Book reviews: Art and womanhood: From the female imagination to feminine consciousness

The Female Imagination, by Patricia Meyer Spacks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975, $10.

Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel, by Sydney Janet Kaplan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975, $7.95.     

Metaphysics and reality of the feminine in early Neo-Confucian thought

The rise of the Neo-Confucian movement marks an important transition in the history of Chinese women. Before this mode of thought became widespread, customs regarding divorce, remarriage, and education generally allowed women a relatively high degree of personal freedom. The Neo-Confucian movement changed this by reinterpreting the Confucian classics in ways that sharply limited the range of social options open to women. Most significantly the Neo-Confucians emphasized the flawed nature of yin, the basic feminine element, enshrining this antipathy in their complex metaphysical systems. These philosophic abstractions soon influenced works ranging from history to family management. In this way the attitudes expressed by Neo-Confucians slowly spread into the popular consciousness. Thus many of the popular notions held toward women in China today date from the beginnings of Neo-Confucianism.     

Quest for grace: fraternal authority and feminine resistance in colonial Australia

The emergence of feminism in Australia, as elsewhere, was grounded in personal experience. This paper explores the small and private rebellion of one woman against fraternal authority, an episode that took place before women had access to a feminist ideology with which to express their feelings of oppression. It argues that an examination of the tissue of domestic life – in this instance, a tiff about piano-playing – can be read at a number of levels: as a metaphor of inarticulate resistance and as an important precondition for feminism.     

The Double Play of Mirrors: Anna Kavan,Autobiography and Self-Portraiture

Abstract

Better known as the author of complex visionary novels of female experience, it is important to note that Anna Kavan was not only a writer, but also an artist, painting throughout her adult life in tandem with her writing. This article considers the nature of the relationship between her literary life and her artistic life, and what her novels tell us about her relationship to the cultivation of her self-image. Famously destroying her personal archive, shirking notable correspondents and recapitulating a mental disquiet across many of her paintings and prose works, it is of little surprise that Kavan’s enigmatic presence often figures more prominently than serious discussion of her literary and artistic achievements. How did this mercurial relationship to identity shape the ways in which Kavan explored her self-image?     

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.     

Gender,body, and feminine performance: Edna St.Vincent Millay's impact on Anne Sexton

This paper will discuss Edna Millay's influence on Anne Sexton, with particular reference to issues such as gender politics, femininity, performativity, and the female body. Through close comparative readings of some of the two women's most representative poems, I analyze, firstly, how Millay's outspokenness and daring self-presentation as a woman writer facilitated Sexton's handling of material that was previously considered unacceptable for poetry and, secondly, how Sexton expanded the scope of women's writing in a manner that paid tribute to the earlier poet's innovation. My paper maintains that Millay's repeated attempts to explore gender and interrogate the concept of ‘authentic’ femininity anticipated Sexton's overtly feminist works. Ultimately, I am arguing that, despite the literary climate of the 1960s (which urged the rejection of poets like Millay) and despite her own ambiguous feelings for the earlier poet, Sexton eventually recovered Millay as an important literary predecessor for her generation, consistently imitated her artistic posturing, performance strategies, and self-presentation, and finally acknowledged her unique contribution to women's writing.