Trauma, Female Identity and the Trope of Splitting in Lessing, Figes, Tennant and Weldon

Abstract

Issues concerning identity have preoccupied both feminist theorists and women writers from the beginning of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s to the present. However, the definition of the category ‘woman’ has proved to be problematic. The position of liberal feminism, which is based on traditional humanist assumptions about human integrity and autonomy and which requires essential female identity as an organisational category for political action, has been challenged by poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers. On the one hand, it has been argued that this essentialist position disguises the divided character of subjectivity and clashes with Freud’s theory of the unconscious and those poststructuralist ideas, developed by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, which emphasise the incoherence, difficulty and discontinuity in all human identity. 1 On the other hand, postmodernist philosophers, like Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, have called attention to the fact that the subject is never fully autonomous, being born into language, culture, and some specific politics of race, class and gender.2 As Patricia Waugh points out, exploring the contradictoriness of female identity, women writers have recognised that ‘the formulation of a unified “woman’s voice” is as risky a strategy as its dissolution into a fluid and free-floating semiosis’ (2006, p. 204). Waugh also notes that throughout the 1970s and 1980s feminist theorists were particularly concerned with this contradiction: how might women affirm a feminine identity historically constructed through the very cultural and ideological formations which feminism as a movement was also seeking to challenge and deconstruct? (p. 198).