Fall 2010, Volume 29, Number 2

(Publication schedule is a year behind; the fall 2010 issue was published in fall 2011)

ARTICLES

At the Margins of Menippean Dialogue: Sarah Fielding’s “History of Anna Boleyn” and the Muted Female Figures of Lucian’s Satiric Underworld
Elizabeth Goodhue

Scholarship on ancient and modern dialogues of the dead has had surprisingly little to say about the genre’s persistent antifeminism—and no more to offer about the women writers of Britain’s long eighteenth century who called attention to that hostile undercurrent by authoring scenes of posthumous speech that stretched the gendered limits of the form. This article redresses both oversights by reading Sarah Fielding’s posthumous speech of Anna Boleyn against the satiric portraits of women in Lucian of Samosata’s Menippean dialogues (second century CE) and in the works of Fielding’s brother Henry. The essay argues that Lucian and his male followers predicate the afterlife of satiric speech on the repeated truncation and distortion of feminine voices; it also expands the critical definition of “Menippean” dialogues to accommodate the alternative story told by women writers. A brief coda then places Fielding’s “History of Anna Boleyn” in a wider feminist context by situating the text alongside her Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia and a pair of underworld dialogues composed by Fielding’s fellow bluestocking, Elizabeth Montagu.

The Difference She Makes: Staging Gender Identity in Graffigny’s Phaza
Heidi Bostic

Françoise de Graffigny’s mid-eighteenth-century play Phaza features a main character who is unknowingly crossed dressed as male. The text provides a rich starting point for exploring questions of gender identity and performance. This article situates Phaza within the fairy-tale tradition in which women authors played a major role. Its analysis draws upon philosophies of narrative identity and theories of gender to show that identity comprises both permanence and performance. Reading Graffigny can make an important difference in our understanding of gender, authorship, and relations between the sexes in Enlightenment France. Phaza’s masquerade sheds light on the ways in which women authors of the era approached and assumed various gender identities. Eighteenth-century texts like Phaza reveal a lineage of ideas that continue to influence feminist thought today and will do so in the future.

“There is no sin in our love”: Homoerotic Desire in the Stories of Two Muslim Women Writers
Indrani Mitra

This article explores the conditions that make possible or impossible the articulation of homoerotic desire in the texts of two Muslim women writers, Ismat Chughtai’s “The Quilt” and Alifa Rifaat’s “My World of the Unknown.” Despite the homophobia written into colonial and nationalist discourses, Chughtai’s feminist voice is enabled by a particularly secular and progressive cultural moment in India in the 1940s. Rifaat, on the other hand, speaks out of a deep inner commitment to her faith as well as under the external pressures generated by a radical cultural climate and its effect on gender roles. Both women are ultimately unable to fully privilege homoerotic desire. The argument in this paper explores how far the texts take us, the manner in which each engages the teachings and traditions of the faith, and where, because of internal and external pressures, the writing must stop.

Speaking (in) the Silences: Gender and Anti-Narrative in Carole Maso’s Defiance
Robin Silbergleid

This essay treats Carole Maso’s novel Defiance as an instance of feminist “anti-narrative.” Toward this end, it considers the novel’s use of direct address, its formal and thematic silences, and its parody of narrative convention. It reflects on the lack of scholarship on the novel and situates it in the context of Maso’s nonfiction to argue that it might be understood as a piece of feminist narratology.

Uneasy Lie the Bones: Alice Sebold’s Postfeminist Gothic
Sarah Whitney

This essay considers the novels of Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (2002) and The Almost Moon (2007), within the nascent genre of postfeminist gothic. Sebold, the essay argues, revivifies the female Gothic genre in a moment that is invested in minimizing and repressing gendered inequity. The posthumous narrative of The Lovely Bones addresses the “victim/agent” debate within postfeminist discourse while dissipating rage over the heroine’s rape and murder through a variety of textual strategies. By contrast, The Almost Moon’s mad matricidal heroine exposes the rage simmering beneath the surface of postfeminism’s supposedly compliant visage. Both works explore the difficulty of writing about gendered violence and reveal tensions within postfeminist ideology.

“Painting While Rome Burns”: Ethics and Aesthetics in Pat Barker’s Life Class and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
Fiona Tolan

This article examines recent novels by Pat Barker and Zadie Smith, two of the most prominent contemporary British women writers. Both Barker’s Life Class (2007) and Smith’s On Beauty (2005) engage in a debate on the value and purpose of art and beauty as the protagonists attempt to articulate their own individual statements of moral purpose. This article suggests that Smith demonstrates a liberal humanist belief in transcendent and transformative values, whereas Barker, in contrast, proves more wary of inscribing this same confident vision of art’s moral worth. Nevertheless, On Beauty demonstrates a level of caution towards fully endorsing its strongly liberal humanist impulse, whereas Barker’s novel, despite its instinctual disavowal of liberal humanism, also sustains a romantic vision of transcendent nature that goes some way to disrupting the largely postmodern impulse of the text. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that Smith, despite her acknowledgement and exploration of the limits of liberal humanism, concludes her novel with an image of art’s capacity to drive positive ethical choices, whereas Barker’s final informing image is one of humanity cast adrift after World War I, unanchored by moral codes or liberal certainties.

“Female Poet” as Revolutionary Grotesque: Feminist Transgression in the Poetry of Ch’oe Su˘ng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yo˘n-ju

Ruth Williams

In South Korea male poets are simply referred to as siin (poet), while women poets are called yo˘ryu siin (female poet). As yo˘ryu siin, women poets are expected to write sentimental, “pretty” poetry that conforms to Korean poetic traditions as well as gender norms of femininity. In a radical transgression of these norms, the poems of contemporary South Korean poets Ch’oe Su˘ng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yo˘n-ju function like the body of a female grotesque as they seep from the page, protruding with images of violence, vomit, trash, bodily decay, and death. The poems’ “ugly” images weep an excess which transgresses not only Korean gender norms but the strictures of the yo˘ryu siin literary tradition. By writing poems which are neither gentle nor pretty, Ch’oe, Kim, and Yi employ what this article terms the “poetics of the grotesque” to challenge Korean patriarchal gender constructions and to contest the rosy visions fostered by Korean nationalism. By embracing the seepage of the abject, these poets subvert the restrictive façades of beauty and social acceptability in favor of a grotesque permeability that creates openings within their works through which a new language of Korean womanhood can be voiced. Reading these poets’ works within the framework of Mikhail Bhaktin’s theory of the grotesque and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject illuminates how their works create the problematic body of a female grotesque: a body which claims the unsettling power of ugliness to challenge and transform culture.

 

ARCHIVES

A Deleted Manuscript, an Early Story, and a New Approach to the Fiction of Lee Smith, Martha Billips

INNOVATIONS

Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives: The Woman Writers Project, Jacqueline Wernimont and Julia Flanders

Translating The Second Sex, Constance Borde and Shelia Malovany-Chevallier