Feminist Fiction Research Articles

Employing references in feminist fiction: A theoretical approach.

Employing references in feminist fiction: A theoretical approach.

Feminine Sensibility and Self-Affirmation of Woman in Shashi Deshpande’s “The Dark Holds No Terrors”

Shashi Deshpande’s novel “The Dark Holds No Terrors” explores themes related to feminine sensibility and self-affirmation in the context of a woman’s life.Fictional works by Shashi Deshpande depict the struggles of Indian women and build a world from the perspective of feminists. Her story presentations in That Long Silence are very real, thanks to the emotional identification and validation of self-anguishing via their difficulties. She stands in for the feminist longing for India’s rich cultural heritage and traditional practices that these women feel. She admits her fictitious art world was lacking strength and significance due to a lack of understanding of Indian women’s inner lives. Deshpande disrupts the typical matrix of ‘home and homelessness’ in the galaxy of feminist fiction by creating different narrative patterns that give her feminist protagonists adequate freedom to show their repressed sense for their motherland. Aside from the characters’ sentimentality, she promotes local sensibility via poetry, performances, ethics, and ethnic arts. In her narrative work, she has come to terms with the paradigms and commitments.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Feminist Manifesto as a Compilation of Her Major Topics

Abstract Her award-winning novels and thought-provoking TED talks propelled the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie into the public consciousness and sparked a worldwide discourse about feminism in the late 2010s. Adichie uses her work to empower women all around the world to dismantle gender constructs, stereotypes, and sexualities designed to enslave women in society. Several researchers have successfully construed common motifs in her fiction. This paper draws on recent studies undertaken by Moffat Sebola, who affirms that Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017) is not only a list of proposals; with closer examination, the manifesto reveals the recurring themes throughout Adichie’s writing. Furthermore, for analytical convenience, Moffat Sebola (2022) selects only seven of Adichie’s fifteen suggestions, identifies the elements that reflect her authorial perspective, and utilizes them as filters in analysing the author’s novels. The main objective of this study has been the presentation of the elements of Adichie’s fiction in all fifteen manifesto statements. In order to achieve this objective, themes of womanhood, femininity, love, history, culture, gender equality, and otherness are discussed in separate sections with examples from her novels. The first section of the paper provides a brief overview of African feminist fiction within which the work of this third-generation Nigerian writer is embedded.

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Unbecoming Language by Annabel L. Kim is a detailed study of three French writers: Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig and Anne Garréta. Through extensive and careful analysis of each of these writers’ works and personal backgrounds, Kim traces a direct chain of influence between them. Furthermore, she proposes to consider their works as a common corpus—a coherent theoretical project of anti-difference writing: an innovative project that presents us with ways in which language can become a means of societal and political potential to undo identity. In the first of four chapters, Kim examines Sarraute’s work and proposes a new, surprising rereading of her corpus. Even though Sarraute is most often situated within the categories of New Novel and “woman writer,” Kim argues that both categories rob us of some important aspects of her works and instead offers a political reading of Sarraute’s writing. In her study of Sarraute, Kim pays special attention to Tropismes, in which language becomes a powerful force with the ability to shape reality. For Kim, Sarraute’s tropisms place the reader in an indeterminate space where they can experience language as Sarraute’s anonymous subjectivities, and, through an encounter with unbecoming language, have their own identity erased. In this sense, Kim concludes that Sarraute’s writing is revolutionary.

Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as a Feminist Bildungsroman

In accordance with the increasing confirmation within feminist literary and cultural studies on women’s literature and the rumination of its social function to provide a sympathetic as well as a critical analysis of contemporary feminist fiction, this paper explores the attempt of women writers to reconfigure and reformulate established fictional genres to create more responsive genres that better represent the heterogeneity of women’s experiences. Focusing on the way Audre Lorde incorporates individual and collective memories as well as erotic and traumatic memories in her literary works, I use the literary category of feminist Bildungsroman to examine her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in which she presents an alternative model of female development. The paper traces the strenuous personal development and transformation of Audre as a black woman endeavouring to challenge marginalization and resist the various forms and layers of abuse and subjugation practiced against her in a racist and sexist society. Taking into consideration that the political implications of women’s writing can only be theorized when it is related to the cultural and ideological processes that shape it, I employ Rita Felski’s analysis of women’s modern writing as a area where female political identities and collective consciousness are treated and depicted.
 In accordance with the increasing confirmation within feminist literary and cultural studies on women’s literature and the rumination of its social function to provide a sympathetic as well as a critical analysis of contemporary feminist fiction, this paper explores the attempt of women writers to reconfigure and reformulate established fictional genres to create more responsive genres that better represent the heterogeneity of women’s experiences. Focusing on the way Audre Lorde incorporates individual and collective memories as well as erotic and traumatic memories in her literary works, I use the literary category of feminist Bildungsroman to examine her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in which she presents an alternative model of female development. The paper traces the strenuous personal development and transformation of Audre as a black woman endeavouring to challenge marginalization and resist the various forms and layers of abuse and subjugation practiced against her in a racist and sexist society. Taking into consideration that the political implications of women’s writing can only be theorized when it is related to the cultural and ideological processes that shape it, I employ Rita Felski’s analysis of women’s modern writing as a area where female political identities and collective consciousness are treated and depicted.

Politics and Poetics

Politics and Poetics

Reading Fraud from the Gaze Theory: The Gaze and Anti-Gaze in Anna Durrant

The loneliness and isolation experienced by older women have frequently been the focus of Brookner's writing. Fraud, one of her typical novels, provided a provocative perspective on age and gender. In light of a number of previous studies, this article aims to contribute to the study of feminist fiction that focuses on older women and to encourage more academic inquiry and study in this area. Based on the method of literature research and detailed reading of Fraud, the essay demonstrated the dual gaze that Anna, the protagonist of Fraud, experienced from both sexes, particularly from her mother and Lawrence Halliday, in accordance with the gaze theory. The gaze showed exterior control in Anna as well as how she internalized those gaze and molded herself into the object of others’ sight. Though she was observed by others and lived by their expectations for half of her life, Anna "counter-gazed" the overall look in her own unique way. She was liberated from the ongoing fraud thanks to her anorexia, dreams, straight look, and clothing design. Finally, the once-submissive Anna developed into an independent woman, speaking up forcefully for women to follow their own aspirations. By examining the gaze and anti-gaze that Anna experienced, the essay empowers all older women to recognize that new routes are open to them and inspires all women to confront the oppressive gaze and live their lives to the fullest.

『미들마치』와 『각성』: 이타적 봉사와 ‘진정한 자아’

In this article, I apply a feminist lens to study the two heroines, Dorothea Brooke of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) and Mrs. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” (1899). The two heroines each pursue intellectual fulfillment and desire to find their “true selves” in patriarchal nineteenth-century society. In marrying 45-year-old pastor Casaubon, Dorothea, like a modern Saint Teresa, seeks to achieve self-fulfillment through her husband, but, eventually frustrated with his monochrome and stuffy life, marries Will Ladislaw after Casaubon’s death. Chopin’s Edna, on the other hand, achieves her true self only through rejecting an identity based solely on her roles as mother and wife. First, she purchases a small house with her own money, thereby gaining both psychological and economic independence. However, realizing that she can neither live with her husband nor run away with Robert, she ultimately decides to commit suicide as she wades into the water. Her awakening had made her painfully cognizant of her tormented life, and she concludes that the only path to mental victory is through death. She rejects the roles patriarchal society expects of her, and, in accomplishing freedom the only way she can, makes “The Awakening” a seminal work of feminist fiction. Female authors like Eliot and Chopin portrayed the “inaudible weeping” of women trapped in systems that deny them their full humanity.

Wasting time? The politics and poetics of feminist waiting

ABSTRACT In this article I analyse the politics and poetics of waiting, as it is represented in feminist fictions of the 1970s, through reference to relevant philosophies of time. Focusing on examples drawn from American literary culture, I trace how writers including Lisa Alther and Marilyn French have envisioned the role of waiting in women’s oppression and liberation, and ask why feminist fictions so routinely explore the issue of gender inequality through the experiences of those who wait. Extrapolating Henri Bergson’s claim in Creative Evolution (1907) that waiting sharpens the individual’s consciousness of time, I investigate the emotional valences of waiting and its literary articulations, arguing that the agitated feelings associated with waiting – from excitement and anticipation to impatience and dread – work to establish an affective temporality of waiting that comes to characterise the feminist novel in the 1970s. More pressingly, perhaps, as depictions of waiting acquire currency as salient animations of women’s asynchronous temporality, I explore the extent to which attempts to represent women’s fears and desires in time might, for certain subjects, model new forms of ethical engagement and political action.

Patriarchal Spell In Veronica Roth’s Divergent

Divergent is the first series of Divergent trilogy penned by Veronica Roth. As a work that tells a story about a supposedly strong female protagonist, the novel seems to uphold feminist values. However, upon a closer look, the pro-feminist worldview found in the novel operates merely on a cosmetic level. The long-standing patriarchal ideas about women still hold this novel captive, making it incapable of realizing its affirmative feminist aspirations. This study aims at proving that Divergent’s superficial pro-feminist stance is subverted by the underlying support it has for patriarchal ideas. The analysis is conducted by applying Margery Hourihan’s theory regarding three patriarchy’s archetypal conceptions about women—The Mother, Damsel-in-Distress, and The Witch. In gathering the data and conducting the analysis, this study employs qualitative methods. The result of this study shows that, while the novel appears to be a feminist fiction, it is still firmly grounded in patriarchal and misogynistic values that do not coincide with current feminist ideas about gender equality and female identity.

Remembering Carol Lazzaro-Weis (1949–2022)

Remembering Carol Lazzaro-Weis (1949–2022)

Pangs of Widowhood in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novel Water

Since the dawn of time, gender inequity and sex discrimination have been the result of the human mentality. Internationally acclaimed author Bapsi Sidhwa has contributed significantly to the field of feminist fiction. Her magnificent novels are a mix of conflict and beliefs, sensibility and dignity, all of which are rooted in the Indian Subcontinent's historical, political, and socio-cultural context. Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Water, set against the backdrop of Indian Freedom Movement, questions the orthodox religious traditions and the repressive restraints imposed on Hindu widows, pushing the bounds of India's male-dominated cultural narratives beyond patriarchal predicaments. She exposes the centuries-old practices that oppress women though her internationally acclaimed novels. The novel Water’s theme is contentious and complicated. It is about the plight of widows in India in 1930s. Water exposes traditional intrinsic indifference, fatalism, and orthodox conventions and injustice to women.

The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities

This article furthers ongoing work on the merits of the feminist novel’s intrinsic variability by probing its dynamics in four publishing contexts: contemporary anglophone literary criticism, prestigious review publications, marketing materials, and online book reviews by social readers. We explore how these interpretive communities converge and diverge in their assessments of feminist fiction over the past twenty-five years by evaluating articles from the MLA International Bibliography, book reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supp-lement, and other prominent periodicals, blurbs from Amazon, and Goodreads reviews. We trace the feminist novel’s ambivalent fates—or rather, feminist novels’ ambivalent fates—in and across these four domains. To do so, we engage computational methods of topic modeling, most distinctive word analysis, and named entity recognition. We synthesize these quantitative results with qualitative attention to provocative examples from our corpus. In so doing, we consider how literary scholars can develop more robust understandings of what feminism and feminist fiction mean to contemporary readers and what we stand to gain by bringing this diverse interpretive labor into our scholarly conversations.

Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’: madness, mothers and ghosts

This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron’s notion of the ‘global gothic’, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women’s rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the ‘time of ignorance’, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women’s relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts.

‘Creative Ferment’: abortion and reproductive agency in Bessie Head’s Personal Choices trilogy

Using original archival research from Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, this article examines representations of abortion in three novels by Bessie Head: When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971)...

God is a Female Plant: Femininity and Divinity in the Stories of Anne Richter, Kathe Koja, and Karen Russell

ABSTRACT This essay is concerned with the relationship between femininity and divinity in feminist speculative fiction. It equates becoming divine with becoming plant, and studies the transformations that attend women in this process in modernity, postmodernity and transmodernity. Taking as its point of departure Mark Taylor’s evolution of the concept of God through immanence, transcendence and immanent transcendence, and Rosa María Rodríguez Magda’s definition of transmodernity, it examines “The Sleep of Plants” (1967) by Anne Richter, “The Neglected Garden” (1991) by Kathe Koja, and “The Bad Graft” (2014) by Karen Russell. It argues that by becoming plants these women locate themselves in opposition to the norms of divinity created by men, and proposes to delineate the contours of a new feminist paradigm in the present transmodern age through the study of botany.

Kendine Ait Bir Kimlik: Postmodern Feminist Bir Kurguda Akademik Kadının Feminist İdeolojisi ve Kimlik Krizi

Why academic women struggle to find an identity of their own in “the genderization of science” (Keller, 1984, 78)? Is it because they still “face stereotyping, gendered barriers, exclusion, mobbing, discounting and discrediting in the patriarchal domain of science”? (Buran, 2020). This paper close-reads the interface between feminist ideology and biology that Margaret Drabble develops in her The Millstone (1965), which tells the transition from traditional ideal women to women in crisis in Post-War Britain. This postmodern feminist fiction reconstructs an alternative woman protagonist, Rosamund Stacey, liberated in all facets of life for whom marriage is not the goal but her academic career, as she prefers to remain a single mother without depending on a husband. The aim of this article is to explore how Drabble portrays an academic woman’s self-journey towards a sense of fragmented identity crises of social, familial, professional, and maternal. This is achieved by exploring Rosamund’s quest to find her feminist ideology and true identity flying from body constraints and socially assigned female roles.

Big heroine dramas in contemporary China: Costume, authenticity and an alternative history of women of power

Big heroine dramas (da nü zhu jü) – a specific category of Chinese costume dramas – have been popular recently, due to the big market of female audiences/consumers in China, and brought up fierce debates on feminism. The shows, written by female authors, are about the stories of powerful women in imperial China. A critical hypothesis here is that the shows combine the figuration of ancient, powerful women and a persona of neo-liberalist feminism. Why do audiences accept the anachronism of big heroine dramas, and how does historical authenticity become coherent with a modern narrative? With costume as an analytical corpus, this article involves the approaches of feminist theory, historical theory and costume studies. The costumes of big heroine dramas are a hybridity of authentic antique and imaginary design. They contribute to building up historical authenticity and the neo-liberalist ideas of power and hierarchy. Costumes thus become the field where the authenticity of the past folds with the reality of the present. Meanwhile, big heroine dramas rewrite an alternative history of powerful women for women audiences. The assemblage of historiography and modern feminist fiction offers rebellious narratives that disturb the state-advocated notion of heterosexual romantic relationships, marriage and family.

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions. By Annabel L. Kim

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions. By Annabel L. Kim

유대계 영문학의 분기점: 에이미 레비의 『루벤 삭스』를 중심으로

Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs, among her three novels published in her very short literary career, is the only one which intendedly tackles the “Anglo-Jewish question” set in a upper-middle class Jewish community in West London. As the first Jewish female student at Cambridge, Levy has an ambition for placing her poems and fictions in the great tradition of women’s literature, also in the tradition of Anglo-Jewish writing.BR As Britain had been regarded as a “sweet exile” for the wandering Jews of Europe since the re-establishment of Anglo-Jewish communities in the 17th century, Levy’s contemporary Jews were enjoying the status of ‘successful minority’ in Britain, especially after the Jewish Emancipation in 1858. However, there remained all the stereotypes of the Jewish, both anti- and pro-Semite, which polarized the Jewish characters in fiction into the innocent and the pious on the one hand, and the shrewd and the greedy, as the ones in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.BR Levy tries to portray Jewish people as they really are, with all their complexities and self-contradictions, without those apologetic or self-congratulatory attitudes of Jewish writers before her. In Reuben Sachs, Levy sneers at the snobbery and materialist culture among the Jewish middle class, through the unrequited love and inter-racial marriage of Judith Quixano. Levy switches focus from the successful career and the sudden death of a promising Reuben, to the frustration of Judith, a Jewish woman of intellect and dignity whom she sympathizes with.BR Reuben Sachs is not only a creative reworking of marriage plot which has been popularized since the rise of the novel itself, but also a very unique feminist fiction where all the problems of race, gender and class are entangled around the suffering of an attractive, but all too modest Jewish woman.