Authenticity of self‐expression: Reinterpretation of female independence through the writings of simone de beauvoir

Based on the autobiographical writings of Simone de Beauvoir, this paper reinterprets the concepts of “dependency” and “independence” with respect to women's experiences. De Beauvoir, considered a strong and independent woman, continuously struggled for emotional independence, a struggle which she conceived as being against the need that drove her “impetuously toward another person”. However, a careful examination of de Beauvoir's inner voice as it is reflected in the subtext of her autobiographical writings, suggests that her true struggle revolves around a desire for authentic expression of her feelings and needs — rather than for separation from others.

As an adolescent de Beauvoir was caught between the expectations of her parents and her own needs, remaining the “dutiful daughter” at the expense of being false to her own self. This pattern of dependency reappears in her adult life, when she seems to be incapable of validating her feelings of jealousy and anger in her relationship with Sartre. Her means of coping with this problem is by giving it a literary expression, hence, she seems to gain a sense of freedom and independence by giving her repressed feelings an authentic outlet.

The re‐reading of de Beauvoir's autobiography in a new light of feminist criticism reveals a concept of dependency different from the need to rely on, receive help from, and be influenced by another. When one examines the meanings of dependency and independence through the female language of connectedness and women's values of care and involvement, the essential meaning of dependency shifts from the lack of self‐reliance to suppression of self‐expression, and from struggles for separation to struggles for one's personal truth and for authenticity in one's relations with others.     

Challenging the Biological: The Fantasy of Male Birth as a Nineteenth-Century Narrative of Ethical Failure

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë portrays a fully realized heroine who challenges society's and fiction's conventional roles for women. In order to broaden her heroine's role, Brontë had to go beyond the genres open to her — the novel of manners, the Gothic, and the governess novel — to establish a new genre: the feminist fairytale. In establishing this genre, Brontë pinpoints Jane's specifically female dilemma: how to achieve intimacy and still maintain independence.

At once beautiful and terrible, sustaining and destructive, fire is the perfect element to convey a sense of Jane's often conflicting desires. Brontë carefully establishes hearth fires as an index to how included and “at home” Jane feels. Similarly, Brontë uses metaphors of self‐sacrifice and immolation to indicate times when Jane feels her independence is being threatened.

The hearth fires and the metaphorical fires are overshadowed by the “big” fires in the novel, but their consistent, unobtrusive use allows Brontë to reinforce her theme in the simple details of the story and to maintain an attention to craft that is too often undervalued or ignored.     

Making It Up with the Motherland: Revision and Reconciliation in Edna O'Brien's The Light of Evening

This article explores the relationship between the Irish woman writer and exile and return in Edna O'Brien's recent novel The Light of Evening (2006). This work, dedicated as it is ‘To my mother and my motherland’, represents a new chapter in O'Brien's configuration of the connection between the Irish woman writer and the image of Ireland as a place from which escape is a necessary step towards creative freedom. The Light of Evening contains a web of subtle allusions that invite a reading of the novel as a statement of O'Brien's allegiances with the English and Irish literary traditions. Ultimately, however, it foregrounds the quotidian world of the main character's home place—one represented fully in her mother's letters—as the key source of inspiration for the Irish woman writer. The article examines how relationships with the literary past are mapped onto familial ties in the novel, as O'Brien seems to move away from the Joycean promise of creative exile towards a more hopeful reading of the relationship between the Irish woman writer and her ‘motherland’.     

Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.     

The Changing Images of Simone de Beauvoir in Norway

Abstract

The ways in which the French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) has been portrayed in Norwegian print media have undergone significant changes since she was first introduced to the Norwegian reading public in the 1940s. But how—and why—did her image evolve? This article explores the interplay between the words and phrases used to depict de Beauvoir in Norwegian print media and her seminal essay Le deuxième sexe (1949) and different translations in Norway. By analysing how de Beauvoir is depicted, I aim to produce a better understanding of her multiple and changing images in Norway, and to show how they may be related to the different translations of her best-known work and to her changing status. The transformation of de Beauvoir—from being considered outdated and dependent on Sartre during the 1940s and 1950s, to being highly valued and recognized as an author and memorialist, significant philosopher, and popular feminist icon at the turn of the millennium—is partly a result of the different translations of her major work. At the same time, it could be claimed that her changing image prepared the ground for the translations.     

The Archive Function

As Joan Wallach Scott warns in The Fantasy of Feminist History, the danger of depositing one's personal papers in an archive is that one's papers then become open to misinterpretation. In this article, Scott's fears are enacted in relation to another feminist theorist's archival collection, that of prominent Canadian scholar Barbara Godard who died before she could complete the process of donating her papers to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. Drawing on personal memories and eclectic textual traces, this article attempts to recover Godard's theory of the archive—a theory she never fully articulated in her lifetime, despite dedicating much of her time and energy to collecting and preserving her own words and the words and papers of her students and collaborators.     

Tracing two generations in twentieth century Indian women's education through analysis of literary sources: selected writings by Padmini Sengupta

ABSTRACT

This article uses literary sources written by Padmini Sengupta, 1906–1988 (daughter of Kamala Satthinadhan, 1880–1950, educator, writer, and editor of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine) to map two generations of women in India from reformist backgrounds and their education and writing. Padmini's biography of her mother, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, 1956, is analyzed at length. Here, Sengupta offers at once a memoir of her own growing years and a biographical portrait of her mother Kamala Satthianadhan. Supplementing this analysis is an examination of how women's education is represented in Sengupta's novel Red Hibiscus, 1962. Padmini wrote many works of a non-fictional and biographical nature. In analyzing her writing, we also understand better how Indian women writers representing their own educational trajectories in the print and public sphere shortly after Indian independence lay the groundwork for the later development of women's history and Women's Studies in India.     

Stevie Smith's Myth-Kitty

Abstract

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 ‘statement on poetry’, contemptuously called a ‘common myth-kitty’. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this ‘myth-kitty’, especially ?n her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld.     

the ambivalence of colonial desire in Marguerite Duras's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Lover</Emphasis>

This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial society. In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject – one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy – is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies.     

Love and Marriage: Ellen Key and Hiratsuka Raichō Explore Alternatives

This article provides a case study of how maternal feminist ideas traveled across national and cultural boundaries in the early twentieth century. It briefly examines Swedish feminist Ellen Key's (1849–1926) ideas on love, marriage, and motherhood and then explores the impact these ideas had on Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971). Encountering Key's writings early in her career had a lasting impact on Raichō's thought, writing, and activism. It also shows how Raichō drew on the modern, universal aspects of Key's thought to promote women's rights and influence in an increasingly nationalistic Japan. The condition of all development is, not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action. —Ellen Key, Love and Marriage 3.     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

Adventures of Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiographies,Women's Liberation,and Self-Fashioning

While The Second Sex is usually taken as Simone de Beauvoir's major theoretical contribution to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s it was very often through her autobiographies – especially Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and Force of Circumstance, along with novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins – that her feminist ideas were most thoroughly absorbed. The autobiographies became nothing less than a guide for the fashioning of a new kind of feminine self. Where The Second Sex had intimated that a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their identity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies which suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere slogan, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascinating and challenging life. In this paper, I reflect on de Beauvoir and her historical and contemporary relevance: first through reminiscence and re-reading of the autobiographies themselves; then with an historical examination of how they were read, taking Sydney, Australia, as my example; and finally by offering some reflections on subsequent feminist critique.     

Editorial

The whole of this issue of Australian Feminist Studies is devoted to the theme ‘Making us Modern’ guest-edited by Alison Ravenscroft. Modernity was, I have argued myself, an essential element of First-wave Feminism. The articles that Alison has brought togetherm show how mutually imbricated are questions raised by a later feminism and modernism. Alison has written her own introduction for this splendid issue. Accordingly, all that I need to do here is extraneous to it. I want to record our regret at the passing of Oriel Gray, one of Australia's first female playwrights. The Playwrights' Advisory Board voted her work, The Torrents, best play in 1955, alongside Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. She wrote a number of stage plays, worked for radio and television, and published an autobiography—Exit Left: Memoirs of a Scarlet Woman (Penguin Books)—in 1985. I want to record our sadness, too, at the death of Glen Tomasetti, singer, song-writer and author. She wrote poetry, articles and reviews, and two novels: Thoroughly Decent People (1976), and Man of Letters (1981). In the Australian Women's Movement she is best known for one of the protest songs that she wrote in the early 1970s; this one, ‘Don't Be Too Polite, Girls’ has often been played as a kind of Women's Movement anthem. As always, I owe thanks to everyone who contributes to this journal—authors, assessors, editorial advisory collective members, review editor Susan Sheridan, assistant editor Mary Lyons, and, for this issue, my very warm thanks to Alison Ravenscroft.     

‘Not Simple,Not Pure’: Revisioning of Mythical Wicked Women in the Stories of Sara Maitland

The British novelist, feminist and religious thinker Sara Maitland (b.1950) is renowned for her short stories, many of which involve the rewriting of fairy tale and classical and biblical myth. This article situates Maitland's retellings within the contemporary feminist tradition of literary revisioning, but emphasises that her retelling of old tales is distinguished by a deep—and often discomforting—engagement with questions of morality. This is rooted in Maitland's political commitment and Christian faith, and is particularly evident in her treatment of mythical female evil. Her short stories take a morally ambiguous approach, paying attention to the moral and psychological complexities of the wicked stepmothers in fairy tale, gorgons and child-killers of classical myth, and temptresses of the Hebrew Bible. Maitland's feminist revisioning of mythical wicked women does not flinch from their darkness, or impose simple ethical lessons, but at the same time she is (sometimes horribly) aware of their moral significance. This article examines the portrayal of feminist theology's concept of the ‘female sin’ of passivity in Maitland's revisioning of Delilah (in Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978) and ‘Helen of Troy's Aerobics Class’ (in On Becoming A Fairy Godmother, 2003); how the crimes of mythical wicked women are retold as being motivated by revenge against men in ‘Deborah and Jael’ (Daughter of Jerusalem), ‘Siren Song’ and ‘The Swallow and the Nightingale’ (Far North and Other Dark Tales, 2008). The latter of these raises issues of women's conflicting loyalties, which is also considered in ‘The Swans’ (2008). The taboos of incest and child abuse are explored powerfully and sensitively in ‘Jocasta’ (2003) and ‘The Wicked Stepmother's Lament’ (A Book of Spells, 1987), and resistance to simplistic moralising is encapsulated in the story of a menopausal Eve, in ‘Choosing Paradise’ (2003).     

The Spinster in the Garden: Joy and Transcendence in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Father and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

Abstract

This article proposes an original reading of Father (1931) and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), two texts by Elizabeth von Arnim that centre on a young single woman. It will examine how female autonomy is spatially imagined in the form of a garden and poses significant challenges to the patriarchal societies presented in the texts. Many scholars have detailed the recurring motif of the garden in Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899). The two texts this article addresses were published later than those that have been discussed in relation to the garden, and signal a move away from the married female towards an examination of the independent or single female. Significantly, they disrupt the traditional ‘marriage plot’ novel by tracing two single women’s movement into the garden as a retreat from the societies in which they live. In both texts, von Arnim presents a distinctively beautiful, transcendent garden experience for her female protagonists that contrasts with the oppressive expectations placed on them by urban society. These texts turn on dichotomies—city/country, built/organic environments, repression/freedom—to expose the central characters’ repression and their attempts to gain some degree of independence. Each central character experiences joy as a result of her interaction with the organic environment and the power the protagonist exercises over this space.     

Anxiety about Whiteness in Joyce Carol Oates's Novel Blonde

Since the beginning of the 1990s Joyce Carol Oates's fiction manifests increasing interest in the issues of race and ethnicity. Her novel Blonde (2000), a fictional depiction of Marilyn Monroe's life, reflects critically the construction of white self, and displays racialization as a complex dialogue between social practices and individual subject constitution. Inspired by critical whiteness studies and feminist theories of intersectionality, this article examines how Oates's novel represents effects of racialization to a white female identity and aims to decipher questions about power and discursive conceptions concerning ideas of race and gender. By giving emphasis to the concepts formation and interface in the US context and American literary tradition, the analysis shows how the construction of the protagonist's gendered and racialized identity is represented as a complex and anxiety-ridden negotiation. The representation of the protagonist's engagement with the white ideal highlights both her desires and anxieties about the idea of race. In so doing, Oates's novel elicits how racialization works both as defining and limiting to white female identity.     

Trickster Humour in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home: Negotiating Arab American Muslim Female Sexuality

Randa Jarrar’ s A Map of Home (2008), a major contemporary Arab American woman's novel, utilizes trickster humour as a way to resist the ideological manufacture of the Muslim female body propounded by US orientalism, Islamist orthodoxy and secular Arab patriarchy. Current scholarship on A Map of Home has not examined the relationship between humour and contemporary female sexuality. Focusing mostly on authorial tone, this article reads the novel's narrator-protagonist, Nidali Ammar, as a trickster figure, who resists being perceived as a cultural heroine and in doing so disrupts the sacredness of social conventions. The trickster A Map of Home celebrates, and Nidali enacts, prompts readers to laugh at key cultural norms shaping the Muslim female body in post-9/11 US sculpture. This inquiry examines a range of interconnected sexual themes—most notably, ‘proper’ sexual boundaries, orientations and codes of virginity—to illustrate how trickster humour fosters Arab American women's agency.     

Effeminate Edmund Burke and the masculine voice of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the gendered and nationalist rhetorical strategies Mary Wollstonecraft used in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Man which was written as an open letter of response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France . While a number of scholars note Wollstonecraft’s adoption of a masculine voice in her systematic feminizing of Burke, this article also pays attention to the ways in which Wollstonecraft impugns Burke with the taints of being crypto-Catholic, Irish, and quasi-French. We notice how Wollstonecraft’s masculine voice is rational, combative, righteously passionate, middle-class, patriotically English and critically Protestant. We compare the fashioning of Wollstonecraft’s voice with contemporary political caricatures of John Bull and the cartoon depictions of Edmund Burke that appeared as Wollstonecraft was composing her VRM. Wollstonecraft’s VRM gained her considered attention and her critique of Burke’s character, (and what this article claims is her misreading of his aesthetic treatise), have been remarkably influential even to the present day. The characteristics of the distinct voice created in Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication are also evident in her second and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, the rhetorical commitments entailed in Wollstonecraft’s public voice created challenges for her arguments in the second Vindication that demand careful attention.     

Catherine Breillat's Romance and Anatomy of Hell: Subjectivity and the Gendering of Sexuality

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has consistently challenged viewers to consider the ways women negotiate sexual freedom in light of numerous forces of repression. This essay considers how Breillat's depiction of women's sexuality in Romance and Anatomy of Hell simultaneously evokes abjection and empowerment. Specifically, we consider Breillat's contrast between her female protagonists and male protagonists, her treatment of women and their bodies as infused with desire yet struggling towards sexual subjectivity, and the avenues available to women to define themselves outside of hegemonic masculinity. We argue that Breillat's provocative portrayals provoke consideration of the problems inherent in hegemonic female sexuality while also offering hopeful alternatives to sexual expression, sexual freedom, and changing definitions of power and pleasure.     

Netta syrett's lesbian heroine

This article discusses Judgment Withheld (1934) in which Netta Syrett makes it clear that the most likeable character, Mimi Landsfeld, is a lesbian. This was unusual, other writers being too afraid of prosecution to depict lesbianism sympathetically, particularly after Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness was banned in 1928. The article also shows how Syrett combined her established reputation as a writer of popular fiction with offering her middlebrow readers varied and controversial portrayals of sexual relationships, including homosexuality. The article concludes with comments on Syrett's personal life, thereby placing her novels in context.