy. Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. New  York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. Wilson, Colin, The Outsider: An Inquiry into the Nature of the Sickness of Mankind in the Mid-Twentieth Century (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1956), republished with a new “Introduction”. London: Picador, 1978. Wisker, Gina. “Don’t Look Now! The Compulsions and Revelations of Daphne du Maurier’s Horror Writing.” Journal of Gender Studies 8:1 (1999): 19-33 (23). Wisker, Gina. “Katherine Mansfield’s Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic.” Katherine Mansfield Studies 4, Katherine Mansfield Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 20-32.

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Wisker, Gina. Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Wisker, Gina “Undermining the Everyday: Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic Horror”, The Enduring Appeal of Daphne Du Maurier’s Fiction, “‘Adieu Sagesse’, or Troubled Identities in Du Maurier’s Fiction”, 19, no. 52 (2021), https://doi. org/10.4000/lisa.13590 at https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/13590? lang=en Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.

Websites British Council Literature: https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/alice-­ munro

CHAPTER 3

(Dis)continuing the Mother-daughter Dyad in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? Working Back Through Our Mothers Caleb Sivyer

Introduction The relationship between mothers and daughters, in both literature and in so-called real life, is one fraught with complications and emotional ambivalence. Writing of the problems faced by aspiring female writers, Virginia Woolf argues in A Room of One’s Own that such women must ‘think back through [their] mothers if [they] are women’, despite the fact that they have ‘no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it [is] of little help’.1 Alternatively, in ‘Professions for Women’, Woolf writes that she ‘did her best to kill’ the ‘Angel in the House’,2 a masculine version of maternal femininity characterised by self-sacrifice and the suppression of an independent mind, because doing so was a necessary condition of being able to write as a woman. Woolf also had a difficult relationship with her

C. Sivyer (*) University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_3

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biological mother, feeling neglected when she was a child and then obsessed with her after her death, an obsession that was cured, intriguingly, by the writing of a novel.3 Woolf’s ambivalence concerning both literary and biological mothers has haunted much of women’s writing up to the present day, as contemporary women writers both look back at an ever-growing tradition of women’s writing, and attempt to look forwards and find voices of their own.4 In this chapter, I consider the case of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (2012), a work of auto-bio-graphic fiction focused on the relationship of mothers and daughters, and which explores this double focus of looking backwards and forwards in compelling ways. Bechdel’s graphic novel stages the ambivalence about mothers both thematically and intertextually, drawing on texts by earlier women writers in her literary and personal project of coming to terms with her strained relationship with her mother, Helen. The text also positions a number of female therapists, as well as the psychoanalytic writer D. W. Winnicott, as maternal figures that help Bechdel with her working-through of the anxieties of the mother-daughter relationship. In this way, the text is about continuity and difference, lineage and innovation, specifically mediated through the combination of words and images. Indeed, the medium of comics is especially effective at portraying both multiple temporalities and difficult personal histories. With reference to Bechdel’s work, Hillary Chute observes that comics can ‘express life stories, especially traumatic ones, powerfully because it makes literal the presence of the past by disrupting spatial and temporal conventions to overlay or palimpsest past and present’.5 Bechdel utilises this palimpsestic power to bring together past and present, in terms of her relationship to both her biological mother and her literary mothers. Scenes from her childhood are overlaid with conversations with her mother in the present and images depicting her constant struggle to write are juxtaposed with quotations from other writers like Woolf and Adrienne Rich. In order to unpick and understand how Bechdel blends past and present in her graphic memoir, and to analyse how the book functions as an attempt to work through the painful emotions generated in her relationship with her mother, this chapter focuses on three kinds of mother-figures that appear throughout the memoir: biological, literary and therapeutic.

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Are You My (Biological) Mother? It is clear from the beginning of Bechdel’s memoir that writing about her mother will be neither an easy nor a simple task. The very title announces the difficulty of this endeavour in the form of a question, a question that haunts the narrative. That this question-title appears inside a mirror on both the cover and the title page of the book adds another layer of meaning, for it suggests that the process of identification involves both reflection and an acknowledgement that the boundary between mother and child is ambiguous and fluid. This latter point is made clear in a chapter entitled ‘Mirror’ when Bechdel reproduces the first line from an important essay by Winnicott: ‘In individual emotional development, the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face’.6 In the light of this interpretation, the mirror on the cover takes on an uncanny significance as a double of Bechdel’s mother’s face. The uncertain boundary between mother and child is also drawn attention to further on the cover by the reproduction of what appear to be two photographs, one of the author as a teenager and the other of her mother as a young woman, spliced together as if they were a single photograph. This foreshadows a prominent theme in the book, namely Bechdel’s feeling of being overpowered by her mother and her deep need to liberate herself from her influence. The title is also figuratively mirrored in the dedication: ‘For my mother, who knows who she is’. The daughter’s uncertainty is contrasted with the mother’s certainty. After recounting a dream that involves being initially trapped in a house before escaping and then diving into a river,7 the narrative proper begins with a large close-up image of Bechdel, seated in a car and looking across to the other side of the vehicle. Appropriately, the first piece of text on the page is ‘Mom…’ and so readers would be forgiven for assuming that this is the beginning of a conversation between mother and daughter.8 Like a child’s first uttered word, this memoir begins with the enunciation of and calling to presence of the mother. In the next two panels, Bechdel is shown trying to tell her mother something important but clearly wavering. However, the fourth panel reveals the absence of the mother and in subsequent panels we learn that Bechdel is in fact rehearsing talking to her mother about her decision to write a memoir about her father. This would later be published as the critically-acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). Given the family secrets divulged in this book, in particular her father’s secret bisexuality and suicide, Bechdel’s anxiety about how her mother will respond to this book is understandable. The

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question of where this particular narrative begins is thus a complicated one, as Bechdel writes that ‘[t]his story begins when I began to tell another story’ (4). The anxious rehearsal of this confession quickly calls to Bechdel’s mind two earlier confession scenes, each of which could have provided the starting point for her narrative: the time, ‘twenty years earlier’, when she came out to her mother as a lesbian, and ‘five years before that’ when she was ‘working up the courage’ to tell her that she had begun menstruating (6). However, this is then replaced with the more troubling idea that ‘the real problem with this memoir […] is that it has no beginning’ (6). As if to illustrate this dilemma, Bechdel paints a ‘dizzying’ image of human reproduction: ‘I was an egg inside my mother when she was still an egg inside her mother, and so forth and so on’ (7). While this backwards sequence recedes to infinity, it comes to an abrupt stop in the other direction; Bechdel notes that, coincidentally or not, her ‘clockworklike menstrual cycle skipped its first beat the very week […] that [she] sat down to begin writing about [her] mother’. Instead of sadness at this inability to reproduce and thus continue the sequence, Bechdel writes that she feels ‘a certain relief in knowing that [she is] a terminus’ (7). Strangely or not, the beginning of this memoir not only offers multiple points of conception but also quickly turns to endings. When Bechdel finally musters up the courage to tell her mother about her plans, Helen challenges her, offers no assistance, and later adds that she ‘hope[s] [the book] won’t be all angry’ (10). Fears about anger appear throughout the narrative and indeed this is one of the book’s dominant themes. On one occasion, Helen is scathing of Sylvia Plath for ‘always asking her therapist for permission to hate her mother’ and even acts out an imagined dialogue between the two: ‘“Am I allowed to hate my mother?”’ ‘“No!”’ (34). Relatedly, Bechdel worries about her possible feelings of anger at her mother: with reference to Freud, she speculates that she might have been ‘repressing’ ‘hostile wishes’ for her mother since the age of ten (63). Indeed, she considers the possibility that in exposing many of the family secrets in Fun Home she is on one level actually trying to express this repressed anger at her mother. After all, it is significant that her mother ‘considers memoir a suspect genre’ (11). Indeed, throughout the book, Bechdel recounts multiple conversations in which her mother attacks the legitimacy and value of life-writing and so, by extension, her daughter’s project and perhaps even her need to express difficult emotions. On one occasion, Helen seemingly casually asks her daughter if she has read an article on memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker and tells her

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it is about ‘“inaccuracy, exhibitionism, narcissism, [and] those fake memoirs”’ (11). These negative views about autobiography are not uncommon, as Mendelsohn writes that ‘for much of its modern history’, memoir has been ‘the black sheep of the literary family’, criticised for its ‘[u]nseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, [and] unavoidable mendacity’, among other things.9 Much later in the book, Bechdel reproduces a conversation with her mother in which the latter quickly becomes angry about a series of confessional poems that she has read: they are ‘too specific’ and ‘“too personal!”’, Helen argues, before concluding that ‘“[t]he self has no place in good writing”’ (198-200, emphasis in original). Bechdel exposes some of the subtext of her mother’s hostility, explaining that she regrets not having become a poetry critic like Helen Vendler, a ‘distinguished’ professor she admires and who is ‘good at explaining not just what poems say, but how, formally, they say it’ (199). This regret is compiled by the fact that Bechdel’s memoir about her father ‘had been published six months before this conversation’ (199) and which had caused her mother to feel ‘betrayed’ by the revelation of things that were told ‘in confidence’ (200). Standing up to her mother’s judgemental attitude and anger, Bechdel offers an alternative interpretation of life-writing, one in which writing “minutely and rigorously” about the self can lead to a transcending of it (201). However, her mother has the last word in this reported conversation: ‘“Wallace Stevens wrote transcendent poetry, and he never used the word ‘I’”’ (202). Despite the failure to convince her mother of this more positive interpretation of memoir at this stage, it is significant that Bechdel is able to overcome her fear of making Helen angry and assert herself. This is in marked contrast to a moment earlier in the book when Bechdel recounts the disappointing response she received from her mother upon sending her a creative writing piece many years earlier which was about ‘the time [Helen] stopped kissing [her] good night’. In a cover letter, Bechdel had asked her mother if she remembered the episode and if the writing was successful in ‘avoid[ing] a resentful or moralistic tone’ (184). Five months go by before a reply finally arrives, but Bechdel is disappointed to discover that all of her mother’s comments ‘pertained strictly to matters of style’. However, Helen did recall thinking that ‘if [her daughter] [grew up] to be a famous concert pianist [she] would be insanely jealous”, a remark that makes clear the mother’s failed ambitions and inherent jealousy of her daughter (193). The effect of this letter was palpable, as Bechdel states that she ‘would not attempt to write about [her]

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own life again’ for ‘seventeen years’ (193). Unlike the exchange mentioned above, on this occasion the mother effectively silences the daughter. Curiously, while mother and daughter disagree over the legitimacy of publishing life-writing, they ‘share’ a ‘compulsion for keeping track of life’ in private journals. However, even here the self is mostly absent as her mother’s diary is ‘just a record of […] external […] experience’ and Bechdel’s own childhood journal appears to have been merely a log of daily events (12). In a further complication of their strained relationship, Bechdel recalls that at one point during her childhood her mother took over the writing of her diary due to ‘a spell of obsessive-compulsive disorder’ (13). Bechdel says that she was overjoyed at ‘getting her [mother’s] undivided attention’ and that it ‘felt miraculous, […] like persuading a hummingbird to perch on [her] finger’ (13). Unlike with her published life-writing later in life, in this scenario Bechdel’s mother ‘was listening to […] whatever [she] said’, which had a ‘calming [and] composing’ effect on her (13). However, this episode is indicative of the kind of trade-off that Bechdel has always had to make: in order to receive love from her mother, she has had to sacrifice her own voice. This is made clear early on in the narrative when she suggests that her mother’s ‘editorial voice—precisian [sic], dispassionate, elegant, adverbless—is lodged deep in [her] temporal lobes’ (23). Helen’s abhorrence of writing about the self also appears in her daughter’s habit of ‘obscur[ing]’ her diary entries with ‘repetitive markings’, the ‘most heavily obliterated word’ being ‘I’ (49).10 These markings were ‘an attempt to ward off evil from the people [Bechdel] was writing about’, an indication of her early sense of guilt in writing about real life (49). This relationship between mother and daughter is then inverted many years later when Bechdel ‘transcrib[es] what [her mother] says’ during telephone conversations in order to ‘capture [Helen’s] voice, her precise wording, her deadpan humor’ (11). In a neat symmetry, Bechdel notes that just as her mother ‘composed’ her as a child, so now she composes her mother (14). However, whereas Bechdel enjoyed those childhood collaborative acts of writing because she felt that she had her mother’s undivided attention, during the adult telephone conversations that she transcribes she ‘suspect[s] that [her mother] was not so much talking to [her] as drafting her own daily journal entry out loud’ (12). There is a suggestion near the end of the first chapter that mother and daughter once enjoyed a more loving and harmonious relationship, with a double-page spread that shows a sequence of photographs of Helen holding her daughter as a baby. Initially, Bechdel had thought that there was

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only one such photograph of this moment, but in her ‘search for meaningful patterns’ she discovers that it is in fact part of a sequence of snapshots that had been ‘scattered about in different albums and boxes’ (31).11 As the negatives are missing, Bechdel admits that ‘there’s no way to know their chronological order’ and so decides to arrange them ‘according to [her] own narrative’ (32). This metafictional statement functions as an emblem of the particular medium that Bechdel works within (and narrative more generally), as images and words are arranged in boxes according to the needs of the author.12 In each photograph, the baby ‘reflect[s]’ the mother’s ‘expression and the shape of her mouth with uncanny precision’, in yet another example of mirroring (32). Scattered among these photographs, Bechdel juxtaposes a number of different voices. Firstly, a number of seemingly mundane comments made by her mother appear in speech bubbles, including her statement that were she to have ‘another life’ she would ‘costume rock divas’, her admission that she had slept badly due to having ‘dreams about dad’, and more complaints about that ‘spoiled brat’ Sylvia Plath, whose fights with Ted Hughes she had been reading about in the former’s journals (33). Secondly, Bechdel admits in a series of caption boxes that she had ‘resisted including [her] present-day interactions’ with her mother ‘because they’re so ‘ordinary”, but that she had eventually ‘started seeing how the transcendent would almost always creep into the everyday’ (32-33).13 Lastly, a passage from Winnicott explains that in the ‘weeks and months’ after birth, ‘[the mother] is the baby, and the baby is her’.14 The arrangement of the snapshots suggests that this early bond was severed by the father: while Bechdel is looking directly at her mother in the first four photos, in the final snapshot she is looking directly and fearfully at the camera, the ‘rapport’ between mother and daughter ‘shattered’ as she ‘notice[s] the man with the camera’. At a mere three months old, Bechdel explains, she had ‘seen enough of [her] father’s rages to be wary of him’ (33). On the following pages, Bechdel explains that at the time these photos were taken her mother had found herself pregnant once again and hints that she may also have been suffering from depression. Another fragment from Winnicott suggests that a young baby ‘may be able to show that he or she knows what it is like to be a mother’, which is then followed by Bechdel’s statement that the final snapshot ‘feels’ to her like ‘the end of [her] childhood’ (35). This sequence of snapshots thus lies at the heart of Bechdel’s meaningful narrative of how her difficult relationship with her mother began.

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All of the above observations reveal a strained and problematic relationship between Bechdel and her mother, a fractured and fractious bond that is both buried and excavated in the medium of writing. It is, indeed, through her writing and drawing that Bechdel is able to express and to attempt to address what she sees as the failure of her mother to be what Winnicott calls the ‘good-enough mother’, a mother who is able to facilitate her child’s emotional development. The very title of Bechdel’s book draws attention—in a memoir that uses poignant drawings to capture the reader’s attention—to the central drama in Bechdel’s life: is Helen her mother, and if she is not, then what else might she be in relation to her daughter? One thing that Helen appears to be, as well as or instead of a mother, is a critic—a critic both of her daughter’s life-choices and of the latter’s favouring of the memoir form. Of course, Bechdel’s preference for life-writing makes sense precisely because of the problems in her life, in particular her relationship with her mother—writing about life acts as a kind of substitute for but also a solution to life’s problems. Bechdel is, in a sense, using life-writing as a vehicle for communicating her frustrations with her mother, for expressing buried emotions, and, ultimately, as an attempt to heal wounds and thus further her incomplete emotional development. Her narrativising of her mother and of the mother-daughter relationship is an attempt at finding and asserting her own voice, over and above the dominant and dominating voice of her mother. However, Helen’s assumption of her daughter’s childhood literary voice, the implied warning contained in her hope that her daughter’s memoir will not be full of anger, and Bechdel’s need to rehearse talking to her mother about her book-project are all dramatic examples of the too-powerful maternal voice that Bechdel needs to overcome. However, just as Bechdel narrativises her life in order to overcome its problems, and just as she expresses her anger and frustrations at her mother through the mediated form of memoir, so too she looks for inspiration in the writings of other female writers, and ones who also had a problematic relationship with their own mothers. In order to develop a voice of her own, a project that might have but was not facilitated by and in her relationship with her biological mother, Bechdel turns to the voices of a series of literary mothers.

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Are You My (Literary) Mother? As with Fun Home before it, Are You My Mother? is filled with literary references and allusions. However, whereas in the former the selection of authors was determined by her father’s rather masculine literary taste, featuring discussions of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Albert Camus, in the latter the choice of texts is dictated by Bechdel’s own needs and she engages with the writings of mostly female authors, including Woolf, Rich, and Anne Bradstreet. These writers function in the book as literary mothers in several senses. Firstly, they represent multiple earlier generations of successful women writers who produced literary works under the constraints of a patriarchal and heteronormative society, constraints that Bechdel herself faces as a contemporary female writer of memoir and lesbian comics15. Secondly, they provide Bechdel with a model of how writing can have a therapeutic value; as mentioned in the introduction, Woolf’s obsession with her own mother was apparently cured by the writing of a novel. Lastly, in each of these literary mothers Bechdel discovers an explicit concern with the problem of the female (literary) voice in a world dominated by men and by masculine conventions. Their struggles with both developing and expressing a voice of their own are helpful for Bechdel given the dominance of her mother’s voice and the latter’s adherence to masculine conventions. It is therefore in looking back at earlier generations of female authors and the hardships they faced, that Bechdel is able to move forward—in her life and in her writing. Of all the literary mothers in the book, Woolf is surely the most significant, for Bechdel quotes frequently from her diaries, essays and fiction, and both writers share much in common. Karyn Sproles has suggested that both women are writers ‘unwinding their pasts and oppressed by their present’, using fiction or memoir to mourn the loss of parents.16 Furthermore, both writers struggle to write about lesbian sexuality in a heteronormative society: while Woolf hid what she called her ‘sapphistry’ in coded form in Orlando (1928), Bechdel encounters censorship from her mother, who disapproves of her daughter’s ‘lesbian cartoons’.17 Gloria Steinem, one of the most important figures of the women’s movement when Bechdel was a child in the late 1960s, and so another foundational figure for contemporary women’s writing, has written that Are You My Mother? is ‘like a comic book by Virginia Woolf’.18 Bechdel herself highlights Woolf’s significance early on by choosing as her epigraph a line from To the Lighthouse: ‘For nothing was simply one thing’. This phrase

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resonates throughout the memoir and is particularly suggestive of the interchangeable roles of mother and daughter. Bechdel first engages with Woolf’s writing by noticing similarities between her and her mother. After discussing Helen’s ‘compulsion’ for recording her daily life in a journal, Bechdel quotes Woolf bemoaning a ‘disgraceful lapse’ in her own journal-­ keeping: noticing a gap of ‘[e]leven days’, Woolf describes this as ‘life allowed to waste like a tap left running’ (13).19 Taking up this image, Bechdel writes that in transcribing her mother’s speech the ‘running tap of her life flows through my fingers’, an indication that she enjoys being in control of the relationship with her mother (14). Woolf’s description of her diary as a record of ‘external’ events, an account of ‘life’ rather than ‘the soul’ (17), also reminds Bechdel of her mother’s insistence that her own diary is merely a record of ‘external experience’ (12). This recollection brings out her anxieties about writing because her mother’s remarks feel like ‘an implied criticism, as if she’s comparing her own selflessness to [her daughter’s] self-absorption’ (18). Initially, then, Woolf’s appearance in the book only seems to accentuate Bechdel’s uneasy relationship to her mother. Bechdel finds a more positive and inspiring connection to Woolf when she discovers a passage about the therapeutic value of writing in the latter’s autobiographical essay ‘A Sketch of the Past’. In the essay, Woolf writes that ‘the presence of [her] mother obsessed [her]’ for many years, but that in completing her novel To the Lighthouse, she ‘ceased to be obsessed’ and ‘no longer hear[d] her voice’.20 Furthermore, Lily Briscoe’s obsession with Mrs Ramsay in that novel functions on one level as a mirror of Woolf’s relationship to her mother and the writing of this relationship in fictional form clearly had a therapeutic effect: ‘I supposed that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest’.21 Furthermore, Bechdel notes that for Woolf, biography and fiction play very different roles: as the latter puts it, while the biographer may publish the ‘known facts without comment’, the ‘life’ should be written as ‘fiction’ (28).22 Bechdel then reproduces a passage from To the Lighthouse in which Lily Briscoe has a transcendent vision of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, explaining in an adjacent caption box that this piece of writing illustrates the point that fiction achieves ‘deeper truths than facts’, that a ‘symbolical’ quality as Woolf calls it transcends the figures in the text (29). Woolf thus saw literary fiction rather than life-writing as the appropriate form to work through anxieties about life.23

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Bechdel, however, does not share this view and thus feels unable to follow directly in Woolf’s literary footsteps. Despite her mother’s wish that she had ‘written the book about [her] father as fiction’, Bechdel explains that she is ‘not ultimately interested in writing fiction’; the ‘whole point of the book’, she argues, is that ‘it [is] true’ (28). She also wonders if Woolf’s need to write her life as fiction is responsible for her finding it “difficult to give any clear description’ of her actual, nonfictional mother’ (29).24 As Hermione Lee observes, Woolf ‘uses the word “difficult” whenever she tries to write about her mother’, no doubt in part because her mother died when Woolf was still a child but also because her mother was ‘reticent and aloof’, ‘very beautiful and very sad’, and her ‘past kept mysterious’.25 Bechdel quotes a passage in which Woolf describes her mother as ‘[v]ery quick; very direct; practical; and amusing. […] She could be sharp, she disliked affectation’.26 Bechdel adds that ‘these things will do very well to describe [her own] mother, too’ (29). While both women therefore record the often-problematic relationship between mothers and daughters, they differ over their choice of form. Although Bechdel looks back to Woolf for inspiration, she also forges her own unique literary path. The other major literary mother in the memoir is Adrienne Rich, whose writing Bechdel discovered in college. Importantly, Bechdel notes that despite the fact that Rich is ‘apparently a respected poet of [her mother’s] generation’, she was ‘not assigned reading for any of [her] classes’ (170). Bechdel hints that Rich’s absence in the academic canon may be due to her ‘com[ing] out as a lesbian’. Indeed, it is only through Bechdel’s ‘new lesbian friends’ that she was ‘turned on to [Rich]’ in the first place (170).27 This brief introduction to Rich appears at the end of a section in which Bechdel recalls her mother’s aversion to the word ‘vagina’. As a young child, Bechdel had asked her mother for the name of her genitals after she had heard her parents talking openly about the male genitalia, ‘env[ying]’ all of the words her brothers knew and used frequently (169). Disappointingly, though, upon asking her mother for the ‘real name’ for her genitals, her mother responds by saying that she will ‘find out what it is and tell [her] later’ (169). As an adult, Bechdel is understandably confused by this bizarre exchange, although a partial explanation arrives towards the end of the book when she reveals that one of the ‘main things’ that Helen learned from her own mother was that ‘boys are more important than girls’ (263-64). When she finally tells her daughter the real name, Bechdel recalls that there was something off in her mother’s delivery: ‘Was it her tone? The suspicious delay? Or could a word actually convey distaste

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for its own meaning?’ (169). It is only when Bechdel arrives in college that she ‘found a lot of women asking and answering that very question’, including Rich (170).28 Bechdel’s discovery of women writers concerned with the female body and its repression in a patriarchal society is in a sense an attempt to find literary mothers who will make up for the inadequacies of the biological mother—where the latter was silent, the former shall speak. Rich is brought almost immediately into relationship with Woolf’s writing and more specifically the issue of the female voice. In one panel, Bechdel reproduces a portion of Rich’s 1971 essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Reading as Re-Vision’, in which the latter ruminates on Woolf’s ‘detached’ tone in A Room of One’s Own. Upon rereading this classic feminist text, Rich says she was ‘astonished’ at Woolf’s ‘dogged tentativeness’. Despite her surprise, Rich confesses that she ‘ha[s] heard [this tone] often enough, in myself and in other women’; it is ‘the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry’.29 Bechdel then illustrates the stark difference between the ‘distance and formalism of the male poets’ that women writers have often felt compelled to emulate and the attempt by female writers to find a voice of their own. Below a caption box in which she paraphrases Rich’s observations about Woolf’s detachment, Bechdel depicts a scene from college in which a (girl)friend sits astride her and reads some erotic lines from Rich’s ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’.30 After having tried to emulate the male poets, Bechdel explains, Rich was ‘kind of going for broke’ with such poems (170). In a similar fashion, despite the pressures from her mother and the literary establishment,31 Bechdel is attempting to create a voice of her own. Like Rich, she rereads earlier women writers in an attempt to understand and overcome the obstacles to female creativity. Finally, she too has had issues with being angry but is trying to get in touch with her anger, in both therapy and in her writing. In her search for meaningful patterns, Bechdel also discovers a link between Rich’s essay on rereading and her own mother’s unpublished writing. Following Woolf’s lead, Rich observes that women writers face the enormous challenge ‘to cease being an object and start being a subject’ in Bechdel’s paraphrase (171). As readers, Rich argues, women look to fiction to find their ‘way of being in the world’ but all they discover are masculine ‘myths and images of women’.32 They find ‘a terror and a dream’ or ‘a beautiful pale face’ in examples such as ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘Juliet or Salomé’.33 During her archival research, Bechdel discovers that her mother once wrote a poem entitled ‘La Belle Dame’, which

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‘copies the form of the Keats ballad’ but is ‘about the woman herself, not the knight’s fantasy of her’ (171). Nothing more is said about this poem, but it hints at the idea that her mother shared the same frustration as both Woolf and Rich about images of women in fiction. Intrigued by this discovery—‘What else did my mother write?’ (171)—Bechdel delves into the archive of Helen’s past, ‘striving to decipher the submerged [plot] of [her] mother[‘s] [life]’.34 Fast-forwarding to the present, Bechdel then reproduces a telephone conversation with her mother that reveals the latter’s frustrations at having sacrificed her freedom to write in order to raise children. She directs these frustrations first at Plath for ‘exhaust[ing] herself making curtains and gingerbread’ instead of doing something more fulfilling, and secondly at Betty Friedan for writing about the importance of freeing women from housework when she herself ‘hire[d] other women’ to do it for her (172). Bechdel has some sympathy for her mother who, when The Feminine Mystique was first published in 1963, would have been ‘stuck at home with two small children’; ‘I would have been pretty angry, too’, she adds (172). In one of many metafictional moments in the book, Bechdel then checks with her mother about a line that appears in this very memoir which explains that she has never read Plath and Helen has never read Woolf. As she puts it in the published text: ‘we have stayed out of one another’s way like this’ (30). Surprisingly or not, her mother then corrects her by admitting to having read A Room of One’s Own though none of Woolf’s fiction. This brief set of connections between Rich, Woolf and Bechdel’s mother is revealing of some of the differences between mother and daughter, in particular the notion that Steinem raises of daughters living out the unlived lives of their mothers.35 However, this section of the book also suggests that both women have a lot in common, more so than is often explicitly stated in the narrative, and that it is through Bechdel’s reading that she finds a bridge connecting her to her mother. Looking backward at literary mother-figures allows Bechdel to better understand her biological mother’s frustrations and anger. Rich also functions as a literary mother in a more direct sense. Recalling her first year living in New York, Bechdel notes that it was at this point that she first started writing her ‘memoirs’; in fact, this ‘bout of writing began just after a visit from mom’ (178-79). In the afternoons after work, she wrote a creative piece about the time she ‘tried to get grass stains on [her] pants in a bid for mom’s attention’, working hard on it for two weeks before ‘sen[ding] it off to two literary journals’ (179).36 Although the ‘more prestigious’ journal rejected the piece ‘with surprising rapidity’,

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Bechdel was astonished to read Rich’s signature on the rejection letter. While Bechdel ‘cringes’ at her ‘arrogance’ for having sent this piece off to such a journal and says that she would not try again for a long time, Rich leaves a couple of encouraging comments. She tells Bechdel to put more work in next time and to not be ‘put off, or discouraged’, for ‘[w]riting is a very long, demanding training, more hard work than luck. Strength to you’ (180). Coincidentally, Bechdel then attends a talk given by Rich only a few months later, a speech that was published as ‘Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet’ in 1984. Although the speech is ostensibly focused on Rich’s experience in Nicaragua, Bechdel freely admits that she was ‘more interested in the middle section, the story of [Rich’s] evolution as a poet’ (186). She finds inspiration from Rich’s open discussion of the negative reaction to writing personal poetry ‘informed by any conscious sexual politics’. Rich says that she was ‘told, in print, that [her] work was ‘bitter’, ‘personal” and that she had ‘sacrificed the sweetly flowing measures of [her] earlier books for a ragged line and a coarsened voice’.37 Bechdel says that she took copious notes of the speech and it is clear that it made a profound impact on her; her ability to stand up to her mother’s harsh judgements about life writing both in person and in print must surely have been strengthened from hearing Rich’s passionate defence.38 However, as inspiring and helpful as these literary mothers are, Bechdel also feels the need to find and draw strength from a different group of mother-figures, one which will help her more directly with her anxieties and to express her repressed anger at her mother.

Are You My (Therapeutic) Mother? Early on in the book, Bechdel describes her relationship with her mother as a paradox: ‘I can’t write this book until I get her out of my head’ but ‘the only way to get her out of my head is by writing the book!’ (23). Although the literary mothers instruct and inspire Bechdel to find a voice of her own and to use her writing as a way to work through her anxieties, this only addresses one side of the paradox. In order to address the other side, Bechdel draws on a number of mother figures within the psychoanalytic world who help her to work through her emotional difficulties both in therapy and through intellectual engagement. The most obvious examples are a pair of therapists that Bechdel has seen over many years, referred to in the book simply as Jocelyn and Carol. Both therapists gradually help Bechdel to acknowledge and express her long-repressed anger towards her

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mother rather than directing it at herself. With reference to the concept of transference, Bechdel suggests that she transforms her therapists into maternal figures and is then able to express her buried feelings. Unsurprisingly, given her cerebral character and reading habits, Bechdel also finds a therapeutic mother figure in the course of her reading about psychoanalysis. Upon encountering the ideas of Winnicott, Bechdel perceives in them a maternal quality and so wishes that he had been her mother. As we will see, the legacies of these therapeutic mothers compliment the literary mothers in helping Bechdel to work through her emotional trauma and find the courage to write about her life. Early in the first chapter, after reproducing Woolf’s line about writing as akin to a psychoanalytic treatment, Bechdel explains that she has been in therapy for ‘nearly [her] entire adult life’. Unlike Woolf, and despite this long-term treatment, Bechdel says that she has ‘not laid [her] deeply felt emotions about [her] mother to rest’ (18). However, by the end of the narrative, Bechdel makes it clear that her therapy has helped her in this endeavour, in large part as a result of her therapists acting as surrogate mother figures upon whom she can release her repressed emotions. After only a single session with Jocelyn, Bechdel reports that her ‘depression immediately began to lift’, confessing in her journal that night that she ‘want[s] Jocelyn to be [her] mother’ (51). Further evidence of Jocelyn’s maternal role can be seen when Bechdel explains that she wants to ‘be [Jocelyn’s] best client’ (106) and that she loves her (280). Similarly, Carol is also positioned as a maternal figure: in the dream that opens the third chapter, Carol appears at Bechdel’s office and proceeds to give her a ‘perfect massage’ before offering to mend her trousers (78-79). As Bechdel interprets it to her therapist, ‘[y]ou’re healing me!’ (82). Carol’s observation that her arrival at Bechdel’s office is a ‘reversal of roles’ then leads her to wonder if her patient is ‘trying to heal [her] mother with the book about [her] father’ (82). It is then that Bechdel explains that she has ‘been trying to heal [her] mother for as long as [she] can remember’ (83). Examples like these reveal the mechanism whereby Bechdel is able to use her therapists as mother figures in order to act out her childhood relationship to her mother, thereby working through the repressed emotions so that she can heal herself rather than her mother. In addition to therapy, Bechdel acknowledges that she is ‘trying to figure out—from both sides of the couch—just what it is that psychoanalysts do for their patients’, and so has been ‘studying’ the works of various psychoanalysts, including not only Freud and Jung but also and especially

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Winnicott. Like her therapists, Winnicott functions as a therapeutic mother-figure as a result of his ideas about mothering and childhood development which Bechdel finds attractive. Asked by Carol why she feels so ‘drawn to’ Winnicott, Bechdel replies simply: ‘I want him to be my mother’ (21). This is given an indirect and abstract explanation on the following page in the form of a multi-panel diagram that illustrates Winnicott’s claim about the centrality of ‘relationship’. Throughout his career, Winnicott argued that human beings are not ‘isolate’ beings but are rather always in relationship to others. As he put it in one essay, ‘there is no such thing as a baby’ because wherever there is a baby there is always ‘someone caring for the baby’.39 Furthermore, this ‘mother-infant’ relationship was seen by Winnicott as a ‘paradigm for what happens between the analyst and the patient’ and more generally for how people will ‘relate to the entire world’.40 Bechdel illustrates this by splitting the page into three sets of drawings, with her mother at the top, her various therapists in the middle, and her ‘romantic attachments’ at the bottom; various lines then connect the three sets of women. Although Bechdel does not explicitly comment on these ideas, it is clear from many of the other scenes in the narrative that it is at least partly because of her problems with sustaining long-term monogamous relationships that she turns to therapy, which in turn leads her to an analysis of her problematic relationship to her mother. When asked by Carol why she would like Winnicott to be her mother, Bechdel explains that ‘[i]f he had been [her] mother, [she] wouldn’t be suffering over this book’ and would rather be ‘doing something useful’ (23). This assessment will change by the end of the narrative as Bechdel will come to see the book as performing a similar function to the one that To the Lighthouse did for Woolf. This idea of ‘doing something useful’ is developed later in the narrative when Bechdel explains Winnicott’s distinction between ‘relating’ and ‘using’, an important distinction to understand as it sits at the centre of Bechdel’s attempts to change her relationship with her mother, find her own voice, and more generally use material from the past in order to create something new in the present. In an essay entitled ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications’, Winnicott argues that when a subject ‘relates’ to an object, she does so through projection and identification, seeing herself in the object. By contrast, for an object to become available for use, Winnicott argues that it must ‘necessarily be real in the sense of being part of a shared reality’ and not just ‘a bundle of projections’.41 The journey from ‘relating’ to ‘using’ objects is, however,

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‘the most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development’ since it requires what Winnicott calls a ‘good-enough mother’ and a ‘facilitating environment’.42 Rephrased in terms of the relationship between infant and mother, the former ‘relates’ to the latter when it ‘sees the mother as a part of itself’, but only learns to ‘use’ her when it understands that it is separate from her, as Bechdel paraphrases Winnicott (262). Those infants that never learn to use the mother ‘may later enter analysis in hopes of fixing things’, as Bechdel goes on to explain, but this is a more difficult way of learning to use others given that the patient is not initially able to ‘use’ the therapist in this very endeavour—the therapist thus has to do what the mother should have done many years earlier, only the adult has developed defences and habits that make change difficult (266). In yet another paradox, Bechdel then fleshes out what this facilitating process looks like according to Winnicott: ‘The subject must destroy the object. And the object must survive this destruction’ (267).43 In developing a capacity to ‘use’ others, the infant/patient has to ‘destroy’ the mother/analyst and, most importantly, the latter must survive this assault. If this happens, then the infant/ patient is able to see the object as external and hence separate from herself. If not, the object will ‘remain internal, a projection of the subject’s self’ (267). In a revision of Freud’s idea that reality frustrates the individual’s desires, Winnicott argues that in fact ‘aggression makes us feel real’, as Bechdel puts it (268).44 Drawing on these ideas, Bechdel suggests that because she was unable to express her anger towards her mother she was therefore unable to ‘feel real’. Instead of learning to ‘use’ her mother, Bechdel was instead ‘used’ to satisfy her mother’s (unconscious) needs. This has lasting consequences, as can be seen in a therapy session, recounted towards the end of the book, in which Jocelyn lists some of Bechdel’s many positive attributes: she is ‘good, kind’, has ‘integrity and talent’, works hard, is ‘willing to change’ and is ‘adorable’ to boot (266-67). However, Bechdel swiftly denies these qualities and adds that if she were all of these things ‘[she] would die’ (268). Jocelyn then offers an important interpretation in the form of a question: ‘you’d rather die than feel anger at your mother for not giving you what you needed?’ (268). Just as Rich’s remarks about women writers subduing their anger inspire Bechdel to have the courage to write directly about her life rather than fictionalise it or repress it, so too Jocelyn encourages her to express her anger towards her mother rather than direct it inwards, at least during the safe environment of the therapy session. At this point, though, Bechdel is ‘unable to cross’ this line as she puts it (268).

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In order to better grasp this deadlock, Bechdel looks back at her mother’s parenting style while incorporating ideas from her readings. She begins abstractly with a brief outline of Winnicott’s idea of the ‘good-­ enough mother’, that is one who is able to ‘make active adaptation to the infant’s needs’ while also allowing the infant to learn to ‘tolerate the results of frustration’ (61).45 As if fearful of her mother’s reaction, Bechdel quickly states that she ‘[does not] want to suggest that [her] highly capable mother was not ‘good enough” (61). However, she comes close to implying this in a panel which depicts her being bottle-fed by her mother. In a caption box, Bechdel writes that Winnicott cautioned mothers about letting their babies tolerate frustration too soon, tempting as this might be; in a second box, she writes that her mother always said that she was ‘a ‘good baby” (62). Whilst this merely hints at the idea that Helen put her own needs above those of her child by encouraging the latter to adapt too quickly to frustration, the next panel appears to make this explicit. During one therapy session, Bechdel explains that she is ‘always’ the one who telephones her mother, and that although she listens patiently while her mother talks ‘on and on’ about her own life, she ‘doesn’t want to hear about [her daughter’s] life’ (62). As she concludes her thought: ‘It’s like I’m the mother’ (62). Bechdel gives further evidence of this asymmetry throughout the book. When she was five years old, for example, she overheard her mother sobbing behind a closed door, this ‘glimpse’ of her mother’s ‘private agony’ confirming ‘what [she] already knew’ (153). Then, a few years later, Helen rather abruptly asks her daughter one night if she loves her, an unusual question in a family that ‘never talked about love’ (86). Bechdel explains that ‘all [she] wanted was to assure her [mother] that [she] loved her’, but that this felt like an especially arduous task: ‘I had to be careful how I replied […] Too enthusiastic, and I’d seem disingenuous. Too serious, and I’d seem grudging. Too slow, and I might miss my chance forever’ (87). Eventually, she answered simply ‘yes’, but looking back Bechdel says that she now sees that ‘no degree of sincerity or alacrity […] would have sufficed’ (87). These and other similar episodes in the narrative illustrate Winnicott’s idea that the sensitive child has a ‘marvellous’ or ‘magical’ ability to pick up on the parents’ needs, but that such an ability is potentially harmful to the child’s development because her own needs can become subsumed by those of the parents (153). An ‘intrusively demanding’ mother would, in Adam Phillips’ words, ‘foster a precocious compliance in the child’ and the latter would end up developing what Winnicott called a ‘False Self’.46 Bechdel’s admission, noted

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earlier, that she has always been ‘trying to heal [her] mother’ is a clear suggestion that she suffered from her mother’s demands and became overly compliant (83). Bechdel also draws on the ideas of Alice Miller, whose book The Drama of the Gifted Child47 helps make sense of such episodes by ‘describ[ing] perfectly the strangely inverted relationship’ between mother and daughter (53). In a passage reproduced by Bechdel, Miller explains that the sensitive and empathic child, with her ‘unusually powerful “antennae”’, is almost ‘predestine[d]’ to be ‘used—if not misused—by people with intense narcissistic needs’.48 This passage clearly betrays the influence of Winnicott and indeed it is through Miller’s influential book that Bechdel first read of his ideas. Interestingly, Bechdel says that she mistook Winnicott for a woman at first partly because Miller never used any pronouns in referring to him but also, significantly, because his ‘ideas themselves had a nurturing, maternal aspect’ (55). Alongside her reading of Winnicott and Miller, Bechdel’s therapists gradually help her to feel her anger towards her mother and to recognise that she puts the needs of others above her own. On one occasion, Bechdel talks at length about her ‘nearly unbearable spasms of professional envy’ and says that she feels ‘annihilated’ (70). Carol then tells her that this feeling that her own ‘achievements get erased by other people’s’ is perhaps a sign that ‘there wasn’t enough room under one roof for several geniuses’ when Bechdel was growing up. Her feeling of annihilation is thus a reversal of her own aggression, directed at herself rather than at others because of feelings of guilt (71). Her inability to get angry at her mother has thus turned into a general inability to express anger towards anyone except herself and as a result of this she doubts her own abilities as a writer.

Transitional Objects and the Use of the Past I want to conclude by focusing more closely on how Bechdel uses her memoir to work through her painful relationship with her mother and to look further at how she manages to bridge the gap between mother and daughter, the past and the present. In the second chapter of the book, Bechdel outlines what she calls Winnicott’s ‘primary contribution to psychoanalysis’, namely his concept of the ‘transitional object’ (56). According to Winnicott, all babies are initially under the ‘illusion’ that the mother’s breast is part of themselves, and in order for them to learn that they are separate from the mother they need to make use of a special object which

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will occupy a ‘territory between the subjective and the objective’ (56). Over time and with the help of this object that is both ‘not part of the infant’s body’ and ‘not fully recognised as belonging to external reality’49, the infant begins to appreciate the difference between the mother and herself. Winnicott adds, however, that ‘no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality’, but that ‘relief’ can be obtained from what he calls ‘an intermediate area of experience’, examples of which can be found in the arts and religion, but all of which can be traced back to the ‘small child who is “lost” in play’.50 After giving a brief outline of Winnicott’s theory, Bechdel then explains that her mother was unsuccessful in her attempts to breastfeed her, a ‘failure’ that ‘must have been deeply frustrating’ for both of them (60). She speculates that ‘a pattern of mutual, pre-emptive rejection could have been set in motion’ as a result, with ‘each of us withholding in order to foreclose future rejection’ (60). Along with Bechdel’s many comments about how she played the maternal role, this picture of unsuccessful feeding further emphasises the difficult relationship between mother and daughter. Furthermore, Winnicott’s ideas help Bechdel and her readers to understand that when she and her mother transcribe each other’s speech, they are treating each other as objects rather than subjects. Bechdel’s interest in Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects is thus driven by her desire to understand this way of relating, to grasp the lack of proper separation between herself and her mother, and to find a way out. In this regard, Lee Konstantinou helpfully suggests that Bechdel’s memoir itself might be read as a transitional object, for Bechdel ‘wants her book to become an object that she can use to separate herself, in a performative fashion, from her mother’.51 I would further argue that her use of various mother-figures can be seen as part of this project; Bechdel learns to ‘use’, in Winnicott’s sense, mother-figures such as Woolf, Rich and her various therapists in order to achieve a more healthy level of separation from her mother and from her painful past, in large part by validating, and encouraging her need to express, anger. By the end of her narrative, Bechdel appears to have achieved her goal of laying her obsession with her mother to rest and asserting her own distinctive voice—indeed, the very book that we are reading would seem to be proof of that. After sending her mother a significant portion of the memoir, Bechdel is both relieved and elated when Helen tells her that the book ‘coheres’ and correctly perceives that ‘it’s a metabook’ (285). ‘At last’, Bechdel writes paraphrasing Winnicott, ‘I have destroyed my mother, and she has survived my destruction’ (285). On the back of this success,

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Bechdel is then able to look backwards in acknowledgement of the fact that her mother, like the various mother-figures that appear throughout the book, has also given her the ability to move forwards by creating something distinctively her own. The final pages of the memoir return to the ‘crippled child’ game that Bechdel and her mother used to play when she was a small child, a scenario in which both pretended that Bechdel was disabled in some way, with her mother offering her assistance in the form of an imaginary pair of crutches, ‘leg braces’ or ‘special shoes’ (287). Bechdel tells Jocelyn that this game was ‘fun’ because ‘wherever [she] went with the fantasy, [her mother] was right there’ with her, echoing Winnicott’s point about the child’s need to be lost in play mentioned above (20). At the end of the book, Bechdel then adds crucially that she has ‘always thought’ of this game as ‘the moment [her] mother taught [her] to write’, for the ‘further [she] moved into this imaginary space, the more it opened up’ (287). Most importantly, this shared imaginary space allows the two women to recognise each other’s ‘invisible wounds’ (287). The legacies of Woolf, Rich and others are thus joined up with the legacy that Bechdel’s mother has bequeathed to her daughter, a personal and literary legacy that she is able to recognise at last. In the final panel, Bechdel is able to hold two thoughts in a productive tension: ‘There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. […] But in its place, she has given me something else. […] She has given me the way out’ (288-89). Although Bechdel has had to find a variety of surrogate mother figures in order to work through her difficult relationship with her biological mother, eventually she is able to look back positively at what the latter has given her, a legacy that is responsible for her innovations in the present.

Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 99. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar put it: “the daughter of too few mothers, today's female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively emerging” (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [London: Yale University Press, 2000], 50). 2. Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 141. 3. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Pimlico, 2002), 93.

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4. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal The Madwoman in the Attic is arguably the most well-known study of this problematic. 5. Hillary Chute, “Comics Form and Narrating Lives”, Profession (2011): 109. Scott McCloud’s critically acclaimed book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Collins, 1993) provides a more detailed analysis of this ability of comics to bridge the gap between past and present. In the first chapter, for example, he discusses the fact that comics always involve the juxtaposition of images and/or words, and he gives many interesting examples of what can be done with this. 6. D.  W. Winnicott, “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development,” in Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1991), 111 (emphasis in original). 7. Readers of Bechdel’s previous memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), will appreciate this opening dream as it creates a sense of continuity between the two books. This memoir is not only about her father but about the house that they lived in and which he worked obsessively on, renovating and decorating it constantly. 8. Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 4. All further references will appear in parentheses in the body of the text. 9. Daniel Mendelsohn, “But Enough About Me,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/25/ but-­enough-­about-­me-­2. 10. Bechdel sees this as responsible for her adult “tendency to edit [her] thoughts before they even [take] shape” (49). 11. This image of a meaningful pattern that is scattered across multiple boxes is an apt description of Bechdel’s book. 12. Lee Konstantinou argues that the composition of this double-page spread, with the photographs clearly arranged on Bechdel’s desk to create what he sees as a trompe l’oeil effect, “gorgeously” depicts the “movement of [Bechdel’s] mind” frozen on the page, and is a brilliant example of something that “[o]nly comics can do” (“Relatable Transitional Objects,” The New Inquiry, July 3, 2012. https://thenewinquiry.com/ relatable-­transitional-­objects/). 13. This recalls the argument Bechdel had with her mother about writing about the self, mentioned earlier. 14. D. W. Winnicott, “The Ordinary Devoted Mother,” in Winnicott on the Child (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press 2002), 13. 15. Bechdel gained initial success and fame for a regular comics strip called Dykes to Watch Out For which began in 1983. Given the, until recently, widespread view that comics represent a less serious genre, at least from conservative literary critics and journalists, Bechdel has also had to over-

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come this barrier too. A selection of the comic strip appears in The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). 16. Karyn Sproles, Reflective Reading and the Power of Narrative: Producing the Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 174. 17. Sproles, Reflective Reading, 173. 18. This comment, which appears on the blurb for Are You My Mother?, is rather unfortunate comment given Bechdel’s anxiety about the dominance of her mother’s voice and her fear that she has internalised it. By suggesting that Are You My Mother? is akin to a comics book written by Virginia Woolf, Steinem perhaps unwittingly erases Bechdel’s voice and replaces it with that of the literary mother. Steinem also correctly observes that the book is directly concerned with the fact that many women are “living out the unlived lives of [their] mothers”, a comment that makes sense towards the end of the book when it is clear that Bechdel’s mother regrets not becoming a writer. Both of these comments appear in the section devoted to praise for Bechdel’s memoir. 19. This quotation and the ones following are taken from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1977). 20. Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”, 92-93. 21. Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”, 93. Later in Are You My Mother?, Bechdel reproduces another similar passage from Woolf’s diary from 1928 in which the latter says that she “used to think of [her parents] daily” but that writing To the Lighthouse “laid them in [her] mind” (152). 22. These comments appear in Woolf’s notebooks and are quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), 10. 23. Although Woolf did compose a piece of memoir, she clearly believed that the genre had firm limits on what could be published. Mendelsohn points out that when Woolf was asked by her sister to write an autobiographical sketch, she eventually recalled “an incestuous assault by her half-brother Gerald, an event that her memory had repressed, and about which, in the end, she was unable to write for publication” (“But Enough About Me,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2010. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/25/but-­enough-­about-­me-­2.) 24. Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” 93. 25. Lee, Virginia Woolf, 81. 26. Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” 94. 27. Again, this is in contrast to the typically male authors recommended to her by her father, as recounted in Fun Home. 28. The panel below this caption box depicts Bechdel’s college desk with two important books on it: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology.

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29. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Reading as Re-Vision,” in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (London: Norton, 1993), 169. 30. Although not referenced, the lines are from ‘(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)’, part of the ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’ and collected in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. 31. Not to mention Bechdel’s frequent financial problems with trying to earn a living from being a comics writer. 32. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” 170. 33. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” 171. 34. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, xxiii. 35. Steinem’s comment appears in the section devoted to praise for the book. 36. Like many of the other possible beginnings that Bechdel considers in the opening chapter, this might well have served as the beginning of Are You My Mother? 37. Adrienne Rich, “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet,” in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (London: Norton, 1993), 247. 38. It is worth noting that nowhere in the course of her memoir does Bechdel mention or quote from Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, first published in 1976. Although it would be interesting to see if and how Rich’s ideas contained in this book resonate with Bechdel’s memoir, given that my focus is on how Bechdel herself engages with a series of mother-figures I will not offer an analysis of Rich’s fascinating book in this chapter. 39. Quoted in Bechdel, Are You My Mother?, 22. Winnicott gives a brief explanation of his famous remark in The Child, The Family and the Outside World (London: Penguin, 1957): “I once risked the remark, ‘there is no such thing as a baby’—meaning that if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone, but is essentially part of a relationship” (88). 40. Quoted in Bechdel, Are You My Mother?, 22. 41. D.  W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications,” in Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1991), 88. 42. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object,’ 89. 43. See Winnicott, “The Use of an Object,” 89-90 for his discussion of why the subject must destroy the object and the object must survive this action for it to become real and hence usher the subject into developing the capacity to use objects. 44. As Winnicott explains, while orthodox psychoanalytic theory sees “aggression [as] reactive to the encounter with the reality principle”, he sees “the

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destructive drive [as] creat[ing] the quality of externality” (“The Use of an Object,” 93.) 45. This quotation is taken from “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”, first published in 1953  in the International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis but later collected in Playing and Reality in 1971. Bechdel reproduces material from the latter on numerous occasions throughout her narrative. See Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1993), 10-11. 46. Adam Phillips, Winnicott (London: Penguin, 2007), 4. 47. Miller’s book has been published under several different titles and was heavily revised in 1995. To avoid confusion, I refer to the unrevised Virago edition published as The Drama of Being a Child as this matches the passages reproduced by Bechdel from The Drama of the Gifted Child published by Basic Books. 48. Alice Miller, The Drama of Being Child (London: Vintage, 1992), 38. 49. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 2. Winnicott gives various examples of transitional objects, such as a soft toy or blanket, but stresses that the actual object is not the most important aspect of this concept. “It is not the object”, he writes, “that is transitional. The object represents the infant’s transition from a state of being merged with the mother to a state of being in relation to the mother as something outside and separate” (14-15). Bechdel initially uses the example of Winnie the Pooh but also discusses her own teddy bear as an example of a transitional object. 50. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 13. 51. Lee Konstantinou, “Relatable Transitional Objects,” The New Inquiry, July 3, 2012, https://thenewinquiry.com/relatable-­transitional-­objects/

Works Cited Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. New  York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Bechdel, Alison. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. Chute, Hillary. ‘Comics Form and Narrating Lives’. Profession (2011): 107-17. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. London: Yale University Press, 2000. Konstantinou, Lee. ‘Relatable Transitional Objects.’ The New Inquiry, July 3, 2012. https://thenewinquiry.com/relatable-­transitional-­objects/. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997.

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McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: Harper Collins, 1993. Mendelsohn, Daniel. ‘But Enough About Me.’ The New Yorker, November 17, 2010. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/25/but-enoughabout-­me-­2. Miller, Alice. The Drama of Being a Child and the Search for the True Self. London: Virago, 1992. Phillips, Adam. Winnicott. London: Penguin, 2007. Rich, Adrienne. ‘When We Dead Awaken: Reading as Re-Vision’. In Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, 166-77. London: Norton, 1993a. Rich, Adrienne. ‘Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet.’ In Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, 239-51. London: Norton, 1993b. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1995. Sproles, Karyn. Reflective Reading and the Power of Narrative: Producing the Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Winnicott, D.  W. The Child, The Family and the Outside World. London: Penguin, 1957. Winnicott, D. W. ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.’ In Playing and Reality, 1-25. London: Routledge, 1991a. Winnicott, D. W. ‘Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development.’ In Playing and Reality, 111-18. London: Routledge, 1991b. Winnicott, D. W. ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications.’ In Playing and Reality, 86-94. London: Routledge, 1991c. Winnicott, D.  W. ‘The Ordinary Devoted Mother.’ In Winnicott on the Child, 11-18. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2002. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008a. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Professions for Women.’ In Selected Essays, edited by David Bradshaw, 140-45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008b. Woolf, Virginia. ‘A Sketch of the Past.’ In Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 78-160. London: Pimlico, 2002. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1977.

CHAPTER 4

‘You’ll be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at all.’ Facts, Fictions, and Anachronism and Realism in Contemporary Women’s Historical Novels Leanne Bibby

For several decades, popular historical novels by women have been a widely read category of women’s writing, but one that is marginalised in literary criticism. This is despite what critics including Diana Wallace (2005, 2017), Jerome de Groot (2010) and Susan Bordo (2013) have identified as recent historical fictions’ fresh challenges to understandings of the complex relationships between fiction and historical knowledge; challenges with roots in twentieth-century popular and literary texts. In Wallace’s pioneering study The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (2005), she describes historical fiction’s appeal in terms of the paradoxical relationships between fiction and historiography within novels themselves—relationships which are acknowledged in the L. Bibby (*) School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_4

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theoretical work of Hayden White (2014) and Linda Hutcheon (1988), as I will explain—such as the fiction’s use of ‘facts’ and its perceived ‘authenticity’.1 De Groot acknowledges the specific and ‘markedly different’ experience of writing, reading, and interpreting historical rather than contemporary fiction, concerned as the former is with the conventions of both fiction and facts, facts which are themselves of the past and so inherently ‘other’ and not as straightforward as they may seem.2 Bordo’s study of the cultural ‘creation’ of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII and subject of many successful fictions, is a notable contribution to the debate around such fiction’s often inventive and provocative use of historical facts to create a varied tradition of stories about Boleyn, from the seemingly accurate and authentic, to the romantic and fanciful, and the postmodern and metafictional. This chapter proposes that the nature of the legacy between historical novels of the twentieth century and those of the twenty-first century can be traced in their uses of historical realism (apparent adherence to facts) and anachronism (departure from facts and addition of modern or otherwise out-of-place details), often in the same texts and representations, and that this supports useful new thinking about the role of fiction in shaping historical knowledge. The historical novels of recent decades, both literary and popular and across their remarkably varied subjects and themes (surveyed, for example, in Wallace, 2017), are voracious in their use of historical evidence and explicit in their inventive and yet serious engagement with historical facts and narratives. This is true from genre novels to historiographic metafictions, and furthermore, ensures that popular and literary categories relate more closely to one another than is sometimes supposed. The chapter will not elide the differences between the strong self-awareness and resistance to conventional literary form of historiographic metafictions such as Mantel’s (which flags its own constructedness, for example, with a dryly intrusive narrator and by suggesting that Georges-Jacques Danton’s wife has been reading a novel, ‘and this is it’ [loc. 10852]), and less mischievously experimental texts, but rather to suggest that they both owe certain debts to older, popular forms. Apparent historical inaccuracies within fiction, including outright anachronisms, are a key, productively paradoxical feature of certain novels with a great deal to suggest about historical ‘reality’ and knowledge. I will advance this argument by discussing novels by Deryn Lake and Suzannah Dunn, two authors so far absent, to my knowledge, from these critical debates. I examine Dunn’s use of anachronistic, ‘defiantly modern’ dialogue and

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mindsets (an apt phrase from a review by Hughes, 2004), in her first historical novel The Queen of Subtleties (2004) and intensified and refined in her 2010 novel The Confession of Katherine Howard, as crucial instances of Linda Hutcheon’s characterisation of historiographic metafiction’s paradoxical self-reflexivity alongside its ‘claim’ to ‘real’ people and events,3 and its affirmation of historical knowledge that also queries that knowledge’s authority.4 Dunn’s Katherine Howard, for example, emerges both as a result of Dunn’s exhaustive research into the social, material, and political world of Tudor England, and an interrogation of the historical narratives (literary and non-literary) that have usually constructed Katherine either in the mould of an ill-fated political pawn or as a foolish agent in her own downfall and execution for adultery in 1542. This chapter contends that along with The Queen of Subtleties, The Confession of Katherine Howard can be read productively in dialogue with twentieth-century historical fiction including two historical romances by Lake (Sutton Place [1983], Pour the Dark Wine [1989]) and literary fiction by Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety [1992]). These authors’ works also query in groundbreaking ways the critical distinction between literary and popular historical fiction and the illusory separation of literary and history writing more broadly, when read in light of Linda Hutcheon’s ideas regarding historiographic metafiction (1988) and Hayden White’s notion of the practical past (2014). Indeed, through outright invention and anachronism, and by giving controversial new voices to historical figures within realist historical settings, I argue that Dunn’s novels are especially important signposts in thinking about the relationships between twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical fictions specifically through a primarily popular body of women’s writing.

Facts, Fictions, and the ‘practical past’ Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety is, in many ways, reminiscent of a Victorian novel in its hugely detailed evocation of Paris before and during the French Revolution, complete with a mainly omniscient, often intrusive narrator. At the same time, however, the novel signals its place in the lineage of twentieth-century historiographic metafictions partly by prefacing sections of the narrative with extracts from historical documents, to self-­ referential and ironic effect. One of these sections quotes French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre’s pronouncement in 1793, during the ‘Reign of Terror’ that would end his life and those of the novel’s other

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protagonists, that ‘History is fiction’ (loc. 695). The novel is interested intensely in both the practice and theory of metafiction; as its omniscient narrator explains at the same point in the book, ‘Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-­ breeding, sand-blind and parched’ (loc. 696). Mantel’s novel is also an exercise in examining historical knowledge, myth, and stories about Robespierre and other revolutionaries, writer Camille Desmoulins and lawyer Georges-Jacques Danton, by way of being a hyper-realist fiction which also invents in rich detail these figures’ mental and emotional lives. Mantel expressed her qualms about inventing historical detail about French Revolutionaries’ personal lives, facts that could later be queried by readers as inaccurate, in her 2017 Reith lecture for the BBC;5 even so, her novel treats the ‘error-breeding, sand-blind and parched’ ‘light of history’ as a space in which possible new knowledge must be imagined. In her essay collection On Histories and Stories, novelist and critic A. S. Byatt describes perceptively Mantel’s novel’s realist, ‘precise images of small, local details of pain, excitement, curiosity, terror and desire’ and capacity to tell what a history book such as Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) ‘cannot tell, because [Schama] cannot know it, although both writers use the same evidence’.6 Contemporary historical fiction, whether popular or literary, always treats its audience as well-informed and as though they have opinions about the historical events and debates to which the texts refer. The evidence they use underpins this contract between text and reader, in which the evidence and inventions are both constructed to be recognisable. This occurs many times in Mantel’s novel, for example when Robespierre’s ‘History is fiction’ quotation occurs later in the narrative as part of his ironic, metafictional acknowledgement that he will have a definitive place within a future, historical narrative (loc. 10063). When it comes to the novels I examine later in this chapter, that particular contract between text and reader is modified further even than an informed awareness of irony: outright invention and anachronism function, often in paradoxically realist ways, to refer back to the historical record and, beyond that, to ideas of the ‘real’ past. As a set of historical events, the French Revolution itself is constructed in English language in literary just as often as non-literary narratives; fiction has a key role in ‘making’ historical knowledge about this specific period, especially so for the anglophone audiences for whom French sources are less accessible. And although historiographic

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metafictions work in part by calling the literary/non-literary distinction into question, the Revolution is itself a watershed in how historical discourse was produced using literature: in its aftermath, and at the moment of the realist novel’s formulation, nineteenth-century European writing sought to express changes so cataclysmic that they seemed ‘more like fiction than fact’, as a New York Times review of A Place of Greater Safety describes the 1792 execution of Louis XVI.7 Theorist Hayden White remarks on the relationship of the French Revolution to previous and future historical discourse, and the key place of literature in this, in his essay ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’: ‘Prior to the French Revolution, historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary art. […] In the early nineteenth century, however, it became conventional, at least among historians, to identify truth with fact and to regard fiction as the opposite of truth, hence as a hindrance to the understanding of reality rather than as a way of apprehending it’.8 The violence and excesses of the Revolution contributed, White argues, to a ‘profound hostility to all forms of myth’ in the West during the nineteenth century.9 As history and discourse, the Revolution is unprecedented, shocking, and perhaps indescribable as simple ‘fact’. Still, twentieth-­ century fictions and theory seem to recognise that fictions are not capitulations to the impossibility of facts, but rather explorations of possible pasts—possible ‘facts’ and knowledges. Contemporary (meta)fictions such as Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety reflect on this distrust of myth and literary narratives as part of historiography by addressing historiography’s limitations, considering the things that cannot be definitively ‘known’— speech, emotions, private events—in ways that underline their existing place in writing about the past. Few if any historical accounts, after all, avoid speculating about events and personalities that cannot be verified by evidence. Beyond simply filling imaginative space left by historical evidence, however, fiction can structure knowledge based on available evidence, a process in which the novels of Lake, Mantel and Dunn are engaged. For instance, in The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, Jacques Rancière comments on the telling displacement of the death of Philip II of Spain in Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (1949), so that this death no longer occurs to mark the end of a conventional story. Rancière explains that placing the king’s death

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at the end, at the edge of the blank space that separates the book from its conclusion, is to transform it into its own metaphor. We understand that the displaced death of Phillip II metaphorizes the death of a certain type of history, that of events and kings. […] The death of the king signifies that kings are dead as centres and forces of history.10

Hayden White termed this literary organisation of history texts ‘emplotment’,11 and Braudel’s remark highlights the role of subject matter in this emplotment. Conventional (and commercially very popular) ‘history from above’ is obsessed with powerful, prominent, and royal figures, and so are historical fictions. Recent years, however, have brought self-aware historical fictions that refer to their own broad literary history as well as powerful historical personages, and which include resolutely the popular, female-authored texts usually ignored by critics. In her essay ‘An Honourable Escape: Georgette Heyer’, A. S. Byatt praises Heyer’s Regency-set ‘escape’ novels, the inspiration for many decades-worth of bestselling romantic novels set in the same period, as examples of evidence-based realism as an integral feature of their lasting appeal as genre fiction. Byatt notes that Heyer’s works are underpinned by the ‘minute details of the social pursuits of the leisured classes’, linking to their author’s awareness of the ‘emotional structure behind the fiction’ the era produced.12 These ‘minute details’ include slang ‘right to the year in which the book is set’, clothing, and a ‘skilful’ representation of the battle of Waterloo in An Infamous Army (1937).13 Heyer’s novels, along with other genre texts, can be characterised as part of the body of twentieth-century historical fictions whose legacy is the historiographic metafictions of the twentieth century such as Mantel’s representations of the French Revolution and its people. The historical novels of Deryn Lake and Suzannah Dunn covered here are further examples of this legacy from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries respectively. My reading of A Place of Greater Safety as a literary novel owing a debt to ‘escapist’ fiction that is also realist in its strategies allows, now, for a reappraisal of recent criticism examining historical fiction’s development. Diana Wallace traces the origins of women’s historical novels, specifically, in late-eighteenth-century Gothic romances, traditionally seen as separate from the ‘classical’ historical novels (Wallace quotes Georg Lukács for this term) that began with Walter Scott.14 The twentieth century, romantic (in the sense of focusing on central love stories) novels of Deryn Lake deploy strongly Scott-esque, fantastical subplots and secondary characters. Lake’s

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characters in this classical vein include the visionaries Cloverella and Dr. Zachary in Pour the Dark Wine (1989), a saga set in Tudor England which combines historically accurate events with themes of magic and divination presented as complementary to the extraordinary twists and turns of real historical events. Among the most consistently popular historical novels by women are such biofictions as this, with protagonists based on historical figures. These novels also include Jean Plaidy’s stories of royal, usually female, central characters. Michael Lackey defines ‘biofictions’ as ‘literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure’,15 although many late-twentieth-century biofictions do not only name historical people, themes and events; they constitute interventions in previous fictions that, along with metafictions such as Mantel’s, are likewise reflections on historiography itself. And where A Place of Greater Safety defies conventional biofictions by looking away from iconic, doomed royals Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette almost completely (they only appear in brief glimpses), the romantic novels and innovative reworkings by Lake and Dunn respectively look back at perennially popular subjects: Henry VIII’s wives. I would suggest that while Lake’s texts both confirm and subvert the aspects of women’s historical fiction that are both loved and despised as ‘escapist’—romance plots, emotional and sexual lives, and a provocative kind of revisionist use of historical evidence (to suggest, for example, romantic relationships that did not factually take place)—Dunn’s novels enhance the meticulously researched, realist and metafictional elements of previous texts, and demonstrate the ways in which women’s historical fictions are part of a dynamic, questioning relationship with historical discourse. Theorist Hayden White’s final book The Practical Past (2014) is especially useful for examining and understanding this relationship. In the study, White extended his ground-breaking arguments in works including Metahistory (1973) regarding the literary ‘deep structures’ of historical texts, to make his clearest statement ever about the role literary texts play in constructing and reconstructing historical knowledge. This book’s concept of a ‘practical past’ references Michael Oakeshott’s separate ideas of the ‘whole past’ (the entirety of ‘what happened’, whether evidenced or not), the ‘historical past’ (the referents of the past represented in ‘the genres of writings’ termed as historical, by professional historians), and the ‘practical past’. In White’s words, the practical past is the past that people as individuals or members of groups draw upon in order to help them make assessments and decisions in ordinary, everyday life as well as

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in ‘extreme situations’ such as conflicts and disasters.16 Whereas professional historians’ writings claim ‘a proper professional historiography’ as a marker of authority and legitimacy, by contrast the practical past is a manner of ‘dealing with what is commonly called “history”’ using ‘techniques of description, analysis, and presentation that resemble those cultivated by professional historians primarily in form (the narrative) rather than in content (factual information)’.17 Fiction is a key mode of expounding the practical past, but White’s analysis emphasises the broad category of ‘the modern, realistic novel’ rather than postmodern, metafictional forms. Citing Erich Auerbach, White explains that ‘history’ is this modern novel’s main referent, in the sense of the practical past which professional historians ‘have ruled out as a possible object of investigation because it is not amenable to a properly scientific or objective treatment’. A more appropriate, literary—‘artistic or poetic’—treatment of the practical past is not necessarily ‘fictional in the sense of being purely imaginary or fantastic in kind’, but ‘focuses on those aspects of the real past which the historical past cannot deal with it’.18 This notion of a ‘literary treatment’ seems to encompass the paradoxical nature of historiographic metafiction identified by Linda Hutcheon,19 and the unknowable but narratable past detailed by A. S. Byatt.20 The ‘true stories’ of Tudor queens are instructive examples of the practical past at work in cultural history: figures and events that certainly belong to the historical past embodied in scholarly discourse (albeit somewhat old-fashioned discourse, reproducing stories of monarchy), but which enjoy lively afterlives in popular culture, including popular history texts, television and films, and both literary and popular fiction, as Bordo explores in the case of Anne Boleyn.21 As subjects of the practical past, figures such as the wives of Henry VIII allow for well-documented resistance of the borders between these forms and even between the historical past and the practical past as White defines these. The novels of Deryn Lake and Suzannah Dunn are undeniably fiction, but exhaustively well-­ researched narratives hinging on a great deal of verifiable, factual historical detail. Dunn’s novels, especially, reference strongly the historical past in the sense of documented evidence but also the lineage of female-authored historical, often romantic fiction of which Lake’s works are under-regarded examples. Dunn’s novel’s deliberately amplify these relationships: her texts’ realism is as intense as Mantel’s in A Place of Greater Safety and, like that novel, carried out in dialogue with the work of professional historians: Mantel speaks back to Simon Schama’s work on the French Revolution,

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for example, whereas Dunn answers the claims of Tudor historians including Retha Warnicke (1989; 1991) and G. W. Bernard (2010; 2011).22 The manner in which these dialogues proceed, in Dunn’s work, is through the paradoxical combination of realism and anachronism already described: her representations of Tudor queens include modern language, attitudes and behaviours, constructed in such a way as to point back to a ‘real’ past that need not contradict a ‘historical’ past, but rather which highlights anew the dynamic and narrative nature of knowledge itself. Contemporary women’s historical fiction, therefore, is emblematic of the practical past, and a body of contributions to historiographic discourse.

Deryn Lake, Suzannah Dunn, and the Historical Event An interpretation of contemporary historical fictions as exemplifying Hayden White’s (via Michael Oakeshott) concept of the practical past should proceed with his explanation of the historical ‘event’ in discourse. The stories of monarchy, their relationships, marriages, scandals, births and deaths—the stories epitomised by narratives of Tudor monarchs, reiterated in the continuum of school curricula to scholarly books and popular culture—belong to a traditional category of professional ‘history’. White explains that this ‘specifically historical past’ created by professional historians or others ‘socially authorised’ to organise and reproduce accounts of the past, as ‘based on specifically Western, aristocratic, racist, gen(d)eric, and classist preconceptions’ and, in its limitations, ‘has very limited if any practical usefulness’23 for communities seeking to understand the past. This notion of the historical past, still, is almost a cliché of what ‘history’ is often seen to be: the ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ of school lessons, TV documentaries, and opulent costume dramas. These narrative ‘others’ of professional historical explanations such as books and articles written for other specialists seem to play with White’s distinction between the historical event and the historical fact: ‘An event cannot enter into history until it has been established as a fact […] events happen, facts are established’.24 Facts are thus events with special status established by historians’ discursive practices, underpinning ‘events’ with evidence; they are ‘factualized, which is to say, dated, placed, described, classified, and named’ so as to ‘allow us to imagine a wide range of “historical facts” which would make up that “history” which is the object of study of

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“historians”’.25 The discursive making of ‘events’ in relation to ‘facts’ is key. Crucially for the present reading of historical fiction, White also draws on Paul Ricoeur’s suggestion that ‘a historical event is a real event capable of serving as an element of a “plot”’; narrative, in the sense of a plot of a story, is integral to what allows past events to ‘qualify as “historical”’.26 The women’s historical fictions under discussion here work with events constructed at once as ‘real’ events, historical ‘facts’, and even as familiar ‘plots’ taken from fiction, historiography and everything in between. Furthermore, the texts are most effective when all three are recognisable, within the changing contract between text and reader alluded to earlier. Their treatment of events and facts as White describes them is both familiar and radical. They are stories of real ruling elites whose trajectories are shaped by shadowy secondary characters at the edges of the historical record, and as such are reworkings of the 1960s novels of ‘captive women’, confined in various ways by the villain or their husbands (who may be the same person). Diana Wallace’s periodised account of women’s historical novels27 described such Gothic novels featuring these ‘captive women’ rightly as predecessors of the modern historical novel. Wallace remarks that the paperback historical romances of Jean Plaidy (one of the pseudonyms of prolific popular novelist Eleanor Hibbert, 1906-1993), forerunners of Deryn Lake’s novels in their focus on real sixteenth-century personages, were damaging to the prestige of women’s historical novels. At the same time, however, she stresses their subversive properties as recognised by critics including Margaret Scanlan—these ‘pulp’ historical novels ‘marginalise the great events of history’ in favour of exploring the intersections between such great events and personal lives, and “exploit” the demarcations between history and fiction rather than denying them’.28 Nonetheless, as A. S. Byatt illustrates in relation to both Georgette Heyer’s Regency rigorously researched romance novels and Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety with its (fictionalised) focus on the personal lives of the French Revolution’s public men, women’s historical fiction can be said to characteristically serve practical historiographic purposes by exploiting the real, documented, factual past and combining these established facts with invented scenarios that is effective precisely in its ‘inventedness’. Importantly, as Wallace remarks in relation to Jean Plaidy’s novels, twentieth-­century women novelists’ stories of high-profile women of the past engage directly with the feminist sexual politics of the twentieth century as well as the historical sexual oppression of women. These 1960s novels ‘suggest an implicit argument for many of the reforms for which

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second-wave feminists were to struggle: control of their own bodies, the right to sexual fulfilment, easier divorce and the right to retain their children, access to abortion and so on’.29 These novels, then, are part of the body of women’s writing that anticipated and then complemented feminist theory and polemic, and their representations of women’s physical and emotional lives—intersected, as Wallace explains in the case of twentieth-­century ‘pulp’ novels, with the ‘great’ events of the historical record30—interpret women’s history by exploiting the discursive porousness of ‘events’ and ‘facts’. One author of historical fictions who has so far not featured in literary criticism is Deryn Lake, a pseudonym of Dinah Lampitt, born in Essex in 1937 and perhaps better known as the author of the Georgian John Rawlings Mysteries. Lake is also a prolific author of romantic novels set in the upper social echelons of society in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two under consideration here take real historical figures and events—narratives made from myths, speculation and other fictions as well as evidence—and makes them into family sagas with supernatural elements. Sutton Place (1983), Lake’s first novel, makes such a saga of the story of Tudor courtier Francis Weston and his family, by the way of the legend of a curse said to have been placed on the Westons’ seat, the Sutton Place of the novel’s title, by Queen Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor. This curse predestines the Weston heir Francis to an early death, realised in his execution in 1536 on charges (generally accepted as trumped-up) of adultery with Anne Boleyn. Pour the Dark Wine (1989) imagines that the rise to power of the Seymour family began with Jane, Henry VIII’s third wife, when she and her brothers Thomas and Edward made wishes on Merlin’s Mound for wealth and power. The novels are, in some ways, reworkings of the romantic biofictions of Tudor queens popularised by Jean Plaidy (with their roots in gothic romance, as Wallace explains).31 However, more than reiterating these queens’ stories, these latter twentieth century texts look again at the minutiae of their lives and also at the fanciful but very deliberate stories often told about them in a version of the practical past that paves the way for the challenging hybridisations of romantic and historiographic (meta)fictions of Suzannah Dunn. Lake’s Sutton Place is prefaced with a telling author’s note, the space in which novelists customarily provide their background historical reading and so acknowledge the historical past underpinning the fiction; the brief note explains that ‘Although the story of the strange events of the Manor of Sutton is presented here as fiction most of the incidents are, in fact, true

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and a matter of recorded history’ (loc. 40) The plot presents the real fall and execution of Francis Weston as the consequence of a curse, but the ‘recorded history’ is much more instrumental than may be apparent— what Jerome de Groot calls the ‘canon of events’ of Anne Boleyn’s life32 functions here and in Pour the Dark Wine because the text incorporates the historical past in the form of recognisable evidence in such a way that the texts’ inventions point back to that evidence. Anne Boleyn bears the ‘witch’s mark’ of an extra finger on her ‘malformed’ left hand (loc. 792) now accepted by historians as posthumous slander originating in the Spanish Chronicle,33 and part of the novel’s supernatural inventions that also, at one point, sees Anne consulting the sorcerer Dr. Zachary Howard (an illegitimate son of the Duke of Norfolk) in an effort to defy a prophecy that a queen of England would be executed (loc. 4077).34 In both novels, prophecies, destinies, curses, magic, dreams, ghosts, and time slips—the material of escapist historical fiction in a gothic tradition—combine with carefully researched detail to constitute narratives about knowledge and historiography that are not quite metafictions, but which suggest later strategies. Sutton Place reflects, for instance, on the execution for treason of Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham, on 17 May 1521, the same date on which Francis Weston would be executed in 1536. Francis’s father Richard Weston attends Buckingham’s death, drawn in horrific, bodily detail and refigured immediately into the clean, cold, political language that recalls historical documentation [Edward VI & Elizabeth]: ‘All that Stafford’s flowing arteries meant as far as he was concerned, was that a fool had been disposed of’ (loc. 483). The real historical past stands not for sober ‘truth’ in the text but for a space in which very little is actually known and documented, as is certainly the case when it comes to even high-profile individuals who became the focus of character assassination after their deaths. Again, these novels are part of late-twentieth-century negotiations of feminist sexual politics and a growing awareness of women’s history. Lake’s Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr, then, and other ‘real’ figures such as Ann ‘Rose’ Pickering and Anne Stanhope, wives of Francis Weston and Edward Seymour respectively, inhabit a world in which their sexual and inner lives have textual as well as historic impact. Henry VIII’s series of love affairs and marriages is well known, and it is a narrative that illustrates neatly the process by which events can become facts when legitimated by historians. These facts, still, are recognisable only in a context of many other events that cannot be fully ‘known’ and so are confined to the novel form which, as White

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argued, is a component of the practical past. This is not without problems in Lake’s novels, but nevertheless in Pour the Dark Wine, Jane Seymour is ostensibly a heroine of romantic costume drama, and escapes her narrow existence at Wolff Hall as a pawn of her family by having a passionate, sexual relationship with the King. Lake’s prose is typical of novels in this genre in its free indirect discourse and contrast between characters’ outward appearances and inner desires and turmoils, but uses these same strategies to test the limits of documented historical events and challenge the myths that only appear to be facts. Jane Seymour herself, for example, who is usually mythologised as the meek, fair foil to the ambitious, glamorous Anne Boleyn, only appears this way outwardly: ‘the Seymour daughter, with her quiet unassuming ways, might attract the King’s attention by her very contrast to Anne Boleyn’ (loc. 47). Jane actually revels in her sexual feelings and genuine attraction to the monarch. Her outward virtues, and the King’s later description of her as a ‘full-blooded nymph’, function as patriarchal, dichotomous, limited designations of a more complex figure, and furthermore, her appearance and personality represent two perspectives on the history depicted, in the sense of the ‘facts’ legitimising its series of events as historical. On paper, so to speak, Jane is indeed the woman who attracted Henry VIII with her conventional meekness, but very little is ‘really’ known about their early relationship; prurient legends and fantasies abound, supported by fiction as much as non-fiction discourse. Her fictionalised sexuality is ostensibly anachronistic, but this anachronism points back towards a real past beyond the documented, historical one.

Events, Anachronisms, and Back Again: Suzannah Dunn’s Tudor Queens Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard were, along with Jane Seymour, two of Henry VIII’s subjects who became queens but ended their lives as executed traitors, already written into historical narratives defined by their supposed sexual crimes, whereas Jane’s was defined by her reputation for purity. In Deryn Lake’s two novels discussed above, their stories do not really deviate from these first narratives. Ambitious Boleyn refuses to become the King’s mistress in the hope of becoming his wife (lending extra irony to her rival Jane Seymour’s passionate, fictionalised affair with him), and Howard marries the King for luxury, status and fun, foolishly

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committing adultery and losing her head as a consequence. Suzannah Dunn’s The Queen of Subtleties (2004) and The Confession of Katherine Howard (2010) are not only novels about Boleyn and Howard respectively (and so contributions to a body of such novels along with Lake’s) but are also critical responses both to previous novels and the historiography to which they refer. Whereas Lake wrote to intervene in documented historical events and their inevitable emplotment in discourse, in such ways that even the most fanciful additions point back to historiography shaped by women’s hidden lives, Dunn’s novels intensify the characteristic, pulpy fictionality of popular historical novels in order to emphasise the role such fiction plays in constructing the past within discourse. The novels are realist in their representation of the past, based on the kind of ‘precise images’ A. S. Byatt praises in the case of Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety35 and also place this realism alongside some of the most provocative use of anachronism in any historical fiction of recent years. Real historical characters including Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard themselves use modern speech to express modern attitudes, names are shortened to nicknames and well-known historical events are re-presented with a modern edge, in the form of small anachronisms to complement the modern language. One witty instance of such anachronism is designed to wrong-foot, but only slightly, the reader well-informed by previous non-fiction and fiction: the historical episode in which Henry VIII appeared in public with the motto ‘Declare je nos’ (‘Declare I dare not’) embroidered on his clothing, a playful reference to his infatuation with Anne Boleyn. This event is fictionalised so that the motto reads ‘No comment’ (16). This inaccuracy takes the facts drawn from events (and legitimised by historians) and emphasises the necessity of emplotment to recreate sixteenth-century courtly love in paradoxically anachronistic terms, so that the novel is both formidably well-informed and irreverent in its attitude towards the available historical evidence and the fictions that are the materials of history-­ writing itself. The contract between text and reader, then, is explicitly built on the knowledge and understanding that both possess. This effect is underlined by a structuring principle Dunn uses in these two historical novels and others: the juxtaposition of Boleyn and Howard’s narratives with those of two much less well-known, yet no less real historical figures whose fictional trajectories span both ‘true’ and invented events in self-­ conscious ways. The Queen of Subtleties depicts a palace confectioner and skilled maker of sugar ‘subtleties’ or sculptures for court banquets, Lucy

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Cornwallis, and her fictional love for musician Mark Smeaton, one of Anne Boleyn’s accused lovers. In The Confession of Katherine Howard, the suspense contrived around Katherine’s fate relies on the book’s other protagonist, Catheryn Tilney, a woman known to have been raised with Katherine in a Norfolk dormitory at the time when (according to her famous, documented confession) Katherine had a sexual relationship with a young man of the household, Francis Dereham. The Francis of the novel has a subsequent, invented relationship with ‘Cat’ or Catheryn. These fictional storylines are not simply genre conventions of romantic novels (although they are that, again self-consciously)—they also speak to ‘practical’ historical discourse as White theorised it, used here as a method of reading the past’s blank spaces that is apt, given that women as historical actors do indeed appear and disappear in the historical, documented past as a result largely of their marital and sexual destinies. Another source of suspense in Dunn’s novels is the issue of knowledge itself: the sparseness of reliable evidence for these women’s lives (perhaps especially the material traces of these royal wives which, as the effects of convicted traitors, were certainly destroyed), and which narratives—both fiction and non-fiction—result. Both novels look away somewhat from many of the familiar events of the lives of Boleyn and Howard, from figures such as Henry VIII himself and from the queens’ gruesome common fate (usually dwelled on, pruriently, in novels, films and TV dramas), and focus instead on the events and people at the margins of knowledge itself. In The Queen of Subtleties, Lucy Cornwallis’s fictional, developing friendship with Mark Smeaton centres at one point on a particular, material object—an apricot from the King’s fruiterer. She thinks: ‘Why on earth would Mark be interested? And yet. It also is something, isn’t it? It is something: it’s new, it’s alive, and we’ve never seen it before, and isn’t that something? (70) Such mundane, physical details depart from the melodrama of previous romantic fictions but do follow from the other physical, sexual stories that seemed to be pure invention. The apricot both is, and is not, real. In the novel’s reimagining of a documented, damning flirtation between Anne Boleyn and another of her ‘lovers’, William Brereton, here called Billy, the language is anachronistically modern to produce an immediate, realist version of what was probably a notorious miscarriage of justice: ‘I never regret a showdown nor anything I’ve ever said about anyone I despise. Not even that I wanted to see Catherine [of Aragon] hang and all Spaniards drowned. But there is something that’s haunting me, now’ (152). As de Groot argues in his study of historical fiction, ‘Historical

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novels are obsessed with paratexts’36 such as footnotes, authors’ notes, quotations from historical documents, documentaries and ‘histories’ to go with the novel (such as the lists of history books at the end of Lake’s novels). Dunn’s romantic themes and plots end hauntingly in silence, confusion, death, contradictory love affairs-that-were-never-there, and her writing is centrally concerned with the knowledge we absolutely do possess in such material, realist details of food and domestic work. The form governing The Queen of Subtleties—executed queen and almost unknown women whose name appears fleetingly in historical documents—is developed with more success and an intensified sense of realism in The Confession of Katherine Howard. Here, Katherine is neither promiscuous or tragic, as legends have her, because she is mostly the precocious, intriguing, and secretive friend of the narrator, Catheryn. No one can know the complete truth about Katherine’s life, rise and fall (not even her date of birth is reliably documented), but the novel reminds us vividly, in simple, spare language, what we do know, for example how ladies in waiting lived in royal households. These small details take a striking precedence over more familiar historical plot points. As Cat recounts of her life in Queen Katherine’s household: I launched laboriously into a list of the day’s decidedly unspectacular activities: I’d written to my cousin and to my father; tackled a new piece on the virginals; been entrusted to choose a gown and some jewellery for Kate [Katherine Howard] from The Wardrobe and The Jewel House, settling on an indigo satin gown and sapphire-and-pearl necklace. (23)

Letters, jewellery, and musical pursuits are details well-supported by the kind of material found in archives and presented here as part of the domestic details usually absent from both history books and historical fictions about ‘great’ historical figures. Moreover such spare, realist details of daily life are conduits through which much better-known, mythic historical narratives (such as of Katherine’s precocity and appeal to the jaded King) are conveyed; around the text’s approximation of ‘evidence’ (clothing, jewels, social customs), these narratives are organised. For example, Katherine Howard’s quick rise as queen is described in material terms: One afternoon, I dropped by our room for a pair of gloves and there in front of the window were clothes which I didn’t recognise and which didn’t belong in the girls’ dormitory […] These clothes were turning towards me

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and inside them was Kate. Around her neck was a crucifix so large and heavily jewelled that I half-expected it to clank. (218)

This effect is reinforced at the moment of Katherine’s downfall, which Cat experiences again through her knowledge of (and the reader’s encounter with), the other young woman’s clothing: ‘How had that old black gown turned up here? In one of those cases? What was happening? I stayed by the door, trying to make sense of what I was seeing: was she unpacking, or packing?’ (303) The contract between text and reader, here, builds upon that implied within earlier historical fictions by women. It anticipates a reader’s prior knowledge not only of the broad details of Katherine Howard’s story, but also the controversies and politics of that story around, for example, her supposed sexual behaviour, her family’s role and motivations in supporting her rise to queenship, and her previous representations in history texts, fiction, film and television. Cat’s vision of her clothing, in particular, recalls costume drama representations of the fashionable Katherine in lavish attire that functions both as scenery and symbol of the historiography surrounding her, and a reminder that her ‘afterlife’ depends on both ‘history’ and popular culture. The novel’s anachronistic modern language, then, allows for a heightened sense of realism, of the role of evidence in constructing historical narratives and knowledge, and of the central place of fiction in this process.

Conclusion In Hayden White’s concept of the practical past, fiction is a central discursive mode for making practical uses of historical discourse, and of broadening out what is thought of as ‘history’. I would argue that contemporary historical fiction by women has proved key to this process, from the twentieth-­century genre novels of Deryn Lake, with their knowing use of earlier novels, to the later, metafictional work of Hilary Mantel, and their joint legacy in the Tudor novels of Suzannah Dunn. Dunn’s use of realism and anachronism is built from the kind of exuberant romantic inventions combined with well-informed use of documented history found in Lake’s novels. This marked juxtaposition of invention and evidence is sharpened in literary novels including Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, but Dunn’s texts exemplify the hybrid twenty-first-century legacy of literary and

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popular historical fiction and its historiographic impetus and implications. They are historical fictions with a stake in knowledge and wider understandings of the past.

Notes 1. Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), x. 2. Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 4. 3. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), 5. 4. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 89. 5. Hilary Mantel,‘The Day is for the Living’, The Reith Lectures, June 2017, accessed 15 August 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b08tcbrp 6. A.  S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, London: Vintage, 2001 [2000], 54. 7. Olivier Bernier, ‘Guillotine Dreams’, The New  York Times, May 1993, accessed 15 August 2018, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes. com/books/98/10/11/specials/mantel-­place.html 8. Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 123. 9. White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, 124. 10. Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1994 [1992]), 11. 11. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 12. A.  S. Byatt, ‘An Honourable Escape: Georgette Heyer’, in A.  S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays (London: Vintage, 1993 [1991]), 262. 13. Byatt, ‘An Honourable Escape’, 263. 14. Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 3. 15. Michael Lackey, ‘Introduction: Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction.’ Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 3. 16. Hayden White, The Practical Past (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2014), xiii. 17. White, The Practical Past, xiv. 18. Ibid. 19. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. 20. Byatt, On Histories and Stories.

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21. Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: In Search of the Tudors’ Most Notorious Queen (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2014 [2013]). 22. Warnicke’s The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (1989; 1991) and Bernard’s Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (2011; 2010), interpret the scant evidence of Boleyn’s supposed crimes in unusual, controversial ways to suggest, in Warnicke’s case, that Boleyn’s stillborn baby delivered early in 1536 was also deformed, and in Bernard’s book, that she and the King were sexually active from much earlier in their relationship than is usually assumed in both historiography and fiction. 23. White, The Practical Past, 42. 24. White, The Practical Past, 45. 25. White, The Practical Past, 46. 26. White, The Practical Past, 53. 27. Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 133-5. 28. Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 129. 29. Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 137. 30. Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 129. 31. Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel. 32. de Groot, The Historical Novel, 72. 33. An chronicle written in Spanish by an unidentified author, thought to be contemporary. Translated with notes and published by Martin A.  Sharp Hume in 1889. 34. Anne Boleyn is said to have mentioned such a prophecy, as reported in Starkey (2004, loc. 7161). 35. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 54. 36. de Groot, The Historical Novel, 63.

Works Cited Bernard, G.  W. Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011 [2010]. Bernier, Olivier. ‘Guillotine Dreams.’ The New York Times, May 1993, https:// archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/11/specials/mantel-­ place.html. Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: In Search of the Tudors’ Most Notorious Queen. Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2014 [2013]. Byatt, A. S. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Vintage, 2001 [2000]. Byatt, A. S. Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays. London: Vintage, 1993 [1991]. Dunn, Suzannah. The Confession of Katherine Howard, London: HarperPress, 2011 [2010]. Dunn, Suzannah. The Queen of Subtleties: A Novel of Anne Boleyn. London: Harper Perennial, 2005 [2004].

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de Groot, Jerome. The Historical Novel. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Hughes, Kathryn. ‘Hal’s Kitchen.’ The Guardian, June 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jun/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview17. Hume, Martin A.  Sharp. Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England: Being a Contemporary Record of Some of the Principal Events of the Reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. London: George Bell and Sons, 1889. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Lackey, Michael. ‘Introduction: Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction.’ Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 3-10. Lake, Deryn. Sutton Place. London: Endeavour Media, 2015a [1983]. Lake, Deryn. Pour the Dark Wine. London: Endeavour Media, 2015b [1989]. Mantel, Hilary. ‘The Day is for the Living.’ The Reith Lectures, June 2017, https:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp. Mantel, Hilary. A Place of Greater Safety. London: Harper Perennial, 2009 [1992]. Rancière, Jacques. The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1994 [1992]. Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. London: Penguin, 2004 [1991]. Starkey, David. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: Vintage, 2004. Wallace, Diana. ‘Historical Fictions’, in Clare Hanson and Susan Watkins, eds, The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945-1975. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. Warnicke, Retha. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1989]. White, Hayden. The Practical Past. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2014. White, Hayden. ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation.’ In Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

CHAPTER 5

A Feminist Genealogy: L’Écriture Féminine, The Youngest Doll, and Contemporary Puerto Rican Women Writers Melissa R. Sande

In 1975’s “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous aptly provides that “Woman must write her self: must write women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies…”.1 To do so, women writers and literary critics alike must construct a literary history of such works, connecting across historical periods and geographical boundaries. By writing herself, woman must construct a literary space and a history of that space, or, more simply, woman must inject herself into a literary history that has previously precluded her. In so doing, authors and critics carve out a space for the existence and identity of women and women’s writing. Phallocentrism, Cixous argues, has prevented women from accessing the history and existence of their stories. In opposition to this practice, David Scott’s 2004 Conscripts of Modernity first explains that literary history, like all historical narrative, is constructed,

M. R. Sande (*) Union County College, Cranford, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_5

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and such an act is troublesome. For Scott, the past does not speak for itself so much as for the particular acts of history writing in a given context and to this point, he proffers the notions of the “problem space” and “emplotment” to trace modes of storytelling and their utility within certain historical structures. He writes, for example, that a “problem space” is “an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs.”2 Problem spaces, built around investigatory questions, then generate forms of organization or emplotment. For instance, “anticolonial stories about past, present, and future have typically been emplotted [as] Romance” as that genre is most appropriate for “narratives of overcoming” (7, 8). Scott elaborates: “problem-spaces alter historically because problems are not timeless and do not have everlasting shapes. In new historical conditions old questions may lose their salience, their bite, and so lead the range of old answers that once attached to them to appear lifeless, quaint, not so much wrong as irrelevant” (4). Scott thus identifies the literary/historical period as marked by its limitation with regard to the available degree of intervention accessible to writers. These problem spaces may have value, however, especially when conceptualized as means of creating connections amongst texts that demonstrate the lack of historical altering, or that significant silencing is almost timeless. Similar to Scott’s work, Alison Donnell’s Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature (2005) casts the impulse to construct (or reconstruct) progressive narratives of Caribbean literary history as a failure to recognize that “all histories and traditions are based on acts of selection, exclusion and preference.”3 Donnell reminds us that the impetus to reconstruct literary history constitutes a means to inform the past through the present. While acknowledging the peril of such anachronism, this chapter seeks to practice some of what Donnell and Scott object to in an attempt to forge new connections and tell not new, but recovered stories across the constantly developing field of women’s contemporary literature, with a particular focus on Puerto Rico, and how twentieth-century writing gives way to the work and the themes of the twenty-first century. Similar focuses on subversion and escape, for example, suggest that 20th and 21st century works have similar goals for women’s writing, but also indicate a forged space for writing and a space for gendered identity. As Cixous asserts in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “woman must write woman.”4 In that thesis lies the necessity of some backward revision, or some historical reconstruction, as Scott suggests--not to have the present inform the past, but to reclaim and

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connect voices that have historically been silenced and kept from each other in order to further that silence. In exploring how the relationship between mother and daughter can be articulated, Luce Irigaray offers, “Here is one place where the need for another ‘syntax,’ another ‘grammar’ of culture is crucial.”5 She explains that a language of “woman’s desire” will push beyond the boundaries of male-dominated discourses, or “the law of the father” and will “insert within the gaps left by ‘their’ history, stories, and myths of the divergent power of woman’s word.”6 This chapter observes a language of woman’s desire at work in contemporary Puerto Rican writing by women and constructs a genealogy of such in mother and daughter(s) texts. This chapter is particularly interested in the work of Rosario Ferré (1938-2016), on whom very little criticism exists,7 and her deconstruction and rewriting of the Puerto Rican folktale8 to construct a female-centered social space, and lastly how her refashioning of the genre prefaces the contemporary work of, for example, Zoé Jiménez Corretjer (b. 1963) and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (b. 1970).9 This chapter then assembles a feminist genealogy of contemporary writing by women in Puerto Rico through the use of l’écriture feminine as a common denominator to mark the genre, literary devices, and tropes at play. Ferré is an important woman author deserving of more critical attention as her short stories bring together concerns that characterize much of contemporary writing by women and of l’écriture feminine: the construction of female identity and the many stylistic and experimental methods of postmodernism. Yet Ferré’s 1976 short story collection, The Youngest Doll, has received very little attention since its publication (and subsequent translation into English). Devising the kind of genealogy of writing with which Scott or Donnell may ultimately disagree opens new possibilities, allows the telling of important stories, and, crucially, inserts a language of women’s desire into a history controlled by the law of the father. This chapter’s investigation of previously unmined connections between texts seeks solidarity amongst women writers and delineates how future women writers may shape their literary roles. Toward such connectivity, I argue that Ferré’s feminist techniques align with the work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who together created a shift from essentialized identity to more experimental constructions of subjectivity. Understanding the links between l’écriture feminine, Ferré, Corretjer, and Pizarro open an avenue for reconsideration of l’écriture feminine across geographical boundaries and may serve to reassert its relevance to contemporary women’s writing more broadly.

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Returning to “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous proclaims that “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing.”10 To write herself, woman must know herself through history (and must therefore engage in periodization) and, as Ann Rosalind Jones explains, that history is one of women’s “oppression by men and male-­ designed institutions,”11 a frame central to much of Cixous’s work. Two of Ferré’s short stories, “The Poisoned Story” and “When Women Love Men,” read here through the lens of l’écriture feminine, demonstrate this difficult history and how Ferré “began to understand what it meant to write ‘as a woman’” as Jean Franco notes in the foreword to the collection. Franco goes on to explain that much of Ferré’s early work “established a sisterhood with European writers such as Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, and Simone de Beauvoir” but what allowed her to write was the development of “a different voice, a vernacular voice”—an act that corresponds directly to Cixous’s claim that woman must write her self.12

L’écriture Féminine In her essay, “Inscribing Difference: L’Écriture Féminine and New Narrative by Women,” Elizabeth Ordóñez positions l’écriture feminine in response to Freud’s reading of female sexuality as a lack and Lacan’s “positing of the phallus as the ultimate signifier of desire which structures, determines, and limits how sexual life can be expressed.” As a corrective circumvention, French feminists have worked to “structure a language closer to the female body and identified with the mother rather than the father.”13 Working apart from patriarchal discourse, French feminists seek to create a distinct feminine, close to the female body and empowered to “raise mother and daughter to the status of subjects in possession of their own discourse” (p. 46). This new discursive framing leads to “the emergence of a new female identity.”14 Ordóñez aptly locates this liberation at the intersection of the three pillars of l’écriture feminine (through the writing of Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray) where a “triadic process of subversion, escape, and affirmation”15 may take place: Julia Kristeva stresses the “subversion of male order of logic, mastery, and verisimilitude” as Cixous calls for an escape from “male desires for mastery and domination” and Irigaray affirms difference in a new mythology of “the reproductive earth-mother-nature.”16 In the sections that follow, I examine Kristeva and Cixous’s departure concepts in Ferré’s short stories as well as how her works may serve as mother texts for women writers concerned with the same tropes of extrication today.

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Ann Rosalind Jones labels the triad of “subversion, escape, and affirmation” as a “site of ‘différence,’ a point of view from which phallogocentric concepts and controls can be seen through and taken apart.”17 As Pokorny elaborates, this “frees women from their condition of Object…[which] also leads to the liberation of their voices and the evolvement of the Female Subject.”18 In the case of contemporary Puerto Rican women writers, the development of the Female Subject, as I will demonstrate, claims a textual space for women’s voices in Puerto Rican culture and inscribes women’s subjectivity onto a historical space where it was once silenced. Scott and Donnell aside, fashioning Ferré’s writings as mother texts initiates a fuller Female Subject and is posited here as a productive instance of periodization: it tracks the returning to successor women writers in “possession of their own discourse.”19 Readers may therefore see Ferré’s work as a precursor to the 21st century writers that use subversion, escape, and affirmation in their own writing to further affirm the Female Subject. The connections across historical periods further demonstrate women’s ownership and establishment of such a discourse.

When Women Love Men Ferré’s hyper-sexual short story, “When Women Love Men,” is told from the dual perspective of Isabel Luberza and Isabel la Negra, the wife and lover, respectively, of Ambrosio, who has just died as the story begins. The same name indicates that the women lack individual identity in the eyes of Ambrosio, whose perspective haunts the narrative and is constantly referenced by the speakers. Ambrosio splits his inheritance equally between the two women, initially creating a “slapped and stunned confusion that [Ambrosio] swung around for the sake of power, pushing [both women] downhill at the same time.”20 It is understood that Ambrosio had always pitted them against each other; in his suspension of them as opposites, “lady and prostitute”—puritanical wife or slut, the patriarchal duality of womanhood—Ambrosio exiles the women from themselves. Cixous reconciles this idea of exile or being at a distance from one’s own self as also being the place and space of writing, and it is indeed in this space that the narrative begins, in media res, following the death of Ambrosio, when “all this confusion began, this scandal spinning all over like an iron hoop” (p.  133). Early emphasis on confusion (the word appears twice in the opening paragraph) anticipates the disruption of phallocentric structures realized at the close where, by rejecting their dichotomy and discovering a

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shared wholeness, the Isabels find it “almost impossible to distinguish between the two” (136). In this we see and by seeing, witness the dismantling of a phallogocentric binary system governed by difference that is articulated along the contours of a Freudian lack. Posited as opposites, the Isabels establish in their joining a structural breakaway from the male imposition of difference. Their plural voice declares in the opening paragraph that Ambrosio really wanted to “meld us, to make us fade into each other” (133) and so their mutuality is inaugurated as a subversion of male desire.21 Indeed, the two women “fade into each other like an old picture lovingly placed under its negative, so that our own true face would finally come to the surface”—indicative of their sexual desire for each other and their blurring together as one (133). Through their desire for one another, the two Isabels become their true selves, evoking Irigaray’s notion of non-­ hierarchical “twoness” as a catalyzing jouissance for the subversion of phallocentric oppression: “I am a unified, coherent being, and what is significant in the world reflects my male image,” she writes.22 The graphic sexual imagery and verbosity of their union unleashes the boundless libido of woman and locates her “at the beginning of a new history” wherein she can now intersect and blend with all women.23 This new history is activated by the death of Ambrosio and the erasure of male desire from the narrative. Early on, in a game of “who is who?” the collective we narrating the story asks, Was it Isabel Luberza who used to collect funds for Boys’ Town, for the Mute and Deaf…or was it Isabel la Negra, the soul of Puerto Rico turned into song, the temptress of Chichamba, the Jezebel of San Antón…was it Isabel Luberza, the baker of charity cakes…or was it Isabel the Rumba, Macumba, Candombe, Bámbula, Isabel the Tembandumba de la Quimbamba, swaying her okra hips through the sun-swilled Antillean streets, her grapefruit tits sliced open on her chest; was it Isabel de Trastamara, the holy Queen of Spain…24

With this interwoven gestalt of womanhood, Ferré initiates Cixous’ notion of a new history. As the story opens, the narrative “we” proclaims that the women “had purified each other of all that defiled us; and we had grown so close that we no longer knew where the lady ended and the prostitute began” (134). The voice of the “we” begins the story, stipulates to the primacy of the woman in the text and in so doing centralizes her narrative voice, leaving

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Ambrosio marginalized and unvoiced. This narrative “we” that represents both Isabels follows Cixous’s insistence that woman must “write about women and bring women to writing.”25 But Cixous also maintains that women must concern themselves with how they came to be who they are through the forensic history of their oppression by men and male-designated institutions, allowing necessarily for periodization within the l’écriture feminine project. Readers may note this as both Isabels contemplate their lives without Ambrosio, their shared inheritance, and what each will want to do with the house that they now co-own—an interesting play on patri(matri)lineage by the author. They both reflect on their lives with Ambrosio, knowing when he was with the other Isabel, plotting how to win him over. The story moves from present to past tense and back again, as Ferré makes use of the double narrative “I,” having Isabel la Negra narrate the story of Isabel Luberza and vice versa. While their histories are entwined with Ambrosio—indeed they both come into being through their relationships with him—the female “I” is dominant. In the end, the two women decide to turn the home jointly inherited from Ambrosio into an elegant whorehouse, sharing the profits. In this, they repurpose their repression and prostitution under Ambrosio and benefit from it, thereby subverting the patriarchal system that once oppressed them both. Ferré’s decision to use a whorehouse, where women’s bodies are sold to men, is indicative of these women reclaiming power and control over the use of their bodies. The new whorehouse does not contribute to a patriarchal capitalist system, as Ferré highlights with the whorehouse her characterization of prostitution as that through which a “series of important mysteries may be clarified.”26 Here there is a link to Kristeva through woman challenging a dominant discourse, as it intersects with Cixous in her challenge of the male urge to power. Ambrosio’s splitting of his estate between wife and lover might by design cause the women to compete over material objects indefinitely as a metaphorical extension of their vying for Ambrosio—to wit, for him to live on through the Isabels, retaining control of their identities even in death. But the Isabels cleverly refute this. The undoing of Ambrosio’s control over their identities via his control of their material conditions is what Kristeva explains as the role of women in the rejection of conventional culture: women oppose and flatly “reject everything finite, definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society.”27 Women may, she continues, wield a capability to break up existing power structures and create an avenue for freer social expression.

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To this end, structure, point of view, and genre may be employed by women writers in the disruption of dominant narrativistic modality. Accordingly, Ferré’s construction of female subjectivity coalesces around several structural innovations. First, because the two Isabels become one, they appear as a female multi-consciousness. Second, Ferré rewrites an anonymous plena (a traditional Puerto Rican folk song), “la plena que yo conozco,” (“the song that I know”) with its roots in Puerto Rican traditionalism, by substituting “puta” (bitch) for “plena,” a revision meant to signify the feminization and sexualization of the musical form. Her title, “When Women Love Men” references another traditional oral plena concerning the “tricks and strategies used by women in their efforts to control love relations, rituals based on folkloric beliefs of African origin.”28 In keeping with the oral tradition of the plena, the Isabels narrate each other’s stories and speak directly to Ambrosio, recounting events for him out of order, piecemeal. From there, Ferré reconfigures the narrative. The re-­appropriation of the folk form of the plena is the same process of re-­ appropriation for her subjects: the two Isabels are the center of the story. As they go on to become one, they are no longer wife or whore, pure or tainted; they are instead all of these things, made complex and whole by the reverberations of one another to the extent that readers, like Luberza and la Negra, “no longer kn[o]w where the lady end[s] and the prostitute beg[ins].”29 In her essay, Ordóñez discusses how French feminism manifests in many Spanish women writers as “a tendency to demythify patriarchal or phallic myths that have bound or deprived women of being and autonomy, and a desire to free female discourse…from their historical constrictions.”30 Ferré’s melding of the two Isabels together to create an identity divorced from patriarchal stereotypes of women is a good example of this. Ordóñez further explains that “the desire to rewrite echoes across texts” and in “When Women Love Men,” we can observe the impulse to reconstruct a popular short story narrative with centralized female voices and also see such echoing in the ways in which Ferré’s work is similar to that of 21st century writers like those analyzed later on in this chapter (49). Irigaray suggests that “philosophical categories have been developed to relegate the feminine to a position of subordination and to reduce the radical Otherness of woman to a specular relation: woman is either ignored or seen as man’s opposite.”31 In “When Women Love Men,” the consistent focus on the bodily image of both Isabels in relation to the oppressive male gaze recalls Irigaray’s specular theory and her particular emphasis on

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the subjection of women’s bodies, sexuality, and identity to the desires of men. For Irigaray, women “must, through repetition—interpretation of the ways in which the feminine finds itself determined in discourse—as a lack, default, or as mime and invert reproduction of the subject—show that on the feminine side it is possible to exceed and disturb this logic.”32 In their turning toward one another sexually, the Isabels exceed patriarchal logic and reposition their bodies as subject rather than object. In Ferré’s repetitive use of the semicolon and the comma,33 indicative, per Cixous, that “her writing can only keep going without ever inscribing or discerning contours,” we grasp the potentiality in rejecting the specular default, the boundlessness of the mirror turning to consider itself.34

The Poisoned Story As in “When Women Love Men,” Ferré grounds “The Poisoned Story” in notions of subversion, escape, and affirmation. The story of Rosaura, her father Don Lorenzo, and his second wife, Rosa, begins shortly after Don Lorenzo’s first wife dies.35 When he marries Rosa, she takes over the family home like a dictator, putting all of Don Lorenzo’s resources into her shop and work as a seamstress. Rosaura, for her part, is ever a thorn to Rosa: absorbed in reading fantasy books, she is unmotivated to be part of the aristocratic class that Rosa so covets. The story is organized as a narrative conflict between characters: narration switches with each new paragraph to a different voice, pointing again to Ferré’s interest in how perception and point of view might carve out new spaces. Like “When Women Love Men,” “The Poisoned Story” becomes a “dialogic text constituted by two female voices;”36 two renditions of the same story intersect and as the two female voices occupy multiple spaces at once, they reverberate against one other. However, unlike “When Women Love Men,” here Ferré, in the end, orients the two women against each other. Rosa represents and reinforces patriarchal structures, particularly capitalism and the material desire. She lusts after aristocratic class status—she enjoys “opulent” gowns and “lavish illustrations of kings and queens, all sumptuously dressed in brocaded robes”—and despises Rosaura because she “fiddles away her time daydreaming, refuses to make herself useful.”37 The transgressive nature of Rosaura’s absorption in her reading and writing of fantasy serves to disengage her from the ideological and moral values of the patriarchal system, to which Rosa has unconditionally resigned herself. As material foundations are inseparable from superstructure, patriarchal structures cannot

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be upended without subverting their foundations. Rosa is just so fundamentally entwined, and Ferré kills her off at the close of the story, but does so through Rosaura’s writing, pinning the character of Rosaura as the subversion of patriarchal structures and her writing the “beginning of a new history” as prescribed by Cixous. Through Rosaura, Ferré rejects the masculinist defense of capitalism and women’s bodies as capital. The brief interjection of a male narrator in this text is dismissed as well: “The small-town, two-bit writer’s style makes me want to laugh; he’s stilted and mawkish and turns everything around for his own benefit” (p. 9). The irony here is that the description also applies to Rosa. Therefore, per Cixous, the story presents an impulse toward displacement and replacement as Ferré employs Rosaura to rewrite across the text as a form of ownership. Rosaura’s dream that one of the fairytales in her book has a mysterious power to “destroy its first reader” wakes her in a cold sweat one night (17). A few months later, Rosa opens that very book when a story “caught her eye,” and despite the fact that it had no drawings, which she would have preferred, she begins reading it. She immediately notices the “thick, guava-colored ink” which is reminiscent of a guava compote made by Rosaura months earlier, spilled on Rosa’s dress made from the “brocaded living-room curtains, just as Vivian Leigh had done in Gone with the Wind,” though Rosa does not make the connection. We can assume the Guava-ink is the poison that kills Rosa, and, in that it creates “blood-colored streaks of syrup” when it trickles down Rosa’s skirt, it is reminiscent of the female body—the final affirmation of the story. The color is reinforced again as the first line in the book, “Rosaura lived in a house of many balconies, shadowed by a dense overgrowth of crimson bougainvillea vines…” (18, ellipses in original). While the assertion of the female body is much subtler in “The Poisoned Story,” both short stories end with the significant color red. In the final lines of “When Women Love Men,” as Isabel Luberza describes la Negra morphing in appearance to look like her, she says, “now swaying back and forth defiantly before her and feeling the blood flow out of me like a tide, my treacherous turncoat blood that has even now begun to stain my heels with that glorious, shocking shade I’ve always loved so, the shade of Cherries Jubilee” (145). In both stories we see a gush of the liquid, which may be read as the escape of the repressed female identity. Rosaura’s writing has the power to kill but it is more importantly an extension of her body, expressive of achieved autonomy. Rosaura reinvents her place in the world, as Cixous urged

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women to do. Like the Isabels, Rosaura rewrites/retells her story from her own point of view, and as Irigaray insisted, interjects her own discourse onto the gap left by another history.

“At the Beginning of a New History”: Zoé Jiménez Corretjer and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro Contemporary authors ZoZoé Jiménez Corretjer and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro continue the traditions of the recuperation of silenced voices and the creation of women’s discourses and the appropriation of their own modes of expression. Here I read their continuation of these tropes as a means of expansion into 21st century women’s writing, while also acknowledging the mother texts of the 20th century, Ferré’s work being one example. The continued emphasis on subversion, escape, and affirmation is not seen here as a lack of progress, but instead as a continuation of women writing themselves as Subject and not object. Corretjer’s poem from a 2007 collection of the same name, “Antigua vía” or “Ancient Way,”38 for example, alludes in title to the patriarchal power apparatus as the old way. The collection contains myriad references to ancient Rome, in an important assertion of women’s roles and presence in a forgotten time period. In drawing upon the ancient world to write contemporary feminist poetry, Corretjer makes use of periodization to assert the presence of female identity in a period and place often marked for its absence, as well as to mark the act of revision and rewriting through periodization. The female voice in this poem begins speaking in past tense, presumably to a male listener: Yo queria contarte historias de serpientes y de estrellas y te vi valiente en tu nube y solitario de vientos Quise enseñarte las hebras De mi voz y mi garganta de ave39 I wanted to tell you stories of snakes and stars and I saw you brave in your cloud and lonely winds I wanted to show you the threads of my voice and my throat of bird

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The use of the past tense places the speaker’s attempt to approach the listener in an earlier time, before the speaker’s assertion of themselves: “tu reprochas mis palabras/de leche y miel” or “you reproach my words/ of milk and honey.” This is the first use of present tense. The “threads of my voice and my throat” both affirm the identity of the speaker and their difference from the listener. The use of milk and honey is metaphorical for general richness, but can also be understood as a sexual metaphor for bodily fluids issued from a male or female. In the context of a l’écriture feminine reading, it can echo the gushing of Cherries Jubilee or guava ink from the previous stories, again an expression of woman’s identity and subjectivity flowing forth uncontrollably. The lines that follow, “y no comprendes que estoy hecha/ de cíclopes/ que soy el eco de un viñedo/ en flor” or “and you do not understand that I’m made of cyclops/ that I am the echo of a vineyard/ flowering” indicate that the speaker is of an ancient history (“of cyclops”) perhaps unacknowledged to this point and that again, the speaker is asserting their identity. The “echo of the vineyard” is reminiscent of the reflection and refraction of the women in the previously discussed stories, but distinguishes itself here in the claim that the speaker is of nature and is “flowering”—another inherently female act. To echo the vineyard is to connect to Irigaray’s mythology of “earth-mother-­ nature,” reinforced by this notion of flowering. Structurally, we see that the poem begins with the subversion of the male listener, escape of his control over the speaker of the poem (similar to the death of Ambrosio in “When Women Love Men,” and the concomitant assertion of the female “I” by the two Isabels speaking), and finally affirmation of her identity and subjectivity. This pattern of the establishment of female Subjectivity then mirrors the work of Ferré (and the criticism of the French feminists) in that it moves from subversion to escape to affirmation. Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s 2006 novel, Los documentados similarly engages in subversive tropes. Like all of the texts discussed here, the novel offers a subversive inversion of traditional point of view and perspective, as it is narrated by a nine-year-old deaf girl named Kapuc. Nightly, Kapuc goes down to the beach, climbs a favorite mangrove tree, and records the world around her. This setting is yet another echo of Irigaray’s “earth-­ mother-­nature” trope. The claiming of the story for a female voice is an example of Cixous’s escape from male mastery over the text. In the fashioning of the story through Kapuc’s journaling, Pizarro has subverted the male order of verisimilitude as described by Kristeva, as the genre of the journal and the act of journaling point to the creation of a female narrative

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voice in control of narrative structure. The third person omniscient narrator that interjects near the text’s conclusion may represent Pizarro’s acknowledgement of the male voice and its will to power. In her journal, Kapuc documents individuals that mainstream society has overlooked, silenced, or even persecuted. The novel’s content therefore indicates larger social issues brought to the surface via the female voice, perhaps an extension of the work initiated by 20th century women writers in their establishment of tropes that may give way to this work. Of particular interest to l’écriture feminine is Pizarro’s emphasis on the interrelatedness of the perspective of the female narrator and the use of natural surroundings and imagery. Kapuc is tied to nature, as she narrates from her mangrove tree at night, and intersperses her observations with the natural imagery. She also affirms her desire to capture, in writing, all that she encounters: Escribo sobre los que se escapan con el mismo fervor que documento a los jueyes y a las aves que pueden navegar gracias al Sol y a las estrellas, astros que cambian de posición a medida que el tiempo pasa, y que sirven para esgrimir latitudes y marcar constelaciones.40 I write about those who escape with the same fervor that I document the crabs and the birds that can navigate thanks to the sun and the stars, stars that change positions as time passes, and that serve to wield latitudes and mark constellation.41

Here Kupac connects nature and people in the world that surrounds her. The continual emphasis on nature and its direct connection to Kupac’s voice reaffirms Irigaray’s “earth-mother-nature.” To harken back to Pizarro’s title, despite the youth of the narrator and her inability to hear, Pizarro’s novel demonstrates Kupac’s ability to legitimize and transcribe what she sees—to, in other words, officially document in her own words— the social issues of disability and deafness surrounding undocumented people (in that their voices are silenced and/or not heard by the mainstream) and their attempts to reach Puerto Rico. In that, Pizarro’s novel highlights not only the importance of women’s voices but the ways in which women’s voices may call attention to larger social and cultural issues otherwise dismissed by a phallocentric historical order. Pizarro continues such tropes in other works. The trilogy, Negras: Stories of Puerto Rican Slave Women tells three separate narratives of slavery from the viewpoints of three black females, making each women the main

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subject of each story. The narratives are not told in the genre of romance or overcoming, as Scott suggests, rather they seek to centralize the female voice and female identity. In the second story, Ndizi is a midwife being executed for killing the babies of other slave women in order to prevent them from entering the slave-trade as children and to ensure that the white slave masters lose their “property.” Instead of romance, these kinds of stories bring women to writing and fill in historical lacks. In conclusion, the work of Rosario Ferré, which employs the “triadic process of subversion, escape, and affirmation” of l’écriture feminine sets the trajectory for the contemporary women writing now in Puerto Rico who seek to centralize the female voice, body, and identity in their work.42 While the 21st century writers discussed here do not explicitly note their indebtedness to 20th century writers like Ferré, close readings of these texts establish significant provenance. Ferré, Corretjer, and Pizarro create a female discourse that “transgresses and subverts with [their] own message[s], language, story and experiences the codified space and the traditional canonical model of the “feminine” of patriarchal and phallogocentric discourse.”43 In turn, each author transforms the object of woman into a speaking subject with agency and the ability to inscribe herself onto history and engage discursively with a society that had previously silenced her. Female narrators in these works tell their own stories and legitimize female voice and text, answering Cixous’s imperative: “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away violently as from their bodies. Woman must put herself into the text, as into the world and into history.”44

Notes 1. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 875. 2. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. 3. Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London: Routledge, 2006), 4. 4. Cixous, “The Laugh,” 877. 5. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 143. 6. Elizabeth J. Ordóñez, “Inscribing Difference: ‘L’Écriture Féminine’ and New Narrative by Women,” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 12, no. ½ (1987): qtd in 47.

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7. A handful of essays have been written about The Youngest Doll: See, for example, Cynthia A. Sloan’s “Caricature, Parody, and Dolls: How to Play at Deconstructing and (Re-)Constructing Female Identity in Rosario Ferré’s Papeles de Pandora” or Elba D. Birmingham Pokorny’s “(Re)writing the Body: The Legitimization of The Female Voice, History, Culture and Space in Rosario Ferré’s ‘La muňeca menor.’” A scant amount of criticism exists on her other texts, most of which were only published in Spanish, like the criticism. Additionally, existent criticism tends to analyze Ferré’s short stories without putting them into conversation or context with other feminist writers. 8. Many of the short stories in this collection deconstruct and reconstruct folktales. Ferré’s interest in folktales is likely linked to their prevalence in Puerto Rican culture broadly, having originated within the oral tradition and been heavily influenced by the inherited Spanish culture. Like other cultural mythology, folktales arguably reinforce the norms of a patriarchal society, which Ferré’s short stories are constantly challenging. 9. This is by no means an exhaustive list of current writers that derive from Ferré via the use of l’écriture feminine. Others include Caridad de la Luz or Judith Ortiz Cofer. The examples expounded upon here are simply limited by the scope of this chapter. 10. Cixous, “The Laugh,” 875. 11. Ann Rosalind Jones, “‘Writing the Body’: Toward an Understanding of L’Écriture Féminine,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 361. 12. Rosario Ferré, The Youngest Doll, trans. Rosario Ferré and Cindy Ventura (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), xi. 13. Ordóñez, “Inscribing Difference,” 46. 14. Elba D. Birmingham-Pokorny, “(Re)writing the Body: The Legitimization of The Female Voice, History, Culture and Space in Rosario Ferré’s La muñeca menor,” Confluencia 10, no. 1 (1994): 75. 15. Ordóñez, “Inscribing Difference,” 46. 16. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), qtd in 173. 17. Jones, “Writing the Body,” 362. 18. Pokorny, “(Re)writing the Body,” 76. 19. Ordóñez, “Inscribing Difference,” 46. 20. Ferré, The Youngest Doll, 133. 21. In her short essay, “How I Wrote ‘When Women Love Men,’” Ferre discusses the value of anger that “has been refined in the crucible of irony” (147). While there are two conventional literary ironies, the play on words and dramatic irony, a third type, as defined by the author, dissembles anger

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and is useful in that “it can more accurately pierce the reader’s heart” (147). This irony, she surmises, is most often seen in women’s writing. Ferre describes how such an irony takes shape: “the narrative ‘I’ divides itself into a historic and literary one” and the “ironic voice takes shape when the first ‘I,’ the one nurtured by the author’s experience in the world, realizes the existence of the second ‘I,’ the ‘I’ that tells the story” (147-148). This is quite similar to Cixous’s proclamation that “woman must write woman” (877). 22. Jones, “Writing the Body,” qtd in 362. 23. Hélène Cixous, Le Rire de la Méduse (New York: Schocken, 1981), 252-253. 24. Ferré, The Youngest Doll, 134-135. 25. Cixous, “The Laugh,” 875. 26. Rosario Ferré, El coloquio de las perras (Harrisonburg, VA: Banta Co., 1990), 112. For more on Ferré’s positive and subversive conception of the prostitute, see Simone de Beavoir’s 1983 The Second Sex, from which it is primarily derived, according to the author herself. 27. Julia Kristeva, “Oscillation between Power and Denial,” in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 166. 28. Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 49. The entirety of the plena’s text is quoted herein. 29. Ferré, The Youngest Doll, 134. 30. Ordóñez, “Inscribing Difference,” 49. 31. Culler, On Deconstruction, qtd in 58. 32. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 75-76. 33. See, for example, the following passage on page 134: “Was it Isabel Luberza who began the campaign to restore the plaster lions of the town square, or was it Isabel la Negra who misspent the funds in making herself beautiful for the rich boys of the town, the sons of your friends that used to visit my shack every night, their shoulders drooping and dragging themselves like pigeons gripped by consumption, staring hungrily at my body as though at a promised banquet; was it Isabel Luberza, the Red Cross Lady, or was it Elizabeth the Black, the Young Lords’ President, who used to shout from her platform that she was living proof of the fact that there was no difference between Puerto Ricans and Neoricans, because they had all come together in her cunt; was it Isabel Luberza who used to collect funds for Boy’s Town, for the Mute and Deaf, for Model City, dressed by

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Fernando Pena with long, white lambskin gloves and a silver link stole, or was it Isabel the Slavedriver, the exploiter of innocent little Dominican girls, put ashore by smugglers on the beaches of Guayanilla; was it Isabel Luberza the Popular Part Lady…” (134-135, ellipses mine). This passage continues for another page and a half of the story without a single period. 34. Cixous, “The Laugh,” 888. 35. As with “When Women Love Men,” the two female characters have very similar names. 36. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 45. 37. Ferré, The Youngest Doll, 14-15. 38. This poem is published in Spanish. All translations here are my own. 39. Zoé Jiménez Corretjer, Antigua Vía (Bloomington: Xlibris, 2007). 40. Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Los documentados, 3rd ed. (Carolina, PR: Publicaciones Boreales, 2010). 41. Again, the translation is mine. 42. Ordóñez, “Inscribing Difference,” 46. 43. Pokorny, “Rewriting the Body,” 80. 44. Cixous, Le Rire, 252-253.

Works Cited Aparicio, Frances R. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Birmingham-Pokorny, Elba D. “(Re)writing the Body: The Legitimization of The Female Voice, History, Culture and Space in Rosario Ferré’s La muñeca menor.” Confluencia 10, no. 1 (1994): 75-80. Cixous, Hélène. Le Rire de la Méduse. New York: Schocken, 1981. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 875-893. Corretjer, Zoé Jiménez. Antigua Vía. Bloomington: Xlibris, 2007. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Donnell, Alison. Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. London: Routledge, 2006. Ferré, Rosario. The Youngest Doll. Translated by Rosario Ferré and Cindy Ventura. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Ferré, Rosario. El coloquio de las perras. Harrisonburg, VA: Banta Co., 1990. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

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Jones, Ann Rosalind. “‘Writing the Body’: Toward an Understanding of L’Écriture Féminine.” In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 357-369. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Kristeva, Julia. “Oscillation between Power and Denial.” In New French Feminisms: An Anthology, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 165-167. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Ordóñez, Elizabeth J. “Inscribing Difference: ‘L’Écriture Féminine’ and New Narrative by Women.” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 12, no. ½ (1987): 45-58. Pizarro, Yolanda Arroyo. Los documentados. 3rd edition. Carolina, PR: Publicaciones Boreales, 2010. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

CHAPTER 6

The Smallest Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson in Close Quarters Shareena Z. Hamzah-Osbourne

This chapter examines the legacies and continuities between the work of the modernist Virginia Woolf and the modernist/postmodernist/post-­ postmodernist Jeanette Winterson. Both express and advocate for the rights and place of women in society through their writing by revealing the intricate connections between writer and reader, and between reader and text. Their writings produce layers of meaning that elicit diverse emotions and the desire to question and protest about the freedom of women in society and their right to participate in the patriarchal state. Winterson records that she used to escape to the ‘smallest room’—the outside toilet—to find the space to read what her mother termed ‘books of sin’. As Mrs Winterson said: ‘the trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late’.1 Woolf famously declared that what a woman needs to write are independent means and a lockable door. Taking

S. Z. Hamzah-Osbourne (*) Swansea University, Swansea, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_6

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these personal spaces of refuge as a starting point, this chapter argues that it is in and through language—the tool of their art—that Woolf’s and Winterson’s true reconceptualisations of freedom and equality in matters of gender and sexuality can be found. Through writing, taboo topics such as diverse sexual desires were suggested by Woolf and discussed more openly by Winterson. The literary relationship between these two female authors will be examined here because, as Bakhtin stated, ‘dialogue is the only sphere possible for the life of language.’2 Winterson has wrestled with the effect of Woolf’s works, and her texts bear an appreciable trace of Woolf’s thinking, especially with respect to freedom and equality in matters of gender and sexuality. Confessing her admiration for Woolf’s ground-breaking corpus, Winterson has stated: ‘Virginia Woolf was a great writer, and for us as reader, the only honest undistorted focus is her work’.3 Winterson suggests that Woolf’s legacy has been subject to inaccurate and distorted interpretation (possibly from studies that allow Woolf’s biography to colour the assessment of her writing), and so this chapter seeks to study the ambivalent relationship between Woolf and Winterson by placing their works in dialogue with each other to gauge the past ideas that have influenced Winterson’s writing up to the present. This is consonant with Winterson’s claim that she has inherited Woolf’s mantle, declaring in a television interview that she was ‘the only true heir to Virginia Woolf’.4 Woolf’s craft has been reborn in Winterson’s work, revealing itself in the latter’s varied and controversial style. Through Winterson’s career as a devotee and practitioner of the arts, her risk-taking approach to fluid gender and sexuality shows an insistence on female intellectual growth. She embraces Woolf’s legacy as she continues, and enhances, Woolf’s battle for women’s rights through her work in the arts and her presence in the public space. Public discussion of sex was still a much censored and policed activity in Woolf’s time. Orlando was published in 1928, the year that Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was banned in the UK following a trial for obscenity. 1928 was also when D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover made its first appearance, through Italian publishers. However, following its own confrontation with the moral and legal authorities, it would not be legally available for purchase in Britain until 1960. Woolf comments on this lack of sexual expression in her early life and works: ‘it is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long. […] When all intellectual questions had been debated so freely, sex was ignored.’5 Winterson, by contrast, grew up in a much-changed world from

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Woolf’s time, and was just over a year old when the court case allowing the publication of Lady Chatterley helped to signal the beginning of the permissive era in 1960s Britain. As a result, Winterson has had a freedom to engage in print with topics that would have led to prosecutions for Woolf. Winterson has embraced the task of debating issues of non-normative gender and sexuality, and she is outspoken in both her fiction writing and her commentaries on contemporary society. Her sexual orientation as a lesbian is well documented and her works openly portray sexual acts between same-sex partners. As such, her novels display a markedly different approach to these topics from those of Woolf’s. As a female writer who is both controversial and courageous, Winterson is a worthy successor to Woolf, who, despite the constraints of her era, was still no stranger to contentious issues. Woolf’s legacy includes the purposeful and complex ways in which information, values, and beliefs have passed on to other women writers, and her courageous support of women’s rights continues to affect others today. Julia Kristeva, discussing Bakhtinian concepts of formalism, posits that language functions as a ‘set of dialogical, semic elements or a set of ambivalent elements’ [italics in original].6 Winterson’s writing displays dialogism on many levels, not least the way it responds to the works of Woolf. This relationship with Woolf’s writing is also, at times, ambivalent. Despite the differences of epoch and class, Woolf’s works are still desired, followed, and continued by Winterson. Her response to Woolf’s œuvre comprises a dialogue that creates a space between the text of the past and the present, while still enabling an ambivalence in respect to the involvement of history and society. This ambivalence can be seen in Winterson’s engagements with freedom and equality in her literary fiction: she uses past histories and stories to expose her readers to contemporary issues of gender and sexuality, undermining notions of fixed subjectivity. As Kristeva proposes, when we are confronted with the ‘spatial conception of language’s poetic operation, we must first define the three dimensions of textual space where various semic sets and poetic sequences function’.7 These dimensions are ‘writing subject, addressee, and exterior texts’.8 Kristeva argues that a text speaks not only to a contemporaneous reader, but also responds to previous works. In this way, these interstitial spaces of repression and expression, of unconscious and conscious desire, become, in Winterson’s work, sites for self-conscious questioning of, and engagement with, Woolf’s literary legacy.

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Winterson’s language, often deceptively simple on the surface, yet beautifully ordered and controlled in its rhythm and sequence of ambiguous images, is intertwined with a pervasive humour often absent from Woolf’s writing. However, both authors’ ways of expressing language are distinctively mysterious, erotic, and confrontational. Themes such as love and loss, desire and sex, are repeatedly and fetishistically present in Winterson’s works.9 Woolf, who believed women should write and speak freely in order to achieve equality in society, was fixated by flux: the sense of movement and change. Nothing remained stable long. One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed.10

Through these experiences, Woolf and Winterson coax their readers into seeing things differently and more deeply and the poetics of their style are developed temporally and spatially. Winterson believes ‘it is style that makes nonsense of conventional boundaries between fiction and fact. Style that refuses history as documentary and recognises that history is as much in the reconstruction as in the moment.’11 Her texts reflect Kristeva’s argument on stylised, poetic language: the specific status of the word as signifier for different modes of (literary) intellection within different genres or texts puts poetic analysis at the sensitive centre of contemporary ‘human’ sciences—at the intersection of language (the true practice of thought) with space (the volume within which signification, through a joining of differences articulates itself).12

Winterson writes from an intersectional position, and she is obsessed with creating and remaking new meaning of language. She experiences this process as a kind of love affair, with ordinary language being transmuted into her works into literary style. Her affair with language is one of exactness, yet defamiliarization: she sees art forms as a ‘foreign language’ and she suggests that ‘we have to recognise that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue’.13 For Woolf, language and writing were often a way to reveal and express emotions, such as when she wrote about the loss of family members; through her clear command of language she managed to convey the ambiguity of characters’ emotions in her life and novels. Woolf describes how different her life would have been if her mother had been alive, as she was ‘very quick; very definite; very upright; and

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behind the active, the sad, the silent. And of course she was central’.14 Accordingly, there is often a subtle mother-daughter relationship in her novels. Winterson, on the other hand, decries her mother in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, saying she ‘was a monster’.15 This denouncement can also be traced in her early fiction; for example, the cruel mother of Oranges can be devastatingly contrasted with her monstrous-yet-­ maternal counterpart in Sexing in the Cherry, Dog-Woman. Woolf’s relationship with her father is mirrored by Winterson’s relationship with her mother—they are both symbols of tyranny in their life. However, the two writers acknowledge the oppressive parent to be the reason why they determined to gain the right to education and why they acquired knowledge. Although Woolf, as a woman, was barred from a university education, she had access to her father’s library, including many books ‘of politics, of international relations, of economics’.16 For Winterson, her mother’s banning of books in the home, unless they were connected to the Scriptures, fomented a rebellious and voracious desire for reading in the young Jeanette. Making surreptitious use of all the local public library could offer, Winterson set out to widen her knowledge, not least by her plan to read ‘English Literature in prose A-Z’, in contravention of the maternal prohibition.17 In Winterson’s texts, gender and sexuality are extremely fluid and flexible. For example, in Written on the Body, the Unnamed Narrator has both male and female lovers, and this serves to defamiliarize gender norms and to oppose gendered stereotypes. In place of heteronormativity, love in diverse guises acts as a focal point of desire between the self and the other: ‘Love it was that drove them forth. Love that brought them home again. Love hardened their hands against the oar and heated their sinews against the rain.’18 The physical identity of the narrator is abstract and fluid, thus allowing the material body to move between female and male genders as it pursues a range of choices in identity and sexuality. For a further example, Villanelle in The Passion, develops her sexual identity through a contradictory negotiation with the environment; ‘I content myself with this: that where I will be will not be where I am.’19 Her expressions of gender and sexuality are changeable and mobile, governed by her capability to switch between performative identities. She is not positioned in any single identity and is thus, paradoxically, both where she is and where she is not. In comparison, Woolf’s struggle with gender and sexuality during her time is significantly different from Winterson’s. Woolf expressed in her writing the struggles faced by women in a patriarchal society to express

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their sexual feelings, particularly those which differed from the norm. For instance, in Orlando, Woolf employed parody to obliquely challenge the primacy of heterosexuality, such as the scorn directed at the sailor who nearly fell to his death due to a glimpse of Orlando’s ankle, while, with the novel overall, ‘Woolf pulls a fast one on the censor, creating a radical text that enables readers to repudiate homophobia and experience lesbian desire.’20 Despite placing these authors in dialogue, it is difficult to precisely gauge the depth of Winterson’s connection to Woolf, as it resists definitive categorisation. She believes that Woolf’s reputation ‘as a feminist and as a thinker’ means that ‘the unique power of her language has still not been given the close critical attention it deserves.’21 At the same time, what can be said with some certainty is that Woolf’s significance as a feminist and thinker is unmistakeably present in Winterson’s life and writing, as shown by the quests for individual freedoms repeatedly expressed and enacted in Winterson’s texts. In correspondence with the author, Winterson declared: I am a feminist—as is any sane woman. Feminism isn’t a label, it’s a political position, and I believe that writers need to be actively involved in the world, and yes, to make a difference where we can. I don’t like labels though—and they are usually a way of reducing or confining a person or their work, and mostly unhelpful.22

Winterson’s acknowledgement of her feminist beliefs, while actively resisting pigeon-holing, is another reason for the further exploration of the relationship between her work and Woolf’s. Such an investigation also needs to remain mindful of the divergent factors between the two writers, not least the differing eras and social classes in which they were born. Despite these differences, they share language, gender, and elements of their sexuality. They also converge through their common interests in the equality of women in the public space and their use of language as a political weapon to provoke and upset societal norms. Language, as Luce Irigaray claims, ‘ought to be a place of resource in words which could assist us in transforming our natural belonging into a human identity, in modelling our energy so that it can perform the passage from our vital to our spiritual destiny’.23 The ability to employ language adroitly for specific purposes is the primary characteristic Woolf and Winterson share; for Woolf, it offers a means to express a female identity in a deeply patriarchal society, and for Winterson, it also provides a way to preach her own

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particular message of sexual freedom in a more liberated, but still patriarchal, present. Woolf is a writer who, for Winterson, ‘has a gift of wings’, and Winterson openly confesses her admiration for her as a modernist and a catalyst for social change in Art Objects, in which she compares Woolf’s works with other (predominantly male) modernist writers. Winterson finds ‘art is abundant’ in Woolf’s work, her writing acting as ‘waterfall and wine’ to the reader’s spirit.24 This process suggests a perilous yet intoxicating voyage for both writer and reader, in the mode of adventurous exposure; as Winterson states, ‘Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists’.25 Winterson’s and Woolf’s writings engage with the social and the political, provoking diverse responses from their readers. These external consequences result from the internal and subjective experiences these writers underwent in their lives; as Woolf said: ‘It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment.’26 These complex interactions produce a ‘living’ moment for the writer to continue writing and producing meaning, and also a ‘moving’, a transformation that is either positive or negative and stimulates any number of mysterious responses as art forestalls life through the writers’ choice of words that ‘seems ritualistic, obsessive, absurd’.27 Winterson discovers the textual dialogue in the writing of Woolf, which seeks equal rights for the unfortunate other, especially women and the disadvantaged. Winterson is an equally radical figure whose work continues to provoke debate and appreciation in corresponding measures, while raising and blurring notions of modernism, postmodernism and—pointing to a future we are perhaps already inhabiting—post-postmodernism. However, the relationship between the work of Winterson and Woolf is not always harmonious, and sometimes oppositional stances can be perceived. In the process of examining the two writers’ intricate and special relationship as a tête-à-tête, a focus needs to be placed on the complex and vocal interactions between gender and sexuality that Woolf and Winterson address throughout their literary lives. However, Winterson’s early exposure to Woolf’s writing, and her interest in, and admiration of, Woolf’s assertion of equality for female writers, have encouraged Winterson to build on Woolf’s work for women’s rights and freedoms. Woolf saw the importance of self-sufficiency for women and urged all women to work and earn an income in order to survive in a male-dominated, patriarchal society. Winterson agrees with Woolf’s advocations and made the most of

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the opportunities she fashioned that women in Woolf’s times could not. Whereas Woolf had the gift of an income left to her by her aunt, Winterson had to work multiple jobs to earn a living and support herself through university. The following passage from Art Objects, paraphrasing Woolf’s requirements in A Room of One’s Own for a woman to become a writer, lists precisely the conditions Winterson achieved after finishing her degree and moving to London: ‘a measure of economic independence, some privacy, some security, freedom to travel alone, freedom from domestic interruption, and a proper education’.28 Winterson’s early attraction to Woolf’s writing encouraged her desire to tamper with genre, to replicate what had been, in Woolf’s time, avant-garde writing. As an illustration, Oranges reveals Winterson’s ambition to write something different from the regular autobiographical novel, as it mixes fact with literary fiction in a similar way to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Winterson is on a mission to change the world, writing about past events, but amalgamating them with the present and the future as she attempts to give a voice to those marginalised in society, such as women. Similarly, Woolf’s Orlando, as much as any of her polemical essays, illustrated the difficulties faced by women in accessing the opportunities afforded to men, not least of the all the ability to earn a living through writing. Winterson places herself firmly within the movement for equality, stating: ‘I am proud to have been a part of the change in attitudes towards gender and sexuality. My work has been useful and powerful, and separate to my work, I continue to be a provocateur for change.’29 This can be compared with Woolf’s different approach in A Room of One’s Own, in which she urges her female audience to create the better future they wish to inhabit: ‘I should implore you to remember your responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual; I should remind you how much depends upon you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future.’30 Further commonalities between the two authors include the emotional basis for their writing, as personal issues influenced their sense of self and their relations to the world around them. Winterson argues that only art is capable of challenging our sense of self: ‘Art opens the heart [...] true art, when it happens to us, challenges the “I” that we are.’31 Her passion for language and art never wanes in intensity as she keeps exploring different genres, such as essays and literary criticism, in addition to her fiction. T.S. Eliot observed that a writer has to continue to develop emotionally, ‘but very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is

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impersonal’ [italics in original].32 Writing about experiences and emotions can be seen clearly in both Woolf’s and Winterson’s works, yet they use their personal experiences as a base for the invented realities in their fiction. Their works fuse the ‘emotion’ with their ‘history’, creating a certain level of impersonality, which allows their work to be enjoyed by a wide readership. With ability of the printed word to reach out across time, Winterson can be seen as one more member of the audience addressed by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, someone who has embraced Woolf’s message and sought to influence the future as much as her skills and position will allow. In other words, Woolf was a catalyst and thanks to the opportunities available to Winterson, she is able to advance Woolf’s agenda. Both authors have similar ambitions to create an invented space to which their readers can escape, a space which presents women with the possibility of freedom and equal rights in society. For example, Winterson believes, ‘inside books, there is perfect space and it is that space which allows the reader to escape from the problems of gravity’, and for Woolf, expectations for women, such as the rights to education or the freedom to voices their opinions in public, can be challenged and changed ‘if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think’.33 Woolf was comparatively fortunate to grow up in a highly intellectual household, mixing with the London intelligentsia as part of the Bloomsbury group, in which she could more freely express her opinions. Granted this freedom, Woolf believed in genuine expression and encouraged women to explore and express themselves in society. Hence, she used her valuable experiences of her background in her writing where she consistently underscores to women the importance of education, equality, and freedom of speech. Winterson considers Woolf to be a bold and unconventional writer who questions and challenges prevailing social norms through her language. To adopt the categorisation of artists employed by Woolf (when discussing the work of E.M.  Forster), Woolf acts as both preacher/teacher and as pure artist for Winterson, who analyses and deconstructs Woolf’s texts into something other, creating a site of intertextual interpretation.34 For example, when Woolf writes on how to read, she urges her audience that ‘[t]he only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusion.’35 This idea of liberating, rather than directing, the reader is also found in Winterson’s works; for example, in Art Objects she insists that all art has ‘its own customs and speaks its own

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language’.36 Winterson believes it is the job of the author to take the ‘pleasures of the rummaging-den, the piling in of stuff, the fight to make the chaos into an honest order and not a dead and empty catalogue’, and continue to imbue language with new significance because, as she says, the ‘word carries in itself an abundance of meanings. There is the meaning of the moment, because words alter their meanings, or less drastically, but with equal significance, they alter their associations.’37 In relation to the movement of the postmodernist world and the recasting of modernity, Lisa Moore states that the early modern setting of Winterson’s novels ‘allow her to make an argument about the inextricability of postmodern unravelling of the subject and the founding moments of modern subjectivity itself.’38 In this way, Winterson’s works represent language and movement by stretching, refining, and reshaping them through exceeding the boundaries of interpretation and imagination for a new word and new meaning. For her, new words always produce new meaning, because ‘[if] the words have been chosen with sufficient prescience [the text] will be alive and will continue its work among new generations of readers.’39 To Moore, Winterson’s works have been ‘re-moulding the reality we assume to be objective’, in part by rejecting given gender and sexuality norms: In the world of her novels, culture doesn’t have to and doesn’t always operate to assure the successful ‘rule’ of heterosexuality; representation does not depend on the centrality of ‘the heterosexual paradigm’, nor on the inevitable ‘duality’ of femininity in relation to masculinity.40

Winterson reimages and recreates Woolf’s stories in the past into her version of histories and stories for new readers and writers, in accordance with Woolf’s advice ‘to follow your own instincts’ when it comes to textual matters.41 Woolf believed that women in the past, particularly women writers like the Brontës and Jane Austen, faced obstacles at all stages of their lives. She stated this clearly in A Room of One’s Own: But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.42

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Likewise, Winterson keeps creating new spaces full of the fluid experiences and emotions of the past writers and transfers into them new meanings of language in conveying the ideas of women’s struggles and lack of opportunities in the past, present, and perhaps in the future. This can be seen in Frankissstein, Winterson’s reimagining of Frankenstein, which is bookended by the fictionalized recollections of Mary Shelley. She states at the start of the novel, ‘We observe that men subjugate women’, while at the end, (Winterson’s) Shelley anticipates the central arguments of A Room of One’s Own: Neither [Byron nor Polidori] seemed to consider that being refused an education, being legally the property of a male relative, whether father, husband or brother, having no rights to vote, and no money of her own once married, and being barred from every profession except governess or nurse, and refused every employment except mother, wife or skivvy, and wearing a costume that makes walking or riding impossible, might limit the active principle of a female.43

Both Woolf and Winterson are obsessed with the stories and histories of the past as a means to create a better world for women writers, and women in general. For Winterson, a work of art is ‘a living line of movement, a wave of colour that reprocesses in my body, colouring it, colouring the new present, the future, and even the past’.44 Through her works, Woolf bore witness to the difficulties her mother’s generation faced in society; thus she vowed to fight for women’s rights and freedoms in society, which ‘throughout the greater part of its history has treated [woman] as a slave; it has denied [her] education or any share in its possessions’.45 Woolf spent her entire career promoting women’s rights, especially the right to proper education and economic independence, and this naturally attracted criticism from some quarters. Winterson touches on this opprobrium and proffers a certain level of defence: ‘Woolf is a martyr to maleness, to others, a non-practising Sappho. To some, her madness was a weakness, to others, it has been confirmation of her genius and a sign of her spiritual health (to be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not breakdown).’46 Recurring themes in Winterson’s writing reflect many of Woolf’s preoccupations from A Room of One’s Own, such as equality, freedom, space, and escape. In her essay collection, The Second Common Reader, Woolf describes the challenges presented by literature: ‘to go from one great novelist to another—from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to

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Trollope, from Scott to Meredith—is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.’47 Comparably, Winterson illustrates in Art Objects her impressions of past and present influences on her, such as Gertrude Stein, Woolf, James Joyce, and George Eliot, and she expresses her conviction that ‘art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.’48 In addition, Winterson, who states she is ‘a literary and fiction writer’, invents ‘great pretend games’, playing with words and manipulating concepts of time, to produce unique notions of gender, sexuality, and identity in her works.49 For example, she uses history as a mirror of the present, believing what happened then is also happening now. This can be traced in her playful reinvention of past works of fiction, such as The Gap of Time’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Furthermore, Woolf’s various modes of writing, which included more marginalised forms, such as diaries, letters, and essays, have influenced Winterson’s own creations, which are hybrid and defy easy definition and categorisation. Her texts both express and enact the inextricable connection between aesthetics, economics, politics, and gender despite their resistance to all constraints, authorities, and totalising systems. Woolf’s quest for freedom and equality finds new energy and modes of transmission in Winterson’s writing. In addition to her ability to promote herself and her views in the public sphere, Winterson’s imaginative freedom stands revealed throughout her fiction. It is worth noting that Woolf’s Orlando is, even if for ironic purposes, closeted as both a male and a female. During his initial masculine state, he laments the possibility that Sasha, the object of his desire, could be male: ‘Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question.’50 When Orlando is female, the negative consequences of same-sex desire continue: ‘though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved’ [italics added for emphasis].51 By contrast, Winterson’s Villanelle in The Passion and Ry in Frankissstein embrace their fluid sexuality and have physical relationships with both men and women, overtly expressing and enacting the desires that Woolf in Orlando could not. Winterson voices her disappointment with societal norms through her art, preaching her notions of equality in gender and sexuality. She further suggests: ‘All good writers aspire towards such precision and movement, and the experiments that writers must make are for the sake of new frequencies of language which in turn allow new frequencies of emotion’.52 In contrast, Woolf believed ‘words protrude, cold and raw’.53 For both

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authors, words must be capable of expressing emotion and not be constrained. As Irigaray states: ‘our language is a sort of code which indicates to us how to make good use of the world in which we are situated’.54 Therefore, Winterson’s advocacy for women’s rights in society, in particular those of a woman writer, is a passionate endeavour and she feels the exigency to continue fighting for the freedom and equality of women in society. While Orlando is magical realism avant la lettre, Winterson advanced this literary style for a new generation, rejecting, in novels such as The Passion and Sexing the Cherry, realism for an exploration of language that reinvents the past through imaginative, and sometimes fantastical, means, as an indirect way of projecting political injustice. It is clear from her own words that Winterson is an emotional writer, and this is similar to Woolf’s ideas about writing—in the author’s wellspring of creative impulse lies the crucial qualitative difference between the experiences that produce despair and those that spark satisfaction. This is why Winterson is the personification of Woolf’s idea of a good writer. Further, Woolf observed that writers have to continue to develop emotionally, involving events of the past in the present: The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moment I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past it’s a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual.55

Woolf considers that a writer needs space for expression and exploration in writing and in discussion to gain experience in the public sphere to talk and think freely on an equal footing with men. Through Woolf’s complicated journey of fighting for equal rights for women, Winterson has managed to show that these spaces are available to women in the present era, and she uses her art as a tool to communicate these issues to others. This aligns with Irigaray’s belief that ‘linguistic performance will amount to dominating the world by mean of language, and […] “to be appropriate to” amounts to an obligation to imitate at the level of behaviour, as well as at the level of word.’56 However, even though women today have more

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rights and opportunities than in Woolf’s era, there are still barriers against women speaking or doing as they please, and Irigaray’s argument still involves the imitation of male language rather that its replacement. To this end, Winterson’s striving to change patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies conforms with Kristeva’s statement that ‘the only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing [it] through a process of reading– writing; that is, through the practice of a signifying structure in relation or opposition to another structure’.57 In this case, Winterson follows the path Woolf proposed in A Room of One’s Own by using some of the educational and economic structures typical of twentieth-century Western societies— the university education system, the publishing industry—against the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative status quo, in order to spread the transgressive message of gender and sexual equality; as Winterson argues, ‘Writers are fighters, they have to be, because to begin with, they are the people who must stand up for their own work’.58 Both Winterson’s and Woolf’s works produce and perform extremely nuanced and complex narratives and rhetorical strategies. They critique the works of others, whether literature or other forms of art, but at the same time encourage their readers to draw their own conclusions; for example, Woolf wrote: ‘I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.’59 This action relates to Kristeva’s analysis that ‘the notion of ambivalence pertains to the permutation of the two spaces observed in novelistic structure: dialogical space and monological space’.60 Spaces that allow for ambivalence are indeed crucial. Winterson, like Woolf, continues to argue transgressively for female freedom and equality, and both women argue controversially through their art. These two authors also present an insight into the human experience that postulate psychological androgyny as essential to creativity. Woolf articulated: I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. […] The androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.61

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Woolf considers that what drove her as a writer was the desire to make some sense of the big questions in life; thus, she is compelled to write with deep psychological, emotional, cultural, and sexual involvement in order to revitalise the mechanisms of art. Literature is for her a way of realising and articulating a personal philosophy: ‘[i]n writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy.’62 Woolf’s language stretches our conceptual frameworks and liberates our thinking, as does Winterson’s. For both women, their literary language is often distinct from the ordinary type used for quotidian transmission, the language of everyday speech (though it is recognisable within the terms of such ordinary communication). For instance, in one section of To the Lighthouse, Woolf describes the titular structure thus: When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again.63

Metaphor is used to create an anthropomorphic lighthouse, one that delivers a ‘stroke’ as if it were a sentient being capable of making physical contact. The literariness of the passage is further underlined by the alliteration of ‘mixed with moonlight gliding gently’ and the use of polysyndeton (‘and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again’), to convey a sense of repetition and rhythm in the lighthouse’s activity. In comparison, Winterson’s description of the Cape Wrath lighthouse in Lighthousekeeping draws on zoomorphic simile to create its literary depiction: ‘The lighthouse looked like a living creature, standing upright on its base, like a seahorse, fragile, impossible, but triumphant in the waves.’64 Woolf’s thinking informs Winterson’s past and present writing, which expands and alters Woolf’s legacy, playfully using language to continue the debate on women’s rights in society in the present day. Winterson frequently gives her characters both feminine and masculine traits, challenging the hegemony of patriarchal domination in society. For example, in The Daylight Gate, Christopher’s rape and castration in prison undermines his ability to adopt a stereotypically dominant masculine position. The removal of Christopher’s penis is compensated by the use of his tongue as a phallic substitute that is capable of satisfying his lover, Alice. At the same time, Winterson uses Christopher’s body to confound the stereotype of

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the human male’s sealed-off and non-penetrated body. This is reminiscent of Orlando’s loss of his penis as he transitions to womanhood: Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one strength of a man and a woman’s grace […] The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.65

In fact, many of Winterson’s novels echo characteristics, plots, and themes from Woolf’s works, with Orlando’s gender fluidity and crossdressing foreshadowing comparable events such as Villanelle’s donning of men’s clothing in The Passion, Jordan’s adventures in drag in Sexing the Cherry, and even the ambiguous gender of the unnamed narrator in Written on the Body, to name but a few. Irigaray states that, ‘Language, as it exists, is above all a tool to define, appropriate, use and share our knowledge.’66 Words in Woolf’s and Winterson’s works are poetic, exact, and full of rapturous energy from the recreation of language in their works. Both authors are obsessed with diction: Winterson urges the astute reader to ‘[c]heck that the book is made of language, living and not inert, for a true writer will create a separate reality and her atoms and her gases are words’, while Woolf believes that the English language is much in need of new words but ‘words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing.’67 Winterson’s works regularly produce and reproduce debates around the subject of gender and sexual equality, and the poetic nature of her language is articulated through her distinctive use of metaphor and metonymy. Language in Winterson’s world contains multi-­layered meanings, stimulating the reader into deploying their conscious and unconscious experiences as they connect to the text, producing plural interpretative possibilities. For Winterson, as for Woolf, language becomes a living thing, encompassing the past and the present through the staging of the fluidity of gender, identity, and sexuality. Winterson desires her writing to create ‘emotion around the forbidden, which is also what art does, to go into those forbidden places’.68 Both these authors’ works have contributed in a major way to debates on equality by rejecting orthodox thinking and providing a space for contemporary views of gender and sexual freedom. Winterson argues for the autonomy and agency of literature, urging readers and critics to judge her works and her language on their own terms: ‘A work of fiction, a poem, which is literature that is art,

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can only be itself, it can never substitute for anything. Nor can anything else substitute for it.’69 Thanks in no small part to her exposure to Woolf, Winterson creates a love affair with language, writing: language alters and poetry, if it is to be living, must move with those changes in language but also stretch them, refine them, so that the thoughts and sensibilities of a people, as reflected in their speech, are kept taut.70

This dynamism in her work allows Winterson to use her position as a literary writer, with her art as her tool, to convert the reader to alternative views of gender and sexuality, offering a depiction of what equality and freedom in both could look like. She believes her words change people’s perceptions and approaches to gender and equality, through ‘a living language, a language capable of expressing all that it is called upon to express’.71 While the main objectives of emancipation and equality for Woolf are the right to speak in public, and to obtain an education and employment, Winterson, born a generation after Woolf’s death, often takes a more theoretical and philosophical approach to the issues of equality, invariably tackled through her self-confessed love of language: Relationships of language are not only grammatical. If they were, textbooks would rank as the finest literature in the world. What a writer is looking for are the relationships within language. The tensions and harmonies between word and meaning that gradually can be resolved into form. What moves us, what can affect us through time, are not words loosely clothing ideas but words with the full impact of meaning stamped through them.72

Winterson’s relationship with language is intimate both psychologically and emotionally; she creates her own language which is ‘flexible enough to stretch around new and difficult ideas and fixed enough within a poetic tradition’.73 Her robust experiments with different linguistic approaches expand her use of language to create flexibility of meaning in her literary fiction ‘with truly charming inventiveness’.74 One of her distinctive methods is a triple layering of the narrative: ‘what I do use are stories within stories within stories. I am not particularly interested in folk tales, but I do have them about my person, and like Autolycus (The Winter’s Tale), I find that they are assumed to be worth more than they are.’75 For example, in Sexing the Cherry, Winterson uses the fairy tale of the twelve dancing princesses to challenge orthodox views on sexism and homophobia. Fluidity,

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Winterson’s texts suggest, is the principal way for us to experience the world and Jordan’s experiments with crossdressing are echoed by Villanelle in The Passion as they both experience the cultural performance of internal and external desires. In The PowerBook, Winterson adopts the tropes of fairy tales to show the boundaries of desire faced by Ali/Alix, who is at the end filled with madness and melancholy: ‘the woman I love rode this way, carried off by a horseman. If I do not find her, I will never find myself. If I do not find her, I will die in this forest, water within water.’76 In Woolf’s essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, she insists we should halt our prejudiced notions of ‘asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices.’77 She further acknowledges that books allow us to have an adventure, and she urges her readers to: open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.78

In Art Objects, Winterson proffers similar advice to the reader: books, to Winterson, are meant to be read deeply, and she did just that, spending ‘three years doing what modern governments more and more want to stop students doing; reading widely and thinking for themselves’.79 She believes that ‘[t]he world of the book is a total world and in a total world we fall in love.’80 Likewise, Woolf read widely, even material seemingly beyond her years when she was a child, and was pleased when this impressed her father: ‘What have you got hold of?’ he would say, looking over my shoulder at the book I was reading; and how proud, priggishly, I was, if he gave his little amused surprised snort, when he found me reading some book that no child of my age could understand.81

Winterson, too, read widely, despite the parental prohibition on books at home because her mother believed they were ‘trouble’. In contrast with Winterson’s restricted access to literature, Woolf took advantage of her background and class in society as she was encouraged to read books from her father’s library from a young age, and was present during the visit of

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various intellectuals, many of whom had progressive notions of women’s rights in the patriarchal society of her time. As a child, Winterson struggled to have her own space just to read. Not only did she have to smuggle books into her home and hide them, she also had to read them secretly, often in the ‘smallest room’—the outside toilet in the back garden. Despite the disparity in their upbringings, both Woolf and Winterson worshipped books, advocated reading widely, and demonstrated what books could do, especially how they could transport a person to different worlds and offer other points of view. Woolf writes: This influence, by which I mean the consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves; public opinion; what other people say and think; all those magnets which attract us this way to be like that or repel us the other and make us different.82

Woolf fought for equality in educational opportunities and the right to voice women’s discomfort with the prevailing societal norms. The right to proper education was a significant battleground for Woolf, as the barriers of class and gender in social mobility can be abated by the equal provision of education. Winterson has proved this throughout her career, highlighting in her writing issues of patriarchal inequality in society, and supporting feminist movements for freedom and equality for women. Even though Winterson is a woman from a working-class background, her determination and intelligence enabled her to study at Oxford University. Before that, her childhood was founded on a limited access to books and a claustrophobically religious-minded mother, factors that influenced Winterson psychologically and culturally—especially with regard to knowledge and writing. Books are, for her, fetishistic objects, and she uses them to preach in the public space. Talking about the idiosyncratic religious education of her youth, Winterson says: the Bible is a great resource for any writer and was for me. […] And church was a community that taught me the power of collective action, and the capacity of individuals to change—and to experience life at a level beyond the daily impoverishment of circumstances.’83

This religious fervour has bled into other parts of her life, such as the way she describes her bibliophilia:

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[m]y book hunts and book passions [are] something pretty close to hoarding the hair of martyrs and the sweat of saints. My books are a private altar. They are a source of strength and a place of worship. I see no reason to refuse to bend the knee.84

Winterson views the church as a means of creating a community and as a place for individual change. However, this is in contrast to Woolf’s opposition to religion, even though there are many religious themes in her novel. For example, she says she was ‘really shocked’ at T.S. Eliot’s conversion: ‘He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. […] I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.’85 Woolf’s derision of religion can also be traced in her fiction, such as when Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out loses her faith in the church, ‘the New Testament, and the sad and beautiful figure of Christ.’86 Winterson uses the play of fancy with an ironical approach to dip in and out of her own bodily experiences as she remoulds the present and future into a highly textured mental and emotional landscape. Winterson is adept at using and reusing words to create new and persuasive synergies, to convert and persuade others. Thus, she believes: That every word [should] be charged. Charge: to load, to put something into, to fill completely, to cause to accumulate electricity, to lay a task upon, to enjoin, to command, to deliver an official injunction or exhortation. To accuse. To place a bearing upon, to exact or demand from, to ask the price. To attack at a rush; the load of power. A device born on a shield. The object of care.87

For example, ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ are two words with a particular charge in Woolf’s life: 'Love was never mentioned. Love had no existence’, while she feared that her sister’s betrothal would ‘snatch us apart just as we had achieved freedom and happiness’.88 In comparison, the questions of love and marriage in Winterson’s works are faced aggressively: ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’ and ‘marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.’89 While A Room of One’s Own documents women’s struggles in a patriarchal society and the word ‘women’ has an important meaning, Woolf also says that women themselves need to oppose what is imposed upon them: ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties

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and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.’90 She further declared women ‘suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation’ and argued that ‘men would suffer’ under such social constraints.91 Woolf believed that a writer needs a room of their own; not just a physical location, the space she declares necessary is also in the mind, facilitating the entry into the public sphere, unlike ‘those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone’.92 Woolf’s Three Guineas focuses on the role of information and the clash between transparency and secrecy in government policy. Enquiring as to the link between nationalism and gender, for example, she wrote: ‘That is a fair general statement of what patriotism means to an educated man and what duties it imposes upon him. But the educated man’s sister—what does “patriotism” mean to her?’93 Like any contest in the public and political spheres, the fight for, and against, female equality and freedom was waged in part through the manipulation of language. Woolf’s works clearly present the need for critically assessing how language is used by those in power to persuade, conquer, and silence the people’s voice. This mode of critical thinking about language—through language—is used by Woolf in her writing on equality and freedom for women in society, a method of critique later continued by Winterson. The process of reading both Woolf and Winterson can encourage individuals to take a stand, make decisions, and, at times, consider difficult choices, as new emotions are provoked, and each new reading offers different experiences. Both writers read voraciously and frequently reflected the works of others in their own, such as Woolf’s extensive essays on the Elizabethans, John Donne, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Hardy.94 For Winterson, Woolf herself is an author she repeatedly returns to, especially in Art Objects, in which Woolf’s work is a thread that runs through the whole piece. Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past both describe the writers’ childhood experiences and the people who directly and indirectly contributed to their highest artistic achievements. Both Winterson and Woolf had access to mass media such as newspapers and magazines, as well as radio. Today, for Winterson, media technologies have progressed to online platforms such as email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, which enable her to disseminate her thoughts on women’s rights, as well as LGBTQ+ issues, more widely. Unfortunately, not all of the mainstream press can be relied on for objective reporting of such social concerns, so, for Winterson, as it was for Woolf, the production of their own texts is one way to raise awareness of women’s rights to equality and freedom. Thus,

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Winterson expands Woolf’s struggle for women to have proper education and adequate income by using her art as another platform to create the opportunity for women to speak freely. Winterson participates actively in the public sphere, giving talks and lectures at public events, in addition she has often been interviewed by the mainstream press—spaces that were not readily available to Woolf in her time. However, Winterson’s stance on advancing equality is an inclusive one, and the importance of literature for all is always foremost in her thinking; ‘I write for anyone who is interested in books, in thinking, in expanding their imagination, female or male, any sexual orientation etc.’95 Declaring Woolf and Winterson to be prominent figures in the fight for equality in gender and sexuality is not without complications. Such a designation runs the risk of reducing Woolf’s and Winterson’s multifaceted works to merely political functions, implying a rigidity that obscures the creative spirit in the context of their writing. However, while ‘provocateur’ could be considered a problematic label, it also reflects the dynamism and agency with which both authors have engaged with important concerns regarding the actions of female writers, and women in general, when it comes to pursuing equality and freedom. Further, as this chapter has argued, Woolf’s legacy can be traced in Winterson’s works as they display the values Woolf declared a great writer should have: a ‘desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance’.96 The work of women writers such as Woolf has left a legacy that produces a continuing impact and significance and that passes on, in a complex way, their information, values, and possessions to future generations. Woolf, as a writer from the past, has influenced Winterson, the writer of the present. In turn, Winterson maintains and enhances Woolf’s literary legacy. As gender and sexuality become increasingly important measures of people's everyday social relationships, it is essential to develop new insights about how fluid gender and sexuality intersect with the legacies and inheritances bequeathed by previous writers. Woolf’s work towards female equality and freedom has sparked current debates into how women’s rights might be passed down in the future. For example, Winterson’s works provoke discussions about how given gender and sexuality norms might support or complicate existing social practices. Her writing reflects Woolf’s desire for equality and freedom for women, and the difficulties of achieving liberation in a society that is still patriarchal. What becomes clear in this exploration of Winterson’s and Woolf’s works and rhetorical

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strategies on women’s rights to equality and freedom is the current need for in-depth critical thinking about their writing; if a ‘great lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to it and risk being thought a monster’, then the least this risky effort deserves is careful consideration.97 The connection between Woolf and Winterson means an extended lifespan and legacy of the work of both, as well as for the future women writers advancing in the same direction. Woolf, who finally escaped financial reliance on her father and brother, was able to support herself and earn her own living; she was able to write freely, to express her ‘genuine likes and dislikes’, and to support and promote women’s rights through her writing.98 And Winterson, an award-winning and influential contemporary British author who has been described as ‘one of the most gifted writers working today’, competes successfully with the male writers of her time.99 The following passage by Woolf, originally part of an critique of male privilege, can be seen as an address to a future reader such as Winterson: It would seem to follow then as an indisputable fact that ‘we’—meaning by ‘we’ a whole made up of body, brain and spirit, influenced by memory and tradition—must still differ in some essential respects from ‘you’, whose body, brain and spirit have been so differently trained and are so differently influenced by memory and tradition.100

Winterson, the most prominent of Woolf’s heirs, uses her hard-won social advantages as a powerful tool to promote freedom and equality for women in society, especially the right to exist, explore, and express themselves freely. Winterson’s legacy will, in turn, continue Woolf’s and pass down to a new generation of women writers as feminist literature and criticism advances.

Notes 1. Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), 33. 2. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 68. 3. Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects (London: Vintage, 1997), 63. 4. ‘Profile: Mad, bad, or plain brilliant?: Jeanette Winterson, Britain's least modest great author,’ Independent, June 10, 1994, https://www.inde-

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pendent.co.uk/voices/profile-­m ad-­b ad-­o r-­p lain-­b rilliant-­j eanette-­ winterson-­britains-­least-­modest-­great-­author-­1421782.html. 5. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt, 1985), 196. 6. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 66. 7. Ibid., 65. 8. Ibid. 9. See Shareena Z.  Hamzah-Osbourne, Jeanette Winterson’s Narratives of Desire: Rethinking Fetishism (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 10. Woolf, Moments of Being, 79. 11. Winterson, Art Objects, 187. 12. Kristeva, Desire of Language, 65. 13. Winterson, Art Objects, 4. 14. Woolf, Moments of Being, 83. 15. Winterson, Why Be Happy, 229. 16. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 91. 17. Winterson, Why Be Happy, 39. 18. Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (London: Vintage, 1994), 81. 19. Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (London: Vintage, 2001), 150 20. Leslie Hankins, ‘Orlando: “A Precipice Marked V” Between “A Miracle of Discretion” and “Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible.”’ In Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, ed. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 181. 21. Winterson, Art Objects, 70. 22. Jeanette Winterson, Email correspondence with author, August 19, 2017. 23. Luce Irigaray, To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 4. 24. Winterson, Art Objects, 65. 25. Ibid., 25. 26. Woolf, Moments of Being, 75. 27. Winterson, Art Objects, 167. 28. Ibid., 62. 29. Jeanette Winterson, Email correspondence with author, August 19, 2017. 30. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 83. 31. Winterson, Art Objects, 7–15. 32. T.S.  Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 4th ed. (London: The Fountain Library, 1934). 59. 33. Winterson, Art Objects, 157; Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 86. 34. Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 166.

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35. Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book? (London: Laurence King, 2020), 19. 36. Winterson, Art Objects, 4. 37. Ibid., 75, 80. 38. Lisa Moore, ‘Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson.’ In Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 106. 39. Winterson, Art Objects, 80. 40. Moore, ‘Teledildonics,’ 107. 41. Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, 19. 42. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 56 43. Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019), 8, 318. 44. Winterson, Art Objects, 19. 45. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 185. 46. Winterson, Art Objects, 63. 47. Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader, Kindle edition, location: 3716–3717. 48. Winterson, Art Objects, 63. 49. Jeanette Winterson, ‘Face to Face with Jeanette Winterson,’ interview by Jeremy Isaac, The Late Show, BBC2, June 28, 1994, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00nw1xh/the-­l ate-­s how-­f ace-­t o-­ face-­jeanette-­winterson. 50. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Vintage, 1992), 19. 51. Ibid., 103. 52. Ibid., 167; Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 81 53. Woolf, The Second Common Reader, Kindle edition, locations: 3702–3882. 54. Irigaray, To Be Born, 57 55. Woolf, Moments of Being, 66. 56. Irigaray, To Be Born, 57–58. 57. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 65. 58. Winterson, Art Objects, 43. 59. Woolf, The Second Common Reader, Kindle edition, location: 3679. 60. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 74. 61. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 74. 62. Woolf, Moments of Being, 72. 63. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Vintage, 2004), 126. 64. Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping (London: Fourth Estate, 2004), 80. 65. Woolf, Orlando, 87. 66. Irigaray, To Be Born, 57. 67. Woolf, The Second Common Reader, Kindle edition, location: 3705

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68. Wachtel, Writers & Company, 146. 69. Winterson, Art Objects, 35. 70. Ibid., 37. 71. Ibid., 36. 72. Ibid., 171, 36. 73. Ibid., 38. 74. Ursula K.  Le Guin, ‘Head Cases,’ Guardian, September 22, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.fiction. 75. Winterson, Art Objects, 189. 76. Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook (London: Vintage, 2001), 280. 77. Woolf, The Second Common Reader, Kindle edition, locations: 3697–3882. 78. Ibid., locations: 3701–3704. 79. Winterson, Art Objects, 158. 80. Ibid., 25. 81. Woolf, Moments of Being, 111. 82. Ibid., 80. 83. Jeanette Winterson, Email correspondence with author, August 19, 2017. 84. Winterson, Art Objects, 131. 85. Virginia Woolf, Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Joanne Trautmann Banks, (London: Harcourt Brace, 1989), 233. Letter to Vanessa Bell, February 11, 1928. 86. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, (London: Harper Press, 2013), 255. 87. Winterson, Art Objects, 129–130. 88. Woolf, Moments of Being, 191–192. 89. Winterson, Written on the Body, 9. 90. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 52. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 48. 93. Ibid., 94. 94. For further information, please refer to Woolf’s essays in The Common Reader: Volume 1 & 2, and The Second Common Reader. 95. Jeanette Winterson, Email correspondence with author, August 19, 2017. 96. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 43. 97. Ibid., 44. 98. Ibid., 101. 99. Dean Bakopoulos, ‘“The Gap of Time,” by Jeanette Winterson,’ New York Times, October 20, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/ books/review/the-­gap-­of-­time-­by-­jeanette-­winterson.html. 100. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 102.

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Works Cited Bakopoulos, Dean. ‘“The Gap of Time,” by Jeanette Winterson.’ New York Times. October 20, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/books/review/ the-­gap-­of-­time-­by-­jeanette-­winterson.html. Eliot, T.S. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 4th edition. London: The Fountain Library, 1934. Hamzah-Osbourne, Shareena Z. Jeanette Winterson’s Narratives of Desire: Rethinking Fetishism. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Hankins, Leslie. ‘Orlando: “A Precipice Marked V” Between “A Miracle of Discretion” and “Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible.”’ In Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer, 180-202. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Independent. ‘Profile: Mad, bad, or plain brilliant?: Jeanette Winterson, Britain's least modest great author.’ June 10, 1994. https://www.independent.co.uk/ voices/profile-­mad-­bad-­or-­plain-­brilliant-­jeanette-­winterson-­britains-­least-­ modest-­great-­author-­1421782.html. Irigaray, Luce. To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Le Guin, Ursula K. ‘Head Cases.’ Guardian. September 22, 2007. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.fiction Moore, Lisa. ‘Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson.’ In Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, 104-127. London: Taylor and Francis, 2013. Wachtel, Eleanor. Writers & Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1997. Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Winterson, Jeanette. ‘Face to Face with Jeanette Winterson.’ Interview by Jeremy Isaac. The Late Show, BBC2, June 28, 1994a. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ episode/p00nw1xh/the-­late-­show-­face-­to-­face-­jeanette-­winterson. Winterson, Jeanette. Frankissstein. London: Jonathan Cape, 2019. Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. London: Vintage, 2001a. Winterson, Jeanette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001b. Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.

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Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. London: Vintage, 1994b. Woolf, Virginia. Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks. London: Harcourt Brace, 1989. Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Woolf, Virginia. How Should One Read a Book? London: Laurence King, 2020. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind. New  York: Harcourt, 1985. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. London: Vintage, 1992a. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992b. Woolf, Virginia. The Second Common Reader. Kindle edition. London: Green Light, 2012. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London: Vintage, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. London: Harper Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 7

“They are not only one; they’re two, and three, and four”: Building a Trauma Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing Laura Dawkins

Reviewers of Homegoing (2016), Yaa Gyasi’s ambitious novel of slavery and its aftermath in Africa and America, have noted the young Ghanaian-­ American writer’s indebtedness to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), especially in Gyasi’s treatment of transgenerational trauma. However, these two novels share much more than a common focus on slavery and its repercussions. In Homegoing’s portrait of the Asante mother Akua, Gyasi revisits Morrison’s portrayal of Sethe in Beloved; indeed, the striking parallels between these characters indicate Gyasi’s deliberate attempt to create an African counterpart to the African American Sethe. Sethe and Akua survive remarkably similar traumatic histories: both lose their mothers violently at the hands of white men; both are abused by a white “instructor”

L. Dawkins (*) Murray State University, Murray, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_7

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(Morrison’s schoolteacher and Gyasi’s Missionary); both bear disfiguring scars on their bodies; both commit infanticide and are shunned by their respective communities; and both seek reconciliation with the cherished victim of their displaced violence. Gyasi has repeatedly affirmed her admiration for Morrison, singling her out as a “huge influence,” and remarking that her first encounter with Morrison’s fiction represented “a turning point in my life,” “like a light switch going off.”1 The author has deflected inquiries about Beloved’s direct influence upon her conception of Homegoing, responding to Ismail Muhammed’s question, “Did you ever see yourself as being in conversation with Beloved and other neo-slave narratives?” with a partial disclaimer: “I don’t know if I felt that I was in conversation with Morrison, though she’s a huge hero of mine, so maybe I’m always in conversation with her.”2 Yet the figure of Akua in Gyasi’s densely populated, multigenerational saga—a character who, as Gyasi confirms, “ties everything together.”3—emerges, like Morrison’s most tragic and memorable protagonist, as a strong, defiant mother who embodies the trauma of slavery as well as the ongoing struggle of slavery’s survivors to come to terms with traumatic memory. In creating the character of Akua, Gyasi arguably invokes Morrison’s Sethe to reaffirm the centrality of slavery as a unifying link between African and African American experiences of trauma. Morrison has rejected the “romantic” and “illusory” connections sometimes drawn between African and black diasporic cultures, contending, “It was easy for Black Americans […] some of them […] to think about Africa […] as one continent full of everybody in their neighborhood, instead of very distinct, very different, very specific, widely divergent people.”4 Yet rather than contributing to African Americans’ sense of alienation from their ancestral history, black Americans can bridge these cultural differences, Morrison indicates, through a shared acceptance of trauma and remembrance as elements constitutive of a common racial identity. Similarly, Gyasi suggests in Homegoing that cultural disparities between Africans and African Americans have sometimes impeded the formation of crucial communal links among black trauma survivors on both sides of the Atlantic. In conceiving Akua as a reflection or counterpart of Morrison’s Sethe, Gyasi demonstrates the devastating intergenerational impact of the slave trade and colonialism upon African mothers in their own homeland and suggests that the transatlantic recognition of a “trauma community” among survivors in Africa and the diaspora provides an important avenue to healing and historical recovery.

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Kai Erickson, one of the first trauma theorists to explore the notion of trauma communities, has explained that the experience of trauma can paradoxically both isolate the survivor and draw him or her into an immediate fellowship with other survivors: Trauma can create community. In some ways, that is a very odd thing to claim. To describe people as traumatized is to say that they have withdrawn into a kind of protective envelope, a place of mute, aching loneliness, in which the traumatic experience is treated as a solitary burden that needs to be expunged by acts of denial and resistance. What could be less ‘social’ than that? [But] for some survivors, at least, this sense of difference can become a kind of calling, a status, where people are drawn to others similarly marked [….] Trauma shared can serve as a source of communality in the same way that common languages and common backgrounds can.5

Building upon Erickson, Ron Eyerman makes a crucial distinction between the idea of “trauma communities,” sometimes formed across cultural, political, and ideological gulfs, and the conception of “cultural trauma,” which “articulates a membership group as it identifies an event or an experience, a primal scene, that solidifies individual/collective identity.”6 Eyerman maintains that cultural trauma “refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some level of cohesion.”7 Yet Eyerman is careful to note that the experience of cultural trauma is not confined to those survivors who have directly endured the traumatic event. Rather, “it is through time-delayed and negotiated recollection that cultural trauma is experienced, a process which places representation in a key role [….] Here the means and media of representation are crucial, for they bridge the gap between individuals and between occurrence and its recollection.”8 Cultural trauma, in other words, can be transmitted across generations, with descendants of trauma survivors both experiencing repercussions of the “primal scene” and committing themselves to keeping the collective memory alive through oral or written testimony and other forms of cultural representation. According to Eyerman, the experience of slavery in America constituted a cultural trauma that has served as a source of identity and a “point of origin in a common past” for successive generations of African Americans. As Eyerman argues, this identity both solidified a sense of community among black Americans and provided a means of resistance to

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the dominant culture’s own representations: “Whether or not they directly experienced slavery or even had ancestors who did, blacks in the United States were identified with and came to identify themselves through the memory and representation of slavery [….] This was a self-imposed categorization, as opposed to, and meant to counter, those of the dominant white society. In this sense, the memory of slavery by African Americans was what Foucault would call a ‘counter-memory.’”9 Eyerman has located the foundation of a self-conscious African American trauma community at the turn of the twentieth century, when the end of Reconstruction ushered in a period of virulent racial terrorism in the American South. Eyerman observes, “This is the generation which articulates the cultural trauma and begins to formulate the responses, including the recollection of collective memory [….] It is the convergence of social forces and the emergence of social movements which are key to the formation of a collective consciousness.”10 With slavery as “an ever-shifting, reconstructed reference point,” black Americans united around their experience of cultural trauma and buttressed the “internalized moral force [that gave] meaning as well as order to collective memory.”11 Yet in discussing the impetus for her composition of Beloved, Morrison has observed that African Americans too often submerge or evade the collective memory of slavery. Beloved, Morrison affirms, serves as a corrective to this historical amnesia: “I think Afro-Americans, in rushing away from slavery, which was important to do—it meant rushing out of bondage into freedom—also rushed away from the slaves because it was painful to dwell there, and they may have abandoned some responsibilities in so doing […] The act of writing the book is a way of confronting [slavery] and making it possible to remember.”12 Indeed, Morrison insists that contemporary representations of slavery, and the recovery of repressed traumatic memory, can restore the sense of communal solidarity that enabled enslaved black Americans to survive the dehumanizing institution: “[African Americans] don’t want to talk, they don’t want to remember, they don’t want to say it, because they’re afraid of it—which is human. But when they do say it, and hear it, and look at it, and share it, they are not only one, they’re two, and three, and four, you know? The collective sharing of that information heals the individual—and the collective.”13 For Morrison, Beloved is not just an “altar,” a “memorial” for her slave ancestors, but an appeal to present-day black Americans to recognize the healing power of a unified trauma community.

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Like Morrison, Gyasi returns to the era of the transatlantic slave trade to reinforce the continuities between past and present as well as to honor the memory of African ancestors. Morrison has insisted, “The gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present does not exist. It is bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no one’s ever assumed responsibility for. They are those who died en route. Nobody knows their names and nobody thinks about them.”14 The character of Beloved, as Morrison has attested, represents not only “[Sethe’s] child returned to her from the dead,” but also “a survivor from the true, actual slave ship,” speaking “a traumatized language, of her own experience.”15 Similarly, Gyasi’s Akua, as the author herself confirms, is “literally visited by an ancestor [Maame]”16 who, like Beloved, demands that Akua acknowledge her traumatic history and pass that knowledge on to her (Akua’s) descendants. In deploying the trope of ancestral return, both Morrison and Gyasi invoke the West African idea of the “infinite past” and the “continuous present”—what Morrison has explained as the “notion of it’s always being now, even though it’s past,” a concept of time that she “wanted to incorporate into the text [of Beloved], because the past is never something you have to record or go back to. Children can actually represent ancestors or grandmothers or grandfathers.”17 Maame, Akua’s great-great-great grandmother, experiences the primal wound of slavery that subsequently repeats itself, in various forms, in the lives of her descendants. As a young Asante woman, she is captured and made a slave within a Fante household, then raped and impregnated by her master. Escaping on the night of her daughter Effia’s birth by setting a “great fire” in the fields surrounding the village, Maame leaves her newborn infant behind. After marrying an Asante warrior, she gives birth to a second daughter, Esi, who at the age of fifteen is captured, sold, and taken to America on a slave ship. Four generations later, Maame appears in Akua’s dreams as “Firewoman,” an ancestral spirit mourning her lost daughters. Akua’s own experience reflects the abuses of British colonialists in Africa: she is raised by a white Christian missionary who causes her mother Abena to drown by forcibly baptizing her in the river, and who savagely lashes the “sinful” Akua regularly during her childhood. The tragic histories of Maame and Akua intersect when Akua, haunted by persistent visions of Firewoman’s desperate search for her daughters, sacrifices her own daughters, Ama Serwah and Abee, in a dream-state—handing them to Firewomen—by setting her children’s beds ablaze. Only Akua’s

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infant son Yaw, badly burned and permanently scarred, survives the fire. Akua is exiled to the outskirts of the village and estranged from her son until late in his life. Ancestral visitation in Homegoing, as in Beloved, speaks not only to the repercussions of trauma in successive generations but also to the profound and far-reaching impact of maternal loss. Although Gyasi’s Akua kills her daughters in a dream-state as a tragically misguided gesture of appeasement to her bereft ancestor, while Morrison’s Sethe, by contrast, murders the infant Beloved in a desperate attempt to prevent her children’s re-enslavement— “putt[ing] my babies where they’d be safe”18—both Morrison and Gyasi use the horrific act of infanticide to capture the cataclysmic shattering of maternal bonds within slavery. Examining the instances of intrafamilial violence in Morrison’s novels, Sam Durrant has astutely argued, “The black community inflicts on itself—acts out—that part of its history which it has been unable to digest. Each act of self-inflicted or familial violence is a way of remembering—while not remembering—the violence done to the whole race.”19 As Durrant explains, Morrison’s concept of “rememory” in Beloved represents “racial memory that remains nonverbalized yet somehow passes itself on from generation to generation, as if it were secretly encrypted in the cultural text,”20 asserting its power through an individual’s subconscious replaying of historical trauma. Sethe’s rescue of Beloved through murder— “dragg[ing] [her] through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt [her]”—reflects not only the cornered mother’s desire to protect “every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful,”21 but also the trauma survivor’s compulsion to replicate an unbearable history. Similarly, Gyasi’s Akua compulsively reenacts Maame’s experience of maternal bereavement— “cradl[ing] [her daughters] in her own burning hands” until “the children began to disappear”22—as a way of “remembering” a repressed ancestral past. Cathy Caruth has observed that traumatized individuals carry “an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptoms of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”23 For each mother, unable to assimilate or come to terms with this “impossible history,” the weight of traumatic cultural memory plays out as self-destruction, perpetuating the cycle of familial loss. Both Morrison in Beloved and Gyasi in Homegoing underscore the conflation of the past and the present by assigning dual roles to the victims of infanticide in their respective novels: Beloved is simultaneously Sethe’s daughter as well as a survivor of the Middle Passage, while Ama Serwah

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and Abee are at once both Akua’s daughters and the spirits of Maame’s lost children. However, it is important to note that neither Morrison nor Gyasi portrays the slain daughters in a strictly metaphorical sense as embodiments of “the return of the repressed.” Rather, Morrison’s Beloved and Gyasi’s Maame and her children are ghosts who have quite literally returned from the dead. John S.  Mbiti has pointed out that traditional West African philosophy “emphasizes that the spiritual universe is a unit with the physical and that these two intermingle and dovetail into each other so much that it is not easy or even necessary at times to draw the distinctions or separate them.”24 Morrison has rejected the label “magical realism” as a description of her works, since the term suggests a self-­ contradictory blend of the real and the supernatural, whereas in her view the magical “is the reality [.…] it’s what informs your sensibilities. I grew up in a house in which people talked about their dreams with the same authority that they talked about what ‘really’ happened. They had visitations and did not find that fact shocking.”25 Morrison further observes, “There is a seamless line between the real and the ghostly.”26 Commenting on Maame’s visit to Akua in a dream, Gyasi similarly asserts the validity of the “mystical”: “I feel like it wouldn’t be strange for a West African woman to tell you that her ancestors visited her in a dream [.…] It wouldn’t be any less real in that culture even if it feels magical.” She adds, “The Western idea of realism can be really limited [….] I meant [in Homegoing] to disturb people’s notions of what is mystical or real.”27 Like Morrison, who claims, “My own use of enchantment simply comes because that’s the way the world was for me and the black people I knew,”28 Gyasi affirms that the ancestral visitations she writes about are “true.”29 Susan Bowers explains, “West African religion believes that after physical death, the individual spirit lives, but because it is no longer contained by its ‘carnal envelope,’ it gains in power.”30 Bowers indicates that Beloved functions both literally as an outraged ghost and metaphorically as a representation of traumatic memory, maintaining, “The invasion of the world of the living by Beloved’s presence is evidence of the terrible destruction of the natural order caused by slavery.”31 Gyasi’s Firewoman and her two daughters also serve both as “real” ancestral spirits and as personifications of an inadequately resolved traumatic history. In functioning as metaphors for traumatic memory, the destructiveness of both Morrison’s Beloved and Gyasi’s Firewoman demonstrates the danger to selfhood that unresolved trauma poses for the survivor. Morrison’s description of Beloved’s voracious consumption of Sethe’s

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singular identity captures the tyranny of the past as it paralyzes the present and threatens the individual: “The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became [….] She sat in the chair licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur.”32 Like Beloved, Gyasi’s Firewoman “consumed everything [….] [her] sadness would send orange and red and hints of blue swarming every tree and every bush in sight.”33 Embodying both the collective trauma originating with the slave trade in Africa as well as Akua’s personal sorrow, Firewoman robs Akua of agency in the same way that Beloved annihilates Sethe’s active will: “She [Akua] could feel that she was dreaming, and yet she could not exert control over that feeling. She could not tell that feeling to grow hands, nudge her body into waking. She could not tell that feeling to throw water on the firewoman, put her out of her dreams.”34 If, as Judith Lewis Herman contends, traumatic memory frequently presents itself as “image without context,”35 Akua’s persistent dreams of fire arguably reflect her repressed recollections of her mother’s death (since the Missionary burned Abena’s body after drowning her), as well as the actual visitations of her enslaved ancestor Maame, who lost one of her daughters after setting the “great fire” that enabled her to escape captivity. The scars on Akua’s hands and feet represent both the inheritance of traumatic memory and the visible evidence of the ancestral burden that Maame has bequeathed her. As a sign of trauma externalized, bodily scarring emerges as an important and recurring motif in Homegoing, recalling Morrison’s memorable description of Paul D’s discovery of the “chokecherry tree” on Sethe’s back, the result of a brutal beating by schoolteacher’s nephews: Behind her, bending down, his body an arc of kindness, he held her breasts in the palms of his hands. He rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches. Raising his fingers to the hooks of her dress, he knew without seeing them or hearing any sigh that the tears were coming fast. And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, ‘Aw, Lord, girl.’ And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years.36

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Significantly, Gyasi’s description of the scar stretching across the back and shoulders of Esi’s enslaved daughter Ness invokes not only the “chokecherry tree” but also the image of Paul D bending over Sethe’s back and embracing her: “Her scarred skin was like another body in and of itself, shaped like a man hugging her from behind with his arms around her neck [….] Ness’s skin was no longer skin, really, more like the ghost of her past made seeable, physical. She didn’t mind the reminder.”37 Although Gyasi has acknowledged that Ness’s scar, as Ismail Muhammad points out, “seems like a callback” to Sethe’s chokecherry tree, the young writer distinguishes her treatment of physical trauma from that of Morrison: “Something Morrison is good at that I’m not is very lyrical, beautiful language about trauma. There’s a beauty to it that is separate from what’s happening [….] The question [is]: does the beautiful, elevated language distance you in a way that doesn’t serve you as a reader, or doesn’t serve the character?”38 Despite Gyasi’s doubts about the appropriateness of lyrical language to describe trauma, she nevertheless indicates that Ness’s interpretation of her scar as “a man hugging her from behind”—like Paul D’s similar imagining of Sethe’s scar as “the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display”—redefines the disfiguring wound as a shadow image and welcome “reminder” of the embraces of Ness’s beloved husband Sam, who was lynched after the couple attempted to escape slavery with their infant son. The slave community’s psychological need to reinterpret and transform the inscriptions imposed by the dominant society emerges as a central concern in Beloved. In discussing her vision in the novel shortly after its publication, Morrison stated, “I’m trying to explore how a people—in this case one individual or a small group of individuals—absorbs and rejects information on a very personal level about something [slavery] that is undigestable and unabsorbable, completely [….] Those people could not live without value. They had prices, but no value in the white world, so they made their own, and they decided what was valuable”39 As Lynda Koolish has argued, Sethe demonstrates the ability even as a small child to revise the master’s definitions, as evidenced when she asks to be stamped with the branding iron that has burned a mark of ownership into her mother’s flesh: “[When] Sethe demands of her ma’am, ‘Mark me, too,’ she unconsciously refuses the meaning of the slave branding iron as terror, cruelty, possession, and renames it, reclaims it, attempts to appropriate it as chosen, tribal, familial.”40 Similarly, Sethe’s adoption of Amy Denver’s

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description of the scar on Sethe’s back as a “chokecherry tree” reveals, as Caroline Rody contends, the slave mother’s implicit recognition that the brand of white terrorism also establishes generational connections: Morrison’s women [in Beloved] are linked by a three-generation chain of scars, marking both bond and breach: Sethe’s mother urges her daughter to recognize her body in death by the scar under her breast, and Sethe’s resurrected daughter bears on her neck the mark of her mother’s handsaw. Between them, Sethe has a ‘chokecherry tree’ on her back…. The tree is a cruciform emblem of her suffering but also an emblem of her place in generation; as the second of three links—a ‘trunk,’ with roots and with ‘branches,’ ‘leaves,’ and ‘blossoms,’ Sethe carries the family tree on her back.41

As what Anita Durkin has called “communal marker[s],”42 the scars of slavery constitute not only a vocabulary of pain but also the shared language of a trauma community. François Pitavy affirms, “The slaves’ narratives are inscribed on their bodies; it [the scar] has become the text of their stories and the most powerful signifier of their personal and communal histories.”43 The master’s stamp recoded serves as a nonverbal means of self-revelation and a unifying link among survivors haunted by traumatic memory. In Homegoing, the scars borne on the bodies of trauma victims not only bind survivors to one another but also provide a “map” to the past.44 Like the chain of scars linking Sethe’s mother, Sethe, and Beloved, Akua’s burned hands point back to ancestral trauma as well as connecting her to her surviving child Yaw, who bears on his face the marks of the fire that killed his sisters. Estranged from his mother for decades because of his anger about his misshapen face, Yaw ultimately acknowledges the bond of suffering that unites them: ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted, for his mother had put her hand on his scar, running her fingers along the ruined skin that he alone had touched for nearly half a century. She continued, undeterred by the anger in his voice. She took her own burned fingers from the lost eyebrow to the raised cheek to the scarred chin. She touched all of it, and only once she had finished did Yaw began to weep [….] ‘Tell me the story of how I got my scar,’ he said [….] She held out her hands to him and he looked at them carefully. He recognized her skin in his own.45

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When Yaw asks his mother to tell him “the story of how I got my scar,” both Akua and Yaw begin the journey toward healing that, as Dori Laub and other trauma theorists concur, depends upon a survivor’s willingness to bear witness to an attentive listener: “The ‘not-telling’ of the story serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny.”46 John Berger maintains that the “immersion in or haunting by a traumatic event can be countered by narrative. Instead of allowing the trauma to return on its own terms, we recall the trauma in a narrative of our own framing.”47 Akua shapes her narrative around the belief that she has been “chosen,” like Yaw himself, to be the repository and conduit for her ancestor’s traumatic history, a legacy of enslavement and exploitation that serves as a “warning” to future generations that “evil begets evil.”48 Yaw himself invites his young students to create a story around the origins of his disfiguring scar, and the interpretations they provide—that he was “lit by fire” and thus made “smart”49 or that his mother “was fighting evil spirits”50—transform the mark of his trauma into an emblem of enlightenment and heroism. By creating “narratives of [their] own framing,” Morrison’s trauma survivors similarly redefine the inscriptions of racial terrorism as marks of courage and endurance. Storytelling in Beloved, as in Homegoing, becomes an important means through which trauma survivors take control of their painful memories, shape the narratives of their experience, and pass these tales down to the next generation. Just as Akua bears witness to Yaw, who takes on the burden of keeping his mother’s story alive, Sethe passes down the tale of her escape from slavery to her younger daughter Denver (born during her mother’s flight), who in turn relates—and recreates—the story for her resurrected sister Beloved. As Sally Keenan contends, the sisters’ construction of the narrative both cements familial bonds and illustrates the oppressed group’s power to create alternative histories in defiance of the dominant society’s script: “The storytelling process mimicked here takes on the resonance of mythmaking. It shifts from a monologue to a duet, from the individual to the communal […] The mythic quality exists in its meaning as well as in its telling, for it is a heroic story of female liberation from slavery: the mother’s death-defying flight is a venture not only to ensure her own survival but also that of the daughter inside her and the one who was sent ahead.”51 Sethe’s tale of her courageous escape from slavery and the almost miraculous birth and survival of Denver confers the responsibility to perpetuate a matrilineal legacy of strength and valor onto her daughters’ generation.52 The story of Sethe’s own mother’s acts of defiance precede Sethe’s tales to Denver and Beloved: the slave Nan

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tells the child Sethe that “her mother and Nan were together from the sea,” and that Sethe’s mother rebelled against coerced maternity within slavery: “ ‘She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man.”53 Like Sethe’s tale of Denver’s birth, which both provides a model of female heroism and assures Denver of her secure place as cherished daughter, Nan’s story simultaneously serves as an oral history of maternal resistance and a confirmation of Sethe’s singular value to her mother. Like Morrison, Gyasi creates female characters who bequeath a heritage not only of traumatic memory but also of fierce rebellion. The defiance that Maame demonstrates in burning her master’s yam crops and escaping captivity is replicated in succeeding generations when Abena and Akua challenge the white Missionary’s despotic authority. The Missionary tells Akua, “‘Your mother, Abena, she wouldn’t repent. She came to us pregnant—you, her sin—but still she wouldn’t repent. She spit at the British. She was argumentative and angry. I believe she was glad of her sins,”54 Abena, violently resisting the Missionary’s forcible baptism of her—his stamp of possession and control—ultimately drowns without surrendering her independent will. Similarly, Akua determines that, following her mother’s example, she will risk her own life for her freedom: “‘Will you beat me until I stay?’ she asked. ‘You’d have to kill me to keep me here.”55 In a final rejection of the white man’s religion and language, Akua discards her English name—Deborah—and returns to her village to marry an Asante warrior. Abena’s daughter repudiates colonial control in “walk[ing] over the [prostrate] body”56 of the Missionary as she leaves him, triumphantly upholding her mother’s legacy of resistance. In both Beloved and Homegoing, the black mothers who pass on this tradition of resistance deliver oral narratives that their children implicitly carry into lettered culture as counter-texts to the dominant society’s discourse. Homegoing’s Yaw, educated by “the white book” (226) in colonial schools, becomes stalled in writing his own book—asking himself as well as his students, “Whose story am I missing?”—and ultimately decides to “find that story, too.”57 His subsequent reconciliation with his estranged mother, and her “gift” of “the story of how [he] got [his] scar”58 enable him to return to his “lifework” and complete it, “taking the title from an old Asante proverb and using it to discuss slavery and colonialism.”59 Although Beloved, unlike Homegoing, does not span multiple generations and reveal the destinies of the children who hear their mothers’ tales,

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Morrison suggests that Denver, reintegrated into the black community at the end of the novel, will pass down the story of her birth and her mother’s heroic escape from slavery. As Caroline Rody points out, “Denver is the daughter who emerges from the storytelling a woman, embraces her community, learns to read and write, and even plans to go to college [….] Denver the survivor and story-inheritor becomes a proto-Morrison, bearer of the family exodus saga into literate American culture.”60 While Linda Krumholz notes that Paul D, after hearing of Denver’s plans to attend college, silently warns her that “Nothing in this world more dangerous than a white schoolteacher,” she also insists, “But this is the very reason that Denver must usurp schoolteacher’s position: she must take away from him the power to define African Americans and make their history in a way that steals their past, their souls, and their humanity.”61 In their own revisionist storytelling, Denver and Yaw both honor their maternal heritage and subvert the “lessons” of schoolteacher and the Missionary, respectively. As Morrison has commented on her decision to write about slavery, “You have to take the authority back; you realign where the power is. So I wanted to take the power.”62 The connection between Yaw and Denver as story-inheritors, as well as the persistent links between Akua and Sethe as infanticidal mothers and trauma survivors, suggests Gyasi’s intentional creation of African characters who mirror the experience of Morrison’s African American characters in Beloved. However, the less obvious links between Akua and Beloved provide perhaps the strongest clues to Gyasi’s purpose in revisiting Morrison’s masterpiece. Beloved, as Carol E.  Henderson maintains, “becomes a material symbol of those bodies unaccounted for [….] She is the conduit through which these disembodied victims of the Middle Passage gain a literate voice.”63 Her dual identity as both Sethe’s resurrected daughter and a victim of the Middle Passage enables Beloved to serve as a bridge between Africa and America. As the collective ancestral spirits of those Africans who lost their lives during the transatlantic voyage, Beloved haunts the survivors with silent appeals for remembrance and devotion: “Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed [….] They never knew where or why she crouched, or whose was the underwater face she needed like that.”64 Similarly, Akua serves as a conduit not only for her ancestor Maame’s voice as she mourns the loss of one daughter to American slavery and the other daughter to Maame’s

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enslavers in Africa, but also, implicitly, for the ancestral spirits of all the victims of the slave trade. Speaking to her granddaughter Marjorie, Akua bears witness to these visitations: ‘One day, I came to these waters and I could feel the spirits of our ancestors calling to me. Some were free, and they spoke to me from the sand, but some others were trapped deep, deep, deep in the water so that I had to wade out to hear their voices. I waded out so far, the water almost took me down to meet those spirits that were trapped so deep in the sea that they would never be free. When they were living they had not known where they came from, and so dead, they did not know how to get to dry land.’65

“Chosen” to transmit her ancestors’ stories to succeeding generations, Akua, like Beloved, serves as a physical embodiment of traumatic memory. To adopt Henderson’s description of Beloved, Akua “becomes the interior language of pain, externalized.”66 As embodiments of the “disremembered and unaccounted for,” both Beloved and Akua are rejected by communities attempting to heal from the trauma of slavery and its repercussions. For the members of Sethe’s community, “Remembering seemed unwise,” so they “forgot [Beloved]. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep.”67 Similarly, the people in Akua’s village in Edweso “called [Akua] Crazy Woman” and “exiled [her] to the outskirts of town”68 because she “dreamed dreams and saw visions,”69 stirring up memories of a past that they would prefer to erase. Yet Beloved’s presence persists as a “rustle of a skirt” or “knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep,”70 just as Akua’s Firewoman, Marjorie senses, “would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear her family’s stories,”71 Morrison has asserted that in Beloved, “The struggle to forget which was important to survive is fruitless and I wanted to make it fruitless.”72 This irresolvable contradiction—the need to forget and the impossibility of forgetting—disrupts any tidy endings in both Beloved and Homegoing, denying the reader a sense of closure or resolution. Durrant observes, “While Morrison passes on to us the tellable story of Sethe’s and Paul D’s mourning, she also encrypts within this story the untellable, unmournable story of the Middle Passage. This cryptic story is passed on to us as that which refuses to pass on, that which can never be laid to rest precisely because it can never be adequately told.”73 In Beloved’s closing lines, Beloved’s “footprints come and go, come and go,” and survivors assure

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themselves that “the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for” is “wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.”74 Similarly, in the conclusion of Homegoing, Ness’s great-great-great grandson Marcus avoids the sea, shrinking from the knowledge that the ocean floor “was littered with black men,”75 but he cannot dispel “the smell of the ocean, thick in his throat,” evoking thoughts of the unclaimable, anonymous victims of the Middle Passage: “Them. Them. Always them. No one called them by name.”76 In both novels, the story of these nameless and unmourned Africans continues, in Jean Wyatt’s words, to “haunt the borders of a symbolic order that excludes it.”77 Both Morrison and Gyasi affirm that it is specifically the traumatic, often repressed memory of the Middle Passage that irrevocably links Africans and African Americans. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has explored the diverse ways in which collective trauma has informed Africanist cultural expression, arguing that “a dynamic rapport with the presence of death and suffering […] is integral, for example, to the narratives of loss, exile, and journeying which, like particular elements of musical performance, serve a mnemonic function: directing the consciousness of the group back to significant nodal points in its common history and social memory.”78 Building upon Gilroy’s insights, Durrant has suggested that traumatic memory in Beloved becomes a force for community-making: Morrison recognizes the impossibility of reclaiming an African tradition and turns this impossibility into the ground of a new possibility. For it is precisely the strange, negative ‘affirmation’ of a lost origin, of an original, unmournable loss, that enables Morrison’s characters to contemplate the future. In the final instance, Beloved asks us to reconceive of racial identity and community as grounded not in the continuous history of cultural tradition but rather in the discontinuous history of racial trauma.79

Carl Pedersen has contended that the Middle Passage “emerges as more of a bridge than a breach, a space-in-between where memory entails reconstructing the horrors of the voyage westward and retracing the journey of Africans to the Americas.”80 Although traumatic memory remains partial, fragmentary, “encrypted,” it nevertheless—in its very elusiveness and fragility—contributes to the formation of a black community dedicated to its recovery and preservation.

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Accordingly, the conclusions of Beloved and Homegoing indicate that both Morrison and Gyasi, expanding Eyerman’s notion of a “membership group”81 founded on the American trauma of slavery, embrace the idea of a Pan-African trauma community. The return of traces of Beloved after her final disappearance suggests that her spirit reappears as a Middle Passage victim, her spectral touches and sounds “seem[ing] to come from a far-off place.”82 Henderson observes, “Beloved’s presence may well be read as the spiritual supplication of an ancestral past or a blend of two forms of spiritual expression—African and ‘Americanized’ African.”83 In addition, Henderson notes, “The blending of the geographical spaces of water and land—of Africa and America through sound—serves to link the experiences of the past and present communities in word and deed.”84 In Homegoing, it is ultimately traumatic memory that binds Effia’s and Esi’s twenty-first century descendants Marjorie and Marcus, both of whom are haunted by “terrifying” images—Marjorie by images of fire that capture the “raging” greed fueling the slave trade in Africa, and Marcus by impressions of the ocean’s “abyss”85 invoking the spectres of Middle Passage victims. When, subduing their fears, they walk to the edge of the ocean, “where the fire met the water,”86 Marjorie’s Ghanaian heritage and Marcus’s American legacy are implicitly joined. Like Morrison, Gyasi suggests that trauma survivors, by becoming “two, and three, and four,” by “collective sharing,” can move toward healing and empathic understanding. The Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has commented upon Morrison’s importance not only to black Americans but also to all Africans in the diaspora, stating, “I think there is so much about us as a people, a people scattered on many different continents, speaking many different languages, that can seem so broken, because there have been efforts to break us, efforts to destroy us. I see in [Morrison’s] work an effort to mend us and weave our stories together through memory or ‘rememory.’”87 Morrison’s enormous impact on young black women writers is nowhere more apparent than in Homegoing, in which Gyasi “weaves together” stories both of Africa and of America during and after the slave trade, and, like Morrison, affirms the value of a trauma community that unites Africans across cultural and geographical differences. Twenty-nine years after the publication of Beloved, Gyasi takes up Morrison’s goal of “confronting [slavery] and making it possible to remember,”88 defining her project in Homegoing as “trac[ing] the trail of trauma reinvented.”89 Conceiving the traumatic memory of the Middle Passage as a bridge that spans the

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experiences of black survivors throughout the diaspora, both Morrison and Gyasi memorialize the “disremembered” victims of slavery and point the way to communal healing. Like Denver, a story-inheritor who passes down the tale of her mother’s trauma and survival, Morrison sees herself as a griot retelling and reinventing the oral narratives that shaped her own childhood:90 “I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people.”91 Speaking for all young black women reading Beloved for the first time, Lydia Magras has declared, “[T]he text resonated with us in another, unspoken language: the call of a mother to her daughters, the call of the crossings of the diaspora. That we are still interpreting that call some thirty years later is a tribute to the multilayered universality of language, its longevity, and the ability of Beloved to withstand the test of time.”92 As literary “daughter,” Gyasi answers her foremother’s call to keep that voice alive with a multigenerational tale of slavery and its repercussions that spans three centuries, fulfilling Gyasi’s stated intention “to get to the present and insert the question of legacy into this narrative.”93 Morrison has remarked, “What was driving me to write [about slavery] was the silence—so many stories untold and unexamined.”94 Affirming the need to break this silence, Gyasi responds, “I really do believe that Toni Morrison quote about how if you’re looking at your bookshelf and you can’t see the book you want to read, you have to write it.”95 In Homegoing, as in Beloved, “passing on” traumatic memory through storytelling both strengthens communal bonds and enables survivors to gain narrative control over an “unspeakable” past.

Notes 1. Yaa Gyasi, “Slavery Scars a Transatlantic Family Tree in Homegoing,” interview by Jean Zimmerman, Fresh Air, NPR, January 8, 2017. https:// www.npr.org/2016/06/04/480480531/slavery-­scars-­a-­transatlantic-­ family-­tree-­in-­homegoing 2. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview with Ismail Muhammad, ZYZZYVA, July 21, 2016. http://www.zyzzyva.org/2016/07/21/if-­y oure-­g oing-­q a-­w ith-­ yaa-­gyasi/. 3. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview with Abigail Bereola, The Rumpus, July 29, 2016. http://therumpus.net/2016/07/the-­rumpus-­interview-­with-­yaa-­gyasi/

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4. Toni Morrison in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-­ Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 228. 5. Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 185-86. 6. Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 15. 7. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, 2. 8. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, 12. 9. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, 16-17. 10. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, 19. 11. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, 19. Eyerman emphasizes that both the collective memory of slavery and the black community’s responses to it are everchanging: “Slavery has meant different things for different generations of black Americans, but it was always there as a referent. It was not until the 1950s, even the 1960s, that slavery moved outside group memory to challenge the borders, the rituals, and even the sites of public memory. The phenomenon of erecting monuments has become popular for African Americans only recently…. Again, it was a social movement, the civil rights movement, that opened the sores and helped transform the cultural trauma of a group into a national trauma” (17). 12. Toni Morrison in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-­ Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 247. 13. Morrison in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 248. 14. Morrison in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 247. 15. Morrison in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 247. 16. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview with Ismail Muhammad,” ZYZZYVA, July 21, 2016. http://www.zyzzyva.org/2016/07/21/if-­y oure-­g oing-­q a-­w ith-­ yaa-­gyasi/. 17. Toni Morrison in Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C.  Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 130. 18. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 193. 19. Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 82. 20. Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative, 80. 21. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 192. 22. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 197. 23. Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4.

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24. John S.  Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann Press, 1992), 32. 25. Toni Morrison, Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-­ Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 226. 26. Toni Morrison, “Live from New York Public Library,” interview by Junot Diaz, December 12, 2013. 27. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview with Ismail Muhammad,” ZYZZYVA, July 21, 2016. http://www.zyzzyva.org/2016/07/21/if-­y oure-­g oing-­q a-­w ith-­ yaa-­gyasi/. 28. Toni Morrison in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-­ Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 226. 29. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview with Abigail Bereola,” The Rumpus, July 29, 2016. http://therumpus.net/2016/07/the-­rumpus-­interview-­with-­yaa-­gyasi/ 30. Susan Bowers, “Beloved and the New Apocalypse” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1999), 34. 31. Bowers, “Beloved and the New Apocalypse,” 34. 32. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 294-95. 33. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 177. 34. Gyasi, Homegoing, 187. 35. Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 38. 36. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 21. 37. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 74. 38. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview with Ismail Muhammad,” ZYZZYVA, July 21, 2016. http://www.zyzzyva.org/2016/07/21/if-­y oure-­g oing-­q a-­w ith-­ yaa-­gyasi/. 39. Toni Morrison in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-­ Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 235. 40. Lynda Koolish, “Fictive Strategies and Cinematic Representations in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Postcolonial Theory/Postcolonial Text,” in African American Review 29, no. 3 (1995): 233. 41. Caroline Rody, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, Rememory, and a ‘Clamor for a Kiss,’” in Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Criticism of the Works by the Nobel Prize-Winning Author, eds. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere (Albany, New York: Whitston Press, 2000), 99. 42. Anita Durkin, “Object Written, Written Object: Slavery, Scarring, and Complications of Authorship in Beloved,” African American Review 41, no. 3 (2007):546. 43. Francois Pitavy, “From Middle Passage to Holocaust: The Black Body as a Site of Memory,” in Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures,

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ed. Udo J. Hebel (Heidelburg: Universitätsverlag, 2001), 62. Pitavy reads Morrison’s description of Paul D’s tracing of Sethe’s scar as “a perhaps too visible metafictional device.” As Pitavy elaborates, “Paul D follows with his lips the design of the chokecherry tree on Sethe’s back, which she herself cannot read, but which has to be deciphered through the mediation of Paul D to make the past recoverable, usable. The whole book can then be construed as the deciphering of the text inscribed on Sethe’s body” (62). 44. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 74. The scar on Yaw’s face “reminded him of a map. He had wanted that map to lead him out of Edweso and in some ways it had” (227). Pitavy has also described the scars on captive bodies as maps: “The body represents memory, as a map represents the actual land. It is a biographical map of a sort, the guide for a narrative. This is particularly true in cultures with strong oral traditions, which often associate the telling of stories with bodily imagery and experience, and where bodily parts or marks can almost literally become landmarks of historical memory, be it personal or communal, the foundation of historical narratives” (54). 45. Gyasi, Homegoing, 239-42. 46. Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 38. 47. John Berger, “A War of Ghosts,” review of Writing History, Writing Trauma, by Dominick La Capra, Tikkun 14, no. 1 (2003): 172. 48. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 241. 49. Gyasi, Homegoing, 225. 50. Gyasi, Homegoing, 226. 51. Sally Keenan, “Four Hundred Years of Silence: Myth, History, and Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism, ed. Jonathan White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 75. 52. Like Yaw, Denver is both a story-inheritor and a victim of trauma herself. In Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber points out, “Even though she was born into freedom and a loving family, trauma pervades Denver’s being: her traumatic birth during Sethe’s escape; the traumatic return of Schoolteacher and her sister’s murder; her time in jail with her mother; the abandonment by her brothers; and the death of Baby Suggs [….] Denver gains her positive sense of self from the stories her mother tells her about her birth” (48). 53. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 74. 54. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 189. 55. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (Knopf, 2016), 189.

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56. Gyasi, Homegoing, 190. 57. Gyasi, Homegoing, 226. 58. Gyasi, Homegoing, 240. 59. Gyasi, Homegoing, 60. 60. Caroline Rody, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, Rememory, and a ‘Clamor for a Kiss,’” in Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Criticism of the Works by the Nobel Prize-Winning Author, eds. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere (Albany, New York: Whitston Press, 2000), 95. 61. Linda Krumholz, “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” African American Review 26, no. 3 (1992), 406. 62. Toni Morrison, in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-­ Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 245. 63. Carol E. Henderson, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 89. 64. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 324-25. 65. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 268. 66. Carol E. Henderson, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 94. 67. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 324. 68. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 227. 69. Gyasi, Homegoing, 267. 70. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 324. 71. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 274. 72. Toni Morrison, “Living Memory: Meeting Toni Morrison,” interview by Paul Gilroy in Small Acts (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 180. 73. Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 108. 74. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 324. 75. Yass Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 284. 76. Gyasi, Homegoing, 299. 77. Jean Wyatt, “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Criticism of the Works by the Nobel Prize-Winning Author, eds. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere (Albany, New York: Whitston Press, 2000), 249. 78. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 198.

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79. Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 109. 80. Carl Pederson, “Sea Change: The Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Imagination,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, eds. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2001), 43. 81. Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16. 82. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 323. 83. Carol E. Henderson, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 92. 84. Henderson, Scarring, 93. 85. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Knopf, 2016), 300. 86. Gyasi, Homegoing, 300. 87. Edwidge Danticat in Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 206. 88. Toni Morrison, in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-­ Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 248. 89. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview,” interview by Kate Kellaway, The Guardian, January 8, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/08/yaa-­ gyasi-­slavery-­is-­on-­peoples-­minds-­it-­affects-­us-­still-­interview-­homegoing-­ observer-­new-­review. 90. In “Ghosts in the House: How Toni Morrison Fostered a Generation of Black Writers” (The New  Yorker, vol. 79, no. 32, 2003), Hilton Als has described the importance of the oral tradition within Morrison’s family: “The Woffords told their children stories and sang songs [….] No matter how many times Ramah [Morrison’s mother] told the ghost stories she had learned from her mother and her Auntie Bell in Alabama, Chloe [Morrison] always wanted to hear more. She used to say, ‘Mama, please tell me the story about this or that,’ her mother recalled in a 1982 interview with the Lorain Journal. Finally I’d get tired telling the same stories over and over again. So I made up a new story.’ Ramah’s stories sparked Morrison’s imagination. She fell in love with spoken language” (67). 91. Toni Morrison qtd in Lydia Magras, “Popular Reception of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Reading the Text through Time,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 7 (2015), 36. 92. Lydia Magras, “Popular Reception of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Reading the Text through Time,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 7 (2015), 36.

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93. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview with Ismail Muhammad,” ZYZZYVA, July 21, 2016. http://www.zyzzyva.org/2016/07/21/if-­y oure-­g oing-­q a-­w ith-­ yaa-­gyasi/. 94. Hilton Als, “Ghosts in the House: How Toni Morrison Fostered a Generation of Black Writers, The New Yorker 79, no. 32, 2003), 70. 95. Yaa Gyasi, “Interview,” with Abigail Bereola, The Rumpus, July 29, 2016. http://therumpus.net/2016/07/the-­rumpus-­interview-­with-­yaa-­gyasi/

Works Cited Als, Hilton. “Ghosts in the House: How Toni Morrison Fostered a Generation of Black Writers.” The New Yorker 79, no. 32 (2003): 64-75. Berger, James. “A War of Ghosts.” Review of Writing History, Writing Trauma, by Dominick La Capra. Tikkun 14, no. 1 (2003): 72-76. Bowers, Susan. “Beloved and the New Apocalypse.” In Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Modern Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom, 27-44. New York: Chelsea House, 1999. Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 3-12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Denard, Carolyn C., ed. Toni Morrison: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Durkin, Anita. “Object Written, Written Object: Slavery, Scarring, and Complications of Authorship in Beloved. African American Review 41, no. 3 (2007): 541-556. Durrant, Sam. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M.  Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison. Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2004. Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 183-99. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1995. Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993a. Gilroy, Paul. “Living Memory: Meeting Toni Morrison.” In Small Acts, 175-82. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993b. Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing. New York: Knopf Publishing, 2016a. Gyasi, Yaa. Interview by Kate Kellaway. Guardian, January 8, 2017a. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/08/yaa-­gyasi-­slavery-­is-­on-­peoples-­ minds-­it-­affects-­us-­still-­interview-­homegoing-­observer-­new-­review.

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Gyasi, Yaa. Interview by Abigail Bereola. Rumpus, July 29, 2016b. http://therumpus.net/2016/07/the-­rumpus-­interview-­with-­yaa-­gyasi/. Gyasi, Yaa. Interview by Ismail Muhammad. ZYZZYVA, July 21, 2016c. http:// www.zyzzyva.org/2016/07/21/if-­youre-­going-­qa-­with-­yaa-­gyasi/. Gyasi, Yaa. “Slavery Scars a Transatlantic Family Tree in Homegoing.” Interview by Jean Zimmerman. NPR, January 8, 2017b. https://www.npr. org/2016/06/04/480480531/slavery-­s cars-­a -­t ransatlantic-­f amily-­t ree-­ in-­homegoing. Henderson, Carol E. Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Herman, Judith Lewis. Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Keenan, Sally. “‘Four Hundred Years of Silence’: Myth, History, and Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism, edited by Jonathan White, 45-81. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Koolish, Lynda. “Fictive Strategies and Cinematic Representations in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Postcolonial Theory/Postcolonial Text.” African American Review 29, no. 3 (1995): 421-38. Krumholz, Linda. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review 26, no. 3 (1992): 395-408. Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 61-75. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Magras, Lydia. “Popular Reception of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Reading the Text through Time.” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 7 (2015): 29-44. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann Press, 1992. Montgomery, Maxine Lavon, ed. Conversations with Edwidge Danticat. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 1987. Morrison, Toni. “Live from New York Public Library.” Interview by Junot Diaz, December 12, 2013. Pedersen, Carl. “Sea Change: The Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Imagination.” In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, 42-51. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Pitavy, François. “From Middle Passage to Holocaust: The Black Body as a Site of Memory.” In Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures, edited by Udo J. Hebel, 51-64. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2001. Rody, Caroline. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, ‘Rememory,’ and a ‘Clamor for a Kiss.’” In Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected

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Criticism of the Works by the Nobel Prize-Winning Author, edited by Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere, 83-112. Albany: Whitston, 2000. Schreiber, Evelyn Jaffe. Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Wyatt, Jean. “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Criticism of the Works by the Nobel Prize-Winning Author, edited by Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere, 231 -257. Albany: Whitston, 2000.

CHAPTER 8

‘Ageing and Care in Contemporary Women’s Writing: Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby’ Katsura Sako

In Margaret Drabble’s 2013 novel, The Pure Gold Baby, Jess, the protagonist, describes the various care relationships and spaces in Britain: All over Britain, there are little communities and care homes, some open, some heavily gated, where the able and the fairly able look after the less able, with varying degrees of compassion and success. Some hope to cure; some

Part of an earlier version of this chapter was published in Japanese as “Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983): Ageing and Care” in Niju seiki “eikoku” shosetsu no tenkai, ed. Kazuhisa Takahashi and Ai Tanji (Tokyo: Shohaku-sha, 2020), 391-413.

K. Sako (*) Keio University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_8

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are content to manage. Some of these care homes have ageing populations, as some of the needy live longer, and their carers age too. This is a worry, as our demographic curve changes. There are new needy being born every day, as we strive to keep alive premature babies that are not really viable, but Jess says we haven’t even begun to worry about that yet.1

This is a picture that is likely to resonate in many societies, where care has become a pressing issue, particularly in connection with an ageing population.2 In these societies, anxieties and debates about care often centre around its cost and provision, making care a primarily economic and social matter. This has contributed to the rise of a view of older population, or more broadly, ‘the needy,’ who are more vulnerable and dependent on support than others, as a burden on ‘the able’ and society at large. Scholars suggest that the 2008 Lehman shock has intensified this sentiment in neoliberal societies, where the prevailing sense of insecurity manifested as the ‘demonisation’ of those marked by vulnerability and dependency.3 As a result, ‘the needy’ and ‘the able’ are increasingly seen in dichotomy rather than in relation. Care, therefore, is not only a socio-­ economic matter; it also concerns ethical questions about vulnerability, dependency and relationality. Eva Feder Kittay, Bruce Jennings and Angela A. Wasunna emphasise reciprocity in ethical care: ‘the ethics of caregiving pertain to carer and care recipient alike, and caring brings into being (or rests on) a relationship that has crucial cultural and ethical meanings.’4 Ageing and care are also gendered issues. As Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag suggested in the early 1970s—echoed by many critics since—ageing makes more and negative impacts on women’s lives than men’s.5 Care also affects women’s lives in significant ways, since it is predominantly women who provide care, both formal and informal.6 As Martha Holstein points out, caring is not a ‘choice’ for most women but ‘[E]ssentialized and billed as “natural.”’7 Women are also more likely to receive care, as they live longer. Therefore, ageing and care are both issues of profound concern for women. In this chapter, I consider some responses to care and ageing in contemporary women’s writing, through the specific examples of Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble, two ‘grandes dames’ of British women’s literature from the second half of the twentieth century to the twentyfirst.8 They are also writers who have contributed to bringing issues of age into contemporary women’s writing.9 Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins point out that in addition to the increasing concern about population

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ageing in society, a ‘generational shift’ has contributed to the rising visibility of ageing in contemporary women’s writing in Britain.10 Authors writing about ageing after the millennium mostly started to publish in the post-war period or in the sixties and seventies. Lessing and Drabble are representative of these authors.11 The two texts I examine—Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby (2013)—are both concerned with women’s ageing and care. Lessing’s novel is known for the fact that she sent its manuscript to publishers using the pseudonym of Jane Somers. In her preface to the book, Lessing reveals that one publisher regarded it as ‘too depressing to publish.’12 This suggests how Lessing was ‘ahead of the game’ in a cultural climate that was unwilling to address ageing.13 Set and published in the early 1980s, when the welfare state was dismantled under the Thatcher government, the novel takes the form of a diary written by Janna, a 49-year-old successful editor of a women’s fashion magazine, and depicts her friendship and care relationship with the over 90-year-old Maudie, a working-class, impoverished woman. In The Pure Gold Baby, Eleanor recounts a story of her neighbourhood friend, Jess and her daughter Anna, who has developmental problems, and their neighbourhood community, from the post-war period through to the present in the twenty-first century. The novel depicts care in the context of motherhood but explores its broad meaning in wider and increasingly individualistic society. Drawing on ageing studies and feminist critical work on care and time, I analyse the different ways in which these two texts explore the temporal ideologies that dictate the relation between the young and the old, and ‘the needy’ and ‘the able.’ Both novels critique the linear progressive model of time that marginalises women’s care, and those older and less able. Drabble’s text, however, questions this model in a more fundamental way.

Ageing, Care and Time Elizabeth Grosz states that ‘time is not merely the attribute of a subject, imposed by us on the world: it is a condition of what is living, of matter, of the real, of the universe itself.’14 As Grosz and other feminist and queer theorists have suggested in recent decades, clock time, or a linear and measured model of time, dictates human lives, identities and relations in pervasive ways. This is the case with our understandings and experiences of ageing and care. Jan Baars explains that clock time, or ‘chronometric

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time’ in his preferred term, has long facilitated and structured the human world in numerous ways, ‘provid[ing] a complete continuous and linear ordering that can be represented either numerically or as a straight line.’15 Baars suggests that while this temporal order helps to objectify ageing based upon measurements such as chronological age, it does not adequately represent the complexity, multiplicity and organicity of the experience of ageing (72-79); nor does it fully respond to ‘lived’ time (79-80). Unable to capture singular and multifaceted ‘lived’ times of individuals, clock time therefore produces limited visions of ageing. One such narrative of ageing, and a pervasive one in contemporary societies is, as Margaret Morganroth Gullette suggests, the ‘decline narrative,’ a monolithic narrative that equates ageing with loss.16 The decline narrative encapsulates the negativity that surrounds ageing, and this negativity, as Kathleen Woodward suggests, is rooted in youth-oriented culture in the West: ‘youth is the valued term, the point of reference for defining who is old… . Young and old may frame the continuum of the life course. But as people grow older, most of them—of us—take youth with them … Concomitantly, age—meaning ‘old age’—is pushed ahead.’17 As feminist scholarship points out, clock time also operates in ways that exclude women’s work in the private space. Linda Adkins explains that ‘industrial labour was paradigmatically measured in terms of clock time’ and therefore it was ‘the key and hegemonic unit of measure’ in industrial capitalism.18 Socially reproductive labour by women was not organised by clock time, and thus was seen as being ‘beyond measure.’19 Clock time continues to dominate in the contemporary world; as Barbara Adam states, the ‘hegemonic patriarchal time’ of globalisation leaves ‘invisible’ much of women’s work, which often eludes the measurement of clock time.20 Care is a typical example of such work. Julia Twigg explains, in relation to professional care provided in private homes, that care service is organised around the time of economic production that is ‘measured, cut up, allocated and costed.’ However, care often deals with the body and ‘[B]ody time is rooted in organic processes; it is fluid, experiential. Its timings cannot always be predicted; nor can it be accumulated in ways that the time of economic production can.’21 The economic logic of clock time is at odds with the lived and bodily time, and as a result, it marginalises care that attends to this time. To shift the temporal relations in fundamental ways and effect change, feminist politics needs to undertake a ‘reworking of time itself’.22 More specifically, to create new narratives of ageing and care, we must challenge

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the ideal of progress that inheres in clock time. If decline is one dominant meaning persistently attached to ageing, progress is another, and even more pervasive, valued term in the contemporary life narrative. As Gullette observes, ‘Progress is latent in all developmental metaphors of psychological, physical, and moral “growth.”’23 The notion of progress is bound up with the future, and especially, the discriminatory imagining of the future, as Mary Russo explains: While the critique of Progress is more often the rule than the exception in contemporary cultural theory, progressivism still dominates the commonsensical notions of a life course, generational difference, and social change. Hope, desire, understanding, and optimism seem ineluctably joined against the forces of the past, the backward, the unenlightened, the old. The trajectory of a lifetime, for instance, is ideologically weighted in favour of a future goal, a going forward into empty time.24

The ideal of progress works in a way that excludes not only those older but more generally, those who represent ‘a shrinking horizon of future potentiality.’25 Margrit Shildrick suggests that this sensitivity has gained force in post-Lehman neoliberal societies, where ‘living on is merged with getting better.’26 In her queer critique of contemporary investment in the future as ‘a promise of happiness,’ Sara Ahmed also suggests that futurism ‘requires negativity to be located in those who cannot inherit this future’ and leans towards ‘the individualism that posits the unhappiness of one against the happiness of many.’27 Aspirational futurity therefore functions to divide rather than connect people; it does not help ethical care relationships to develop. The Diary of a Good Neighbour and The Pure Gold Baby both critique hegemonic clock time. They share a narrative form in which one woman tells a story of another woman. However, their narrativisations of ageing and care contain different expressions and ideas of time. Closely depicting women’s care and their ageing bodies, The Diary of a Good Neighbour brings into focus a time that clock time marginalises and has received critical acclaim for its representation of women’s connections.28 The most significant of these, and the focus of my analysis, is the intergenerational relationship between Janna and Maudie. For Cynthia Port, this relationship suggests the possibility of reciprocity between the old and the young and questions the ‘economies of ageing’ in which the old signifies less value than the young.29 I suggest, however, that Janna’s story-telling at

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multiple levels undermines the reciprocity depicted within her narrative and reasserts the economic logic of clock time. The Pure Gold Baby poses a more radical challenge to clock time; in many ways it interrogates and rejects the ideal of progress to imagine a future differently. Care in the novel emerges as an ethical response to temporal others, or, in the words of Lisa Baraitser in Enduring Time, as ‘the temporal practice of staying alongside others and ideas when care has failed.’30 The self-reflective and retrospective narrative in The Pure Gold Baby also resists the linearity of clock time, presenting ageing as a process that is open to possibilities of change but does not promise resolution.

The Diary of a Good Neighbour The Diary of a Good Neighbour draws a cultural and social climate that sees little value in older people, a climate evoked in Lessing’s account of the publication history of the novel. The electrician who visits Maudie’s flat asks, ‘”Why isn’t she in a Home?” … ‘What’s the good of people that old?” (23). Immersed in the youth-oriented and consumerist fashion world, Janna also wonders: ‘What is the use of Maudie Fowler? By the yardsticks and measurements I’ve been taught, none’ (24; emphasis in original). Not surprisingly, care is in short supply or is inadequate in the novel: older women refer to all social services by the abstract and general term, ‘The Welfare’ (86); Maudie and other older women have families but they refuse to or are unable to care for them. There are instead ‘Good Neighbours,’ volunteers who are paid to visit older people in the neighbourhood. In the form of Janna’s diary, the novel depicts Janna’s changing attitude towards ageing through her relationship with Maudie. Significantly, central to this shift is Janna’s acceptance of the ageing body. For women, ageing normally represents, among others, a loss of their sexual value.31 Moreover, the woman’s ageing body, seen in proximity to death, is often made the object of fear and disgust and, as such, Woodward suggests, it is both ‘invisible’ and ‘hypervisib[le]’ (66). Helen Paloge also observes that what she calls the ‘female Bildungsroman of second adulthood’ often evades the ageing body in favour of presenting a facile optimistic narrative.32 This is not the case with Lessing’s novel. Early in the novel, Janna proclaims, ‘I hate physical awfulness,’ reflecting upon her failure to confront the hard reality of death when her mother and her husband were dying (5). In contrast to the ageing body that signifies decay, Janna’s body

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is presented as a text onto which she performs the identity she desires. She spends an immense amount of time and money grooming herself in the bath and taking care of the tailored clothes for her expensive dressing style. For her, older women are both invisible and hypervisible (Woodward 66), as seen in the shock she expresses during her first encounter with Maudie: ‘suddenly, I looked up and down the streets and saw—old women. Old men too, but mostly old women… . I had not seen them. That was because I was afraid of being like them’ (11). It is through care for Maudie, who becomes increasingly frail and ill due to cancer, that Janna overcomes her fear of the ageing body. When Janna first washes her, Maudie’s naked and fragile body is depicted with graphic realism: ‘A fragile rib cage under creased yellow skin, her shoulder bones like a skeleton’s, and at the end of thin stick arms, strong working hands. Long thin breasts hanging down’ (51). Janna, however, recognises ‘the vitality beating there: life. How strong it is, life’ (52); she also writes Maudie’s day from her perspective, imagining her desperate efforts to manage her meals and toileting in order not to soil her underwear. Janna reflects how ‘the drudge and drag of maintenance’ exhausts Maudie but also realises that the bodily demand is absent from her own diary only because she is “young,’ only forty-nine’ (131; emphasis in original). Yet, Janna also experiences her own vulnerability when lumbago keeps her bed-ridden for a few weeks. These experiences help Janna to see beyond the ageing body and move closer to the ageing subjectivity. Caring for Maudie also brings Janna into contact with other older women and with women in social and health care. This allows Lessing to closely depict the tension between the time of care and the economic logic of clock time, a tension suggested by Twigg earlier. Janna imagines a Home Help called Bridget and writes her work day, in which she struggles to deliver necessary care within her working hours and ends up working overtime, unpaid, looking after her ill client’s children at her own home. Through Bridget, Janna questions, ‘How can one work to rule in this job?’ (199). Visiting Maudie at hospital, Janna also observes that it is the non-white ward maids who hold everything in place—although no one notices. Even at her work, women keep things together, Janna observes, but ‘The formal structure of the office did not correspond at all with what was happening’ (77; emphasis in original). Based on these observations, Janna publishes a sociological book whose title—Real and Apparent Structures— resonates with the novel’s primary concern with the invisible.

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Significantly, Janna’s change in attitude towards ageing is represented through her changing hours of work. As she becomes increasingly involved in care for Maudie and a few other older women, she gives up chief-­ editorship and opts for an advisory role, switching from full-time to parttime; she takes time off work for what is almost the first time in her working life. Janna spends her time off writing her fictional and sociological work, wandering London’s streets and listening to older women’s conversations. Janna now spends far less time grooming and styling herself, activities that have been crucial not only for her self-presentation but for her career in the fashion industry; she accounts for this change in her diary: ‘I haven’t time, that’s what’ (205). These changing uses of her time illustrate her movement away from the world of economic production to the world of relationships and care with women. Story-telling is significant in this movement. In Janna’s narrative, it works as an effective means for achieving an understanding and a relationship between the old and the young. Listening to Maudie and other older women telling their life stories, Janna realises that they are not a homogeneous other but that each of them have personal histories. As explained earlier, writing about and from Maudie’s perspective also helps to bring Janna closer to ageing subjectivity. In other words, story-telling helps to connect women beyond the boundaries of kinship, age and class. For Maricel Oró-Piqueras, this suggests that ageing narratives such as The Diary of a Good Neighbour can have a social impact, offering ‘the link between the inner part of the protagonists, young and old, and society, that is, the readership.’33 Nonetheless, Janna’s story-telling in various ways reasserts the logic of clock time. The diary form of the novel, which contains Janna’s first-­ person narrative, is particularly significant, because it inevitably introduces the young/self and the old/other relation in the text; her younger perspective dominates in the diary, while the representation of Maudie’s voice and perspective is extremely limited. As Wallace points out, ‘the text speaks for old people rather than giving them a voice directly.’34 The diary form also emphasises the meaning of growth for her experience. Janna’s diary entries are not written regularly, nor are they strictly dated, and she also acknowledges the diary as a partial record of experience, ‘a recap’ (29). Nonetheless, the diary largely presents a chronologically linear narrative that tracks Janna’s gained experience and knowledge. This is clear in the first pages of her diary, where she reflects on her past, repeating phrases such as ‘I know now’ and ‘I see that now’ (3). Waxman’s treatment of this

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text as the ‘novel of ripening’ for Janna seems to confirm that her narrative of change is dominant in the novel.35 The dominance of Janna’s progress narrative becomes clear in its contrast to the gradual decline of Maudie in the novel. Noting this contrast, Oró-Piqueras argues that the diary plays a positive role in presenting ‘the ostracized experiences of dying and ageing’ as ‘normal, ordinary ones,’ de-stigmatising them.36 What is implied here, however, is that Maudie’s value lies in what she offers to Janna and the novel’s (younger) readership, in this case, a lesson about dying and ageing. Janna’s diary recounts some happy moments that Maudie has with Janna, such as when Janna takes her to a tea shop or for a drive. However, Maudie’s present and inner life is largely left unexplored in Janna’s diary, and she is represented, to a large extent, through her body as she is cared for by Janna. Ironically, it is Maudie’s dying that most effectively unsettles and resists Janna’s linear time, insisting on her singular lived time. For Janna, who devotedly attends to Maudie in hospital, it is a prolonged, uncertain time of waiting that is void of meaning, a time which Grosz describes as the ‘the untimely,’ that is, ‘events that disrupt our immersion in and provoke our conceptualization of temporal continuity.’37 Yet, the disruption that Maudie’s dying causes is eventually contained in Janna’s narrative of growth as Janna sees it through until her death. Janna’s story-telling also raises the issue of ownership of a life that is not one’s own. In the novel, Janna uses Maudie’s stories and turns her life into a very successful romantic novel. Port suggests that this publication, for which Maudie offers material and from which Janna receives profit, is one example of the reciprocity between the two women.38 As I suggested, however, this also means that Maudie’s value lies in her usefulness for the young, in this instance, her value for economic production. Moreover, Janna’s choice of the romance genre for ‘reconstructing’ Maudie’s ‘relentless life’ (252) for publication signals a possible appropriation of Maudie’s life and its commodification for mass consumption. This highlights the ethically questionable nature of Janna’s story-telling. Furthermore, Janna’s publication of her novel emphasises the irony at the heart of The Diary of a Good Neighbour: her story-telling is enabled by and benefits from the economic logic of clock time. If Janna’s writing is an act that seeks to reclaim women’s time, it is the economic logic of clock time that enables her writing and brings the invisible time to the public domain. It is, after all, Janna’s success as a fashion magazine editor and the financial security that it brings that allow her to invest time in unpaid care

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for Maudie and in writing. Susan Watkins thus observes: ‘Janna’s conservative, image-conscious, consumerist values pervade the novel even though she has to reassess them once she meets Maudie.’39 Even writing her diary seems to become a project in which Janna invests time, ‘Diary Time’ as she calls it, just as she has invested time in bathing and grooming herself (208). Lessing summarises the irony of Janna’s story as she closes the novel.40 Janna attends Maudie’s funeral dressed in elegant fashion as a gesture of love and respect for her friend. For Maudie’s nephew, this only indicates Janna’s socio-economic status and he believes Maudie has been a charitable ‘little job’ for her (261). Seeing him and his family showing little appreciation of the care they previously received from Maudie, Janna is left angry ‘[l]ike Maudie’ (261). Jill, her niece, expresses her care, taking and commenting on her ‘lovely hat,’ her ‘lovely gloves’ and her ‘lovely shoes,’ and then suggests a nice cup of tea for them (261). There is a sign here of the three-generational relationship between Maudie, Janna and Jill, a relationship which challenges the narrative of generational conflict that is dominant in feminism.41 Nonetheless, Jill’s comment on Janna’s fashion evokes the commodity value it represents, a value that can override other values, just as it obscures well-dressed Janna’s intension in the eyes of Maudie’s nephew. Jill’s remark, which closes the novel, ‘Provided you know who you are being angry with,’ seems to recall the prevailing power of the capitalist order and Janna’s entanglement with it, even if she is willing to enter the world of care (262; emphasis in original). Janna’s experience as an unpaid ‘good neighbour’ allows her to learn the value of age and suggests the possibility of women’s care and relationships that cross age, class and kinship, a possibility that challenges Thatcher’s (in)famous words: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’42 At the same time, however, Janna’s story-telling at multiple levels emphasises the dominance of clock time, a measurement that privileges youth and capital production. Therefore, the novel problematises but does not deconstruct the hegemonic model of time.

Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby Once named ‘the novelist of maternity’ by Elaine Showalter,43 Margaret Drabble has depicted motherhood in many of her works and explored an ethics of care in that context. Reading Drabble’s earlier novels, Clare

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Hanson argues that overcoming the oppositions of motherhood and work, the private and public, Drabble’s fiction demonstrates what she terms ‘an ethics of labour’: In this space [private sphere], her heroines develop an ‘ethics of labour’ founded on an understanding and experience of mutual and shifting relationships of dependency. In the (usually male) spheres of work and action, by contrast, it is assumed that human beings are free and equal, unconstrained by obligations to children, the sick, the dispossessed. Drabble’s fiction works away at this contrast/contradiction, exploring the ways in which an ethics of labour might be brought into the public and political world.44

Here, Hanson extensively draws upon Hannah Arendt’s categorisation of human activities into labour, work and action. ‘Labour,’ Hanson explains, is ‘the activity necessitated by the biological processes of the human body, the life of which must be renewed, sustained and nurtured’ (98) and thus it is analogous to care as is understood in this chapter. In The Pure Gold Baby, Drabble continues to explore motherhood and an ethics of care. The novel’s opening scene anticipates the centrality of maternity and care in Jess’s life, describing ‘the proleptic tenderness’ (1) that she experiences as an anthropology postgraduate student on a field trip in Africa, encountering ‘lobster-children’— indigenous children with deformed toes. Jess’s life unfolds to confirm this prolepsis: she becomes pregnant as a result of her affair with a professor and gives birth to Anna, who, it turns out, has developmental problems. While Jess works as a freelance writer of anthropological articles, caring for Anna continues to be a significant part of her life. The novel’s exploration of care, however, contains more explicit social critique than Drabble’s earlier novels, something that reflects the post-millennial standpoint from which she writes. In the novel, Eleanor recalls seeing an adult man in Oxford Street holding a placard with the message ‘MUM IS DEAD’ (122; emphasis in original). This man reminds Eleanor of the beggar that Wordsworth saw on his visit to the capital, who represented to him a ruined industrialised society. Similarly, this motherless figure in one of the most commercial places in London stands as a critique of the absence of care in a society invested in aspirational and exclusionary futurity. The critique of futurity in the novel is connected to a broader interest in history as collective time. Described as a ‘record’ by Eleanor herself, her narrative is largely chronological, if not precisely dated, peppered with

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historical and cultural references and her reflective thoughts on recalled events (291). Telling a story of Jess’s life, Eleanor’s narrative also charts the history of one London neighbourhood, including a group of women and their families who live there. Eleanor’s frequent use of ‘we’ emphasises the shared historical experience of the women of her generation, as they move in time from being daughters to wives and mothers, and from younger to older women.45 Furthermore, Jess’s specialisation in anthropological history introduces into the text tales of British missionaries and explorers in Africa, making the subject of human civilisation prominent in the novel. These collective and retrospective dimensions of the novel make its exploration of time and the ideal of progress particularly effective. One significant way in which the novel interrogates the progress narrative is through the idea of the child as a developmental subject. As a symbol of hope, the figure of the child is pivotal in contemporary futurity. The child is ‘the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value,’ states Lee Edelman in his critique of what he calls ‘reproductive futurism’ in western culture.46 Gullette similarly notes, in relation to the US in the twentieth century, that ‘“growth” and “progress” became America’s semiofficial life narrative for children.’47 The Pure Gold Baby interrogates the discourse of progress attached to the child, as Eleanor’s narrative weaves into it stories of children and their growth in the neighbourhood community. The most prominent of these is, of course, the story of Anna, the “pure gold baby’ of the novel (6).48 Through Jess’s maternal and anthropological interests, the text outlines changing policies for—and understandings of—children with disabilities, and, mentions various psychiatric theories and practitioners, suggesting the uncertainty of what constitutes normality. The most significant intertext is, however, William Wordsworth’s The Idiot Boy, a text that Drabble admires and often alludes to in her fiction.49 As Eleanor reflects, associating Anna with the Idiot Boy, Anna is a child who signifies ‘[A]n innocence’ and ‘[A] possibility of another way of being human’ (44). Anna is indeed presented as a Wordsworthian, innately happy child who is also empathic and caring. Eleanor observes that Anna ‘loved to help. This was her nature, her innate nature’ (75). Such a portrayal of Anna undoubtedly risks romanticising disability, but Drabble is also careful to depict her life in social relations in the neighbourhood, school and social services groups. Representing life with disability as a socially contextualised experience in this way, the novel rejects a narrow view of disability as an individual trait that inherently means dependency and vulnerability.

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At the same time, the novel suggests that vulnerability is not only social, but also ontological. The stories of Anna and other children in the novel signal the contingency of life that betrays the expectation of linear temporality, a force to which all are vulnerable. This is suggested, for instance, in the absence of formal diagnoses and obvious causes for Anna’s problems. Other children in Eleanor’s middle-class neighbourhood have also turned out in unexpected ways as they grow up, including: Ollie, ‘a success story of our time,’ who has transformed from ‘the bad boy, for whom we feared the worst’ to an owner of a successful organic food business (165); and Josh, ‘[T]he choir-boy turned crook, the toxic luminous lamb, the public-­ school swindler’, who has grown from a strikingly beautiful and innocent-­ looking child into an imprisoned criminal (Ibid.). These signs of the random nature of life in the novel unsettle the myth of progress attached to the child. More importantly, with this emphasis on the unpredictable force of life, the novel insists that the future one plans and wishes for is not promised to anyone. The novel not only questions progressive temporality but also explores life outside it through Anna and Jess’s life together. Their life is depicted as out of time but in a way that resonates with Russo’s re-formulation of the concept of ‘anachronism.’ She explains: ‘anachronism is a mistake in a normative systemization of time. As such, one risks anachronism. In my view, anachronism is a risk which is both necessary and inevitable as a sign of life.’50 Described as ‘[T]he child that never grew,’ Anna signifies the risk of anachronism (68). Eleanor observes: ‘There was no story to her life, no plot. The concept of progress did not apply to Anna’ (147). Nonetheless, as we have seen before, Drabble presents Anna as a happy and exceptionally empathic child, and she lives not in isolation but in communities of people. Long-term care for Anna also turns Jess’s life course into one of anachronism. For instance, Gullette argues for the need to conceptualise ‘postmaternity,’ in order to challenge the gendered decline ideology of age that finds little meaning in a woman’s life after youth and reproduction.51 However, Jess’s care responsibility makes it difficult to define her midlife period in terms of postmaternity. For her, as Eleanor asserts, ‘maternity has no prospect of an ending’ (12). In one episode, for example, Jess, while ill in bed, still needs to feed Anna, who is, chronologically, an adult. Anna and Jess therefore both live a non-normative life course, and for them, Eleanor states, ‘the concept of progress was in perpetual abeyance’ (130). Yet, in the novel, the mother and daughter have many intimate and happy moments, such as one sunny summer day spent at an

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outdoor swimming pool. These moments insist that the risk of anachronism is also, as Russo suggests, ‘a condition of possibility’52; that different times can be, and are, lived. The exploration of care in the novel extends its scope beyond the mother-child context through Jess’s relationship with Steve, a mentally troubled poet. Steve is a character who incarnates the symbolic figure of the motherless man in the text (he is estranged from his well-off yet uncaring family, and he is emotionally and financially vulnerable). Steve’s recitation of ‘The Idiot Boy’ to Anna, and her enjoyment of it, connects the two as children who never grow; but, unlike Anna, he is ‘a motherless lost boy’ with ‘no natural happiness accessible to him’ (97). The location of Steve’s suicide attempt in the Wendy House in the communal Secret Garden, with its rich references to the canonical texts of children’s literature, emphasises his anachronistic being and his resultant vulnerability. Eleanor recalls that she and many others in the community choose to keep ‘our energy for our own lives,’ making Steve ‘our scapegoat, our loser, our sacrifice to ambition’ (105). Jess, however, is ‘curiously vulnerable to the claims of others,’ and although not entirely willingly, she takes on the ‘unrewarding and probably hopeless task’ of caring for Steve in her home and finds a therapeutic community for him (89). Much later in the narrative, Steve is seen in the company of Jess and others: ‘he is still alive, he gets from day to day’ (196). Unable or unwilling to thrive, Steve lives ‘unbecoming time’ that does not move or flow like modernity’s linear, progressive time.53 Jess’s care for Steve, then, represents an ethical response to others who need support, even when there seems no future as ‘a promise of happiness’ for them.54 Drabble’s narrativisation of ageing also rejects the linear model of progress. Unlike Janna’s diary, which adheres to clock time, Eleanor’s self-­ reflective and retrospective narrative accommodates uncertainty and indeterminacy. Eleanor is more aware of her own meaning-making, as evident when she admits to the ethical ambiguity of her writing about Jess’s life, suggesting: ‘I’ve speculated, here and there, … there will be things I have got wrong’ (290). However, Eleanor’s subjective and retrospective perspective offers a representation of ageing that attends to lived time, a time which eludes clock time. Eleanor reflects: As we grow older, our tenses and our sense of chronology blur…. The trick of proleptic memory, towards the end of life, confuses us…. we live in a confused timeframe, where all seems fore-ordained and fore-suffered, and yet all is unfinished and unknown. Foresight and hindsight are one. (63)

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This passage echoes with Baars’ suggestion that ageing should be understood in terms of what it means to ‘live in time and to live time.’55 In Eleanor’s narrative, ageing emerges as a process in which the past and the present, memory and anticipation merge to create and re-create meanings; a process that is open to possibilities of change but does not promise meaning. Eleanor also contemplates the corporeality of ageing, and her narrative is full of reflections upon various and often difficult aspects of ageing: physical changes and ailing bodies, a feeling of being redundant at work, and approaching death. While in Lessing’s novel the ageing body is mostly explored through Maudie and is depicted from Janna’s younger perspective, Eleanor’s reflections represent the perspective of an older woman herself and, moreover, they are not accompanied by fear or panic. For her, old age is no longer ‘other,’ as is suggested by her different responses to sculptures that depict old age at earlier and later points in her life. Eleanor reflects on her encounter with Rodin’s The Helmet-Maker’s Once Beautiful Wife at the age of seventeen: ‘I was unprepared for the shock of the woman’s naked body… . Her image wounds, insults, reduces. I stood, transfixed, appalled and undefended’ (141). Revisiting the museum as an older woman, Eleanor finds that Rodin’s sculpture is on loan (an incident that reiterates the text’s refusal to deliver narrative fulfilment), but she finds the work entitled ‘Maturity’ by Camille Claudel, Rodin’s mistress and student. Facing ‘the ageing man … naked, grim, doomed and tragic … torn from Youth’s imploring grasp and impelled ever and forcefully onwards into the swirling, grasping, enfolding bronze arms of age,’ Eleanor experiences a calm identification with the image: ‘It had been waiting for me’ (248). This encounter subverts what Woodward describes as ‘the mirror stage of old age,’ a theorisation of identity in later life that reverses Lacan’s mirror stage of infancy.56 Woodward explains that in old age the subject denies identification with the image, seeing it ‘as uncannily prefiguring the disintegration and nursling dependence of advanced age’ (67). In The Pure Gold Baby, however, Eleanor grows older, able to see the embodiment of ageing without fear, and to see herself in it. The novel’s refusal to redeem Jess’s moment of prolepsis in Africa, where the novel opens, most clearly advances its imagining of life as an open process. In her later life, Jess finally travels back to Africa, the place she has dreamed of ever since her first and only visit. The trip proves to be full of disappointments, as places she has imagined visiting fail to deliver the significance she expected: the missionary settlement ‘is not really very

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interesting’ (281) and the headwaters of the Congo are ‘unsatisfactory’ (283). Jess suspects, ‘maybe all revelation, all discovery, is unsatisfactory,’ and wonders, ‘Has she come all this way for this?’ (283). Even the genesis of her proleptic moment with the lobster-claw children is thrown into doubt when Jess suddenly remembers another potential source of that moment: a girl she knew at kindergarten, who had burned and lost her fingers; a new memory, a new beginning to her story of life. Ironically, the most significant moment on Jess’s trip is one that undercuts the ideal of human progress in history. Jess visits the ‘Saucepan Graves,’ a burial site covered with saucepans. The historical origin of the saucepans is unknown, but seeing them closely, Jess’s thoughts turn to Britain’s imperial past, and human history. She sees the human race ‘[s]tumbling blindly with its pots and pans … stumble on’ (286). The combination of the ‘stumbling’ and the peculiar domesticity of the pots and pans evokes a mythical, yet almost comical image, redrawing one of the human race marching purposefully forward. This image also links to Anna, who often ‘stumbles’ when she moves, and receives the reproaching words, ‘Look where you’re going’ (179). It is not only Anna. The human race stumbles—but importantly, it stumbles on. Significantly, Eleanor refuses narrative closure, abruptly ending her story-telling, leaving Jess’s story in movement, with Jess, her ex-husband and Anna on the flight back from Africa. Eleanor then briefly turns her thoughts to the future; she speculates about what will or will not happen in the lives of Jess and others, including the idea of talking to Jess about Anna’s future, a subject that they have so far avoided. This is an imagining of the future not as ‘a promise of happiness’,57 but as one of both uncertainty and possibility. This ending reiterates the novel’s rejection of time as a linear, forward movement towards anticipated closure. Life, it suggests, is an ongoing search for, and revision of, meanings and stories.

Conclusion The Diary of a Good Neighbour and The Pure Gold Baby both address questions about ageing and care that concern vulnerability, dependency and relationality. Each novel approaches these questions, taking issue with time as a cultural and social force that organises human lives and relations in specific ways. In many ways, the novels respond to the historical and cultural conditions from which they emerge, offering different narratives of ageing and care. At a time when ageing was less visible (or was kept so)

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and when the welfare state was on the decline, The Diary of a Good Neighbour makes an important contribution in bringing the issues of ageing and care into focus. It depicts women’s old age, the ageing body and care, things that are invisible in the world of clock time, and Janna’s connections with other and older women suggest a possibility of care relationships beyond the boundaries of age, class and kinship. This optimistic vision, however, is undermined by the implications of Janna’s story-telling that reassert the hegemony of clock time. The Pure Gold Baby poses a more radical challenge to clock time. It interrogates and rejects the ideal of progress and aspirational futurity, and explores care as an ethical response to those who live outside these temporal models. Eleanor’s self-reflective and retrospective narrative also attends to the lived experience of time that cannot be captured by clock time, presenting ageing as a fluid and open process. Depicting the contingency of life as a source of both uncertainty and possibility, The Pure Gold Baby invites us to think what future might be possible, for us and for literary narratives, if we see and relate to time differently, and if we open ourselves to ‘another way of being human’ (44). Acknowledgements  Research for this chapter was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI: 17K02517). I am grateful for helpful discussions with Kayoko Saito and for the useful comments on a draft of the chapter that I received from my colleagues, Yuri Fuwa, Hiroshi Muto and Yoko Nagai.

Notes 1. Margaret Drabble, The Pure Gold Baby (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 54. References to the novel hereafter are from this edition. 2. In Britain, the context of the two texts discussed in this chapter, in 1976, those aged sixty-five and above counted as 14.2% of the population; whereas in 2016, the figure was 18.0%, and is predicated to rise to 24.7% in 2046 (Office). A report published in 2015 suggests that the economic value of care provided by informal (family) carers was higher than that provided by formal carers; the social care cost is projected to rise (Hoff 7). 3. Margrit Shildrick,‘Living On; Not Getting Better,’ Feminist Review 111 (2015): 16. 4. Eva Feder Kittay, Bruce Jennings and Angela A. Wasunna, ‘Dependency, Difference and Global Ethic of Longterm Care,’ The Journal of Political Philosophy 13, no. 4 (2005): 444.

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5. Simone de Beauvior, Old Age. 1970. Trans. Patrick O’Brian (London: Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson and G.  P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972); Susan Sontag, ‘The Double Standard of Aging,’ The Saturday Review of the Society (23 Sept. 1972): 29-38. 6. Although men, as sons, husbands and grandfathers, are increasingly involved in care, women still provide more care (Hoff 5). 7. Martha Holstein, ‘Ethics and Old Age: The Second Generation,’ in The Sage Handbook of Social Gerontology, ed. Dale Dannefer and Chris Phillipson (London: Sage Publications, 2010), 636. 8. Maroula Joannou, ‘The Grandes Dames: Writers of Longevity,’ in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, ed. Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 99. 9. Recognising a growing number of texts which seek to present new scripts of ageing, Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Barbara Frey Waxman respectively coined the “midlife progressive novel” (Safe) and “the novel of ripening” in 1988 and 1990. Drabble’s novels focused on middle-aged women and their lives are discussed as an example of the former, and The Diary of a Good Neighbour, the latter. 10. Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins, ‘Writing Now,’ in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, ed. Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 253. 11. Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950, when she was in her early thirties, while Drabble, who is twenty years younger, published her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, in 1963, when she was in her early twenties. Their earlier works—Lessing’s best-known Booker-prize winning The Golden Notebook was published in 1962, and Drabble’s first five novels were all published in the 1960s—anticipated the second wave feminism that was to come shortly after. Although neither author identifies themselves with the movement, they are often associated with the second wave (Joannou 100). 12. Doris Lessing, The Diaries of Jane Somers (London: Flamingo, 2002), vii. References to The Diary of a Good Neighbour hereafter are from this edition. The Diary of a Good Neighbour and its sequel, If the Old Could… were re-­ republished together as The Diaries of Jane Sommers under Doris Lessing’s name. 13. Diana Wallace, ‘“Women’s Time”: Women, Age and Intergenerational Relations in Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 39, no. 2 (2006): 45. 14. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. 15. Jan Baars, ‘Concepts of Time in Age and Aging,’ in The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging, ed. Geoffrey Scarre (London: Palgrave, 2016), 71.

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16. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13. 17. Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 6. 18. Linda Adkins, ‘Feminism after Measure,’ Feminist Theory 10, no. 3 (2009): 332. 19. Ibid. 20. Barbara Adam, ‘The Gendered Time Politics of Globalization: Of Shadowlands and Elusive Justice,’ Feminist Review 70, no. 1 (2002): 23. 21. Julia Twigg, The Body in Health and Social Care (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 128. 22. Linda Adkins, ‘Sociological Futures: From Clock Time to Event Time,’ Sociological Research Online 14, no. 4 (2009): 1.1, https://doi. org/10.5153/sro.1976. 23. Gullette, Aged, 16. 24. Mary Russo, ‘Aging and the Scandal of Anachronism,’ in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Bloomingon: Indiana University Press, 1999), 21. 25. Cynthia Port, ‘No Future? Aging, Temporality, History, and Reverse Chronologies,’ Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 4 (May 31, 2012): 3, http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/98. 26. Shildrick, ‘Living On,’16. 27. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 161 and 196. 28. See Gayle Greene, Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Jeannette King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012); Wallace, ‘“Women’s Time”’; Barbara Frey Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990). 29. Cynthia Port, ‘“None of It Adds Up”: Economies of Aging in The Diary of a Good Neighbour,’ Doris Lessing Studies 24, no. 1 & 2 (2003): 30. 30. Lisa Baraitser, Enduring Time (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 14. 31. See Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell, eds., Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012); Imelda Whelehan, ‘Not to Be Looked At: Older Women in Recent British Cinema,’ in British Women’s Cinema, ed. Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (London: Routledge, 2009), 170-83. 32. Helen Paloge, The Silent Echo: The Middle-Aged Female Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 13. 33. Maricel Oró-Piqueras, ‘Narrating Ageing: Deconstructing Negative Conceptions of Old Age in Four Contemporary English Novels,’ The Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013): 50.

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34. Wallace, ‘“Women’s Time,”’ 50, emphasis in original. This might relate to Lessing’s subjective position when the novel was published. At 63, she had not yet experienced Maudie’s age. 35. Barbara Frey Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 59-74. 36. Maricel Oró-Piqueras, ‘The “Dys-Appearing” Body in Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and Margaret Forster’s Have the Men Had Enough?’ Societies 2 (2012): 279. 37. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 5. 38. Port, ‘None,’ 30. 39. Susan Watkins, Doris Lessing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 105. 40. Lessing of course is not blind to this irony. Considering Lessing’s account of the publication history of this novel, and the nature of the literary field which worked discriminately against Lessing at that point in her career, Watkins sees Janna’s diary form as part of Lessing’s “staging” of realism that critiques the gendered and ageist aspects of the literary field (104). Watkins states: “With almost flagrant exaggeration, Lessing seems to be saying: ‘If you want realism then this is what it means for countless elderly women.’ It makes for a disturbing read” (110). See also Eagleton for an insightful analysis of Lessing’s career and the literary field from the perspectives of gender and age. 41. Wallace, ‘“Women’s Time,”’ 55-56. 42. Margaret Thatcher, interview by Douglas Keay, 31 October 1987, Woman’s Own. 43. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 305. 44. Clare Hanson, Hysterical Fictions: The ‘Woman’s Novel’ in the Twentieth-­ Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 23. 45. This is Drabble’s own generation. The writing of this novel also represents her looking back to her earlier novel, The Millstone (1965). In this novel too, a young postgraduate student has an affair and gives birth to a daughter, who is later found to have a heart problem. The novel ends shortly after a successful surgery on the baby. The Pure Gold Baby (2013) continues from there, although Anna’s problems are untreatable, and Jess’s story is recounted retrospectively. 46. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press), 2004, 4. 47. Gullette, Aged, 17.

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48. The phrase “pure gold baby” also appears in Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” a poem about motherhood. The author thanks an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this intertext. 49. See Perkin for a detailed discussion of Wordsworth’s influence on Drabble. 50. Russo, ‘Aging,’ 21, emphasis in original. 51. Gullette, ‘Valuing “Postmaternity” as a Revolutionary Feminist Concept,’ Feminist Studies 28, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 553-72. 52. Russo, ‘Aging,’ 27. 53. Baraitser, Enduring, 5. 54. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness. 55. Baars, ‘Concepts,’ 83; emphasis in original. 56. Woodward, Aging, 53-71. 57. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.

Works Cited Adam, Barbara. ‘The Gendered Time Politics of Globalization: Of Shadowlands and Elusive Justice.’ Feminist Review 70, no. 1 (2002): 3-29. Adkins, Linda. ‘Feminism after Measure.’ Feminist Theory 10, no. 3 (2009a): 323-39. Adkins, Linda. ‘Sociological Futures: From Clock Time to Event Time.’ Sociological Research Online 14, no. 4 (2009b). https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1976. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Baars, Jan. ‘Concepts of Time in Age and Aging.’ In The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging, edited by Geoffrey Scarre, 69-86. London: Palgrave, 2016. Baraitser, Lisa. Enduring Time. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Beauvior, Simone de. Old Age. 1970. Translated by Patrick O’Brian. London: Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson and G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972. Chambers, Claire and Susan Watkins. ‘Writing Now.’ In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, edited by Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker, 247-65. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015. Dolan, Josephine and Estella Tincknell, eds. Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. Drabble, Margaret. The Millstone (1965). London: Penguin, 1968. Drabble, Margaret. The Pure Gold Baby. New  York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Eagleton, Mary. ‘The Spectre of the Aged Writer.’ Doris Lessing Studies 28, no. 2 (2009): 4-9. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Greene, Gayle. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Aged by Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. ‘Valuing “Postmaternity” as a Revolutionary Feminist Concept.’ Feminist Studies 28, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 553-72. Hanson, Clare. Hysterical Fictions: The ‘Woman’s Novel’ in the Twentieth-Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Hoff, Andreas. ‘Current and Future Challenges of Family Care in the UK.’ Government Office for Science, 2015. Holstein, Martha. ‘Ethics and Old Age: The Second Generation.’ In The Sage Handbook of Social Gerontology, edited by Dale Dannefer and Chris Phillipson, 630-40. London: Sage Publications, 2010. Joannou, Maroula. ‘The Grandes Dames: Writers of Longevity.’ In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, edited by Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015, pp. 99-113. King, Jeannette. Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Kittay, Eva Feder, Bruce Jennings and Angela A.  Wasunna. ‘Dependency, Difference and Global Ethic of Longterm Care.’ The Journal of Political Philosophy 13, no. 4 (2005): 443-69. Lessing, Doris. The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984). London: Flamingo, 2002. Office for National Statistics. Overview of the UK population: July 2017. 2017. Oró-Piqueras, Maricel. ‘The ‘Dys-Appearing’ Body in Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and Margaret Forster’s Have the Men Had Enough?’ Societies 2 (2012): 270-85. Oró-Piqueras, Maricel. ‘Narrating Ageing: Deconstructing Negative Conceptions of Old Age in Four Contemporary English Novels.’ The Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013): 47-51. Paloge, Helen. The Silent Echo: The Middle-Aged Female Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Perkin, Russell. ‘Margaret Drabble’s Wordsworth.’ Wordsworth Circle 46, no. 3, (Summer 2015): 197-201. Port, Cynthia. ‘No Future? Aging, Temporality, History, and Reverse Chronologies.’ Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 4 (May 31, 2012). http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/98. Port, Cynthia. “None of It Adds Up’: Economies of Aging in The Diary of a Good Neighbour.’ Doris Lessing Studies 24, no. 1 & 2 (2003): 30-35.

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Russo, Mary. ‘Aging and the Scandal of Anachronism.’ In Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, edited by Kathleen Woodward, 20-33. Bloomingon: Indiana University Press, 1999. Shildrick, Margrit. ‘Living On; Not Getting Better.’ Feminist Review 111 (2015): 10-24. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Expanded ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Sontag, Susan. ‘The Double Standard of Aging.’ The Saturday Review of the Society. 23 Sept. 1972, pp. 29-38. Thatcher, Margaret. Interview by Douglas Keay. 31 Oct. 1987 Woman’s Own. Twigg, Julia. The Body in Health and Social Care. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Wallace, Diana. ‘“Women’s Time”: Women, Age and Intergenerational Relations in Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers.’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 39, no. 2 (2006): 43-59. Watkins, Susan. Doris Lessing. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Waxman, Barbara Frey. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Whelehan, Imelda. ‘Not to Be Looked At: Older Women in Recent British Cinema.’ In British Women’s Cinema, edited by Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams, 170-83. London: Routledge, 2009. Woodward, Kathleen. Aging and Its Discontents. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

CHAPTER 9

(Re)Writing the Future/Disavowing the Past: Reading Feminism(s) in The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale Adele Jones

Generational Divides? The relationship between Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman has been described as one of friendship, mentorship, and collaboration, yet is always couched in terms that acknowledge the generational difference between the writers. Atwood is often implicitly placed in an archetypal position of mother, or wise elder, occupying a ‘continuing role in shaping and inspiring newer generations of contemporary women writers’.1 Atwood and Alderman’s writerly relationship is mirrored in their most well-known works of speculative fiction and both The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Power (2016) have cemented the writers’ positions as feminist authors. Atwood has also gained a new generation of readers and fans through the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale for the small

A. Jones (*) Swansea University, Swansea, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_9

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screen (Hulu, 2017, 2018, 2019). The relationship between these works has, I will argue, converged to both mirror and inform a particular moment within feminism and within contemporary women’s writing. That moment demands that we ask difficult questions of feminist cultural production in order to explore changing constructions of women’s identities within patriarchy: how far have we come and how far do we have left to go? Atwood’s thorny acceptance of her standing within the cohort of late twentieth century feminist writers is well-documented. Whenever she is asked about her feminism, she responds: ‘It is always—“What do you mean by the word?’”,2 although her questioning of the word ‘feminism’ belies the vast body of critical work focusing on her literary production as a woman—and a feminist—writer. On the contrary, Naomi Alderman proudly claims the ‘F-word’ for herself, describing The Power as ‘feminist science fiction’ and, indeed, the novel has been widely accepted as such.3 Elaine Showalter states that: Alderman is reflecting and channelling the anger of a young generation of feminists who will not forgive, excuse, cover up, and accept male abuse […] For decades, there has been a lot of rhetoric about politically-aware third-­ wave feminists criticizing “naïve” second-wave feminists, and fourth-wave feminist millennials looking down on talky third-wave revisionists. But this round is different […] this feminist wave is a tsunami. Alderman sees herself as part of that wave.4

Although Alderman herself does not situate her work (or her politics) within a ‘wave’, Showalter’s assessment of the novel reflects popular acceptance of the wave metaphor which assumes that the Second Wave of feminism is over and done with, replaced by a newer, up-to-date version which is the province of Generation X and Millennials. The problem inherent in escaping this framework is evident even in scholarship that recognises the conservative nature of its construction. In her empirical study of contemporary feminism, Alison Dahl Crossley argues that feminism is alive and kicking ‘long after the decline of the second wave of mass feminism’,5 even whilst advocating for ‘the concept of waveless feminism’.6 Indeed, in this chapter, although I refer to the ‘Second Wave’ of feminism in order to highlight the dividing lines drawn by the wave metaphor, I also risk entrenching that metaphor and undermining my contention that a linear construction of feminism is simplistic and damaging. Reading The Power as part of this discourse speaks to the characterisation of Atwood as

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feminist foremother of Alderman’s generation of writers and contains the implicit construction of Second Wave feminism as a moment in the past, something to be remembered. The premise of The Handmaid’s Tale reflects the position of women in the 1970s and 1980s when rights to reproductive control were less available in most Anglo-American cultures than they have been in more recent decades (although, devastatingly, these rights are once again being denied in several US states at the time of this book’s publication). Gilead, an authoritarian religious state, is established in North America in response to increasing women’s rights and declining fertility leading to a lower birth rate. Gilead is a rigidly structured society where Handmaids occupy a highly prized position due to their fertility. They are, however, effectively brood-mares, enduring a monthly ritual in which their male Commanders try to impregnate them (that is, rape them). Offred is one such Handmaid and Atwood’s novel follows her inner monologue of terror and defiance until the ambiguous end, where she either escapes Gilead or is incarcerated for that defiance. The first season of the Hulu adaptation of the novel remains largely faithful to Atwood’s vision, its highly stylised visualisation of the narrative rendering the violence of Gilead inescapable. The second and third seasons move beyond the end of the novel, though Atwood herself states that ‘th[e] second season might function as something even more culturally significant: a call to action. “I don’t want you all to come to Canada right now, because I want you to stay here and vote”’, she says.7 This is a clear recognition that both her novel and the adaptation speak to a political climate in which women’s bodily autonomy and rights are under explicit attack, particularly in the USA. In contrast, the central event of The Power is the Day of the Girls, which sees women explicitly exercise the defiance that is so brutally suppressed in Offred. This particular moment marks the point in the reader’s recent history (but thousands of years previously for the characters writing the novel’s frame narrative) at which women and girls across all societies and cultures begin to discover a ‘skein’ located under the collar bone. The skein allows them to access and deploy an electrical charge which can be used for a range of purposes from sexual stimulation to electrocution. The inevitable result, clear to the reader from the opening pages, is mass use of the power by women against men, resulting in a reversal of gender roles and a world in which men live in fear. It is difficult to find a review of Alderman’s novel that does not position it as a twenty-first century rendering of a female backlash against patriarchy (see, for example, Showalter,

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above, Goh (2017), or Ron Charles who asserts, in The Washington Post, that the novel’s ‘fiery theme of female empowerment seemed to spark right off the day’s news about women standing up to sexual harassment’8). This, it seems, is a tale for an era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, an era which loudly proclaims a ‘new’ feminism in which women must rise up as individuals to take back their bodies.9 The links between The Power and these on- and offline social movements is significant: #MeToo and #TimesUp both demand the end of endemic sexual violence against women, by men, and are based around individual women articulating their stories of abuse. Both movements have been lauded by the media after being endorsed by famous actors (Emma Watson, Reese Witherspoon, Ashley Judd, for example), and both explicitly state that they see change happening through ‘global conversation’ and representation.10 The articulation of the wrong is the righting of that wrong; ‘No more silence’ is a key part of the mission statement (see www.timesupnow.com) and the #MeToo conversation on social media focuses on individual story telling. They reflect the premise of The Power in which individual women rise up and take positions of power, providing the basis for societal change. This contrasts with Atwood’s society in which women are presented as a sex class and categorised within patriarchy according to their bodily functions. The aims and actions of Burke’s Me Too Movement, then, are far more closely aligned with Atwood’s conceptualisation of women’s identities in its recognition of the materiality of violence against women. The lack of awareness of Burke’s movement from the architects of #MeToo speaks to the tendency of the current cultural and literary moment to rewrite what has come before it, presenting its own challenges to patriarchy as new and necessarily individual.11 This #MeToo substitution functions as a prime example of the ways in which social, political, and cultural discourses replace one feminism (the Second Wave) with another (a new, exciting twenty first century kind). This chapter will explore the reasons for the process of substitution using The Power as a mirror to this exchange. Alderman, I will argue, is engaged in a re-writing of The Handmaid’s Tale which displaces Atwood’s focus on the materiality of women’s oppression. Alderman favours an examination of women’s place in the world through an inversion of gender positions which reflects not only a focus on individualism, but also a twenty-first century need to distance feminism from its Second Wave past. While this inversion lays bare the grotesque functioning of patriarchy, I argue here that replacing that patriarchy with its mirror image (a similarly functioning

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matriarchy) is a strategy that fails to question the fundamental workings of systemic oppression of women. Alyson Miller argues that The Power can be read, at least in part, as a parody of female monstrosity, ‘giv[ing] space to those who have traditionally been relegated to the margins’.12 While this element of Miller’s reading of the novel may seem to problematise the argument of this chapter, it is also the case that the relationship between Alderman’s text and The Handmaid’s Tale unavoidably contextualises The Power within Atwood’s Second Wave focus on women’s bodies and reproduction. Thus, Alderman’s focus on gender politics highlights the way in which contemporary cultural politics glosses over Atwood’s concerns and empties Alderman’s parodic rendering of political substance. Despite this elision of a Second Wave analysis of women’s position in society through a focus on third, or fourth wave, or Showalter’s ‘tsunami’, feminism, Alderman’s intertextual engagement with The Handmaid’s Tale clearly invokes Gilead and its horrors in a way that makes a rumination on women’s material oppression inescapable. In addition, the intense concentration of reviewers and other cultural commentators on the links between the two novels reinforces the relationship. The reader, then, brings a knowledge of Atwood’s text to The Power prior to reading. Alderman’s position is further problematised by the release and success of Hulu’s adaptation in the same year as The Power, engendering a popular re-focus on Atwood’s concerns. Thus, The Power’s relationship to The Handmaid’s Tale is complicated by a double focus; at the same time as disavowing a feminist past, it centres that past. The doubleness of The Power is, I will argue, indicative of an ironic compulsion within contemporary feminist discourse to return to its past in order to distance itself from that past; the Second Wave is, then, highlighted as a ‘seething absence’.13 Following Jacques Derrida, I will refer to this paradoxical invocation as a ‘present absence’,14 which, I will suggest, undermines the wave metaphor in a disruption to the linearity of the ways in which we think about feminist history and feminist historiography. In order to explore these claims about Alderman’s novel, I want to think about the disruptive potential of The Power in two ways. Firstly, I suggest that Alderman engages with the strategy of ‘Re-vision’ conceived of by Adrienne Rich in ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (1972). Alderman’s use of re-vision results in a curious ambiguity where The Power is placed within a tradition of feminist, women’s writing at the same time as suggesting that re-writing is necessary for a new generation. Thus, the relationship established between The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale constructs

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second wave feminism and its writers as simultaneously absent and present (the Derridean present absence). Secondly, this simultaneity is indicative of the way in which the Second Wave continues to haunt contemporary women writers, continues to ‘make[ ] its presence known to us’.15 This haunting makes visible how, in twenty first century cultural production, feminism is a ghost (of itself). I will draw on notions of haunting explored by Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters (1997) though, of course, each theoretical articulation is haunted by the traces of other voices, most notably for Gordon, Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993). Both these conceptions of The Power rely on a reading of this simultaneity as undermining duality, as producing a textual space in which disavowal and centring are possible at the same time.

Paradoxical Positioning The Power is a novel with one eye on the past and the other fixed on the now, demonstrating the simultaneity that has always shaped the act of women rewriting, particularly when considered through the lens of Rich’s call to arms. In ‘When We Dead Awaken’, Rich recognises that rewriting—or re-vision—is ‘an act of survival’ because ‘[u]ntil we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-­ dominated society’.16 I invoke Rich here in order to suggest that Alderman is highly aware that in knowingly engaging with The Handmaid’s Tale, she invites a reading of The Power that interrogates its re-vision of Atwood’s text and the very notion of re-vision itself. Liedeke Plate suggests that: ‘Rewriting is […] an act of transfer in which texts from the past are re-produced and passed on. In particular, contemporary women’s rewriting constitutes an act of transfer through which a feminist memory is established’.17 Although Plate is focusing here on the plethora of women’s rewritings of the 1970s and 1980s which changed and shaped ‘cultural memory […] by filling the gaps of literary history’,18 it is my contention that the intertextuality of The Power destabilises feminist cultural memory, allowing in the ghost. This ghost is, in simple terms, the spectre of the Second Wave feminist and she is ushered into this novel because, as Derrida asserts, all signs can only exist in relation to other signs which are, as a result of this relationship, both present and absent. That is, in Derridean terms, all representations are ghostly;

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they are never fully of the here and now because they depend on defining themselves against prior representations for meaning. This is precisely the problem for Alderman who attempts to write a future story for feminism at the same time as being unable to fully escape its past. This approach to The Power is elucidated by broadly following Julia Kristeva’s characterisation of the text as ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect’.19 Each text contains traces of what has come before and for Rich, these traces become the focus of her call to women writers to re-vision the canon in order to exorcise ‘the specter of [ ] male judgement’.20 We could describe, then, the feminist rewriting of feminist writing as an ‘intervention in cultural memory’,21 a tracing of feminist history, which has the effect of creating the ‘original’ feminist writer as spectre. Victoria Hesford has already conceptualised feminism as a haunted discourse through her formulation of the way in which the ghostly figure of the feminist-as-lesbian structures cultural memory of the Second Wave (gendering Derrida’s exploration of Western capitalism as haunted by Marx). Hesford suggests that ‘[h]aunting is intrinsic to every dominant social and political order because it is a sign of what has been forcibly expunged or evacuated from that order: the other that threatened to disrupt the emergent hegemony’.22 This haunting can be identified through the presence of ghosts, which Gordon describes as a ‘special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present’; a ghost is a nagging presence, a reminder or representation of a past event, person, place that appears and reappears as if ‘improperly buried’.23 The reappearance of The Handmaid’s Tale in The Power is precisely a sign of haunting that exposes a tendency within contemporary feminist discourse to distance itself from the Second Wave. Hesford sees this desire for distance as based on a remembering of the humourless, essentialist, 'feminist-as-lesbian (I would expand Hesford's focus to argue that this remembering can be applied to the Second Wave as a whole). She draws on Mary Russo’s identification of this distancing and the ‘considerable effort [that] has been put into reassurances that feminists are “normal women” and that our political aspirations are “mainstream”’.24 Russo states that these actions ‘concede[ ] much to the misogyny which permeates the fear of “losing one’s femininity,” “making a spectacle of oneself,” “alienating men” (meaning powerful men) or otherwise making

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“errors”’.25 Alderman herself articulates this desire as the premise for writing The Power: I hoped, at least at the outset, that it would be good for women to feel or imagine what it would be like to be in a position of control. It’s always nice to have a little peek and see how society would look from the other side. But finally, you have to ask, are women better than men? They’re not. People are people. You don’t have to think that all men are horrible to know there are some men who abuse their strength. Why wouldn’t the same hold true for women?26

Coded within Alderman’s statement is a complex intertwining of positions which reveals the ultimate paradox of her novel. Firstly, women are not in a position of control and can only ‘imagine’ what this must be like (that is, feminism has not done its job); secondly, if the individual holds responsibility—because not all men are horrible—then this statement lacks an articulation of the systemic workings of patriarchy; thirdly, feminism could go too far (why wouldn’t women abuse their strength? Alderman asks). Unspoken, at the centre of each of these positions, is the ghostly figure of the Second Wave feminist. If this ghost haunts contemporary feminism(s), and the surfacing of the The Handmaid’s Tale in The Power is a symptom of this haunting, then, this chapter asserts, The Power is clearly a haunted text. Put simply The Power attempts to re-vision the Second Wave through creating distance from it (both temporal and ideological) by focusing on individual power, and moving away from a representation of women as a class oppressed by materiality. Thus, the novel refuses to risk alienating men by asserting that power corrupts each individual regardless of sex and gender. This dissociates Alderman and her novel from the perceived essentialism of the Second Wave even at the same time as highlighting the damage done by patriarchy. Articulation of this position is presented as a new direction in feminism. However, The Power cannot escape the traces of the Second Wave both because of the construction of Alderman’s relationship to Atwood and the traces of The Handmaid’s Tale within the novel and within perceptions of the novel. Second Wave utterances circulate throughout the text, pulling it into a simultaneity which results in a paradoxical disavowal and centring of a Second Wave position.

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Narrative (Re)Framing The whole story of the Day of the Girls is contained within Alderman’s narrative framework, consisting of an exchange of letters between two writers, Neil and Naomi. Neil, a member of ‘The Men Writers Association’ has written ‘a sort of hybrid piece […] Not quite history, not quite a novel’27 and is seeking the opinion of a female mentor, Naomi, who condescendingly characterises his work as ‘saucy’ and ‘sexy’ because it depicts a ‘world run by men’ before the gender reversal.28 The irony of the exchange is reinforced by the final part of the opening narrative framework in which Neil’s full name appears on his novel’s title page as an anagram of Alderman’s own name. At the end of Neil’s novel, in the closing framework, the reader understands that Neil’s attempt to teach Naomi that ‘Gender is a shell game […] Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there’, will be thwarted by the ability of the ruling gender to decide what history is, based on her possession of the power.29 This does, of course, throw into focus the barriers facing the woman writer as identified by Rich: the ‘active discouragement and thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival’.30 But the power of Alderman’s framework is emptied of meaning because it is based not on an interrogation of systemic oppression, but rather on a simple role reversal. The placing of the woman writer in a man’s place does not undermine the erasure of women’s cultural identity as identified by Rich. This simplicity is, though, problematised by what I see as the instances of haunting threaded through the narrative framework. The first comes in its dedication (a framework to the framework): ‘For Margaret and for Graeme, who have shown me wonders’.31 Even without the scaffold of the relationship between Alderman and Atwood constructed by the majority of the reviews of The Power, this acknowledgement of the importance of Atwood to the novel gestures towards contemporary feminism’s reluctance to finally move out of the house of its foremothers. Alderman’s nod to Atwood makes her novel a response to both the Second Wave and Atwood herself, strengthening the notion that The Power is an attempt to ‘move beyond’ or break the ties with a previous generation. This, ironically, imbues the novel with a sense of nostalgia, a (perhaps unintended) hauntological position which speaks to the Derridan present absence. In addition, Alderman echoes Hesford’s own assertion that, ‘[a]s a young

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feminist/ queer scholar in the US academy, “second wave feminism” is the enigmatic object that academic feminism necessarily, if only obliquely, has to place itself in relation to’.32 By placing herself in relation to Atwood, Alderman introduces an echo of Second Wave discourse, establishing what I identify as the simultaneity of her novel. That is, Alderman’s world of post-patriarchy is directly engaged with Atwood’s world of all-­ encompassing patriarchy. Atwood’s ghostly presence is consolidated in the first part of Alderman’s framing device, a lengthy section from the Old Testament’s first Book of Samuel in which the Israelites beg for a King at the expense of the protection of God.33 This is Alderman’s first oblique reference to Gilead, ruled by a religious sect calling themselves the Sons of Jacob.34 Her choice of reference establishes a sense of historical linearity; if the Sons of Jacob (both biblical and Gileadean) are the progenitors of a society designed to populate a religious patriarchy, then the replacing of that authority with a kingly authority indicates a movement forwards in time. Thus, Alderman’s reference to the Book of Samuel signals that The Power is concerned with a different kind of society in an attempt to move beyond The Handmaid’s Tale at the same time as being anchored to that novel and the moment in which it was produced. This paradox embodies the simultaneity of The Power; it is concerned with the ‘after’ of the moment in which Atwood’s text is produced yet is placed in relation to it. The apparent linearity of Alderman’s framework is, then, disrupted by a ghostly presence which forces analysis of the ‘affective, historical, and mnemonic structures of such hauntings’.35 That is, the ghost compels a reading of both texts together.

Materiality, the Body, the Gaze The state of Gilead described in The Handmaid’s Tale is, perhaps, the logical endpoint reached by a society which defines women by and seeks to control them through their bodies. Janet J. Montelaro states, ‘the dystopian future of the novel often distracts critical attention from reading this text as a commentary on contemporary feminist issues, specifically the precarious status of women’s reproductive rights’,36 but Atwood herself has stated: ‘One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened’.37 Atwood’s novel does not simplify the Second Wave focus on violence against women; Offred finds herself remembering and yearning for a time before Gilead whilst simultaneously

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being confronted with the reality of that time through the porn films and documentaries shown to the Handmaids at the Red Centre. Fiona Tolan finds in Atwood’s representations of the before and after of Gilead a critique of the Second Wave of feminism: ‘By juxtaposing flashbacks of 1970s feminist activism with current descriptions of Gilead’s totalitarianism, each informs the other so that The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a dystopian society that has unconsciously and paradoxically met certain feminist demands’.38 Both positions notwithstanding, the novel maintains a clear focus on the materiality of women’s bodies; the Handmaids are not sent to die in the Colonies only because they may provide children to the Commanders. Offred is aware that her womb is her destiny: ‘I avoid looking down at my body’, she says, ‘I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely’.39 The figure of the Handmaid has been taken up in protest movements across the world and a plethora of news articles throughout 2017 and 2018 has detailed how the Handmaid has become a symbol at Planned Parenthood protests (demanding a stop to the funding cuts across the USA) as an organised collective, the Handmaid Coalition.40 The protest has moved across boundaries with groups like the Hollywood Handmaids (a distinct chapter of the Handmaid Coalition) now protesting in association with #TimesUp, identifying on their Facebook page that they are engaged in a global fight against violence against women. The visual impact of the Handmaid’s protests is indelibly linked with the Hulu adaptation of Atwood’s text, in which the red and white of the Handmaids’ enforced costume symbolises the clash of stereotyped femininities which Gilead seeks to control. Thus, the individualism of contemporary social movements is haunted by representation of the Second Wave notion of sex-based, or bodily, oppression, in an instance of what Gordon identifies as ‘an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known’.41 The production of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale was underway at the same time as the publication of The Power and the circulation of imagery between all three texts and the symbolism engendered by the Hulu production is striking. In Atwood’s narrative, Offred sees her mother in an old video, ‘in a group of other women, dressed in the same fashion; she’s holding a stick, no, it’s part of a banner […] TAKE BACK THE NIGHT’.42 The link between the uniforms of the Handmaids and the pre-Gilead feminists represents the continuity of material violence (or ‘Freedom to and freedom from’ as Aunt Lydia puts it)43 albeit in a different form, and

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depends on the image of the collective. Like her mother, Offred finds solidarity in collectivity, even in oppression: as she walks the streets ‘doubled’ with Ofglen,44 she discovers the May Day movement that may save her. This representation is transposed to the Hulu production when, in a striking end to the first season, Offred leads a marching group of Handmaids through the streets after refusal to take part in a stoning: ‘They should never have given us a uniform if they didn’t want us to be an army’, she says.45 Thus, an oft-derided stereotype of the Second Wave is imbued with power and positivity in a recognition that subjugation of a group requires, and can engender, action from a group. Even in Hulu's season three finale where June (as we now think of Offred) still has not escaped Gilead, resulting in a frustrating, almost claustrophobic, circularity, the Handmaids and Marthas work collectively to smuggle children from Gilead to Canada. Collective resistance hurts Gilead from the inside. The notion of collectivity and power functions in a similar way in the opening sections of The Power. When first introduced, each woman or group of women is shown to be targeted by patriarchy because they are women, and each find power in tackling patriarchal violence through plurality. The protesting women in Saudi Arabia rail against a curtailing of movement and a forbidding of sexual identity, overthrowing the government;46 the enslaved Moldovan women use the gift of the power to escape from sex trafficking;47 Allie, one of the central characters, kills the man who sexually abuses her under the guise of Christian charity.48 The positive power of the collective is momentarily consolidated when Allie finds refuge in a convent with other girls driven from home because of their developing power. This female-identified space in which the girls hone their electrical skills is a clear challenge to the repressive religious framework which governs Gilead, and which is so often the focus of the Handmaid protests for Planned Parenthood. The link to Gilead comes through Alderman’s identification of Atwood’s influence in creating this space: ‘“The one thing Margaret directly suggested was the idea of a convent,” she says. It was a eureka moment which sparked one of the lateral synapse bursts that characterise Alderman’s way of being’.49 Alderman, then, embeds Atwood in the novel which directly indicates her engagement with writing of the Second Wave (I follow Julie Sanders here who identifies that ‘[i]n appropriations the intertextual relationship may be less explicit, more embedded’50). That both author and text (Atwood and The Handmaid’s Tale) are embedded within The Power reinforces my position that Alderman’s

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work is more than simple textual engagement with an influential novel. The presence of both in The Power makes a rumination on the lifespan of the novel and the legacy of a feminist movement inescapable, raising questions about the fundamental tenets of that movement and our contemporary relationship to it. One of Alderman’s answers to those questions comes through her response to Atwood’s suggestion of the convent. Allie’s relationship with the convent, and so with the notion of the collective, changes very quickly as she styles herself as Mother Eve and begins to create a movement in which she is the leader, telling herself: ‘The only way you’re safe, honeybun, is if you own it’.51 Alderman moves beyond the collectivity of the Handmaids, reinforcing individualism as the route to power and safety, ushering in the same ghost that circles the #metoo and #TimesUp movements.52 This position is reinforced as each of the women in the novel eschew female identified relationships in favour of treading an individual path. This can, of course, be read in a multitude of ways from ironic comment on the ways in which men, under patriarchy, do not need to act as a collective to rise to power, to a rejection of the notion of collective consciousness-­raising or ‘Sisterhood’ used to mock and limit the power of the Second Wave. However, I want to suggest that in deliberately moving beyond her own embedded intertextual reference, Alderman articulates an alignment with a feminism ‘now being framed in extremely individualistic terms, consequently ceasing to raise the spectre of social or collective justice’.53 This position is symbolised when, in her penultimate move to power, Mother Eve kills her final ally. In fact, the only consistent material link between the women in The Power is possession of the skein, the (only) source of their power. While the Handmaids’ shared bodily function is also the root of their oppression, the skein allows women to upturn social order and its significance lies in Alderman’s phallic characterisation: There’s a thing you can do to a bloke. Roxy’s done it herself. A little bit of a spark in the back passage and up he comes, neat as anything. It’s fun, if you want it. Hurts a bit, but fun. Hurts a lot if you don’t want it. Ricky kept on saying he didn’t want it. They took their turns on him. They were just trying to hurt him, he says.54

While the rape scenes in the novel (as women’s power advances, so the instances of rape and attempted rape increase) very obviously expose and

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highlight contemporary rape culture, their depiction is also problematic because they reveal a reluctant yet consistent circling around the central tenets of the ideas expressed in The Handmaid’s Tale. That the skein is gendered is clear from the representation of the minority of boys who have one but ‘keep it to themselves; there have been boys who’ve been murdered for showing their skein in other, harder parts of the world’.55 The necessity of maintaining clear gender boundaries has not disappeared simply because femininity dominates masculinity. However, and surprisingly given the novel’s hesitancy to engage with Second Wave tropes, the simplicity with which the Day of the Girls happens—through a mass awakening of the electrical charge that was latent in the bodies of women and girls—also points to the skein as sexed, rooted in bodily materiality. This reading is reinforced by the gory detailing of the removal of her skein from Roxy, one of the characters with the most powerful ability to use her electrical charge. In an attempt to wrest power from her and take it for his own, her father kidnaps her and forces her to undergo surgery which ends with the skein being transplanted into Roxy’s brother: Her eyelids flutter as they lift the thing out of her. She knows she’s seeing now, not just imagining. She sees it in front of her, the strand of meat that was the thing that made her work. It’s jumping and squirming because it wants to get back inside her. She wants it there too. Her own self.56

The pathos of this scene lies in the fact that regardless of the gendered power held by the women, systemic patriarchal violence, represented here by the father, locates its own power in the figurative and literal dismemberment of female bodies. Like the Gileadean ownership of Offred’s womb, Roxy’s father sees control of her body as the best way to assert his own power. Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale extends Atwood’s representation of the ownership of women’s bodies in a chilling scene that echoes the removal of Roxy’s skein. In Season One, Episode Three, Ofglen is sentenced to a clitoridectomy for ‘gender-treachery’ (having a relationship with a Martha); like Roxy, who is voiceless throughout her ordeal, Ofglen does not speak for the entire episode.57 If material violence against women renders them unable to speak their pain aloud, Alderman, in a telling return to the notion of collectivity, perhaps articulates for her female characters a sense of futility in trying to name the violence. The group of women working for Roxy’s brother—the recipient of her skein—decide to take it

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back. As they advance on him, he says: ‘The fucking bitches are just staring at him; their mouths as closed as the earth, their eyes as blank as the sea’.58 They are neither seeing nor voicing which contrasts directly with a #TimesUp moment based on articulation. Like the silent Handmaids at protests around the world, the silence of the women in The Power links them to the Handmaids and the Second Wave, and the ghostly feminist at the heart of Alderman’s statement about women’s misuse of power. I suggest that ‘Following th[is] ghost[ …] refashions the social relations in which [we] are located’ because she draws attention to the fact that patriarchy is dependent on control of women’s bodies, rather than simply their gendered identities.59 Thus, a Second Wave moment informs the scene, undermining the identity politics of the novel and affectively drawing the reader back to a consideration of material oppression.

The Power of the Gaze This scene also emphasises the importance of the interaction between the gaze and control. In both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power, the positions of the characters within systems of control and domination are governed by scopic networks which deny or confer personhood and power. Atwood’s rendering of the power of the gaze engages Offred in a complex, shifting subjectivity which is intimately linked to her inner narrative and her ability to name herself and survive the abuses of Gilead. Offred returns the gaze of the outside world wherever possible; looking back at a Guardian until he turns away is ‘an event, a small defiance of a rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself’.60 Looking, in Gilead, is the ultimate power because the Sons of Jacob rule through surveillance. A system of ‘Eyes’—informants— determine the fate of all subjects within the state and the terror the informants engender is represented by their black vans ‘with a winged eye in white on the side […] When they pass, we avert our eyes’.61 In one of her clearest intertextual moves, Alderman uses the notion of the gaze to establish authority as the domain of women. In witnessing one of the first public displays of female power, a horrified parent states: ‘I saw a girl in the park doing that to a boy for no reason, he was bleeding from the eyes. The eyes. Once you’ve seen that happen, no mom would let her boys out of her sight’.62 Alderman highlights the well-established notion that the male gaze is used as a tool of objectification and, therefore, control, and since the women in the novel gain control of the gaze through

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the phallic power of the skein, they also come to possess the gaze. That the gaze is linked to power is symbolised through the tattooing on women’s palms of an eye, most powerfully represented by Mother Eve: Allie unfolds her arms and holds her palms up to face the audience. In the centre of each one is tattooed an eye, with the tendrils extending out […] Behind her, the rippling silk curtain that has stood as a backdrop all evening falls gently to the ground. It reveals a painting, twenty feet high, of a proud buxom woman in blue, her eyes kind, the skein prominent across her collarbone, an all-seeing eye in the palm of each hand.63

Here, she completes the upturning of religious authority, replacing the everyday utterance of Gilead—‘Under His Eye’ —and the sinister surveillance of the Eyes with a firmly female gaze.64 Again, I argue that this is a signal of a feminism that wants to defiantly proclaim that it has moved beyond a Second Wave position that it perceives as broadly accepting that ‘[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/ female’.65 Where Offred lives in a world in which ‘To be seen—to be seen—is to be penetrated’,66 Alderman’s world is one where Tunde, the male journalist, ‘learns early on not to use his cellphone camera. Three times in the first few weeks a woman touches the camera and the thing goes dead’.67 But although the women (attempt to) refuse to be trapped within the frame of the male gaze, Tunde—despite the imbalance of gender power—decides to surreptitiously photograph the uprising using old-­ fashioned film. By the end of the novel, he has documented the atrocities carried out by women and posted them to a group of Men’s Rights Activists, challenging Mother Eve’s authority despite the power of the women to refuse scopic framing and undermining her apparent gendered power. This paradox is completed by the ways in which the gaze of the reader functions. Even if Alderman’s women return the male gaze of the Sons of Jacob, they are always already framed by the gaze of the contemporary reader. This reader is already informed by the intertextual relationship constructed by cultural commentary on the novels, and by the fact that we live in a fully functioning patriarchy in which the dangers of Gilead are not so far removed from imagining (I think back to Atwood’s own statement that nothing she wrote had not already happened). The apparent simplicity of The Power’s premise, then, is undermined by this wider gaze and the

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ghost of the Second Wave is present before we turn the first page. Thus, Alderman does not successfully render a depiction of a reversal of gendered power and control because she does not engage with Atwood’s (and the Second Wave’s) assertions that materiality is one of the roots of patriarchy and its control of women. In fact, in her movement ‘beyond’ the Second Wave, Alderman ironically reinforces the fact (particularly in the scenes I have highlighted in this section) that a simple reversal of power is not possible within patriarchy. The novel, then, through its relationship to its feminist history problematizes its own compulsion to move beyond.

(In)Conclusion Although this chapter is only a beginning in making the links between two specific texts and a wider cultural moment, it is also (in small part), I hope, a continuation of a feminist project which rejects the notion that feminism moves in waves.68 In the wave metaphor lies an implicit assertion that there are periods of time in which there is no feminism (so much so that in 1998, Time Magazine felt confident in asking whether feminism is dead). This position could be solidified by a contemporary women’s writing which attempts to distance itself from the Second Wave; the danger in that distancing is that each ‘wave’ of feminist articulation is presented as something new and the history in which patriarchal violence is contained becomes silenced and repressed. Hesford argues that feminist works ‘should be read, not as an attempt to describe the historicity of the experiential reality of women […] but as an attempt to produce that historicity’.69 In turning away from feminist production in capitulation to what Russo characterises as a ‘normalisation’ of feminism, we lose the opportunity to ‘theorize and explain the ways in which women are coerced into their dominated state’.70 One of the ways to continue that theorization is to see the ghosts seething in our presence; this undermines the patriarchal strategy of forcing feminism to always be over and done with. I would also suggest that in refusing ‘normalisation’, we refuse a patriarchal strategy which characterises feminism as the opposite of ‘normal’ in order to co-opt and control feminist cultural production. In tracing the ghosts of Atwood and The Handmaid’s Tale in The Power and in Alderman’s own writerly consciousness, I hope to have highlighted that recognizing the ghost and its haunted position allows us to see those ‘instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the

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over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view’.71 Not acknowledging the blind spot blinkers us to both a feminist history of writing and the ‘something-to-be-done’ notified by the presence of that ghost.72 None of this is to suggest that Alderman’s rendering of a post-­patriarchal world is not a worthwhile examination of the consequences of power and gender, or that contemporary women writers must demonstrate an indebtedness to the Second Wave. The novel is part of a moment in which a questioning of women’s power and empowerment may well tip the balance in favour of a more positive and less violent future. I am suggesting, though, that an active distancing from the tropes of the Second Wave (materiality, collectivity, for example) and a consistent return to Atwood’s tropes situate The Power within a paradox which embodies a moment of risk for the contemporary woman writer. Put simply, this risk is that in a disavowal of feminist history lies a lack of articulation that, for women, our present is not so different from the past represented by an earlier generation of writers. In all haunting, though, as Gordon states, lies possibility, and The Power’s double focus—on elision and invocation of the Second Wave—offers hope that contemporary feminism will ‘grasp[ ] the unfinished possibilities of feminisms from earlier times’.73 These twin notions of risk and hope are explored in Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Published in 2019, The Testaments charts the fall of Gilead and offers the reader a lens through which to look back at the issues discussed in this chapter. In the time between the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Power, and production of the first season of Hulu’s adaptation, the rise of the New Right has morphed into a resurgence of neo-liberalism that brings the Republic of Gilead closer to reality than perhaps even Atwood could have imagined. The framework of The Testaments speaks to this resurgence through a clearer validation of women’s voices than we see in The Handmaid’s Tale. Professor Pieixoto, who casts doubt on Offred’s story at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, is far more willing at the Thirteenth Symposium to accept the ‘convincing testament’ of the female perspectives that form the narrative.74 If we can read intertextual echoes of the dystopian ending of The Handmaid’s Tale and the playful yet hollow framing of The Power in The Testaments, then we can also see an echo of Rich’s call to women writers to re-vision the canon in order to exorcise ‘the specter of [ ] male judgement.75 Thus Atwood acknowledges our past and offers hope for the future.

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Notes 1. Fiona Tolan, ‘Introduction to Special Issue: Margaret Atwood’, Contemporary Women's Writing 11, no. 3 (2017): 294. 2. Lisa Allardice, ‘Margaret Atwood: “I am not a prophet. Science fiction is really about now”’, The Guardian, January 20, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/margaret-­atwood-­i-­am-­not-­a-­prophetscience-­fiction-­is-­about-­now. 3. Claire Armistead, ‘Naomi Alderman: “I went into the novel religious and by the end I wasn’t. I wrote myself out of it”’, The Guardian, May 30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/naomialderman-­interview-­the-­power. 4. Elaine Showalter, ‘Imagining violence: The power of feminist fantasy’, The New  York Review, February 26, 2018, http://www.nybooks.com/ daily/2018/02/26/imagining-­violence-­the-­power-­of-­feminist-­fantasy/. 5. Alison Dahl Crossley, Finding Feminism: Millennial Activists and the Unfinished Gender Revolution (New York: New  York University Press, 2017), 6. 6. Dahl Crossley, Finding Feminism, 20 (emphasis in original). 7. Olivia Aylmer, ‘Margaret Atwood says The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 is a call to action’, April 16, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollyw o o d / 2 0 1 8 / 0 4 / t h e -­h a n d m a i d s -­t a l e -­s e a s o n -­2 -­m a r g a r e t atwood-­interview. 8. Ron Charles, ‘Demand for Naomi Alderman’s feminist novel The Power outstrips supply, December 19, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost. com/entertainment/books/demand-­f or-­n aomi-­a ldermans-­f eminist-­ novel-­the-­power-­outstrips-­supply/2017/12/19/c6ced4b8-­e4ff-­11e7-­ a65d-­1ac0fd7f097e_story.html. 9. It is important here to note the distinction between #MeToo—a movement begun in Hollywood in 2017 and primarily functioning online, which names those who perpetuate sexual violence—and https://metoomvmt.org. The latter was founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke to provide direct support for women and girls who have experienced sexual violence and to involve those women in demands for services and policy changes. On #MeToo, Burke has written: ‘A year ago today I thought my world was falling apart. I woke up to find out that the hashtag #MeToo had gone viral and I didn't see any of the work I laid out over the previous decade attached to it. I thought for sure I would be erased from a thing I worked so hard to build. I remember calling my friends frantic and trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t know whether to go online and say—THIS ALREADY EXISTS! Or to just let it go, but then I realized letting it go wasn’t an option in this moment’ (see https://twitter.com/TaranaBurke, 2018).

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10. See www.twitter.com/hashtag/metoo and www.timesupnow.com. 11. I want to acknowledge that the ideas raised here are dealt with in much more depth in Karen Boyle’s 2019 text, #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism. This chapter was submitted before publication of Boyle’s eloquent consideration of the overlaps, disjunctions, and aims of #MeToo and feminism(s), but her work has helped me develop my thinking on these issues. This is an important exploration of the cultural shift in how women are articulating their experiences of sexual violence. 12. Alyson Miller, ‘Day of the Girls: Reading gender, power, and violence in Naomi Alderman's The Power’, College Literature, 47, no. 2 (2020): 406. 13. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2nd ed.), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): 21. 14. Derrida’s notion of presence and absence is inherently bound up with the function of language in relation to the self, though it has been widely adopted to talk about the way we find meaning in linguistic and social structures. For the purposes of this chapter, I use it simply in the terms Derrida lays out in Positions (1981): ‘no element can function as a sign without reference to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each 'element […] being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system […] Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces’: see Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981): 19. 15. Victoria Hesford, ‘Feminism and its Ghosts: The Spectre of the Feminist-­ as-­Lesbian’, Feminist Theory, 6, no.3 (2005): 231. 16. Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, College English, 34, No.1 (1972): 18. 17. Liedeke Plate, Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 42. 18. Plate, Transforming Memories, 54. 19. Julia Kristeva, Desire in language : A semiotic approach to literature and art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S.  Roudiez, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980): 36. 20. Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’, 20. 21. Plate, Transforming Memories, 97. 22. Hesford, ‘Feminism and its Ghosts’, 229. 23. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 24. 24. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, (London and New York: Routledge, 1994):12. 25. Russo, Ghostly Matters, 12.

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26. Ruth La Ferla, ‘Naomi Alderman on the world that yielded The Power’, The New  York Times, January 29, 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/01/29/style/the-­power-­naomi-­alderman.html. 27. Naomi Alderman, The Power, (London: Penguin, 2016): ix. 28. Alderman, The Power, x. 29. Alderman, The Power, 338. 30. Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’, 20. 31. Aldermam, The Power, vi. 32. Hesford, ‘Feminism and its Ghosts’, 231, my emphasis. 33. Alderman, The Power, vii. 34. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, (London: Vintage, 1996): 318. 35. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 18. 36. Janet J. Montelaro, ‘Maternity and the Ideology of Sexual Difference in The Handmaid's Tale’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 6, No. 3-4, (2008): 233. 37. Margaret Atwood, ‘Margaret Atwood on what The Handmaid’s Tale means in the age of Trump’, The New  York Times, March 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-­ atwood-­handmaids-­tale-­age-­of-­trump.html. 38. Tolan, ‘Margaret Atwood’, 19. 39. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 72-73. 40. See https://handmaidcoalition.org (2018). The Handmaid’s sporadic presence has coalesced into organised action directly targeted at the political sphere and the decisions made by the US government, extending the scope with which initial protests were concerned. 41. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. 42. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 129. 43. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 34. 44. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 33. 45. Access to Hulu, and therefore the episode transcript, is not available in the UK, though this piece of dialogue has been widely reported (see, for example, Julia Raeside, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale finale recap—a heart-­wrecking, near-perfect ending’, July 30, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-­ and-­radio/2017/jul/30/the-­handmaids-­tale-­finale-­recap-­a-­heart-­wreckingnear-­perfect-­ending). 46. Alderman, The Power, 60. 47. Alderman, The Power, 94. 48. Alderman, The Power, 32. 49. Armistead, ‘Naomi Alderman’. 50. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and appropriation, (Oxford and New  York: Routledge, 2015): 5. 51. Alderman, The Power, 46.

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52. The second and third seasons of Hulu’s production move beyond the end of Atwood’s novel and so this chapter does not consider them in any depth. However, it is true to say that these storylines are engaged in a more paradoxical relationship with the ideas explored in Atwood’s work than the first season. Offred returns to and remains in Gilead, building resistance among the female characters, in a move that echoes Alderman’s compulsion to return to the Second Wave and the notion of collectivity. However, Offred is also positioned as the lone hero operating outside of a sisterhood in a way that reflects a post-Second Wave preoccupation with individualism and identity politics which characterise The Power, as well as the cultural moments/ movements that frame the novel. 53. Catherine Rottenberg, ‘The rise of neoliberal feminism’, Cultural Studies, 28, No.2, (2013): 419, emphasis mine. 54. Alderman, The Power, 194. 55. Alderman, The Power, 153. 56. Alderman, The Power, 236, my emphasis 57. (see Renfro, 2017, n.p.) Kim Renfro. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale showrunner explains the brutal ending of episode 3.’ Insider. May 3, 2017, http:// w w w. t h i s i s i n s i d e r. c o m / h a n d m a i d s -­t a l e -­e p i s o d e -­3 -­e n d i n g explained-­2017-­5. 58. Alderman, The Power, 305. 59. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 22. 60. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 31. 61. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale , p. 31–32. 62. Alderman, The Power, 21, emphasis in original. 63. Alderman, The Power, 187. 64. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 54. 65. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ In Film theory and criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 837. 66. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 39, emphasis in original. 67. Alderman, The Power, 55. 68. The ‘Breaking Feminist Waves’ series of texts from Palgrave Macmillan collates several positions in the resistance to thinking of feminist history in distinct periods. 69. Hesford, ‘Feminism and its Ghosts’, 243, emphasis in original. 70. Hesford, ‘Feminism and its Ghosts’, 243. 71. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. 72. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. Dr Heidi Yeandle pointed out to me that Gordon’s quote brings to mind one of the chilling premises on which Gilead’s power rests: ‘Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will

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become ordinary’ (Atwood, 1996, p.  43). Acknowledging—and heeding—the ghosts, then, is necessary for not allowing this sort of power to become ordinary. 73. Victoria Browne, Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History, (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 1. 74. Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, (London: Chatto and Windus, 2019): 415. 75. Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’, 20.

Works Cited Allardice, Lisa. “Margaret Atwood: ‘I am not a prophet. Science fiction is really about now.’” The Guardian, January 20, 2018. https://www.theguardian. com/books/2018/jan/20/margaret-­atwood-­i-­am-­not-­a-­prophet-­science-­fictionis-­about-­now. Alderman, Naomi. The Power. London: Penguin, 2016. Armistead, Claire. “Naomi Alderman: ‘I went into the novel religious and by the end I wasn’t. I wrote myself out of it.’” The Guardian. October 28, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/naomi-­alderman-­interviewthe-­power. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage, 1996. Atwood, Margaret. “Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale.” The Guardian. January 20, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/20/handmaidstale-margaret-­atwood. Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood on what The Handmaid’s Tale means in the age of Trump.” The New  York Times. March 10, 2017. https://www. nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-­atwood-­handmaids-­ tale-­age-­of-­trump.html. Atwood, Margaret. The Testaments. London: Chatto & Windus, 2019. Aylmer, Olivia. “Margaret Atwood says The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 is a call to action.” Vanity Fair, April 16, 2018. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/04/the-­handmaids-­tale-­season-­2-­margaret-­atwood-­interview. Blanco, Maria del Pilar and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Browne, Victoria. Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Boyle, Karen. #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Charles. Ron. “Demand for Naomi Alderman’s feminist novel ‘The Power’ outstrips supply.” Washington Post, December 19, 2017. https://www. washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/demand-­for-­naomi-­aldermans-­ feminist-­novel-­the-power-outstrips-­supply/2017/12/19/c6ced4b8-­e4ff-­11e7-­ a65d-­1ac0fd7f097e_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.353ec3f9cd90.

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Dahl Crossley, Alison. Finding Feminism: Millennial Activists and the Unfinished Gender Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Goh, Katie. “She’s got the power: Naomi Alderman’s ‘The Power’ and empowerment feminism”. July, 2017. https://culturised.co.uk/2017/07/shes-­got-­thepower-­naomi-­aldermans-­the-­power-­and-­empowerment-­feminism/. Hesford, Victoria. “Feminism and its Ghosts: The Spectre of the Feminist-as-­ Lesbian.” Feminist Theory 6, No. 3 (2005): 227–250. Handmaid Coalition. Accessed 27 December, 2018. https://handmaidcoalition.org. Hollywood Handmaids. Accessed 30 May, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/ HollywoodHandmaids/photos/a.799329706929616.1073741828.79470 6340725286/811189572410296/?type=3&theater. Handmaids Unite. Accessed 30 May, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/Handm aidsUnite/?fref=mentions. Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. London: Macmillan Press, 1996. Kassam, Ashifa. “Margaret Atwood faces feminist backlash on social media over #MeToo.” The Guardian. January 15, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2018/jan/15/margaret-­atwood-­feminist-­backlash-­metoo. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language : A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S.  Roudiez. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. La Ferla, Ruth. “Naomi Alderman on the world that yielded The Power.” The New York Times. January 29, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/ style/the-­power-­naomi-­alderman.html. Me Too Movement. Accessed May 30, 2018. https://metoomvmt.org. Miller, Alyson. “Day of the Girls: Reading Gender, Power, and Violence in Naomi Alderman’s The Power.” College Literature 47, No. 2 (2020): 398-433. Miller, Bruce. The Handmaid’s Tale. Produced by Hulu. Aired 2017, 2018, 2019. Montelaro, Janet J. “Maternity and the Ideology of Sexual Difference in The Handmaid’s Tale. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 6, No. 3-4 (2008): 233-256. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film theory and criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 833-844. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Plate, Liedeke. Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Raeside, Julia. “The Handmaid’s Tale finale recap—a heart-wrecking, near-perfect ending.” The Guardian. July 20, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-­ and-­r adio/2017/jul/30/the-­h andmaids-­t ale-­f inale-­r ecap-­a -­h ear twrecking-­near-­perfect-­ending. Renfro, Kim. “The Handmaid’s Tale showrunner explains the brutal ending of episode 3.” Insider. May 3, 2017. http://www.thisisinsider.com/ handmaids-­tale-­episode-­3-­ending-­explained-­2017-­5. Rich, Adrienne. ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, College English 34, No.1 (1972): 18-30. Rivers, Nicola. Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Rottenberg, Catherine. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, No. 3 (2013): 418-437. Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. Oxford and New  York: Routledge, 2016. Shaw, Katy. Hauntology. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Showalter, Elaine. “Imagining Violence: The Power of Feminist Fantasy.” The New  York Review. February 26, 2018. http://www.nybooks.com/ daily/2018/02/26/imagining-­violence-­the-­power-­of-­feminist-­fantasy/. Tolan, Fiona. “Feminist Utopias and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second Wave Feminism.” Women: A Cultural Review 16, No. 1 (2005): 18-32. Tolan, Fiona. “Introduction to Special Issue: Margaret Atwood.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 11, No. 3 (2017): 291–296.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 8, 192, 207n9, 208n11 #TimesUp, 8, 192, 199, 201, 203 A Alderman, Naomi, 8, 189–198, 200–206, 207n3, 207n8, 208n12, 209n26, 209n27, 209n28, 209n29, 209n33, 209n46, 209n47, 209n48, 209n49, 209n51, 210n52, 210n54, 210n55, 210n56, 210n58, 210n62, 210n63, 210n67 Atwood, Margaret, 3, 8, 32, 41n102, 189–194, 196–206, 207n1, 207n2, 207n7, 209n34, 209n37, 209n38, 209n39, 209n42,

209n43, 209n44, 210n52, 210n60, 210n61, 210n64, 210n66, 211n72, 211n74 B Beauvoir, Simone de, 69n28, 96, 166 Bechdel, Alison, x, 5, 47–67, 68n7, 68n8, 68n10, 68n11, 68n12, 68n13, 68n15, 69n18, 69n21, 69n28, 70n31, 70n36, 70n38, 70n39, 70n40, 71n45, 71n47, 71n49 Bernard, G. W., 81, 91n22 Bradstreet, Anne, 55 Bukowski, Charles, 17, 39n45 Byatt, A. S., ix, 76, 78, 80, 82, 86, 90n6, 90n12, 90n13, 90n20, 91n35

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1

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INDEX

C Camus, Albert, 17, 39n44, 55 Carter, Angela, x, 13, 14, 38n27 Cixous, Hélène, 93–99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 106n1, 106n4, 107n10, 108n21, 108n23, 108n25, 109n34, 109n44 Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, ix, 2, 9n2 Corretjer, Zoé Jiménez, 95, 103–106, 109n39 D Derrida, Jacques, 193–195, 208n14 Drabble, Margaret, 7, 165–181, 181n1, 182n9, 182n11, 184n45, 185n49 du Maurier, Daphne, 4, 11–37, 38n30, 39n60, 40n86 Dunn, Suzannah, 6, 74, 75, 77–89 E Erickson, Kai, 141 Eyerman, Ron, 141, 154, 156n6, 156n7, 156n8, 156n9, 156n10, 156n11, 160n81 F Ferre, Rosario, 3, 107n21 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 55 Foucault, Michel, 142 Freud, Sigmund, 16–18, 36, 38n39, 39n47, 50, 61, 63, 96 G Gordon, Avery, 194, 195, 199, 206, 208n13, 208n23, 209n35,

209n41, 210n59, 210n71, 210n72 Grosz, Elizabeth, 167, 173, 182n14, 184n37 Gyasi, Yaa, 7, 139–155, 155n1, 155n2, 155n3, 156n16, 156n22, 157n27, 157n29, 157n33, 157n34, 157n37, 157n38, 158n44, 158n45, 158n48, 158n49, 158n50, 158n54, 158n55, 159n56, 159n57, 159n58, 159n59, 159n65, 159n68, 159n69, 159n71, 159n75, 159n76, 160n85, 160n86, 160n89, 161n93, 161n95 H Hall, Radclyffe, 85, 112 Heyer, Georgette, 78, 82, 90n12 Hutcheon, Linda, 74, 75, 80, 90n3, 90n4, 90n19 I Irigaray, Luce, 95, 96, 98, 100, 103–105, 106n5, 108n32, 116, 123, 126 J Jackson, Shirley, 4, 11–37, 37n12, 37n13, 37n14, 37n20, 38n21, 38n29, 40n70, 40n71, 40n72, 40n77, 40n78, 40n79, 40n87, 40n88, 40n90, 40n91, 40n92, 40n93, 40n94, 41n95, 41n96, 41n98, 41n111, 156n4, 156n12, 156n17, 157n25, 157n28,

 INDEX 

157n39, 159n62, 160n87, 160n88 Joyce, James, 55, 122 K Kristeva, Julia, 4, 9n8, 9n9, 95, 96, 99, 104, 108n27, 113, 114, 124, 195, 208n19 L Lake, Deryn, 6, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80–85, 88, 89 Lawrence, D. H., 112 Lessing, Doris, 7, 9n1, 165–181, 182n11, 182n12, 182n13, 183n28, 183n29, 184n34, 184n36, 184n39, 184n40, 184n43 M Mansfield, Katherine, 4, 11–37, 37n1, 37n2, 37n3, 37n19, 38n28, 39n48, 39n49, 39n51, 39n52, 39n53, 39n57, 39n58, 39n60, 39n66 Mantel, Hilary, 6, 74–80, 82, 86, 89, 90n5 Morrison, Toni, 3, 7, 139–155, 156n4, 156n12, 156n13, 156n14, 156n15, 156n17, 156n18, 156n19, 156n21, 157n25, 157n26, 157n28, 157n30, 157n32, 157n36, 157n39, 157n40, 157n41, 158n43, 158n51, 158n52, 158n53, 159n60, 159n61, 159n62, 159n64, 159n67, 159n70, 159n72, 159n73, 159n74, 159n77, 160n79, 160n82, 160n88, 160n90, 160n91, 160n92, 161n94

217

Munro, Alice, 4, 11–37, 37n15, 37n16, 37n17, 37n18, 38n24, 39n54, 41n99, 41n100, 41n101, 41n107, 41n108, 41n109, 41n110, 41n112, 41n113, 41n114, 41n115 N Nin, Anaïs, 96 P Pizarro, Arroyo, 95, 103–106, 109n40 Plaidy, Jean, 79, 82, 83 Plath, Sylvia, 50, 53, 59, 185n48 R Rich, Adrienne, 48, 55, 57–59, 63, 66, 67, 70n29, 70n32, 70n33, 70n37, 70n38, 193–195, 197, 206, 208n16, 208n20, 209n30, 211n75 Roberts, Michèle, x, 3 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 16, 17, 30, 38n36, 38n41 Schama, Simon, 76, 80 Showalter, Elaine, 2, 9n1, 107n11, 174, 184n43, 190, 191, 193, 207n4 Stein, Gertrude, 118, 122 W Warnicke, Retha, 81, 91n22 White, Hayden, 6, 74, 75, 77–82, 84, 87, 89, 90n8, 90n9, 90n11, 90n16, 90n17, 91n23, 91n24, 91n25, 91n26, 158n51

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INDEX

Winnicott, D. W., 48, 49, 53, 54, 61, 62, 64–66, 68n6, 68n14, 70n39, 70n41, 70n42, 70n43, 70n44, 71n45, 71n46, 71n49, 71n50 Winterson, Jeanette, ix, 3, 6, 8, 111–133 Woolf, Virginia, x, 3, 6, 8, 9n7, 20, 26, 39n55, 39n56, 39n66, 47, 48, 55–58, 61, 62, 66, 67, 67n1, 67n2, 67n3, 69n18, 69n19, 69n20, 69n21, 69n22, 69n23, 69n24, 69n25, 69n26, 96,

111–133, 134n5, 134n10, 134n14, 134n16, 134n20, 134n26, 134n30, 134n33, 135n34, 135n35, 135n41, 135n42, 135n45, 135n47, 135n50, 135n52, 135n53, 135n55, 135n59, 135n61, 135n62, 135n63, 135n65, 136n67, 136n77, 136n81, 136n85, 136n86, 136n88, 136n90, 136n94, 136n96, 136n100