Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World

In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.

The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture@@@Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women

Nous definissons l’hybridation litteraire comme la combinaison d’elements a priori disparates aboutissant a la creation d’un ensemble a la fois un et multiple, qui garde les traces de ses parties constitutives tout en etant autre, different, nouveau. L’hybride englobe les spheres de representation de ses elements-parents tout en les depassant. Par consequent, l’hybridation tend vers l’extension de toutes les frontieres, litteraires et culturelles, dans le but de nous offrir une vision du monde et du sujet toujours plus complete. Dans Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body et The PowerBook de Jeanette Winterson, l’hybridation se manifeste a tous les niveaux du texte. L’hybridite physique et sexuelle des narrateurs est ainsi une des manifestations de leurs identites et vies plurielles et paradoxales. Ces hybrides incarnes (monstres, travestis ou androgynes) se construisant au fil de leurs histoires, qui s’inspirent toujours de recits anterieurs, narrateurs et narrations se demultiplient conjointement, s’entremelent et se redefinissent sans cesse. Le texte fluctue au gre de l’hybridation generique et de l’intertextualite. De l’entrecroisement de genres realistes – tels que l’autobiographie, le recit historique ou le discours scientifique – et fictionnels – tels que le conte ou la romance – nait un hybride generique a resonances parodiques representant la nature du sujet, de sa vie, de la realite et de la verite. Enfin, en hybridant des textes preexistants a des motifs personnels, l’auteur elabore une narration originale qui reecrit les schemas sexistes relayes par ses ancetres et retranscrit sa vision de l’individu, du monde et de l’art.

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00835085/document

L'hybridation dans l'oeuvre de Jeannette Winterson

In comparison with ancient folklore, magic realism is a more recent form of fantastic fiction still relatively unfamiliar to many contemporary readers in Britain and Europe. Its very name associates the term with oxymoron (how can something simultaneously be “real” and “magical” at the end of the twentieth century?) and, in that regard, provides a perfect framework for many of the concerns of postmodern writers of the fantastic, while also being integrally concerned with the impact of post-colonialism upon narrative theory. The etymology of the term is repeatedly emphasized by all critics of the field. To reiterate this in brief, its origins lie in art history, first being coined in 1925 by Franz Roh, actually as a counter-response to what Roh saw as the “exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects” typical of the Expressionist movement.2 In literature it can be seen to take the opposite trajectory, rooting itself in the real, but allying magical realism with the extraordinary within the real, evoking a type of double-edged frisson not dissimilar to the concerns of the post-colonial, in that both actively resist turning what one might define as “the Other” (the fantastic/foreign/ native) into “the Same” (realism/empiricism/empire).3

Magic Realism Meets the Contemporary Gothic: Isabel Allende and Angela Carter

A great deal of work has, by now, been published on the gothic (including the female gothic), but until recently relatively little of that has focused upon the role played by the contemporary ghost story as a way of exploring female subjectivity. From the start this task may appear an atavistic one. In one of his characteristically sweeping statements, Freud confidently asserted in 1919, “All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits”, but this is not to say that he advocates their redundancy as objects of phantasy. On the contrary, he acknowledges: 
… the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation … Considering our unchanged attitude towards death, we might rather inquire what has become of the repression, which is the necessary condition of a primitive feeling recurring in the shape of something uncanny.2
As is well known, what Freud goes on to argue in his essay is that the mother’s body is the ultimate taboo which deflects us away from a recurrent confrontation with the dead, the mother’s genitals forming the all-pervasive embodiment of the uncanny: “what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un-’] is the token of repression”. Though the origins of life, for Freud the castration complex reconfigures the mother’s body as the space of death to the phallus and hence death in general.3 Freud’s analysand/protagonist in this essay is presumed to be male. What happens in the context of fiction when both protagonists (the alive and the dead) are female?

Ghosts and (Narrative) Ghosting: Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison

Fictional utopias can be deceptively unsatisfactory. Elsewhere I have even claimed they may be threatened by redundancy, being “among the most rigid (and rigidly reductive) of generically bound forms”2 Literary fantasy in general has always had to negotiate the establishment’s determination to trivialize it as mere narrative formula. While increasingly successful challenges to these attitudes are mounted by such magic realist writers as Allende, Carter, Marquez and Rushdie, utopia still tends to carry a reductive stigma. Nevertheless, readers and writers of fantastic fiction continue to return to that space with an almost melancholic constancy, always looking to find a “shared identification with the trajectory of the ‘beyond’”.3 One might adopt, as a definition of that impulse, Susan Stewart’s term “longing”, for, as she affirms, the word not only refers to an exaggeration or unnatural overstepping (the elongation) of the limits and limitations of the real, but also a sense of ongoing, “yearning desire”,4 this surely being the presiding motivation behind these texts. In a conventional utopia we are confronted by a closed text and reduced parameters. But, as Stewart’s definition implies, “longing” has a more sustained dynamic that requires the ongoing textual interrogation of boundaries. In narratives that employ utopia as a destabilizing series of glimpses, or as a means of opening up a chink of light onto the unknown and unknowable beyond, we often find more interesting textual gaps, absences, lacunae: invitations that forbid as much as they instill desire.

The Grotesque Utopia: Joanna Russ, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Jane Palmer and Monique Wittig

The vampire can, it seems, be put to any (perhaps every) use. James B. Twitchell cautions us to “Witness poor Dracula: in our century he has been sent from Transylvania into outer space, into corporate finance, into the antebellum South, into California encounter groups…”.2 As part of what we have seen to be Donna J. Haraway’s playful use of fantastic tropes in her work on the ethics of science and technology, in Modest Witness the vampire takes over from the cyborg as a player who flirts with boundary-negotiations such as “category-crossing” and “the pollution of natural kinds”. But the vampire is also intrinsically related to OncoMouse™, both existing as “an invention who/which remains a living animal … subsisting in the realms of the undead”. This preoccupation, in itself, suggests that the fantastic carries along with it an intrinsically ideological aspect which can accommodate speculations beyond the realm of mimesis for, as Ken Gelder claims, “The vampire is not an arbitrarily conceived invention; rather, it is a way of imaging what in a sense has already been vampirized by prevailing ideologies”.3 As all these readings assert, despite the vampire’s impressive historical lineage, Dracula is a figure before his time whose “home” is the twentieth century in which he is “reproduced, fetishized, besequeled, and obsessed over” and hence “less a specter of an undead past than a harbinger of a world to come… ”4 Thus as much a time-traveller as many of the characters we encountered in Chapter 2, the vampire’s ongoing relevance to the contemporary is sealed in its importance to recent women’s fantastic fiction.

Vampires and the Unconscious: Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Bessie Head

Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) are obvious examples of what Pearce terms the “polychronotopic” text. Picking up on what she reads as one of Bakhtin’s most suggestible phrases, “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible”,2 its application to Butler’s novel adds a further dimension to its gendering. Dana, the central protagonist of Kindred, is a Black woman writer who, on her twenty-sixth birthday, the day after she moves house with her white husband Kevin, is suddenly projected back in time into a nineteenth-century slave America. There she comes face to face with two of her distant ancestors: Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner and Alice, the Black “free-” woman who will be bought back into slavery by him for choosing the “wrong” man and, later, bear Rufus’s children. In the process Dana comes face to face with a mirror image of her own relationship with Kevin, projected backwards into a new chronotope that has a significant material effect upon both her own subjectivity and personal relationship.

Lucie Armitt

Papers

Magic Realism Meets the Contemporary Gothic: Isabel Allende and Angela Carter

Ghosts and (Narrative) Ghosting: Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison

The Grotesque Utopia: Joanna Russ, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Jane Palmer and Monique Wittig

Vampires and the Unconscious: Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Bessie Head

Chronotopes and Cyborgs: Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Fay Weldon and Marge Piercy