Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting

10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate

Also by Liedeke Plate:

TECHNOLOGIES OF MEMORY IN THE ARTS (edited with Anneke Smelik)



STOF EN AS. DE NEERSLAG VAN 11 SEPTEMBER IN KUNST EN CULTUUR (edited with Anneke Smelik)

By Liedeke Plate Assistant Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen



Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting

© Liedeke Plate 2011

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 13 978–0–230–23221–1

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For Eline and Louise in memoriam Matei Calinescu




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Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Part I Consuming Memories 1

1

Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories: Contemporary Women’s Rewriting and/as Cultural Memory Contemporary women’s rewriting Producing the past Memory culture The rise of ‘the past’ Instant obsolescence Manufacturing the past Consuming memories Post-Fordist literary marketplace The presence of the past A new historical culture Myth as methodoloy Tactics and strategies of memory Performing cultural memory

Part II Fair Use 2

3

3 5 9 12 13 15 17 18 21 24 26 29 32 34 37

En/gendering Cultural Memory: Rereading, Rewriting, and the Politics of Recognition Rewriting as productive reception Reading and (re)writing: Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ ‘Récriture féminine’: Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine as rewriting Author-izing women’s writing Reader-oriented approaches and anti-authoritarianism Production and consumption

49 54 57 61

Women’s Rewriting as Counter-memory: An ABC of ‘Stolentelling’ (Authorship, Branding, and Copyright) ‘Literary theft’ as a metaphor to live, write, and die by Stealing the language The risk of rewriting

66 67 70 75

39 41 45

vii



Contents

viii Contents

Part III Cultural Scripts 4

Untold Stories: ‘Writing Back’ to Silence Silence and women’s (re)writing Rewriting silence The subject of ‘writing back’ The ethics of rewriting Towards a poetics of silence

5

High Infidelity: Tradition, Rewriting, and the Paradoxes of Decanonization Cultural capitalism Supplementary rewritings of female tradition Suspicion and after Feminine versions: rewriting as a translation into a (m)other tongue The liveness of the canon: paradoxes of decanonization

78 83 89 95 97 100 106 109 114 120 130 132 138 144 148 154

Part IV Mythical Returns

157

6

159 160 164 168 171 174 177 179

Winged Words: Women’s Rewriting as Remythologizing Rewriting in times of ‘secondary orality’ Performing memory Mythical speech Liquid mythologies Remembering the future Myth and memory Multiperspectival memory

Notes

182

Bibliography

193

Index

214



Un-author-ized rewriting: Pera’s Lo’s Diary Rewriting and brand management Rewriting in the post-Fordist literary marketplace

This book proposes an assessment of contemporary women’s rewriting from the 1970s to the present in the light of its engagement with cultural memory. Women’s rewriting is defined as a genre in which narratives of the past are retold from the perspective of a new, marginal, and usually female character in the original story. Literally re-membering and re-calling the old stories differently, contemporary women’s rewriting engages questions of remembrance and of forgetting in relation to gendered identity. Contemporary women’s rewriting emerged in a moment of history particularly obsessed with memory. Cultural historians agree to locate a shift in culture’s relationship to the past in the wake of the emancipatory movements of the 1960s. The new ‘memory culture’ developed through the democratization of history and the attendant fragmentation of History into histories (and ‘herstories’). Viewed as interventions in cultural memory seeking to generate helpful memories by changing the way the past is remembered, women’s rewritings ostensibly form a constituent part of the contemporary culture of memory. In this book, I therefore ask: How did the literature inspired by the international women’s movement transform cultural memory and, vice versa, how did the memory culture that developed through the democratization of history, in turn, affect the practice of women’s rewriting? By inquiring into the mutually constitutive nature of contemporary women’s rewriting and the ‘consumer memory culture’ that developed through the democratization of history and the commoditization of the past, this book explores women’s rewriting as integral to the dynamics of contemporary cultural remembrance. The book is divided in four parts. Part I, ‘Consuming Memories’, sets the scene: it sketches the contours of the emergent new historical culture, places the concept of women’s rewriting in its historical context, and elucidates the relationship between rewriting, cultural memory and consumerism. Part II, ‘Fair Use’, explores the specificity of women’s rewriting as a historically situated literary genre, examining it as mode of literary production that stands in a particular relation to contemporary debates about gender, memory and the past. In this part, Chapter 2, ‘En/gendering Cultural Memory: Rereading, Rewriting, and the Politics of Recognition’, ix



Preface

Preface

focuses on the emergence of concepts for women’s rewriting in the 1970s. Looking especially into Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ and what I term Hélène Cixous’s ‘récriture féminine’, the chapter situates rewriting in the context of second-wave feminism and explores its relationship to contemporary theories of reading, authorship, and of literary consumption and production. Chapter 3, ‘Rewriting as Counter-memory: An ABC of “Stolentelling” (Authorship, Branding, and Copyright)’, inquires into the counter-memorial practice of women’s rewriting as the stealing of language, particularly as it relates to other forms of literary theft. Taking two notorious plagiarism cases of the 1990s as its focus – Pia Pera’s Diary of Lo and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone – it examines the limits copyright puts on what can be rewritten and demonstrates its ability to impede the memory-work of rewriting as an intervention in cultural memory. Part III, ‘Cultural Scripts’, takes up some important issues contemporary women’s rewriting raises about silence, speech, forgetting and remembering, canonization, and cultural identity. Chapter 4, ‘Untold Stories: “Writing Back” to Silence’, looks into rewriting in relation to silence and forgetting to address the vexed relationship of feminism to postcolonialism. Focusing on what I see as contemporary women’s rewriting’s metafictional moment, the chapter discusses J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem as novels reflecting on the possibilities rewriting offers for the articulation of alter/ native experiences. Chapter 5, ‘High Infidelity: Tradition, Rewriting, and the Paradoxes of Decanonization’, explores the relation of women’s rewriting to the past in the light of the canon. Comparing and contrasting recent and older rewritings – Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, and Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia on the one hand, and Christa Wolf’s Kassandra and Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl on the other – the chapter inquires into issues of canon formation, cultural identity, and collective memory, identifying strategies of supplementation and reparation complementing women’s rewriting’s hermeneutics of distrust. In the final part, ‘Mythical Returns’, I proposes a re-assessment of contemporary women’s rewriting in the light of myth. Chapter 6, ‘Winged Words: Women’s Rewriting as Remythologizing’, begins by situating contemporary women’s rewriting within the market culture of inscription and of accumulation that is printed book culture. Focusing on two of Jeanette Winterson’s recent novels – Weight and The Stone Gods – it proceeds to explore mythical retelling as a means to engage cultural continuity and change in transforming memory today. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


x

In the two years it took me to write this book, I received the support of many. I here especially want to thank the Faculty of Arts and the Institute for Gender Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen for a generous grant and sabbatical leave; the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Center for the Critical Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, especially Marianne Hirsch, for welcoming me so warmly in the Spring of 2009; and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research for a teaching replacement grant, enabling me to complete this project. I here also wish to thank Cary Henson, Daniel Simon, and Kristine Steenbergh for commenting on early drafts, Mark Llewellyn for being a charitable (anonymous) reader for Palgrave Macmillan as well as the members of the Cultural Memory Colloquium of Columbia University and my colleagues from the Department of Cultural Studies, the Performances of Memory Research Group, and the Institute for Gender Studies. I am particularly grateful to Stefan Dudink, Judith Greenberg, Willy Jansen, Geertje Mak, Nancy Miller, Veronica Vasterling and Wouter Weijers for their insightful comments; to Kiene Brillenburg-Wurth, Aleid Fokkema, Susan Gubar, renee hoogland, Dennis Kersten, Claudia Krops, Sophie Levie, Christian Moraru, Marijke Orthel, Rigtje Passchier, Ann Rigney, Annelies van Solinge, Martijn Stevens, my parents, and my fellow board members of the Dutch Women’s Studies Association for abiding interest in my work and for keeping me on my toes long after I stopped dancing on them; to Daniëlle Bruggeman for helping me with the bibliography and to David C. Felts for preparing the index; and to Anneke Smelik for encouraging me to start on this project and for reading through the whole manuscript. It is the students in my MA classes on cultural memory at Radboud University Nijmegen who first got me thinking about the changing function of contemporary women’s rewriting in the context of consumer memory culture, and students elsewhere – in Amsterdam and in Utrecht – who challenged me to develop these ideas. This book is in memory of Matei Calinescu, dearly missed interlocutor on the subject of rewriting. It is dedicated to my daughters, Eline and Louise. It would not have been possible without the loving support of my husband, Michiel Scheffer. Nijmegen, April 2010 xi



Acknowledgements





Part I

Consuming Memories





Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories: Contemporary Women’s Rewriting and/as Cultural Memory

Rewriting – the act of writing again, literally re-membering the old stories – is an act of memory. It is an act of re-collection in which the past is re-called and made sense of in the light of the present. As each age rewrites the past in its own image, rewriting is the process and product of cultural remembrance and can thus be viewed as emblematic, representative, and characteristic of cultural memory conceived as a ‘realm of traditions, transmissions, and transferences’ (Assmann 2008: 110). Rewriting is marked by a dynamics of storing and retrieving, inscribing and obliterating, remembering and forgetting, that is productive of memory as shared and formative of collective, cultural identity. This book focuses on contemporary women’s rewriting: writing published over the period 1970 to the present, in which narratives of the past are retold from the perspective of a female character, often with the explicit aim to re-member the past differently. In their introduction to a special issue of Signs on ‘Gender and Cultural Memory’, Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith observe that the ‘explosion of literary and cultural production by women’ in the past decades has shaped much of the period’s cultural memory (2002: 3). Contemporary women’s rewriting partakes in the explosion, directly confronting questions of cultural memory from the perspective of women. Compiling, in the 1980s, a dictionary of key terms for his own novels, Milan Kundera includes an entry for the term ‘rewriting’ in which he notes: ‘Rewriting comme esprit de l’époque’ – ‘Rewriting as the spirit of the times’ (1986: 178; 1988: 147). This book submits that women’s rewriting, as part of the period’s ‘democratic rewriting of history’, ‘subjecting it to an agonizing revision’, as Jean Baudrillard puts it in The Illusion of the End, ‘reviewing 3



1

Consuming Memories

everything, rewriting everything’ (1994: 43; 12), especially embodies this spirit of the times. But to speak of the spirit of the times is to obscure the fact of change (even if, as I shall maintain, change is the current spirit of the age and the dominant characteristic of our times). Yet it is this change that I want to chart, tracing four decades of women’s rewriting, from its emergence as a feminist genre in the 1970s to its contemporary manifestations. To this end, this book explores the reasons and conditions for the critical, literary-narratological, political and commercial success of women’s rewriting since the 1970s. It examines the productivity of rewriting as a feminist concept in the critical arena, the cultural imaginary and the literary marketplace. And it illuminates how broad social, political, and economic trends combine to affect the capacity of women’s rewriting to transform memory. The book’s point of departure is my concern with what appears as a loss of critical purchase on the cultural imaginary that women’s rewriting has recently undergone. This vexing fact can be explained by placing contemporary women’s rewriting in the context of changing moments of capitalism. As Nancy Fraser explains in her essay ‘Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History’, the cultural changes brought about by second-wave feminism have been an integral part of the social organization of capitalism. ‘Aspirations that had a clear emancipatory thrust in the context of state-organized capitalism assumed a far more ambiguous meaning in the neoliberal era’, and feminist critiques that were once emancipatory later served to legitimate new forms of capitalism (2009: 108–13). The paradox of women’s rewriting, then, is that its success in the literary marketplace, signalling the mainstreaming of assumptions about feminism’s central tenets, indicates its aims have come to converge with those of capitalism. This in turn means it has lost its power to unsettle culturally central texts and, with this, its power to inflame the imagination and set the narrative of further change. The vicissitudes of women’s rewriting, then, are part of broader social and cultural transformations. Neoliberal capitalism, postmodernity, hypermodernity, and consumerism all converge in what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has termed ‘liquid modernity’. ‘Liquidity’, I will explain below, has permeated all dimensions of existence, including people’s sense of identity, relationship to the past, present, and future, as well as their affiliations, bonds, and connections with others. Mindful of an idea of women’s rewriting as promoting change for the better – a better world, the ‘good society’ – I am ultimately interested in recovering the emancipatory potential of rewriting. To do so, this book explores 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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women’s rewriting as a complex emergent phenomenon and takes an interdisciplinary approach to try and understand what happens to the idea of rewriting in a consumer society, as it becomes a commercially savvy publishing strategy and a choice of past. Because it refuses to submit women’s rewriting to the present forces of inertia and of permanent change, it also explores how rewriting can continue to open up the present moment to new feminist futures and thus remain an instrument of radical promise. In the following pages, I explore women’s rewriting as a literary genre that has much to say about the relationship to the cultural past. To this end, I illuminate the notion of a contemporary culture of memory and, placing women’s rewriting in this emergent new historical culture, situate it in relation to ‘memory’, feminism, and to economic developments in the book-publishing industry. Explaining that rewriting is productive of the past as ‘presence’, I go on to clarify how it is one of our culture’s central ‘technologies of memory’. The chapter concludes with the argument that in a culture as obsessed with the past and as saturated with memories as ours, the very means of cultural memory production is itself affected by this memory surplus. How memories are produced, shared, passed on, and given meaning is not stable but changes over time, as both the social frameworks and the media of memory change too. In particular, I maintain, women’s rewriting as the re-membering of a culture’s founding texts (as the repository of cultural memory and source of cultural identity) works in another way and to a different effect today than it did in the 1970s, when it was first articulated in programmatic texts of feminism.

Contemporary women’s rewriting Women’s rewriting came into view as a literary genre and a feminist praxis as writers affiliated with the International Women’s Movement and scholars with feminist affinities developed theories about the relationship of gendered identities to language and to literature. One of its first theoreticians is the American writer, poet, literary critic, and feminist activist Adrienne Rich, whose concept of ‘re-vision’ would energize women writers – initially, especially poets – to respond to tradition with texts of their own. As she addressed the subject of ‘The Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century’ at the Modern Language Association professional meeting in 1971, Rich spoke of the need for rereading and rewriting the texts of the past from the perspective of women’s experience. Because literature does not reflect women’s lives 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories 5

Consuming Memories

and experiences, she maintained, its effects on women are devastating. It informs their ideas of themselves as second-class citizens and offers no ‘guides, maps, possibilities’ for the young woman who ‘goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world’ (1972: 21; emphasis in the original). In contrast, women’s writing was to be a motor of cultural change and re-writing, a means of opening the past to alternative stories, which in turn meant opening the future to new possibilities. Starting in the 1970s, the literary market sees the development of a genre of women’s writing that is the rewriting of the classics as told from the perspective of one of the ‘marginal’, usually female, characters from literary history. These retrospective first-person narrations first occurred in poetry. It is indeed in poems ‘steeped in the light of Greek myth that is part of the poet’s heritage’, as Olga Broumas’s award-winning collection Beginning with O is introduced (Kunitz 1977: ix), that feminist re-vision is first practised in the 1970s. By the end of the decade, these ‘enactments of feminist antiauthoritarianism’ (Ostriker 1982: 87) opposing traditional views through poetic personae that speak in the voices of mythical figures such as Medusa, Helen, Circe, and Eurydice and characters familiar from fairy tales extend to short stories. In ‘Penelope’ (1978), Sara Maitland explores the mythical paragon of the faithful wife from a feminist perspective, explaining her choice for married life in Ithaca as a choice for a meaningful life, away from the uselessness of her princessly existence. As Penelope recounts, it was because she enjoyed ‘being part of a necessary production process’ that she took to ‘weaving and farming and rearing my own children and administering our community, creating something real’ (149). Just as Maitland’s Penelope dispels the myth of her nightly unweaving – she calls it a ‘ridiculous motivation’, invented to account for her unlikely occupation (ibid.) – so does Angela Carter counter the myth of women’s sexual passivity in her retellings of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), recounting Bluebeard’s young wife’s awakening to her own sexuality, or telling of a self-assured Little Red Riding Hood who ‘knew she was nobody’s meat’ and freely gives herself to the Wolf (147). As a literary genre, contemporary women’s rewriting develops in the 1980s, when rewriting is explored for the possibilities it holds for telling another story in novels such as Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (1983) and Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem (1986) – two retrospective first-person novels that counter received accounts with alternative accounts of the past – and the ‘playgiaristic’ novels of Kathy Acker, Great Expectations (1982) and Don Quixote (1986). The genre then booms in the 1990s – a trend that continues through the first decade of 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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the twenty-first century, when a host of novel rewritings are published and republished. Conceived as a re-writing that inscribes obscured lives into cultural memory, allowing them equal share in the cultural imagination, rewriting as ‘re-vision’ is especially invested in whose version of the story we remember. It thus turns to what Molly Hite has termed ‘the other side of the story’, which ‘is also, if implicitly, another story’ (1989: 4). Giving a voice to characters that have been repressed or silenced altogether, the point of view is frequently that of a well-known figure’s ‘other’ – e.g. Job’s wife in Andrée Chedid’s La femme de Job (1993) or Mrs. Gulliver in Alison Fell’s The Mistress of Lilliput (1999). Contemporary women’s rewriting also features many a mythical character – Lolita and Rebecca of eponymous fame in Pia Pera’s Diario di Lo (1995) and Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale (2001), respectively – as well as ‘minor’ or secondary characters from well-known, mostly nineteenth-century novels, for instance: Jane Fairfax, the ‘second heroine’ from Jane Austen’s Emma (Aiken 1990), Mary Reilly, Jekyll-and-Hyde’s maid in Stevenson’s novella (Martin 1990), and Adèle, Jane Eyre’s tutee in Brontë’s novel (Tennant 2002). Such rewriting of a classic text from an alternative perspective intervenes in the production of cultural memory. It affects the way we read and understand these texts, and it transforms the way we remember them. The by now classic example of a successful intervention in cultural memory would be Jean Rhys’s revisionary prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Rhys’s novel, indeed, has so effectively transformed the way we remember Charlotte Brontë’s nineteenth-century novel of development that most recent adaptations of Brontë’s novel, whether for television, stage, or the big screen, and ranging from novels to films to plays and operas, all include references to it as if it were part of (the subtext of) Brontë’s novel (see Rubik and Mettinger-Schartmann 2007).1 Producing both the texts that constitute cultural memory and the sentiments and ideologies that accompany it, Rhys’s novel is a cogent example of how women’s rewriting can be successful in opening up literary history to negotiation over which stories are to be included in it, who is entitled to define it, and which meanings it holds. Indeed, putting the nineteenthcentury novel together differently, constituting it as it were anew, it has been especially successful in demonstrating what Marita Sturken sees as memories’ most valuable insight, which is ‘the stakes held by individuals and institutions in attributing meaning to the past’ (1997: 9). As a technology of re-production and re-presentation, rewriting belongs with adaptation and translation to the techniques at a culture’s disposal for the transmission and dissemination of texts, into other places 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



Consuming Memories

and times, as well as in order to reach new audiences. Participating in the process of cultural transmission and inheritance, rewriting is a medium that works to preserve culture – even as it, inevitably perhaps, transforms it in the process.2 Yet rewriting may also be primarily vested in change. Julie Sanders speaks of ‘appropriation’ instead of ‘adaptation’: whereas adaptation ‘both appears to require and to perpetuate the existence of a canon’, appropriation implies ‘the notion of hostile takeover’ (2006: 8–9). Its interest, then, is not so much in preserving culture as it is in transforming it. Feminist rewriting, in particular, is concerned with creating a ‘usable past’, to use Van Wyck Brooks’s phrase (1918). Intent on unsettling culture as it is, it re-collects a future-oriented past in view of what Mieke Bal has termed ‘helpful memories’, seeking to counter the destructive effects of collective repression and forgetting (1999: xii). Indeed, what characterizes contemporary women’s rewriting is a special relationship to the past. Engaging texts from the past and about the past, it recollects and recalls old texts that hold particular cultural significance – the ‘classics’, familiar stories that have achieved mythic status, what Christian Moraru refers to as ‘“identity narratives”: heavily ideology-laden tales about us as individuals and members of certain communities’ (2001: xiii). And as it searches for what can be retrieved from them and made available to sustain alternative identities and other worldviews, it intervenes in cultural memory, seeking to transform it. This is especially true in countries with a strong sense of ‘canon’ as cultural heritage and the repository of shared but contested values: for instance, England, France, Germany (formerly, the two Germanys), the United States. In these contexts, novels such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (1983) or Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999) participate in tradition as a dynamic process of actualization and transmission in their bid to be part of literary history, inscribing the narratives of Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason; of the Greek prophetess Cassandra; and of captain Ahab’s wife within the stories as we used to know them. So do poems such as Anne Sexton’s retellings of fairy tales in Transformations (1971) or Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife (1999), a collection which gives a voice to the wives of famous and infamous ‘great men’ of world literature and civilization (Mrs. Midas, Mrs. Tiresias, Mrs. Darwin, Queen Kong, etc.). Remembering the past differently, women’s rewriting embodies a feminist approach to the past confident that change is possible and that it will be brought about by changing the stories which shape cultural foundation myths and thus human existence. As such, it forges cultural 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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memory. Focusing especially on the re-inscription of effaced, obscured, or altogether forgotten lives into literary history, women’s rewriting exemplifies memory’s reworking of the past to shape identity in the present. Its concentration on inscription highlights literature’s role as ‘a repository of culture’, as cultural heritage and inheritance (D’haen 2000: 1). Because it is concerned not so much with what is known as with what ‘can be recovered, re-membered, and brought to the surface’ (Neubauer and Geyer-Ryan 2000: 6), particularly as it can be put to the service of (re)constructing female identity, its relationship to the past is complicated, frequently ambivalent, and almost always complex.

Producing the past The point of departure of this book is the observation that the relation of contemporary Western culture to the past has recently changed and that this change, in turn, impinges upon the imagination of the future. Contemporary culture is obsessed with the past. It has been so for at least twenty-five years now. Although the end of ‘the era of commemoration’, as French historian Pierre Nora (1996) has dubbed the age, has long been forecast, nothing indicates this fascination is about to relent. Surprisingly, perhaps, there are (as yet) no signs of ‘memory fatigue’ (Huyssen 2003: 3), however inevitable it might seem that the fascination with memory would quickly reach a point of saturation. In the context of the contemporary culture of instant obsolescence with its ever-increasing acceleration of history and its ever faster cycles of innovation, it would indeed be expected that the newness of the old and the novelty of the past as fashionable interest would soon wear out. That this is not the case seems instead a tribute to memory as not just ‘a significant symptom of our cultural present’, as Andreas Huyssen has it (2003: 3), but as a constituent part of it. Indeed, as new pasts keep being retrieved, unearthed, and manufactured and as discussions about national canons and defences of a (traditionally defined) Western cultural heritage continue being renewed, it becomes increasingly clear that memory and the past are no passing fad but an abiding concern. Today, cultural memory – the shared remembrance of the past and its production as memory in the present – is the central terrain on which to stake the values we hold most dear. This is because memory provides the knowledge from which we derive identity, both at the individual and at the collective level. It is also because of the intrinsic relation between the production of memory and consumer culture. We need to think of memory and the memory boom as inextricably linked with consumer 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



Consuming Memories

culture.3 Cultural memory and ‘the past’ are produced by a culture in the interest of particular people in that culture. As the discussion, in Chapter 3, on the limits copyright imposes on rewriting illustrates, they are solidly ideological and economic, and are to be examined in both these terms, especially as they intersect, diverge, or converge. I am not, of course, the first scholar to remark on the relation of memory to money. The fascination of late capitalism with the past has been amply discussed, documented in studies across a variety of disciplines, focusing especially on heritage and tourism. Its relationship to the global flows of people, money and goods has been observed; as has its increasingly commoditized and commercial character (a recent example is Marita Sturken’s Tourists of History, which explores the intersection of cultural memory, tourism and consumerism in the United States). But what is the relationship of feminism to this memory culture? What role did women’s rewriting play in the production of the past as presence? And how does women’s rewriting relate to the commodification of the past? In Present Pasts, Andreas Huyssen observes that ‘[m]emory discourses of a new kind first emerged in the West after the 1960s in the wake of decolonization and the new social movements and their search for alternative and revisionist histories’ (2003: 12). Similarly, Pierre Nora argues that the contemporary concern with memory is attendant upon ‘the “democratization” of history’: the emancipatory atomization of History into histories, which is ‘the emergence, over a very short period of time, of all those forms of memory bound up with minority groups for whom rehabilitating their past is part and parcel of reaffirming their identity’ (2002: 5). Taking my cue from Huyssen’s and Nora’s observations, I aim to explore whether women’s rewriting played a part in these emerging new memory discourses. It is in the wake of feminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism that History came to be viewed as one of the grand narratives denounced as totalizing and negatively associated with public and presumed objectivity, while ‘memory has become positively associated with the embedded, with the local, the personal and the subjective’ (Radstone and Hodgkin 2006: 10). As the narrative means of articulating alternative accounts of what happened, women’s rewriting contributed to the transformation of the ways we think about the past. Particularly invested in retrieving ‘that which runs against, disrupts or disturbs dominant ways of understanding the past’, as Radstone and Hodgkin define the uses of memory today (10), it changed the ways in which stories, histories, and her-stories are told, enabling the production of the past as so many small and local narratives. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Yet, setting out to revisit and revise the past in order to project new futures, did it not, in effect, also work to collapse past, present, and future? Under the temporal regime of ‘liquid’ modernity, the radical and transformative potential of women’s rewriting was curtailed. Whereas the rewriting of the old stories from an alternative, ‘feminine’ perspective constituted a radical challenge to and a fundamental critique of what Fraser has called ‘the pervasive androcentrism’ of state-led capitalism (2009: 97), this is no longer so in the context of the neo-liberal (post)capitalism of liquid modernity, which thrived precisely on the fragmentation and decentralization of all its narratives. In consequence, we cannot take contemporary women’s rewriting’s radical promise as a ‘counter-culture of the imagination’ (Widdowson 1999: 166) for granted anymore. Today, it is simply not true that, as Peter Widdowson writes in his survey of re-visionary fiction, ‘re-visionary novels almost invariably have a clear cultural-political thrust’ (Widdowson 2006: 505; see also Widdowson 1999: 166). There is very little that holds emancipatory promise in the retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the tutee, Adèle (Tennant 2002); of Austen’s Emma retold from Jane Fairfax’s point of view (Aiken 1990); or of Nabokov’s Lolita from Lolita’s viewpoint (Pera 1995). Also, Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), though giving a voice to Aeneas’s second wife, ‘mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy’, explicitly resists the idea that Virgil should be blamed for slighting her life and refuses to engage in rewriting as social criticism (3–4). In consequence, the automatism with which claims are made that rewriting is change and that this change implements ‘a saliently political and cultural agenda’ (Moraru 2001: 143) needs to be resisted and the deep-seated belief in its ‘heartfelt political commitment’ (Sanders 2006: 7) must be held to critical scrutiny. This is not to say women’s rewriting has lost its capacity for revising cultural history altogether. Cultural memory continues to interact with history to produce culturally meaningful narratives. Storytelling, including literary women’s storytelling, plays a significant role in this. Yet it is to alert us to the possibility that rewriting may challenge very little, being actually an integral part of the literary and cultural life of texts – and hence, of canonicity and marketing. To be alert to these possibilities, however, does not mean I do not believe this is what women’s (re)writing should do. On the contrary, I still trust in the power of feminist narrative to mobilize the imagination and open up the cultural imaginary to unimagined possibilities, including a better world and fairer social organization. Yet we need to let go of our kneejerk reactions and rethink our key critical concepts in the context of 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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the present time.4 It is the premise of this book that this time is a liquid and consuming one, framed by the forces of economic globalization and troubled by the temporal collapse of past, present, and future. Women’s rewriting, forming an integral part of these liquid times, should be thought of in these terms. It is by locating contemporary women’s rewriting in relation to the culture of memory that its significance can best be understood: as a constituent part of the consumer culture of late capitalism that engages the memories that preoccupy contemporary culture.

Memory culture The idea that we are living in a ‘memory culture’ has been maintained by scholars for some time now. Ours is ‘the era of commemoration’, Pierre Nora says in his conclusion to his monumental Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92), which collects in seven volumes a decade of research done in France on sites of memory: sites that crystallize what he terms ‘the new memorial age’ (Nora 1996: 632) and that articulate the historical shift from history to memory as buttress of identity. The new culture of memory manifests itself in various cultural domains, subsumes many different things and takes a variety of forms, ranging from Nora’s ‘commemorative bulimia’ (636) to what Huyssen has so aptly termed ‘the seduction of the archive’: the many ways in which the past is recreated, reread, reproduced, and rewritten at all levels of culture (2003: 5). As Susannah Radstone puts it, contemporary memory is ‘aligned with subjectivity, invention, the present, representation, and fabrication’ (2000: 9). Emerging in the West some time after World War II, the new memory culture combines a distrust of historiography as the scientific and objective record of times past with a new interest in those bygone times. Pierre Nora describes this crisis of history well, remarking that ‘[t]oday, the historian is far from alone in manufacturing the past; it is a role he shares with the judge, the witness, the media and the legislator’ (2002: 8). As he explains, as history lost its ascendancy over the past, the separation of collective history and private memories into two distinct categories people had to negotiate individually disintegrated, creating a new notion: that of a ‘collective memory’, a term first introduced by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1940s and 1950s, and that recognizes the fundamentally social character of memory. As Halbwachs pointedly notes in The Social Frameworks of Memory, ‘it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize and localize their memories’ (1992 [1952]: 38). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Historically, then, memory and history undergo a semantic shift. This leads to terminological and conceptual confusion. Indeed, in its current early twenty-first-century use, ‘memory’ has taken on a meaning so all-encompassing that it also refers to what used to go by the name of history: the minute reconstruction of the past with the aid of documents and archives (Nora 2002: 4). I wish here neither to disentangle the terms nor to take a stance in the history versus memory debate but simply to signal a fuzziness that is inherent to the memory discourse whose contours I am sketching here and which is symptomatic of the memory culture. Whether it is ‘a radical and dangerous shift’, as Nora has it, I cannot say. Certain is only that it is memory, not history that so obsesses the cultural imaginary; and that this concern with memory is linked to a concern with identity, especially as it relates to notions of continuity, of collective consciousness, and of belonging (Assmann 1995). For if there are historiographical motives for rethinking history as not simply opposed to or founded on memory – motives internal to the field of history as an academic discipline and a subject taught in school – it is mostly due to social consciousness and the consciousness of a social identity that history and other official (especially national) versions of the past came under fire and were challenged by ‘memory’.

The rise of ‘the past’ Let me briefly outline these social forces as they came to bear on society in the course of the twentieth century. Generally, the reasons advanced for the rise of memory and the emergence of new ways of thinking about history, memory, and the past are globalization, digitalization, consumer culture, and the memory of the Holocaust – broad and distinct phenomena that have altered the ways we conceive of the self and that anchor memory at the heart of the contemporary world. Briefly put, migration brings about a concern with place, tradition, and belonging both for the displaced and for those receiving them in their midst. The effect of migration on social memory – memory as it is shared, lived, and transmitted in the community – was already a concern in the nineteenth century, when urbanization led many people to leave their homes to move to the cities. The distinction Ferdinand Tönnies made in 1887 between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft articulates this nineteenth-century understanding of urbanization as bringing about forms of social groupings characterized by a different relationship to the past: on the one hand, the rural communities centred on rituals of shared traditions and memories and, on the other hand, urban 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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societies that lack such shared knowledge. For Pierre Nora, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft refers to what he calls a ‘milieu de mémoire’: the living environment of ‘real memory’, which is unmediated and present to itself, ‘a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition’ (1989: 8). Richard Terdiman explains: ‘In traditional societies . . . objects and people could be said to carry their pasts and their meanings openly.’ In contrast, the urban population severed from the communities in which they grew up ‘were involved in an effort of memory that made the very lack of transparency of the past a conscious focus of concern’ (1993: 6). That the city thus becomes the environment of a disrupted relationship to the past (and hence of the past as problem) is the subject of Walter Benjamin’s imposing Arcades Project (written between 1927 and 1940), which more than any other study of its time develops an archeology of the city that revolves around the retreating past, its remains and memories. In the course of the twentieth century, however, as war, decolonization, and world-wide urbanization intensify and diversify this process, memory increasingly becomes a global problem. The ‘globalization of memory’, as we might call ‘the world-wide upsurge in memory’ (Nora 2002: 1), not only means that memory becomes a concern throughout the world; it also means that (some) memories are aspiring to global rank and lay claim to universalizing status. Digitalization, the new media, and technologies of communication obviously play an important role in this process. Not surprisingly, a number of recent studies have therefore been devoted to those new ‘prosthetic’ memories brought about by the technologies of mass culture such as film, as well as to how digital media technologies inform memory, recollection, and remembrance (Landsberg 2004; van Dijck 2007). The development of the Holocaust into ‘a cipher for the twentieth century’ and ‘a universal trope’ (Huyssen 2003: 13) and of Holocaust studies into an essential a part of education and hence of responsible citizenship (see Hirsch and Kacandes 2004) especially crystallizes the new discourses on the past, at once investing memory with the idea of the authenticity of lived experience and confronting its fragility in the face of death. Time passing, indeed, shows the precariousness of the past as held in individual memory, proving the need to remember collectively if one wants not to forget. Cultural memory, then, is this collective act of remembrance that negotiates between history and memory, locating itself at their intersection, attempting to formulate a public discourse that can stand in for the fragility of individual memory, its unreliability and ephemereality.5 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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In the West, the problem of memory as articulating a ruptured and inorganic relationship to the past is compounded by a consumer culture of instant obsolescence. In Present Pasts, Huyssen recalls how, wanting to purchase a new computer, he is confronted with a dilemma we probably all know, for it is one facing anyone who has ever bought a new camera, computer, phone, television, iPod or car – in short, any relatively expensive contraption we believe should last us some time but is always already obsolete, ‘i.e. museal, by comparison with the imminently expected and so much more powerful next product line’ (2003: 23). The radically shortened shelf life of consumer objects is an effect of fashion becoming the dominant paradigm, establishing ‘the axis of the present as the mode of temporality now socially prevalent’, as Gilles Lipovetsky puts it (2005: 37). Indeed, Huyssen’s purchase of a two-year-old computer model can be read as an act of triumphant resistance to the sales personnel’s persuasive powers and to the lures of the new, allowing instead the sensibility of protestant thrift to prevail (the computer’s price had recently been cut in half, he tells us). The anecdote serves Huyssen to illustrate the German philosopher Hermann Lübbe’s idea of the musealization of everyday life. Yet it also can be seen to point to a close relationship between consumer culture and memory culture: consumer culture not only destroys the past by preferring the new over the old, which it then almost immediately discards as out-of-date, out-of-fashion, or simply no longer needed. It also produces ‘the past’, manufacturing it ever faster and in ever larger quantities, for instance in the form of consumer goods that are ‘styled for obsolescence’ (Strasser 2000: 5), ready to be dumped as trash as soon as they are produced (waste being what consumer culture produces above all). Nora argues that the economic crisis of the mid-1970s is what swept France into a renewed awareness of its cultural past. As he writes, ‘thirty years of accelerated growth and intensive industrialisation and urbanisation . . . had mercilessly swept away an entire set of traditions, landscapes, jobs, customs, and life styles that had long remained unchanged in France’ (2002: 1–2). The economic crisis, bringing this development to an abrupt end, caused people to recognize the loss it entailed: old things first discarded as junk are suddenly viewed to constitute inalienable patrimony, and ‘la campagne’ remains to this day imbued with all the mystique of profound, age-old traditions and ‘natural’, rooted ways of life. But more than as an explanation of



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why memory became such an acute focus of concern from the 1970s onwards, it is Nora’s point about the connection between economic growth and the destruction of the past as it used to be known that interests me here. The relations between modernity and tradition have always been strained. Radical modernisms such as Marinetti’s Futurism, for instance, even explicitly called for the destruction of museums and libraries (Marinetti 2006 [1909]). Recently, the Dutch scholar Marita Mathijsen published a pamphlet in which, ostensibly going against the general view that the Netherlands in particular and the West in general are witnessing a resurgence of interest in history, she laments ‘the absence of the past’ (as her title goes). Mathijsen decries the contemporary lack of interest in all things historic, ranging from knowledge of national history to the photograph albums of one’s forebears to the houses of celebrated nineteenth-century writers, claiming it is precisely the fashionable drive for the new that governs the contemporary relationship to one’s living environment. In her perspective, it is to keep up with the Joneses that the Dutch remodel both individually and collectively the places they inhabit so as to retain no traces of their past and earlier inhabitants. Striving not to be outdone by the neighbors in all manner of things both material and symbolic of social standing, people are encouraged permanently to buy the newest model or fad and to discard the old. There is, of course, much to disagree with in Mathijsen’s polemic and much with which to take issue. Surely not everything that is old is worth keeping? Also, does not the new, in some cases, constitute a real improvement on the old?6 What is worth retaining from it from the perspective of this argument is the link it illuminates between a consumer culture of instant obsolescence and the production of ‘the past’. This link is a feature of contemporary, consumerist material culture and, as such, also applies to literature understood in its material dimensions, as a product bought and sold on the literary market. As I argue in Chapter 2, women’s rewriting produces narratives about the past that increasingly fall under the regime of ‘production and rubbishing’ (Assmann 1996) – of letters as litter. It is, indeed, one of the ironies of women’s rewriting that it ends up feeding a conception of literature as product ruled by the logic of consumer culture. Whereas rewriting can be viewed as a kind of productive reception engaging the reader’s critical and creative faculties, the materialization of it as a book to be sold on the increasingly commercial literary market also turns it into a commodity subjected, like any other commodity, to the logic of capital and fashion. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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As we discard ever faster all kinds of things, replacing them by the newer and better, we also produce things old and historical ever faster.7 The so-called ‘acceleration of history’, Nora explains, basically means ‘an accelerated precipitation of all things into an ever more swiftly retreating past’. Time passes faster and faster as change occurs increasingly rapidly, making change ‘the most continuous or permanent feature of the modern world’ (2002: 4). Instant obsolescence is the application of this principle to the world of production. Accelerating obsolescence does not only produce litter to be disposed and processed; it also produces ‘the past’. And this past it produces is not just material culture, but also immaterial, consisting of sounds and smells, of movements, gestures and other incorporated practices, all of which are substituted, displaced and replaced by new ones, as well as narrative – memories recollected, memoirs and personal accounts, stories and histories. The forces of modernity and consumer culture, however destructive they may be of the old ways of life, are also productive of them as vanishing or already vanished, yielding nostalgic poems such as Baudelaire’s ‘The Swan’ (1857), memorably observing that ‘Old Paris is no more (the form of a city / Changes faster, alas! than a mortal heart)’ (2006: 115), or the equally nostalgic photography of Eugène Atget and Robert Doisneau, to remain with the example of Paris, attempting to capture the last remains of a world and a lifestyle in the process of disappearing. In our times, it produces heritage trails, retro-fashion, 1950s innocence, and surveys of national canons – all those things that I have subsumed under the name of ‘memory culture’ above. The so-called memory boom, then, is not about to recede, for the production of the past is inextricably linked with consumer culture. Memory culture is an integral part of consumer culture because ‘the past’ is just like trash consumer culture’s main yet unintended output, its ‘side effect’, as it were. ‘Modern societies are increasingly ruled by the unwanted side effects of their differentiated subsystems, such as the economy, politics, law, media, and science’ (Klein 2004: 4). One of the unexpected side effects of consumer culture is the production of the past. This ‘side effect’ ‘cannot be handled with the codes of the systems’ (4); it necessitates other discourses. This, then, is the methodological function of Western memory discourses, which can thus be likened to user information leaflets warning about the side effects of consumer goods. As they articulate the contemporary fascination and concern with ‘the past’, they in effect document its potential outcomes, both



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adverse and beneficial. The meaning of so-called side effects, it is well known, depends on the frame of reference and the expected outcome: an effect unintended in one context can be turned into a desired effect in another. The same may be said of trash/patrimony. Because ‘trash is a dynamic category’ (Strasser 2000: 3), it can easily be embedded in instantaneous and capricious ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm 1983). This means that ‘the past’ is consumer culture’s main product, located just a few steps beyond the store-door. It also means that the past which Western cultures value as their inalienable ‘heritage’ or ‘patrimony’ is the same as their alienable junk. This is a fact that is well known to archeologists, whose digging-sites are traditionally located on the dumping grounds of earlier cultures. It is also, of course, akin to pointing to the intrinsic relationship between remembering and forgetting. Jorge Luis Borges, whose story ‘Funes the Memorious’ tells about a character who remembers everything, already established this connection when he had Funes say, ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap’ (2007 [1942]: 64).

Consuming memories The suggestion that ‘the past’ is garbage by another name and from the perspective of some other conceptual framework is not simply a provocation aiming at ‘épater les bourgeois’. It illuminates how consumer culture articulates a particular relationship to the past and to the future. Indeed, choosing which pasts to value and which ones to discard, which ones to burn and which ones to retrieve and recycle, consumer culture has an instrumental and sometimes fickle view of the past, conceiving of it only from the perspective of the present, as a choice in the interest of a selected lifestyle, a chosen sense of community, or an anticipated future. Producing the past as choice, consumer culture also produces different views on it. On the one hand, it enables the liberal disenfranchising of the present from the past and from the future, putting the burden of choice on the individual. On the other hand, it produces a fundamentally conservative perspective, believing society is, in Edmund Burke’s words, ‘a partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (2009 [1790]: 96), a contract that requires the present to value its past, to endorse it, and to improve on it, ultimately to pass it on to the future. Whereas in less affluent societies, there is no such choice, and the past is present simply because that is all there is and one cannot afford anything new – including ways one may wish it were not so, for instance, in the form of broken tools or crockery 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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one has to make do with – consumer culture produces the past as choice product of economic modernity and as perspective on the relationship to time it engenders. Seen in this light, consumer culture commands a liberal perspective as it works towards the total disenfranchising of the present from the past and from the future, leading to living solely in the present, ever faster, with an increasing acceleration of the cycles of consumption. The acceleration of time signifies the temporal collapse of past, present, and future into a permanently fluid and changing present. As the titles of Bauman’s recent books suggest – Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006), and Liquid Times (2007a) – the consuming present is characterized by ‘liquidity’. Life is fluid, our jobs impermanent, and our relations volatile. Redrawn as a sphere of consumerism where subjects are addressed primarily – indeed, are produced – as consumers, liquid modernity signifies both changing subjectivities and senses of self and altered relations to virtually everything, ranging from others to politics to narrative. In this redrawn public sphere where subjects are reconstituted as shoppers and as consumers, citizenship and identity, the cornerstones of the emancipation movements of the 1960s, are dissolved through the scattering forces of consumer culture. Indeed, with everything a matter of choice, shopping around becomes our prime activity: scanning, surveying, comparing, and remaining ever on the alert for new possibilities, other opportunities, better offers. Scattering attention, energy, but also individual and collective identity into fragmented and individualized components without unifying mobilizing strength, consumer culture makes that instability and insecurity, change and movement become the prime constituents of existence. What I am arguing, then, is that just as the world becomes a myriad possibilities, so does the past. Increasingly conjured up for its own sake, ‘the past’ becomes a matter of choice, retrieved and recovered not for its exemplary value, but for what Gilles Lipovetsky terms ‘the emotionalmemorial value associated with feelings of nostalgia’ (2005: 60).8 This extension of the logic of shopping to our relationship to the past implies that ‘the past’ gets caught in the cycle of newness, subjected to marketing and consumption, evidently no longer capable of structuring life. ‘The more we summon up historical memory and dramatize it, the less it structures the elements of ordinary life’, Lipovetsky explains (61). This loss of capacity to structure life also applies to women’s rewriting of ‘the old stories’, that vast corpus of stories that make up the cultural imaginary and that is stored and passed on in ‘the classics’, ‘the canon’, and the books of myths. If the stories that shape one’s life 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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were once given, this changes with the advent of the freedom to select one’s identity. Whereas rewriting as the telling anew of ‘the old stories’ initially served the purpose of offering an alternative to the few stories, scripts, and identities available to women, with the rise of what Bauman terms ‘the supermarket of identities’ (2000: 83), this alternative becomes one out of many. Whereas it is one of the distinguishing features of ‘the old story’ to be told and retold, the publishing culture in which retelling takes place transforms it into a product subjected to the system of consumption. Thus, rewriting becomes linked to the fluidity of identity conceived not as a radical challenge to a constricting inherited identity but, in the context of neoliberal capitalism, a means of selling more. Within the context of the publishing industry, the story told again takes a variety of forms, ranging from reprints to re-editions to rewritings. These ‘retellings’ in published print differ significantly, of course. Yet they respond in kindred ways to the ‘fashionable’ pressure of producing literature as litter, that is, to discard the old and produce it anew. In Chapter 6, I discuss Canongate’s series The Myths in this light, as a major and global publishing venture – it involves some forty publishers worldwide – that takes retelling as its innovation strategy. As the series’ general introduction reads, The Myths aims ‘to bring together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way’. Canongate’s commissioning of contemporary retellings of myth and dissemination across the globe thus combines the selling of a unique product created for a global market with the creation of a market for such a product. Likewise, ‘the classics’ get repackaged again and again, sometimes accompanied by a new introduction or critical apparatus, yet always with a new cover. Thus, in 2003, Penguin relaunched its seventy ‘flagship classics’ as ‘an exciting opportunity to rethink the classics’, as it reads on its Penguin Classics website. To invite readers – the general public, students, and academics – to rethink the classics by presenting them with the texts ‘repackaged’ and rejacketed, however, is tantamount to inviting them to buy the new books. To locate rewriting within the culture of continuous renewal and identify it as a form of innovation that emerges in response to market pressures has far-reaching implications for our understanding of women’s rewriting as an intervention in cultural memory. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the motives for writing and publishing women’s rewritings were mostly political and ideological. Designed to counter a tradition of silence and alleged misrepresentation, rewritings were viewed as instrumental in changing the future, for by opening the past to alternative stories, 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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they would also open the future to new possibilities. As summarized by Susan Suleiman in a chapter on feminist intertextuality: ‘Not the same old story, to be sure, or if the same old story, then rewritten, rewritten’ (1990: 169). Those were the years, then, when, energized by the international women’s movement, women writers set out to rewrite the classics of world literature as part of ‘the struggle to alter gender asymmetries agreed upon for centuries’ (Purkiss 1992: 441) and to participate in the production of new stories for women to live and think by.9 By the 1990s, however, it is not only writers who value rewriting, but also the publishing houses that are to bring out these books, albeit not necessarily for the same reasons. As rewriting’s potential for selling books becomes increasingly apparent, its feminist political, ideological, and cultural necessity is co-opted by a market that increasingly recognizes women as dominating the book-buying business. Indeed, whereas for women writers, rewriting is a literary form that combines narrative strategy with feminist praxis, for publishers, it is a means of responding to a presumed audience demand for strong female characters and sell books with low risk and low marketing costs.

Post-Fordist literary marketplace To understand this development, it is useful to recall that the period that saw the development of women’s writing I’m charting in this book is also one that saw the commercialization of the book-publishing industry. This means that the success of women’s rewriting in the literary marketplace at the turn of the millennium is not only to be viewed in relation to the changes, both ideological and economic, brought about by feminism and the women’s movement. It is also to be linked to changes in the book-publishing industry. In fact, developments attendant upon the second feminist wave – especially, the increasing participation of women in the public sphere and in the professions – converge with economic developments due to the globalization of capital to cause the fin-de-millénaire boom in women’s rewriting. In the 1970s, the financial success of a publishing house depended on a large publishing list, which was achieved through economies of scale and a high gross margin due to printing a large number of copies in one print run. In the 1980s, capitalism shifted to a model of short turnover cycles of capital: short lead times with a small number of copies, low stocks, and regular reprints (Harvey 1989). One of the most visible effects of this global shift is that publishers rely increasingly on front lists, generating more and more of their overall 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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sales from fewer books and fewer authors. As the executive summary of Simba Information’s Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2005 report states: ‘Given a choice, publishers would rather release a new title from a bestselling author with a proven customer base than take a chance on a title written by an unknown author’, adding wryly, ‘The reasons are pure economics’ (2). There is, of course, nothing really new to publishers trying to cash in on bestselling authors. As the very term ‘bestseller’, which dates from the late nineteenth century, indicates, large sales through immediate popularity have been around for as long as printed books have been mass produced. Yet the tendency among publishers to try and quickly recover expenses becomes more widespread under the pressures of the planned obsolescence that is built into the system of consumption. Today, publishers and booksellers increasingly prefer books that sell quickly. It is in this post-Fordist economic context governed by the logic of ‘forgetting as planned obsolescence’ (Connerton 2008: 66) that rewriting emerges as a literary genre that allows for feminist literary and political aims to be realized in a commercially viable form. On the literary market, rewritings take up a special position, for they are products with a short life cycle which derive value from the accumulated symbolic capital of products with a substantially more durable lifetime: the texts they rewrite. This can be seen clearly in the strategies devised to sell women’s rewritings on the basis of the prestige that is to be gained from their being associated with canonical names, as when Aiken’s Jane Fairfax (1990) is dubbed ‘a companion volume to Emma by Jane Austen’ and Emma Tennant’s Adèle (2002) is given the subtitle Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story.10 As such, contemporary women’s rewriting participates in the logic of the short production cycle by exploiting both market fashions and accumulated symbolic capital. In the consumer culture of the end of the millennium, the retelling of well-known stories from alternative points of view becomes part of the shopping. An example from The Walt Disney Company, which has been at the forefront of commercial rewritings and adaptations throughout the past century, will illustrate my meaning. When, in November 1992, Disney released its thirty-first ‘Animated Classic’ Aladdin, it did not just issue the film. Among the merchandising paraphernalia there was also Disney’s Aladdin: The Genie’s Tale (Kreider 1993) and, later, Disney’s Aladdin: Jasmine’s Story (Elder 1997). These two books exemplify the way in which rewriting has become an integral part of product marketing and a matter of personal choice, defining the field in which women’s rewriting operate. As bedtime approaches, parents turn to their offspring and 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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ask: whose story do you want to hear tonight? Aladdin’s? Jasmine’s? The Genie’s? In fact, the Upside Down Tales series and Steck-Vaughn’s ‘Point of View Stories’, both of which were started in the early 1990s, similarly offer children such a choice of perspectives. After reading the classic tales of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, or of Little Red Riding Hood, the reader is invited to flip over the book and read the story again as told from the point of view of the stepmother, the witch, or the wolf (Black 1991; Rowland 1991; Heller 1995). ‘I know you’ve heard the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf who eats her and her granny’, The Wolf’s Tale begins. ‘Well, I’m the wolf. William is my name, and I’m going to tell you the real story’ (Rowland 1991: 1). Just as Margaret Atwood does in short stories such as ‘The Little Red Hen Tells All’ and ‘Gertrude Talks Back’, both in Good Bones (1992), which, as their titles indicate, offer the Little Red Hen’s version of the events in the folk tale and Gertrude’s version of what happened in Hamlet, these books take the feminist adage that ‘there is another side to every story’ to the letter and adroitly adapt the narrative technique of rewriting to produce new stories, which then combine with the old ones to sell as a packet of choice. The children of the 1990s to whom these stories were read are the (young) adults of today. Growing up knowing there is always another side to every story, they take a pragmatic approach to the past. The possibility to shop for alternative versions has far-reaching consequences for cultural memory. It also has consequences for feminist rewriting and its impact on the cultural imaginary. The availability of many rewritings, from a variety of perspectives and with different foci of attention, creates a sense of the past as present, multifarious, and polyvalent. Transforming the relationship to tradition and to the founding myths of culture, it also undermines the possibility of projecting the future – of representing the future as project. Whereas rewriting has long been a powerful political and ideological tool in the shaping and reshaping of collective memory, its critical effectiveness in a literary marketplace that increasingly works according to the logics of consumption is transformed. Today, indeed, memory and shopping are linked, not only because consumerism is an integral part of contemporary commemorative practices but also because memories and memorability are central to a society of consumption that has embraced experience as its key marketing concept.11 In their handbook of business strategy and innovation, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argue that ‘Experiences represent an existing but previously unarticulated genre of economic output’ (1999: ix). Attempting to convince companies that they ought to ‘script and stage compelling experiences’, as the blurb on the book’s front 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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flap reads, they write, ‘In the emerging Experience Economy, companies must realize that they make memories, not goods’ (100). An economy that is geared toward producing memories should certainly make us wary of the kind of memory into which we are buying. Producing competing memories as consumer goods, it is also an economy that puts rewriting and retelling at the heart of economic culture and consumerism at the centre of rewriting as a memory practice.

The presence of the past Many scholars have recently reflected on the presence of the past in contemporary culture: on the sense in which the past seems present today – even omnipresent. One of them is the German philologist Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, who refers to the present production of the past as a ‘production of presence’ (2004). In his analysis, the many and diverse pasts actualized in the present create a sense of the presence of the past in the present. This presence of the past designates a material and spatial relationship to it: it is about the impact of the world and its objects on the body and the senses. ‘Presence’ is a contemporary phenomenon that signals an emergent new historical culture – one that, Gumbrecht maintains, ‘has little, if anything to do with the traditional project of history as an academic discipline, with the project of interpreting (that is, reconceptualizing) our knowledge about the past, or with the goal of “learning from history”’ (2004: 121). Instead, what he terms ‘the presentification of past worlds – that is, techniques that produce the impression (or, rather, the illusion) that worlds of the past can become tangible again – is an activity without any explanatory power . . .’ (2004: 94). Aiming neither at interpreting and understanding the past, nor at learning from it, ‘presentification’ (Vergegenwärtigung) in Gumbrecht’s analysis is about ‘the possibility of “speaking” to the dead or “touching” the objects of their world’ (2004: 123). As he explains, ‘Short of always being able to touch, hear, and smell the past, we certainly cherish the illusion of such perceptions. This desire for presentification can be associated with the structure of a broad present where we don’t feel like “leaving behind” the past anymore and where the future is blocked’ (2004: 121). As Gumbrecht describes it, the presentification of the past emerges in reaction to an overly Cartesian environment, one that is ‘metaphysical’ in that it always wants to go beyond the physical. Instead, presence focuses on ‘what meaning cannot convey’, as Gumbrecht’s subtitle goes. Its function is to help ‘us to recuperate the spatial and the bodily dimension 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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of our existence’ (2004: 116). ‘Presence’ is a memory discourse suggesting that the contemporary culture of memory as it manifests itself in practices of cultural remembrance is driven by a desire to make the past present in reaction to the cultural primacy of the mind over the body and the virtualization of everyday life. As such, its emphasis on lived experience and affect ties in with concurrent developments in the humanities and the social sciences, which increasingly seek to explain human behavior and cultural practices in non-rational, emotional or intuitive terms (e.g. Damasio 1994). It also ties in with contemporary notions of a post-capitalist ‘experience economy’ that increasingly revolves around the selling of emotions (Pine and Gilmore 1999). Promulgating a different kind of knowledge that is not so much concerned with meaning as with affect, Gumbrecht’s presence centres on a sensory knowledge that cares not for what one can learn from experiencing the past. Whereas traditionally, the uses of history included deriving lessons from the past and seeking in it solutions to current problems, today, Gumbrecht asserts, ‘nobody relies on historical knowledge in practical situations anymore’ (1997: 411). And indeed, one might ask, what is there to learn, cognitively, strategically, about how the past feels affectively and somatically, except, as Gumbrecht suggests, to ‘enjoy the moment’? The problem for feminism, though, is the question what emancipatory force is to be extracted from Gumbrecht’s ecstatic ‘feeling of being in synch with the things of the world’ (2004: 117; his emphasis). Or, to quote some of the questions that drive Wendy Brown’s investigation into these same issues in Politics Out of History, ‘how do we conjure an emancipatory future within a liberalism out of history? . . . on what do we pin our hopes for a more just society? And without belief in progressive history carrying liberalism toward whatever this reformulated aim might be, what is the engine of historical movement that would realize these hopes?’ (2001: 14). From my brief outlining of its main tenets, it seems clear that we ought to be suspicious of Gumbrecht’s advocacy for ‘presentification’. Especially the ways in which his ‘production of presence’ resonates with Pine and Gilmore’s bestselling retailing handbook The Experience Economy should worry us: while there is nothing necessarily wrong with tapping into the same desires consumer culture taps into, Gumbrecht’s discourse of memory does little to counteract it. Yet as an analysis of the transformed spatio-temporal dimensions of contemporary culture, Gumbrecht’s words nonetheless ought to be taken seriously. They have diagnostic value and resonate productively with key analyses of the politics of memory, past and future in the cultural present (Bauman and Tester 2001; Brown 2001; Jameson 2002; Huyssen 2003; Jameson 2005). In particular, it seems to 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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me that we should heed Gumbrecht’s advice to ‘respond seriously to a situation in which the claim that “one can learn from history” has lost its persuasive power’ (1997: 411). The implications of the claim that whatever one does with history, it has very little to do with learning, are simply too far reaching and therefore need to be examined carefully for what they imply for a politics and a tactics of memory such as the rewritings by women that is the subject of this book, structured as they are by the temporality of modernity’s narrative of progress. Located in-between past and future, women’s rewriting as re-vision belongs to historical time conceived as a progressive sequence of events. Its ‘understanding that change is possible and that narrative can play a role in it’ (Greene 1991: 2) predicates social transformation on a notion of progress – of the present as a moment marked by change resulting from the unfolding of time, out of the past and into the future. The sense of identity it sustains is one that builds on an idea of ‘[c]onsistency of consciousness and a sense of continuity between the actions and events of the past, and the experience of the present’ (King 2000: 2). To achieve this new sense of self, it trusts in the value of historical knowledge: the belief that one can learn from the past and put such knowledge to productive use, ‘to imagine a future that serves women better’, as Catharine Stimpson puts it in ‘The Future of Memory’ (1987: 263). Writing about feminist fiction in the early 1970s, Margaret Drabble observes, ‘Many people read novels in order to find patterns or images for a possible future – to know how to behave, what to hope to be like. We do not want to resemble the women of the past, but where is our future? This is precisely the question that many novels written by women are trying to answer’ (1983 [1973]: 159). By the end of the century, however, times had changed. Huyssen confirms: ‘One learned from history. That was the assumption. . . . This model no longer works’ (2003: 1–2).

A new historical culture What, precisely, has changed? And what are the implications of this new relationship to the past? To begin with, the ‘acceleration of history’ spells the end of historical time and the end of the future imagined as progress. Progress, indeed, is the temporal horizon of modernity. It structures modernity as out of a past conceived of as regressive, and into a future conceived of as improvement. Wendy Brown explains: A fundamental Enlightenment precept, the thesis that humanity is making a steady, if uneven and ambivalent, progress toward greater 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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freedom, equality, prosperity, rationality, or peace emerged in a variety of explicit formulations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Today, however, it is a rare thinker, political leader, or ordinary citizen who straightforwardly invokes the premise of progress. (2001: 6). Harking back to some blissful illo tempore, conjuring a variety of imagined pasts, contemporary culture is more immersed in a past it frequently imagines as better than the present than it is invested in a future that would hold betterment (however conceived). That we no longer turn to history for lessons about how to act in the present and the future is then a symptom of the end of historical time. Second, as the contemporary focus on the past as imagined coincides with the emancipatory project of retrieving, uncovering, or recovering the many pasts it contains, encodes or obscures, it forms a horizon of experience consisting of ‘present pasts’ (Huyssen 2003). Bringing Bauman’s and Gumbrecht’s analyses together, we might say that the ‘liquid’ present characterized by permanent flux and constant change broadens out, swelling to incorporate both the past and the future, which become as it were present in the present. Such a ‘broad present’, Gumbrecht writes, can be seen to herald a new historical culture: one in which the past is present and where one no longer learns from it. Marked by the end of historical time, it is also one in which our linear models of understanding time no longer apply. Third, attempts to resist the broadening present by endeavouring to retain a sense of telos in the face of consumer culture’s ‘nowism’, to use a recent coinage, appear to maintain a conservative perspective onto time, tapping into the forces of the past and of the future. Indeed, choosing to trust in some sense of preordained destiny imposed by the past onto the future, or viewing it as imposing itself retrospectively, from the perspective of some anticipated future – Burke’s ‘to be born’ no less than socialist and utopian visions of the ‘good society’ – is to reassert historical time itself as a solid value in ‘liquid times’. From the perspective of a liquid present, the idea of historical, teleological time appears a desperate life-vest thrown in the sea of change that characterizes the contemporary moment, hopelessly resisting the timelessness of ‘liquid modernity’, its fluidity, impermanence and constant fickle change. Instead, new and less linear models of understanding time are called for to grasp the temporal sea change that the liquid modernity of consumer culture brought upon us. In fact, ‘accumulating different past worlds and their artifacts in a sphere of simultaneity’ (Gumbrecht 2004: 121–2), can this ‘presentist’ 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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historical culture not be viewed to herald a totally new environment of memory? In his introduction to the monumental project Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92), Pierre Nora posits a distinction between memory and history, and locates his object of study, the ‘lieu de mémoire’ (the memory site), as firmly wedged between memory and history. According to Nora, the current obsession with remembering, remembrance, and the fear of forgetting points to a loss of ‘real memory’. ‘We speak so much of memory because there is none left’, he writes, adding, ‘There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory’ (Nora 1984: xvii; Nora 1989: 7).12 Nora has been, rightly, criticized for his romanticized, nostalgic representation of a time prior to the fall into history as reconstruction and re-presentation. There is no doubt that his image of a pre-industrial prelapsarian peasant culture living within a memory that is organic, immediate and unmediated, unself-conscious and present to itself, is romantic, reflecting a nostalgia for an imagined lost realm of authentic ‘real’ and ‘true’ memory that we have learned to suspect as ‘metaphysics of presence’ (see Frow 1997). Yet, as a term that describes a way of dealing with the past that differs fundamentally from that of modernity, does Nora’s ‘milieu de mémoire’ not have heuristic value? To begin with, it can be seen to provide a background for Gumbrecht’s ‘presence’ as living (in) memory. Also, as I wish to propound, it constitutes an instrument for understanding the new historical culture that is in the process of emerging today and that forms the context in which to situate contemporary women’s rewriting. An important challenge posed by the emergent new historical culture is how to think its temporalities and temporal dimensions. Historical time, linearly unfolding as past–present–future, no longer applies. How then to conceptualize this new historical time of simultaneity? Nora’s ‘milieu de mémoire’, inscribing a mythical relation to time that refers the present to the past and to the future while eluding the causal linearity of historical time, suggests a possible answer.13 The ‘milieu de mémoire’ Nora describes is an environment in which remembrance functions as ‘a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth’ (1989: 8). In Nora’s analysis, traces of this earlier form of memory are today still to be found ‘in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories’ (13). In short, in all those forms of incorporated memory that are not marked by separation, whether in time or in space, and therefore lacking the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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distance that would require re-presentation. This ‘memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage’ (8) has clear physical and spatial dimensions. It constitutes a knowledge that is shared, based on familiarity, habit, and repetition, and without conscious control; a tacit knowledge that is ‘as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms’, to use Michel de Certeau’s evocative phrase (1984: 93; see Polanyi 1967), and that ‘presentifies’ time in a way that can be defined as ‘mythic’.

Myth as methodoloy In a context where historical time as the linear unfolding of time, out of the past and into the future, no longer applies, Nora’s ‘milieu de mémoire’ thus provides a conceptual apparatus to think the new temporalities of the contemporary memory culture in its narrative dimensions. Myth can be taken as a non-linear mode of understanding liquid time. As a narrative form, myth brings the past into the present in a movement that remains open to a future in becoming. Characterized by cyclical return (Eliade 1969), myth is traditionally defined as an oral story whose distinguishing feature is that it presupposes retelling: it needs to be told and retold to achieve the status of myth (Kirk 1974). Myth works according to the principle of repetition with a difference. This built-in reproduction mechanism makes that myth is never fixed but is in permanent flux, changeable and changing with every telling, part of ‘a long tradition of borrowings and mendings’ (Sellers 2001: 7). Does this make myth particularly suited to the spirit of the present, ‘liquid’ age? I would suggest so: the narrative dynamics of mythical retelling appear adapted to its fluid character, resonating with the sense of a memory culture as marked by a ‘secondary orality’, as Walter Ong suggested in Orality and Literacy (1982). In the final part of this book, I therefore explore the radical potential of myth for a time structured as a broad present in which increasingly many pasts impinge upon the present. Here, I want to draw out the theoretical implications of the conceptual shift this book proposes. How might mythical retelling prove a productive successor to earlier concepts of women’s rewriting? To begin with, the shift from Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ to contemporary mythremaking reveals a change of perspective on what rewriting can do that reflects received ideas about the past, its place, and role in culture. It shows rewriting as a ‘technology of cultural memory’ that changes as culture itself, in its relationship to the past and in its understanding of that past, also changes. Rewriting is a ‘modality of our relationship to the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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past’ (Terdiman 1993: 7). As the process or procedure by means of which cultural remembrance – what a culture remembers – is produced, rewriting is a ‘technology of memory’: it is one of the ways ‘through which memories are shared, produced, and given meaning’ (Sturken 1997: 9; see also Landsberg 2004); and it determines both what and how a culture remembers, ‘the things and the ways in which a culture remembers’ (Plate and Smelik 2009: 1). As I have argued above, Western culture’s relation to the past has changed. This change means that not only, as Richard Terdiman writes, ‘memory has a history’ (1993: 3), but its technologies change too. How memories are produced, shared, passed on, and given meaning is not stable but changes over time, as both the social frameworks and the media of memory change too. In particular, women’s rewriting as the remembering differently of a culture’s so-called classics in order to project a feminist future does not work in the same way and to the same effect as it did forty years ago, when the notion of women’s writing as re-vision was first articulated. This is because the context for rewriting has changed. In the memory culture of liquid modernity, rewriting is a technology of cultural memory that is implemented to affect and so to transform cultural memory; it no longer works as a tactics to redress and reform wrongful representations so that out of the revised past new futures can emerge. For instance, Wide Sargasso Sea is now part of the literary canon alongside Brontë’s Jane Eyre, much like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is appended to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a text it rewrites. In this way, the countermemorial rewritings of the feminist and postcolonial emancipation movements that stood at the heart of the so-called canon wars, serving to challenge the authority of the canon and the legitimacy of the colonial perspectives it was frequently seen to embody, have affected cultural memory and achieved a place in literary history. As I discuss at more length in Chapter 5, they have not, however, succeeded in doing away with the idea of canonicity itself. Myth presents us with a method to understand this evolution and apparent failure. To begin with, it emphasizes how rewriting also serves to repeat, transmit, and literally re-present the past as it adapts it to present concerns. This conservative dimension of myth is inherent to rewriting – even to those rewritings aiming at remembering differently, as critics have been pointing out (e.g. de Lauretis 1984; Purkiss 1992; Sellers 2001). It is crucial to the production of cultural memory as memory shared yet contested: the rereading and rewriting of texts is one of the central ways in which culture builds its literary heritage. This ‘heritage’, however, is not simply a corpus of texts inherited, received, 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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and passed on. Rather, it is to be understood as a field of negotiation, an arena of dispute and contest over the texts’ meanings and their eventual place in literary history. Second, it enables us to distinguish between two different modes, or orientations, of rewriting: one directed towards the past it seeks to correct, ‘re-righting’ wrong, as Chantal Zabus puts it (Zabus 2001; Zabus 2006; see also Connor 1994), another oriented towards the future as opened up by the promise of further retellings. These two modes of rewriting are related to the distinction Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick draws, in her book Touching Feeling (2003), between a critical mode driven by a hermeneutics of suspicion and a reparative impulse. They can also be mapped onto the distinction Laurence Coupe draws between demythologizing and remythologizing (1997: 106–10). The difference serves to distinguish the women’s rewritings of the 1970s that I refer to as ‘feminist re-vision’ from those of the turn of the millennium and early twenty-first century that I have termed ‘mythical retelling’. As such, it identifies one of the major changes that has occurred as residing within the very discourse on memory, from memory as inscription and feminist remembering as re-inscription to cultural memory as a dynamic process of amnesia and anamnesis, of forgetting, recovery, and reconstruction. The difference can be explained as follows: feminist re-vision, seeking to inscribe another (woman’s) story within the storehouse of tradition, operates in the mode of allegory, which works towards closure: allegory’s two senses, the literal and the allegorical, link the provisional to the projected as its ‘only “true” significance’ (Preminger and Brogan 1993: 32). It appropriates the story it rewrites for alternative ends, explaining it away and substituting another, particularizing story for the one we used to know. Because its main aim is to demythologize what it rewrites, feminist re-vision can be viewed to be driven by suspicion, converging feminist ideas with a Barthesian denaturalizing of myth. Angela Carter, for instance, affirms: ‘I’m in the demythologizing business’. As she explains, myths are interesting to her ‘just because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree’ (1983: 71). They are ‘consolatory nonsenses’, as she puts it in The Sadeian Woman (1979: 5). In contrast, mythical retelling taps into myth’s radical potential for open-endedness and ultimately is ‘additive and accretive’, as Sedgwick writes of the desire for a reparative impulse (2003: 149). As an oral story that presupposes retelling, myth remains open to further appropriation. Never a myth’s final telling, mythical retelling is merely a moment in a cultural process of storytelling that is ongoing. This makes 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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it particularly amenable to the cycles of consumer culture, literally buying into the fluid, mobile, and protean character of the liquid modern condition. The negative picture of myth as the narrative equivalent of a contemporary liquid modernity capable only of assimilating more pasts into its ever broadening present should not, however, make us forget that its never-endingness also harbors a sense of futurity and resources for renewal, resistance, and transformation, to be enacted or performed in the act of reading and of further rewriting, both individually at the level of the private imagination, and collectively in the cultural imaginary. Mythical retelling is also the fluid encounter of the individually lived life with the told story, inscribing the individual with the collective – or, alternatively, allowing the collective and cultural memory to be impacted by the individual.

Tactics and strategies of memory The term mythical retelling captures the historical changes that occurred within memory conceived as a discursive formation that inscribes a specific understanding of the relationship to the past, shifting from a predominantly antagonistic, ‘paranoid’, and suspicious attitude to one seeking to draw sustenance from it. These changes that can be traced in the way women’s rewriting functions in cultural memory in the period since 1970 can further be understood in terms of tactics and strategies of cultural memory. Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics presents a useful conceptual pair to comprehend rewriting as a technology of memory, inviting to distinguish between the technologies produced by institutions that partake of hegemonic power and those produced to counter sanctioned memory. As defined by Marita Sturken, cultural memory is ‘a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history’ (1997: 1). This means that stories do not simply add up to constitute cultural memory. Instead, they compete and clash, and are thus all part of the power dynamics that define cultural memory as contested and even altogether counter-memorial. Therefore, we need to recognize that these stories as technologies of memory are also unevenly implicated in the production of cultural memory. Certeau’s ‘tactics’, which he defines as ‘an art of the weak’ (1984: 37), is a kind of guerilla warfare waged by individuals to generate space for themselves in environments defined by ‘strategies’, that is, by ‘the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships’ effected by institutions and power structures. Tactics and strategies are different ways of engaging in power struggles: not 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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only from different places, but also with distinct utilizations of time. Strategies are devised from places of power and have clear spatial dimensions; tactics are emergent procedures that rely on the chance offerings of the propitious moment (34–9). The many retellings of well-known, culturally central texts show rewriting to be a tactics that has proved a powerful political and ideological tool in the reshaping of cultural memory. Over the past four decades, histories have been retold and canonical texts rewritten, not through any concerted effort of a league of women writers, but through many individual acts of rewriting. The proliferation of counter-narratives yields multiple counter-memories that co-exist in the broad synchronous space of mythical memory. Today, indeed, it sometimes seems there is hardly a story left that has not been turned over and told from another perspective, and from The Journal of Mrs Pepys (George 1998) to novels about Captain Ahab’s wife (Naslund 1999), Scarlett O’Hara’s mulatto half-sister (Randall 2001), or Proust’s beloved fugitive, Albertine (Rose 2001), women’s rewritings have enriched our repertoire of stories with accounts of untold ‘lives of the obscure’, as Virginia Woolf phrased it (1984 [1925]). Yet, tactics may give way to strategy. Indeed, multiplying the perspectives on literary history and our so-called cultural heritage, women’s rewriting also can be seen increasingly to be part of a feminist strategy devised from a place of relative power. No longer mere ad-hoc tactics seizing the opportune occasion, women’s rewritings are also strategic representations that rejoin the goals of women’s history more generally, to wit: ‘to restore women to history and to restore our history to women’, as Joan Kelly phrased it (Kelly-Gadol 1976: 809). Feminist art, literature, and scholarship have been defined as ‘a means of redressing the official “forgetting” of women’s histories’ (Hirsch and Smith 2002: 4). Their methods, like those of feminist re-vision, have been described as a ‘re-membering’ of women’s histories (Lourie et al. 1987: 3), while their purpose has been identified as the undoing of the hegemonic and authoritative version of History (and his story). A form of ‘countermemory’, women’s studies as a whole is a movement that has always more or less directly engaged issues of cultural memory. In this context, the distinction between women’s rewriting as a tactic or as a strategy of memory hinges on the rewriting’s relation to feminism, women’s studies and the women’s movement. It is also a historical development that can be likened to that undergone by a guerilla movement that gains a place in national parliament, where it continues to engage in power struggles yet has a legitimate place and voice. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



Consuming Memories

The transformation of women’s rewriting from a tactic into a strategy of memory shows rewriting to be a technology of cultural remembrance that has changed not only the ways in which stories, histories, and herstories are told, but also how the past is conceived. As a tactic levelled at transforming the memory of the past, women’s rewriting has enabled the production of the past as a multiplicity of stories and perspectives. Now a strategy used not only by writers with feminist inclinations but by publishing houses such as Canongate to sell books, it has also contributed to the transformation of our relationship to the historical and cultural past. In the years that saw the development of Rich’s term into a feminist imperative, cultural critics and philosophers like JeanFrançois Lyotard observe the atomization of History into histories, of grand narratives into petits récits (Lyotard 1979). Women’s rewriting, I submit, played a vital role in this process. Indeed, the imperative to re-vision that became the rallying cry of feminism in the 1980s served not only as a catalyst for many rewritings and from many different perspectives. It also helped to usher in new uses of the past, contributing to making the past one of our prime commodities, sold on the cultural market for consumption and profit.

Performing cultural memory Consumer culture is a fact that we cannot ignore anymore, for consumerism is the driving force of society today and its logic has spread to all domains of social and cultural life. In consequence, its role needs to be taken into account in any study of cultural production and reception. Yet to acknowledge the centrality of consumerism to contemporary society is not the same as to say all and everything abide by the laws of the market. The society of producers may have transformed into a society of consumers whose purpose is directed at the commoditization of the consumer (Bauman 2007b); nonetheless, there still are different ways of assuming the role of the commoditized subject, of making the self into a sellable commodity and of bringing it to the market. The art of life, as Bauman (2008) has termed the imperative to chose how to construct and narrate one’s life trajectory, inevitably plays itself out within the space of consumer culture. Reminding us that all art involves choices, struggle with the resistance of the materiality of the medium, and vision, Bauman’s art of life also reminds us that if consumerism conditions life, it certainly does not determine it. To reformulate consumption as (artistic) production and an act if not of creation, then of art as craft, may not immediately strike one as a very 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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radical gesture. Yet it allows us to see that even a system as all-engulfing as consumerism cannot control everything that falls within its purview, but continues to leave room for alternative uses. It also enables us to see that while today, the long-term (life) project as a durable work has given way to short-term projects as continuous re-assemblages pertaining to the realm of the ephemeral and the performance, it is precisely on these terms, as performance of cultural memory, that the utopian potential of women’s rewriting can be recovered. Ultimately, it is not as narratives and trajectories leading to a clearly defined and identified destination that women’s rewriting is especially valuable today, but rather as enacted presence, meaningful precisely because it embodies choice – artistic, social, and political choice – yet remains open to further and new choices. As I detail in the final chapter of the book, rewriting as the performance of cultural memory and reading as its enactment moves women’s rewriting out of the domain of the archive and into that of the repertoire (Taylor 2003), refocusing attention on its intervention in public space. Indeed, seen as mediation of the memories that preoccupy contemporary culture, women’s rewritings turn out to be consuming memories not only in the sense of manufactured memories (re)produced for consumption. Instead, producing the literary past in the present as a kind of event, they are mediations of memory that engage feminist discourse in such a way as to remain of consuming feminist interest.








Part II

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En/gendering Cultural Memory: Rereading, Rewriting, and the Politics of Recognition

In the 1970s, rewriting emerges as a privileged mode of feminist textual production. Feminist activist writers such as Adrienne Rich in the United States and Hélène Cixous in France develop concepts for it and feminist writers and writers’ collectives explore the possibilities rewriting affords them to convey their understanding of existence. The resulting stories, Sara Maitland explains apropos of her ‘Penelope’, speak of ‘experience at large. Not only as it is but as it might be’ (1978: 114). Rewriting from the woman’s perspective inscribes this possibility of change within cultural memory: ‘Our whole history and the structures of consolation (myths) that we have built for ourselves need to be and can be transformed’ (114). There is nothing intrinsically new about women’s rewriting in the 1970s. Rewriting has functioned as a motor force of literature since time immemorial. The history of Western literature can be told as a history of rewriting, with Virgil’s Aeneid as a Roman rewriting of Homer’s ancient Greek epic poems, Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Divine Comedy as rewritings of Virgil, Cervantes’s Don Quixote rewriting Dante, and so forth.1 Also, much postmodern writing in the early 1970s consists of rewriting – think of John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), retelling the canonical Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf from the perspective of the monster, or of John Barth’s retellings of myth from the perspectives of Bellerophon, Perseus, and Sheherazade’s sister, Dunyazade, as collected in Chimera (1972).2 As this last example shows, the rewriting from the standpoint of the female characters of literary history is not new either. In the Heroides, the Roman poet Ovid already gives a voice to mythological figures such as Penelope, Dido, and Medea in letters addressed to the famous lovers who abandoned them. These Ovidian epistles have yielded a rich tradition of rewritings and adaptations running to this day.3 Michèle Roberts’s ‘Hypsipyle to Jason’ (2000), for instance, can be traced to this tradition. 39



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In this short story, Hypsipyle, rather than berating Jason, accusing him of infidelity and eventually pronouncing a terrible curse, relishes her time alone and the pleasures of waiting, longing, and writing the letter his absence occasions. What, then, is new about contemporary women’s rewriting? In my view, its specificity resides in the uses to which rewriting is put at the time. The meaning of rewriting, in other words, is not transhistorical, but is bound up with the particular social and cultural context in which it operates. In this chapter, I submit that women’s rewriting emerges as a privileged feminist genre in the 1970s because it embodies secondwave feminism’s emancipatory promise – its ‘will to change’, as Elaine Showalter puts it in her recent literary history of American women writers, referring to Adrienne Rich’s landmark 1971 poetry collection The Will to Change (2009: 441). As Showalter explains, by the late 1960s, women writers were ‘calling for a new kind of writing that would abandon the masks of feminine decorum and tell the whole truth about the gender and the nature of things’. In the 1970s, the mood was generally one of ‘optimism and determination about the possibilities for change in relations between women and men, and women and society’ (439–41). Women’s rewriting embodies this will to change literally. Rewriting is not only about change; it is change. It transmutes the stock of narratives that serves to shape cultural identity and allows women writers to carve a space for the expression of female experience within literary tradition that they can legitimately claim their own. Challenging the authority of traditional representations (of the past, of women, of their roles in the past), it enables female authorship, facilitating women’s access to print while satisfying their desire to supplement or correct the texts of the past. By the mid-to-late 1980s, however, as women became increasingly part of the professions, including the literary professions, rewriting loses its feminist sense of urgency and of transformative potential. Although it continues to form a mainspring of literary creativity, and although its necessity as a strategy of intervention and a tool for social change is at times reasserted in novels and short stories published during the ensuing decades, on the whole, rewriting changes function and status. Perhaps because it so unabashedly asserts a feminine identity in public space, women’s rewriting from the 1980s onwards is expressive either of a continued commitment to feminism, or of its writer’s deliberate assumption of her identity as a woman writer speaking to feminine concerns. Because the feminist rewriting of the 1970s envisions new possibilities for the future in the revision and rewriting of the past, it can be understood as engaging primarily with culture as memory, that is, with 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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cultural memory as the social and cultural process of remembering, forgetting, misremembering, or distorting the past. It is, indeed, because the lost voices and forgotten women were considered a legacy that had been withheld, ‘an inheritance that had been denied us’, as Nina Baym phrases it (2001: 21), that so much second-wave feminist writing, both scholarly and artistic, was directed towards the retrieval and reinscription of women’s voices. Partaking of the feminist ‘salvation project’ that seeks to resurrect past women’s lives (Beizer 2009), rewriting is a practice by means of which women writers and readers ‘unlearn submission’, as Alicia Ostriker defines one of the purposes of feminist fiction (1982: 87). Women’s rewriting teaches readers to be critical of tradition, inducting them in the art of suspicious reading, to paraphrase Rita Felski (2009: 28). Articulating feminism’s sense of gender injustice in texts that rewrite the old stories from the newly-found perspective of ‘woman’, it ‘author-izes’ writers to voice female concerns within the public sphere. In retrospect, its aim to transform culture and the social organization of gender it inscribes notwithstanding, women’s rewriting appears an intervention in the cultural memory of the late twentieth century that unwittingly engendered consumer memory culture. This is because, in the context of the rise of neo-liberal capitalism, the feminist goal of women’s rewriting to generate a usable past is put to economically productive use. In this chapter, I therefore look at how women’s rewriting, embodying feminism’s emancipatory promise, defined a feminist project that, with hindsight, can be seen to have contributed to creating the condition for the emergence of consumer memory culture. To understand this development, I scrutinize two concepts for women’s rewriting that have proved particularly influential and productive: Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ and Hélène Cixous’s ‘écriture féminine’. Placing them in the context of developments in the material reality and the literary-theoretical conceptualization of reading, I argue that their articulation of a new (resisting, anti-authoritarian, non-submissive) relationship to tradition not only enables women’s rewriting to intervene in cultural memory but opens it up to commoditization.

Rewriting as productive reception Rewritings tell stories of reading. As a form of ‘productive reception’, rewritings embody a reaction to the texts they rewrite. They speak of how their writers ‘received’, understood, and interpreted what they read. Inviting a double, comparative reading, they also stage a particular scene of reading, one in which readers are encouraged 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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to look again at the rewritten text, and to look at it in the light of the new text. In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton defines the object of the study of the social formation of memory as ‘those acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible’ (1989: 39). Rewriting is such an act of transfer in which texts from the past are re-produced and passed on. In particular, contemporary women’s rewriting constitutes an act of transfer through which a feminist memory is established. Rewriting is an act of transfer triggered by reading, born in the interstices of another text, in that complex act of actualization and meaningmaking that is ‘the act of reading’ (Iser 1976). Many rewriters locate the genesis of their text in the reading of another one. For instance, in her letters, Jean Rhys records her resistance to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, her being ‘vexed at her portrait of the “paper tiger” lunatic, the all wrong creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr Rochester’ (1984: 262). Rhys, it is worth recalling, originated from the West Indies. Her conviction that Brontë’s representation of the West Indian Bertha is flawed rests on a sense of misrecognition – of a distorted image, ‘a legend’, as she puts it (271). ‘I’ve never believed in Charlotte’s lunatic’, she claims, adding, ‘that’s why I wrote this book’ (296). Similarly, Christa Wolf says she set out to tell the story of Cassandra to correct what she cautiously terms ‘a “mistake” on Aeschylus’s part’ (1984: 150). In her account of how she came to conceive of her novel, she reports reading Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon and thinking, ‘Never would she [Cassandra] have said this: “Inside as well as outdoors I can/Mourn Agamemnon’s fate.” . . . Not if I knew her as well as I thought’ (150). What Rhys and Wolf share is first of all an engaged experience of reading. Their reading is implicated and their response to the text combines cognition with emotion and affect (cf. Pearce 1997). The texts are ‘identity narratives’ in Moraru’s sense of the term (2001: xiii); they hold special personal and cultural significance: Wolf turns to Aeschylus in preparation for a trip to Greece and with Jane Eyre, Rhys tackles a novel she had read often and that was long been part of any young woman’s education – ‘that indispensable tabletop reference work of all our mothers and grandmothers’, as the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva puts it (1980: 319). In women’s rewriting, distrust, disbelief, anger, and a desire to set things right converge to give shape to a reader’s response in the productive reception of literature. Women’s rewriting is marked by what Paul Ricoeur has termed the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. It mistrusts and resists those texts it views as the embodiment of oppressive 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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power and authority – the Bible, the classics, texts seen to embody patriarchal, heteronormative and/or colonial worldviews – and uses ‘interpretation as a tactic of suspicion and as a battle against masks’ (1970: 26). This hermeneutics of suspicion, Alicia Ostriker explains in her discussion of feminist Biblical revisionism, intersects with a hermeneutics of desire (1993: 66). It is filtered by what Adrienne Rich has termed, as the title of her poem goes, ‘the phenomenology of anger’ (1973: 25). Because it refuses to submit to culture as it is, women’s rewriting is a practice in which women ‘unlearn submission’, in Ostriker’s formulation (1982: 87), learning to become ‘a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us’, as Judith Fetterley writes in The Resisting Reader (1978: xxii). This response is informed by the women’s movement and what Rita Felski has termed ‘the feminist public sphere’, i.e. ‘an oppositional public arena for the articulation of women’s needs in critical opposition to the values of a male-defined society’ (1989: 166). It is facilitated by the advent of feminist criticism, that is, by the ‘critical revolution’ brought about by the insight that ‘women readers and critics bring different perceptions and expectations to their literary experience’ (Showalter 1985: 3). Women’s rewriting is part of the discursive space of second-wave feminism, drawing on its sense of identity and of gender-based oppression. According to Wolf, Cassandra ‘prefigures what was to be the fate of women for three thousand years: to be turned into an object’ (1984: 227). Wolf not only deploys a feminist rhetoric, but draws on a sense of a shared female experience to claim she knows Cassandra better than Aeschylus. Ultimately, it is because of feminism’s recognition of women’s experiences as source of knowledge and hence of authority that she can set out to retell her story as seen from her own perspective. In this light, women’s rewriting can be seen to articulate something about women’s reading and women’s relation to what is given to read or is available to women for reading – to culture as memory. Women’s rewriting first emerges as a quest for a female language and literature that ‘reflects’ the woman reader’s experience.4 Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminist criticism, both within and outside the universities, is drawing connections between women’s lives as they are lived and women’s lives as they are represented.5 The findings of feminist criticism are widely available, in non-fiction bestsellers such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), which first combined 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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literary and cultural criticism to analyze the role of literature in the transformation of culture – conceived by Millett as a sexual revolution that is also a cultural, social, political, and psychological revolution – and in resisting such a radical transformation. Women’s rewriting has clear links with feminist criticism. Syntagmatically, it is a writing that is also a (re)reading, like feminist criticism seeking to expose structures of sexual oppression and repression as they are formulated in representative texts. (The notion of ‘critical rewriting’, as used by Marcel CornisPope and André Lefevere, for instance, establishes the same analogy between literary criticism and creative rewriting by other means.) The artistic and creative articulation of a reading fermented in a mind sensibilized by feminist thinking about women’s oppression, misogyny and male chauvinism, and sexual politics, women’s rewriting is a literary genre that grew out of a feminist insight into the effects of stories on the imagination and, consequently, on lived experience – life as it is lived and experienced. Taking gender as its fundamental category of analysis, the feminist criticism of the late 1960s and early 1970s first focused on the stereotyped images of women in literature, which cast woman as, in Adrienne Rich’s words, ‘a terror and a dream’ (1972: 21). Concerned with the exclusion of women’s experience from literature, it also turned its attention to the exclusion of women writers from literary history. Diagnosis went hand in hand with suggestions for remedy. Change in the condition of literature was in the hands of writers – especially, of women writers. They were to explore this newly emerging terrain and develop a language and imagery adequate to it. From the onset, reading in its feminist critical sense was linked to writing: a production of text that would not reproduce literature’s exclusions and misrepresentations, but find alternative modes of writing; ‘to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, . . . to call experimentally by another name. For’, Rich adds, ‘writing is re-naming’ (1972: 23). This alliance between feminist criticism and women’s (re)writing developed under the auspices of the women’s movement. Subsequently theorized by Elaine Showalter as ‘feminist critique’ and ‘gynocriticism’, the dual focus of feminist criticism on the woman as reader and the woman as writer is not only a division into distinct varieties of criticism, with different objects of study and different theoretical concerns (1979: 25). The two orientations also complement one another in the task of transforming consciousness, looking critically to the past and anticipating hopefully on a promised ‘herland’ of feminist vision.6 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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The double orientation of feminist criticism, towards the past in its practice of reading literature as the study of ‘the sins and errors of the past’ (Heilbrun and Stimpson 1975: 64) and towards the future in its practice of writing literature as the imagining of alternatives and a better society, coalesce in the practice of women’s rewriting. In rewriting, looking back to the past and looking forward to the future come together. This is literally inscribed in the morphology of the word: whereas the verb ‘to write’, meaning to form (letters, symbols, words) on a surface, implies a movement forward, advancing in time and space, the prefix ‘re’, meaning ‘again’ or ‘back’, on the contrary implies a movement backwards, of returning, of looking back, and of repetition. The dual orientation of rewriting is most clearly articulated in Adrienne Rich’s concept of ‘re-vision’, a concept she takes from Henry James in, to use James’s own words, an ‘infinitely interesting and amusing act of re-appropriation’ (2009: l; emphasis James’s).7 Re-vision even better than rewriting articulates the double-directed look: its hyphen, crucially releasing the word’s polysemy, gives us a ‘revision’ that is a looking back or again, implementing a change designed to correct or improve, yet also contains the power of vision, that is, the ability to imagine the future. Not surprisingly, Rich’s words defining re-vision became the locus classicus of feminist criticism and of women’s rewriting: Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see – and therefore live – afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order re-assert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (1972: 18–19)



Reading and (re)writing: Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’

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Often quoted, Rich’s words are worth pondering for what they tell us about women’s reading and (re)writing. Emphasizing the necessity of a radical feminist critique of literature momentous in its potential for change, Rich defends a novel perspective that is first of all a new, feminist theory of reading. The ‘new critical direction’ of feminist criticism puts literature in a new light, thus constituting a re-reading of the texts from the literary tradition. To return to the old texts and to approach them from a feminist perspective is to see them illuminated differently and from a new critical viewpoint, with the ‘fresh eyes’ of feminist vision. The perspective takes into account the broader cultural context of the literary work, relating it to ways of thinking about and of being in the world, linking the reading of literature to life as it is lived. Thus, it is also a perspective that explicitly distances itself from New Criticism and its ‘new critical’ emphasis on the text as an autonomous entity – on ‘what the poem says as a poem’, in Cleanth Brooks’s well-known formulation (1947: xi).8 Instead, the ‘new critical’ direction propounded by Rich turns a page of literary history. Emerging from the historical moment of the women’s movement, re-vision is a new procedure of reading that also marks a defining moment in literary and cultural history. Although Rich says it is ‘more than a chapter in cultural history’, her phrase rhetorically implies it is also precisely that: a chapter in cultural history that is also a stage in literary history. From the perspective of second-wave feminism, this stage is pivotal: it is to revolutionize the course of history. Speaking of what a feminist critique of literature ‘would’ do, Rich describes the consequences of re-vision as an event that can be imagined but has yet to happen. In her view, however, it is imperative that it should take place: re-vision is ‘an act of survival’. As the title of the essay, taken from Ibsen’s play, indicates, not to do it means if not physical death, then social and psychological death. ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ is about the awakening of a feminist consciousness. The collective awakening of women to their reality is to yield self-knowledge – a self-knowledge that is essential, part of women’s search for identity: it is to gain insight into ‘how we live’ and ‘how we have been living’, how consciousness is shaped, the imagination curtailed and the real construed. This knowledge, in turn, forms the basis for social change: it is through an understanding of these mechanics that women’s collective resistance to what Rich identifies as ‘the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society’ is to be achieved – what she would gloss, in a later version of her essay, ‘a fatalistic pessimism as to the possibilities of change, whether societal or personal’ she finds in the work of her male contemporaries 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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(1979: 49). ‘We all know that there is another story to be told’, Rich writes in a sentence that was deleted in subsequent versions of the essay (1972: 25). ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction’ (1979: 49). Possibly ‘the price of masculine dominance’, this self-destruction can only be remedied through ‘a change in sexual identity’, which implies altered consciousnesses for both men and women: ‘just as woman is becoming her own midwife, creating herself anew, so man will have to learn to gestate and give birth to his own subjectivity . . . women can no longer be primarily mothers and muses for men: we have our own work cut out for us’ (1972: 25). There is a discernibly prescriptive strand in the ‘new critical direction’ proffered by feminist criticism, as there is an imperative tone to Rich’s essay. The urgency and necessity of what Sandra Gilbert would call ‘the revisionary imperative’ is made possible by a feminist ethics articulating a clear sense of right and wrong, of what needs to be left behind, and of where humanity needs to be heading to. Indeed, the feminist understanding that ‘we must redo our history, . . . review, reimagine, rethink, rewrite, revise, and reinterpret the events and documents that constitute it’ (1980: 32) was based on a firm idea of what re-vision was to achieve. This sense of re-vision’s purposefulness underwrites its importance for the feminist project it initiated. It also allowed for the formulation of criteria for ‘good conduct’. Literature that was to receive its stamp of approval was to meet feminist standards of ‘good literature’. The critique of the texts that failed to meet these standards entailed the writing of new ones that did meet them. In her ‘American Feminist Literary Criticism: A Bibliographical Introduction’, Cheri Register identifies this prescriptive strand, explaining, ‘It can guide authors who are writing literary works from a new feminist perspective, as well as those critics who are analyzing existing literature’ (1975: 2). The criteria by which to judge literature were set by its value to the women’s movement, the way(s) in which it served the cause of women’s liberation. Register puts it this way: To earn feminist approval, literature must perform one or more of the following functions: (1) serve as a forum for women; (2) help to achieve cultural androgyny; (3) provide role-models; (4) promote sisterhood; and (5) augment consciousness-raising. (18–19) These are criteria worlds apart from the academically dominant criteria of the New Critics, who valued literary works for their intrinsic qualities, 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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for paradox, ambiguity, and irony, and who practiced close reading to come to the best and fullest interpretation of them – certainly not for their effect on readers, raising their consciousness, or providing them with models to emulate. Such emotive meaning, indeed, the New Critics discounted as ‘the affective fallacy’, that is, as ‘a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 21; emphasis in the original). In contrast, feminist criticism and the new writing by women distrusted the New Critical isolation of the text from its cultural context, putting its performative meaning at the heart of their critical practice. In the light of 1970s feminist criticism, the meaning of a text is precisely what it does, its ideological and political effects on male and female readers. The diagnosis of the effects of the existing literature as mostly nefarious, providing neither positive role-models nor realistic representations of relations between women but requiring of the female reader she identifies against herself, led to the development of two related activities. On the one hand, it led to the formulation of alternative modes, tactics, and strategies of reading – for instance, Fetterley’s ‘resisting reading’, advocating a re-reading of literature ‘from a point of view which questions its values and assumptions’, as she puts it in The Resisting Reader (1978: xx). For as she argues, ‘While women obviously cannot rewrite literary works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality, we can accurately name the reality they do reflect’ (xxiii). On the other hand, it led to the articulation of a female language and literature, a new kind of women’s writing that tries precisely to reflect ‘our reality’ and that sometimes takes the form of actual rewriting. Adrienne Rich’s essay ‘When We Dead Awaken’ is permeated by the sense of a need for a female language and literature, from her search for ‘guides, maps, possibilities’ (1972: 21) to her quest for a ‘non-male’ style, voice, for ways in which, for women as for men, ‘the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united’ (23–4). Not surprisingly, her own literary production as a poet is similarly engaged in this quest for a female language, most notably in the award-winning Diving into the Wreck, a collection of poems published in 1973 and containing a poem entitled, like her essay, ‘When We Dead Awaken’. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Margaret Atwood qualifies it as ‘extraordinary’, observing, ‘If Adrienne Rich were not a good poet, it would be easy to classify her as just another vocal Women’s Libber, substituting polemic for poetry. . . . But she is a good poet, and her book is not a manifesto, though it subsumes manifestoes; nor is it a proclamation, though it makes proclamations.’ As Atwood proceeds to explain, 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Diving into the Wreck is ‘a book of explorations, of travels. The wreck she is diving into . . . is the wreck of obsolete myths, particularly myths about men and women’ (1993 [1973]: 280). In the title poem, the poet is a reader who, ‘having read the book of myths’ and equipped herself with proper diving-gear, journeys to the depth of the sea ‘to explore the wreck’; ‘the wreck and not the story of the wreck/ the thing itself and not the myth’ (1973: 22–3). Through its vivid imagery, the poem explores issues akin to those addressed in Rich’s prose. The diver ‘carrying . . ./ a book of myths/ in which/ our names do not appear’, exploring the place and discovering treasure concealed inside rot, is obviously a figuration of the feminist reader ‘entering an old text from a new critical direction’. Finding her way ‘back to this scene’, the diver probes the depths of the sea, investigating mythologies of gender, of women and men, and of the relations between them, realizing she is part of the wreckage, one of its ‘halfdestroyed instruments’. Examining, as it were, ‘the assumptions in which we are drenched’, the poem partakes of the quest for self-knowledge that is Rich’s journey to self-discovery in poetic language. As Rich writes in the poem, ‘The sea is another story’, meaning it is another element, where different rules and principles apply. Echoing her claim, at the close of her essay, that ‘We all know that there is another story to be told’, it also suggests Diving into the Wreck is an attempt to tell this other story. As such, it is an exploration of the linguistic conditions and literary possibilities for the telling of this other story. Questing for the truth behind the myth, seeking to recover the reality of the wrecked lives, it defines rewriting as a restorative gesture that is animated by suspicion yet is directed at salvage.

‘Récriture féminine’: Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine as rewriting Writing in the same years, on the other side of the Atlantic, Hélène Cixous addresses similar issues in her work. The context, of course, is different, as are the terms of reference. For the French feminist, the crucible of a bankrupt masculinity is the war in Algeria rather than in Vietnam and the bogeyman is the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan rather than writers like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Yet the stakes are comparable, Cixous’s concerns with another story and another language echoing with Rich’s in resonant ways. In fact, the literal echoes of Rich’s words in Cixous’s, suggesting some transatlantic pollination, point towards an international feminist public sphere in 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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which rewriting functions as a central concept in thinking women’s way out of the historically oppressive past and into a better future. As discussed above, in Rich’s view, ‘re-vision . . . is an act of survival’ because it leads to help autonomy and self-determination. By identifying sources of oppression and charting their mechanics of reproduction, re-vision was to help retrieve a female sense of self that was not defined by patriarchal society. Its revelation that there is nothing natural about the stories that sustain social organization and its gendered division of labour was to rescue women from the confines of an identity defined primarily in terms of domesticity. Indeed, its revelation that they are stories to begin with, myths that are passed off as timeless truths but that can be told differently, was considered the first step in the process of emancipation that was to lead, through the stages of consciousness-raising and political action, to the radical transformation of the public sphere. Hélène Cixous voices views analogous to Rich’s when she asks, in her contribution to The Newly Born Woman, what would happen if the myths that sustain the patriarchal order were to be demystified and claims, ‘Then all the stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would change, will change hands, bodies, an other thought still unthinkable will transform the functioning of every society’ (Cixous 1977 [1975]: 66; see also Cixous and Clément 1986: 65).9 Throughout her writings in the 1970s and early 1980s, Cixous’s concerns are with the ways literature and philosophy function as edifices for maintaining male supremacy and legitimating the social dominance of men over women. As she submits, a serious challenge to this social order entails the retelling of its central stories, which is exactly what she sees happening around her: Now, we are living through precisely that age when the conceptual foundation of a millenary culture is in the process of being undermined by millions of a kind of mole [taupe] which is as yet unrecognized. When they awaken from among the dead, from among the words, from among the laws. (ibid.) Cixous’s words resonate intertextually with Rich’s, reprising the phrase taken from Ibsen to signify women’s collective awakening to their social condition as ‘the second sex’, to use Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark expression, unfolding it across the domains of language and legislation. And as they echo the title of Rich’s essay and poem, they assert the centrality of re-vision to the transformation of culture envisaged by the international women’s movement. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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The importance of re-vision to second-wave feminism is underscored by the use of rewriting in Cixous’s best-known essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975). This essay is a polemic against Lacan, whom Cixous sees as the descendant of a long tradition of what she terms ‘phallologocentrism’, a word that yokes logocentrism with phallocentrism together in solidarity, thus signifying the way the social order that privileges its male members is produced in and through language (logos). Among Cixous’s first texts to be translated in English and her most frequently anthologized one, it opposes especially key psychoanalytical notions such as the death-drive, lack, castration, and separation.10 Instead, it ‘hysterically’ proclaims woman as the source of life, the plenitude of her body, breath, speech, promulgating another conception of (bi)sexuality that brings about ‘multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire’ (1976: 884). ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ is a manifesto propounding feminine writing (écriture féminine). It encourages women to write themselves, explores women’s relation to language, and attempts to project new futures out of the dismantled past. Cixous’s rewriting of the myth of the Medusa illustrates the new writing. Putting the theory into practice, the laughing Medusa articulates feminine writing as a powerful intervention that disrupts the reproduction of the phallologocentric order. In the brief passage evoking the Greek mythological figure that gives the essay its title, Cixous apparently reverses the values traditionally ascribed to Medusa. In Cixous’s account, Medusa is no longer the monster she is traditionally held to be, turning to stone whoever looks upon her, the ‘symbol of horror’ that signifies castration in Freud’s analysis (1955: 273). ‘You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing’ (1976: 885). Immediately following her assertion ‘that women aren’t castrated, that they only have to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change direction and meaning’, Cixous’s beautiful and laughing Medusa embodies her refusal to listen to the dangerous song of men. As such, it echoes May Sarton’s poem ‘The Muse as Medusa’ (1971), a poem that builds on a tradition of women poets finding poetic inspiration in the myth of Medusa and whose opening lines run, I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone. I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold. I was not punished, was not turned to stone – How to believe the legends I am told? (107)11 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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Resting, like Sarton’s poem, on a hermeneutics of suspicion and of disbelief, Cixous’s Medusa owes its textual existence to two related linguistic strategies: on the one hand, the denial of her traditional form (she’s not deadly) and, on the other, the affirmation of her new one (she is beautiful and she is laughing). These two linguistic threads form as it were the warp and woof of the myth’s intertextuality, weaving a positive and a negative strand into its fabric.12 They also articulate rewriting’s dual methodology as rereading and as writing, oriented towards the past it revises and the future it envisions. To affirm life over death in her reweaving of the myth of Medusa’s textual fabric, Cixous rescues from oblivion a thread of the narrative that is often forgotten. In Ovid’s version of the myth, in Book 4 of Metamorphoses, Perseus, having given his hosts an account of how he slew Medusa, is asked why she wears snakes mingled with her hair. He replies: That, too, is a tale worth telling. She was very lovely once, the hope of many An envious suitor, and of all her beauties Her hair most beautiful – at least I heard so From one who claimed he had seen her. One day Neptune Found her and raped her, in Minerva’s temple, And the goddess turned away, and hid her eyes Behind her shield, and punishing the outrage As it deserved, she changed her hair to serpents . . .. (trans. Rolfe Humphries [1955: 106]) Cixous’s rewriting of the myth as the celebration of the beautiful Medusa can thus be seen to counter myth with myth, substituting for the version that blames the victim of rape one that restores her to her condition prior to her violation by the sea god. As such, it is a restorative reading that dives as it were ‘into the wreck’, to use Rich’s metaphor, mining the past for knowledge it can put to productive use, trying to undo a mythology built up through centuries of artistic representations.13 In particular, Cixous resists Freud’s interpretation of Medusa as the embodiment of a femininity that is both fascinating and terrifying, divided by the decapitation that relegates femininity to the realm of the unknown and of the unknowable, linking the terror she inspires to that of the threat of castration.14 Restoring Medusa beautiful, alive, and laughing to tradition, Cixous acts instead as a midwife to ‘the newly born woman’, as she and 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Catherine Clément refer to the subject of feminine writing (1986 [1975]). This task she performs through the dual operation of a deconstructive reading, on the one hand, and a reconstructive rewriting, on the other. As she explains, ‘what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project’ (1976: 875). This récriture féminine, as we may call Cixous’s practice of revisionary rewriting, has much in common with Rich’s re-vision. Knowing a dual orientation like Rich’s re-vision, Cixous’s feminine rewriting is grounded in the rereading of the old texts from a new, feminist perspective and mines them for insights into how women have been defined and femininity constructed, using this knowledge of the literary tradition not to pass it on, but to break its hold over the contemporary imagination: ‘to project’, as she puts it – a term that needs to be understood in Sartrian terms, meaning as a gesture that is at the same time regressive and progressive, a ‘past-surpassing’ determined both in terms of the present reality it negatively attempts to surpass and a future reality it positively tries to bring into being. At once ‘a refusal and a realization’, as Sartre puts it in his Search for a Method (1968: 92), Cixous’s explanation why ‘woman must write her self’ evokes reasons akin to those Rich advances in ‘When We Dead Awaken’: The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. (Cixous 1976: 875) Conceiving of her project in terms of midwifery, of giving birth and re-birth, Cixous employs a feminine metaphorics that yet again echoes Rich’s, whose original version of the essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ closes with the claim that ‘woman is becoming her own midwife, creating herself anew . . . women can no longer be primarily mothers and muses for men: we have our own work cut out for us’ (1972: 25). In the same way, Cixous calls on women to write themselves, asserting ‘It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her’ (1976: 878). Women’s rewriting, thus defined, is to achieve self-knowledge for women through an act of birthing. It is, indeed, ‘en la connaissant’, as Cixous’s polysemic punning text reads, that the New Woman is to come into being: by knowing her and by jointly giving birth to her (1975: 41). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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The emergence of women’s rewriting as a privileged feminist genre needs to be seen in the light of its ambition to transform society through a transformation of its cultural memory. Looking back – possibly in anger, always with suspicion – and looking forward in a gesture of reparation, women’s rewriting works from a vision of a future where women have equal share in power, money, and the right to speak (and publish, teach, . . .) towards the realization of that vision through the transformation of the narratives that sustain the cultural and social imaginary. Thus, it articulates feminism’s emancipatory promise in texts that join recognition for feminine subjectivity with the struggle for redistribution of power, rights, and capital – symbolic, cultural, and economic. To this end, the old, traditional and canonical texts constitute a privileged locus for women’s rewriting. These texts and traditions not only constitute the cultural heritage of a culture, shared and passed on as part of processes of national and individual identity formation. Because they also function to sustain gender injustice in the domains of culture, politics, and economics, from the perspective of second-wave feminism, the stories of masculine domination they tell need to be corrected, supplemented, or changed. Intervening in cultural memory by shifting the points of view and filling the gaps of literary history, women’s rewriting is a practice that asks for women to be recognized as subjects of and for cultural memory. It does so by laying claim to narrative space and asserting women’s rights to tradition. A practice that literally author-izes women’s writing, it enables female authorship in a writing constructed as a legitimate space for the expression of female experience. Women’s rewriting occurs as it were between the lines, in the interstices and the margins of the texts of the past. This could easily be claimed women’s writing space: a space most certainly ‘liberating in its very emptiness’, as Diane Wallace has argued apropos of the woman’s historical novel, which like its fictional counterpart leaves much to write that has not been written before (2005: 169), but also a space to all appearances ‘reserved’ to women and limiting precisely for this reason: ‘feminine’ by virtue of its initial silence, and now for women to fill with accounts of women’s histories and experiences from within. As such, rewriting defines a certain kind of writing as women’s writing: confessional, centred on the female self, giving her perspective and view of things. The answer rewriting formulated to the question of cultural legitimacy so crucial to the woman writer in the 1970s is then ambiguous.



Author-izing women’s writing

Rewriting gave women access to a narrative and poetic space they could legitimately claim their own and enabled them to explore matters of female subjectivity and sexuality within its designed space. Thus Angela Carter, for instance, recently returned to England after a three-year stay in Japan and needing to reclaim her place in the London literary scene, ventures into the interstitial space of rewriting to find a niche culturally defined as properly women’s yet concordant with feminist ideals.15 In 1977, shortly after the publication of Bruno Bettelheim’s award-winning The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), Carter publishes The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, a translation of the seventeenth-century French contes into contemporary English that is already a kind of rewriting of the tales in that it gives the female characters more agency than they have in Perrault’s text and because it appears to eschew words and situations that seem needlessly denigrating to them (see Plate 1995: 221–7).16 In The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) she then rewrites Perrault’s fairy tales, retelling ‘Bluebeard’ from the perspective of his youngest wife in the title story and exploring young women’s sexual awakenings and complicit relationships in rewritings of Belle and the Beast and of Little Red Riding Hood, among others. In the following year, she publishes ‘Black Venus’s Tale’ (1980), a rewriting of the cultural myth of the poet Charles Baudelaire and his mulatto mistress Jeanne Duval, re-imagining the story of the poet and his muse from the latter’s perspective. In Carter’s case, rewriting literally afforded her entry into public space, enabling her to tell her own stories. As Lorna Sage writes, the rewritings in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories enabled Carter ‘to read in public with a new appropriateness and panache, as though she was telling these stories’ (1994: 40; Sage’s emphasis). At this historical juncture, women’s rewriting authorizes women to write by laying claim to cultural legitimacy for them both in terms of traditional femininity and in the light of new feminist conventions. This two-track approach comes to the fore in Virginia Woolf’s wellknown words on the subject in A Room of One’s Own – words which were penned half a century earlier than Rich’s and Cixous’s but which retain relevance for understanding contemporary women’s rewriting. Addressing the female students of Oxbridge on the subject of women and fiction, Woolf says: It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lopsided; but why should they not add a supplement to history, calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. (1993: 41–2; ch. 3) Woolf’s advocacy for discretion and the use of caution especially are telling. Wishing to encourage women to rewrite history, Woolf suggests they should ‘add a supplement’ and give it ‘some inconspicuous name’ so as not to offend propriety and call no attention to themselves – to operate in the shadows as it were, stealthily, under cover and underground. Raising issues of legitimacy and propriety, Woolf’s words serve as a reminder that behaviour was still strongly codified in the 1960s, the transformation of what constitutes proper and legitimate female behaviour being part of the changes of which feminism and the women’s movement partook. For Cixous, this question of legitimacy is an integral part of her analysis of feminine writing. It is addressed in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, for example, when she calls upon women not to let themselves be held back by feelings of inadequacy or any other form of auto-censure and self-censorship, nor by what she calls ‘the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs’ (1976: 877). As she claims, ‘I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.)’, explaining this is because they believe writing is not for them, ‘reserved for the great – that is, for “great men”’ (876). Or when she describes woman’s public speaking as ‘the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away – that’s how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak – even just open her mouth – in public’ (880). In the light of conventions about woman’s place and women’s internalized sense of propriety, rewriting appears a relatively innocuous activity linked to subjectivity and the privacy of one’s own mind – a kind of reading, really, and therefore legitimate and proper: a private activity that is gendered as feminine (in contrast to original writing, which is construed as masculine). The possibility of being construed as properly feminine and therefore as not indecorous, even when the subject matter was in reality quite immodest, thus can be viewed as part of the appeal of rewriting in 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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the early days of second-wave feminism. This possibility also renders the meaning of rewriting ambiguous, generating an ambivalent space for women’s writing. On the one hand, rewriting is a feminist imperative; on the other, it is also a means of textual production that reinscribes traditional notions of femininity. This doubleness presents opportunities for women’s voices to be heard; it also makes women’s rewriting an uncanny form of textual production, capable of being adapted to unexpected functions, eventually yielding versions ‘it can neither simply embrace nor wholly disavow’, to evoke Fraser’s argument on ‘feminism and its doubles’ (2009: 114): on the one hand, rewritings such as Emma Tennant’s Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002), which in its retelling of Brontë’s novel from the perspective of Jane Eyre’s pupil accrues detail but does not radically challenge its memory;17 on the other hand, maleauthored rewritings such as Theodore Roszak’s Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995), for instance, or Arthur Japin’s narrative of Giacomo Casanova’s first love, Lucia, reworking the eighteenth-century adventurer’s Story of My Life as the story of her life in In Lucia’s Eyes (2005; originally, Een schitterend gebrek, 2003). Such late-twentieth-century rewritings are evidently feminism’s offspring. They cannot, however, be seen to intervene in cultural memory as part of a movement intent on social change.18

Reader-oriented approaches and anti-authoritarianism Central to the emergence of women’s rewriting as a privileged genre of second-wave feminism is the theorization of rewriting as a form of productive reception, and hence, as an act of transfer in which the relationship between past, present, and future is negotiated and culture transformed. As I have shown, both Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ and Hélène Cixous’s ‘écriture féminine’ articulate rewriting in ways that link new concepts of feminine/feminist writing to practices of (re)reading. In their analyses, (re)reading and (re)writing are complementary activities that work together to transform cultural mythologies, inscribing a critical practice oriented towards suspicion and a creative one that is ‘reparatively’ oriented, to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms. This understanding of rewriting emerges from the recognition of the role of social facts in shaping the experience of reading. At the heart of the reader-oriented theories of literature stands attention to new subjects and to new forms of subjectivity as they relate to established authority. Serving the theoretical emancipation of the reader from the one to the many, the practical emancipation of the reader resulting from, among 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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other, an increase and diversification of school and student population cannot but recognize the social facts of class, gender, and of culturalethnic background as informing the act of reading. The novel ways in which reading is conceptualized in the course of the second half of the twentieth century accounts for the emphasis on the literary-theoretical relationship between women’s rewriting and reading. The ‘return of the reader’, as Elizabeth Freund (1987) refers to the critical shift of focus from work to reader, then, is not only the return of the repressed of literary discourse. In actuality, the subject of reading is part of a democratization process that developed in the wake of World War II – one that encompasses better schooling and increasing welfare for many. The literary-theoretical interest in the role of the reader marks an epistemological shift brought about by what may be called the democratization of literature, which by and large refers to two major trends: the democratization of the classroom (boys and girls from a broader social spectrum going to high school and to the university) and the democratization of the book (most notably, the cheap paperback). Both democratization processes entailed changes in the practices of reading. With less of a shared social and cultural background, more of the classroom’s emphasis is put on how to read, and the study of literature becomes reading instruction rather than writing instruction (rhetoric). Meanwhile, critical reflection on these transformations inquires how consensus can nonetheless be achieved in the heterogeneous classroom. With books increasingly widely and cheaply available, reading outside the classroom becomes less the intensive rereading of a few books and more the extensive reading of many titles (see Calinescu 1993: esp. 79–90). These changes are particularly pertinent to a women’s movement intent on female empowerment. They form the material base of cultural and ideological change and interact with it. In the United States and in England, the democratization of literature would crystallize through the New Critical methods of ‘close reading’. Aiming at educating readers, New Criticism was a democratization movement in that its basic stance was that every reader could, with a little effort, do it. New Criticism was a pedagogical practice that focused on the text itself. To read poetry as poetry meant all one needed was a good poem and an inquiring mind; it did not require vast knowledge of history and of authors’ biographies, the cultural baggage that came with good breeding. The methods, in fact, could be learned; with a little cognitive effort and mental concentration, every reader in the classroom could read the poem as a poem. A reading, in the New Critical perspective, is ‘the fullest realization of 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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the symbolic structure that is the poem’ (Brooks 1947: 238). It is to actualize the text, to make it happen. Refusing to limit the meaning of literature to its historical context, New Criticism thus opened the way for a reader-centred approach to literature. Yet because it refused to open literature to what it says about life, culture, and society, it also remained too mired in aesthetic considerations to really speak to the concerns of an emerging body of readers that identified themselves in terms of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Asserting social difference and recognizing the role of experience, reader-oriented theories formulated a critique of traditional authority that was crucial to feminism and provided an attractive avenue for women’s writing. This critique of authority entered literary theory through the identification of reading with writing. From the 1970s onwards, theories of reading proclaim the equivalence of reading and writing. Claiming that, as A.S. Byatt would put it in Passions of the Mind, ‘Writing is reading and reading is writing’ (1991: 2), such theories not only trope reading and writing as a chiasmus that takes them apparently into opposite directions – with reading becoming a production and writing converting into decoding and decomposition, taking apart what it reads. Instead, they go counter what the terms are habitually taken to mean. Setting up a dynamics between the activities of reading and writing that shows them to be mutually implicated and already present in each other, they undermine their distinctiveness and, with that, the authority of authorship. As is well known, the critique of the paternal/patriarchal authority of authorship found its most radical statement in Roland Barthes’s 1968 pronouncement in ‘The Death of the Author’. In this essay, Barthes proclaims the death of the author is necessary for the emancipation of the reader. To allow the latter to ascend to the place of production and ‘give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth’, Barthes asserts; ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ (1977: 148). Barthes’s polemical theories of reading as (re)writing are particularly interesting in the context of this book. Working to decentralize power, knowledge, and authority from the single author to a plurality and diversity of readers, his proposed shift ‘From Work to Text’ announced by the birth of the reader is an enactment of anti-authoritarianism that is also an instance of anti-capitalist critique. Importantly for my present concerns, in the context of the late 1960s and early 1970s in France, it is to be understood as part of a critique of the rise of consumer culture (also denounced in, for instance, Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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Barthes’s dethroning of the author, indeed, is a revolutionary gesture targeting a cultural system that reacts to debates about the ‘droit d’auteur’ as they were first settled in the Law of 1957 – ‘the right of the author’, i.e. French copyright law. Barthes is especially critical of the debate’s focus on economic interests. Denouncing this conception of authorship as ‘the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology’ (1977: 143), Barthes evokes the spirit of the revolution to make his point. Thus, in ‘Writing Reading’ (first published in the magazine Figaro littéraire in 1970), he implicates the publishers by speaking of an ‘exorbitant privilege’ – the term ‘privilege’ evoking its former meaning as publishers’ rights as they were abolished under the French Revolution in favour of a legal recognition of authors’ rights over their work – saying it determines ‘a very special (though an old) economy: the author is regarded as the eternal owner of his work, and the rest of us, his readers, are simple usufructuaries. This economy obviously implies a theme of authority: the author, it is believed, has certain rights over his readers . . .’ (1987: 30). As copyright historian Anne Latournerie explains, the law that was passed in 1957 and that forms the basis for subsequent laws (1985, 1992, 2006) seeks foremost ‘to reconcile the interests of the author with the demands of capital’ (Latournerie 2001). Whereas in the past, the debate included reflection on the relationship between private and public interest – the interest of the individual (the author, but also the citizen and the user) and the interest of society, the collectivity – in the years leading to the passing of the new law, the focus of the debate is on the market: how to balance the economic interests that oppose authors, the public, and the intermediaries who produce and diffuse the works. The publishers play an especially important role in this debate. It is, indeed, modern publishers like Bernard Grasset who inaugurate the new economy of literature, making literary authorship dependent on the publishing business and thus radically transforming the writer’s trade as well as public status and image. As Grasset sees it, the publishing business creates ‘value’. Combining new marketing techniques with large print runs and making the authors’ income (their financial rights) dependent on the commercial success of the work, publishers not only play an important role in mediating between writers and readers. Rather, the publisher is a ‘creator of value’, a manufacturer of the author as this figure is understood in the traditional, nineteenth-century sense of the term (Latournerie 2001). Seen in this light, Barthes’s championing of ‘the reader’s rights’ (1977: 148) takes explicit stance within the public debate in France. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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His theories of reading as rewriting are integral to his criticism of the rising commodification of culture and serve the cause of social criticism: critique of consumption, of consumer society. As he explains in S/Z, to all appearances taking issue with Grasset’s notion of the publisher’s ‘creation of value’, ‘the value of a text’ is linked to the practice of writing: ‘What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’ (1974: 3–4).

Production and consumption Reading is ‘the true place of the writing’, Barthes claims (1977: 147); for it includes that which happens when we lift our eyes from the written page, when we pursue the text’s ‘flow of ideas, stimuli, associations’ and happen ‘to read while looking up from [our] book’ (1987: 29; Barthes’s emphasis), Barthes’s reading as mental rewriting, then, ‘at once insolent . . . and smitten’ (ibid.), describes what we might call (after Susan Sontag) an ‘erotics of reading’: a ‘desiring reading’, as he puts in his essay ‘On Reading’, that identifies the reader with the amorous subject (1987: 39). Deploying the discourse of love, Barthes’s theory of reading as rewriting defines the real reader as ‘he who wants to write, to devote himself to an erotic practice of language’ (1985: 999; emphasis Barthes’s). Truly an amateur (in the etymological sense of the word), the reader who practices reading as rewriting is the better (real, true) reader; as a lover of literature, s/he devotes time and loving attention to it. The discourse of love is not only a typically French myth that Barthes enlists here for the cause of the reader’s rights. It also introduces the question of time into the argument, making a critique of time as colonized by the metaphorics of Benjamin Franklin’s ‘time is money’ – the commodified relationship of time to consumer culture – part of the reading-as-rewriting bid for preeminent literary value. Time, indeed – time that can be measured, time as duration; the ‘lived time’ Barthes refers to as ‘amorous time’ in his Lover’s Discourse and that he distinguishes from the ‘lost time’ of reading (1978: 63 and passim; 217) – is as crucial to the discourse of love as it is to that of literature (as analyzed, for instance, in Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume Time and Narrative). It is also post-capitalism’s scarcest good, dividing the world into those who have too much of it and those who have too little of it, as Lipovetsky reminds us in Hypermodern Times (2005: 51). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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Taking the time (to interrupt the flow of the narrative and lift the eyes from the page, mentally writing between the lines, as it were) is to resist the book’s abolition through its rapid consumption (its being devoured, as the expression goes) by rereading passages, or reading it again altogether. It is also to resist the logic of consumption. For as Barthes remarks in ‘On Reading’, the book is ‘traversed by a mediation which has nothing particularly clean about it: money; we have to buy it, which means not having bought others’ (1987: 38). In fact, Barthes’s distinction, first elaborated in The Pleasure of the Text, between the text of bliss ( jouissance) and the text of pleasure, is similarly to be read as an assault on consumer culture as it increasingly dominates the discourse of literature and what he calls ‘the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader’ (1974: 4). In Barthes’ view, ‘contemporary civilization tends to flatten reading by turning it into a simple consumption, entirely separated from writing’ (1985: 999). ‘In our society, a society of consumption and not of production, . . . lovers of writing are scattered, clandestine, crushed by thousand – even internal – constraints’ (1987: 41). In this context, the two kinds of texts command two different modes of reading. The text of pleasure is a ‘readerly’ text of reading as consumption, calling for a rapid reading that goes for the plot: a quick and easy pleasure. In contrast, the text of bliss is a ‘writerly’ text of reading as production, requiring a slow and participative (re)reading that attends to the production of a proliferation of meanings: the labour of (re)writing. As he explains in his most sustained attempt to put the theory to practice, S/Z, ‘Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us “throw away” the story once it has been consumed (“devoured”), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book . . .’ (1974: 15–16). It is the paradox of women’s rewriting that whereas Barthes’s views on reading as rewriting were meant as a jamming of the capitalist machinery, women’s rewriting as cultural production ironically ends up feeding a conception of literature as product for consumption. Seeking to effect social change through the transformation of cultural memory, women’s rewriting was understandably interested in reaching a broad audience so that this transformation could be if not collective, then at least wide-ranging. The possibilities print offer, both in terms of diffusion as well as in terms of status, combine with the medium’s purchase on duration (Rigney 2004). It is because women’s rewriting 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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was emphatically directed at having an impact on the archive as the culturally sanctioned repository of cultural memory that it became caught in the dynamics of consumer culture as ruled by the logic of cycles of capital, fashion, and identity as product. By taking as its medium of operation that of writing and especially of print, women’s rewriting as the reinscription of women’s voices, histories, and experiences within literary history becomes subject to the logic of print as it unfolds under the post-Fordist capitalist regime. Women’s rewriting turns Barthes’s notion of the ‘writerly text’, as designed to transform the reader ‘not into a consumer, but into a producer of text’, on its head. Indeed, rather than jamming the capitalist machinery, rewritings actually allow it to run evermore smoothly. And instead of resisting the commercial and ideological habits of contemporary society as Barthes’s rereading had us do, contemporary women’s rewriting actually partakes in it. Women’s rewritings are ‘readings’ that can be purchased. By the 1990s, they are made into products for consumption redesigned by publishers for obsolescence: to be discarded once they have been consumed, ‘so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book . . .’, as Barthes puts it (1974: 15–16). The so-called Austen industry illustrates this particularly well. Of Jane Austen’s hand, there are only six completed novels, yet within the past three decades, more than fifty rewritings, sequels, and completions of her small oeuvre have been published. This remarkable and much remarked-upon fact (see, for instance, Terry 1986; Latkin 1993; Breuer 1999; Spillman 2006), Margaret Drabble explains, results from the fact that there are so few novels by Austen: ‘It is simply a regret that there was no more. One would have wanted more of the same’ (qtd in Terry 1986: 74). Because the chances are slim an unknown manuscript of Austen’s may yet be discovered, Drabble says, ‘readers will have to satisfy themselves with re-reading her six masterpieces’ (1974: 7) – or, alternatively, turn to the rewrites. In other words, instead of finding satisfaction in the rereading of Austen’s handful of novels, Austenites increasingly define themselves through the consumption of what amounts to new Austen products, substituting the fashionable pastime of buying, reading, and discarding novel ‘readings’ for the anti-consumerist activity of rereading the same old texts.19 In fact, even when rewritings invite their readers to return and reread what they rewrite, it is often in the form of a new book – the commercial possibilities afforded by the double marketing of text and rewrite going both ways. Indeed, it is not just rewritings that derive prestige from their association with canonical names – as when Joan Aiken’s 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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Jane Fairfax is given the subtitle ‘Jane Austen’s Emma, through another’s eyes’ in its American edition, or when Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl (1984) is reissued as The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene (2007) to tap the popular interest in the figure of Magdalene that was fostered by Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code (2003) and its 2006 film adaptation. In the bookstores, text and rewrite are juxtaposed or presented in boxed sets – Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and its (authorized) sequel, Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett (1991); Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Susan Hill’s Mrs. de Winter (1993); and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Grimm’s Fairy Tales (2007). These presentations, underscoring the connection between text and rewrite, serve not only to market new or relatively unknown writers on the basis of their book’s connection to the known product that is the classic text it rewrites. It also sells the classic again. Women’s rewriting forms a genre that fits the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism in the literary marketplace particularly well. As capitalism moves to a model of short turnover cycles of capital and publishers increasingly prefer books with a proven customer base, women’s rewriting appears a particularly interesting genre, at once responding to the increasing demand for women-identified literature and fitting the requirements of ever shorter turnover cycles of capital. The rewriting of a classic can be marketed according to the mechanics of branding. Because they have an existing readership to whom they can be sold as part and parcel of that which they rewrite, rewritings require the launching not of a new and unknown author (which often entails costly publicity and marketing expenses) but of a product that belongs to the prestigious predecessor. Publishers of contemporary women’s rewriting thus capitalize on the ways in which the canonical work or author functions as a brand name, happily exploiting the canonical name’s wide recognition and its function as guarantee of a standard of quality and of certain aesthetic or narrative pleasures. Whereas for feminist writers in the 1970s and 1980s, rewriting was a literary form combining narrative strategy with feminist praxis, for publishers confronted by the need to adapt to the new economy, it soon revealed itself as a means of selling books with low risk and low marketing costs. The market forces that combined to turn a feminist narrative strategy into a commercially successful product in the post-Fordist literary marketplace did not simply spell feminism’s success. With the advent of neoliberal capitalism, the claims for recognition that women’s



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rewriting inscribed ceased simply to assert the political and social will to change. Instead, the narrative fragmentation of the grand stories of the past into a plurality of histories and ‘herstories’ helped to bring about the social fragmentation of culture into subcultures forming niche markets. Transforming cultural memory not just in content, but also in form, women’s rewriting thus unwittingly engendered consumer memory culture.




Women’s Rewriting as Counter-memory: An ABC of ‘Stolentelling’ (Authorship, Branding, and Copyright)

‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’, T.S. Eliot said in a renowned aphorism (1928 [1920]: 125). Eliot’s distinction between imitation and theft identifies rewriting as a highly ambiguous practice that stands at the heart of the art and craft of writing: it is at once what writers do and should not do, or should not be seen to be doing, or do not want to acknowledge as having done. Pointing to a complex relationship between rewriting and plagiarism, Eliot’s aphorism suggests the distinction may be less obvious and tenable than its pithiness implies, troubling the opposition between good and bad, mature and immature. Considering its role in authorizing discourse and the high financial or symbolic profits one stands to gain or lose by it, it is decidedly disturbing to find the distinction between imitation and stealing to be really far from crystal clear, evidence that, as Marilyn Randall puts it, ‘plagiarism is, above all, a matter of opinion’ (2001: vii). Whereas copyright lawyers and literary critics persist in understanding plagiarism as ‘a failure of the creative process’ (Stearns 1999: 7), recent studies have shown that plagiarism is neither a feature of the text nor a failed or fraudulent authorial act but an act of reception: ‘plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder’, ‘“constructed” by the reception of authoritative readers’, Randall convincingly argues in Pragmatic Plagiarism (2001: vii; viii). Obviously, the gender dynamics of plagiarism redefined as an act of reception are not to be underestimated. They play an important part in the literary power struggles of which accusations of plagiarism are such significant indicators. In the light of women’s rewriting as an intervention in cultural memory, challenging cultural narratives and the versions of the past they sustain, intellectual property law appears a major factor. 66



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Evidently, those who wield the power to ‘call’ plagiarism – or, more precisely, those who are authorized to wield that power – hold definitional power in the context of the field of cultural remembrance conceived as an arena of struggle over versions of the past. In this chapter, I therefore take my point of departure in the notion of plagiarism as an act of reception and explore women’s rewriting through the lens of the metaphorics of theft. Rewriting as stealing is, indeed, a commonly used metaphor that serves both to name the process of creativity and to protect its product. Between condoning the act and condemning the thief, however, the stakes are undeniably high. In this chapter, I therefore scrutinize the implications of the ‘writing is stealing’ metaphor for women’s rewriting, looking into how it informs both its production and its reception and examining how the uses of the metaphor engage the language(s) for creative work as contrasted with the processes of creation. To explore the issues of property and legitimacy women’s rewriting raises, I look especially into the reception of women’s rewriting as ‘derivative work’ (both in the dictionary sense of ‘unoriginal’ and in the legal sense of a work ‘based upon one or more preexisting works’, as the United States Copyright Act defines it). Focusing on two recent cases of alleged plagiarism – Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary (1995), which retells the story of Lolita from her perspective, and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), rewriting Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind from the perspective of a plantation slave – I discuss the reception of women’s rewriting, especially by readers who have a particular stake in them: gatekeepers, stakeholders, and other ‘professional’ readers (e.g. literary critics). The fact of copyright, sine qua non of the two cases is revelatory of contextual and cultural issues central to women’s rewriting. Presumably adding the insult of unearned profit through copyright infringement to the injury of plagiarism as the violation of the author’s moral rights,1 the novels by Pera and Randall illustrate how women’s rewriting operates in a field that is structured by economics as much as by artistic or political and ideological interests. Seen in the light of cultural memory, these interests are revelatory of the forces that intersect to licence certain rewritings and hinder others.

‘Literary theft’ as a metaphor to live, write, and die by The recurrence of the metaphor of writing as stealing suggests it is a conceptual metaphor – a metaphor ‘we live by’, to use Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase. As they explain in their seminal study Metaphors We Live By (1980), such metaphors structure our experience of the world 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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and define reality. Dictating how creativity is thought of and dealt with, the theft metaphor is a metaphor writers write by and become authors by. However, it is also a metaphor writers can die by, meeting a literary death as lethal and definite as the physical end of life. This is the case of the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, who was accused of plagiarizing Graham Greene, among other writers. His entry on Wikipedia states that ‘Ouologuem turned away from the Western press as a result of the matter, and even today remains reclusive’ (see also Wise 1998). It is also the case of the Italian Pia Pera, who seems to have abandoned further aspirations as a literary author after her dispute with Vladimir Nabokov’s son over her rewriting of Lolita.2 In the light of the power of literary life and death it wields, it is astonishing to find the metaphor of theft to be so unstable, inscribing a central paradox: ‘stealing’ is an intrinsic part of the creative process yet is also immoral and punishable by law. This paradox is well known and the conundrum it poses is generally resolved by the assumption that the difference between ‘stealing’ as the labour of creation and ‘stolen’ as the apparent nature of a work is both fundamental and evident. In other words, that theft and its cognate, plagiarism, are features of the text. This view, however, no longer goes without saying. In her research on plagiarism in France, Hélène Maurel-Indart demonstrates that literary critics, public opinion, and the judges in court are more tolerant of the ‘plagiaristic’ activities of some authors than others (1999; 2007). As she illustrates, accusations of plagiarism are value judgments about the writers. They are a priori assumptions about their supposed ‘talent’, fame, and greatness – criteria external to the text that prove Randall’s thesis that the belief it is possible to distinguish between imitation, borrowing, plagiarism and literary grand theft is ‘fraught with presuppositions about originality, ownership and authorship of discourse’ (2001: xiv). They raise the question, central to Randall’s analysis and crucial for understanding contemporary women’s rewriting: Why does literary repetition sometimes become plagiarism and other times great art? In her ground-breaking study Pragmatic Plagiarism, Randall suggests this question can only be answered by shifting the burden of proof away from the text, focusing instead on the production of plagiarism as a performative and pragmatic category and looking into its discourse and its socio-cultural conditions. This shift is in line with the currently received notion that ‘the literary’ is not a feature inherent in the text, but an attitude and way of reading brought to it (Zwaan 1991; Widdowson 1999). The idea that ‘the literary’ and its 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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opposite, plagiarism, are judgments imposed on texts is an important insight. It moves the focus of analysis away from the text, requiring the study not of the formal ways in which a rewriting recasts another text, but of its context of reception. In consequence, this chapter’s leading question is: How are these products valued as instances of literary repetition? As I wish to show, the metaphor of theft that governs the production of women’s rewriting as a counter-memorial project functions differently in its reception in the context of the literary market. This has farreaching consequences for contemporary women’s rewriting conceived as an intervention in cultural memory. Its reception as fraudulent in what Assmann (1995) has identified as ‘communicative memory’ – that is, the early, living phase of cultural memory, when memory is the subject of everyday communication and hence of negotiation over its forms and meanings – is likely to affect its impact negatively, thereby hindering the transformation of culture. Quite simply, works which are censored are literally excluded from the cultural heritage and hence, from the archive of cultural memory. More importantly, the exclusion of certain types of revisionary discourses from the communicative phase of cultural memory effected by intellectual property law shapes cultural memory in ways that can be at odds with the public interests the rewritings serve. In Chapter 2, I pointed out that the development of women’s rewriting as a privileged feminist genre is contemporaneous with the redrawing of copyright laws to protect the commercial interests of authors and especially their publishers. Although the motives and intentions of women’s rewriting differ fundamentally from those of artistic postmodernism, in terms of literary history, the genres do develop concurrently. Rewriting – whether as pastiche, parody, quotation, or intertextuality – is postmodernist fiction’s main narrative technique of (re)production and ‘perpetual rewriting’ is, as Lyotard says in his essay ‘Rewriting Modernity’ (1991: 28), its central epistemology. Claiming everything has been said already, the ‘literature of exhaustion’ (Barth 1967) endorses the burden of the past as a poetics of belatedness, promoting the endless varying of repetition, especially in a ludic mode. ‘For PLAGIARISM / read / also / PLAYGIARISM’, Raymond Federman bids his readers in his essay ‘Imagination as Plagiarism’ (1976: 565). Increasingly taking a place of prominence in the aesthetic production of the late twentieth century, postmodern rewriting demonstrates Fredric Jameson’s thesis that by the 1980s, ‘aesthetic production has become integrated into commodity production generally’, as he argues in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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of Late Capitalism (1991: 4). There may, indeed, be good reasons why in the course of the twentieth century, ‘the writer thinks less of writing originally, and more of rewriting’, as Edward Said submitted in his essay ‘On Originality’ (1983: 135). These reasons include ‘the logic of consumer capitalism’, which postmodernism as an aesthetics ‘replicates or reproduces – reinforces’ ( Jameson 1983: 125). In fact, ‘the image of writing’ that Said sees changing ‘from original inscription to parallel script’ appears within the context of a consumer society driven by the production of the new at ever more frantic rates of turnover. In this chapter, I therefore read rewriting as an aesthetic agenda and a literary position engaging literature as productive of cultural memory within consumer culture: as a reflection, a critique, and a tapping of literature’s reproductive system.

Stealing the language It is in a spirit of contestation, protesting notions of ownership and of literary property, that feminist writers first deployed the metaphor of stealing the language, not to dodge accusations of plagiarism, but to contest dispossession. ‘La propriété, c’est le vol,’ the French anarchist Proudhon famously wrote, and the feminist writers of the second wave appear to agree: literary property, too, is theft. It is appropriated discourse, taken away and turned into goods caught up in a masculine economy of ownership, of profit and loss, and of symbolizations and exchanges between men. Thus Claudine Hermann’s Les voleuses de langue (The Thieves of Language; translated as The Tongue Snatchers, 1990), for instance, called for women’s reappropriation of language. Published in 1976 with the recently founded feminist publishing house Des femmes, the book took its title from a metaphor for women’s writing that enjoyed currency among the ‘new French feminists’ of the day (Marks and de Coutivron 1981: 87). Meaning both ‘to fly’ and ‘to steal’, the verb voler came to embody this ‘feminine’ reclaiming of writing, its polysemy and the feminist refusal to be limited: its meaning is at least double and thus does not let itself be pinned down or reduced to any single one, let alone The One (psychoanalytically speaking, the Phallus, the Law of the Father). In her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous elaborates on the significance of the metaphor for women’s writing: Voler [to fly/to steal] is woman’s gesture – flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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techniques; for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers. It’s no accident that voler has a double meaning, that it plays on each of them and thus throws off the agents of sense. It’s no accident: women take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They (illes) go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down. What woman hasn’t flown/stolen? (Cixous 1976 [1975]: 887) Central to the use of the metaphor for women’s writing is the sense that language is the language of men. It is not only that men developed the rules of rhetoric and of grammar. More importantly, they imbued all language and inscribed all forms with their ways of thinking. The idea of a language colonized by a masculine way of thinking, seeing, and being in the world motivates the development of alternative ways of writing and of speaking: a feminine writing, a writing that gives expression to sexual difference. It also provides ground for the moral right to steal. Indeed, in the light of women’s unjust expropriation, stealing becomes a reclaiming of what ought to be to theirs by right: the human, inalienable right to language and symbolization. Framed as an act of civil disobedience, women’s stealing of the language serves to reveal how language and its uses are not neutral but thoroughly invested in the social organization of gender. The metaphor of theft designates women’s writing as an act of resistance to the gendering of language as masculine and its upholding of a phallocentric worldview and bolstering of a gendered configuration of practices. It also points to the relationship between its social institutions and the conception of language as private property protected by law. Rewriting highlights the close ties between authorship, ownership, and an economic system of cultural production regulation. Although the notion of plagiarism has existed for as long as literature itself – it was first used by the first-century Roman poet Martial in his Epigrams – the view of language as belonging to someone takes on specific meanings in the context of the literary market that is predicated on the material base provided by the invention of print. Printing enables – indeed, author-izes – a new conception of language: one that constitutes an appropriative act of staking out a claim to it, which in turn is supported by institutions, (inter)national conventions and laws. Codified as copyright under the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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Berne Convention (1886; rev. 1979), this author’s right comes automatically to the author: without any other act than that of creation, the author of so-called ‘literary and artistic works’ holds exclusive rights to them when ‘they have been fixed in some material form’ (Art. 2). This conception of authorship revolves around the notion of paternity: the author is both owner and father, progenitor of his work. Paternity is already inscribed in the idea of plagiarism, a word which derives from the Latin plagirius (kidnapper) and plagium (kidnapping), meaning the abduction of another’s child or slave. Etymologically identifying literary theft with the stealing of a human being considered as somebody’s property, plagiarism situates the literary progenitor in the place of the father and lawful owner. This explains why plagiarism is considered the worst crime a writer can commit: it is not just a matter of larceny; it is also to usurp a masculine position of authority and entitled ownership. This idea Harold Bloom developed as the agonistic relationship between writers and their precursors in his The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Linking priority and property to paternity in what is probably the single-most influential twentieth-century theory of literary creativity, Bloom describes poetic influence as ‘the labyrinthine affections of . . . the “family romance”’ (27). Although he refuses to acknowledge the ‘politics of commerce’ or the ‘dialectics of theft’ that are involved in the process – these are petty issues for ‘economists of spirit’, he claims (78) – his idea of ‘strong’ poets who ‘clear imaginative space for themselves’ ‘by misreading one another’ (5) evidently revolves around a kind of linguistic territorialization that is also the basis for copyright – a language rush which, like the nineteenth-century American land runs, is founded on a first-come principle. Bloom’s model, indeed, places the emphasis on priority, for as he explains, ‘for the commodity in which poets deal, their authority, their property, turns upon priority. They own, they are, what they become first in naming’ (64). ‘Poetry is property, as politics is property’, Bloom writes as he emphasizes ‘the only authority that matters, property or the priority of having named something first’ (78). Replicating authorship as a masculine preserve, Bloom’s model presents a much criticized patrilineal theory of poetry. In their landmark study of Victorian women’s writing The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out the patriarchal bias of Bloom’s Oedipal model yet suggest it has diagnostic force as ‘an analysis of the patriarchal poetics (and attendant anxieties) which underlie our culture’s chief literary movements’ (2000 [1979]: 48). Indeed, as they ask the question ‘Where, then, does the female poet fit in?’ (47), they also reveal Western literary history to be so intensely 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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patriarchal it cannot conceive of any other female role but that of the Muse upon whom the poet must engender himself.3 Women’s (re)writing as the stealing of language emerges as a deliberate and self-confident feminist strategy in resistance to such conceptions of literary creativity as excluding the female poet. Illuminating the connections between the ideas of priority, property, and male prerogative – what might be seen as a manifestation of Connell’s ‘patriarchal dividend’, that is, the benefits that accrue to men in a patriarchal society (2005) – feminist writers like Hélène Cixous evoke notions of expenditure to undo the entanglement of this view of language with men’s interests, suggesting woman as subject for history ‘un-thinks the unifying, regulating history’: ‘Elle dé-pense l’histoire unifiante, ordonnatrice’, she writes, releasing the French verb’s potential for thinking through this relationship between financial and gender economies by hyphenating dé-penser to make it signify both ‘to spend’ and ‘to un-think’ (1975: 45; 1976: 882).4 In its rebellious spirit of contestation, resisting the forces of the market and contemptuous of accumulated wealth and property, the stealing metaphor belongs especially to the spirit of the radical feminism of the 1970s, its interests in ‘“another” commerce’ and a ‘feminine economy’ (Irigaray 1977; Cixous and Clément 1986 [1975]). Nonetheless, the metaphor would continue to enjoy popularity among feminist writers in the decades that followed, serving to identify women’s narrative and poetic strategies as they proceeded to explore the possibilities for working across different economies of writing.5 Thus, ten years after Hermann’s Les Voleuses de langue, Alicia Suskin Ostriker echoes her title in her study of women’s poetry in America, Stealing the Language (1986). Her chapter ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’ in particular explores revisionist mythmaking in women’s poetry as ‘a vigorous and various invasion of the sanctuaries of existing language, the treasuries where our meanings for “male” and “female” are themselves preserved’ (1986: 211). Ostriker’s use of the word ‘treasury’ is, of course, not coincidental. It identifies cultural heritage as treasure and as highly valuable. It also refers to patriarchy as a symbolic system invested in this treasury and to men as having a controlling interest in this business and getting benefits from it – a metaphorics referring to, for instance, Cixous’s view of the Symbolic as a system that demands women ‘deposit [their] lives in their banks of lack’ (1976: 884) and resonating with the financial metaphors informing the analyses of patriarchal reproduction of sociologists such as Bourdieu (social capital) and Connell (masculine interest, the above-mentioned patriarchal dividend). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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Ostriker’s belief in the transformative potential of rewriting also informs the fictions of Sara Maitland, whose short stories explore a feminine imaginary shaped by feminism as it intersects with ‘the old stories’ – cultural narratives and generic tales such as the romance (in ‘An Un-romance’), or specific myths and fairy tales such as those of Cassandra, Daphne, Rapunzel, or the early Christian martyr Perpetua. Maitland compiled a number of her rewritings under the title Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching (1993), thus drawing not on the stealing part of Cixous’s voler metaphor, but on its winged, fabulous, and fabulist part symbol of freedom and liberation. Evoking Cixous’ ‘What woman hasn’t flown/stolen?’ and referencing Erica Jong’s ‘key book’ of the 1970s, Fear of Flying (1973), Maitland’s title is a reminder that what women do when they fly/steal is not just to operate in the margins of the man-made laws of what is permissible. It is also to practise what Cixous terms ‘the art of flying’: ‘flying in language and making it fly’.6 This art of flying might be referred to as the winging of words. Indeed, the expression ‘winged words’ means both language performed (as Homer’s formula e’′pea ptero´enta suggests; see Létoublon 1999), as well as quotations which have passed into common usage and thus lost their sense of belonging to an originary author (as Georg Büchmann’s nineteenth-century collection of quotations Geflügelte Worte: Der Citatenschatz des deutschen Volkes implies). The winging of words is thus a procedure akin to that of stealing the language, yet works in a different linguistic register and according to a different logic. The semantic double meaning of voler suggests that to steal words and to give them wings, allowing them to take flight and to move from writer to writer and from context to context, actually refer to kindred procedures, yet function within different systems, with logics and reasonings of their own. On the one hand is the logic of the fixity of print, which enables the staking of claims to authorship and the drawing of the benefits that accrue from it. On the other hand is the logic of language itself, and of poetry-making and storytelling in particular, which is the logic of winged words: words repeated and performed anew, and thus passed on, generating knowledge in their utterance.7 Authorship as defined in Western culture today operates on the cusp between the two, adroitly navigating both systems. As Bloom repeats in his introduction to The Western Canon, ‘Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism . . . The originals are not original, but . . . the inventor knows how to borrow’ (1994: 11). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Notwithstanding the spirit of contestation, there are also clear dangers involved in deploying the metaphor of women’s writing as stealing. This is not just because the cultural moment has changed, and that like much leftist activism of the 1970s and 1980s, the reclaiming of literary territory through overt rewriting as a kind of ‘guerilla plagiarism’, to use Randall’s term (2001: 218ff), is now often regarded with some embarrassment.8 The risk is also to be taken at face value, as ‘mere’ rewriting, copy, imitation, derivative product. There is, after all, a distinguished tradition of viewing rewritings not as art but as mere exercises – the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, speaks of ‘parasitic books’ and ‘useless carnivals’ (2007: 39).9 To flaunt rewriting – to assert one is stealing the language through texts that make their nature as rewriting explicit, for instance in the title – is to risk plagiarism in the sense of risking being received as such. For as it is generally agreed, plagiarism is no literature; it is not art; it is also not the product of an author; and it is, ultimately, not worth anybody’s while. While overt rewritings invite a comparative reading, comparing the relative merits of the ‘original’ and its rewrite and evaluating the changes effected by the latter, they also present themselves in relation to what they rewrite. Obviously lacking autonomy, they are irremediably lacking uniqueness in at least some respects. Confidence in rewriting as a trustful gauge of a writer’s artistry remains central to a number of critical practices dealing with literary repetition, ranging from theories of intertextuality, adaptation, and appropriation. Thus Structuralist critics such as Michael Riffaterre and Gérard Genette, as well as theorists of adaptation such as Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders, insist on the need to account for the creative import of the author and recognize (re)writing as an intentional act that includes being identified as writer/author. Writers confirm their desire to measure up, and be measured up, to their predecessors. Pia Pera, for instance, speaks of her rewriting of Lolita as accepting Nabokov’s ‘implied invitation to a literary tennis match’ (Dobnik 1998). This element of literary competition to which rewriting ostensibly attests is also central to Harold Bloom’s agonistic theory of literary creativity and authorship.10 His claim, quoted above, that ‘originality’ is a matter of knowing how to borrow amounts to saying that ‘great writing’ is a matter of skill that can be measured. Indeed, indicating the difference between what might be called ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ rewritings, the difference between knowing how to borrow and not knowing how to do it is a distinction that pertains to the process of creative production, differentiating between masterful (re)writing and



The risk of rewriting

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inchoate writing, which is defined as immature and imitative rewriting. It can thus be understood as distinguishing the master and the apprentice. This is, of course, no absurd or senseless distinction. After all, the arts of language are arts of repetition and of performance, and the art of writing is, like all art, learned and mastered through acts of imitation and repetition. One of the ways in which fledging writers learn to forge their own style is through the time-honoured tradition of rewriting well-known texts, as pastiche and as parody. As Borges writes in ‘The Writer’s Apprenticeship’ (but I could have quoted many another writer here to the same end), the young writer ‘should begin, of course, by imitating the writers he likes’ (1994: 164). For women writers wishing to demonstrate their artistic talents, skills in composition and rhetoric, and creative imagination, rewriting therefore appears to present an interesting arena. Commanding a comparative reading, overt rewriting opens a space in which new authors can literally in-scribe themselves, writing themselves into a body of texts, displaying their familiarity with it, showing (off) their dexterity in handling the language, plot, or characterization. This it did for Angela Carter, for instance, whose rewritings of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories were received as exuberant reworkings of the traditional tales as told by Grimm and Perrault. Carter’s collection of short stories was published by Gollancz in 1979, as the women’s movement was at its height. They were commissioned for its Fantasy Collection by Liz Calder, who was determined to get more women writers on Gollancz’s male-dominated list, publishing ‘a lot of overtly and inherently feminist fiction reflecting on women’s lives’, as she later would tell a journalist (Jaggi 2005). Carter’s stories were not only valued by second-wave feminists for their re-inscription of strong women within the traditional tales. They were also admired for their artistic bravura, linguistic wit, and baroque style, phrasing and rhythm, continuing to engage their readers in debate about their meanings (Bristow and Broughton 1997; Munford 2006). Critics such as Lucie Armitt have cogently argued that Carter’s short stories ‘are not fairy tales at all’ (1997: 89). Yet their reception (including, in fact, Armitt’s essay) always refers to them as retellings of fairy tales. This is indeed how the stories are presented, on the front flap of the first edition and on the backcovers of re-editions, in reading guides, and in the recently issued Vintage Classic Twin Vintage Fear, which collects The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm and Angela Carter’s ‘groundbreaking reworking of these stories’ in a limited edition gift



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pack (Grimm and Carter 2007). Although Carter’s stories can also be read as more, or other, than fairy tales, significantly, it is in this context that they are presented, received, and read: in conjunction with the traditional tales, in a dual comparative reading that creates a context of reception designed to highlight her inventiveness, which then signifies her authorship, for her signature style authenticates her unique, individual author-ity.11 As illustrated by Carter’s short stories, overt rewriting returns art to a question of craft and artistry that calls for the study of literature as performance, that is, of art considered as a how rather than a what. Thus conceived, literary writing is, indeed, like literary reading, a doing (and a re-doing): by focusing on the ‘act’ of writing, attention inevitably goes to it as re-writing. Such a conception of literature constitutes a first step towards countering the improbable romantic ideology of originality that still holds sway and that is raised in the cultural market to the status of highly valuable good and protected under the current author’s rights and copyright laws. However, because it suggests the rewriting’s unbiased evaluation solely occurs on the basis of its artistic merits, this model does not adequately account for the context of reception as a field of dynamic and subjective forces. Phenomenologically, it is well known, originality belongs to whichever of two writers or texts one discovers first; it is, therefore, a quality arising from what Said calls ‘impressions of novelty and force too subjective for sustained analysis’ (1983: 138).12 In consequence, to flaunt one’s own work as a rewriting of another text is to risk being seen not as a skilful artisan reworking the material of language, but as a plagiarist producing derivative work. In other words, it is to risk calling plagiarism upon oneself. The risks are considerable, for plagiarism is the epitome of ‘bad’ writing: writing that is bad in the artistic as well as in the moral sense, the product of writers both incompetent and wicked, and receiving particular salience in the case it trespasses yet another boundary: that constituted by copyright. Concretely, since plagiarism is considered the most odious crime a writer can commit, this means: ignominy for the person of the writer, who is seen as less than a writer, for s/he lacks the talent to be an author (Randall 2001: 17); and exclusion of the text from the domain of literature, for as Randall rightfully observes, plagiaristic texts ‘are rarely studied . . . precisely because their qualification as plagiaristic automatically excludes them from the domain of appropriate objects of literary attention’ (4).




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This is arguably what happened to Pia Pera’s Diario di Lo (Lo’s Diary), her rewriting of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita from the eponymous character’s perspective. First published in Italian in 1995 and subsequently issued in a Dutch translation in 1996, it was licensed to five other countries before being blocked from publication in France, England, and the United States. Pera’s publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and Macmillan in England, dropped the book from their list when Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov’s son and executor of his estate, claimed copyright infringement. Subsequently, maverick publisher of Grove Press fame Barney Rosset took it upon himself to challenge Dmitri Nabokov and negotiated a deal with him that resulted in the case being settled and the book published with Rosset’s publishing house Foxrock together with a preface by Dmitri Nabokov and on the condition half of Pera’s royalties would go to PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, and Novelists). The book is currently out of print yet available through used bookstores. A French edition never materialized. The text is also largely absent from university syllabuses, where it is not taught as part of courses on literature. In academic books, apart from the passing reference to it as a case of rewriting (Capozzi 2003: 222–3; Stam 2004: 29; Sexton 2006: 217; De la Durantaye 2007: 92; Vickers 2008: 208–11), it only occasionally features as a case-study in discussions of plagiarism and copyright (e.g. Samuels 2000: 149; Saint-Amour 2003: 216–17 and 266n.37). Yet its lack of literary merit is not immediately evident. In a special issue of his journal Evergreen Review, Rosset recounts how, after learning about Pera’s novel through the newspapers, he asked to read the translation and decided to publish it: ‘I liked it very much, as obviously had the American and English editors before me. It seemed to me that a grave injustice would be committed on the reading public, let alone the author, if publication of Lo’s Diary did not take place’ (Rosset 1999). Rosset’s words are telling. As he explains to the journalist of The New York Observer, his interest in Pera’s novel was raised not just by its connection to Lolita, a novel for which he had tried to acquire the American rights of some forty years earlier, but because, as he says, it had been bought by Macmillan, Knopf was also involved, I believe, and then Farrar Straus – and then all three walked away from it. That was very intriguing, because I had respect for all three companies and their editors. I couldn’t believe they had decided to do a book that was inferior just to exploit its name – and then to walk



Un-author-ized rewriting: Pera’s Lo’s Diary


What these words reveal is that Pera’s novel changes from being viewed as a book worth publishing to ‘a very bad book’, as Nabokov’s lawyer puts it (Manus 1999). Although the text itself has not changed, the way it is judged has, and this change has everything to do with Nabokov’s judgment of Pera and her novel. The view that Lo’s Diary is ‘vulgar, and badly done’ is, indeed, Nabokov’s; he is the one who succeeded in convincing publishers and other readers that ‘the allusions to sexuality in Nabokov’s Lolita are eloquent and brilliantly written, the parallels in the Pera are lewd and tawdry, stripped of the elegance of Nabokov’s prose. It’s cheap and crass’ (Manus 1999). Crucial to the whole case is, of course, the copyright to Lolita. First published in the United States in 1955, Nabokov’s novel is under copyright there until the year 2050. Only then will it fall into ‘the public domain’, as intellectual property law calls that which is ‘public property’. It is because ‘Lolita isn’t in the public domain, and won’t be until well into the next millennium when its copyright expires’, as Nabokov wryly observes, that so much is made of Pera’s rewrite (1999: viii). Nabokov dismisses the idea that Pera’s novel belongs to ‘the catalogue of such “transformative” works as My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Updike’s S, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’ on the grounds that, as he puts it, ‘Pygmalion, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre – all had been safely tucked into the public domain when the “transformations” were penned’ (viii). Yet if the case is about profit both financial and symbolic that is judged to be unearned, this is also because Pera is seen as undeserving of the benefits that may accrue from the publication of her book. ‘[D]eclin[ing] to acknowledge that Lo’s Diary is a derivative work’ (viii), Pera implicitly declines to acknowledge the superiority of Nabokov’s ‘original’. The perceived presumption of this is part of Nabokov’s defensiveness, as is his fear of her expanding field of influence: ‘When Lo’s Diary journeyed beyond its original Italian bailiwick, into Finnish, Dutch, then . . . into English translation, time came to put a stop to it’, Nabokov says, thus making clear that his wish to impede the progress of Pera’s novel is linked to its widening international scope (ix). That Nabokov begrudges Pera any form of success also transpires from his characterization of her as ‘one Pia Pera (henceforth “PP”), an Italian journalist, author of some stories that I have not read and of a translation of Eugene Onegin into Italian which I have, decided to seek inspiration, fortune and fame 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


away from it! It amazed me. So I decided I better find out about it. (Manus 1999)13

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from a book called Lolita’ (vii). Condescending in its tone and choice of words, refusing to recognize her as an author by referring to her as a journalist and a translator, Nabokov’s description of Pera fits well enough into what has been identified as ‘a significant strategy in constructing plagiarism’: ‘to construe the potential plagiarist as something other than an author’, that is, as a literary upstart, untalented yet bent on success, and ‘achieving fame – or notoriety – by virtue of a genius to which he can, however, only pretend’ (Randall 2001: 161). There seems, indeed, a parti pris on Nabokov’s part about the superiority of his father and his celebrated book on the one hand, and the evident inferiority of ‘Madam Pera’ (ix) on the other.14 This parti pris works as a presupposition framing Pera’s rewriting as not art but a derivative work plagiarizing Nabokov and constituting copyright infringement. Conforming to the received reception of Nabokov’s Lolita as a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Nabokov’s accusation constitutes an act of reception that wields enormous power, potentially taking the writer and her publisher to court, ‘spending years and millions on trials and appeals’, as he points out (x). It is easy to see why publishers would feel hesitant about publishing a novel to which such risks attach, preferring to go ‘on to more productive matters’, as Nabokov phrases it (x). Whereas there is no doubt Lo’s Diary contains some form of reprise of Lolita, the issue was never the fact of repetition, but interpretations of the nature of the act of repetition performed in the rewriting – legal or illegal, transformative or derivative, with motives that are noble (‘literary’) or base (‘seeking fortune and fame’) – as well as prejudices about the context of reception: apparently, it matters less in the context of Italy, Finland, or the Netherlands than it does in the context of England, France, and the United States, countries with potentially much larger readerships and hence much larger spheres of influence. The fact of Nabokov’s accusation, however, has significant effects, amounting to censorship calling for self-censorship, and damaging to the reputation of the author and her novel. Today, Lo’s Diary is read primarily in the context of discussions about copyright and thus as plagiaristic. This reception of the text in turn reflects negatively upon the author. As Pera tells the reporter of the Toronto Globe, ‘People are still in doubt whether I am a villain or not’ (Gill 1999). Although one always stands to lose when engaging in competition, Pera’s losing is framed as dishonourable. In rewriting and thus engaging Nabokov’s Lolita, she did not simply meet her better. Risking rewriting, she lost authorship. For contemporary women writers, as Mary Eagleton argues in her book on the figure of the woman author, there is a clear 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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necessity ‘to claim cultural legitimacy through authorising themselves’ (2005: 2). Rewriting may then be a way to author-ize oneself; it may also jeopardize one’s chances to authorship. Instead of being recognized as a highly talented author, as for instance happened to Michael Cunningham, whose The Hours supposedly ‘draws inventively’ on the life of Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway, revealing him ‘one of the most gifted writers of his generation’ (the quotes are from his official website), the rewriter as plagiarist is viewed as laying illegitimate claims to authorship, and hence as fundamentally undeserving of the credit, fame, or money that derive from it. Pera’s rewriting exemplifies this loss of authorship and literariness: in the section on ‘New Women Writers’ of The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel, Lo’s Diary is referred to as ‘Pera’s postmodern fictional rewrite of Nabokov’s Lolita’ and is said to have ‘won her notoriety in the editorial world’ (Capozzi 2003: 223). She is not categorized as part of the ‘New voices of Italian fiction’, the next section in the Companion’s survey of ‘The New Italian Novel’ – a section, one might observe, that covers the same period and starts with postmodern ‘remakes or revisitations of classic narratives’ such as Luigi Malerba’s Itaca per sempre (Ithaca Forever, 1997), a rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey that similarly ‘exploits the usual postmodern devices of founds manuscripts and intertextual parodies’ by featuring Penelope as she takes her returned husband to task for having taken so long to return home. Malerba’s novel, in contrast, is reported to be ‘a most enjoyable metafiction’ (223). Rewriting the classics, it has been argued, is a way for women writers to claim cultural legitimacy, enabling them to inscribe themselves in the tradition, demonstrate familiarity with it, and derive literary status from dealing in high literary stuff rather than writing ‘personally’ or ‘confessionally’ (Ostriker 1982: 73). Yet this claim may be contested and legitimacy refused to the rewriter by various gatekeepers: guardians of literary estates such as Dmitri Nabokov, literary critics and university professors, or potential publishers deterred by legal aspects of publishing a rewriting of a text that is still under copyright. The rewriter is then barred from her vision on the grounds that she has come too late: the writing has already been done, and it has been done better than any rewriting of it could ever do. As a politics of writing and a poetics that inscribes the aesthetics of repetition characteristic of postmodernism in artistic terms, belatedness can thus backfire and be read as a failure of artistic timing and hence of artistry tout court. Functioning as an instrument for gauging the artistic merits of a work, belatedness then serves to defend staked-out terrain. The president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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explains why the publishing house decided not to publish Lo’s Diary: ‘It’s poaching on someone else’s territory’ (qtd in Manus 1999). Reception, I have argued, using the case of Pia Pera’s rewriting of Lolita to illustrate my point, is the central act that determines the status of the rewriting, recognizing it as masterful metafiction or disqualifying it as belated plagiarism. Because its initial authoritative reception determines the text’s subsequent reception and hence, the text’s fate, it is of paramount importance. Crucially, it is also an act of reception that may occur under such conditions that the rewriting is not recognized as such. Indeed, if plagiarism is a paramount risk of rewriting, for women writers, writing always involves the risk of not being taken seriously: of being viewed as part of that ‘damn mob of scribbling women’, as Nathaniel Hawthorne once infamously said. Instead of being judged in terms of its reworking of earlier material, the text is then taken to be (auto)biographical, the writer writing straight out of her personal life or, worse, out of that of others.15 Thus, throughout the 1980s and even beyond, the term ‘intertextuality’ was generally reserved for the literary production of contemporary male rewriters, who then formed the canon of postmodernism; women who rewrote were viewed to produce either derivative work, or genre fiction (cf. Barr 1992).16 This is comparable to the long misrecognition of the dense intertextuality of Jean Rhys’s Parisian novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939), for instance; the novel, indeed, is generally read as a fairly straight autobiographical story.17 A similar fate befell Connie Palmen’s Lucifer (2007), a Dutch novel whose title references a whole literary tradition, including Milton’s fallen angel, novels by the brothers Klaus and Thomas Mann, and the Dutch tragedy Lucifer by Joost van Vondel, which is one of the Netherlands’ most important Renaissance poets. Lucifer’s reception at the time of publication was dominated by controversy over its fictionalized reworking of the mysterious death of the wife of the late Dutch composer Peter Schat (1935–2003). In contrast to Pera’s novel’s reception as plagiaristic, in Palmen’s case, the fact of literary repetition is totally ignored, with literary critics in effect refusing to acknowledge the novel is dealing in serious literary material, made of the stuff of Real Literature. Palmen herself has commented on this reception. In a public apology for her novel that was subsequently published in one of the major Dutch newspapers, she responded to this critical oversight by drawing attention to the literary aspects of her novel and its reworking of a classic theme, pointing out that ‘Lucifer is called Lucifer for a reason’ (2007: 27). To conclude, then, the risks of rewriting are plenty: by rewriting the classics of Western literature, one stands to win or to lose literariness and, with that, authorship. Clearly, the symbolic gains of rewriting are 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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potentially immense: true artistry being recognized in the masterful rewriting of the established classic work and resulting in recognition for the rewriter and her text. Yet, as the dominant aesthetic of repetition and quotation, self-consciously reflecting on the conditions of narrative, in effect reveals the mechanisms of writing as rewriting, its potential losses are equally formidable, in some cases leading to literary death: dishonour to the writer labeled plagiarist, disappearance of the rewriting that is viewed as mere ‘derivative’ product.

Rewriting and brand management As my discussion of Pera’s rewriting of Lolita illustrates, plagiarism especially becomes an issue when the plagiarized work violates not only the moral rights of the author but also copyright. ‘It may be that aesthetic uses of plagiarism may now only be potentially revolutionary in the event that they risk infringing copyright’, Marilyn Randall writes in Pragmatic Plagiarism (2001: 229). As she suggests, it is when it risks being taken to court for copyright violation that the rewriting truly challenge the interweaving of authorship, ownership, and the territorialization of language that limits the life of literary language and serves commercialism and masculinist protectionism. Illuminating the politics of rewriting, texts accused of plagiarizing copyrighted work help to contextualize its production and reception by posing questions not just about the what and the how of rewriting, but also about its social, cultural, and economic context. Such contextualization is crucial to understanding women’s rewriting not as a trans- or a-historical process of textual transformation, but as part of the commoditization of culture of which the confusion between ownership as a category of property rights and authorship as a moral category is itself a symptom. Rewritings of works under copyright can thus be seen to highlight processes that are always at play in the rewriting of a ‘classic’, whether ‘modern’ or not: at issue in Pera’s rewriting of Lolita was never the fact of repetition – there is no doubt about that – but of the perceived unearned and undeserved benefits that would accrue to Pera. Because she sought inspiration from a book under copyright, Pera was seen as trying to achieve a fortune and fame that was not hers to get, but that lawfully belongs to the Nabokovs, father (the fame) and son (the money). There is a sense, indeed, in which contemporary women’s rewriting is a literary genre ‘that always achieves a part of its meaning in relation to intellectual property law’ (Saint-Amour 2003: 215). One writer acutely aware of this was the late Kathy Acker. Inscribing her work in 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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the emergent tradition of women’s rewriting as a stealing of the plots of precursors, she appropriated texts and rewrote them as a means of exploring the nature of feminine identity and subjectivity. In her experimental novels Great Expectations (1982) and Don Quixote, Which Was A Dream (1986), she used ‘plagiarism’, as she came to name her method of textual production, to address woman’s relation to language and literature. Opening with an almost literal repetition of Dickens’s first sentences, Great Expectations weaves autobiography with purloined texts to literally ‘recall’ her story, at once remembering and renaming it. In Don Quixote (1986), she rewrites Cervantes’s epic novel to work through complex issues of woman’s relation to her body and sexuality, having her endure trials such as an abortion ‘(so that she could keep having adventures)’, as she puts it (15). As she states on the title page of ‘The Second Part of Don Quixote’, ‘Being Dead, Don Quixote could no longer speak. Being born into and part of a male world, she had no speech of her own. All she could do was read male texts which weren’t hers’ (1986: 39). Acker’s strategy to identify her literary practice as plagiaristic and hence as an aesthetic choice rather than motivated by fraudulent intent may be the result of a hard-learned lesson, when following the publication of her novel The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec: By Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1978), Harold Robbins’s publisher demanded she withdraw her book from publication for plagiarizing Robbins’s best-selling novel The Pirate. In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Acker recalls the incident and denies the accusation, saying ‘I’m not guilty of plagiarism’ (1991: 12). As she explains, she did not ‘represent somebody else’s material as [her] material. . . . I have been very clear that I use other people’s material. . . . I’ve always talked about it as a literary theory and as a literary method. I haven’t certainly hidden anything’ (12–13). Although the distinction between fraudulent intent and literary theory and method invoked here is obviously relevant, artistic motivation is not sufficient to absolve the writer from plagiarism. In fact, unlike other work of Acker’s, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec was not published in England – a form of banning, as she points out (1991: 12). Openly flaunting the plagiaristic character of her writings, Acker is well aware of the contradictions inherent in her practice as writer and her business of writing. She said to Lotringer: ‘If I had to be totally honest I would say that what I’m doing is breach of copyright – it’s not, because I change the words – but so what? We’re always playing a game. We earn out of the stupid law but we hate it because we know that’s a jive.’ Continuing to explain that this is ‘one of the basic contradictions 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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of living in capitalism’, she told him, ‘I sell copyright, that’s how I make my money. . . . That’s how writers make their money’ (12). If the business of writing is to sell copyright, is the business of re-writing then to fence copyright, selling stolen goods ‘with guilty knowledge’, as the OED puts it? The cases against Acker’s and Pera’s ‘plagiarisms’ certainly suggest so, implying that to know ‘how to borrow’ is to know what can be taken, where and when, and what can be done with it. Making clear that literary uniqueness is predicated upon material appropriated in such a way that indebtedness is not visible, T.S. Eliot already stated, ‘A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest’ (1928 [1920]: 125). Echoing the received wisdom that ‘the originality of a piece of work is directly proportional to the ignorance of its readers’ (qtd in Randall 2001: 235), Eliot’s description of the methods of the ‘good poet’ reads as a piece of wise advice to any writer who wants to avoid being accused of plagiarism or charged with copyright infringement. Suggesting there is pragmatism in the choice to rewrite texts that are in the public domain, it also hints at the ways in which copyright is a determinant force in the production of rewritings. This throws a new light on the current vogue for historical fiction. Much has been written about the contemporary popularity of the nineteenth-century, neo-Victorian, ‘hystorical’ novel. As critics remark on the ‘Victorian afterlife’ (Kucich and Sadoff 2000) and the wealth of English-language rewritings dealing especially with ‘Victoriana’ (Kaplan 2007), their speculations as to why this period is so favored tends to focus on the (historical) parallels between then and now, suggesting, in the words of Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, that ‘The postmodern mindset shares important aspects with the Victorians, in particular a belief in its own modernity and the crisis of all categories’ (2004: 142–3). Frequently, criticism focuses on postmodernist conceptions of time, opening up the past to the present, ‘to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological’, as Linda Hutcheon writes (1988: 93); or, alternatively, it emphasizes the ineluctability of the past (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2004), looking into its engagement with the processes of historiography (King 2005; Heilmann and Llewellyn 2007). What none of these writers points out, however, is that the Victorian past is such a productive terrain for rewriting because, like Shakespeare, the Biblical or the mythical, it is fair game. If, as Heilmann and Llewellyn maintain, ‘the Victorians are history at its closest’ (2004: 142), then their Victorian novels are historical fiction at its closest. That is, they are the most contemporary historical novels in the public domain and can thus be re-produced without risking copyright infringement. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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Distant enough in time to be public property, yet close enough to be still living memory, they are also on the brink of becoming objectified culture stabilizing the memory of the period. According to Jan Assmann, one can distinguish between two phases in cultural memory. Communicative memory is based on everyday communications and has a ‘limited temporal horizon’, extending to no more than ‘eighty to (at the very most) one hundred years into the past’ (1995: 127). Memories in this communicative phase are in flux, subject to dispute, negotiation, and contention. Beyond the temporal horizon of three or four generations, memory becomes fixed in what for Assmann is cultural memory proper, ‘cristallized in the forms of objectivized culture’ (128). In terms of cultural memory, Victorian novels are poised on the threshold of the communicative and its cultural objectification. Because they are also novels that continue to bind their readers to nineteenth-century ideas of gender and sexual difference through their plots and their continued affirmation as cultural capital, rewriting them is a particular urgent task. The rewriting of these novels, then, occurs at the junction of two fields of power crucial in the formation of cultural memory. On the one hand is time as it passes, receding to a temporal distance that eventually stabilizes memory and removes it from the sphere of everyday communication and negotiation. On the other hand is copyright law, which takes the text out of the public domain and thus away from certain forms of rewriting during the communicative phase of cultural memory, fixing it in the very phase when it might be most open to being transformed. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Victorian novels are located at this junction when communicative memory is still active yet copyright has lapsed, forming a window of opportunity for writers and their publishers, who can then engage with their stories and the forms of cultural identification they sustain without risking a lawsuit for copyright infringement. In this light, it is worth noting the effect of the harmonization of European and American copyright law in the 1990s. This GATT agreement extended copyright from fifty to seventy years after the death of the author, safeguarding the latter’s legacy for another twenty years. Surely, it is not incidental this harmonization happened at a time of intensifying globalization that is also characterized by increased life expectancy for the more affluent inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere? As a higher life expectancy extends the temporal horizon of communicative memory for members of socially and economically dominant groups, the extension of copyright law in effect facilitates the commemorative work of these groups. In The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Imagination, Paul Saint-Amour remarks on this articulation of copyright with memory, observing, ‘postmortem copyright has been held to be coterminous with memory and the lapse of copyright to be a desecration or annihilation of memory’ (2003: 202). The law that protects copyright, giving its holder the exclusive right to exploit the work and license derivative products, performs its commemorative function by limiting the kind of rewriting it licenses. What Pera’s alleged copyright infringement case reveals is that rewritings work according to the logic of branding. Like branded products, they are works that sell on the basis of their being associated with what they rewrite, building on expectations raised by it, tapping its promises. Brand recognition manifestly plays an important role in the marketing of Lo’s Diary. This is most visible on the book’s cover, which consists of a blackand-white picture of a young girl’s face, her lightly eye-lined eyes wide open and her lips half parted in an air of youthful innocence, covered by a semi-translucent dust jacket bearing the book’s title and its author’s name, as well as a pair of pink-rimmed sunglasses and red lips covering the girl’s face. This image evokes Stanley Kubrick’s iconic representation of Nabokov’s heroine in his 1962 film adaptation, with her red heart-shaped sunglasses and red lollypop-sucking lips. Although different enough to eschew further accusations of copyright infringement, the cover is similar enough to make clear it is evidently, perhaps even defiantly, designed to visually reinforce the book’s link with the iconic Lolita. Copyright holders who manage their rights well do so through what might be described as careful brand management: authorizing or not copies, adaptations, and other derivative products, they build brand identity and recognition, and they create and maintain value. To illustrate, when Margaret Mitchell’s estate authorized the publication of Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to Gone With the Wind, Scarlett (1991) and, more recently, Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People (2007) but sued Alice Randall for retelling it from the perspective of the protagonist’s mulatto half-sister in The Wind Done Gone (2001), it made choices designed to maintain a certain image of the novel. Literary estates, of course, exist to maintain – regulate, administer, and protect – an author’s cultural legacy: they are commemorative institutions, ‘oriented around the commemoration and consecration of an author’s work’, as Saint-Amour puts it (2003: 211). In the case of the Mitchell trusts, their commemorative work revolves entirely around Margaret Mitchell’s only but world-renowned novel – a novel, it is worth noting, that has sold more than 28 million copies since publication (Goldenberg 2007). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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Taking its point of departure in Mitchell’s racist representation of the plantation slaves as blithe ‘darkies’, as they are referred to in the novel (1936: 6 and passim), The Wind Done Gone rewrites Gone With the Wind to address and redress its race politics. As Alice Randall explained to a group of reviewers, ‘Where were the mulattos on Tara? Where were the people in my family history?’ (Sachs 2001). In The Wind Done Gone, Randall therefore seeks ‘to redeem the text’ (ibid.) and, telling the story from the perspective of Cynara, daughter of Mammy and of Gerald O’Hara and thus Scarlett’s half-sister, transforms the reader’s experience of its fictional-historical world. Referring to Scarlett as ‘Other’, to Rhett Butler as ‘R’, and to Tara as ‘Tata’, she withdraws the reader’s emotional investment from the protagonists of Gone With the Wind, seeking instead to draw her readership into the concerns, feelings, and emotional worlds of her African-American characters. For Mitchell’s heirs, it is obviously of paramount importance they succeed in maintaining the novel’s identity, which is key to its market position: its image as romantic drama creates more value and is likely to lead to more sales than its association with slavery. From the perspective of the copyright holder, then, careful brand management is crucial: whereas the right kind of associations can boost the novel’s value, the wrong ones may negatively affect it and reduce its attractiveness and, consequently, demand. Because unauthorized rewritings play a role in its brand image yet are not part of its official management, as managers of the brand, copyright holders are not only keen to see their rights honored and dues paid, but also to control the image. To this end, the Mitchell trusts have established ‘certain ground rules for licensed sequels’, including a prohibition on ‘interracial or homosexual sex’ and on ‘the death of Scarlett O’Hara’ (Saint-Amour 2003: 210). As the inclusion of Gone With the Wind in the list of Time’s 2005 hundred ‘best English-language novels’ suggests, to this day, their policing of the Mitchell brand has proven successful, showing control over the brand image to be instrumental in maintaining best-seller success. In policing Mitchell’s legacy, however, Mitchell’s heirs also police its representation of the antebellum South. Defending the legacy of a white Southerner of privilege, they effectively preserve its racist image of the Old South. Its commemorative work, in other words, is in maintaining a memory of racism that is also a traumatic memory and ‘rememory’, as Toni Morrison calls it (1987), of the African-American community. As such, it prevents the transformation of cultural memory, resisting change in the way the past is represented and remembered. As a group 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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The discussion of the painful legacy of slavery is ongoing among American citizens across the nation. Because of the extraordinary popularity of Gone With the Wind and its unique mythic status, Mitchell’s novel has become a prime source of knowledge about plantation life for much of mainstream America. Now is the time for the American public to hear another perspective on this legend. (www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall_url/) The brand management of Mitchell’s novel demonstrates the high stakes that are involved, effectively enabling the working-through of collective trauma or keeping the memory beyond its reach, unavailable for the transformative potential of rewriting. Revealing the tension between Gone With the Wind’s status as private property and what Saint-Amour has termed its ‘public status in the national imaginary as a myth about compliant slaves, benevolent masters, and an Old South whose demise Scarlett O’Hara famously deplores’ (2003: 212), it also demonstrates the impact of intellectual property law on the production, distribution, circulation, and consumption of texts and how it affects cultural memory.

Rewriting in the post-Fordist literary marketplace The entanglement of literary borrowing with the publishing economy has become all the more inextricable as the recent transformations in the book-publishing industry, submitting it to the strictures of the market, have put increasing pressures on publishers to sell books according to the logic of the market. Ironically, as the aesthetics of a postmodern déjà-vu and déjà-lu come to dominate the literary and cultural landscape, and as technologies of reproduction proliferate, the entanglement of literary theft as artistic practice and of literary theft as artistic malpractice seen as the infringement of intellectual property becomes increasingly complex. In addition to considering the context of production and reception as shaped by the interests of the book-publishing industry, there is a growing need to acknowledge how the forces of production and consumption affect the material conditions under which writers produce books. Issues of plagiarism and copyright infringement may be increasingly complicated in the contemporary digital world (Lessig 2005), where cases of real or alleged plagiarism abound – in 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


of writers and scholars put it in their letter of support of the publication of Randall’s Wind Done Gone,

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the worlds of music, of film, and of student papers, most notoriously. The so-called plagiarism plague is certainly facilitated by the new digital technologies of reproduction. Yet the ease with which things can be copied – and the actuality of copies being made when reading online – should not obscure the fact that the predominance of the copy as an aesthetics is also in the interests of a competitive literary market where writers are pressurized by their publishers to ‘write something’ to respond to the demand of the public (Maurel-Indart 1999: 55). The increasingly short life-cycle of books, reducing the time between the publication of one book and the next one, effectively curtails the time writers are given for their composition. Although not all writers give in to their publisher’s requests for a new book sooner than ready – or give them something that was still sitting in a drawer – there is no doubt that, as Maurel-Indart’s analyses indicate (1999; 2007), the acceleration of turnover times is a significant cause for undue pressure on writers.18 This may lead to sloppiness on the part of the harried writers and their assistants and collaborators, explaining a rise in plagiarism cases. Rewriting, in this light, is also a manner of literary (re)creation that requires little inspiration and that can be composed within relatively little time. To know how to borrow then becomes to know how to employ rewriting efficiently, as a means to producing a new book rapidly. This is what Jeanette Winterson suggests when she acknowledges having written her parodic rewriting of the story of Noah’s Ark, Boating for Beginners (1985), ‘for money in 6 weeks’. Setting the record straight on her website, Winterson recalls it was published three months after her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit had come out. It is because she was young and needed money that she accepted the offer ‘to do something funny’ (www.jeanettewinterson.com).19 In Winterson’s perspective, Boating for Beginners is fun, but should not be taken too seriously. It is not a major work in her oeuvre, but rather a kind of literary entremets – not something in which to sink one’s teeth, but simply to enjoy for its entertaining value, while waiting for the next major piece (which would be The Passion [1987]). It is interesting, then, to note that Winterson’s first two novels both use rewriting as a means of literary production, rewriting the books of the Bible to tell new stories. Yet whereas Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) is pervaded which a sense of rewriting as a subversive and transgressive gesture, potentially dangerous and explosive, Boating for Beginners exploits her newlyachieved freedom from the strictures of the old stories and plays with its generative potential to explore its possibilities for storytelling. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Rewriting as ‘plagiarism’, risking copyright infringement, reveals the forces of the market at work in the production, distribution, and reception of literature as cultural memory: market forces, and the system of protection of the market in the form of copyright law, play a significant part if not in creating, then in defining ‘great’ or, more simply, ‘interesting’ art. Just as the modern literary field, as Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal study The Rules of Art (1996 [1992]) has shown, includes the critics and the publishers as stakeholders whose motives and interests may combine or clash with those of the writers individually and collectively, so does cultural memory constitute a field with contending forces and agents vying for the recognition of their version of the story.20 Therefore, rather than solely putting the burden of proof on the producer, we need to ask how the writer comes to rewrite some texts and not others, as well as inquire into the role editors and publishers, among other co-producers of the literary work, play in its production as discourse on the past. This is not to say the writer has no agency at all. As the rewritings discussed in this chapter show, women’s rewriting is no monolith category of literary work, but takes up different and even opposed positions on the issue of writing’s relation to capitalism. On the one hand, women’s rewriting may confirm the ideology of the subject of writing through an affirmation of its aesthetics by literally buying into its politics of authorship. Thus, to the large constituency of women readers with a disposable income, women’s rewritings sell womencentred stories by offering known stories with a twist. Tapping into such popular modes as the mystery revealed – as, for instance, in Emma Tennant Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002) – publishers of rewritings perfect the commercial art of brand management, marketing them as ‘a companion volume’ and offering them in boxed sets.21 Book covers and flaps more or less explicitly refer to the rewritten text, while layout, lettering, and illustration reinforce the connections between the ‘original’ and its rewriting. This is something completely different from the ‘continuity with the women of the past’ Elaine Showalter identified in A Literature of Their Own, which she saw reasserted by contemporary women writers in their rewritings of nineteenth-century feminine literature (2009 [1984]: 302). Indeed, if there is continuity here, it is in selling books with an explicitly woman-centred content to a proven customer base. On the other hand, women’s rewriting may also go counter to the ideology of authorship as ownership, seeking to redefine the nature of writing. The overt aspect of rewriting is a constitutive element of women’s rewriting as studied in this book: it is central to the text’s meaning that it be seen, recognized, and read as a rewriting of an other 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate



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text, for only then does its new perspective yield comparatively new insights and reveal literary history to be changeable, impermanent, reversible.22 Yet within a literary market protected by copyright law, such overt rewriting is perforce limited to works in the public domain. Copyright puts limits on what can be rewritten (and how) – limits which are imposed by rules and conventions external to the text yet productive of it. Overt rewritings of works that are still under copyright show how those impositions limit what can be said and challenge their authority by questioning their right to enforce obedience. Thus, in the public debate over the Lolita case, journalists joined with Pera to ask to whom Lolita belongs, claiming the iconic heroine has transcended the intellectual property of Nabokov and become common ground, ‘part of contemporary language and mythology’ (Gill 1999). Similarly, writers defended Alice Randall’s ethical and political right to redeem Margaret Mitchell’s novel on the basis of Gone with the Wind’s ‘unique mythic status’ in American culture, pointing to its public status as ‘a prime source of knowledge about plantation life for much of mainstream America’. In Randall’s case, it may be worth noting, the United States Court of Appeals recognized that the status of Mitchell’s novel as private property collided with its public significance and overturned the injunction against Randall, thus releasing The Wind Done Gone for publication. Randall’s first novel would go on to become a New York Times bestseller and Randall to be a successful novelist and songwriter. Truly risking what writing is, women’s overt rewritings of works under copyright invite reconsideration of what writing does, not just in the sense of which stories are told and remembered, as all rewritings do, but also what its social and financial effects are and who is to gain (most) from it. They expose the gender dynamics of what Randall terms ‘the complex nexus of power relationships that are simultaneously aesthetic, political, cultural, social, and economic’ (2001: 229), showing preconceived ideas about women to influence the reception of their writing and disclosing how value judgments about the nature of the rewriting in turn, serve to (en)gender rewritings as strong and authoritative, or as weak, immature, and imitative. Most importantly, such rewritings also show the forces that clash in shaping cultural memory, revealing the interests various types of memory-work serve. Since the notion of women’s rewriting as derivative reproduction, guarding the realm of production as the realm of men, essentially returns women to the domain of reproductivity, it may be useful to go back to the term and observe that the word ‘plagiarism’ etymologically means the abduction of another’s child or slave. Plagiarism is, in other 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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words, a metaphor: ‘a transaction between contexts’, as I.A. Richards defines metaphor in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1965 [1936]: 94), applying the idea of stealing to a new domain, from one kind of property (children and slaves) to another (authored texts). The ground of this metaphor, to use Richards’s terminology, is the tenor’s (stealing texts) and vehicle’s (stealing children/slaves) shared understanding of the object of theft as property (117; 96). Plagiarism as metaphor identifies the author as father/owner of his literary offspring/slave. The metaphoric origins of the word plagiarism are now mostly forgotten. The word has long entered common language, and most people using the term would not know whence it comes. Yet the associations of the context of origin continue to attach to it: writing is not only thought of in terms of stealing. The activity is understood and performed in terms of property theft representing the most odious crime a writer can commit. This is also because the theft poses a challenge to male power as ultimate authority and rightful ownership. Yet, has not the ground of the metaphor shifted? Does plagiarism as the stealing of offspring conceived as property not continue to re-inscribe ideas about authorship that are long past their use-by date? Today, children are no longer their father’s property and slavery has been abolished (if not everywhere in reality, then by law). Does this emancipation of the object of theft then not also apply to its tenor? Clearly, new metaphors are needed – new ways of talking of rewriting neither as plagiarism nor as property and as stealing. ‘The most important task for feminist theorists is to help envision a future that provides alternatives to the way intellectual property is conceptualized and legally protected’, Debora Halbert maintains (1999: 118). Halbert answers to her own call for an alternative feminist vision on creative work by emphasizing ‘the relational aspects of creation’ as well as its ‘communitarian aspects’ (119). As I discuss in Chapter 6, it is to this task that women’s rewritings of myth seem particular devoted. Free from the strictures of copyright, rewritings of myth are free to explore the possibilities of storytelling for alternative futures. In the context of the literary market, they ‘sell copyright’, as Kathy Acker puts it, enabling living writers to make if not their living, then at least some money. Yet because they cannot claim exclusive property rights for themselves for, say, Medea or Penelope, women’s rewritings of myth are positioned differently in the literary marketplace and invite different acts of reception. The possibilities of mythical retelling are explored in the final part of this book.








Part III

Cultural Scripts





Untold Stories: ‘Writing Back’ to Silence

‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak crucially asked (1988), answering that since the subaltern woman cannot speak within existing discourses, the conditions that would allow her to do so need to be created. The silence of the subaltern poses important questions for the feminist project of rewriting as an intervention in cultural memory. Can rewriting be a means of knowing ‘the silent, silenced centre’, and does it constitute a journey into representation as remembered self, or is rewriting rather what Pierre Macherey termed ‘a sort of journey to silence’? Insisting it is not enough to speak to be heard, Spivak’s analysis of the subaltern’s silence as discursively produced both reminds us of the importance of the context of reception, as discussed in the previous chapter, and invites us to see rewriting as the locus of a complex and ambiguous relationship of language to cultural memory and power. Silence is a topos in women’s writing. It is a motive for writing and for rewriting. A central theme of feminist criticism, it is also a key issue for cultural memory. Because remembrance is predicated upon communication, silence and forgetting are linked: silencing is a tool of forgetting, and amnesia, Rich writes, ‘is the silence of the unconscious’ (1995 [1979]: 187). Women’s rewriting, on the contrary, aims to remember: by voicing the silent and the silenced, it seeks to propel them into the space of representation that is also the space of remembrance. Seeking to ‘know the past’ differently, women’s rewriting ‘writes back’ to silence in an effort to generate usable pasts, answering it with stories of its own. Countering the forces that silence, rewriting transmutes silence into speech. Voicing the silenced and telling the other side of the story, however, rewriting can also be seen to suppress speech. As political scientist Wendy Brown writes in ‘Freedom’s Silences’, ‘silences in discourses of domination are sites for insurrectionary noise’ and ‘corridors to be filled 97



4

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with explosive countertales’ (1998: 314). ‘When silence is broken by speech, new silences are fabricated and enforced’ (313). Brown’s essay questions the implicit equation between freedom and speech and suggests it is ‘possible to make a fetish of breaking silence’ (314). As she points out, breaking silence may articulate experience in ways that are not also true for others. Certain ‘traditions of breaking silence’ have adverse effects in privileging some modalities of speech over others while incessant speech ‘not only overwhelms the experience of others, but overwhelms alternative (unutterable, traumatized, fragmentary, or inassimilable) zones of one’s own experience’ (321). Brown’s observations have important implications for women’s rewriting. Does women’s rewriting break silence in the interest of a particular perspective? Does it privilege one type of storytelling, so that other stories cannot be heard, in effect suppressing other voices? In particular, does the concept of ‘writing back’ to silence implicate the subject of rewriting in acts of silencing in the very act of responding to silence with speech? Whereas silence holds all possibility of speech, rewriting breaks the silence frequently to voice only one silenced story. Meanwhile, myriads of stories remain unheard. First developed as a term for postcolonial rewriting in the 1980s, ‘writing back’ has recently become increasingly contested as a defining concept for postcolonial literature. Alluding to the title of the popular Star Wars episode The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the phrase ‘writing back’ derives from an article by Salman Rushdie entitled ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’ (1982). It was subsequently brought to critical prominence by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in their seminal study The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, in which they claim that ‘the rereading and the rewriting of the European historical and fictional record is a vital and inescapable task at the heart of the post-colonial enterprise’ (1989: 196). Although scholars continue to assert the importance of rewriting to the postcolonial project (e.g. Brydon and Tiffin 1993; Edwards 2008), critics have also questioned the limitations inherent in the view of postcolonial literature as a counter-discursive practice ‘writing back’ to the colonial centre: it situates the postcolonial text in relation to an ‘original’ even when it is ‘disputing the very ground on which any such encounter might take place’ or demonstrates ‘no obvious interest in engaging the canon in battle’ (Thieme 2001: 5; see also Caminero-Santangelo 2004). In this chapter, I explore rewriting as ‘writing back’, not just to the colonial centre, but to the silences and absences it produces. Whereas 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Rushdie’s phrase suggests that to write back is to strike back and, hence, to respond to violence with violence, this definition relates rewriting to the violence of (self-)censorship and suppression and to a politics of silence as suppressed voice. Designating a mode of textual production that is counter-memorial and counter-cultural, the conjunction of women’s rewriting as ‘writing back’ and as a ‘voicing of the silenced’ or a ‘telling of the other side’ inscribes a central paradox: while silence as suppressed speech is a cause for rewriting, to speak, in its turn, is to suppress other voices. This paradox is captured in the notion of ‘untold stories’, by which I mean both stories that are not told – that are suppressed or otherwise ‘silenced’ – and stories too numerous to be counted. The paradox clearly becomes a problem when rewriting reveals itself an instrument of suppression, obliterating voices rather than amplifying them, inscribing oblivion, not memory. This means that one of the tasks at hand is to conceptualize women’s rewriting as not simply oppositional, as critics of the postcolonial model of intertextuality suggest we do, yet retaining a sense of rewriting as a feminist project: capable of projecting a sense of feminist possibilities. This chapter is an exploration of the complicated and historically changing relationship of women’s rewriting to silence. First, I look at silence as a topos of women’s writing, examining the relationship of rewriting to the reclaiming of voice and the retrieving of the silenced. Then, I turn to women’s rewriting as a coming to speech that overwhelms other voices, focusing on the vexed relationship of feminism to postcolonialism. The dynamics of gender, ‘race’, and rewriting that informs the politics of women’s rewriting I see illustrated by J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which I read as a metafictional novel about women’s rewriting. Examining rewriting as it relates to representation, I inquire into the possibilities of rewriting as ‘writing back’ for the postcolonial subject, as well as the limitations it imposes. Finally, following suggestions that postcolonial intertextuality be rethought ‘beyond “writing back”’ (Caminero-Santangelo 2005), I discuss the haunting texts of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba . . . (1986) to propose a poetics of silence that recognizes silence as a complex emergent phenomenon requiring rewriting be reconceptualized, not as a giving voice to or breaking of silence, but as a putting into discourse of silence. In its proposition rewriting be conceived metonymically rather than metaphorically, this chapter evokes ‘presence’ as a memory discourse to insist that the question of what can be heard is at least as important as that of what can be said, and that both are crucial in determining who and what can be remembered. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Silence is a topos of women’s writing. It was brought to critical attention by Tillie Olsen’s book Silences (1978) and was subsequently turned into a crucial concept in feminist literary and cultural analysis. Silence is the central motive for identifying women’s writing as different from men’s. In the terms laid down by second-wave feminism, it is also the prime motive for women to write and to rewrite. It is because woman’s experience is excluded from the literature of the past, because her lifeworld remains unarticulated in language, that twentieth-century feminist theorists from Virginia Woolf to Hélène Cixous have encouraged women to write. And to rewrite. As I discussed in Chapter 2, in its early theorizing, women’s rewriting is presented as a remedy to women’s silencing. To recall the figurative language of Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’, women writers are divers submerged in the sea of words, searching for the vestiges of female experience that can be recovered from it, ‘carrying . . . a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear’ (1973: 23). Rich’s acute sense of muted lives leads to a call to action that is also a call to replenishment: there is a need for those stories, which can be retrieved, recovered, re-written. As a politics, women’s rewriting is predicated on the recognition of women’s silence as enforced both through regulatory discourses and repressive practices. The insight into their own condition as silenced, that is, as imposed upon them and hence, as a form of oppression, is part of the legacy of the women’s movement. It is, indeed, in the context of the consciousness-raising activities and effects of the feminist movement that a sense of shared experiences of oppression are identified as structural and gender based, leading to the understanding of silence as a condition that needs to be resisted and consequently, to the political imperative to speak, write, or otherwise break the silence. As discussed in Tillie Olsen’s Silences (1978), silence is distributed unequally across class, ethnicity, and gender. ‘Literary history and the present are dark with silences’, she writes (6). Maintaining that these silences ‘are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot’ (6), she proceeds to identify them as the product of culture, habit, and social convention – as gendered, that is – as well as due to material circumstances and psychological forces. Olsen’s book helped change the way women in the United States and outside read and write, putting issues of creativity, the creative process and its material conditions on the academic research agenda, as well as stimulating new critical and creative writing (Fishkin 2003 [1994]).



Silence and women’s (re)writing

Although recently challenged by Myles Weber, who argues in Consuming Silences that Olsen’s admirers are misled and that her career is a mystification – he contends that her thesis that women are hindered in their writing aspirations is at odds with the fact that Olsen herself was generously provided with ‘the resources necessary to continue writing nothing full-time’ (2005: 10) – there is no doubt but that her work helped shape the burgeoning field of women’s studies and that she was an important inspiration and personal mentor to many, energizing a generation of women and spurring them on to write.1 Thus the anniversary commemorations of Silences are occasions to evaluate not only the impact of Olsen’s work, but also the continued relevance of the concepts of silence and silencing, across time, generations, and place. In Listening to Silences (1994), a collection of essays edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, feminist literary critics explore the dynamics of silence and silencing about feminism, multiculturalism, and the literary canon. Earlier, Joanna Russ developed some of Olsen’s ideas in her How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983). More recently, Ritu Menon’s ‘The Structured Silences of Women: Culture, Censorship, and Voice in a Globalised Market’ (2004) reasserts the continued relevance of Olsen’s concepts, discussing the gender dimensions of ‘the business of silencing’ of what she terms market censorship and arguing these are only new forms of the centuries-old issue emerging anew in the context of the World Wide Web and market. The understanding that silence is woman’s condition under patriarchy leads not just to an analysis of its circumstances. It also instigates the reclaiming of voice as the feminist assertion of the self, ‘bearing witness to what was (and still is) being lost, silenced’, as Olsen puts it in her epigraph to Silences. One of the ways in which this bearing witness to the silenced takes place in women’s writing is through the telling of the other side of the story: the unknown, unheard, silent part of it – what was passed over in the current and official histories. Conceived as the opposite of speech and as unrealized selfhood, silence is put into discourse as repressed speech, an oppression and (self-)censorship that must be overcome. ‘Write! Writing is for you’, Hélène Cixous admonishes her readers in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976: 876). For as she explains, ‘Women should break out of the snare of silence’ (881). The discursive and social fact of silence becomes a motor force for rewriting from the new critical perspective of the woman-identified woman writer. Opening a feminine space within literary history and the literature of the past, it turns pockets of silence into arenas for feminist discourse. Because it bears witness to silence and silencing, women’s 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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rewriting is testimony, testifying to the power of speech and of writing, and to the powers that silence. As the retelling of the old stories from a new feminine perspective, women’s rewriting typically takes the form of first-person retrospective narratives. Autobiographical, it fills the space of confession with stories of the self in the process of becoming story, to evoke Shoshana Felman’s definition of women’s autobiography as ‘a story that is not a story but must become a story’ (1993: 17; emphasis in the original). The feminist imperative for women to tell their own stories finds a particularly productive site for the narrative production of the self in rewriting as a ‘supplement to history’ that inserts itself within the interstices of the text. Filling, as it were, the spaces between the lines, such supplement is inevitably ‘dangerous’, as Derrida had it (1997 [1967]), predictably spilling over onto the main text. Narratologically, gaps, silences, and blank spots are a constituent part of texts. They form as much a part of texts as words do, and together they form the narrative (or the poem, for this equally applies to poetry). After all, to tell a story is to select, and this principle of selection which governs both literary and non-literary language in turn implies that in a very basic sense, any telling of the story inevitably always suppresses other stories. As Cixous puts it in Rootprints, ‘all narratives tell one story in place of another story’ (1997: 178). This basic principle of selection and substitution has many names: it is the poetic function in Jakobson’s scheme, famously projecting ‘the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination’, as he cryptically puts it in ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ (1960: 358); it is also the plot (sžujet) of the Russian Formalists, distinguishing the form from the content, the discourse from the story (fabula). Although contested, the narratological distinction between fabula and sžujet, story and plot, is useful in this context. Of course, the fabula does not exist as such: it is a reconstruction based on the actual telling, which is all there really is, so that plot as the artistic ordering of the raw material, of the events as they chronologically happened, in reality coincides with the telling. Yet it allows us to understand every telling as the suppression of yet another telling, as a more or less deliberate choice, releasing the possibility of alternative tellings – in a different style, with another voice, from an alternative perspective. This notion is central to the Western understanding of literature, leading to experiments such as Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (1947), in which he retells the same anecdote in ninety-nine different ways, or John Updike’s ‘Four Sides of One Story’ (1965), in which he tells the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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story of Tristan and Isolde from the perspective of its four protagonists (and thus anticipates his so-called Hawthorne trilogy, which rewrites The Scarlet Letter from the perspective of its main characters: Arthur Dimmesdale [A Month of Sundays, 1975], Roger Chillingworth [Roger’s Version, 1986] and Hester Prynne [S., 1988]). Reflecting on the narrative conditions of her revisionary prequel to Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys expresses the principle succinctly when she has her character Antoinette say, ‘There is always the other side, always’ (Rhys 1999 [1966]: 77; pt. II). In The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative, Molly Hite similarly points out that ‘the other side of the story is also, if implicitly, another story’, observing that ‘when construed as repressed or suppressed stories of the Other, these other stories become the enabling conditions for the writing and reading of feminist narrative’ (1992 [1989]: 4). In the sense that women’s rewriting is a filling-in of the gaps, it is the actualization of one of the possibilities of the narrative. Supplementing the old stories with accounts of the silenced and unheard, replenishing it by telling what was passed over, women’s rewriting does what the text commands yet does so in at least initially unanticipated ways. Compositionally, semantically, pragmatically, and rhetorically speaking, silence produces effects and has meaning. Thus Brontë’s silence, in Wuthering Heights, about what Heathcliff did during the three years he disappeared, before he returns transformed and in all appearances a gentleman, is an integral part of his characterization as mysterious and is, as such, crucial to the novel as gothic tale. The enigma he poses incites speculation about his deeds and whereabouts during the missing years both within and outside the narrative. Just as Nelly Dean and Lockwood do within the novel, so do readers wonder what he was up to in their reflections on the novel, as when John Sutherland asks ‘Is Heathcliff a murderer?’ (1996). Silence thus functions as an invitation to the reader to perform certain activities – activities which theorists of reading have described in terms of actualizing and concretizing the text, of filling its gaps, blank spots, and indeterminacies (e.g. Ingarden 1973, Iser 1976; see also Kivy 2006); and which less theoretically inclined readers take up as puzzles to be pondered, mysteries to be investigated, and enigmas to be solved, in what Matei Calinescu has termed ‘reading for the secret’. For as he observes, whereas the novel in general follows the pattern of the ‘mystery revealed’ narrative, the novelist’s art includes ‘the skilful use of techniques of “enigmatization” of narrative information and plot construction’ (1993: 240). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Enigmatizations, silences, and omissions form invitations that are directed at specific readers, shaping the relationship between author, text, and reader. In our time, these silences and omissions have been taken up as invitations to (re)write. Brontë’s silence about Heathcliff’s mystery years has yielded several rewritings, most notably Jeffrey Caine’s Heathcliff: The Missing Years (1977; new edition in 1993) and Lin HaireSargeant’s H., subsequently titled Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering Heights (1992, 1993).2 Reading Humbert Humbert’s observation, in Lolita, that ‘it struck me . . . that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind’ (Nabokov 1991 [1955]: 284), Pia Pera interprets this major ‘blank spot’ in the novel as designating Lolita’s mind as unchartered terrain.3 Similarly, it is the silence of Stevenson with regard to the women of the servant class that motivates Valerie Martin’s retelling of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the perspective of the maid in Mary Reilly (1990); and it is the silence of the Bible about the lives of the women that motivate retellings such as Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997), in which Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, tells her life story and so recalls female customs and traditions now long forgotten. These novels exemplify women’s rewriting as replenishment, filling in the blank spots of literary history and making audible the voices of silenced women. Their authors’ motives are made clear in a variety of ways, both within and outside the texts. Recounting how she came to write Mary Reilly, Martin explains she told the story to solve the mystery posed by a crying maid in Stevenson’s novella: ‘I always thought that I’d like to know why that servant was crying’, she tells her interviewer (Graeber 1990: 7). In contrast, Diamant thematizes rewriting within her novel as the redressing of a wrong done to her protagonist by having the characters comment upon remembering and forgetting within the narrative. In a passage that can be read as metafictional commentary, the device is then motivated, as the Russian Formalists used to say, explicitly linking rewriting with remembering. Towards the end of the narrative, as Dinah asks her brother Joseph about their father, he answers, ‘He said nothing of you. Dinah is forgotten in the house of Jacob’ (1997: 273). In the house of Jacob, the silence about Dinah works to disremember her. In contrast, opposing the work of silencing as forgetting, rewriting enacts remembrance, putting together the character and a memory of her in the process of letting her tell her story. Supplying stories of the texts’ silences, women’s rewriting yields narratives as the result of the productivity of silence: it ostensibly responds to the text’s invitation to its readers actively to participate in the production of the text. Pondering what John Sutherland maintains to be ‘perfectly 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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good question[s]’ (1996: ix), such responses to Rich’s call for re-vision as a kind of ‘information retrieval in these silenced areas’, to use Spivak’s phrase (1988: 295), are then at least double, both acquiescing in what the text wants them to do, and providing such alternative readings as have been termed ‘resisting’ (Fetterley 1978). I have already discussed how rewriting, as a materialization of the productivity of reading, in effect becomes production in the most basic sense of the term, producing texts to be sold on the literary market. This context, I have argued in the previous chapters, shapes women’s rewriting as remembering, in-forming what can be produced, marketed, and sold in the contemporary literary market. In this chapter, I suggest that the market also combines with ideology to authorize certain forms of ‘breaking the silence’. In particular, the first-person retrospective perspective privileged by women’s rewriting has led to the assimilation of the ‘autobiographical’ with the idea of an authenticity of voice and of self that becomes most problematic in the context of so-called postcolonial literature. As ideology critics have been telling us for some time now, what can be said at a given time and in a given place is subject to regulation, through law, social convention, cultural understanding. Such regulation also applies to what can be read and, we might add, to what can be written and rewritten. As we all know, to speak is not necessarily to be heard. If the silences depend on shared conventions to be understood – as memorably represented in Susan Glaspell’s short story ‘A Jury of her Peers’ (written in 1917; first published in 1927), in which the women recognize the signs of another woman’s despair while the men remain unable to comprehend the mystery – speech equally needs to be framed in such a way that it can be heard.4 What can be said and what can be heard is limited – framed, as cognitive science puts it. Judith Butler has recently discussed the situation in post-9/11 America in terms of ‘what we can hear’, arguing that in those days and months, a frame for understanding the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath emerged, ‘and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiry, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation’ (2003: 4). Frames are discursively produced. Shaping thought and action, they determine speech and silence, and the meanings that attach to them. As suggested by Foucault’s analysis of the discursive production of sexuality, which he similarly unpicks in terms of silence and censorship (repression, prohibition, and silencing), women’s rewriting is a historical response to literary silences and the silencing of women’s voices in literature made possible by the identification of silence as central to women’s experience and the authorization to speak about it. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Rewriting silence

Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (1990 [1978]: 27) Foucault’s reflections are important for thinking through the relationship of women’s rewriting’s to silence and silencing. They demand that what is traditionally thought of in terms of opposition – silence and speech – be rethought as not simply mutually exclusive, but as mutually constituent, integral, and integrated, part of the same discursive formation. Thus, they invite a reconsideration of language, writing, and rewriting as not just ways of saying things but also as a manner of ‘not saying such things’, articulating the told and the untold jointly and requiring attention be paid not just to who is allowed to speak and who is not, but also to the type of discourse that is and is not authorized. As such, they can be taken to formulate a programme for the study of women’s rewriting as a putting into discourse of women’s silence. In addition to providing an analytical framework, there are also historical reasons why Foucault’s analysis of the discursive production of sexuality provides a useful context from which to approach the question of women’s rewriting’s complex relationship to silence and silencing, language and power. The first volume of his History of Sexuality was published in France in 1976 (with an English translation following in 1978); subsequent volumes would follow in 1984 (with translations appearing, posthumously, in 1985 and 1986). In the preceding chapters, the late 1970s have already been identified as the heydays of second-wave feminism in England and the United States;



In The History of Sexuality, Foucault reflects extensively on the questions of silence and silencing in Western culture. He writes,

these are also the years when ideas about women’s (re)writing as a response to silence and silencing emerged. Telling is indeed the fact that between the first and a later version of her essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, which is included in the collection symptomatically entitled On Lies, Secrets and Silences and containing essays from the period 1966–78, Rich reformulates the purpose of feminist activism by adding ‘and silenced’ to the qualities of the lives to be changed: so as to ‘help to change the lives of women whose gifts – and whose very being – continue to be thwarted and silenced’ (1995 [1979]: 38). My point then is that ideas about silence and silencing as repression are very much in the air; they are, like speech as transgression and the breaking of taboo, part of the doxa of a culture marked by the influence of what Rita Felski has termed the ‘feminist public sphere’ (1989: 9). Although they are clearly directed at the breaking of the silence on sex and sexuality, Foucault’s remarks on what he terms ‘the repressive hypothesis’, in the opening chapter of The History of Sexuality, can be seen to be concurrently addressed to related transgressions. After all, the sexual revolution took place at the same time and in concert with the movement for the liberation of women; they were facilitated by the same social, cultural, economic, and technological conditions. As Maroula Joannou has argued, ‘the fiction written at a time when feminist ideas were hegemonic is likely to reflect and mediate [its] impact’ (2000: 10–11). This is equally true for non-fiction. In ‘We “Other Victorians”’, his opening chapter, Foucault does not question the nature of sexual repression, but asks ‘Why do we say . . . that we are repressed?’ (1990 [1978]: 8–9). Chastising his contemporaries for ‘speak[ing] verbosely of [their] own silence’ (8), Foucault suggests there is something gratifying to the definition of sex and sexuality as repressed: ‘If sex is repressed,’ he writes, ‘that is, condemned to prohibition, non-existence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression’ (6). Speaking of this discursive production of sex and sexuality as repression in term of ‘the speaker’s benefit’, he goes on to explain it as a pose involving a high degree of self-consciousness. In Foucault’s analysis, when we speak about sex, we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making. Something that smacks 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Is there a sense in which Foucault’s sniping is also directed at feminists here?5 Does the speaking of women’s experiences as silenced similarly constitute a putting into discourse engaging not only the position but also the pose of the seer, re-visionary prophetesses of feminist futures? And is the name of ‘other Victorians’, which Foucault derives from Steven Marcus’s study of sexuality and pornography in mid-nineteenth-century England, The Other Victorians (1975), to designate pockets of tolerance where sexuality can be expressed, not also applicable to women’s rewriting which, I have pointed out in the previous chapter, has a predilection for the Victorian age? There is certainly an ‘economic factor’ that is operative in the discursive re-production that is women’s rewriting of Victorian literature – Victoriana, neo-Victorian literature, Victorian ‘afterlife’ or ‘retrofit’ – and this economic factor has everything to do with the ‘discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come, and the promise of a certain felicity to come are linked together’ that is the object of Foucault’s concern (7). Importantly, Foucault links this to confession and the obligation to confess, which he identifies as central to modern Western society, ‘inscribed at the heart of [its] procedures of individualization by power’ and one of its ‘most highly valued techniques for producing truth’ (58–9). Susannah Radstone has recently challenged the ubiquity and cultural dominance of confession in contemporary culture, arguing that the Western world is witnessing a shift from confession to memory. While I concur with her that ‘an injunction to remember appear[s] to be becoming at least as compelling as the imperative to confess’ (2007: 2), it seems to me that confession as it becomes conflated with autobiography – that is, a writing of the self as involving a quest for the truth about the self that is inevitably a putting into discourse of the self in accordance with what can be said and heard – is very much a part of the contemporary memory culture, one of the ways – and arguably the dominant way – in which women can remember themselves.6 Putting into discourse women’s silence as repression according to the confessional form, women’s rewriting is a technology of cultural memory that breaks the silence that presides over forgetfulness by producing subjectivity as speech in a way that feeds a particular ideology of the subject. Because it finds its expression within the mazes of the existing text, this subjectivity is inevitably shaped and regulated by it, thereby undermining its own project of re-vision as in-sight. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. (6)

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In his analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, Derek Attridge argues that its protagonist Susan Barton’s quest to have her story told represents a quest for legitimacy as the ‘assertion of her unique subjectivity’ (2004: 76). Foe (1986) tells the story of one Susan Barton, shipwrecked on the island with Robinson Crusoe and a tongueless Friday. Back in London, and following the death of Cruso (as he is called in Coetzee’s novel), she tries to get her story novelized but fails to convince the author Daniel Foe to make a novel out of her account of her sojourn on ‘Cruso’s island’ because her tale does not fit the requirements of genre. The story is, Susan is made to understand, ‘Better without the woman’ (1986: 72). For as Foe explains to her, ‘It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end. . . . The island is not a story in itself. . . . We can bring it to life only by setting it within a larger story’ (117). For Attridge, Susan’s failure to get her discourse author-ized is a matter of canon and canonization, broadly conceived as legitimation through ‘group approval’ (75). As he submits, Coetzee’s novel engages with the vexed issue of the representation of (female) experience not just in the narrative but through its ‘chiseled style’, ‘to reinforce the awareness that all representation is mediated through the discourses that culture provides’ (74). Crucial to his interpretation of Foe is a sense of the systemic cultural conventions that structure the stories we tell about ourselves, and which he explains in Foucauldian terms, as of a process of canonization that compels and constrains our representations, to ourselves and of ourselves, ‘in such a way as to have it accepted and valorized within the body of recognized narratives’ (75). In my analysis, Coetzee’s Foe is an important text for women’s rewriting, not because it is women’s rewriting, but because it reflects on it. Foe is a putting into fiction of the discourse of women’s rewriting as it has established itself by the mid-1980s. It is not simply a male co-optation of a successful female genre, as might be said of books such as John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000), telling of Hamlet’s mother’s life, D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte (2000), rewriting Jane Eyre, or Claude-Henri Buffard’s novel about Emma Bovary’s daughter, La fille d’Emma (2001). Instead, it partakes of the genre – it rewrites Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a marginal female character – to offer, in rewriting, a representation of women’s silencing as produced discursively, through narrative procedures of literary conventions. Foe dramatizes the woman’s quest for representation, linking her wish to be heard and have her story told with a sense of self as having



The subject of ‘writing back’

Cultural Scripts

‘substantiality’. The novel relies on its readers’ knowledge of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for its effect, in particular, the awareness that there is no mention of Susan Barton in it. Telling the story of a female character so effectively silenced by literary history that until Foe came along, no one had heard of her, Coetzee represents novel-writing not just as the plotting of a story, but as a plot against women. In its proposition that Robinson Crusoe is constructed on the exclusion of Susan Barton, Foe stages the dynamics of speech and silencing discussed above. Bearing witness to silencing as produced through social institutions and literary conventions, it appears to validate women’s rewriting as a legitimate and worthy endeavour. In Susan’s recurrent efforts to make Friday’s silence speak, however, it simultaneously poses crucial questions about its project and possibilities. Friday’s silence, indeed, is an important theme in the story, and his silence resists interpretation ‘doggedly’ (to use Coetzee’s term), both within and outside the fictional world of Foe. From the moment Susan is first made aware of Friday’s lack of tongue to its closing scene, the novel repeatedly returns to the matter of Friday’s silence. And so have critics done, most notably Derek Attridge in his thoughtful analysis of the novel, in which he reads Friday’s silence in Foucauldian terms, as ‘both motivating and circumscribing’ Susan’s story (2004: 81). Friday’s lack of tongue is, of course, a crude symbolization of the violation of slavery. This ‘mut(e)ilation’, as one reader refers to it (Donig 2009), marks the difference between Coetzee’s perspective on the master-slave relationship and that of Defoe – a profound difference which also reflects on the long tradition of uses of the Robinson-Friday relationship including, most notably, Hegel’s lordship and bondage dialectic and its life-and-death struggle that is to lead to freedom in universal history in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Marx’s reinterpretation of it in Capital (1867). It can be read as an indirect comment on politics in South Africa.7 ‘[W]ould it not have lightened your solitude had Friday been master of English? You and he might have experienced, all these years, the pleasures of conversation; you might have brought home to him some of the blessings of civilization and made him a better man’ (1986: 22), Susan tells Cruso, thereby evoking Defoe’s infamous scene of civilizing instruction, where Robinson Crusoe is said to have ‘made it my business to teach him [Friday] every thing that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spake . . .’ (Defoe 2003 [1719]: 166). As she recounts to Foe, ‘Cruso would not teach him because, he said, Friday had no need of words’ (56). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Within the text, Friday’s lack of tongue serves to demarcate different perspectives on silence while suggesting there are yet many more. From her early question, ‘What benefit is there in a life of silence?’ (121), Susan counters Cruso’s embracing of it in stubborn reticence and instead queries silence. For her, Friday’s speechlessness signals differences among silences. As she tells Foe, ‘You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being like Friday’, explaining his is ‘a helpless silence’ while hers is ‘chosen and purposeful’ (121–2). For Foe, Friday’s silence is the mystery that must be revealed: ‘We must make Friday’s silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday’ (141). In contrast to Foe’s repeated wish to find a way of giving voice to Friday’s silence, Susan, who has been living with it, first on the island, then in London, where she has been ‘listening to the silence of Friday, a silence that rose up from the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black smoke’ (118), sees it rather as something that needs to be listened to: ‘It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear’ (142). There are many clues, scattered throughout Coetzee’s text, that lend support to my reading of Foe as a novel about women’s rewriting and its effort to ‘voice the silenced’. For instance, when Susan tries to teach Friday to write, she tells Foe that ‘He is writing, after a fashion. . . . He is writing the letter o’ (1986: 152). To which Foe replies, ‘It is a beginning’, thus echoing the title of Olga Broumas’s collection of poems rewriting mythological themes from a lesbian perspective, Beginning with O (1977). Also, we might see the letter H in the novel, which Spivak reads as ‘the letter of muteness itself . . . the failed echolalia of the mute’ (1991: 170), as a reference to Hélène Cixous and what I have termed her récriture féminine: in The Book of Promethea, which focuses on writing, authorship, and the relationship to the other, the figure of the author in the text is split into I and H so as to allow her ‘to be slightly two, or slightly more, slightly unsettled’ (1991 [1983]: 11).8 More importantly, there is the novel’s ending, which I read, as others have done, as a figuration of reading and, hence, as a mise-en-abyme of the novel as a metafiction about women’s rewriting. In the closing chapter, an unnamed and unidentified narrator enters a house marked with a plaque that reads ‘Daniel Defoe, Author’ (155), finds Susan Barton’s manuscript and, starting to read it, ‘slip[s] overboard’ to discover the ‘wreck’ that holds the dead bodies of its author and her lover, as well as a breathing but speechless Friday. The narrator’s movement of immersion literalizes the metaphor of reading as being immersed in a book; it is also a figuration of Adrienne Rich’s ‘Diving into the Wreck’, the poetic 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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equivalent of her essay on re-vision in which she allegorizes the need for women to enter old texts from a new critical perspectives and query them for the experience of femininity that has been buried within its plot. In Coetzee’s novel, Rich’s allegory of women’s rewriting as a practice that revisits the literature of the past to recover women’s experience is represented as an exploration of the wreck that ends with the discovery of Friday: ‘In the last corner, . . . I come to Friday. . . . But this is not a place for words’, we’re told. ‘This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday’ (157). Friday, then – and Friday’s silence – is here held up as the limit of discourse, ‘the wholly other’, as Spivak puts it (1991: 157 and passim). Beyond or within Susan’s story is the story that cannot be told, at least not in the same register of language. The discontinuities between the feminist project and the postcolonialist one that Coetzee’s novel thus stages are surely to be read as a warning not to make a fetish of breaking silence; signalling how speech produces silence in the process of breaking it, it also suggests other means are needed for re-presenting the untold. My allegorical reading of Foe as metafictionally reflecting on women’s rewriting as a mode of textual production and writing of the self finds further support in Coetzee’s subsequent self-fictionalization as Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth Costello functions as a kind of alter-ego for Coetzee. As critics have observed, the writer and his character share a number of traits, ranging from vegetarianism and a concern for animal suffering to their hailing from Australia, Coetzee’s adopted home since 2002.9 Not unimportantly, it seems to me, Elizabeth Costello is first introduced, in the Princeton Tanner lecture that would be published first in The Lives of Animals (1999) and later as part of Elizabeth Costello (2003), as a rewriter. In ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’, Coetzee writes, Elizabeth Costello is best known to the world for The House on Eccles Street (1969), a novel about Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, which is nowadays spoken of in the same breath as The Golden Notebook and The Story of Christa T as pathbreaking feminist fiction. In the past decade there has grown up around her a small critical industry . . . (16) Featuring early in the first lecture of The Lives of Animals, this passage is moved forward to the first page of Elizabeth Costello, where it appears in slightly revised form. This underscores the importance of rewriting to who she is:



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Elizabeth Costello made her name with her fourth novel, The House on Eccles Street (1969), whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, principal character of another novel, Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce. In the past decade there has grown up around her a small critical industry . . . (1) I shall not dwell here on the differences between these two passages, which seem above all dictated by a different implied audience.11 My point is merely that rewriting is emphatically central to Coetzee’s characterization of his protagonist and thus is integral to her meaning, which I take to include a metafictional comment on the feminist project of re-vision and its reception, as well as on his own reception as a writer who has rewritten another novel, Robinson Crusoe.12 In her lectures, Elizabeth Costello talks not of literature, but about animal suffering – suffering of which she says we have chosen to close our hearts, preferring ‘willed ignorance’ (20) to acknowledging shared liveness. Costello’s shift in interest parallels Coetzee’s, whose ethical trajectory similarly seems to move through questions of representation to questions of attentiveness. Is it then too far-fetched to read the figure of Elizabeth Costello as signalling the complex relationship of rewriting to silence and silencing, bearing witness to the voices that remain unheard as the white woman struggles to have her story told within the frame of existing discourses? Costello herself draws an analogy between the possibility for experiencing sympathy, a faculty she defines as allowing us ‘to share at times the being of another’, including animal beings, with her proven capacity ‘to think [her] way into the existence of Marion Bloom’: ‘Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life’ (Coetzee 1999: 35). The point is debatable, of course, and Coetzee’s own novels seem to disprove her claim that ‘There is no limit to the extent to which we can think our way into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination’ (ibid.; see Durrant 2006). But does not the continued trust of Elizabeth Costello in the power of the sympathetic imagination speak of feminism’s trust and commitment to its limitlessness? Costello then speaks not Coetzee’s own position, but a position that is in sympathy with that of the feminist rewriter whose aim it is to imagine alter/native ways of relating to the other.



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Coetzee’s Foe, then, is not only a didactic aid in the ethics of reading (e.g. Spivak 1991; Attridge 2004). It also addresses the ethics of rewriting. Foe teaches about the ways in which the telling of one story – the story of Susan – is predicated on the silencing of other stories: the story of Friday, who cannot speak, for he has no tongue, but also the story of his mother, since he must have had one, unacknowledged, unremembered, altogether disremembered. Susan says of Friday that ‘He is the child of his silence, a child unborn, a child waiting to be born that cannot be born’ (122). Engendered by silence,13 Friday is the offspring of silence – of pregnant silence, that is, since he is not yet born in language – of a silence that is ‘full of meaning’, then, since that is the first meaning of the adjective ‘pregnant’ according to the OED.14 The child of a silence that contains many more possibilities than the one(s) actualized in the interruption of speech, Friday thus gestures towards the plurality of possibilities of speech and modalities of meaning inscribed in the scene of language and of which he is but one: stories we cannot hear within the discourse as it comes to us, stories like and unlike Friday’s, of which Susan says it ‘will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday’ (118) and to which Spivak pointedly retorts by asking, ‘Where is the guarantee for this?’ (1991: 169). Coetzee’s understanding of women’s rewriting as articulated in Foe is clearly indebted to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and its critical reception. Indeed, by the time Coetzee published Foe, in 1986, Rhys’s novel had become a central text of feminism, inscribing rewriting at the heart of the feminist project as it is formulated in the 1980s. Critics seem agreed that the emergence of women’s rewriting as a feminist project directed at ‘voicing the silenced’ is to be traced to Wide Sargasso Sea.15 In this slim novel, Rhys recounts the events that precede those narrated in Jane Eyre, the widely read classic novel of ‘rebellious feminism’, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call it in their landmark study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979; 2000: 338), from the perspective of Rochester’s mad Creole wife. Thus, she gives a voice to the silenced and incarcerated character of Brontë’s novel. Although there is no mention of Wide Sargasso Sea in their book on nineteenth-century women writers – a fact that is brought to critical light in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s important 1985 essay ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ – Gilbert and Gubar do refer to it in the sequel, No Man’s Land (1988: 113; 208), and call it ‘the paradigm for many other works’ in another piece (1984: 257). More recently, Patricia Waugh refers to



The ethics of rewriting

Rhys’s novel as ‘prophetically and proleptically [catching] what would come to be the dominant literary concerns of the next twenty-five years’ (1995: 203). These concerns were ignited by Spivak’s above-mentioned essay, whose reading of Wide Sargasso Sea as a novel denouncing the links between feminist individualism and the imperialist project challenged received ideas about feminism and its emancipatory project of female subjectivity and sparked the critical industry that has developed around this novel since.16 Rhys’s novel can be read as a de-enigmatization of Jane Eyre that gives a life, story, and voice to its central, fearful and unknown, other. As can be derived from her letters, there is much personal investment in this novel and Rhys, who was born in Dominica in 1890, was keen on setting Brontë correct, not just about ‘the “paper tiger” lunatic’ and ‘the all wrong creole scenes’ (Rhys 1984: 262) but also, more generally, about her misrepresentation of the West Indies. Seeking to redress Brontë’s treatment of the Windward Islands by writing her ‘poor Creole lunatic’ (296) a life, Rhys in effect demystifies Brontë’s gothic machinery. In Wide Sargasso Sea, it is what occasions Jane’s frights – the ‘horror [which] shook all her limbs’ (Brontë 2000 [1848]: 176; ch. 20) – which is explained and what seemed ‘like some strange wild animal . . . covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane’ (250; ch. 26) which is made human. Dispelling the sinister connotations Brontë attached to the region by offering explanations for what are the prime gothic elements of Jane Eyre, Rhys’s narrative exorcises the myths about the Caribbean that haunt the English imagination. In Brontë’s novel, when Jane announces the appearance in Thornfield Hall of a stranger who ‘comes from the West Indies; from Spanish Town, in Jamaica’, this leads to her beloved master’s reiteration of ‘Mason! – The West Indies’ and to his growing, ‘in the intervals of speaking, whiter than ashes’ (173; ch. 19). This first association of the Caribbean with mysterious and frightful forces beyond the master’s control establishes the place as an evil one from which danger originates. The sinister connotations are further reinforced by the unwelcome guest’s triggering of the heart-rending cry that shatters the night. Jane’s first real gothic fright takes place on the night when she first hears Bertha’s ‘peculiar and lugubrious’ murmur above her head and then her step and laughter outside her room – a ‘marrow-freezing incident’ that ‘chilled [her] with fear’ (126; ch. 15). Yet she experiences the full-blown gothic horror on the occasion of the deadly struggle between Mason and Bertha, when the latter reacts to her so- called brother’s nightly visit with ‘a savage, a sharp, a shrill 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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sound’, a ‘fearful shriek’ that makes Jane’s pulse stop, her heart stand still, and paralyzes her limbs (175; ch. 20). As critics have pointed out, historically and sociologically, the context for Wide Sargasso Sea, which was written over a period of twenty-one years, from 1945 through its publication in 1966, is the dismantling of the British empire in the wake of World War II and ‘the arrival in Britain of the first major influx of immigrants from the Caribbean in the 1950s’ (Joannou 2000: 147). The novel can therefore be read in this context, its subject matter ‘a response to the changing racial composition of post-war Britain’ (148).17 A historical novel that addresses, in the words of Sandra Drake, ‘the transition – or failed transition – to some other set of social relations that would constitute a viable Caribbean identity’ following the abolition of slavery in Britain and its colonies (1990: 97), Wide Sargasso Sea is above all a novel about the stories that haunt other stories. A ghost story, then – and we may recall that an early version was called Le Revenant (Angier 1990: 371) – it tells of the untold stories that inhabit the story’s gaps and silences: the story of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Jane Eyre, of course; Jane Eyre’s other, the ‘first Mrs. Rochester’ (as a working title of Rhys ran), whom Brontë names Bertha and Rhys renames Antoinette Cosway Mason. But also the story of the other of British imperialism and of liberal feminism, for ‘That’s only one side – the English side’, Rhys writes in one of her letters (Rhys 1984: 297); as well as the story of how all these stories are connected, jointly weaving a network of stories capturing social form and identity yet allowing others to escape through its mazes. ‘There is always another side to every story’, I have already quoted Rhys as having said – a statement that we can read as a reminder not only of the logic of narrative as always suppressing other stories, but also of the haunting presence of the stories’ other sides: their plural, silent (‘untold’) side, Olsen’s ‘what struggles to come into being, but cannot’, the story that is no story, Coetzee’s ‘child unborn, a child waiting to be born that cannot be born’. That these two aspects of ‘the other side of the story’ were connected in Rhys’s mind can be ascertained from her painstaking attention to her text, of which Judith Raiskin writes in her introduction to the Norton Critical Edition: ‘What read in the final version as simple, perfectly crafted descriptions, interior monologues, and dialogues, begin in exercise books and on loose pieces of paper as repetitions of key words and phrases worked in slightly different combinations, highlighted by slightly different tenses, word order, and the deletion or addition of adjectives’ (1999: x). One is reminded of writing (and rewriting) as the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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selection of one way of telling that occludes other stories and other ways of saying things, which is also a choice for not saying things. As her Letters attest, Rhys is a writer who is immensely preoccupied with the precision of her language, and Wide Sargasso Sea did not come easy: ‘really what a devil it’s been’, she repeats several times (1984: 296; 297; emphasis Rhys’s). One of the ways in which she deals with the difficulty of it not ‘clicking’, as she puts it, is to write poems, which come to her much quicker and less laboriously than prose and enable her to work on language from the inside, as it were – from within the perspective of a specific character or mindset. Rhys’s worries over her wording are evidence of her awareness of the stakes of her literary choices, while her writing technique proves her to be haunted by the untold – the many stories present in the silence that surrounds the words, stories never completely filtered out or kept at bay, however careful the principle of selection may be applied to the narrative’s arrangement. The idea of storytelling as haunted by untold stories is best elucidated through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and monologism, which he associates with the novel and poetry, respectively. As he explains in ‘Discourse in the Novel’, words remember the contexts in which they have been; they carry the ‘taste’ of these contexts, are shot through with the intentions and accents of others. Distinguishing between the work of the poet and of the novelist, Bakhtin submits it is the task of poets to strip the word of these contextual overtones: ‘Everything that enters the [monologic poetic] work must immerse itself in Lethe, and forget its previous life in any other contexts’ (2004 [1981]: 297; emphasis in the original). In contrast, novelists employ the diversity and stratification of voices – the words’ heteroglossia – to achieve their purpose, carefully orchestrating the echoes of the words’ previous contexts to resonate in the novel, turning it into a meeting-place for these voices – a chronotope, in Bakhtin’s terminology.18 However untenable Bakhtin’s distinction between the work of the poet and that of the novelist ultimately may be, it does alert us to the voices that linguistic utterances tag along and thus provides us with the means of understanding why Rhys writes poems to get to her prose, for as she says, ‘Then all traces of effort must be blotted out’ (Rhys 1984: 271). Conceptualizing these voices in terms of memory, Bakhtin defines the work of literary and poetic writing as a work of deliberate forgetting: the pure monologic poem is to forget ‘its previous life’ and all other contexts in which it has been used so as to convey only the poet’s intention; the dialogic novel is to stage dialogues between the words’ voices, echoes, and past lives, accenting them in specific ways (299). In Bakhtin’s 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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understanding of literary labour, the principle of selection governing all utterances and constitutive of narrative becomes specified as the singling out of the willed voice(s) and the erasure of unwilled echoes, banishing them from the space of the text in an obliterating gesture. That the writer may seldom be completely successful in achieving this forgetfulness is evident from the ways in which the literary work continues to carry other voices, unwittingly, like stowaways, to use Eelco Runia’s evocative term for the presence of the past in historical narratives (2006). Yet this definition of literary labour as the subjection of voices ‘to one’s own intentions and accents’ and their transformation into ‘the private property of the speaker’s intentions’ (294) points to an essential trait of the narratives in the realist tradition to which women’s rewritings adhere, and that is the centrality of silencing to writing: literary writing, conceived as the subjection of language to the writer’s will, is an act of suppression. Only by suppressing other voices can the singular emerge from the many, the individual from the collective, the discrete from boundlessness. As story and self fall in line – the self finding its story, the story giving shape to the self19 – this definition of writing also highlights the centrality of the particular concept of identity that this view of literary labour undergirds, showing individuation to be a process, not a condition. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one might say that ‘one is not born a self; one becomes a self’, and this process of becoming an individual self occurs through a kind of streamlining of the manifold possibilities reality actually holds. Building on the analogy with linguistic sound, which is perceived as discrete because of learned conventions of abstracting sound systems from the environment,20 the anthropologist Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb glosses identity as ‘the selective suppression of experience’ and hence as an essentializing activity (2006: 3). As she explains, ‘we are always attempting to eliminate the echoes of other possibilities . . . identity, any identity, would not exist but for the silencing of potential otherness’ (2006: 43). In ‘Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory’, Jens Brockmeier makes clear what the relevance is for cultural memory. Describing these muting practices as the centripetal forces of ‘mnemonic selection’, he suggests this function is fulfilled above all by narrative, thus reasserting the relationship between writing, memory and forgetting (2002: 22). Because Wide Sargasso Sea tells the other side of the story of Brontë’s novel of female emancipation by giving a voice not just to Antoinette, but also to other characters, it is an important site for the definition of what reading, writing, and rewriting as technologies of memory can do. While it takes Brontë’s mad Creole as its starting-point, much of the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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median part of the novel is told from the perspective of Mr. R. (Rochester) yet also includes the voices of others such as Christophine, the black slave. The third part, which takes place in England, adds the subaltern voices and points of view of Leah the cook and Grace Poole, Antoinette’s keeper. The effect of these frequent and abrupt shifts in centres of consciousness is of non-unitary subjectivity. It is arguably because it does not counter one story in a singular voice (Jane Eyre is, as the subtitle on the first editions indicates, ‘an autobiography’) with another singular story in the autobiographical mode that Wide Sargasso Sea most effectively challenges the ideology of the Western subject as autonomous, presenting consciousnesses that appear porous to one another and ‘leak’ into each other, to evoke Trinh Minh-ha’s suggestive term (1989: 94). Telling the other side of Jane Eyre’s story in a form that has been qualified as a ‘writing back together’ (Haliloglu 2009), Wide Sargasso Sea orchestrates the life-story as a network of voices that combine, echo, and interrupt one another. This plurality of voices and the possibilities it presents for affirming a de-essentialized subjectivity, however, has not always been recognized. In the debate they fought over the issue now many years ago, Benita Parry takes Spivak to task for her reading of Wide Sargasso Sea as voicing merely the white Creole’s perspective and not pursuing the text’s representations of Creole culture, focusing on it as a ‘novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native’ (Spivak 1985: 253; Parry 1987: 37). As Parry observes, Spivak’s a priori assumption that a story such as Christophine’s is irremediably tangential to Wide Sargasso Sea prevents her from hearing her voice as it is articulated in Rhys’s text. She concludes, Spivak’s deliberate deafness to the native voice where it is to be heard, is at variance with her acute hearing of the unsaid in modes of Western feminist criticism which, while dismantling masculinist constructions, reproduce and foreclose colonialist structures and axioms’. She thus restricts if not eliminates altogether ‘the space in which the colonized can be written back into history. (1987: 39) The juxtaposition of these two perspectives, Spivak’s and Parry’s, is illuminating on the issue of women’s rewriting and silence. Confronting the question of who can be written back into which history and on which terms, it reframes the question not as the inevitable failing of a project blind to its silencing effects in the very process of voicing the silence, but as a matter of the difference between speaking and being heard. As I have pointed out, referring to Judith Butler’s work, to speak 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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is not the same as to be heard. Whereas silence depends on shared conventions to be understood, speech equally needs to be framed in such a way that it can be heard. It is not just what can be said that is socially, culturally, and discursively limited; this also applies to what can be heard. Both what can be said and what can be heard are framed, then; and frames, too, are produced through discourse, determining speech, silence, and the meanings that attach to them. It is on this point, then, that the feminist project of rewriting proves most valuable. For if it is true that, as Coetzee’s Foe implies, women’s rewriting silences in the process of giving voice, it is also true that, as the novel demonstrates, it can instruct us to listen to silence. We can learn to hear silences even if we do not comprehend them, and we can learn to attend to them – not break them. And this lesson rewriting can teach by re-framing silence, which is not the same as its voicing, or breaking, but is a putting into discourse of silence that neither repeats nor repeals it, but re-presents it in the sense of making it present and available to consciousness (some would say, ‘mediate’ it). Silence is plural and multivalent. In its ‘eloquent’ form, it conveys information, expresses emotions, and performs direct and indirect speech acts (Ephratt 2008). It is pragmatic, its meaning dependent on its context of production and reception: a silence can be comfortable or not, reassuring, enervating, or infuriating. It can be conformist or subversive, shared or debilitating. Silence, then, it is not just the limit of discourse and what needs to be put into discourse. Instead, it is always already discourse, and as such needs to be attended to as integral to it, conveying meaning even as it does not speak.

Towards a poetics of silence Substituting speech for silence and freedom for oppression, rewriting is a ‘writing back’ to silence performing the emancipatory gesture of the prise de parole in resistance to the suppression of voice. In potentiality if not in effect, however, it can also be an instrument of silence, mut(e)ilating untold stories. The selective forgetting effected by (re)writing, foregoing resonances, echoes, and linkages to tell the specific and essentialized story of the narrative’s subject, privileges substitution and emphasizes the principle of selection as constitutive of narrative individuality. Re-presentation, whether in its literary or in its political sense, partakes of the metaphorical dimension of narrative. In contrast, to think of and attend to silence as integral to discourse requires shifting attention from Jakobson’s axis of selection to that of combination, focusing on metonymy, not metaphor: as modalities of each other, speech and silence 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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also exist in relations of contiguity and it is as co-present that silence articulates the untold within discourse. In his essay ‘Presence’, the Dutch historian Eelco Runia breaks a lance for a new philosophy of history that, shying away from representationalism as a mode of historical practice too exclusively centred on meaning, turns to metonymy as the trope of the past’s presence in the present. Metonymy, Runia writes, is a ‘“presence in absence” not just in the sense that it presents something that isn’t there, but also in the sense that in the absence (or at least the radical inconspicuousness) that is there, the thing that isn’t there is still present’ (2006: 20). In this capacity, it enables the study not just of historical continuity, but also of discontinuity and of their interweaving: ‘metonymy is a metaphor for the entwinement of continuity and discontinuity’, he writes (6). The discourse on ‘presence’ is a memory discourse that puts a strong emphasis on its spatial dimensions (121).21 As Gumbrecht explains, ‘the techniques of presentifying the past quite obviously tend to emphasize the dimension of space – for it is only in their spatial display that we are able to have the illusion of touching objects that we associate with the past’ (2004: 123). Because of the linkages between speech and presence, silence and absence, ‘presence’ provides a useful frame not just for the analysis of silence as coextensive with speech, but for rethinking the relationship between rewriting, remembering, and forgetting. Traditionally, silence is thought of as absence – the absence of sound, the absence of speech. This conception of silence, I have argued above, leaning on the work of linguists and anthropologists, does not do justice to the complexities of silence. Moreover, it shows what is ultimately a limited view of what women’s rewriting can do, which cannot just be the voicing of a subject’s story in the liberal feminist mode of individualism, but ought to continue providing readers with the means of imagining alternatives to it. It is because this chapter tries to reconfigure an understanding of silence, not as absence and hence the negation of speech, but as a modality of speech (and speech a modality of silence), that the discourse on presence is most useful: it points to silence as a kind of speech, present in space and time, the site of alternative modes of articulating the self as impossibly essentialized but always relational; it also points to silence as enmeshed with speech and to speech as dialogically interacting with silence within the space of the text. The discourse on memory traditionally focuses on representation – indeed, equates memory with representation. For instance, Richard Terdiman, one of its early and key theoreticians, writes, ‘Whenever 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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anything is conserved and reappears in a representation, we are in the presence of a memory effect . . . memory is the present past’ (Terdiman 1993: 8; emphasis in the original). For Terdiman, the equation of memory with representation hinges on the relationship to absence: they both have absent referents. In his analysis, ‘the referents of memory are always absent. The past is gone. But then, so is virtually everything else’ (8). In contrast, many scholars of memory have argued for the presence of the past not just as re-presentation, re-presenting the past, but as sheer presence. As trauma studies scholars insist, in a psychological sense, the traumatic past is not gone. It is present in a very real sense, never receding into the past according to the chronological unfolding of historical time, but eternally present in the here-and-now of consciousness. The psychological understanding of memory, not as representation but as presence, can best be understood in terms of haunting. In the dictionary sense of the term, to haunt is to be about or to visit some place habitually or frequently. It is said especially of unseen and immaterial visitants – ghosts who make their recurrent or continuous presence and influence manifest, beings who stay or remain usually in a place. And indeed, it is as haunting presence that the otherness that inheres in the self and sleeps in the words we use to give it shape manifests itself. This otherness Western culture is wont to try to master in its attempts to form the individualities upon which its cultural, political, and financial economies depend. It features prominently in postcolonial rewritings of Western classics, ‘writing back to the centre’, then, not only in the sense of responding to the (neo-)colonial representation from its other-perspective, but also ‘writing back’ as a continuous dialogue of voices, acknowledging the haunting presence of otherness in language, including that of the past and of the dead. I have already discussed Wide Sargasso Sea as a story about ghosts. Ghosts indeed are important to Rhys’s novel, from the acknowledgement of their existence – to her husband’s suggestion that ‘We are letting ghosts trouble us’, Antoinette replies ‘Christophine knows about ghosts too, but that is not what she calls them’ (1999 [1966]: 82; pt. II) – to the scene at the end of the novel, when fearful of ‘that ghost of a woman who they say haunts this place’ (111; pt. III), Antoinette eventually sees her reflection in a mirror but does not recognize herself in the image taken from Brontë’s novel: ‘her – the ghost. The woman with streaming hair’ (111–12; pt. III). Ghosts are also central to another important woman’s rewriting which has now reached something of canonical status: Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem (1986; translated as I, Tituba, Black 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Witch of Salem, 1992), published in the same year as Foe and hence, part of the same international ‘feminist public sphere’. Written in French and published with a major Parisian publishing house, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem was an initiative of Simone Gallimard, director of Mercure de France, who suggested to Condé she write ‘a story about a woman from the Caribbean’ (Clark and Dehany 1989: 129), ‘a book about a heroine from my region’ (Pfaff 1996: 58).22 The book, which would win the jeweller Alain Boucheron’s ‘Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme’ in 1986, was conceived in the United States where Maryse Condé was on a Fullbright fellowship at Occidental College in Los Angeles, at a time when she was preparing her return, after many years first in Africa, then in France, to the West Indies and especially to her native Guadeloupe. It is in the United States, Condé recalls, that she first heard of Tituba and started researching her subject. This context is important to the book and to the choices she makes in her telling of Tituba’s story. The biography points to a personal investment in her heroine’s trajectory and explains the critique of contemporary American racism in a novel generally geographically identified as French Caribbean. Her husband and translator Richard Philcox recalls ‘watching her pine like Tituba for her lost island while she endured her “long solitude in the deserts of America”’ (2001: 279). Condé says, ‘I could not have written the book if I had not been in America, because I had to breathe the American air, understand what white American society is, and look at white faces to portray some of the characters in Tituba’ (Clark and Daheny 1989: 129–31). Thus, the personal investment of the writer experiencing racism in the United States and longing to return to her native island meets that of the commercially savvy publisher who solicited the ‘postcolonial exotic’ novel, as Graham Huggan (2001) has referred to the commodification of cultural difference in the bookpublishing industry, culminating in the creation of Tituba as ‘a sort of female hero, en epic heroine, like the legendary “Nanny of the maroons”’ (Scarboro 1992: 201). In I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Condé tells the story of Tituba Indian as the autobiographical first-person narrative of a black slave born in Barbados, the offspring of an African slave raped by an English sailor during the passage from Africa. In the historical and judicial records, little reliable information can be found about her. Tituba is one of the first persons accused of practising witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials, in 1692. Her confession unleashed the witch-scare that would lead to over one hundred and fifty people being arrested and nineteen being hanged, permanently affecting the Puritan community. After her 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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arrest, she presumably remained in a Boston prison. What happened to her after her release in 1693 is subject to speculation. Giving her ‘a childhood, an adolescence, an old age’ (Scarboro 1992: 201), Condé reinvents Tituba as a black woman, ignoring historical evidence that ‘Titiba an Indian Woman’, as she is consistently referred to in the seventeenth-century records, is an American Indian – in all likelihood an Arawak woman captured and brought to Barbados, where she was sold into slavery (Hansen 1974; Breslaw 1996). Instead, Condé inscribes her narrative in the tradition of what Bernard Rosenthal has termed ‘the Tituba myth’ (1998: 194), which, starting in the nineteenth century with Longfellow’s Giles Corey of the Salem Farms (1868) and continuing in the twentieth century, most notably with Arthur Miller’s award-winning play The Crucible (1953) and Ann Petry’s children’s book Tituba of Salem Village (1964), identifies Tituba as African.23 Condé’s obliteration of the historical Tituba in what for her is emphatically ‘not a historical novel’ but ‘just the opposite of a historical novel’ – as she says, ‘I was not interested at all in what her real life could have been’ (Scarboro 1992: 200–1; see also Pfaff 1996: 64) – is, of course, seriously problematic, especially in the context of a novel born out of outrage at the injustice of the historical and imaginative ‘eclipse of Tituba’s life’ (Scarboro 1992: 199). Whereas Condé claims she ‘wanted to offer [Tituba] her revenge by inventing a life such as she might perhaps have wished it to be told’ (ibid.), she in effect does precisely what she condemns: eclipse the life of the Indian woman Tituba. In interviews, Condé has explained her choice for a black character in terms of identity, elucidating it as ‘searching for one’s self, searching for one’s identity, searching for one’s origin in order to better understand oneself’ (Scarboro 1992: 203–4). In her foreword to the English edition, Angela Davis endorses the novel as ‘the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers’, expressing her gratitude to Condé ‘for having pursued and developed her vision of Tituba, Caribbean woman of African descent’ and dismissing criticism as divisive of black and Native American women. ‘This is one possible version of Tituba’, she writes, adding that what really matters, is that it ‘remind[s] us all that the doors to our suppressed cultural histories are still ajar’, sometimes hiding ‘clues about the possibilities ahead’ (Davis 1992: ix; xi). Significantly, such eclipsing of voice is inscribed in the novel’s original French title. Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem powerfully evokes the coming to speech out of silence and the assertion of self as subject of and for history. It also iconically represents breaking the silence as the overwhelming of alternative stories. Indeed, indicating 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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a pause, the ellipsis following the prise de parole parodic of Paul Guth’s historical novel Moi, Joséphine, impératrice (1979) shows a hesitation prior to the revelation of her racial identity, which then both indicates the other possibilities lying dormant in the ‘points of suspension’, as the dots are called in French, and signifies the violence of confessing her identity.24 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem thus illustrates the way rewriting as the voicing of the silenced and the filling of the gaps in history mutes other voices. Yet it does so self-consciously, in a text that both seems to anticipate its critical reception and to enter into dialogue with it. Dawn Fulton has argued that Condé’s novels stage ‘a sustained dialogue with the critical discussion surrounding her work’, reflecting ‘on the productive and critical limits of postcolonial theory’ (2008: 2–3). I would add that such reflection in I, Tituba is especially directed at the limitations of ‘writing back’ as mode of production and reception for postcolonial literature. In the history books, it is Tituba’s confession that sparks the Salem witchcraze. In Condé’s novel, this confession is done at the instigation of the self-avowed white feminist Hester Prynne, whom she befriends in jail. In a deliberately anachronistic episode, Condé has Tituba meet the protagonist of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter (1850), sentenced for adultery in a novel similarly set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston and purportedly found, as its narrator explains in the introduction, in the custom-house of the town of Salem. The encounter can be read as a comment on the relationship of ‘race’ to feminism, and on the forms black feminism is to take. Reframing Tituba’s historical words – in the chapter that ensues, Condé re-presents the ‘Deposition of Tituba Indian’ as it can be found in the archives – it can also be read as metafiction, commenting on the novel’s own condition and mode of existence. In prison, Hester teaches Tituba ‘to prepare [her] testimony’, advising her, ‘Make them scared, Tituba! Give them their money’s worth! Describe him as a billy goat with an eagle’s beak for a nose . . . Tell them about the witches meetings, where they all arrive on broomsticks . . .’ (1992: 97–8). In other words, the prise de parole of the subaltern woman in the confessional form is here modelled by the self-professed feminist. It is identified as a narrative mode that gives its audience what it wants to hear, for as she tells Tituba, ‘give them an element of doubt and, believe me, they’ll know how to fill in the blanks’ (1992: 100). Because the historical Tituba, as she emerges from the transcripts of her deposition, spoke of the devil in terms her confessors could easily reformulate to conform to their own ideas about evil, the scene of feminist instruction can be seen as a mise-en-abyme of 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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the novel and its reception by its own ‘confessors’ – those demanding Tituba speak what they want to hear, which is the feminist trap of ‘the desire for a first-person narrative by a strong Third World woman’, as Jane Moss has put it (1999: 5; see also Fulton 2008: 49). In Condé’s novel, Tituba introduces the episode in prison by saying she ‘fell into the trap of making friends’ with Hester Prynne (1992: 95). Ostensibly prompted by Prynne’s suicide and the resulting sense of abandonment, Tituba’s friendship as trap can also be viewed to apply to the trap of trusting her advice. In the courtroom, Tituba speaks in a confessional mode solicited by a white woman who knows what the audience wants to hear. Though her speech is successful in its effect on the audience and grants her attention, Tituba speaks not on her own terms. Thus interpreted, the encounter in the novel shows ‘writing back’ to be a mode of literary production conforming to the expectations of Condé’s readership and inviting a particular – and particularly reductive – reading, which is then projected onto the text. To perform such reading is then to repeat the gesture of the Puritans, who took what they wanted to hear from Tituba’s confession but let her disappear from the record, so that she cannot be known. In the same way, to read I, Tituba as the voice of the subaltern woman is to apply preconceived notions about the voicing of the silenced indiscriminately to all postcolonial women’s literature. The critique of ‘writing back’ as the mould that shapes all postcolonial women’s rewriting indiscriminately can best be identified through a comparison with Wide Sargasso Sea. Like her precursor Jean Rhys, a writer she has declared to love (Rody 2001: 186), Condé gives a disremembered and misrepresented woman from the West Indies a life-story which at once corrects the (American) historical record and moves beyond it, writing of life before, after, and coterminous with it. And like Rhys’s Antoinette, whose final words indicate that since the novel is a first-person retrospective narrative in the autobiographical mode, she must be speaking from somewhere beyond the realm of the living, so does Condé’s Tituba tell her story as one that ends not in death: ‘My real story starts where this one leaves off and it has no end’, Tituba says in the novel’s epilogue, which concludes the bitter story of her life yet allows her to live on as a ghost, a healing spirit ‘hardening men’s hearts to fight . . . nourishing them with dreams of liberty.’ She claims, ‘I have been behind every revolt. Every insurrection. Every act of disobedience’ (175). In contrast to the historical records, which remain silent about what happened to Tituba following her release from prison, Condé’s novel tells of a Jewish merchant who buys her and eventually sets her free, allowing her to return to Barbados, where she initiates a slave revolt before being hanged. In this way, Condé 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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gives Tituba not only an identity and ‘an ending of my own choosing’ (183) but turns her into ‘a folk heroine of the West Indies’ (Clark and Daheny 1989: 129) who lives on, literally inspiring social change. The parallels, both profound and superficial, between Condé’s novel and that of Rhys, should not obscure the fact that there are also important differences, most notably in the tone and attitude towards the autobiographical novel as the textual realization of the self that writes itself into being. Whereas Wide Sargasso Sea, I have argued above, re-presents the problematic nature of Western self-realization as an inevitably failed individuation, tragic in being capable of being achieved only through the willed severance of the connections to others that are nevertheless always there, Condé takes a much more tongue-in-cheek approach and presents Tituba’s narrative project of writing herself into literary existence as both self-reflective and full of irony. This dual orientation, towards both seriousness and parody, causes Condé’s novel to belong to the same self-reflexive feminist moment as Coetzee’s Foe. As Tituba’s thought she ‘was gradually being forgotten’ attests, feeling that she ‘would only be mentioned in passing in these Salem witchcraft trials about which so much would be written’, but ‘There would never, ever, be a careful, sensitive biography recreating my life and its suffering’ (110), I, Tituba is, like Foe, fully aware of the discourse on gender, ‘race’, and rewriting as remembering in which it inscribes itself yet keeps a certain ironical distance from it. Condé’s novel therefore requires alternative reading strategies if one wants to retain a sense of feminist purposiveness: the demystifying moment of Wide Sargasso Sea, inviting its readers to reread the classics for suppressed stories of the colonial other, is here shown to have become orthodoxy and therefore holding no real critical purchase anymore. In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick therefore argues for a reparative reading, a positionality whose practices of knowing can be found in, for instance, queer camp and intertextuality. Arguing against the hermeneutics of suspicion and paranoia that structure much critical theory throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Sedgwick suggests its methodological faith in exposure and demystification has led to ‘a certain disarticulation, disavowal, and misrecognition of other ways of knowing, ways less oriented around suspicion, that are actually being practiced, often by the same theorists and as part of the same projects’ (2003: 144). Sedgwick’s suggestion that critics explore paranoid and reparative practices as they interact within the same text solves a longstanding problem for readers of Tituba, whose parodic nature is such that the novel is both to be taken seriously and not. In interviews, Condé has insisted on the parody in 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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the novel, emphasizing its importance to the novel’s meaning (Scarboro 1992: 212; Pfaff 1996: 60). The parody therefore cannot be disregarded, yet the reading of parody as subversive and demystifying evidently does not do fully justice to the novel. In interviews, Condé has explained that for her, ‘laughing is a way of looking matters square in the face, of not dramatizing things or falling into a victimization complex or total despair’ (Pfaff 1996: 30). Using Sedgwick’s terms, I submit that Condé, hesitating ‘between irony and a desire to be serious’ (201), writes a novel that is both paranoid and reparative. As a writer who is widely read and fully conversant with contemporary theory and practice, Condé can, of course, only write in the paranoid mode if she is to be taken seriously as an author in the late 1980s. At the same time, the impulse to give Tituba a life-story is a reparative impulse, wanting ‘to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self’ (Sedgwick 2003: 149). Navigating the difficult strait between the Scylla of critical paranoia and the Charybdis of black female nurturance, Condé writes a novel that provides comfort and sustenance, speaking through the parody of a desire for literature as reparative practice. Indeed, if I,Tituba is, as I have argued above, a novel about contiguity and the connections figured by the trope of metonymy, this close proximity of alterity is expressed in the weaving of campy intertextuality. It is, indeed, the parody that makes Tituba’s life-story particularly porous to the meaning of others, whose words literally inscribe hers. Throughout the novel, echoes of various discourses haunt her text, as when she recalls Samuel Harris threatening her with hanging, adding, ‘What a magnificent fruit swinging from the trees of Massachusetts’ in a self-consciously anachronistic echo of Billie Holiday’s ‘strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’ (75; see also 172). Self-reflection on parody as complicit with the status quo is contained in the novel’s representation of Tituba’s husband John Indian, whose strategy of survival is mimicry: ‘Let’s play at being perfect niggers’, he tells her as he enjoins her to join in the revelry that is in the order of things, for ‘[t]hey expect niggers to get drunk and dance and make merry once their masters have turned their backs’ (32); ‘I wear a mask’ (74). Yet in all of these references of Condé to contemporary critical discourses, there is an excess that makes them not just lacking in subtlety, as some critics have suggested (e.g. Bécel 1995: 612), but also exuding exuberant pleasure and life-affirming fun. ‘I split my sides laughing while writing the book’, Condé confides to her interviewer (Pfaff 1996: 60). And indeed, sheer fun repeatedly emanates from the writing (and its translation), the winking at the reader supposed to recognize the allusion. Take, for instance, the reference to Fanon in John 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Indian’s telling to Tituba not to ‘put on such a face, or my friends will . . . say your skin is black, but you’re wearing a white mask’ (32); or when he comforts her with the words, ‘What will become of the world if our women are afraid? Things will fall apart!’ (59).25 Or take the scene at the heart of the novel, when Tituba is thrown in jail and finds herself in the same cell as Hester Prynne, a fictional character from another novel and another time. What all of these intertextual references share is their over-the-top quality expressive of delight in the play of language and the disorienting anachronisms, mixing (up) registers of discourses, as in the use of the inaugural ‘Crick? Crack!’ of West Indian storytelling to give an account of her life-story (99), or when Hester replies to Tituba’s objection to her dream of ‘a model society governed and run by women’, ‘You’re too fond of love, Tituba! I’ll never make a feminist out of you!’ (101). In this sense, Tituba is the postmodern answer to Antoinette’s tragic self-consciousness, similarly traversed by manifold connections to others, yet feeling not undone by it but empowered. Tituba finds sustenance in the connectedness she feels with the spirits, whose invisible presence she acknowledges, not suppresses. Whereas the New England Puritans demonize such connections with the spirits, calling them evil and accusing her of witchcraft, she welcomes their ‘silent presence’ (64) and even reveals it to others, as when she allows her Jewish master to speak to his dead wife. The spirits enable her to survive while in New England and welcome her back when she returns to her island; and when she becomes a spirit herself, in her ‘real story’ which has ‘no end’, she becomes song and in ‘constant and extraordinary symbiosis’ with her island, both material and immaterial, recognizable to those who have ‘learned to recognize my presence in the twitching of an animal’s coat, the crackling of a fire between four stones, the rainbow-hued babbling of the river, and the sound of the wind as it whistles through the great trees on the hills’ (175–9). These sounds of silence revealing the presence of otherness gesture towards silence as a modality of speech and of presence, marked by proximity and contiguity. In this perspective, Condé’s spirit of Tituba points to ways in which postmodern subjectivities might open themselves to ordinary otherness, to seeing and feeling its silent presence rather than shroud themselves in ‘invented absence’.26 As her créolité becomes the emblem of a capacious intertextuality that resonates with the manifold untold stories that exist behind and beside the spoken words, it also suggests contemporary women’s rewriting can be a counter-memorial discursive practice that inscribes untold narratives within the space of remembrance, re-presenting the untold not as absence or disremembering, but as presence. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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High Infidelity: Tradition, Rewriting, and the Paradoxes of Decanonization

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the canon is ‘A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics.’ This definition marks the canon as a collected body of knowledge, the core curriculum of what is read and taught in schools, ‘what everyone should know’. It also suggests the canon has close ties with cultural memory. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom identifies ‘the Canon . . . as identical with the literary Art of Memory’ and equates the canonical with ‘communal or societal memory’ (1994: 17–18). Aleida Assmann concurs: ‘The canon stands for the active working memory of a society that defines and supports the cultural identity of a group’ (2008: 106). Such a definition of the canon as memory is not simply metaphorical: it follows from the understanding of cultural memory as collected and achieved through acts of remembrance involving specific procedures of selection, valuation, and re-presentation. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney point out that the discussions about canon formation can ‘be revisited as exemplifying the ways in which societies squabble over which foundational texts deserve commemoration or not’ (2006: 112). Signalling its role in the formation of (cultural) identity, the definition of the canon as a collection of representative and enduring works designated as worth remembering also points to the fact of agency: works do not simply endure, but their endurance is a function of the activities and interactions, as well as the institutions, that make it endure. The canon embodies the values of dominant social groups. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes in ‘Contingencies of Values’, ‘since those with cultural power tend to be members of socially, economically, and politically established classes . . . , the texts that survive will tend to be those that 130



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appear to reflect and reinforce establishment ideologies’ (1984: 34). In consequence, John Guillory maintains, it is important to recognize that what the canon is really about is ‘the constitution and distribution of cultural capital’; specifically, its unequal distribution and regulation of access (1993: ix). This role as instrument of power makes the canon an integral, active, and not uncontested part of cultural memory as a ‘field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history’, to recall Marita Sturken’s definition of cultural memory (1997: 1). This chapter explores contemporary women’s rewriting in its relationship to the canon, as part of a live and embodied memory-in-the-making functioning to define what is worth remembering and rereading. The canon is vital to the functioning of women’s rewriting as an intervention in cultural memory, as is canonicity: the quality or fact of being canonical. Women’s rewriting challenges the view that the existing canon is worth remembering, or that it is worth remembering as such. Its corrective memory-work is part of the critique of authority embedded in the so-called canon wars that raged on American campuses and in the American media through the 1980s and 1990s. Influencing the reading and teaching of literature worldwide, this critique was integral to the fragmentation of History into histories and ‘herstories’, substituting small localised first-person narratives – Lyotard’s ‘petits récits’ (1984 [1979]) – for the grand narratives of legitimation. As discussed in Chapter 2, it is because women’s experience is excluded from the ‘great texts’ designated as forming culture’s literary heritage that second-wave women first set out to rewrite them. To recall Adrienne Rich’s notion of re-vision: ‘We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us’ (1972: 19). Defined as ‘an act of survival’, the battle feminist writers and critics waged on the canon was a battle over recognition and the representation of femininity: over women’s inclusion in cultural memory, but also over inclusion on their own terms – ‘how a woman is remembered is critical’ (Chedgzoy 2007: 217; emphasis in the original). Yet rewriting is not only an oppositional gesture, challenging the ideology of canonical texts and the perspectives they embody by ‘writing back’ to it, as I have argued in the preceding chapters. It is, paradoxically, also a counter-memorial discursive practice that activates canonicity. Rewriting keeps the canon alive, as well as the idea of the canon. This feature of rewriting is not a mere undesirable side effect but is key to the functioning of contemporary women’s rewriting. Ideologically, it is indeed essential to contemporary women’s rewriting that the texts 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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it rewrites be of canonical status, representative texts of the Western cultural heritage, the embodiment of what it holds as important. Its strategy of denunciation requires the recognition of the rewritten text as part of culture’s core cultural mythology and expressive of its central values. It almost goes without saying that the texts are worth rewriting because they matter. Culturally insignificant texts do not command the same political and ideological need for rewriting; or if they do, it is from a perspective that challenges their exclusion from the body of culturally significant texts, showing them to be really of cultural significance. Either way, women’s rewriting entails the recovery of women’s stories, which is a strategy of replenishment that brings them within the scope of the canon’s will to remember. This chapter explores contemporary women’s rewriting’s complex relationship to canonicity. Focusing on the canon’s relationship to identity and to cultural memory, it looks into women’s rewriting as a form of cultural recall that is directed at remembering differently, challenging the canon yet re-inscribing it. To understand how contemporary women’s rewriting keeps the literary past present, it identifies strategies of supplementation and reparation complementing the hermeneutics of distrust and discusses rewriting as a form of translation into a feminine/feminist language. Rewriting is a form of adaptation that guarantees the liveness of the canon. Proving rewriting to be at once part of the process of canonformation and of the breaking-up of collective cultural memory into niche markets, this chapter explores what I have termed, borrowing from the historian Maria Grever, the paradoxes of decanonization as a process that takes place at the level of everyday communicative memory.1

Cultural capitalism As part of the body of knowledge collected to be shared and passed on, the so-called classics that constitute the canon play a key role in collective, social, and cultural identity. They embody what the cultural elite holds as important and wishes to transmit as tradition, serving to define its values and designate what individuals within the collective ought to value for them to coincide with the collective and be identified with it. As is well documented, the canon plays an important role in the ‘memory-nation nexus’ (Olick 2003: 2). It is central to the idea of the nation as ‘imagined community’ and has played a crucial role in the nationalizing projects of imperialism and colonialism.2 This role shows the canon to regulate the distribution and access to cultural capital as a means of enlisting individuals in the collective imaginary that forms 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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its cultural memory and sustains its identity. Not surprisingly, it is especially in the context of debates over national cultural identity that ‘cultural capitalist’ notions of the canon and of tradition have recently been harnessed in the interest of an idea of culture that is envisioned as capable of providing social cohesion. Exemplary of the way in which the canon comes to symbolize, designate, and re-present the values of a culturally dominant social group is the Great Books of the Western World collection which the Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. first published in 1952. Conceived in a time of cultural insecurity, its presentation as the wellspring of contemporary culture in the 1950s United States can be seen as a reaction formation, responding to the American post-World War II sense of uncertainty with its proposition of timeless and eternal values: Great Books of the Western World claims to represent ‘the essential core of the Western literary canon’ – the founding texts formative of modern civilization, articulating the most important ideas and ‘the fundamental questions of humanity’, as the sales pitch for the sixty-volume collection reads on Britannica’s website. Great Books elicited virulent reactions precisely because its concept of what is canonical and ‘a classic’ was so enmeshed with cultural power. Initially designed to fill a perceived cultural lacuna, Great Books served the purposes of liberal education as formulated by Mortimer Adler, a philosopher and educator who made it his mission to instruct Americans in what he viewed as the fundamental concepts and universal truths and who co-founded the Great Books educational programme to this end. Adler’s aims were the formation of a collectively shared knowledge of the past, which then would form the basis for a Western sense of American cultural identity. His canon was to do so by speaking to individuals and interpellating them, as Althusser would say, into ‘the perspectives of history’s supreme thinkers’. Adler’s canon presents itself as authoritative in that it provides not just the important issues worth pondering – what Adler terms ‘the great conversation’, in which all ‘great books’ participate – but also the stock of narratives, characters, and plots from which individuals derive their identity.3 Designed to stop the work of cultural forgetting in a context in which the remembering of the classics did not go without saying, Great Books is a site of memory in Nora’s definition of the term: ‘material, symbolic and functional’ and driven by ‘a will to remember’ (1989: 19). Not surprisingly, then, it is precisely on these grounds that criticisms continue to be levelled at what is now commonly referred to as ‘the canon’: its being the embodiment of a will to remember some authors and 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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their perspectives, as well as of a will, or willingness, to forget – evade, side-step, or obliterate – those deemed unworthy of recollection. A recent example illustrates canonical rewriting as counter-memorial, showing it to be driven – and still driven, after all these years – by a will to remember differently that is also a will to undo the canon’s double work of remembering and forgetting. In 1999, Sena Jeter Naslund published to critical acclaim her rewriting of Moby-Dick from the perspective of Ahab’s wife. Ahab’s Wife: or, The Star-Gazer draws upon the few references Ahab makes to his wife and child in Melville’s classic to tell the story of the whaler’s spouse. The story of Una Spencer, as Naslund calls her, is an eventful tale in which he is no more central than she is in his – ‘a lookingglass version of Melville’s fictional seafaring one’, as the reviewer for The New York Times Book Review put it, ‘ruled by compassion as the other is by obsession, with a heroine who is as much a believer in social justice as the famous hero is in vengeance’ (D’Erasmo 1999). Asked about the novel’s genesis, Naslund responds, I thought about how Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick are often described as the great American novel, so I asked myself what these books have in common. They’re both quest stories, quests over water, in fact. Both deal with friendships between men of different races. These are great subjects. But neither book had any important women characters in it. This made me suspicious of the canon. It implied that if you’re going to write the great American novel, you’re going to have to leave out women, an unsettling idea. (Naslund 2004: 159) As Naslund explains it, she set out to rewrite Moby-Dick because it ‘irked me a bit to be aware that the two candidates for the title “Great American Novel” (Melville’s and Twain’s) had almost no women in them. Half the human race ignored, yet these two authors’ vision was considered among the most complete, the greatest!’ (Naslund 2005: 8). Another reason she gives is that it made her ‘sad that there wasn’t any great woman character in the book’ that her daughter, who loved the novel and effortlessly recited Ahab’s speeches, ‘might identify with and whose speeches she could recite’ (Naslund 2004: 159). Thus, the suspicion that something was awry with the canon combined with the reparative desire to provide her daughter with female characters to impersonate are what led to her ‘rewriting the Great American Novel’, as Elaine Showalter puts it in A Jury of her Peers (2009: 502). Although ‘in the most nonaggressive way’, D’Erasmo writes in her review, Naslund is in fact ‘rewriting American history, revising American literature and critiquing traditional masculinity’ (1999). 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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The will that motivates Naslund’s rewriting, then, is the 1970s ‘will to change’ which Adrienne Rich so confidently proclaimed in her book of poems of that title and of which re-vision was to be the central means. That a will to change the heritage – the inheritance Naslund’s daughter comes into – still drives rewriting at the close of the twentieth century is tribute both to feminism’s success and to its continued relevance to contemporary culture. Its daring feat of tackling one of America’s sacred monsters, and of getting support for it from the publishing industry – according to a CNN report, no less than six major publishing companies bid for rights to Ahab’s Wife and The New York Post speaks of ‘a fierce bidding war followed by a high six-figure advance’ (Allen 1999; Giltz 1999) – confirm Showalter’s thesis that at the turn of the millennium, women are free to write anything they want, including rewriting the great American novel. But does the novel’s success in the literary marketplace attest to the success of feminist rewriting as a means of changing cultural memory? And does it transform the canon so that women’s lives, voices, and perspectives are included in the cultural heritage? Ahab’s Wife received many enthusiastic reviews and, backed up by massive promotional efforts on the part of the author and her publisher, Morrow-HarperCollins, sold many copies: 80,000 in the first year, followed by many more in several ensuing paperback issues and reprints (110,000 in 2000, then more in 2005, and a new paperback edition in the Spring of 2009, not to speak of audio cassettes, CDs, downloads, and Kindle editions).4 The high sales, however, do not directly seem to have affected the place and status of Melville’s classic. Judging from Amazon’s customer pages (but other bookstores show similar trends), it would indeed appear that if it is possible to speak of women’s rewriting as transforming cultural memory, this is only in the sense that women are encouraged to develop another body of cultural references by reading and buying another set of books than men. That a society harbours several and competing cultures of memory is certainly not a new insight. Yet the relative immunity of those memories to one another and the lack of porosity of the various memory cultures give pause to think, especially in the context of increasing cultural exchange between social groups. Whereas people participate in different cultures of memory, the commercially induced reification of identity categories is cause for worry, especially as it may hinder real and desirable social change.5 The translation, in the literary marketplace, of the cultural notion of difference into the marketing concept of target or niche market has far-reaching consequences for the idea of culture, as well as for 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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cultural memory as creative of a shared sense of identity. Exploiting the commercial possibilities inscribed in the notions of diversity, pluralism, and hybridity, niche marketing tailors products to meet the presumed needs of the targeted market segment. The recognition of women as consumers and, hence, as a target audience, is thus of paramount importance, effectively paving the path for separate memory cultures. Whereas women had long been identified with shopping and as book readers, in the 1990s, they were publicly recognized to dominate the market (Showalter 2009: 495).6 The feminization of the literary market led the industry to specifically cater to women’s presumed readerly needs, as distinguished from those of men. With its female centres of consciousness, women’s rewriting appears to satisfy these needs, offering seemingly endless possibilities for women-centred narratives. This is what Fraser identifies as feminism’s ‘“dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism’ (2009: 114).7 In this liaison, market forces embrace feminism’s claims for recognition and use its identity politics for niche marketing. The affirmation of gender difference that constituted a challenge to the androcentric norm in the 1970s is given new meaning in the context of neo-liberal capitalism. This transformation of a feminist narrative strategy into a commercially successful product in the postFordist literary marketplace can be seen as the happy marriage of feminism and capitalism, with women writers literally capitalising on its possibilities for ‘detraditionalization’, to use Ulrich Beck’s term (1992; see also Heelas et al. 1996). Yet it did not unambiguously spell feminism’s success. Giving legitimacy to the language of recognition, it also provided crucial elements for the refunctioning of identity as motor force of consumer culture. Identity, once something one was born into, becomes under the influence of feminism an individual project, to be achieved, for instance in ‘becoming woman’ on one’s own terms. Simone de Beauvoir’s oft-quoted phrase, ‘on ne naît pas femme, on le devient’, does not only define gender as a social construction; it also defines (gender) identity as a project. Yet as identity becomes a construction and a performance, an individual task and responsibility, under the pressures of the consumerism of liquid modernity, it also increasingly becomes ‘an attribute of the moment’, ‘devoid of a direction determined once and for all’, impermanent, bought and sold on the market, and requiring continuous assemblage and re-assemblage (Bauman 2008: 13). One of the effects of the identification of gender, diversity, and hybridity as productive of niche markets is that the canon remains 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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unaffected. Indeed, in this scheme the canon remains the canon, and whereas it is not surprising that no reader who bought Ahab’s Wife is referred to Moby-Dick – it might, after all, be construed as redirecting the reader to the ‘real’ thing – it certainly is disappointing from a feminist viewpoint to find that neither does the Moby-Dick page on Amazon.com refer to Naslund’s rewriting. In fact, the package the online bookstore proposes consists of the American triumvirate MobyDick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby while actual customer behaviour reflects shopping patterns that look like those of students of some ‘great books’ course.8 The feminization of the book market, then, has led to the recognition of women’s wishes as readers, including ‘an audience demand for strong women characters from authors of both sexes’ (Showalter 2009: 495). It has not led to men sharing in this audience demand, but instead, has been deployed as a strategy of increasing diversification, where the multiple facets of contemporary identity become as many targets for marketing. As Showalter rightly observes, the success of women writers in the marketplace and the accompanying freedom to write anything they like did not come with the recognition of women’s writing as part of the heritage. Neither in the marketing and retailing strategies of the book business nor in the pedagogies of the literary gatekeepers are the stories of women marked as memorable for posterity in the same way as men’s. Yet Ahab’s Wife aimed at reweaving the structure of American cultural memory, returning the issue of slavery to the nineteenth-century experience, as well as courageous, intelligent, and feminist women. Naslund, indeed, has her heroine meet Margaret Fuller, a contemporary women’s rights activist and author of the feminist Woman in the Nineteenth Century, as well the Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. As she explains, she pulled in these historical women because she wanted ‘to show that there were strong, smart, independent women back then’ (2004: 160). The mixing of the historically real and imaginary functions to ‘meet credibility issues’ she felt might arise about her protagonist. Reminding her readers that there were such women back then, it also draws these women within the purview of cultural memory. Naslund was keen to include the issue of slavery, which she felt was wrongly omitted from Melville’s novel. In this, Naslund’s novel is much like Jane Smiley’s notorious 1996 Harper’s Magazine essay in which she denounces the canonization of Huckleberry Finn, arguing Twain’s so-called masterpiece ‘has little to offer in the way of greatness’ and suggesting it would have been better for American culture if American literature had grown out of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Tom’s Cabin. Like earlier critics of the American canon, Smiley denounces the canonization of Huckleberry Finn for ‘misrepresenting our literary life’ and limiting the range of subjects worthy of serious literary attention. She adds, ‘The real loss, though, is not to our literature but to our culture and ourselves, because we have lost the subject of how the various social groups who may not escape to the wilderness are to get along in society; and, in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the hardnosed, unsentimental dialogue about race that we should have been having since before the Civil War’ (1996: 66). Likewise, Ahab’s Wife re-represents the nineteenth-century and, constructing an alternative genealogy for American literature and culture, attempts to transform its memory by changing its canon. It is certainly telling that in the paratextual ‘P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . ’ that frames the novel in its HarperPerennial edition, Twain is not included in Naslund’s list of ‘Fourteen Books That Influenced the Creation of Ahab’s Wife’ while Uncle Tom’s Cabin is mentioned second after Melville’s Moby-Dick (Naslund 2005: 13). Suggesting an alternative set of memorable texts, Naslund evidently makes a serious effort to reorient the ‘great conversation’ that is the canon as it was first defined by Adler, and which still does not include Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel among its ‘500 Classics in 60 Beautiful Volumes’. Making the meaning and relevance of Melville’s novel subject of everyday communicative memory, Ahab’s Wife effectively lays the foundations for a radical transformation of American cultural memory.

Supplementary rewritings of female tradition From Virginia Woolf’s cautious suggestion women re-write history as a supplement in which women might figure without impropriety to Naslund’s bold rewriting of the great American novel, the status of women’s rewriting has changed considerably. This is undoubtedly due to the changed position of the women writer in the literary marketplace. Whereas Woolf writes at a time when ideas about femininity circumscribed women’s writing lives by gendered norms and expectations, today, it seems, women of the Western world can write, in Annie Proulx’s memorable phrase, ‘about anything they want, any sex they want, any place they want’ (qtd in Showalter 2009: 494). This ‘anything’ would appear to include, in the context of the United States, ‘the Great American Novel’ – that deeply nationalist concept of some quintessentially American novel rooted in ideas about cultural distinctness that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Referring to novels that presumably perfectly embody the American culture and spirit, it is crucially linked to the notion of an American literary canon. For Naslund to rewrite the great American novel is then to exercise her right as a woman of her time to write about whichever subject she wants.9 Yet, if the position of women writers has changed and if the industry has backed Naslund in her project, the novel’s effect on cultural memory will remain marginal unless it becomes part of what Showalter has termed ‘the vigorous public debate of a critical trial’ (2009: xii). It is too early, of course, to say whether Ahab’s Wife will have a lasting impact on the cultural memory of America. This will depend upon its further reception. What can already be said is that as long as it remains confined to a domain of women’s literature read by women individually and discussed in women’s book clubs, it will continue to be construed as speaking to women’s concerns rather than to those of culture at large. In this sense, women’s rewriting often forms a supplement, a swelling yet separate ‘tiny rivulet’ flowing ‘alongside the river of heroic songs’, as Christa Wolf’s Cassandra puts it (1984: 81). One of the paradoxes of women’s rewriting, then, is that while it directs itself to destabilizing ‘the canon’ – or, only slightly more modestly, a canonical ‘great text’ – it draws on processes of canonization to affirm the values of another social group than the culturally dominant ones apparently seen reflected in it. From the 1980s onwards, women’s rewriting is aware of this paradox, self-consciously reflecting on female traditions of storytelling as separate from male hegemonic ones. Especially the idea of a split social memory, separating a dominant, socially valued and canonized one from marginalized or otherwise suppressed traditions of experience, is the subject of sustained reflection in novels that, ranging from Wolf’s Cassandra (1983) to Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997), can be identified as ‘supplementary’ rewritings of female tradition. So Diamant’s Biblical rewriting opens in the voice of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, who starts to recount her story with the words, ‘We have been lost to each other for so long’, thus seeking to re-establish the severed connection between teller and reader and found a line of narrative descent that is also a line of female knowledge. As Dinah continues to explain, My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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In the same way, Wolf’s Cassandra speaks of ‘all-important things’ that go unrecorded and so are not transmitted to posterity: ‘No one will learn these all-important things about us. The scribes’ tablets, baked in the flames of Troy, transmit the palace accounts, the records of grain, urns, weapons, prisoners. There are no signs for pain, happiness, love. That seems to me an extreme misfortune’ (1984: 78). Whereas the aims of these two rewritings differ significantly, the one inscribed in the Jewish tradition of midrash and giving the biblical text relevance to women readers today, the other one telling of a distant and mythical past to speak of concerns of contemporary relevance for the then East German writer, they share the sense of severed female traditions of knowledge interrupted by male traditions of epic writing. This is formulated especially clearly in Wolf’s Cassandra, an interior monologue in which the Trojan princess looks back on her life as she awaits her death in front of the gates of Mycenae, the home of Agamemnon, the warlord returned triumphant from the war in Troy with Cassandra as booty. Cassandra recalls the women’s lives on the margins of the bloody events, remembering that while the men were waging war, the women were occupied with activities directed at the continuation of daily life. Their main thoughts, however, were for the future: But more than anything else we talked about those who would come after us. What they would be like. Whether they would still know who we are. Whether they would repair our omissions, rectify our mistakes. We racked our brains trying to think of a way we could leave them a message, but did not know any script to write it. (132–3) What is represented in these novels as the narrator’s desire to have her story remembered is, of course, a projection from the present onto the past. The interrupted line of descent is a disjunction between past and present as perceived from the perspective of the present. Likewise, the concerns expressed by the women in the past about their future memory is in reality a concern about the present, namely that having lost the memory and the knowledge it contains, it has also lost a treasure-trove of wisdom. In her book on women’s biography, Janet Beizer speaks of such projections as ‘bio-autography’, ‘the writing of a self through the representation of another’s life’ and, as such, inscribing a ‘transferential relationship’ 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


way of knowing. This is why I became a footnote, my story a brief detour between the well-known history of my father, Jacob, and the celebrated chronicle of Joseph, my brother. (1997: 1)

akin to that of psychoanalytic therapy (2009: 3; 31). Beizer rightly criticizes ‘bio-autography’ for its imposition of ‘another consciousness – the sensibility of another age – ’ (63) onto the past. Women’s rewriting, whether of the story of a historical or a fictional forebear, cannot simply ‘resurrect’ and re-present her. It cannot be taken as the truth of the past. Instead, it speaks of the present and needs to be read as a story of desire – for the ‘lost mother’, the lost maternal tradition, and the loss of the fullness of memory. In Wolf’s Cassandra, mourning loss is social criticism and remembering, a way of re-imagining the future. Wolf’s Cassandra is a tale of desire for a more hopeful future than the one projected by 1980s militarism and atomic armament. Using the time-honoured device of speaking of places distant in space and time to voice criticism of the present, Wolf’s novel shows memory loss to have particularly far-reaching consequences by establishing a parallel between the situation in Troy and that in Europe in the early 1980s and suggesting there is a causal relation between the two. Christa Wolf, it should be noted, is a writer whose allegiance to her country’s socialist regime was tinged by a feminist commitment to pacifism and environmentalism. Especially concerned at the time with the threat of a nuclear war and the situation of the German Democratic Republic in the wake of the cold war, she writes about Troy to warn about the dangers of rearmament, because, she explains in a conversation about the novel, ‘I could say even more about our culture when she stayed in her time’ (Reck et al. 1984: 106). In her analysis, Troy was defeated because it compromised its integrity and opted for conformity to the militaristic mentality to which it was introduced by its Achaean enemies. It is because the Trojans had become self-estranged as a result of the implementation of a new regime marked by an insistence on property and hierarchy and the gradual exclusion of women from the public sphere that Troy, which had in effect already capitulated to the Achaeans’ way of thinking, lost the war. In this way, Wolf ascribes alienation not to the evils of industrialization, as the GDR’s Marxist policy was wont to do, but suggests it finds its roots in the beginnings of Western civilization, when the social fabric was rewoven without the women and a utilitarian pragmatism replaced knowledge and self-knowledge with a polarizing and hierarchical militarism. Writing about the past to speak of the present, Wolf casts herself as a modern Cassandra whose warnings, like those of the mythical seeress who was given the gift of prophecy but was cursed not to be believed, go unheeded. The identification of the writer with Cassandra is suggested through the novel’s framing paragraphs, which bookend 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Cassandra’s stream-of-consciousness narrative with an account of the narrator standing before Agamemnon’s gate looking onto the same stone lions that looked at Cassandra, making her way into and out of the mind of the Trojan seeress. It is repeated in several texts Wolf wrote and spoke about the same time, suggesting a trust in, and a failure of, learning from the past (e.g. Wolf 1981).10 Thus the rewriting takes on the quality of teachings from the past that went unheeded. However, for Wolf to cast her words of warning as those of the priestess doomed not to be believed – is that not to pre-empt the possibility of them ever being heeded, thus in effect marking them as were they the beginning of the end of learning from the past? Whereas feminism, as Gail Finney has argued, can be seen to represent ‘the culmination of the humanistic rethinking of socialism that motivates Wolf’s entire oeuvre’ (1999: 87), this feminism is also cast as a world marginalized in a patriarchal culture that values heroism, war, and aggression and that objectifies women. Wolf’s Cassandra presents the failure of learning from the past as a fact of history, the direct consequence of a gendered division of memory with its exclusion of women and the nitty-gritty of daily life and love from the written record and its focus on male heroism and rivalry instead. Whereas the epic, like ancient history, contains the records of its leaders’ ‘great’ deeds, this archive of writing as memory-keeping is contrasted with the memorializing traditions of women’s oral transmission of knowledge. Thus Cassandra imagines addressing Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, imploring her, Send me a scribe, or better yet a young slave woman with a keen memory and a powerful voice. Ordain that she may repeat to her daughter what she hears from me. That the daughter in turn may pass it on to her daughter, and so on. So that alongside the river of heroic songs, this tiny rivulet, too, may reach those faraway, perhaps happier people who will live in times to come. (1984: 81) In the series of lectures that culminates in Cassandra, Christa Wolf reflects on the conditions of the narrative and observes that there is such a thing as women’s writing precisely because ‘women, for historical and biological reasons, experience another reality than men do’ (1984: 259). The consequence of a sexual division of experience – of labour, space, association, etc., in fact, of virtually everything and hence, also of time – this difference is represented by Wolf as founded by the systems of patriarchal values and institutions brought to Troy by the war with the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Greeks, which disrupted and marginalized a community characterized by sexual equality, love, and care. Like Cixous, Wolf reads the Oresteia as marking the advent of patriarchy and returns to Aeschylus’s plays to understand its mechanisms of division and marginalization, as well as the reasons behind the existence of different bodies of writing commemorating different cultures of social interaction. In this way, her rewriting also serves the purposes of identifying an alternative to the present, which is here, as in other women’s rewritings, located in some faraway mythical past.11 The unheeded lessons of the past articulated in Wolf’s Cassandra contrast with the teachings of Diamant’s The Red Tent, on the one hand, and with those of Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, on the other. Both novels tap into the separate cultures of women’s reading and writing that emerged in the 1990s with the feminization of the literary market. Yet they address these cultures differently, formulating different answers to the question of women’s relation to literary tradition, collective memory, and the canon. A book that initially went unnoticed but that is now a bestseller thanks to the efforts of its author, who bought the remaindered copies and distributed these widely in an attempt to find a readership, The Red Tent tells of the female-centred world of Jacob’s four wives and their many children, and of their religious rituals and practices of daily life, from within. Evoking the strength and resilience of Dinah and her mothers, The Red Tent speaks to its readers in a way which has been described as ‘at once intensely personal and deeply relational’ as well as ‘hopeful and uplifting’, offering possibilities of identification as well as models for sociality. As the author of the study guide Inside the Red Tent puts it, ‘The Red Tent is hopeful and uplifting because it offers an alternative view of what many Bible readers have often imagined was the lonely and miserable life of biblical women. . . . Even when events result in the most tragic consequences, these women survive, discover new support networks, and live on to see another joyful day’ (Polaski 2006: 2). Suggesting the novel may not only yield knowledge and pleasure but also offer insights applicable to the reader’s own life, she goes on to attribute therapeutic value to it, emphasizing the possibilities it provides for gaining strength and finding support through female communities: ‘If you are a woman reading this book with other women, your experience of the book may spur you to create or rediscover rituals that celebrate your life together as women’ (4). In contrast, Ahab’s Wife seems to want to make up for the loss that the exclusion of courageous and intelligent women and their spiritual quest, as well as the silence about race and slavery, form for contemporary 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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culture. In her notorious Harper’s piece, Jane Smiley argued that the exclusion of a range of subjects from the ‘great conversation’ that forms the canon constitutes an important loss for society. In particular, she maintained that when Stowe’s voice ‘fell silent in our culture and was replaced by the secretive voice of Huck Finn, . . . racism fell out of the public world and into the private one, where whites think it really is but blacks know it really isn’t’ (1996: 67). Much like Smiley proposed in her article, so does Naslund return slavery to the nineteenth century. ‘One of the things that Melville didn’t do in Moby-Dick was deal with the slavery issue.’ Therefore, Naslund explains, ‘I thought that if I was going to write an epic novel of this historic period, I couldn’t not deal with the issue of slavery. Melville was an abolitionist. His heart was in the right place, but slavery wasn’t an important issue in Moby-Dick. I wanted to include the slavery issue . . . ’(2004: 160). Rewriting Moby-Dick for a richer sense of cultural and intellectual life – in fact, suggesting Ahab’s single-minded obsession with the whale is misconceived masculinity – Naslund’s novel engages tradition as canonized to open it up to subjects forgotten or repressed, bringing them within the purview of canonization as cultural remembering. As such, it does not merely represent a supplement to literary history in Woolf’s sense of the term but offers itself as a narrative of recovery for a culture whose prime mechanism of cultural remembrance, canonization, has caused its failure of being a better society. Thus, it stands closer to Wolf’s conception of women’s rewriting as a tiny rivulet that is ultimately to flow into the sea of cultural memory than to Diamant’s The Red Tent with its explicit evocation of a shared sphere of female experience and deliberate cultivation of a female memory.

Suspicion and after Central to the emergence of contemporary women’s rewriting, I have argued in Chapter 2, is a sense of suspicion of the canon. This suspicion has proved immensely productive, leading to the retrieval of facts and fictions about women’s lives and yielding, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘a mass of information’ (1993: 41; ch. 3). As the past is revisited to include the perspectives of women, surely the question of women’s relation to tradition is to be reformulated? In the 1980 diary entry that opens her third lecture on her novel Cassandra, Christa Wolf notes, ‘The literature of the West (I read) is the white man’s reflection on himself. So should it be supplemented by the white woman’s reflection on herself? And nothing more?’ (1984: 225). How is women’s rewriting to generate a usable past? 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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It is not merely a dreadful, shameful, and scandalous fact for women that women were allowed to contribute virtually nothing to the culture we live in, officially and directly, for thousands of years. No, it is, strictly speaking, the weak point of culture, which leads to it becoming self-destructive – namely, its inability to grow up. (1984: 260) As Wolf’s words indicate, the suspicion of the canon that leads to the rewriting of its key texts is founded on the notion that not only is the canon not whole, it is also not wholesome. Misrepresenting the past, the canonized classics of Western literature are not only damaging to the female mind. Their deleterious effects extend to society at large, which is denied a fundamental tool of self-knowledge and self-understanding – of growing up and achieving maturity, in Wolf’s terminology. Therefore, she submits, an ‘aesthetic of resistance to it all’ has to be developed (236). The narrator of Sara Maitland’s ‘An Un-romance’ explains why: The old stories do not lie; that is their rule. . . . But although they do not lie, they omit. They tell us about the frog turned into a Prince, but they never tell us about the Prince turned into a frog; though the divorce statistics uphold the frequency of this version. They do not tell us about the women who prefer dragons to knights; nor about the ones who prefer cottages to palaces, honest independent work to silk gowns. (1993: 72–3) In The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief, Clayton Koelb coins the term lethetic to describe a mode of reading, and of rewriting, which is forgetful, ‘a deliberate ignoring of what the author’s intention may be’ (1984: 143). This mode of textual (re)production he contrasts with alethetic reading, which, following from the etymological understanding of aletheia as meaning both truth and ‘that which is not forgotten, . . . that which is remembered’, ‘assumes that the text essentially tells the truth’ (1984: 36; 1988: 304). Koelb’s terms are useful to distinguish between attitudes towards the rewritten text. In fact, they could be applied to the procedures of contemporary women’s rewriting as a literature of forgetting grounded in disbelief, were it not that Koelb does not account for the possibility, voiced by Maitland’s protagonist, that 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


Reflecting on what women’s rewriting is to do, Wolf mulls over its potential of a corrective to the male tradition that is not merely a reversal of it. This is imperative, she opines, for as she writes,

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while the old stories do indeed basically tell the truth, they do not tell the whole truth. Koelb believes reading ought to be a matter of submitting to the authority of the text. In contrast, contemporary women’s rewriting grew out of the belief it is necessary to read without assenting to the text – to read ‘resistingly’, as Judith Fetterley advocated (1978), ‘to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it’, in Rich’s oft-quoted words (1972: 19). Challenging rather than submitting to the authority of the canon, contemporary women’s rewriting finds its motto in the nineteenth-century American poet Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s poem ‘Atalanta’, which tells the reader ‘Distrust you the fable of old’ for, as the fourth stanza begins, ‘The fable was twisted! I plant a / Firm foot of assurance on this’ (1875: 73–4). This, then, is not to forget the story altogether, but to remember it differently. Returning to the same old stories in some kind of Freudian working-through, contemporary women’s rewriting tries to transform the canon’s gesture of compulsive repetition into a meaningful memory to create a usable past. As women’s rewriting becomes an established genre of feminist and feminine fiction, re-membering and re-calling take on new forms. The productivity of suspicion as a method for teasing stories out of the canon’s silences, gaps, exclusions, and misrepresentations shows women’s rewriting to generate new memories and alternative genealogies. Revealing the canon’s resilience to repeated attacks, it also re-establishes its centrality to the idea of the past. The sense of the canon’s continued relevance in upholding a particular concept of cultural identity was already addressed by Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999). It is brought to productive centrality in Ursula Le Guin’s recent rewriting of The Aeneid, Lavinia (2008). The novel contrasts sharply with earlier treatments of the classics in women’s rewriting, bringing it within the purview of Koelb’s alethetic mode of relating to the literary past. As the negation in the title of Monique Wittig’s rewriting of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgile, non (1985; translated as Across the Acheron, 1987), for instance, indicates and her text substantiates, if women return to the classics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it is frequently in a spirit of contestation, contesting the guiding role given to them and rejecting their universalizing claims in the name of sexual difference. Protesting the exclusionary conventions of gender and the traditional representations of women, women’s rewriting forms a literature of disbelief whose aim is to expose the sexism of the literary canon and its construction of cultural memory as ‘false’. Such ‘paranoid project of exposure’, Eve Sedgwick has explained, is historically specific and dependent on a particular cultural context (2003: 139–40), part of the cultural moment of ‘suspicion’ that is presently past. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Le Guin’s Lavinia underlines how much the exclusive focus on suspicion involves what Segdwick describes as ‘a certain disarticulation, disavowal, and misrecognition of other ways of knowing’ (144), and reveals, instead, how rewriting can help extract sustenance from its ‘conversations with the dead’.12 Lavinia gives a voice to the daughter of Latinus, king of Latium, who in Virgil’s Aeneid is given in marriage to Aeneas because their union is destined to found the Roman empire. Although she is not inconsequential, in Virgil’s poem, Lavinia has no words of her own, and her character is not fleshed out. As she says in Lavinia, the life the poet gave her was ‘a long life but a small one’, ‘dull’, ‘colorless’, ‘conventional’ (4). While this may be cause for grief, in Le Guin’s novel, it is not cause for blame. In her account, Virgil only came to know Lavinia when he was dying. In consequence, ‘He’s not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect’ (3). Le Guin explains, ‘Virgil didn’t have time for little Lavinia’, adding, ‘I didn’t feel I was correcting Virgil, but here was something he didn’t have the time to do, and I did’ (Crossen 2008: W5). In the encounter the novel stages between Lavinia and Vergil, as Le Guin spells his name, the Roman poet acknowledges he did Lavinia wrong, knowing little and thinking even less of her: ‘what I thought I knew of you – what little I thought of at all – was stupid, conventional, unimagined. I thought you were a blonde!’ (58).13 Expressive of a new relationship to the past and to the gender relations it inscribes, Le Guin’s move to having Vergil recognize his shortcomings in the writing of The Aeneid is, admittedly, befitting her rewriting’s position of rearguard in relation to women’s rewriting, as well as her own status as a recognized major author confident in her own power of storytelling. Indeed, the gentleness with which she handles Vergil, representing him as a kind, soft-spoken man ‘sensitive to every suffering’ and speaking of him as ‘a trustworthy man to follow’ (39; 274), talks eloquently of the necessity, also for feminists, to move beyond suspicion, developing ‘more compelling and comprehensive accounts of why texts matter to us’, as Rita Felski puts it in ‘After Suspicion’ (2009: 34). Felski therefore calls for analysis of ‘the multilayered interplay of affect and expectation, of habitual schemata, cultural training, and idiosyncrasies of individual histories, that shapes what and how we read’ (31): ‘Critique needs to be supplemented by generosity, pessimism by hope, negative aesthetics by a sustained reckoning with the communicative, expressive, and world-disclosing aspects of art’, she writes (33). In Lavinia, Le Guin provides precisely such a generous reading of the Aeneid. The rave reviews it received, with critics unanimously expressing their admiration and delight, confirm it caught 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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the new spirit of the ‘postcritical’ age especially well as she speaks in the voice of a woman who ‘wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose [her] man and [her] fate’ (2008: 4). ‘I am not the feminine voice you may have expected’, Le Guin’s Lavinia says, distancing herself from feminist traditions of rewriting. ‘Resentment is not what drives me to write my story’ (68). Evoking the so-called ‘school of resentment’, Harold Bloom’s term for those ‘who wish to overthrow the canon in order to advance their . . . programs for social change’ (1994: 4) – ‘writers who offer little but the resentment they have developed as part of their sense of identity’, as he puts it in The Western Canon (7) – Le Guin’s statement implicitly asserts aesthetics over politics. Yet the position is not simply reactionary, reasserting the eternal values of the classics. It is, she says, because she cannot bear ‘that dim loitering about, down in the underworld, waiting to be forgotten or reborn’ that she breaks out of ‘the splendid, vivid words [she has] lived in for centuries’ to tell her own story (4). A felicitous metaphor for memory, the image of the Underworld as the realm where the dead dwell, leading a shadowy existence, evokes the canonical text’s archival status as an institution ‘of passive cultural memory . . . situated halfway between the canon and forgetting’ (Assmann 2008: 102). As such, it suggests its possibility for returning into circulation and having renewed substantiality or, alternatively, remaining on the other side of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that intersects the Underworld. With this image, the grounds for Lavinia’s act of remembrance have shifted. Speaking of the contingency of all performances of memory, Lavinia’s prise de parole is informed by a will to remember that remains subordinate to the possibilities of the classic, canonical text as repository of cultural memory. Writing herself into existence, Lavinia is active communicative memory, ‘as I write and as you read it’ (4). The subject matter of new communications about the past and about cultural memory, Lavinia models women’s rewriting beyond distrust.

Feminine versions: rewriting as a translation into a (m)other tongue One of Sena Jeter Naslund’s motives for writing Ahab’s Wife, rewriting Melville’s Moby-Dick from a female point of view, is to give her daughter women-centred speeches to memorize and strong female characters with whom to identify: a literature from which she might be able to draw sustenance. It is, indeed, the frequently voiced complaint that ‘Literature’ contains so few strong female characters which makes 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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rewriting such an important means of feminist literary production, central to Hélène Cixous’s notion of a feminine rewriting no less than to Adrienne Rich’s concept of re-vision. This complaint is nowhere heard as loudly as in the context of the Bible – a canonical and foundational text of Western civilization if there ever was one – leading to a rich tradition of women-centred rewritings that both challenge and offer themselves as alternatives to the literary and theological canons.14 Rewritings of this type may be termed ‘versions’ in acknowledgement of the fact that Bible translations are thus called – e.g. The Revised Standard Version and The Authorized King James Version – following the custom of referring in this way to vernacular translations.15 In this section, I therefore discuss women’s rewritings as ‘feminine versions’ in the sense of a translation into the language of (feminist) women – a (m)other tongue, punning on the notion of a language that is at once gendered feminine and other, a maternal first language. Such versions, I argue, are integral to the feminist project of rewriting. Yet they are less the product of suspicion than of its reparative counterpart and as such, vital to the unmasking and repairing of the ‘original’ text’s reinforcement of masculine values and norms. The gesture of translation as feminine versioning is basic and familiar to anyone who has ever read to young girls, as Margaret Atwood’s Tony discovers when she offers to read to her friend Roz’s twin daughters: ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, reads Tony. . . . ‘One day a suitor appeared. He was . . . ’ ‘She! She!’ clamour the twins. ‘Alright, Tony, let’s see you get out of this one’, says Roz, standing in the doorway. ‘We could change it to The Robber Bride’, says Tony. ‘Would that be adequate?’ The twins give it some thought, and say it will do. (1995 [1993]: 331) The novel in which this scene occurs is called The Robber Bride, a title that is derived from Grimm’s fairy tale. It explores femininity as represented by its robber bride, Zenia, and her former friends, in its more malignant and complicitous aspects. Atwood is ostensibly using here the technique of mise-en-abyme, representing the procedure of the novel within the novel and traditionally employed to reflect on it, to comment on the practice of contemporary women’s rewriting as a translation into the feminine. Rewriting and translation are, of course, kindred activities. In fact, translation is nowadays generally defined as a rewriting in another language. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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The OED speaks of translation as ‘a version in a different language’. In their General editors’ preface to Routledge’s path-breaking series on translation studies, Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere state, ‘Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text’ (Lefevere 1992: vii). The 1990s, in fact, saw not only the increased theorizing of translation as rewriting, but also the rise of an interventionist feminist translation practice that is, in truth, a rewriting in the feminine. On the one hand, feminist translation scholars studied early female translators and their role in history, looked to the correlation between the historical and ideological construction of translation, famously dubbed the ‘belle infidèle’ – the beautiful but unfaithful woman – with that of femininity as ‘submission, reproduction and loyalty’, and addressed the issue of translating gendered language both of the unwittingly sexist and of the experimental feminist variety (Hermans 2009: 100). On the other hand, they confronted the issue of the translator’s responsibility when faced with gendered language much as Atwood’s Tony is forced to do, developing a feminist translation practice that aims, in the words of its most outspoken proponent, the Canadian Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, ‘to make the feminine visible in language so that women are seen and heard in the world’ (1991: 112). In Chapter 2, I have already referred to Angela Carter’s practice of translation, carrying Perrault’s seventeenthcentury moralist and misogynist language into late twentieth-century, post-feminist English in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977). Here I want to draw the implications of such a practice for conceptualizing women’s rewriting. Because language is never neutral, de LotbinièreHarwood explains, quoting Luce Irigaray, ‘[t]he expression “rewriting in the feminine” alludes to two registers of translation: from source language (or SL) to target language (or TL), and from masculine to feminine’ (100). This ‘kind of literary activism’ (Simon 1996: viii), deliberately manipulating texts and reconfiguring their tenor, is understandably a vexed issue. This is because, despite all evidence to the contrary, translation continues to be understood as a secondary kind of speaking, faithfully subordinate to the ‘original’ source text and capable of substituting for it in its absence, or when it cannot be accessed. Whereas translation is theoretically acknowledged to be an act of creative rewriting, and sometimes actually recognized as such, for instance in the case of poetry, this fact is not easily reconciled with the ideal of translation as equivalence that still informs most everyday translation practices. But what if, rather than looking at translation as a kind of rewriting, one looks at rewriting as a kind of translation? Although the term is surely 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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too fuzzy to have real methodological import, it might nonetheless be useful conceptually, helping us to think through women’s rewriting as the action, process and product ‘of turning from one language into another’, as the OED puts it. Translation is a term that invites us to bracket the question of language. It asks to theorize rewriting as a mode of engaging with texts that challenges the neutrality of the malegendered universal and to consider the extent to which social groupings such as those of gender speak different languages. Pulling attention towards the wider implications of the claim that the intralingual rewording that is rewriting is, in reality, what Roman Jakobson calls ‘translation proper’ (Munday 2009: 6), it requires recognition of the fact that in this scheme of things, women are always already translators. As de Lotbinière-Harwood puts it, ‘all women are bilingual’ (1991: 93). Fundamental to the understanding of rewriting as translation is the notion of equivalence. Translation aims at equivalence. This equivalence is traditionally conceived as a formal correspondence between source text (ST) and target text (TT), focusing on the text itself, its form and content. Recently, it has been rethought in terms of a functional equivalence, seeking ‘to create the same response in the TT readers as the ST created in the ST readers’ (Munday 2009: 8). Rewritings substituting masculine forms for feminine ones adhere to the idea of formal correspondence, a literal translation in the etymological sense of the word. Such she-word-for-he-word translation informs most rewritings discussed in this book, from rewritings in which the main protagonist is converted into a female one – for instance, Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote – to rewritings providing the female version of the story – e.g. Penelope’s account of the events, in Maitland’s short story ‘Penelope’ or in Atwood’s novel The Penelopiad – to rewritings recounting the women’s worlds that exist outside the ambit of the canonical men’s worlds of foundational texts such as the Bible or the classics – e.g. Diamant’s The Red Tent and Wolf’s Cassandra. In its ‘pure’ form, it can be found in scholastic exercises such as the ones Su Reid assigns to her students in her ‘Feminist Reading and Writing’ class in the late 1980s, rewriting classics such as Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ in the feminine: What is a poet? To whom does she address herself? And what language is to be expected from her? She is a woman speaking to women: a woman, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has great knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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The exercise is illuminating, to be sure, exposing the ways in which texts inscribe familiar assumptions and cultural conventions about gender. As instructors of creative writing know well, re-writing teaches about ‘the nature of the text in its initial moment of production’ (Pope 2003: 106). Yet because the strategy is limited to the rendering of the masculine noun ‘man’ and its pronoun in the feminine, it does little more than reveal that Wordsworth’s manifesto serves neither the interests nor the purposes of women. Not surprisingly, this kind of reversal has been criticized. In ‘The Wicked Stepmother’s Tale’, Sara Maitland has her protagonist say: There’s this thing going on at the moment where women tell all the stories again and turn them inside-out and back-to-front – so that the characters you always thought were the goodies turn out to be the baddies, and vice versa, and whole lot guilt is laid to rest: or that at least is the theory. I’m not sure myself that the guilt isn’t just passed on to the next person, intacta so to speak. . . . All I want to say is that it’s more complicated, more complex, than it’s told, and the reasons why it’s told the way it is are complex too. (1987: 157–8) More interesting than the notion of formal equivalence for mapping the strategies of contemporary women’s rewriting, then, is the concept of functional equivalence: the idea that translation should be directed at creating an equivalent effect in the target-text reader, drawing an equivalent response from her. ‘Skopos theory’ is such a target-text-oriented approach that shifts attention to the target text’s cultural role and gives priority to its purpose and function in the target context (Munday 2009: 227). Its concerns resonate with those of contemporary women’s rewriting, which are similarly occupied with pragmatics, purpose and intention rather than with some kind of formal equivalence with or loyalty to the source text. For instance, Naslund’s desire to provide her daughter with womencentred speeches to memorize and strong female characters with whom to identify can be construed to signify that contemporary women’s rewriting is a purpose-oriented form of translation that is directed at providing women with an ‘equivalent’ reading experience – an equivalence that is to be defined in terms of a range of rhetorical, functional, and translational criteria but that include the pragmatic and affective ones of identification, recognition, and reassurance. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


among womankind; a woman pleased with her own passions and volitions, [etc.]. (Reid 1989: 115)

This purpose can also be found in Roberts’s The Wild Girl (1984), which takes its cue from and elaborates on the only Christian gospel written in the name of a woman to provide women with a gospel of their own. In the little known and fragmentary Gospel of Mary, which already presents ‘a radical interpretation of Jesus’ teachings as a path to inner knowledge’ (King 2003: 3), Roberts finds material for her vision of an alternative Christian faith that recognizes the legitimacy of women as disciples and leaders. By reworking this material, in effect rewriting both the theological canon and tradition and its rediscovered addition, Roberts creates a feminist version offering new possibilities of religious identification and affective response. For not only does Roberts’s account tell of Jesus and Mary’s love story, making her the Lord’s lover, but by having him speak of the fullness of God as the joining of the masculine and the feminine, the light and the darkness, the spiritual and the fleshly, it also challenges its gender-based exclusions and changes his teachings to value the feminine as equivalent to the masculine: ‘Men have forgotten the feminine and the darkness, and praise only the masculine and the light’, Roberts’s Jesus explains. ‘The children of Ignorance are the adversaries of God because they prevent the man and the woman from living out the fullness of God. The children of Ignorance perpetuate a false creation, a world in which one side of knowledge is stifled, in which barriers are set up between man and woman, body and soul, civilization and nature’ (1984: 82). Central to skopos theory are the notions of audience and of a target culture; how these are conceived of determines the translation strategies employed. In this book, I have similarly looked at women’s rewriting in terms of intended purpose, which I have identified as transforming cultural memory. As discussed in Chapter 3, the reception of contemporary women’s rewriting, focusing on the formal (derivative) relation of the rewriting to the source text, contrasted with its purpose as formulated in the more programmatic texts of feminist re-vision. The present framing of the issue of women’s rewriting in terms first of suspicion and of supplementation, then of translation, identifying its strategies as subordinated to a particular purpose and audience design, further underscores rewriting is an act of communication directed at achieving a particular effect with a particular intended audience. Such translations ostensibly rely less on criteria of formal fidelity to the source text than on adaptative ones of situation, purpose, and cultural context. In this way, translation theory shows women’s rewriting to be in effect a form of textual adaptation, producing divergent forms in different environments. As the action or process of modifying the source text so as to suit new 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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linguistic, social, and cultural conditions, translation is the means by which the text becomes adapted to its environment. Contemporary women’s rewriting embodies this notion of translation as a strategy of adaptation most eminently in the way its adaptive strategies of translation construe its audience of women readers as a market segment in the very process of identifying it as its target culture.

The liveness of the canon: paradoxes of decanonization Audre Lorde warned, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (1984: 123). It is the oft-noted central paradox of women’s rewriting that it reinforces what it aims to challenge and strengthens what it aims to weaken. However much rewriting may seek to compromise the authority of a text that is culturally central, it can never simply deny it. Steve Connor, coining the term ‘fidelity-in-betrayal’ to describe this paradoxical and ambivalent character of rewriting, explains, ‘the rewritten text must always submit to the authority of an imperative that is at once ethical and historical’ (1996: 167). In narrative terms, this imperative connects to the notion of a pre-scribed plot, as Margaret Atwood’s Wicked Stepmother, complaining of her bad reputation and lack of popularity, states: ‘You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t you ever forget it’ (1992: 30). If women’s rewriting inevitably reasserts the centrality of the canonical text it rewrites, does this then mean that rewriting is an ineffective tool for challenging the canon? That, as Julie Sanders submits, rewriting is ‘an inherently conservative genre’ (2006: 9), in effect remembering the values and beliefs by which it was shaped in the first place? Does it propagate them rather than disremember or forget? It is the argument of this book that contemporary women’s rewriting aims at transforming memory and the argument of this chapter that by rewriting canonical texts, it brings them within the purview of cultural communicative memory, returning them to that phase when memories are still in flux, subject to negotiation over the forms they are to take and the meanings they hold. Supplementing the canon with accounts of female experience, translating it into a (m)other tongue, rewriting brings its texts within the scope of everyday communicative memory ultimately to alter the meaning of those texts from which a culture derives its sense of identity. Reconfiguring the values it inscribes, it also gives the canon new relevance as it makes it speak to a new readership. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Looked at in the light of canon formation, as a translation that adapts the old text to a new social environment, women’s rewriting appears a necessary and integral part of canonicity. Canonical texts retain their privileged position and continue to fulfil their culturally central role precisely because they are read, taught, discussed, analysed, interpreted, and the object of public debate, even controversy – in short, because they are actively and communicatively remembered, reaffirming in the process the centrality of the values of the socially dominant groups who hold definitional power and the means of distribution. The processes of recollection that ensure their continued relevance are those that ensure their continued existence – keeping them alive, as it were, both in and as memory. Like those other, more broadly defined forms of rewriting André Lefevere identifies, in his Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, as crucial to the survival and fame – indeed, ‘canonization’ – of literary texts – translation, anthologization, criticism, editing – women’s rewriting participates in the evolution of literature as the repository of cultural memory. In her essay ‘Contingencies of Value’, Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes the processes of canonization as ‘a series of continuous interactions among a variably constituted object, emergent conditions, and mechanisms of cultural selection and transmission’, adding, ‘These interactions are, in certain respects, analogous to those by virtue of which biological species evolve and survive’ (1984: 30). Taking my cue from the discourse of cultural evolution evoked here, I can redefine women’s rewriting as a factor of literary life conceived as the reproduction of ideas, beliefs, and texts. On the one hand, women’s rewriting appears to be an act of reproductive cultural memory that invites rituals of cultural remembrance, for instance the rereading of canonical texts, as Le Guin’s Lavinia invites the rereading of Virgil’s Aeneid, as many reviewers have acknowledged. In this way, it functions as object mediating the ritual of cultural remembrance that is canonization, for as Bloom puts it, ‘the Canon is the true art of memory’ (1994: 34). On the other hand, it functions as the action and process of remembrance itself, allowing the old story to adapt and evolve to new contexts and new conditions.16 Performing co-memorative work, it carries the old story across into a(m)other culture, embodying literary life as the continued existence ensured by the adaptative processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance.



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Part IV

Mythical Returns





Winged Words: Women’s Rewriting as Remythologizing

Central to Nancy Fraser’s argument in ‘Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History’ is her claim that rather than offering a radical challenge to neoliberal capitalism, second-wave feminism may actually have fed it, supplying key ingredients in the form of cultural critiques it could resignify. For instance, feminism’s critique of androcentrism is currently re-elaborated as a ‘new romance of female advancement and gender justice’ that serves to increase participation in the capitalist machinery, not advance the cause of women (2009: 109–11).1 As I have argued throughout this book, the transformation of feminist ideals into fuel for capitalism can also be seen operating in women’s rewriting: what started as ‘an act of survival’, as Rich dramatically put it, was recuperated by the publishing industry as a cheap means of book production and a trick to be reproduced, turning a critique of how culture remembers its past into a commercially successful genre. Thus, the criticisms of society contemporary women’s rewriting formulated and the radical challenges it offered to collective and cultural memory also fed a conception of the past as product to be consumed, ushering in the age of memory as consumer good. Consumer memory culture, in this perspective, is the unexpected outcome of a feminist politics of recognition resignified for capitalist productivity. This, however, need not be the end of the story. As Fraser concludes, rather than the end of feminism, now is the time to think big and reclaim its best ideas, reintegrating the critiques of redistribution, recognition and representation in a comprehensive critique of injustice that is also a critique of capitalism (2009: 116–17). This claim Fraser couches – rather interestingly, I would say – in a language evocative, in its use of words starting with ‘re’, of that of the feminist activism of the 1970s she wishes to reanimate. It may well be that the grounds 159



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for her optimism, which in some ways recalls the optimism about the possibilities of a new start on sexual politics after 9/11, may soon vanish in the face of capitalism’s extraordinary resilience. Yet the prospect of a more just world to which literature contributes should not be dismissed beforehand. To the extent that a culture is its memory, this cultural memory remains vital in shaping ideas about self and other, justice and equality. This chapter explores what might be termed ‘the new re-visionary imperative’, seeking to reconnect women’s rewriting to social change in ways that resist easy resignification by neoliberalism and refunctioning by capitalism, reimagining it in ways that reactivate its emancipatory promise. It does so by exploring the mythopoetic potential of women’s rewriting – that is, its capacity for mythmaking, substituting oral traditions of retelling for the conceptual apparatus of ‘rewriting’. Contemporary culture, indeed, is not only characterized by consumption. Equally important are the new information and communication technologies which facilitate it, forming the technological base for the contemporary consumer culture of memory. ‘Liquid modernity’, as Bauman has termed the moment of neoliberal capitalism, is so light, fast, fickle, and fluid because of the new digital technologies, which enable the almost instantaneous travel of vast amounts of data, new mobilities, and novel ways of communicating. Displacing writing, computation, and digitalization have permeated contemporary culture and society at every level in ways that sustain what Walter Ong has referred to as a ‘secondary orality’ (2004 [1982]: 3). It is this orality, then, substituting new forms of writing for face-to-face oral communication, which forms the basis of my reassessment of contemporary women’s rewriting in the light of myth.

Rewriting in times of ‘secondary orality’ To begin with, a brief reflection on terminology is apposite. To speak of rewriting in times of orality may sound like a contradiction in terms, collapsing divergent cultures and systems of inscription, transmission, and storage. It poses questions about the appropriateness of the term ‘rewriting’, asking whether it is chosen advisedly among competing terms – Rich’s ‘re-vision’, to start with; but also ‘hypertextuality’ (Genette); ‘refraction’ or ‘diffraction’ (Lefevere); or, more generally, ‘recycling’, ‘retelling’, ‘adaptation’.2 Obviously, there are connotations that cling to these terms which make them signify in specific ways, emphasizing one or the other facet of the process or product ‘rewriting’. Thus, ‘recycling’ 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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emphasizes re-use and the relationship to waste; ‘adaptation’, on the contrary, stresses its affinity with life: in the realm of biology, adaptation designates the capacity of organisms to adapt to their changing environment or circumstances and thus to survive. Because the term ‘rewriting’ evokes a specific technology of language and of the intellect by invoking a particular technological apparatus – pen, pencil, paper, ink, print are all technologies of writing – it also asks questions about its implicit understanding of the relationship between word, self, and other on the one hand, and between individuals, social life, and the historical moment on the other – in short, about the perspective it implies on its episteme, its praxis and its mode of intervening in the world. Orality and literacy work differently as technologies of language, managing knowledge and cultural memory according to different systems and logics. In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton distinguishes between incorporating and inscribing memory practices, explaining that ‘[t]he transition from an oral culture to a literate culture is a transition from incorporating practices to inscribing practices’ (1989: 75). These incorporating and inscribing memory practices can be identified with what Diana Taylor has termed, in her book subtitled Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, the repertoire and the archive (2003). To elaborate: orality is performative. It belongs to the order of the repertoire, enacting a memory that is embodied, requires presence, and typically, despite claims to the contrary, does not remain the same. In contrast to this memory that transforms as it keeps, literacy produces ‘archival memory’, which is an inscribing memory that is assumed to be resistant to change and which, ‘separating the source of “knowledge” from the knower’, ‘works across distance, over time and space’ (Taylor 2003: 19–20). The differences in how oral and literate cultures remember, store and transmit information, as well as those that follow from the shift from print to digitalization, are crucial to the conceptualization of contemporary women’s rewriting.3 To think of the genre under scrutiny as rewriting, indeed, is to evoke a whole conceptual apparatus and a particular (and Western) conception of language and its relation to memory and experience: ‘The writing = memory/knowledge equation is central to Western epistemology’, Taylor points out (24). It is because contemporary women’s rewriting attempts to enter cultural memory through the literary market that I write about it as rewriting: its field of operation is the print culture of book publishing, which is a market culture of inscription and of accumulation that relies on the trace and the archive to unfold in historical time. This choice of term is not just a matter of ‘medial haunting’, then, with new media being 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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thought of in terms of older ones out of habit or lack of imagination (Sloane 1999; see also Bolter and Grusin 1999). Rather, it is because it has descriptive force. As I have argued throughout this book, the logic of contemporary women’s rewriting can be identified as that of writing as objectified speech: of language in a material form capable of being ‘transmitted over space and preserved over time’ (Goody 1968: 1), of being staked out, owned, stolen, packaged, and marketed, and also, of being ‘rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication’ (ibid.). Contemporary women’s rewriting, in other words, is archive-bound. It functions within writing as an archival system of transfer: it relies on the archival dimension of writing for the performance of re-vision – its ‘act of looking back’, as Rich phrases it – and aims to be integrated within the archive. This orientation towards the archive means women’s rewriting accepts, even reasserts and reinforces, the implicit hierarchy between writing and speech that stands at the heart of Western culture. It is indeed a topos of women’s rewriting that it in-scribes women’s stories in masculine traditions of writing and storytelling. This is because the male traditions of storytelling – canons of literature, literary history, history tout court – are equated with remembrance whereas women’s stories are identified as forgotten. ‘It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing’, Dinah says in the prologue to Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997: 4). Contrasting women’s traditions of oral storytelling and transmission with masculine ones of writing and historiography in narratives that speak of the evanescence of the former as opposed to the enduringness of the latter, novels such as Wolf’s Cassandra, Roberts’s The Wild Girl and Diamant’s The Red Tent all metafictionally refer to their own narrative procedure as an intervention in cultural memory that moves forgotten stories of women into the domain of remembrance. Implicit in these novels is that it is because writing and rewriting can enter the archive, and thus become part of that institutional repository of things designated as worth remembering, that women rewrite the old stories. Rewriting is thus defined as an act of inscription that implies a reordering of the archive. This connection to the archive is crucial, for the archive is more than ‘the paradigmatic institution of passive cultural memory’, a site for the unintentional accumulation of memories as decontextualized traces, ‘halfway between the canon and forgetting’, to recall Aleida Assmann’s phrase (2008: 102). It is a specific dimension of cultural memory in literate cultures, where it functions to legitimate certain statements and de-legitimate others. The archive is an instrument of power and repression, active in its archival impulse, productive of the past as paper, document, and record, founding of history as 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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a mode of memory that claims objectivity and scientificity yet forgets methodically. As such, it is not just that the archive is ‘the law of what can be said’, in Foucault’s well-known phrase (1982: 127). It is also that it can be returned to, which is what enables the building of it as culture’s ‘reference memory’ (Assmann 2008: 102): the repository of culturally sanctioned memory, what is designated as ‘memorable’, that is, as ‘worth remembering’. This function of the archive, and of writing’s archival dimension, is recurrently thematized in contemporary women’s rewriting. Explicitly engaging with the biblical archive, Dinah’s address to her reader in the prologue of Diamant’s The Red Tent frames her tale as an intervention in cultural memory metaphorized as objectified language that can be kept and passed on. In her account, it is because the female tradition of knowledge was not retained in writing but relegated to the margin of the written text that it fell out of the archive and out of the public domain of common knowledge. In The Wild Girl, Michèle Roberts similarly asserts the preponderance of the written over the spoken word. Invoking the materiality of writing and the special authority derived from language objectified, the novel confirms the ideology according to which writing is more durable and, consequently, more authoritative, than speech, which is seen as ephemeral. Presented as the recovered gospel of Mary Magdalene, found in the parched soil of Provence, The Wild Girl explicitly evokes the trope of the book to grant authority to her story, referring to itself as a book both in name and in form – an object buried in a stone jar, ‘dug up’ and ‘uncovered’, as well as ‘copied’ and ‘passed on’ (1984: 180–1). In the novel, the tangible materiality of the found book functions as guarantee of its reality and hence, attests to its veracity. Whereas the novel’s opening address rhetorically testifies to the book’s truth – ‘here begins the book of the testimony of Mary Magdalene’, it says, adding, ‘She wishes you to know that everything she sets down here is the truth, as she experienced it and as she remembers it. She has been, and she is, a witness to that truth’ (11; italics in the original) – at the close of the novel, this declaration is supplemented with a testimony to the book’s material reality. The invocation of writing and its archival possibilities to lend legitimacy to her book of revelation reasserts writing’s epistemological preponderance: ‘She who dug up and found and copied this book is the daughter of the daughter of she who wrote it. . . . We have uncovered and copied and passed on what she wrote in her book, as we have passed on by word of mouth the stories and songs that came from her’ (181). Throughout these rewritings, the topos of the evanescent tradition of female memory passed on by word of mouth is expressed in and 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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countered by written and published texts. This is no mere irony. Nor is it simply the result of the fact that speech, in writing, is always already writing. It is because contemporary women’s rewriting is directed towards the recuperation of writing, clearing literary space for female authorship and reclaiming the space of print and of the archive for women’s stories. The topos of women’s rewriting as a voicing of the silenced, discussed in Chapter 4, confirms this ideology of (re)writing: referring to what speaks not in writing – what Derek Attridge has termed ‘the silence of the canon’ (2004: 65ff.) – this silence is not the performative silence that is integral to speech, but a metaphor for the unwritten.

Performing memory To use the term contemporary women’s rewriting, then, is to stress that much of its emancipatory force resides in it as inscription and as an intervention within print culture. It is in the Western, ‘first-world’ context of books conceived as objects for keeping, affordable and capable of changing lives, that contemporary women’s rewriting emerged. By publishing their retellings of the old stories, writers and their publishers lay claim to these stories while re-circulating them, making them available for reading, for sharing and for passing on, as well as for keeping – in libraries, on bookshelves. However, as turnover cycles get shorter and shorter and books are remaindered ever faster, does not the archival role and status of writing as print change? The book’s sense of permanence, already affected by the rise of the mass-market paperback with its inexpensive and rapidly discolouring and disintegrating paper, decreases and, with that, its status as (fixed) point of reference. In addition, digitalization and the e-book put an end to the principle of scarcity that ruled the traditional archive: the digital archive is not a reference memory but one to which the principle of ‘the long tail’ applies. In retail, the concept of ‘the long tail’ means that instead of – or rather, alongside – selling large volumes of a small number of items – the strategy of bestsellers – businesses such as Amazon sell ‘less of more’: countless niche markets selling small quantities of a large number of unique items (Anderson 2006). This principle also applies to the digital archive, which is (still) an amorphous mass from which information can be retrieved and memories can be selected, thereby allowing for a customized and individualized memory. In contrast, wide availability of the same text is a central characteristic of literature as ‘portable monument’, to use Ann Rigney’s suggestive term: the literary text as part of the canon, ‘preserved as a recognized 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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part of a cultural heritage’ and ‘susceptible to being relocated’ (2004: 383).4 This availability is facilitated by the fixed and protected character of the textual monument, which not only functions as a guarantee for remembrance, its durability turning it at least potentially into a site of memory to which one can return for the purpose of remembering, but also enables dissemination, the transportation into new sites and situations.5 The printed book’s capacity as public medium, enabling representation in the public sphere, is certainly part of what makes the published rewriting a particularly interesting tool for social change. Yet if this constituted a strength of women’s rewriting, enabling it to function as a successful means of transforming cultural memory, this success came at a price. Monuments that are portable, to spin the metaphor, can be alienated; they can be turned into marketable commodities, sold as souvenirs of invented pasts. On the literary market, women’s rewriting transforms into a commodity like any other and signals the triumph of capitalism, not of feminism.6 Yet it would be wrong to simply assimilate writing to the archive, identifying the mediation of storytelling with the medium’s storing capacities. Indeed, if writing, in Western culture, has long functioned as supplement to oral communication, the so-called digital revolution brings a fundamental change to the relationship between the oral and the written. Multiplying in form and function, writing no longer serves primarily or exclusively to record and keep what is designated as memorable. Instead, the digital revolution completes the work initiated by the invention of printing and especially the mechanical printing press, which in turn enabled the so-called ‘paperback revolution’ and the attendant democratization of reading. Severing writing’s connection to the archive, digitalization effectively transforms writing from foundational supplement (as Derrida had it) into a form of speech. As such, it signals the emancipation of writing. Writing, indeed, does not only partake of an archival system of memory and transfer, but is to be understood as a form of mediation that operates on the cusp of the archival and the performative. Although women’s rewriting is archive-bound in its concern with reference memory, it is also concerned with the much more elusive circulating memory, engaging with stories as they are remembered and as they circulate in the domain of active, communicative cultural memory. This is illustrated by Wolf’s Cassandra, whose opening and closing paragraphs complicate the distinction the novel sets up between oral and written, female performance and male archive. The novel begins and ends with an impersonal narrator standing in front of the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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ruins of the fortress that ‘was the last thing [Cassandra] saw’, gazing onto the same stone lions under the same blue sky (1984: 3). This framing of Cassandra’s reminiscences about her life in Troy by a present-day narrator remembering the mythical seeress ‘on location’ highlights Wolf’s feminist desire to remember the past differently. It also implies memory is embodied and performed, re-experienced in the present of the one who does the remembering. The medium of the novel is, of course, writing. But it is writing representing consciousness, and as such, it is writing that appears to be bracketing off the problem of how it came to be writing.7 Yet because the novel engages with the opposition between writing and speech at other moments, as discussed above, it seems more appropriate to read the narrator’s act of identification at the site of memory as integral to the novel’s understanding of how memory works. In Cassandra, it is through identification that the past is summoned up and knowledge is transmitted: the narrator’s act of remembrance is triggered by the act of looking at the same sight and thus seeing what Cassandra saw. Identification suggests that the locus of remembrance is the (female) embodied mind. The narrator recalls Cassandra, literally re-members her story, by identifying as her. This identification is marked in the text by an ‘I’ that first refers to the narrator, then to Cassandra. ‘Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death’, the text reads, abruptly shifting from the narrator’s to Cassandra’s consciousness: ‘Here I end my days . . .’ (3). Representing the act of remembering as the narrator’s movement into the past, the novel suggests a line of knowledge transmission at the site of Cassandra’s death that can be read in several ways. First, it can be read as a story of reading, the reader immersing herself in Cassandra’s story much as happens in Rich’s poem ‘Diving Into the Wreck’. Coetzee’s reworking of Rich’s poem at the close of his novel Foe, as discussed in Chapter 4, is then also to be read as weaving Wolf’s Cassandra, published just a few years earlier, into its web of intertextual references. Second, it can also be read as a performance of memory, with the novel selfconsciously reflecting on its own act of remembering. This reading is supported by the fact that the novel was initially the fifth lecture in a series Wolf gave in 1982 under the title ‘Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen’ (Frankfort Lectures on Poetics), subsequently revised and expanded for independent publication. The novel’s genesis lies in Christa Wolf’s questions upon reading Aeschylus’s play: ‘Exactly how did she experience the collapse of all her alternatives? How is it that she has only this one way left open to her . . . ?’ (150). Its answer is to go to the place of Cassandra’s last sight. At the site of memory, it engages in an act of remembrance 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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that is also an act of identification, the result of which is the narrative of the novel. Thus the novel self-consciously represents the quest for the lost figure of Cassandra as a quest for self-knowledge through identification with imagined precursor lives. However much such an identification may be a contemporary projection – the projection, it has been argued, of a misguided feminism incapable of getting over the loss of the missing woman in culture (Beizer 2009: 35) – this is how stories are lived: ‘performance’s only life is in the present’, Peggy Phelan writes in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993: 143); and this, indeed, also applies to the performance of memory, whose only time is the (broad, all-engulfing, liquid) present. The novel’s way of remembering, performing memory through identification, suggests a line of knowledge transmission that construes memory as an incorporated memory whose locus is the female body. Memory in Cassandra is not simply equated with what is stored and kept in an archive. It is conceived as a performance of identification that takes place in the acts of writing and of reading, connecting the present to an imagined past in such a way as to create the longed-for sense of tradition. With her claims to knowing Cassandra grounded in a sense of shared knowledge, of an understanding between women that exists in spite of the differences that separate them across time and space, Wolf represents female memory as passing through the embodied mind and continuing to be transmitted even when the details of Cassandra’s life have long been forgotten – like vases communicating across generations, as it were. This wordless memory, however, only reaches the level of consciousness, of words and of narrative, when triggered through external stimuli – words, stones, material traces. Wolf’s ‘tiny rivulet’ of female memory does not only flow ‘alongside the river of heroic songs’ in parallel yet separate traditions that are gendered in content and in form. Rather, both ‘river’ and ‘rivulet’ debouch upon the sea of contemporary cultural memory, where they mix in ways that contradict their neat polarization in female-oral performance and male-written archive. Requiring the cue of archival traces – traces to which Diamant’s Dinah refers as ‘voiceless cipher in the text’ (1997: 1), and which can be identified as the stone lions in Wolf’s narrative – the memory embedded in a female lineage evocative of Virginia Woolf’s famous claim, in A Room of One’s Own, that ‘We think back through our mothers if we are women’ (1993: 69; pt IV), eventually resurfaces in its interface with these traces. It is this performative dimension of rewriting that I wish to elaborate upon in the rest of this chapter, as a raiding of the archive for the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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re-activation and re-circulation of a memory that was always passed on by word of mouth but that now employs writing as its technology. Writing is not just the opposite of speech in a binary that has been proven untenable; it is a kind of speech, and functions both as archive and as repertoire within contemporary culture. This is especially true of rewriting conceived as an instrument of change. Instead of thinking of rewriting as looking backwards, then, inviting comparison with a precursor text, and thus functioning within an archival system of transfer, I propound: might it not be more productive to consider rewriting as performance and act in the present? Such reframing of rewriting invites rethinking it not as a kind of after-writing (re-writing implying some kind of repetition and secondariness) but as the life of writing itself: storing as it stories, transforming as it keeps and transmits, and so, preserving while allowing change.

Mythical speech One way of thinking about the performative possibilities of rewriting is through the lens of myth. A myth is a story told and retold. It is also a story ‘everyone knows’, part of a culture’s circulating memory, and possessing no fixed or authoritative form (except when versions selected as memorable are preserved in the archive, where they acquire referential status). Traditionally identified as ‘word’ or ‘speech’, in the West, myth is also a false belief, a widespread but untrue story, a misrepresentation. It is this identification of myth with what is not rational and hence as a misconception that has led to its bad press. ‘Myth deals in false universals’, Angela Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman (1979: 5). Her definition of myth as ‘consolatory nonsense’ Carter derives from Roland Barthes, whose Mythologies (1957) modelled a practice for cultural criticism by convincingly demonstrating that myths need to be demystified and de-mythologized. I have already discussed how, in Touching Feeling, Eve Sedgwick confronts the New Historicist-feminist faith in exposure characteristic of the hermeneutics of suspicion of which Barthes’s Mythologies is such a supreme example. She argues, ‘Some exposés, some demystifications . . . have great effectual force. . . . Many that are just as true and convincing have none at all, however, and as long as that is so, we must admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside somewhere else than in their relation to knowledge per se’ (2003: 141). For Sedgwick, this means the project of exposure needs to be seen as historical. It is also to be viewed as ‘a possibility among other 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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possibilities’, not a categorical methodological imperative (124–5). But what if it has no effectual force, not only because of historical change, but also because such a hermeneutics trusts in reason – in fact, assumes rational behaviour will follow from the revelations and disclosures? What if demythologizing leads to no action and becomes an end in itself?8 What if it leads to no social change and brings about no political transformation? In a recent essay on the failure of Enlightenment thinking to account for the rise of nationalism and identity politics in Europe, the Dutch journalist Bas Heijne remarks upon the streak of unreasonableness that holds people in its thrall, observing with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man that there is no guarantee that rational behaviour is to follow upon understanding. Instead, consciousness may lead to ‘inertia – a conscious sitting down with folded arms’, as Dostoevsky writes in Notes from Underground (1992 [1864]: 18). More radically, basing himself on recent findings in the neurosciences, cognitive scientist George Lakoff breaks a lance for revising how the role of reason is conceptualized in politics. Observing voters do not vote their interests but ‘allow bias, prejudice, and emotion to guide their decisions’, he argues, ‘Enlightenment reason does not account for real political behavior because the Enlightenment view of reason is false’ (Lakoff 2009: 8). ‘Demythologizing’, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory explains, is ‘to expose the production of meaning, to critique cultural myths, to “unlearn” orthodox social values or doxa, and to establish more pluralistic perspectives’ (Slethaug 1993: 529). Contemporary women’s rewriting, as I have pointed out in the first chapters of this book, is a demythologizing, at once exposing the exclusion of women from the literature of the past, critiquing its gender ideology, and reconstituting its stories in a more inclusive way. But this is not all it is. As Michèle Roberts puts it in her author’s note to The Wild Girl, ‘I wanted to dissect a myth; I found myself at the same time recreating one’ (1984: 7). If rewriting-as-demythologizing trusts it implies social change, is this not because rewriting is also remythologizing? Myth, Barthes says, is ‘a type of speech’: ‘speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place. It is this brief act of larceny, this moment taken for a surreptitious faking, which gives mythical speech its benumbed look’ (1972 [1957]: 109; 125; emphasis in the original). Barthes’s definition of myth is useful for understanding contemporary women’s rewriting as a form of remythologizing. It puts theft at the heart of the procedure in a way that resonates suggestively with the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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conceptualization of women’s (re)writing as a stealing of language as discussed in Chapter 3; and it enables the conceptualization of rewriting as performance: as a kind of speech that changes even as it appears not to. In the myth as an act of larceny, a subterfuge takes place. This is its mystifying moment. It is also where its mythologizing power lurks. Mythologizing is a trick by which myth appears eternal: unchanged and always there. But appearances are misleading: myth only appears frozen in time. It may look ‘benumbed’ – Barthes speaks of ‘l’aspect transi de la parole mythique’ (1957: 211) – yet in reality, myth changes; indeed, is changed, since the act of larceny, of stealing and restoring, involves an agent. For Barthes, it is the misleading appearance of myth that needs to be uncovered: its look of inevitability – of seeming always to have been there. The revelation of false consciousness breaks the power of the ideology it asserts, freeing subjects to think for themselves. Taking our cue from the critique of Enlightenment reason, it becomes clear that from the perspective of cultural memory, the gesture of demythologizing may be little more than a laying bare of the device. It reveals how the transmission of knowledge is mediated and transformed, yet has no real or significant effect upon social behaviour. This is because, Lakoff explains, demythologizing does not reframe what it demystifies. In fact, demythologizing not only leaves the frame intact; it actually inscribes it deeper in the mind. In cognitive terms, it activates the conceptual frames that are instantiated in the synapses of the brain. In contrast, the act of larceny that is mythical speech may present a more effective instrument of remembrance and forgetting. It has long been observed that the power of myth resides on the political Right (Barthes 1957; Lakoff 2009). This is not because of some intrinsic connection between myth and politics. Instead, it is a historical development, and there is no reason why myth should not be used to sell another ideology. Indeed, if rewriting is about change, if its aim is change, is this change not best achieved in the act of changing while preserving? Seen in this light, mythical speech is a performative technology of memory that enables the reframing of the stories that structure our understanding of the world. As such, it is transformative, not conservative. Before proceeding to examine in what ways myth is particularly adapted to the contemporary liquid condition, there is an objection to myth that needs to be addressed in this context. This is the notion, propounded by Joanna Russ and defended by Teresa de Lauretis, that myth is Oedipal and propagates a male perspective. ‘Women cannot 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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write – using the old myths’, Russ notoriously ends her essay ‘What Can A Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write’ (2007 [1972]: 211). Feminist scholars who take myth seriously have long known this is not the only story. In addition, as Rita Felski observes in her critique of de Lauretis’s influential discussion of the myth of Oedipus as the basis for Western narrative and plot, ‘what could be more authoritarian than insisting that every story is really that same old story . . . ?’ (2003: 105). Clearly, we need a more sophisticated understanding of myth than this: one that does not simply pit it against a rational view of the world; one that does not see it as telling the same story over and over again; and one that allows for it to have real world effects.

Liquid mythologies Myth’s continued repetition with a difference, replicating consumer culture’s ‘new and improved’ versioning of consumer products, accords well with the cyclical rhythms of consumer culture. Because myth, by its very nature as oft-told tale, implies retelling, it provides a model for inscribing literature in the present-day economy of waste and instant obsolescence, where long-term commitments make way for short-term projects, which are directed at immediate returns. This can be illustrated by the publication project of the independent British publishing-house Canongate entitled ‘The Myths’. The series was launched at the 2005 Frankfurter Buchmesse as a global publishing venture with plans for the worldwide publication, over the next three decades, of a hundred myths retold ‘in a contemporary and memorable way’ by authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Chinua Achebe, and A.S. Byatt. To advertise the series on the publishing firm’s website, Canongate’s owner, Jamie Byng, used as a motto the phrase ‘We want to tell the story again’. This phrase he derived from Winterson’s inaugural rewriting of myth for the series: ‘I want to tell the story again’ is the leitmotif of Winterson’s Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles from the perspective of Atlas. The novel can be read as programmatic for the series. In the introduction, Winterson explains the choice of subject as one that imposed itself on her: ‘When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world . . . was waiting to be written. Re-written. The recurring language motif of Weight is “I want to tell the story again”’ (2005: xiv). In the context of the marketing of The Myths as a new and innovative product – Canongate is founding member of a global alliance of 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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publishers that prides itself on, among other things, ‘innovation in marketing and commercial success’ – the phrase inevitably also means ‘we want to sell the story again’. The sales pitch reveals retelling to be a retailing strategy. In effect, it promises ever new and improved reading experiences – much like any other consumer experience. In the context of the post-Fordist literary market, myth thus appears to form a mode of retelling the old stories that lends itself particularly well to cooptation by consumer culture. In this sense, it is no different than rewriting. As I have argued apropos of women-identified firstperson retrospective rewritings (but the same might be said of other types of niche rewritings such as the prequel, sequel or inquel), texts that retell well-known stories form easily marketable products, selling recognizable ‘branded’ products, not unknown writers or unfamiliar plots. Yet, if myth is easily adapted to the cycles of consumption, does this mean it is inevitably shaped by it? Is consumer culture so all-devouring that it also incorporates myth, or is myth bigger than that? Riding the waves of ever-shorter innovation cycles, myth allows for permanent adaptation to new conditions, as well as to new futures. This puts adaptability at the heart of the definition of myth: myth is a highly adaptable form. Myths, G.S. Kirk writes in his influential study The Nature of Greek Myth, are stories that ‘have succeeded in becoming traditional’ (1974: 27; emphasis in the original). The dialectic relationship that exists between myth and its social environment implies that they are interdependent. Myth depends on its environment, using it while suiting itself to it. It fits itself to the new condition yet also incorporates it to ensure its own survival – to succeed in becoming traditional, as Kirk puts it. To the extent that adaptation is a modification generated by a change in its context of existence, myth thrives on change: permanent stasis implies the death of all life-forms. And as it retains a sense of futurity in its implication of ever further retellings, myth also opens up to the future. Jeanette Winterson’s recent fiction presents a useful source for the analysis of the possibilities myth embodies for women’s rewriting in the present. To be sure, this fiction is not feminist in the sense of engaging with reconfigurations of individual or collective identity through feminist positions. It may therefore be worth recalling here that Winterson has long disengaged herself from any association with feminism her early work still allowed, and that readers who came to women’s writing as an emotionally vested field of inquiry in the years of Winterson’s appearance of the literary scene have learned to recognize and acknowledge this disengagement. This does not mean 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Winterson’s fiction cannot be seen to speak to issues that are also issues for feminism and women’s (re)writing. After all, myth and the retelling of myth are central to Winterson’s conception of her writing and her novels frequently rework culturally central texts. As a matter of fact, starting with her self-representation as a little girl ‘just beginning to enjoy a rewrite of Daniel in the lions’ den’ with Fuzzy Felt in her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985: 12–13), Winterson’s narrators regularly show a concern with storytelling that is foremost a concern with mythical retelling. This self-consciousness serves to draw attention to how she applies oral techniques of storytelling to the writing of literature and deliberately brings oral traditions together with literary ones. Phrases like the haunting ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me’ of The Passion (1987: 5) and the above-mentioned leitmotif from Weight, ‘I want to tell the story again’ are evidence that the novels are self-consciously engaged in storytelling as re-telling. ‘My work is full of Cover Versions’, she acknowledges in the introduction to Weight (2005: xiv). In fact, all of Winterson’s recently published books are retellings. These books include stories for children and ‘to be cherished by families’, as Winterson pitches the illustrated Christmas story The Lion, The Unicorn and Me (2009) on her website, as well as stories derived from operas: Midsummer Nights (2009) is a collection of short stories written by contemporary British authors that Winterson published on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival. It is based on the principle ‘take a story and shift it’, as she explains in the Introduction: ‘Why not take an opera and shift it? All the stories in this collection have done exactly that; found a piece of music and worked it into a new shape’ (2009: 1). Retelling is central to Weight. The novel not only retells the myth of Atlas and Heracles, but also takes retelling as its theme. Its leitmotif, as I have pointed out, is the phrase ‘I want to tell the story again’, and this ‘recurring language motif’, as Winterson calls it (2005: xiv), speaks of narrative desire as desire for re-narration, for repetition and myth’s return. Canongate published Weight concurrently with Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), a retelling of the myth of Penelope and Odysseus from the perspective of Penelope, and Karen Armstrong’s meta-mythical A Short History of Myth (2005), which sets out a programme for what the Daily Mail dubbed Canongate’s ‘ambitious act of mass story-telling’. In fact, the three books are also sold as The Myths Boxset (2005), a presentation that underlines the books’ programmatic nature and suggests a collectability that has been frustrated by the 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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shift from ‘lovely hardbacks’ to paperbacks (as readers have expressed on Canongate’s website). An inaugural rewriting in Canongate’s series The Myths, then, Weight explicitly reflects on myth’s relationship to history and the individual life, countering the view of myth as destiny with myth as multiple telling and choice. In this context, it is interesting to observe that Winterson did not pick a female myth to retell – as Margaret Atwood did with the myth of Penelope in The Penelopiad (2005), Ali Smith with the myth of Iphis in Girl Meets Boy (2007) and Dubravka Ugrešic´ with the story of Baba Yaga, the old witch-like character from Slavic mythology who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children, in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009). Instead, Winterson picks the male, even masculine myth of Atlas burdened with carrying the world because it enables her to explore the themes of ‘loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom’ (2005: xiv).9 Mythical retelling is also central to Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). The novel chronologically follows upon the publication of Weight. It can thus be read as following up on the inquiry into the power of mythical retelling carried out in Weight, tapping the same source of storytelling, exploring other avenues, and applying any insights her meditation on myth at Canongate’s invitation may have generated. The Stone Gods explicitly relates retelling to remembering, invoking a lost art of storytelling as an ars memoria – an art of memory. This connection Winterson explains in an interview: ‘Art began as a memory-system. Before we knew how to write, the oral tradition allowed important events to be preserved . . . we are in danger of losing continuity with the past’ (Andermahr 2009: 125). The novel compellingly poses the question of our responsibility towards the future, showing it to be inscribed in the present rather than to be reached for out of the past. Framing the obligation to remember and to retell in terms of oral traditions of storytelling and mythmaking, it suggests mythical retelling as a technology of memory fitting to the liquid present condition.

Remembering the future How does The Stone Gods articulate the moral imperative of cultural remembrance today? And how does it help to understand myth as an open form of retelling connected to social change, capable of escaping resignification by capitalism, and responding at once to the need to remember and to the necessity for an engagement in a dialectic of past and future, ideology and utopia? In The Stone Gods, the future is perpetually on the horizon. First represented in the world of Orbus, a seemingly near-future 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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of rampant consumerism, technological advance, total state control, and impending ecological catastrophe, it then returns in the apocalyptic postatomic world of Wreck City, the surplus world of Tech City that resembles Orbus but takes place 65 million years later. Both Orbus and Wreck City are dystopian worlds satirizing our own. Their resemblances suggest that, as Karl Marx notoriously had it, ‘History repeats itself’.10 They also suggest that history as progress is a myth, caught in the cyclical return of ‘the same old story’. Speaking of the future as one of our own making, these worlds also represent futures resulting from a failure to learn from the past and an inability to imagine the future as other than more of the present. Shown to be the consequence of a cultural lack of appreciation for books, literature, history, and the imagination, the repeating worlds of The Stone Gods formulate a scathing critique of contemporary culture – a critique Winterson also articulates in texts written (and spoken) about the same time, for instance in her Belle van Zuylen lecture entitled ‘The Cup, the Knife, the Coat, the Remedy’ (2007). They also present a powerful intervention in myth’s relationship to historical time and in the dynamics of the present to the literary past and to imaginable futures. Winterson’s The Stone Gods is ostensibly about ecological disaster resulting from consumerism, warfare, our formidable capacity for producing waste, and the lure of technology as instrument of domination. It is also, and perhaps foremost, about the stories – indeed, the myths – that sustain contemporary society. One of these myths is Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century novel of a shipwreck who by dint of his labour survives for twenty-eight years on a desert island, the last four years in the company of Friday, the native who becomes his servant. Robinson Crusoe is usually read as a myth of civilization as progress, fuelled by radical individualism, a Protestant work ethic, and the accumulation of capital. In Robinson Crusoe, the potentialities of the individual find their realization in the conquest of the environment and in the subjugation of the native subject. In The Stone Gods, Winterson echoes, rewrites, and recreates the very male and masculinist myth of Robinson Crusoe, a novel that, Ian Watt pointed out half a century ago, ‘seems to fall . . . naturally into place with . . . the great myths of our civilization’ (1951: 95). Allowing the myth to interact with the narratives of history, The Stone Gods both repeats the myth and remythologizes it, tapping into myth’s radical potential for open-endedness. Mythical retelling is the fluid encounter of the individually lived life with the told story, the liquid memory inscribing the individual with the collective – or, alternatively, allowing the collective and cultural memory to be impacted by the individual. 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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How, then, does Winterson’s The Stone Gods model rewriting as remythologizing? As I have already pointed out, The Stone Gods revolves around repetition: the repetition of the same mistakes – or, as one of the characters puts it, ‘A repeating world – same old story’ (2007: 49). A fictional world made of possible worlds, the novel is, in fact, itself a repeating world. It is divided in four parts, each situated in a different time and place, yet each leading to ecological disasters, all of them caused by a culturally sanctioned masculine drive to domination, colonisation, and conquest. These parts are linked through repetition, citation, and recurrence, and by centring on a protagonist of the same name (though not always of the same gender). In the first part, entitled ‘Planet Blue’, Billie Crusoe is a recalcitrant female citizen of Orbus, interested in history, the past and the natural life, living on a farm, and refusing to subject herself to the high-tech life of Orbus with its ‘wombfree’ births and ‘genetically Fixed’, forever young-looking people. Because of her recalcitrance, Billie is put on the starship that is sent off to explore the newly discovered Planet Blue that is to present humanity with a second chance and the possibility of beginning again. On this ship, called Resolution in remembrance of the one commanded by the British explorer James Cook, Billie falls in love with an artificially intelligent and stunningly beautiful robot named Spike. Their story comes to an end as Planet Blue is prematurely destroyed by the miscalculations of the crew’s captain, who meant to kill the dinosaurs but ruined the entire planet. This, we eventually learn, was 65 million years ago. In the second part, entitled ‘Easter Island’, Billy Crusoe, now male, is shipwrecked on Easter Island in 1774, left behind during Captain Cook’s second voyage of discovery in search of the mythical Terra Australis. On Easter Island, ecological disaster results from trying to appease and worship the island’s Stone Gods. As the last of the trees is felled, leading to the total destruction of the island and its inhabitants, Billy falls in love, this time with a Dutch maroon named Spikkers. The third part takes place ‘Post 3War’ – post-World War III. In the imagined near-future of an apocalyptic post-atomic world that follows ‘the brutal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of twenty-first century world’ (164), Billie is now an employee of MORE-Futures (MORE is the name of the global company that rules the post-Third World War) working on the Robot Spike (now only a head). Walking out of the gardens of MORE-Futures with Spike in a sling, Billie get lost in Wreck City, a kind of Blade Runner-like final frontier on the edge of Tech City. There they are taken in by Friday, a former economist with the World Bank, who offers them shelter in his book-lined shack. Eventually, on a disused 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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Lovell telescope, they pick up a signal from the past that turns out to be the chronicle of the first Billie Crusoe’s arrival on Planet Blue, a planet described as ‘strikingly similar to our own planet, sixty-five million years ago, with the exception of the dinosaurs, of which we have no record on Orbus’ (202). Crucial for Winterson’s treatment of the Robinson Crusoe theme is that she evokes the myth and the worldview it sustains but does not actually go back to the myth itself to set it correct. Neither looking back nor entering the old text from a new critical direction, Winterson’s The Stone Gods does not simply demythologize Robinson Crusoe to show it to be about colonialism, capitalism, and conquest. One reason for this may be that this is received knowledge: it has been repeated often enough for all to know that already. Another may be that this knowledge changes very little. Winterson then demonstrates her awareness that mythical speech can achieve more to transform consciousness than demythologizing can ever do. Instead, she challenges the myth’s place in contemporary culture – its ways of sustaining the contemporary worldview, its function as dominant ideology – a challenge to the present way of treating the world she frames as a repetition of the hubris of Robinson Crusoe and his likes. In other words, rather than working in terms of closure or as the fulfilment of a (feminist) promise, The Stone Gods addresses re-narration as possibility. Formulating a feminist critique of contemporary culture, the repeating worlds of The Stone Gods also show history as teleology and as progress to be itself a myth, caught in a cycle of repetition and return. Instead of buying into the myth of history as leading to more (and ‘MORE’), the novel seems to suggest, we need to ‘trust . . . in the very power of myth to change and, in the process, to change us’, as Laurence Coupe puts it, ‘to maintain the interaction of myth and history’ (189), starting with the interaction of myth with our personal histories.

Myth and memory Myth, then, is not only about its ‘eternal return’, as Mircea Eliade had it, its coming back, again and again, whether in the same or in a different form. Nor are its literary uses confined to what T.S. Eliot once called ‘the mythical method’, which he defined as ‘simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (1923: 483). In contrast to such a retrospective use of myth as ‘manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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and thus attributing an archetypal, unchangeable quality to the (fictional) world it literally inscribes, myth here is taken to be defined by its capacity for change, for adaptation and transformation. Already in Weight, Winterson explored the possibilities of mythical retelling by weaving her personal story into the fabric of the myth. This, of course, is how myths are lived; in many oral traditions of storytelling, myths are told in the first person. As used in The Stone Gods, myth is not about its meaning for the individual, but for collective, cultural identity. As a technology of cultural memory, myth here is not simply about repeating worlds and repeated stories. Instead, it is about its being set back in cultural orbit, its being put back in circulation. And in this re-circling and recycling, what matters is its encounter with the individual subject’s life-story. This movement of myth’s return as rewriting is explicitly stated in what may be called ‘the book within the book’ episode in Winterson’s novel. The episode is based on a true event.11 On the London Tube, a reader finds the manuscript of The Stone Gods and starts to read it. The anecdote, which Winterson works into her subsequent version of her novel, connects the individual lived life to the return of myth. For as she weaves the story of her own adoption into this line of The Stone Gods, Winterson also brings in the reader as rewriter and re-teller. It is by picking up the text and reading it that the fictional world is actualized, potentially to be inscribed with one’s own story, for as Billie points out, ‘The pages are loose – it can be written again’ (203). As the interfacing of the personal story and the returning myth, reading, retelling, and rewriting constitute the encounter or intervention that is to prevent the world repeating itself. The writer, however, can only try and create the conditions for this encounter to happen. As Billie explains, it was she who left the manuscript there, ‘A message in a bottle. A signal. But then I saw it was still there . . . round and round on the Circle Line. A repeating world’ (203). The metaphor of the myth on the Circle Line, orbiting London’s metropolitan life and waiting to be picked up and actualized in reading, retelling, and rewriting, suggests myth is a story that holds the possibility of change. Retelling myth temporarily opens up the narrative to a new future as potentiality while linking up to the past as already there. In this way, mythical retelling enables the thinking of change outside of historical teleological time. This is evidently not the same as to say that every new retelling becomes assimilated to some mythical origin or merely repeats it. Instead, what I here propose is not to conceive of myth as oriented towards a past it (re)actualizes, but rather to see it as 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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a particular kind of story and storytelling that, by its very nature and definition, implies change and transformation in and through retelling. As Coupe points out, ‘All myths presuppose a previous narrative, and in turn form the model for future narratives. Strictly speaking, the pattern of promise and fulfilment need never end; no sooner has one narrative promise been fulfilled than the fulfilment becomes in turn the promise of further myth-making’ (1997: 108). Myth as ‘permanent possibility’, to use Coupe’s expression (1997: 100), is in fact repeatedly underscored by Jeanette Winterson. In Weight, for instance, she develops the metaphor of ‘the book of the world’, speaking of ‘all the stories [being] here, silt-packed and fossil-stored’ (2005: 6). This thought is echoed in the last sentence of The Stone Gods, a self-quotation that reads, ‘Everything is imprinted for ever with what once was’ (2007: 207). There is a difference of emphasis, to be sure, between the notion, central to Weight, that the stories are there, ‘waiting to be written. Re-written’ (2005: xiv) and the notion, central to The Stone Gods, that ‘the universe is an imprint’ (2007: 87). Indeed, in The Stone Gods, this imprint, this already written – and written on the body of the universe – is conceived in terms of memory and forgetting – of forgetting the lessons of history, yet of remembering that there once was a pristine place. As Billie muses, ‘Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes’ (2007: 87). And there is a change of scale, moving from myth-making as world-making to the retelling of myth as constituting a universe, that is, as constituting an entire system of worlds. It is, then, in this shift of emphasis and this change of scale, in the self-reflective movement of mythical retelling as the remembering of myth and the forgetting of history, that The Stone Gods most powerfully intervenes in the discussion about what retelling can do in liquid times. The repeating worlds inside the novel evidently prove myth to be a narrative mode particularly appropriate to the fluid and ever-shifting mixture of history, memory, and fiction that presently make up our various versions of the past and of the future. At the same time, the universe totalling all these repeating worlds represents a conceptual system that seems the fictional equivalent of that contemporary liquid modernity capable only of assimilating more pasts into its ever broadening present.

Multiperspectival memory By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, as liquidity more and more comes to define the sociocultural aspects of late modernity, calls for the remythologizing of culturally significant memories 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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for women become increasingly pressing. This need for retelling as a means for keeping memory alive and part of everyday communication and debate is expressed particularly forcefully in Elaine Showalter’s recent history – ‘celebration’, as the Vintage paperback edition reads – of American women writers, A Jury of her Peers (2009; 2010). In this study, she constructs a history that is also a canon with the express aim to establish ‘what literary historians call “a definitive, unmistakable, and powerful heritage”’, so that women writers would no longer be forgotten or left in obscurity (511). Showalter’s bold defence of a canon of women’s writing reasserts the importance both of communicative memory and of inscription in the archive as it insists on the need to discuss, comment, and critique the heritage it establishes. As such, it also reasserts the necessity both for active remembrance and for sustained ‘presence’. Indeed, if a technologically driven presentification of the past, for instance through the digital availability of a wide corpus of texts, changes the way contemporary culture remembers the past, this cultural memory through ‘presence’ still necessitates the (human) agency of active remembering. The transformative potential of Winterson’s myth on the circle line is only realized in its reader’s act of re-membering the future. Likewise, Le Guin’s Lavinia speaks of herself as a figure ‘able to remember my life and myself’ (2008: 3), yet her nominal presence in literary history, while guaranteeing her survival both as trace and as presence, requires her prise de parole for her actually to re-enter cultural memory. ‘If I must go on existing century after century’, LeGuin has Lavinia say, ‘then once at least I must break out and speak’ (4). Allowing Lavinia’s voice to be heard, Le Guin joins the storyteller’s active act of remembrance to the memory as mere presence, image of a present past. Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice so that it will mingle and resonate with the manifold voices, and silences, of literary history. As such, her ambition is not to correct her misrepresentation, nor to fill a narrative blank, but simply for her to get some ‘room’ and some ‘air’ (4) – some space within a cultural memory that is necessarily plurivocal, for every retelling of necessity adds not only a perspective, but also a voice to the canon of texts to which people refer themselves for a sense of identity and of belonging. This multiperspectival and plurivocal character of mythical retellings was already emphasized by Christa Wolf, when in her Medea: Stimmen (1998) – literally, Medea: Voices but translated in English as Medea: A Modern Retelling (1998) – she told Medea’s story not just in the voice and from the perspective of Medea, but also gave 10.1057/9780230294639 - Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting, Liedeke Plate


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the accounts of her husband, Jason, of her pupil Agameda, of King Creon’s astronomers, Akamas and Leukon, and of his daughter, Glauce. Wolf’s aim was no doubt to juxtapose these voices, showing events to hold different meanings for different people. Yet she also intended what she refers to as ‘achronism’: the ‘interpenetration’ of epochs (1998: vii), which can be identified as the presentification of the past, and which she conceives of as the meeting point of present and past (1). The interpenetration of time and of echoing voices in Christa Wolf’s Medea, like the conversation with the dead that occurs in Le Guin’s Lavinia, speaks of the nature of contemporary cultural memory as capacious and many-voiced, no longer limited to ‘the characteristic store of repeatedly used texts, images and rituals in the cultivation of which each society and epoch stabilizes and imports its self-image; a collectively shared knowledge of preferably (yet not exclusively) the past, on which a group bases its awareness of unity and character’, as Jan Assmann defined it (1988: 15). Instead, the liquid condition of late modernity, fostering a fluid sense of time and of identity, encourages participation in the production of tradition and of a sense of belonging through multiple acts of cultural remembrance, remythologizing myths old and new as the means to self-assertion, self-determination, and self-creation. The freedom this implies is immense, as are the possibilities for the future. For by putting the burden of the past on individual choice, tradition, identity, and belonging become responsibilities that cannot be taken lightly in view of the futures they may project or disremember.



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1 Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories 1. A notable exception to this trend is Bertha’s treatment in Classical Comics’ Jane Eyre: The Graphic Novel (Brontë and Corzine 2008). 2. Much has been written on writing as a medium of remembrance, and scholars have been discussing literature as cultural memory for some time now, exploring the specificity of literature as a medium for cultural memory (e.g. Rigney 2004; Grabes 2005; Erll and Rigney 2006). 3. In fact, we may also need to think the preoccupation with identity as linked with consumer culture. Cultural critics have convincingly argued that identitycategories such as adolescence, for instance, have been produced as an identity to be targeted as a market (Buhler 2002). Recently, Bauman (among others) has remarked on ‘the liquid modern reprocessing and recycling manipulation of identity’ (2008: 13). 4. In this I align myself with feminist thinkers like Elizabeth Grosz, who has similarly broken a lance for moving beyond received feminist thought to project what feminist thinking could and should be. See also Brian Morris’s ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About “Walking in the City”’, in which he suggests ways in which key concepts of cultural studies could be usefully rethought. More generally, the journal Theory, Culture and Society has been keeping track of the major conceptual overhaul that is upon us in a number of special issues. See, for instance, its Special Issue on Problematizing Global Knowledge edited by Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Ryan Bishop, and John Phillips (vol. 23, nos 2–3, May 2006). 5. Among recent work on the Holocaust and the globalization of memory, one wants to note especially Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2006 [2001]) and Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009). 6. Mathijsen’s talk of ‘the natural place for the kitchen’ (2007: 9) as something historical that has gone lost is a case in point. Have feminist studies of environmental planning not demonstrated that there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ design for homes, and that this design inscribes power relations which have nothing ‘natural’ about them? Surely, there are also good reasons for destroying some of the old . . . 7. Not all things, surprisingly: we tend to buy a new washing machine only when needing one because the old is broken. Unlike cars, which are very much part of how people identify themselves to others, bicycles for instance are much less caught in the cycles of innovation that drive accelerated obsolescence for objects like (cell)phones and televisions. 8. This ‘emotional-memorial value’ is, of course, central to the so-called experience economy – an economy that is geared, its theorists Pine and Gilmore (1999) have argued, towards producing not goods and services, but memorable experiences. 182



Notes

9. For the complex and sometimes ambivalent relationship of women’s writing to the women’s movement, see for instance Sara Maitland’s ‘Novels are Toys not Bibles, but the Child is Mother to the Woman’, in which she discusses ‘feminist novels’ and what, as a writer, she sees and experiences as the ‘exorbitant demands’ that are being laid on writers identified as ‘feminist’ (1979: 206–7). Imelda Whelehan’s The Feminist Bestseller (2005) is a sustained effort to elucidate the impact of feminism on popular women’s fiction. 10. In an ironic twist of the rewriting as recovery paradigm, rewritings are increasingly marketed as revealing hidden secrets. Thus, a reprint edition of Jane Fairfax provides a new tag that emphasizes the ‘mystery revealed’: The Secret Story of the Second Heroine in Jane Austen’s Emma (1997). Jane Fairfax is presented as part of Joan Aiken’s Jane Austen Entertainment series, which also include Mansfield Revisited (1984) and Lady Catherine’s Necklace (2000). Stephanie Barron is the author of a whole Jane Austen Mystery series, including Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (1996) and Jane and the Barque of Frailty (2006). There is also a Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mystery series, authored by Carrie Bebris, with titles such as Pride and Prescience (2004), Suspense and Sensibility (2005), and North by Northanger (2006). 11. Witness also the increasing popularity of women’s writing from the Global South and their marketing as ‘feminist’ and ‘political’ (Hogan 2008). 12. I have adapted Marc Roudebush’s English translation of Nora slightly, to make it a more literal translation. 13. The historian and psychologist Eelco Runia suggests ‘metonymy’ as another model (Runia 2006). I pursue this idea in Chapter 4.

2 En/gendering Cultural Memory 1. In fact, I have done so myself, in classes of world and comparative literature taught at Indiana University and James Madison University between 1992 and 1997. For a discussion of rewriting as a concept in literary history, see Fokkema (2003). 2. For a discussion of American postmodern fiction in the light of rewriting, see Moraru (2001). 3. See, for instance, the poetry collections Ovid in English (Martin 1998) and Ovid Metamorphosed (Terry 2001). 4. There are, of course, antecedents, for instance in the writings of the late twelfth-century poet Marie de France or in those of Christine de Pisan, writing the beginning of the fifteenth century. 5. In her introduction to The New Feminist Criticism, Elaine Showalter recalls that ‘In the United States, feminist criticism was created by literary and academic women’ while in Great Britain, it had its institutional bases ‘outside the universities, in radical politics, journalism, and publishing’ (1985: 5–8). 6. The reference is, of course, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian novel Herland. 7. The quotation is from James’s preface to the (revised) New York Edition of The Golden Bowl (1909), in which he also writes, ‘To revise is to see, or to look over, again – which means in the case of a written thing neither more nor less than to re-read it. I had attached to it, in a brooding spirit, the idea



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8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

Notes of re-writing – with which it was to have in the event, for my conscious play of mind, almost nothing in common. I had thought of re-writing as so difficult, and even so absurd, as to be impossible – having also indeed, for that matter, thought of re-reading in the same light. . . . What rewriting might be was to remain – it has remained for me to this hour – a mystery. On the other hand the act of revision, the act of seeing it again, caused whatever I looked at on any page to flower before me as into the only terms that honourably expressed it . . .’ (2009: lii). For feminist critiques of New Criticism, see for instance Millett (1970: xii) and Heilbrun and Stimpson (1975: 62). I have selected the translation of Cixous’s text as published in Diacritics in 1997 because it captures more fully the 1970s rhetoric. See Cixous and Clément (1986) for a translation of the full text of La jeune née. It first appeared in English in the journal Signs in 1976, in a revised version of an essay published the previous year in a special issue of L’Arc on Simone de Beauvoir and the feminist movement, edited by Catherine Clément. Sarton’s poem proceeds to posit anger as a feeling to explore as she recognizes the ‘frozen rage’ she sees on Medusa’s face as her own and concludes, ‘This is the gift I thank Medusa for’. This anger is also explored in Ann Stanford’s ‘Medusa’ (1977), a poem which retells the myth from Medusa’s perspective. Recalling her rape and the anger that turned her hair to serpents, Stanford’s Medusa ultimately finds herself alone, prisoner of herself and her feeling. It is worth noting that earlier in the twentieth century, both Louise Bogan and Sylvia Plath found poetic inspiration in the myth of Medusa. Bogan’s ‘Medusa’ (1921) is a poem in which the encounter with the mythological figure gives way to a ‘dead scene’ in which ‘Nothing will ever stir’; in Plath’s ‘Medusa’ (1962), a poem about her mother, the encounter leads to the conclusion that ‘There is nothing between us’. All poems are included in Marjorie Garber’s The Medusa Reader (2003). In Subversive Intent, Susan Suleiman speaks of Cixous’s novel Souffles as weaving a negative and a positive intertextuality (1990: 129). For surveys of artistic representations of Medusa, see Siebers (1983) and Garber and Vickers (2003). See also her essay ‘Le Sexe ou la tête?’ (1976), translated as ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ (1981). This also explains the romance of feminism with Angela Carter from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories on. For as Sage reminds us, the relations between Carter and feminism were long strained, ‘since her insistence on reclaiming the territory of the pornographers – just for example – set her against feminist puritans and separatists’ (1994: 40–1). In an interview with John Haffenden, Carter explains that ‘some of the stories in The Bloody Chamber are the result of quarrelling furiously with Bettelheim’ (1985: 83). I discuss the relationship between rewriting and translation – translation as a kind of rewriting in another language and rewriting as a kind of translation – at more length in Chapter 5. It may be interesting to observe that when she died, in 1992, Angela Carter left the synopsis of a novel about Adèle with her publishers (Clapp 1993: x). Another instance of uncanny doubling is the rewriting of feminist classics from the male point of view; for instance, Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway



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(1999), rewriting Virginia Woolf’s novel from Richard Dalloway’s perspective. No longer confined to writing about women or from a female point of view, women writers from the 1990s onward feel free to write about anything they want (Showalter 2009: 494). This includes rewriting female-authored classics as in Janet Aylmer’s Darcy’s Story (1996) and Mr. Darcy’s Diary: A Novel by Amanda Grange (2005), to give two examples from the growing body of ‘Darcyiana’. 19. Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) is a novel that is interesting in this context, for it explicitly connects rereading and rewriting, which it identifies with the bringing to market of new Austen products designed to feed the desire of the Austenite for more Austen.

3 Women’s Rewriting as Counter-memory 1. Plagiarism and copyright infringement constitute distinct forms of violation: plagiarism is an offence against the author’s moral rights; copyright infringement is the unauthorized use of works covered by copyright law and constitutes a violation of the rights of a copyright holder. 2. Pia Pera can be found on the Internet. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as ‘Independent Writing and Editing Professional’ from the Prato Area and states she is interested in ‘consulting offers, new ventures, expertise requests, reference requests, getting back in touch’ (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ a/483/28a). 3. It matters little, I think, that Bloom claims he has ‘never been able to recognize [his] theory of influence when it is under attack’ (1994: 7). His defence of ‘the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness’ (10), constitutes sufficient evidence of his own wilful refusal to consider the social, economic, and ideological dimensions of literature. 4. In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous says something similar, when she writes that the logocentric project has always been about founding and funding phallocentrism (1986 [1975]: 65). 5. This analysis tallies with Mary Eagleton’s reading of 1980s figurations of the woman writer as differing from men in terms of the drive to gain wealth and fame, being instead, ‘in varying degrees, excluded from, indifferent to and suspicious of literary production as it is conventionally understood’ (2005: 139). 6. In A Jury of her Peers, Showalter writes, ‘All the feminist critics looking at the 1970s agree that Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying . . . was a key book of the decade’ (2009: 443–4). Because the novel deliberately eschews ‘all the conventional endings for intelligent women in fiction who aspire to be artists’, it can be said of Jong that ‘she was writing feminist metafiction, rewriting the endings and revising the plots of the past’ (445). 7. It is worth noting that ‘performance as such is not regulated as a cultural commodity under copyright’ (Auslander 2008: 129). In Liveness, Auslander examines the ontological status of performance ‘within a cultural economy dominated by reproduction’, suggesting copyright is the ideal context for such an analysis, since ‘copyright law itself is a direct result of the development of technologies of reproduction and consequent economic changes’ (147). Although Auslander is concerned with very different things than the



Notes 185

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Notes ones that occupy me here, the premises on which our studies depend have significant points of contact. Maroula Joannou makes a similar point when she observes that to contemporary readers, ‘the very novels which empowered and helped to politicise a generation of women may appear lacking in subtlety, formally conservative, and sometimes even hectoring in tone’ (2000: 106). Lise Gauvin points out that the reverse is also true: if to write is always also to rewrite, then to rewrite is also to write in the first degree, reinventing literature and its models (2004: 27). Another model is homage – as Kundera, for instance, writes apropos of his rewriting of Diderot’s Jacques and his Master, ‘to remain in the company of Jacques and his master as long as possible, I began to picture them as characters in a play of my own’ (1985: 1). ‘These glittering stories . . . are not so much retellings of fairy tales as meditations on the imaginative content of such tales’, it reads on the first edition’s dust jacket’s front flap. Although negated, the idea of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories as retellings of fairy tales is activated and thus frames the text. For as we know from cognitive science, ‘when we negate a frame, we evoke the frame’ (Lakoff 2004: 3). To illustrate: in Palimpsests, Gérard Genette reports that in 1670, in his treatise De l’histoire, Father Pierre Le Moyne ‘could state without turning a hair that “The Iliad of Homer, as everyone knows, is practically a copy in verse of what Dares and Dictys wrote in prose about the Trojan Wars.”’ He comments, ‘This is the hypertext made hypotext, and the original epic read in reverse as a derivative versification. Shades of Borges’ (Genette 1996 [1982]: 221). Rosset, obviously, had his own reasons to want to publish Lo’s Diary – reasons which may include making up for the missed chance with Nabokov’s novel and continuing to publish controversial works with sexually explicit content: his Grove Press had issued Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and an uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In his Lolita und der deutsche Leutnant, translated as The Two Lolitas (2005), Michael Maar argues that Nabokov’s famous novel is itself a reprise of another tale of Lolita, which appeared in 1916 under the pen name of von Lichberg, and asks probing questions about the character of this repetition. Reviewers of Maar’s book tend to concur that although ‘the staggering similarities between the plots of the two stories demand an explanation’, ‘Humbert’s story belongs to Nabokov outright’ (Demers 2005). On the tendency of critics to read women’s writing as (auto)biographical, see, for instance, Meijer (2009). In Feminist Fabulation (1992), Marleen Barr argues that what is called ‘feminist science fiction’ is, in fact, metafiction about patriarchal fiction, making a strong argument for revising the idea of postmodernism so as to accommodate the previously excluded form she terms ‘feminist fabulation’. In her recent biography of Jean Rhys, Lilian Pizzichini acknowledges this intertextuality by referring to the novel’s ‘distortion of Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s version of a modernist masterpiece’ and adds, ‘Jean did not parade her literary allusions, acquaintances, or associations. They bled into her writing. This makes her writing all the more subversive – an ironic echo, a passive-aggressive



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18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

swipe at the masters’ (2009: 224). However, she does not unpack this pervasive intertextuality and reads Rhys’s work autobiographically. In addition, publishers increasingly demand of their writers they contribute to their books’ placement and send them on book presentation tours, thus reducing contemplative writing time even further. In fact, she also wrote a fitness book in the early years of her writing career, Fit for the Future (1986). ‘Again, money’, she writes on her website (http://www.jeanettewinterson.com). For the notion of cultural memory as a field I am indebted to Léon van Schoonneveldt (2006). Joan Aiken’s Jane Fairfax (1990) was first subtitled ‘A Companion Volume to Emma’ (1996). In a later edition, it is dubbed ‘The Secret Story of the Second Heroine in Jane Austen’s Emma’ (1997). Much, of course, has been written about the intellectual advantages of a comparative perspective. A key text remains Edward Said’s ‘Intellectual Exiles: Expatriates and Marginals’ in his Representations of the Intellectual (1994: 35 and passim).

4 Untold Stories 1. Many feminist writers and critics have acknowledged the influence of Olsen’s Silences on their work and thought. For a complete survey see Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s thoroughly researched assessment of Olsen’s impact in ‘Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The Lessons Silences Has Taught Us’ (1994; 2003). 2. Although the 1978 paperback edition announces that Caine’s novel is ‘soon to be a TV series’, the series, which was optioned by the late producer Herb Jaffe, was never made. A defunct webpage of the London-based literary agency MBA Literary Agents reports that the option is now expired. (http:// www.mbalit.co.uk/pages/writers/caine.html, found through Google’s cached links, 4 March 2009.) It is worth observing that all these rewritings are not single-edition publications. Thus, Caine’s Heathcliff was first released in hardback both in England (with W.H. Allen, 1977) and in the United States (Knopf, 1977; Random House, 1978), then in paperback by Allen as a Star Book (1978), a mass market paperback (Fawcett Books, 1979), and finally a new paperback edition (Grafton/Fontana, 1993), also released in other countries (e.g. Canada, via HarperCollins, 1993). This publication history can be taken to mean the book continued to interest readers and publishers over a significant period of time. The date of the last edition, coinciding with the appearance of Lin Haire-Sargeant’s version (by 1993 retitled Heathcliff, like Caine’s), suggests the books were competing titles on the literary market. 3. Silence, in fact, can be subject to copyright and copyright infringement: in 2002, British composer Mike Batt was accused of plagiarizing John Cage’s 1952 silent composition 4’33” in a classical rock album that included a track entitled ‘A One Minute Silence’. See also Weber (2005: 1). 4. For Elaine Showalter, Glaspell’s story represents the need for women to ‘constitute themselves as a jury of her peers’ (2009: x), giving its title to her history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.



Notes 187

Notes

5. It might be worth recalling here that in the early 1970s, Foucault works together with Hélène Cixous on his Prison Information project, the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, putting on blitz performances in front of prisons (Cixous 1997: 210–11). 6. Radstone criticizes the conflation, especially in literary studies, of confession and autobiography (2007: 21–7). 7. My reading is informed by Susan Buck-Morss’s groundbreaking rereading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) and, as such, is totally anachronistic (since her insights were first published in 2000). This does not invalidate my suggestion that Coetzee’s novel comments on the politics of South Africa in the light of Hegel’s concept as developed out of history. For more on Coetzee’s reading of Marx, see Spivak (1991). 8. The references, in fact, are many. See also my ‘“I come from a woman”: Writing, Gender, and Authorship in Hélène Cixous’s The Book of Promethea’ (Plate 1996). 9. Critics, of course, differ on the subject of Coetzee’s investment and distance from Elizabeth Costello. See Graham (2006: 217–18) for a short overview of commentators’ views. 10. Here it is part of the first lesson, entitled ‘Realism’, which was initially given as ‘What is Realism?’ at Bennington College in November 1996 and was subsequently published in Salmagundi. The text of ‘What is Realism?’ varies yet again slightly, for here, we are told ‘She has been widely honoured, at home and abroad. There has even come into existence an Elizabeth Costello Society, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which puts out a quarterly Elizabeth Costello Newsletter’ (1997: 60–1). 11. On might indeed surmise the modifications are not those of a writer revising his text for ‘polishing’, but rewriting it for a less academic audience than that of his public university lectures. 12. It might be worth noting that the South African novelist Marlene van Niekerk, when asked to lecture on the subject of ‘the position of the novelist in post-Apartheid South Africa’ in her inaugural address as professor to the Africa Chair of the University of Utrecht, delivered a story The Fellow Traveller (A True Story) in which she lets Elizabeth Costello die. Considering the topic of the lecture, this death of the rewriter seems to include a(n ironic, tongue-in-cheek) comment on rewriting as a means of postcolonial textual production. See Niekerk (2008). 13. Is Friday also engendered by Silences? Olsen writes of silences as ‘the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot’ (2003 [1978]: 6). 14. The OED first lists as a definition for pregnant: ‘Of the mind, language, behaviour, etc.’: ‘1. a. Full of meaning, highly significant; suggestive, implying more than is obvious or stated’. It came as a surprise to me that in the OED, ‘pregnant’ only in second instance refers to the female body. Under the heading ‘II. Of the body or physical phenomena’, it says: ‘3. a. Of a woman or other female mammal: having offspring developing in the uterus. Also of the womb (obs.). Freq. with with (the offspring), by (the male parent)’. 15. There is always a certain arbitrariness to beginnings, as well as ideology. Why not refer women’s rewriting to its beginning with H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, a book-length retelling of the Trojan war from Helen’s perspective, written and published prior to Wide Sargasso Sea? It is, of course, part of the argument



188

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

of this book that though a transhistorical mode of literary production, rewriting needs to be examined in its context of production and reception, for the meanings that attach to it differ over time. See Gilbert and Gubar’s introduction to the second edition of The Madwoman in the Attic (2000: xxxv–xxxvi). This applies not only to the novel’s composition, but also to its reception. As Joannou points out, ‘Jean Rhys was rediscovered in England at about the same time as the race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill in London’ (2000: 147). It might be worth recalling that Bakhtin’s dialogism is the source for the notion of intertextuality as formulated by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, which is, in the latter’s formulation, the citation of texts that are ‘anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read’ (Barthes 1986 [1971]: 60), thus defining intertextuality itself as a mnemonics and a technology of memory and of forgetting. The reference is to Ricoeur’s essay ‘Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator’ (1986). Compare John Cage’s piece 4’33”, which offered the audience four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence divided into three movements. The point of Cage’s piece was that there is no such thing as silence: silence is constructed, as is meaningful sound. See also Nora’s concept of the lieu de mémoire, which can be viewed to herald a spatial historiography: a new kind of historical endeavour that takes place in space (cf. Runia 2006). Memory is, of course, notoriously unreliable. In one interview, Condé recalls, ‘I accepted immediately’ (Clark and Dehany 1989: 129); in another, she says, ‘I was not interested in the topic’ (Pfaff 1996: 58). Although not unchallenged, today, the consensus is that the historical Tituba is Arawak (Breslaw 1996; Linder 2009; but see Hoffer 1996 and Tucker 2000). Confusion about Tituba’s racial identity seems to arise from the racial politics of mid-nineteenth-century America, which initiate the change of her race ‘from Indian, to half-Indian and half-Negro, to Negro’ (Hansen 1974: 3). Tituba’s alleged racial identity can be seen to speak of contemporary concerns (Rosenthal 1998: 203) and the debate itself as a typically contemporary concern fueled by ‘a belief in the existence of race as a functional category of identification’ and a desire to ‘fix’ Tituba aimed at solving the problem of how to read her (Fulton 2008: 47). The intertextual parodic relation with Paul Guth’s bestseller that is established by the novel’s title serves to highlight crucial differences between the daughter of a wealthy white Creole plantation owner from Martinique who would become the first Empress of the French and that of a slave on just such a plantation. While all these allusions can be found in both the French text and its English translation, this last example is to be put on the account of Condé’s translatorspouse Richard Philcox: the phrase ‘Il s’effondrera le monde! (1986: 97) does not have the same evocative power for a French-speaking audience that ‘Things will fall apart’ (1992: 59) has for the English-speaking one. For discussions of Philcox’s role in the production of Condé’s texts, especially his production of them for a broader readership, see Philcox (2001), Fulton (2008: 143–50), and Veldwachter (2009). I borrow the expression ‘invented absence’ from Achino-Loeb (2009).



Notes 189

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High Infidelity

1. Grever researched the paradox that, despite a clear de-canonization trend, the canon continues being recycled in history textbooks and public presentations (see Grever and Stuurman 2007). 2. See for instance, Viswanathan (1989), Olick (2003) and Goff (2005). 3. It is worth noting that for Adler, ‘the difference between great books and good books is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind’. The criterion is whether or not the great conversation about the great ideas occurs (Adler 1997). 4. With the exception of the 2002 German Ahabs Frau, at the time of its ten year anniversary there are no published translations. 5. In this light, it is worth noting that the one rewriting that has most significantly affected the canonization of its precursor text is Rhys’s revisionary prequel to Jane Eyre. Because Wide Sargasso Sea re-visions – and, as such, is a kind of rewriting of – a feminist classic, the ‘vigorous public debate of a critical trial’ which Elaine Showalter claims is necessary for women’s writing to be included in the cultural heritage took mostly place within the confines of women’s writing/feminist criticism (2009: xii). If Rhys’s novel contributed to maintaining the popular interest of Jane Eyre, it did so by reasserting the novel’s relevance from the perspective of (a history of) gender and of feminism, which is a matter construed as of special interest to women. 6. In an article it recently ran on women in the workforce, The Economist claims, ‘The economic empowerment of women across the rich world is one of the most remarkable revolutions of the past 50 years’ (2 January 2010: 49). It concludes its discussion of the consequences of the feminization of markets attendant upon this revolution by stating, ‘The West will be struggling to cope with the social consequences of women’s economic empowerment for many years to come’ (51). In my discussion of women’s rewriting as cultural memory, I identify one such social consequence. 7. The above-mentioned article from The Economist identifies this relationship when it states, ‘The landmark book in the rise of feminism was arguably not Ms Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” but Daniel Bell’s “The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society”’ (2 January 2010: 50). 8. It may be worth remembering that there are many colleges and universities in the United States, but also elsewhere, that offer ‘Great Books’ programmes. 9. The emergence of a new type of rewriting, retelling a woman-centred classic from the male point of view, is a recent development that needs to be viewed in this context, as part of women’s assertion of their right to write about whatever they want. Indeed, this kind of revision is increasingly proving a rich source for women’s rewriting, as Amanda Grange’s series of diaries proves. Since the successful publication of Mr. Darcy’s Diary: A Novel in 2005, she has published Mr. Knightley’s Diary (2006), Captain Wentworth’s Diary (2007) and Colonel Brandon’s Diary (2008). 10. As Wolf writes in a diary entry in ‘Conditions of a Narrative’: ‘Now you no longer need to be “Cassandra”; most people are beginning to see what is coming’ (1984: 239).



5

Notes

11. In this, rewriting forms a counterpoint to science fiction, which locates the alternative in the future. See also the discussion of Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia further on in this chapter. 12. The moment of ‘suspicion’, it is worth noting, is also the moment of New Historicism, a critical practice that memorably began, as Stephen Greenblatt put it in Shakespearean Negotiations, ‘with the desire to speak with the dead’ (1988: 1). Clearly, then, this is a moment of ‘convergent procedures of demystification’ (Ricoeur 1970: 34). 13. In his days, the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, author of The Aeneid among other works, was called Vergilius. While Latinists still tend to prefer Vergil as the more correct abbreviation of his name, Virgil is its more common (mis)spelling in the English-speaking world. In this book, I use Virgil to refer to the Roman poet, reserving the name Vergil for Le Guin’s character in Lavinia. 14. See Ostriker (1993) and A. B. Brown (1999). 15. In French, ‘A translation is called a version when the target language is the translator’s mother tongue. It is called thème when the source language is her native tongue and she is rewriting into her non-native tongue’ (LotbinièreHarwood 1991: 92). From the OED entry for the noun ‘theme’ it would seem the same was true in English at least through the nineteenth century. This would suggest its definition of ‘version’, unsupported by the quotations provided, is erronous and cannot be ‘A translation from English into Latin prose done as a school or university exercise; a piece of English prose set for translation into Latin’. 16. For the distinction between literature as object and as medium of remembrance, see Erll and Rigney (2006).

6 Winged Words 1. Terry Eagleton makes a similar argument in After Theory (2003), suggesting cultural theory more generally served the interests of capitalism. 2. For further adepts of the term, see Calinescu (1997) and Moraru (2001). In the opening chapter of Rewriting, Moraru clears his conceptual ground and, distinguishing rewriting from a number of related practices, explicitly states that ‘rewriting and retelling are not synonyms’ and links rewriting to writing and print culture (2001: 17; emphasis Moraru’s). 3. It is worth remembering that these differences have become apparent following the advent of the electronic age: it is precisely because print is no longer the sole or dominant medium that writing could become visible as such – a specific technology of language. 4. It is not incidental that Rigney develops this notion of the portable monument in the context of her discussion of Walter Scott’s bestselling Waverley Novels. The bestseller’s monumentality, indeed, is crucial to the formation of a shared memory, as Pine and Gilmore (1999) would no doubt confirm. 5. Of course, the relationship of writing to memory has always been contested. Plato already knew that writing is ‘elixir not of memory but of reminding’ (2005: 62). As Goody and Watt have argued in their landmark essay ‘The Consequences of Literacy’ (1968), the fixity of print does not only turn



Notes 191

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

Notes books into sites of memory in Nora’s sense of the term, blocking the work of forgetting, but also fosters a historical and a critical sense: because writing can be returned to, it can be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that fosters critical inquiry. Also, in the return to source it can be found to be different from how it is remembered. The neo-colonial uses of intellectual property law, which defines and limits how cultural products are produced and distributed, suggests this ‘triumph’ is imperialism by other means. See also Saint-Amour (2003: 218). The issue is briefly addressed in the opening pages of Le Guin’s Lavinia, when she poses the question of language, asking how it came the Trojan Aeneas spoke in fluent Latin and how it is ‘that you understand me, who lived twenty-five or thirty centuries ago? Do you know Latin?’ (2009 [2008]: 5). For an extensive analysis of narrative modes for presenting consciousness in fiction, see Cohn (1978). In the preface to the volume of new mythologies published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Barthes’s Mythologies, Jérôme Garcin comments on the paradox of the commemorative effects of Barthes’s de-mythologies: ‘Barthes mythifies so well what he denounces’, he writes, ‘that his subversive encyclopaedia can be read today with tranquil nostalgia’ (2007: 9). For an interesting discussion of men identifying as Atlas, see Vincent (2006: 256–7). Marx’s famous aphorism is in fact a misquotation. The opening sentences of ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ actually reads, ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’ (1978: 594). The event was reported in a BBC News story on 8 March 2007: http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6430775.stm.



192

Primary sources Acker, Kathy, Great Expectations (New York: Grove Press, 1982). ———, Don Quixote, Which Was A Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1986). Aiken, Joan, Jane Fairfax: A Novel to Complement Emma by Jane Austen (London: Gollancz, 1990); Jane Fairfax: Jane Austen’s Emma, through another’s eyes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). Atwood, Margaret, ‘The Little Red Hen Tells All’, ‘Gertrude Talks Back’ and ‘Unpopular Gals’, in Good Bones (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1992), 11–14; 15–18; 25–30. ———, The Penelopiad (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005). Beauman, Sally, Rebecca’s Tale (New York: William Morrow, 2001). Carter, Angela, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (London: Gollancz, 1979), 7–49. ———, Black Venus’s Tale (London: Next Editions, 1980). Chedid, Andrée, La femme de Job [The Wife of Job] (Paris: Calman-Levy, 1993). Condé, Maryse, Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986). ———, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Ballatine Books, 1992). Diamant, Anita, The Red Tent (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Duffy, Carol Ann, The World’s Wife (London: Macmillan, 1999). Etty, Elsbeth, Maak jezelf maar klaar [Finish Yourself Off] (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2007). Fell, Alison, The Mistress of Lilliput or, The Pursuit (London: Doubleday, 1999). George, Sara, The Journal of Mrs Pepys: Portrait of a Marriage (London: Review, 1998). Gonin, Ève, Le point de vue d’Ellénore: une réécriture d’Adolphe [Ellenore’s point of view: A Rewriting of Adolphe] (Paris: Corti, 1981). Haire-Sargeant, Lin, H. (New York: Pocket Books, 1992); reissued as Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering Heights (New York: Pocket Books, 1993). Hill, Susan, Mrs. de Winter (New York: W. Morrow, 1993). Leclerc, Annie, Toi, Pénélope (Paris: Actes Sud, 2001). Le Guin, Ursula, Lavinia (Orlando: Harcourt, 2008; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Maitland, Sara, ‘Penelope’, in Tales I Tell My Mother: A Collection of Short Stories, by Zoë Fairbairns, Sara Maitland, Valerie Miner, Michele Roberts, and Michelene Wandor (London: the Journeyman Press, 1978), 146–58. ———, ‘The Wicked Stepmother’s Tale’, in More Tales I Tell My Mother: Feminist Short Stories, by Zoë Fairbairns, Sara Maitland, Valerie Miner, Michele Roberts, and Michelene Wandor (London: the Journeyman Press, 1987), 157–63. ———, Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching (London: Virago, 1993). Martin, Valerie, Mary Reilly (New York: Doubleday, 1990). Naslund, Sena Jeter, Ahab’s Wife, Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel (New York: William Morrow, 1999). 193



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absence 40, 98, 121–2, 129, 150 invented 129, 189n.26 of the past 16 presence in 121 See also presence acceleration 17, 90 of consumption 19 of history 9, 17, 26 Achebe, Chinua 30, 171 Things Fall Apart 30 Achino-Loeb, Maria-Luisa 118, 189n.26 Acker, Kathy 6, 83–5, 93, 151 Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, The 84 Don Quixote, Which Was A Dream 6, 84, 151 Great Expectations 6, 84 Across the Acheron (Wittig) 146 activism leftist 75 literary 149 feminist 107, 159 adaptation 7–8, 22, 39, 75, 87, 160–1, 172, 178 film 87 form of 132 textual 153 theorists of 75 strategy of 153 Adèle 7, 11, 184n.17 Adèle (Tennant) 22, 57, 91 Adler, Mortimer 133, 138, 190n.3 Great Books of the Western World 133 Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, The (Acker) 84 Aeneas 11, 147, 192n.7 Aeneid, The (Virgil) 39, 146–7, 154, 191n.13 Aeschylus 42–3, 143, 166 Agamemnon 42 Oresteia 143

affect 25, 42, 147 See also emotions Africa 123 See also South Africa After Theory (Eagleton, T.) 191n.1 Agameda 181 Agamemnon 42, 140, 142 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 42 aggression 142 Ahab 8, 33, 134, 144 Ahabs Frau 190n.4 Ahab’s Wife (Naslund) 8, 134–5, 137–9, 143, 146, 148 Aiken, Joan 22, 63, 183n.10 Jane Fairfax 22, 64, 183n.10, 187n.21 Lady Catherine’s Necklace 183n.10 Mansfield Revisited 183n.10 Akamas 181 Aladdin 22 Albertine 33 Albuquerque 188n.10 Algeria 49 allegory 31, 112 Althusser, Louis 133 Amazon 135, 137, 164 America (United States) 8, 58, 78–80, 92, 100, 106, 123, 133, 135, 138, 183n.5, 187n.2, 189n.23, 190n.8 cultural memory of 139 mainstream 89, 92 post-9/11 105 women’s poetry in 73 amnesia 31, 97 anamnesis 31 anarchy 70, 177 androcentrism 11, 136 feminism’s critique of 159 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom) 72 appropriation 8, 31 re- 45, 70 Arawak 124, 189 214



Index

Arcades Project (Benjamin) 14 archive 13, 63, 125, 161–5, 167–8, 180 of cultural memory 69 digital 164 domain of the 35 male 165, 167 seduction of the 12 traditional 164 of writing 142 See also repertoire Armitt, Lucie 76 Armstrong, Karen 173 Short History of Myth, A 173 art 34, 68, 75–7, 80, 103, 114, 147 commercial 91 as craft 34 feminist 33 of flying 70, 74 of life 34 of memory 130, 155, 174 of storytelling 174 of suspicious reading 41 of the weak 32 of writing 66, 76 Ashcroft, Bill 98 Empire Wrikes Back, The (with Griffiths and Tiffin) 98 Assmann, Aleida 130, 162 Assmann, Jan 69, 86, 181 Atget, Eugène 17 Atlas 171, 173–4, 192n.9 Attridge, Derek 109–10, 164 Atwood, Margaret 23, 48–9, 148–50, 153, 171, 173–4 Good Bones 23 Penelopiad, The 150, 173–4 Robber Bride, The 148–50 audience 125–6, 152–3, 189n.20, 189n.25 academic 188n.11 broad 62 demand 21, 137 design 153 implied 113 intended 153 new 8 target 136 Augustine 39 Confessions 39

Auslander, Philip 185n.7 Liveness 185n.7 Austen, Jane 7, 11, 22, 63–4, 183n.10, 185n.19, 187n.20 Emma 7, 11, 22, 64 Australia 112 authority 43, 57, 59–60, 72, 93–3, 153, 163 of authorship 59 of the canon 30, 146 critique of 59, 131 of the text 146 of traditional representations 40 authorship 60, 68, 71–2, 74–5, 77, 80–3, 93, 111 authority of 59 female 40, 54, 164 ideology of 91 politics of 91 autobiography 82, 84, 105, 108, 119, 123, 126–7, 187n.18, 188n.6 women’s 102 See also bio-autography; biography availability 23, 164–5, 180 Aylmer, Janet 185n.18 Darcy’s Story 185n.18 Baba Yaga 174 Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Ugrešic´) 174 Bakhtin, Mikhail 117, 189n.18 Bal, Mieke 8 Barbados 123–124, 126 Barr, Marleen 186n. 16 Feminist Fabulation 186n.16 Barron, Stephanie 183n.10 Jane and the Barque of Frailty 183n.10 Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor 183n.10 Barth, John 39 Chimera 39 Barthes, Roland 31, 59–63, 168–70, 189n.18, 192n.8 Lover’s Discourse, A 62 Mythologies 168, 192n.8 Pleasure of the Text, The 62 S/Z 61–2



Index 215

Index

Barton, Susan 109–11 Bassnett, Susan 149 Batt, Mike 187n. 3 Baudelaire, Charles 17, 55 Baudrillard, Jean 3 Illusion of the End, The 3 Bauman, Zygmunt 4, 19–20, 27, 34, 160, 182n.3 Liquid Fear 19 Liquid Life 19 Liquid Love 19 Liquid Modernity 19 Liquid Times 19 Baym, Nina 41 BBC News 192n.11 Beast 55 Beauman, Sally 7 Rebecca’s Tale 7 Bebris, Carrie 183n.10 North by Northanger 183n.10 Pride and Prescience 183n.10 Suspense and Sensibility 183n.10 Beck, Ulrich 136 becoming 29 woman 136 Beginning with O (Broumas) 6, 111 Beizer, Janet 140–1 belief 11, 25–6, 68, 74, 85, 146, 153–4, 189n.23 false 168 See also disbelief Belle 55 Bellerophon 39 Benjamin, Walter 14 Arcades Project 14 Bennington College 188n.10 Beowulf 39 Berne Convention 72 Bettelheim, Bruno 55, 184n.16 Uses of Enchantment, The 55 Bible 43, 90, 104, 148, 151 readers 143 translations 148 bio-autography 140–1 See also autobiography; biography biography 123, 127 women’s 140 See also autobiography; bio-autography

Blade Runner 176 blank spots 102–104 Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, The (Carter) 6, 55, 64, 76, 184n.15–16, 186n.11 Bloom, Harold 72, 74–5, 130, 148, 155, 186n.3 Anxiety of Influence, The 72 Western Canon, The 74, 130, 148 Bloom, Leopold 112–13 Bloom, Marion 112–13 Bloom, Molly 186n.17 Bluebeard 6, 55 Boating for Beginners (Winterson) 90 Book of Promethea, The (Cixous) 111, 188n.8 Borgan, Louise 184n.11 Borges, Jorge Luis 18, 75–6, 186n.12 borrowing 29, 68 literary 89 Boston 124–5 Boucheron, Alain 123 Bourdieu, Pierre 73, 91 Rules of Art, The 91 Bovary, Emma 109 brand 64, 87–8, 172 management 83, 87–9, 91 name 65 recognition 87 Brockmeier, Jens 118 Brontë, Charlotte 7, 30, 42, 57, 103–4, 114–16, 118, 122 Jane Eyre 7, 11, 30, 42, 79, 103, 109, 114–16, 119, 190n.5 Brooks, Cleanth 46 Brooks, Van Wyck 8 Brothers Grimm 64, 76, 149 Fairy Tales 64 Vintage Fear (with Carter) 76 Broumas, Olga 6, 111 Beginning with O 6, 111 Brown, Dan 64 Da Vinci Code, The 64 Brown, Wendy 25–7, 97–8 Politics Out of History 25 Büchmann, Georg 74 Geflügelte Worte 74



216

Buck-Morss, Susan 188n.7 Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History 188n.7 Buffard, Claude-Henri 109 La fille d’Emma 109 Burke, Edmund 18, 27 Burroughs, William S. 186n.13 Naked Lunch 186n.13 Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2005 (Simba Information) 22 Butler, Judith 105, 119 Butler, Rhett 87–8 Byatt, A.S. 59, 171 Passions of the Mind 59 Byng, Jamie 171 Cage, John 187n.3, 189n.20 4’33” 187n.3, 189n.20 Caine, Jeffrey 104, 187n.2 Heathcliff: The Missing Years 104, 187n.2 Calder, Liz 76 Calinescu, Matei 103 Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel, The 81 Canada 187n. 2 canon 8–9, 19, 30, 98, 101, 109, 130–9, 143–6, 148, 152, 154–5, 162, 164, 180, 190n.1 authority of 30 of cultural heritage 8 of postmodernism 82 See also canonization; canon wars; decanonization Canongate 20, 34, 171, 173–4 canonization 109, 137–8, 144, 155, 190n.5 process of 109, 139, 155 See also canon; canon wars; decanonization canon wars 30, 131 See also canon Capital (Marx) 110 capitalism 4, 11, 64, 85, 91, 159–60, 165, 174, 177, 191n.1 consumer 70 feminism and 136 late 10, 12

neoliberal 4, 20, 41, 65, 136, 159–60 post- 11, 25, 61 social organization of 4 Captain Wentworth’s Diary (Grange) 190n.9 Caribbean 115, 116, 123 French 123 identity 116 Carter, Angela 6, 31, 55, 64, 76–7, 150, 168, 184n.15–17 Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, The 6, 55, 64, 76, 184n. 15–16, 186n.11 Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, The 55, 150 Sadeian Woman, The 31, 168 Vintage Fear (with Brothers Grimm) 76 Casanova, Giacomo 57 Cassandra 8, 42–3, 74, 139–2, 166–7, 190n. 10 Cassandra (Wolf ) 139, 144, 151, 162, 165–7 castration 51–2 censorship 80, 99, 101, 105 market 101 self- 56, 80, 99, 101 Cervantes, Miguel de 39, 84 Don Quixote 39 Charlotte (Thomas) 109 chauvinism 44 Chedid, Andrée 7 La femme de Job 7 Chillingworth, Roger 103 Chimera (Barth) 39 Christophine 119, 122 chronotope 117 Circe 6 Circle Line 178, 180 Civil War 138 See also war Cixous, Hélène 39, 41, 49–53, 55–7, 70, 73–4, 100–2, 111, 143, 148, 184n.9, 184n.12, 185n.4, 188n.5, 188n.8 Book of Promethea, The 111, 188n.8 La jeune née 184n.9



Index 217

Index

Cixous, Hélène – continued Newly Born Woman, The (with Clément) 50, 185n.4 Rootprints 102 Souffles 184n.12 class 58–9, 100, 104 Clément, Catherine 53, 184n.10 Newly Born Woman, The (with Cixous) 50, 185n.4 closure 31, 177 CNN 135 Coetzee, J.M. 99, 109–14, 116, 120, 127, 166, 188n.7, 188n.9 Elizabeth Costello 112 Foe 99, 109–12, 114, 120, 123, 127, 166 Lives of Animals, The 112 cognitive science 105, 186n.11 Colonel Brandon’s Diary (Grange) 190n.9 colonialism 132, 177 See also postcolonialism commercialism 83 commodification 41, 123 of the consumer 34 of culture 61, 83 of the past 10 Condé, Maryse 6, 99, 122–9, 189n.22, 189n.25 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem 99, 122–3, 125–7 Moi, Tituba, sorcière … noire de Salem 6, 122, 124 confession 54, 81, 108, 123, 125–6, 188n. 6 space of 102 Confessions (Augustine) 39 Connell, R.W. 73 Connerton, Paul 42, 161 How Societies Remember 42, 161 Connor, Steve 153 Conrad, Joseph 30 Heart of Darkness 30 consciousness 44, 48, 119–20, 122, 136, 141, 166–7, 177, 192n.7 altered 47 collective 13 consistency of 13

false 170 feminist 46 -raising 47, 50, 100 social 13 of a social identity 13 See also self-consciousness; stream-of-consciousness construction 136, 146 masculinist 119 plot 103 social 136 of translation 149 See also reconstruction consumerism 4, 10, 16, 19, 23–4, 34–5, 175 anti- 63 centrality of 34 of liquid modernity 136 Consuming Silences (Weber) 101 consumption 19, 34–5, 61–3, 89, 160 critique of 61 cycles of 19, 172 logic of 23, 62 reading as 62 society of 23, 62 system of 20, 22 contiguity 121, 128–9 continuity 13, 26, 91, 121, 174 historical 121 See also discontinuity Cook, James 176 copyright 10, 66–7, 69, 71–2, 77–81, 83–8, 91–3, 185n.1, 185n.7, 187n.3 American 86 French 60 infringement 67, 78, 80, 83, 85–6, 89, 91, 185n.1, 187n.3 Copywrights, The (Saint-Amour) 86–7 Cornis-Pope, Marcel 44 Costello, Elizabeth 112–13, 188ns9–10, 188n.12 counter-memory 32–3, 66, 69, 99, 129, 131 rewriting as 134 See also memory Coupe, Laurence 31, 177, 179



218

creativity 68, 100 literary 40, 72–3, 75 process of 67 See also innovation criticism 44, 61, 85, 124, 133, 141, 155, 159 cultural 44, 168 feminist 43–8, 97, 119, 183n.5, 190n.5 literary 44 social 11, 61, 141 See also gynocriticism; New Criticism Crucible, The (Miller, A.) 124 Cruso 109–10 Crusoe, Billie 176–7 Crusoe, Robinson 109–10, 177 Cunningham, Michael, Hours, The 81 Cynara 88 Daily Mail 173 Dalloway, Mrs. 190n.9 Dalloway, Richard 185n.18 Daniel 173 Dante 39, 146 Divine Comedy 39, 146 Daphne 74 Darcy’s Story (Aylmer) 185n.18 Darwin, Mrs. 8 Da Vinci Code, The (Brown, D.) 64 death-drive 51 de Beauvoir, Simone 50, 118, 136, 184n.10 Debord, Guy 59 Society of the Spectacle, The 59 decanonization 130, 132, 154, 190n.1 See also canon; canonization; canon wars de Certeau, Michel 32 Defoe, Daniel 110–11, 175 Robinson Crusoe 109–10, 113, 175, 177 de France, Marie 183n.4 de Lauretis, Teresa 170–1 De l’histoire (Le Moyne) 186n.12 de Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne 149–50

democratization 58 of the book 58 of the classroom 58 of history 10 of literature 58 of reading 165 demythologize 31, 168–70, 177, 192n.8 See also remythologize de Pisan, Christine 183n.4 D’Erasmo, Stacey 134 Derrida, Jacques 102, 165 Des femmes 70 Diacritics 184n.9 dialectic 172 master-slave 110, 188n.7 of past and future 174 of theft 72 dialogism 117, 189n. 18 See also monologism Diamant, Anita 104, 139, 143–4, 151, 162–3, 167 Red Tent, The 104, 139, 143–4, 151, 162–3 Diario di Lo (Pera) 7, 78 Dickens, Charles 84 Diderot, Denis 186n.10 Jacques and his Master 186n.10 Dido 39 digitalization 13–14, 161, 164–5 Dimmesdale, Arthur 103 Dinah 104, 139, 143, 162–3, 167 disbelief 42, 52, 145–6 See also belief discontinuity 121 See also continuity discourse 14, 17, 31, 66, 68–70, 91, 97, 99–102, 106, 108–9, 112–14, 120–1, 127–9, 155 feminist 35, 101 literary 58, 62 of love 61 memory 10, 17, 25, 99, 121 public 14 Disney’s Aladdin: Jasmine’s Story 22 Disney’s Aladdin: The Genie’s Tale 22 disobedience 126 civil 71 dispossession 70



Index 219

Index

diversity 136 of readers 59 of voices 117 Divine Comedy (Dante) 39, 146 Diving into the Wreck (Rich) 48–9 Doisneau, Robert 17 domination 50, 175 discourses of 97 drive to 176 masculine 54 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 39 Don Quixote, Which Was A Dream (Acker) 6, 84, 151 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 169 Notes from Underground 169 Drabble, Margaret 26, 63 Drake, Sandra 116 Duffy, Carol Ann 8 World’s Wife, The 8 du Maurier, Daphne 64 Rebecca 64 Dunyazade 39 Duval, Jeanne 55 Eagleton, Mary 80, 185n.5 Eagleton, Terry 191n.1 After Theory 191n.1 Easter Island 176 e-book 164 economics 22, 54, 67 Economist, The 190ns6–7 écriture feminine 41, 51, 57 See also récriture feminine editors 78, 91 English 78 Een schitterend gebrek ( Japin) 57 Eliade, Mircea 177 Eliot, T.S. 66, 85, 177 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee) 112 Emma (Austen) 7, 11, 22, 64 emotions 25, 120 See also affect Empire Strikes Back, The 98 Empire Writes Back, The, (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin) 98 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 133 Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory 169

England 8, 55, 58, 78, 80, 84, 108, 119, 187n.2, 189n.17 feminism in 106 Enlightenment 27, 169 failure of 169 reason 169–70 environmentalism 141 Epigrams (Martial) 71 epistemology 69 Western 161 equivalence 150, 152 formal 151–2 functional 150–1 principle of 102 of reading and writing 59 translation as 150 Erll, Astrid 130 eternal return 177 ethics feminist 47 of reading 114 of rewriting 114 ethnicity 100 Eugene Onegin 79 Europe 141 identity politics in 169 Eurydice 6 Evergreen Review 78 exclusion 44, 69, 77, 110, 132, 144, 146, 153 of women 141–3, 169 of women’s experience 44 of women writers 44 Exercices de style (Queneau) 102 Experience Economy, The (Pine and Gilmore) 23, 25 Eyre, Jane 7, 57, 116, 119 fabula 102 See also story; sžujet Fairfax, Jane 7, 11 fairy tale 6, 8, 55, 74, 76–7, 149, 186n.11 Fairy Tales (Brothers Grimm) 64 Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, The (Carter) 55, 150 fame 68, 79–81, 83, 155, 185n.5 Fanon, Franz 128 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 81



220

father 72, 93 See also Law of the Father; paternity Fear of Flying ( Jong) 74, 185n.6 Federman, Raymond 69 Fell, Alison 7 Mistress of Lilliput, The 7 Fellow Traveller (A True Story), The (van Niekerk) 188n.12 Felman, Shoshana 102 Felski, Rita 41, 43, 107, 147, 171 feminine 54, 56, 70, 148–52 concerns 40 decorum 40 fiction 146 identity See under identity imaginary 74 language 132 literature 91 metaphorics 53 perspective 11, 102 rewriting 53, 148 space 101 subjectivity 54 versions 148 writing 51, 53, 56–7, 71 See also masculine femininity 52, 149 experience of 112 notions of 57 representation of 131 traditional 55 feminism 4–5, 10, 21, 25, 33–4, 40–1, 43, 56–7, 59, 64, 73–4, 99, 101, 114–16, 125, 135–6, 142, 148, 159, 165, 167, 172–3, 183n.9, 184n.15, 190n.5, 190n.7 black 125 and capitalism 136 promise of 54 second-wave 4, 40, 43, 46, 51, 54, 57, 100, 106, 159 Feminist Bestseller, The (Whelehan) 183n.9 Feminist Fabulation (Barr) 186n. 16 feminist ideals 55, 159 Feminist Revision and the Bible (Ostriker) 191n.14

Fetterley, Judith 43, 48, 146 Resisting Reader, The 43, 48 fiction 6, 107, 109, 146, 172, 179, 186n.16 feminist 26, 41, 76, 112 genre 82 historical 85 Italian 81 postmodernist 69, 183n.2 re-visionary 11 science 186n.16, 191n.11 women and 55, 185n.6 women’s 183n.9 Figaro littéraire 60 film 7, 14, 90 Finland 80 Finn, Huck 144 Finney, Gail 142 first person 6, 102, 105, 123, 126, 131, 178 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher 101, 187n.1 Listening to Silences (with Hedges) 101 Fit for the Future (Winterson) 187n.19 flying 70–1, 74 art of 70, 74 See also larceny; plagiarism; stealing Foe (Coetzee) 99, 109–12, 114, 120, 123, 127, 166 Foe, Daniel 109–11 Fordism 64 post- 21–2, 63–4, 89, 136, 172 forgetting 3, 8, 18, 31, 41, 97, 104, 118, 120, 133–4, 162, 170, 179, 189n.18, 192n.5 deliberate 117 fear of 28 of history 179 literature of 145 of women’s histories 33 formalism 102, 104 Foucault, Michel 105, 106–8, 163, 188n.5 History of Sexuality, The 106–7 4’33” (Cage) 187n.3, 189n.20 Fowler, Karen Joy 185n.19 Jane Austen Book Club, The 185n.19



Index 221

Index

Foxrock 78 frame 105, 113, 120–1, 170, 186n.11 France 8, 12, 15, 39, 59–60, 68, 78, 80, 106, 123 Frankfurter Buchmesse 171 Franklin, Benjamin 61 Fraser, Nancy 4, 11, 57, 136, 159 fraudulence 66, 69, 84 freedom 20, 27, 90, 98, 110, 120, 137, 174, 181 promised 108 symbol of 74 Freud, Sigmund 51–2 Freund, Elizabeth 58 Friday 109–12, 114, 175–6, 188n. 13 Fuller, Margaret 137 Woman in the Nineteenth Century 137 Fulton, Dawn 125 futility 177 future 4, 6, 8, 11–12, 18–21, 23–31, 40, 45, 50–4, 57, 59, 93, 107, 140–1, 172, 174–6, 178–81, 191n.11 feminist 5, 30, 108 imagination of the 9 projecting 23 See also futurity; time futurism 16 futurity 32, 172 Fuzzy Felt 173 Gallimard, Simone 123 gaps 102–3, 116, 146 garbage See under waste Garber, Marjorie 184n.11 Medusa Reader, The 184n.11 Garcin, Jérôme 192n.8 Gardner, John 39 Grendel 39 GATT agreement 86 Gauvin, Lise 186n. 9 gender 21, 41, 43–4, 58–9, 66, 71, 73, 86, 92, 99–101, 136, 146–7, 151, 153, 159, 176 ideology 169 injustice 41, 54 mythologies of 49

Genette, Gérard 75, 160, 186n.12 Palimpsests 186n. 12 Geflügelte Worte (Büchmann) 74 German Democratic Republic 141 Germany 8 Gertrude 23 Gertrude and Claudius (Updike) 109 Gilbert, Sandra 47, 72, 114, 189n.16 Madwoman in the Attic, The (with Gubar) 72, 114, 189n.16 No Man’s Land (with Gubar) 114 Giles Corey of the Salem Farms (Longfellow) 124 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 183n.6 Herland 183n.6 Gilmore, James 23, 25, 182, 191n.4 Experience Economy, The (with Pine) 23, 25 Girl Meets Boy (Smith, Ali) 174 Glaspell, Susan 105, 187n.4 Glauce 181 globalization 12–13, 21, 86 of memory 14, 182n.5 Global South 183n. 11 Glyndebourne Opera Festival 173 Golden Bowl, The ( James) 183n.7 Golden Notebook, The 112 Gollancz 76 Gone With the Wind (Mitchell, Margaret) 64, 67, 87–9, 92 Good Bones (Atwood) 23 Good Morning, Midnight (Rhys) 82 Goody, Jack 191n.5 Gospel of Mary 152 grand narratives 10, 31, 131 Grange, Amanda 185n.18, 190n.9 Captain Wentworth’s Diary 190n.9 Colonel Brandon’s Diary 190n.9 Mr. Darcy’s Diary 185n.18, 190n.9 Mr. Knightley’s Diary 190n.9 Grasset, Bernard 60–1 Great Books of the Western World (Adler) 133 Great Expectations (Acker) 6, 84 Great Gatsby, The 137 Greece 42 Greenblatt, Stephen 191n.12 Shakespearean Negotiations 191n.12 Greene, Graham 68



222

Grendel (Gardner) 39 Grever, Maria 132, 190n.1 Griffiths, Gareth 98 Empire Writes Back, The (with Ashcroft and Tiffin) 98 Grosz, Elizabeth 182n.4 Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Prison Information project) 188n.5 Grove Press 78, 186n.13 Guadeloupe 123 Gubar, Susan 72, 114, 189n.16 Madwoman in the Attic, The (with Gilbert) 72, 114, 189n.16 No Man’s Land (with Gilbert) 114 Guillory, John 131 Gulliver, Mrs. 7 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich 24–8, 121 Guth, Paul 125, 189n.24 Moi, Joséphine, impératrice 125 gynocriticism 44 See also criticism H. (Haire-Sargeant) 104 Haffenden, John 184n.16 Haire-Sargeant, Lin 104, 187n.2 H. 104 Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering Heights 104, 187n.2 Halbert, Debora 93 Halbwach, Maurice 12 Social Frameworks of Memory, The 12 Hamlet 109 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 23, 79 Hansel and Gretel 23 HarperCollins 135,187n.2 Harper’s 137, 144 Harris, Samuel 128 haunting 115–17, 122, 128 medial 161 texts 99 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 82, 103, 125 Scarlet Letter, The 79, 103, 125 H.D. 188n. 15 Helen in Egypt 188n.15 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 30 Heathcliff 103–4

Heathcliff: The Missing Years (Caine) 104, 187n.2 Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering Heights (Haire-Sargeant) 104, 187n.2 Hedges, Elaine 101 Listening to Silences (with Fishkin) 101 Hegel, G.W.F. 110, 188n.7, 192n.10 Phenomenology of Spirit, The 110 Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Buck-Morss) 188n.7 Heijne, Bas 169 Heilmann, Ann 85 Helen 6, 188n. 15 Helen in Egypt (H.D.) 188n.15 Heracles 171, 173 heritage 10, 17–18, 135, 137, 180 collective 29 cultural 8–9, 33, 54, 69, 73, 132, 135, 165, 190n.5 literary 30, 131 poet’s 6 Herland (Gilman) 183n.6 Hermann, Claudine 70, 73 Les voleuses de langue 70, 73 Tongue Snatchers, The 70 hermeneutics 169 of desire 43 of suspicion 31, 42–3, 52, 132, 168 Heroides (Ovid) 39 heroism 142 male 142 heteroglossia 117 hierarchy 141, 162 Hill, Susan 64 Mrs. de Winter 64 Hirsch, Marianne 3 historiography 12–13, 162 processes of 85 spatial 189n. 21 history 10–14, 16, 24–8, 30, 32–4, 39, 46–7, 51, 55–6, 58, 73, 85, 88, 110, 119, 124–5, 131, 133, 138, 140, 142, 149, 162, 174–7, 179–80, 187n.4, 188n.7, 190n.1, 190n.5 acceleration of 9, 17, 26



Index 223

Index

history – continued American 134 collective 12 crisis of 12 cultural 11, 45–6 democratization of 10 literary 6–9, 30–1, 33, 39–40, 44, 46, 54, 63, 69, 72, 92, 100–1, 104, 110, 144, 162, 180, 183 philosophy of 121 rewriting of 3 supplement of 56, 102 women’s 33 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 106–7 Hite, Molly 7, 103 Other Side of the Story, The 103 Hodgkins, Katharine 10 Holiday, Billie 128 Holocaust 13–14, 182n.5 Holocaust studies 14 Homer 39, 74, 81, 186n.12 Iliad, The 186n.12 Odyssey 81 Hours, The (Cunningham) 81 House on Eccles Street, The 112 How Societies Remember (Connerton) 42, 161 How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Russ) 101 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 134, 137–8 Huggan, Graham 123 humanities 25 Humbert, Humbert 104, 186 Hutcheon, Linda 75, 85 Huyssen, Andreas 9–10, 12, 15, 26 Present Pasts 10, 15 hybridity 136 hypermodernity 4 See also modernity Hypermodern Times (Lipovetsky) 61 hypertextuality 160 Hypsipyle 40 Ibsen, Henrik 46, 50 identification 59, 105, 136, 141, 152, 166–8, 189n.23 act of 166–7

possibilities of 143 religious 153 identity 4, 9–10, 12–13, 19–20, 26, 40, 43, 45–6, 50, 54, 63, 88, 116, 118, 124–5, 127, 130, 132–3, 135–7, 181, 182n.3, 189n.23 Caribbean 116 collective 19, 172 cultural 3, 5, 40, 130, 132–3, 146, 178 female 9 feminine 40, 84 fluidity of 20 narrative 8, 42 politics 169 racial 125, 189n.23 sexual 45, 47 social 13 ideology 91, 105, 131, 163, 170, 174, 177, 188n.15 of authorship as ownership 91 capitalist 60 gender 169 of originality 77 of (re)writing 164 of the subject 108, 109 Iliad, The (Homer) 186n. 12 Illusion of the End, The (Baudrillard) 3 imaginary 137 collective 133 cultural 4, 11, 13, 19, 23, 32 feminine 74 national 89 social 54 imagination 4, 11, 44, 46, 53, 76, 113, 162, 175 cultural 7 English 115 of the future 9 private 32 sympathetic 113 imitation 66, 68, 75–6 imperialism 115, 132, 192n.6 Incredulous Reader, The (Koelb) 145 Indiana University 183n.1 individualism 121 feminist 115 radical 175 industrialization 15, 141



224

In Lucia’s Eyes ( Japin) 57 innovation 20, 27, 172 See also creativity inscription 3, 7–9, 28, 31–2, 39, 41, 45, 57, 65, 68, 71–2, 81, 83, 99, 108, 114, 124, 127–9, 136, 140, 147, 151, 154, 161, 164, 170–1, 174–5, 178, 180, 182n.6 act of 162 culture of 161 of desire 51 original 70 systems of 160 See also reinscription Inside the Red Tent 143 intellectual property See under property intertextuality 50, 52, 69, 81–2, 127–9, 166, 184n.12, 187n.17, 189n.19, 189n.24 feminist 21 postcolonial 99 theories of 75 intervention 51, 150, 175, 178 in cultural memory 7, 20, 41, 66, 69, 97, 148, 162–3 within print culture 164 in public space 35 strategy of 40 Iphis 174 Irigaray, Luce 149 Isolde 103 Itaca per sempre (Malerba) 81 Italy 80 Ithaca 6 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Condé) 99, 122–3, 125–7 Jacob 104, 139–40, 143 Jacques and his Master (Diderot) 186n.10 Jaffe, Herb 187n.2 Jakobson, Roman 102, 120, 151 Jamaica 115 James, Henry 45 Golden Bowl, The 183n.7 James Madison University 183n.1 Jameson, Fredric 69

Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 69–70 Jane and the Barque of Frailty (Barron) 183n.10 Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (Barron) 183n.10 Jane Austen Book Club, The (Fowler) 185n.19 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 7, 11, 30, 42, 79, 103, 109, 114–16, 119, 190n.5 Jane Eyre: The Graphic Novel 182n.1 Jane Fairfax (Aiken) 22, 64, 183n.10, 187n.21 Japan 55 Japin, Arthur 57 Een schitterend gebrek 57 In Lucia’s Eyes 57 Jason 39–40, 181 Jesus 152 Joannou, Maroula 107, 186n.8, 189n.17 Job 7 John Indian 128–9 Johnson, Mark 67 Metaphors We Live By (with Lakoff ) 67 Jong, Erica 74, 185n.6 Fear of Flying 74, 185n.6 Joseph 104, 140 jouissance 62 journalism 183n. 5 Journal of Mrs Pepys, The 33 Joyce, James 113, 186n. 17 Ulysses 113 junk See under waste Jury of her Peers, A (Showalter) 134, 180, 185n.6 Kassandra (Wolf ) 6, 8 Kelly, Joan 33 King Creon 181 Kirk, G.S. 172 Nature of Greek Myth, The 172 Knopf 78 Koelb, Clayton 145–6 Incredulous Reader, The 145 Kristeva, Julia 189n.18 Kubrick, Stanley 87 Kundera, Milan 3, 186n.10



Index 225

Index

labour 142, 175 of creation 68 division of 50 literary 118 Lacan, Jacques 49, 51 lack 51, 73 Lady Catherine’s Necklace (Aiken) 183n.10 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 186n.13 La femme de Job (Chedid) 7 La fille d’Emma (Buffard) 109 La jeune née (Cixous) 184n.9 Lakoff, George 67, 169–70 Metaphors We Live By (with Johnson) 67 language 5, 44–5, 49–51, 56, 61, 67, 70–7, 83–5, 92–3, 97, 100, 102, 106, 112, 114, 117–18, 129, 136, 149–51, 159, 161–3, 171, 173, 184n.16, 188n.14, 191n.15, 192n.7 female 43, 48 feminist 132 gendering of 71 otherness in 122 poetic 49 as private property 71 of men 71 stealing 70–1, 73–5, 170 technology of 161, 191n.3 women’s reappropriation of 70 L’Arc 184n.10 larceny 72, 169–70 See also flying; plagiarism; stealing Latinus 147 Latium 147 Latournerie, Anne 60 Lavinia 147–148, 180 Lavinia (Le Guin) 11, 146–8, 154, 181, 191n. 11, 191n.13, 192n.7 Law of 1957 60 Law of the Father 70 Lawrence, D. H. 186n. 3 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 186n.13 Leah (the cook) 119 Leah (and Jacob) 104, 139

Lefevere, André 44, 149, 154, 160 Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame 154 legitimacy 30, 56, 67, 81, 109, 131, 136, 152, 163 cultural 54–5, 81 Le Guin, Ursula 11, 146–8, 154, 180–1, 191n.11, 191n. 13, 192n.7 Lavinia 11, 146–7, 154, 181, 191n.11, 191n.13, 192n.7 Le Moyne, Pierre 186n.12 De l’histoire 186n.12 Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora) 12, 28 Les voleuses de langue (Hermann) 70, 73 lethetic 145–6 Letters (Rhys) 117 Leukon 181 Lion, The Unicorn and Me, The (Winterson) 173 Lipovetsky, Gilles 15, 19, 61 Hypermodern Times 61 Lippincott, Robin 185n.18, 190n.9 Mr. Dalloway 185n.18, 190n.9 Liquid Fear (Bauman) 19 liquidity 19 Liquid Life (Bauman) 19 Liquid Love (Bauman) 19 liquid modernity See under modernity Liquid Modernity (Bauman) 19 Liquid Times (Bauman) 19 Listening to Silences (Hedges and Fishkin) 101 literacy 161 See also orality literariness 81–2 literary, the 68 literary estate 78, 81, 87 literary labour See under labour literature 5, 9, 16, 33, 39, 42–8, 50, 58–62, 64, 70–1, 75, 77–8, 80, 82, 84, 91, 100–2, 112–13, 128, 131, 138, 145–6, 148, 155, 160, 162, 164, 171, 173, 175, 182n.2, 185n.3, 186n.9, 191n. 16



226

American 134, 137–8 comparative 183n.1 democratization of 58 of exhaustion 69 feminine 91 as litter 20 postcolonial 98, 105, 125 theories of 57 Victorian 108 Western 39, 82, 130, 144–5 women in 44 world 8, 21 women’s 126, 139 Literature of Their Own, A (Showalter) 91 litter See under waste Little Red Hen 23 Little Red Riding Hood 6, 23, 55 Liveness (Auslander) 185n.7 Lives of Animals, The (Coetzee) 112 Llewellyn, Mark 85 logocentrism 51, 185n.4 logos 51 Lolita 7, 11, 67, 79–80, 87, 92, 104, 186n.14 Lolita (Nabokov, V.) 11, 68, 75, 78–83, 104 Lolita und der deutsche Leutnant (Maar) 186n.14 London 109, 111, 178, 187n.2, 189n.17 literary scene 55 London Tube 178 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 124 Giles Corey of the Salem Farms 124 long tail 164 Lorde, Audre 153 Los Angeles 123 Lo’s Diary (Pera) 67, 78–82, 87, 186n.13 loss 70, 109, 138 Lotringer, Sylvère 184 Lover’s Discourse, A (Barthes) 62 Lübbe, Hermann 15 Lucia 57 Lucifer (Palmen) 82 Lucifer (van Vondel) 82 Lyotard, Jean-François 34, 69, 131

Maar, Michael 186n.14 Lolita und der deutsche Leutnant 186n.14 Two Lolitas, The 186n.14 Macherey, Pierre 97 Macmillan 78 Madwoman in the Attic, The (Gilbert and Gubar) 72, 114, 189n.16 Mailer, Norman 49 Maitland, Sara 6, 39, 74, 145, 150–1, 183n.9 Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching 74 Malerba, Luigi 81 Itaca per sempre 81 Mammy 88 Mann, Klaus 82 Mann, Thomas 82 Mansfield Revisited (Aiken) 183n.10 Marcus, Steven 108 Other Victorians, The 108 marginalization 139, 142–3 Marinetti, F.T. 16 market 20–2, 34, 60, 64–5, 73, 77, 89, 91, 101, 105, 132, 135–8, 153, 161, 182n.3, 185n.19, 190n.6 literary 4, 6, 16, 21–3, 64, 69, 71, 89–90, 92–3, 105, 135–16, 138, 143, 161, 165, 172, 187n.2 niche 132, 135–6, 164 pressures 20 marketing 11, 19, 21–3, 60, 63–4, 87, 91, 105, 135, 137, 162, 171–2, 183n.10–11 costs 21, 64 innovation in 172 niche 136 product 22 techniques 60 Martial 71 Epigrams 71 Martin, Valerie 104 Mary Reilly 104 Martinique 189n.24 Marx, Karl 110, 175, 188n.7, 192n.10 Capital 110 Mary Magdalene 64, 152, 163 Mary Reilly (Martin) 104



Index 227

Index

masculine 56, 150, 152 authority 72 dominance 47, 54 drive to domination 176 economy of ownership 70 interest 73 language as 71 myth 174 traditions of writing 162 values 148 way of thinking 71 See also feminine; masculinity masculinity 49, 134, 144 See also masculine Mason, Antoinette Cosway 116 Mason, Bertha Antoinette 8 Mathijsen, Marita 16, 182n.6 Maurel-Indart, Hélène 68, 90 McCaig, Donald 87 Rhett Butler’s People 87 Medea 39, 93, 181 Medea: A Modern Retelling 180 Medea: Stimmen 180 mediation 35, 62, 165 of storytelling 165 Medusa 6, 51–2, 184n.11 myth of 51 representations of 184n.12 Medusa Reader, The (Garber) 184n.11 Melville, Herman 134–5, 137–8, 144, 148 Moby-Dick 134, 137–18, 144, 148 memoirs 17 Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, The (Roszak) 57 memorability 23 memory 3–5, 9–10, 12–17, 19, 23–26, 28–32, 34–35, 41–42, 57, 69, 86–89, 99, 104, 108, 117, 121–2, 130, 132, 135, 138–43, 146, 153, 159, 160–1, 163–8, 174, 179–80, 182n.5, 189n.22, 191n.5, 192n.4–5 collective 12, 23, 131, 143 communicative 69, 86, 132, 138, 154, 180 cultural 3, 5, 7–11, 14, 20, 29–35, 39, 41, 54, 57, 63, 65–7, 69–70,

86, 88, 91–2, 97, 108, 118, 130–3, 135, 137–9, 144, 146, 148, 152, 154–5, 159–63, 165, 167, 170, 175, 178, 180–1, 182n.2, 187n.20, 190n.6 culture 10, 12–13, 15, 17, 29–30, 41, 65, 108, 135, 159 culture as 40, 43, 135 female 144, 163, 167 as inscription 31 liquid 175 mythical 33 politics of 26 site of 133, 166 surplus 5 technology of 5, 30, 32, 118, 170, 189n.18 Western 17 See also counter-memory Menon, Ritu 101 Mercure de France 123 metafiction 81–2, 111, 125, 186n.16 feminist 185n.6 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 52 metaphor 52, 67–71, 73–5, 93, 111, 121, 164–5, 178–9 See also metonymy Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson) 67 metonymy 120–1, 128, 183n.13 See also metaphor Midas, Mrs. 8 Midsummer Nights (Winterson) 173 militarism 141 Miller, Arthur 124 Crucible, The 124 Miller, Henry 49, 186n.13 Tropic of Cancer 186n.13 Millett, Kate 43–4 Sexual Politics 43 Milton, John 82 Minerva 52 Minh-ha, Trinh 119 misogyny 44, 150 misrepresentation 20, 44, 146, 168, 180 of the West Indies 115 See also representation



228

Index 229 of Penelope 173–4 return of 178 Mythologies (Barthes) 168, 192n.8 Myths Boxset, The 173 Nabokov, Dmitri 78–81, 83 Nabokov, Vladimir 11, 68, 75, 78–81, 83, 87, 92, 186n.13–14 Lolita 11, 68, 75, 78–83, 104 Naked Lunch (Burroughs) 186n.13 Naslund, Sena Jeter 8, 134–5, 137–9, 143–4, 146, 148, 152 Ahab’s Wife 8, 134–5, 137–9, 143, 146, 148 Nature of Greek Myth, The (Kirk) 172 neoliberalism 136, 160 See also capitalism Neptune 52 Netherlands 16, 80, 82 neuroscience 169 New Criticism 46–7, 58–9, 184n.8 See also criticism New England 129 New Feminist Criticism, The 183n.5 New Historicism 168, 191n.12 Newly Born Woman, The (Cixous and Clément) 50, 185n.4 New Mexico 188n.10 New Woman 53 New York Observer, The 78 New York Post, The 135 New York Times, The 48 New York Times Book Review, The 134 9/11 See under September 11, 2001 Noah’s Ark 90 No Man’s Land (Gilbert and Gubar) 114 non-fiction 43, 107 Nora, Pierre 9–10, 12–17, 28–9, 133, 183n.12, 189n.21, 192n.5 Les Lieux de mémoire 12, 28 North by Northanger (Bebris) 183n.10 nostalgia 17, 19, 28, 192 Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky) 169 novelist 103, 117 novelty 9, 77 See also originality nowism 27



Mistress of Lilliput, The (Fell) 7 Mitchell, Margaret 64, 67, 87–9, 92 Gone With the Wind 64, 67, 87–9, 92 Mitchell, Maria 137 MLA (Modern Language Association) 5 Moby-Dick (Melville) 134, 137–8, 144, 148 modernity 16–17, 19, 26, 28, 85 late 181 liquid 4, 11, 19, 27, 30, 32, 136, 160, 179 See also hypermodernity Modern Language Association (MLA) 5 Moi, Joséphine, impératrice (Guth) 125 Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem (Condé) 6, 122, 124 monologism 117 See also dialogism Month of Sundays, A (Updike) 103 Moraru, Christian 8, 42, 191n.2 Rewriting 191n.2 MORE-Futures 176 Morris, Brian 182n.4 Morrison, Toni 88 Moss, Jane 126 (m)other tongue 148, 154 Mr. Dalloway (Lippincott) 185n.18, 190n.9 Mr. Darcy’s Diary (Grange) 185n.18, 190n.9 Mr. Knightley’s Diary (Grange) 190n.9 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 81 Mrs. de Winter (Hill) 64 multiculturalism 101 Muse 73 music 90, 173 Mycenae 140d My Fair Lady 79 myth 6, 20, 29–32, 39, 49, 52, 61, 89, 93, 160, 168–75, 177–80, 184n.11 of Atlas 171, 173–4 Greek 6, 51 of Heracles 171, 173 of Medusa 51–52 of Odysseus 173 of Oedipus 171

Index

objectivity 10, 163 Occidental College 123 Odyssey (Homer) 81 OED (Oxford English Dictionary) 85, 114, 130, 150–1, 188n.14, 191n.15 Oedipus 72, 170–1 O’Hara, Gerald 88 O’Hara, Scarlett 33, 87–8 Olsen, Tillie 100–1, 116, 187n.1, 188n.13 Silences 100–1, 187n.1, 188n.13 One, The 70 Ong, Walter 29, 160 Orality and Literacy 29 On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (Rich) 107 oppression 42, 50, 100–1, 120 sexual 44, 108 shared experiences of 100 women’s 44 orality 160–1 secondary 29, 160 See also literacy Orality and Literacy (Ong) 29 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Winterson) 90, 173 Orbus 174–17 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 143 originality 68, 75, 85 See also novelty Ostriker, Alicia Suskin 41, 43, 73–4 Feminist Revision and the Bible 191n.14 Stealing the Language 73 other 103, 111, 113 otherness 122, 129 haunting presence of 122 ordinary 129 potential 118 Other Side of the Story, The (Hite) 103 Other Victorians, The (Marcus) 108 Ouologuem, Yambo 68 Ovid 39, 52 Heroides 39 Metamorphoses 52 ownership 67, 70–72, 83, 93 authorship as 91 Oxbridge 55

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 85, 114, 130, 150–1, 188n.14, 191n.15 pacifism 141 Palimpsests (Genette) 186n.12 Palmen, Connie 82 Lucifer 82 Paris 17 parody 69, 76, 127–8 Parry, Benita 119 Passion, The (Winterson) 90, 173 Passions of the Mind (Byatt) 59 past 3–20, 23–35, 40–2, 45, 50–4, 57, 60, 65–7, 69, 85–6, 88, 91, 97, 100–1, 112, 121–2, 131–3, 140–8, 159, 162, 165–7, 169, 174–1, 185n.6 absence of the 16 as choice 18–19 cultural 5, 15 as presence 5, 10, 23–4, 118, 121–2 manufacturing the 12 See also time pastiche 69, 76 paternity 72 See also father patriarchy 47, 73, 101, 143 patrimony 15, 18 PEN 78 Penelope 6, 39, 81, 93, 150, 173–4 Penelopiad, The (Atwood) 150, 173–4 Penguin 20 Pera, Pia 7, 67–8, 75, 78–80, 82–3, 85, 87, 92, 104, 185n.2 Diario di Lo 7, 78 Lo’s Diary 67, 78–82, 87, 186n.13 performance 35, 48, 68, 76, 161, 164–5, 167–8, 170, 185n.7 of cultural memory 35 female 165 of identification 167 literature as 77 of memory 148, 166–7 of re-vision 162 rewriting as 168, 170 Perpetua 74 Perrault, Charles 55, 76, 149



230

Perseus 39, 52 Petry, Ann 124 Tituba of Salem Village 124 phallocentrism 51, 71, 185n.4 Phallus 70 Phelan, Peggy 167 Unmarked 167 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart 146 Phenomenology of Spirit, The (Hegel) 110 Philcox, Richard 189n.25 philosophy 50 of history 121 Philosophy of Rhetoric, The (Richards) 93 Pine, Joseph 23, 25, 182, 191n.4 Experience Economy, The (with Gilmore) 23, 25 Pirate, The (Robbins) 84 Pizzichini, Lilian 186n.17 plagiarism 66–72, 75, 77–8, 80, 82–5, 89–93, 185n.1 See also flying; larceny; stealing Planet Blue 176–17 Plath, Sylvia 184n.11 Plato 191n.5 Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes) 62 plot 62, 76, 84, 86, 102, 110, 112, 113, 154, 171–2, 186n.14 pluralism 136 poet 5, 48–9, 51, 55, 66, 72–3, 85, 117, 147, 151 heritage of 6 poetry 6, 48, 58, 72, 74, 102, 117, 150 theory of 72 women’s 73 politics 17, 19, 26, 54, 72, 169–70, 183n.5 of authorship 91 of commerce 72 feminist 159 identity 136, 169 of memory 26 race 88, 189n.23 of rewriting 83, 99–100 sexual 44, 160 of silence 99 of South Africa 110, 188n.7 of writing 81

Politics Out of History (Brown, W.) 25 Poole, Grace 119 pornography 108, 184 postcolonialism 10, 99, 112 See also colonialism postmodernism 10, 70, 81–2, 186n.16 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson) 69–70 Pragmatic Plagiarism (Randall, M.) 66, 68, 83 presence 24–5, 28, 35, 99, 116, 121–2, 129, 161, 180 in absence 121 metaphysics of 28 of otherness 122, 129 of the past 24, 118, 121–2 past as 5, 10 production of 24–5 See also absence present 5, 11–12, 14–15, 18–19, 24, 26–9, 32, 35, 57, 107, 117, 120–2, 140–1, 166, 174–5, 180–1 liquid 27, 167 memory in the 9 past as 23 See also time presentification 24–5, 180–1 Present Pasts (Huyssen) 10, 15 Pride and Prescience (Bebris) 183n.10 print 20, 40, 62–3, 74, 161, 164, 191n.3, 192n.5 culture 161, 164 invention of 71 logic of 63 space of 164 printing 71, 165 printing press 165 priority 72–3, 152 Prison Information project (Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons) 188n.5 production 6, 17, 22, 34, 44, 48, 57, 59, 62, 67–70, 75, 82–5, 89–92, 102, 104–5, 107, 112, 120, 125–6, 148, 151, 159, 169, 181, 185n.5, 189n.15



Index 231

Index

production – continued cultural 3, 62, 71 of memory 5, 7, 9, 30 of the past 10, 16–17, 24, 34 reading as 62 rewriting as 105 See also reproduction profit 34, 70, 79 symbolic 66, 79 unearned 67 progress 26–7, 175, 177 history as 175 promise 31, 87, 108, 177, 179 emancipatory 11, 40–1, 54, 160 radical 5, 11 property 67, 72–3, 83, 93 intellectual 66, 69, 79, 83, 92–3, 192n.6 literary 70 private 71, 89, 92, 118 public 79, 86 protectionism 83 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 70 Proulx, Annie 138 Provence 163 proximity 129 of alterity 128 Prynne, Hester 103, 125–6, 129 public domain 79, 85–6, 92, 163 publishing 20–21, 76, 79–80, 89, 135, 161, 164, 171, 183n.5 culture 20 house 21, 34, 56, 70, 78, 82, 123, 171 industry 5, 20–1, 60, 89, 123, 135, 159 strategy 5 Pygmalion 79 Queen Kong 8 Queneau, Raymond 102 Exercices de style 102 quotation 69, 83 race 59, 134, 138, 143, 189n.17, 189n.23 politics 88 racism 88, 144 American 123

Radstone, Susannah 10, 12, 108, 188n.6 Randall, Alice 67, 87–9, 92 Wind Done Gone, The 67, 87–9, 92 Randall, Marilyn 66, 68, 75, 77, 83 Pragmatic Plagiarism 66, 68, 83 Rapunzel 74 readerly text 62 See also writerly text reading 32, 35, 41–6, 48, 52–3, 56–59, 61–3, 68, 75–7, 90, 103–5, 111–12, 118, 126–8, 131, 135, 143, 145–7, 152, 164, 166, 172, 178 democratization of 165 ethics of 114 feminist theory of 46 suspicious 41 women’s 43, 46, 143 See also rereading reality 46, 48–9, 56, 68, 93, 102, 142, 148, 163 future 53 material 41, 163 present 53 Rebecca 7 Rebecca (du Maurier) 64 Rebecca’s Tale (Beauman) 7 re-calling 4, 146 reception 34, 66–7, 69, 76, 80, 82–3, 89, 91–2, 113, 120, 125–6, 139, 152, 189n.15, 189n.17 act of 66, 80, 82, 93 authoritative 82 context of 69, 77, 80, 97 critical 114, 125 productive 16, 41–2, 57 reconstruction 31, 102 history as 28 of the past 13 See also construction récriture feminine 53, 111 See also écriture feminine Red Tent, The (Diamant) 104, 139, 143–4, 151, 162–3 Register, Cheri 47 Reid, Su 151



232

Reilly, Mary 7 reinscription 9, 31, 41, 57, 63, 76, 93, 132 See also inscription remembering 3, 5, 8–9, 18, 28, 30, 41–2, 84, 104, 121, 129–34, 140–1, 146, 153, 162–3, 165–7, 174, 179–80 feminist 31 the future 180 rewriting as 127 of women’s histories 33 remembrance 9, 14, 28, 97, 104, 130, 155, 162, 165–6, 170, 176, 180, 182n.2 cultural 3, 25, 30, 34, 67, 155, 174, 181 space of 97, 129 remythologize 31, 159, 169, 175–6, 179, 181 See also demythologize re-narration 173, 177 repertoire 33, 35, 161, 168 See also archive repetition 29, 45, 69, 76, 80, 83–4, 146, 168, 171, 173, 176–7, 186n.14 aesthetics of 81, 83 art of 76 with a difference 29 literary 68–9, 75, 82 replenishment 100, 103 rewriting as 104 strategy of 132 representation 12, 28–9, 30, 33, 40, 42, 87–8, 97, 99, 109, 113, 120–2, 128, 130, 140, 159, 165 of femininity 131 of Medusa 184n.13 racist 88 realistic 48 space of 97 technology of 7 of women 146 See also misrepresentation Representations of the Intellectual (Said) 187n.22 reproduction 29, 51, 73, 92, 150, 185n.7

literature’s 70 mechanics of 50 technologies of 89–90, 185n.7 See also production rereading 5, 30, 44, 52–3, 57, 62–3, 98, 131, 155, 184n.7, 185n.19, 188n.7 See also reading resistance 15, 32, 34, 42, 46, 73, 120 act of 71 aesthetics of 145 Resisting Reader, The (Fetterley) 43, 48 Resolution 176 retelling 11, 20, 22, 24, 29, 31, 39, 43, 50, 55, 57, 67, 87, 102, 104, 124, 160, 164, 171–4, 178–80, 184n.11, 188n.15, 190n.10, 191n.2 of fairy tales 6, 8, 76, 186n.11 of myth 20, 39, 179 mythical 29, 31–2, 93, 173–5, 178–80 re-vision 5, 7, 11, 26, 29, 34, 42, 45–7, 50–1, 53, 57, 105, 108, 112–13, 131, 135, 148, 160, 190 centrality of 50 feminist 6, 31, 33, 152 performance 162 writing as 30 revisionism 10, 43, 73–4 revolution 44–5, 60, 190n.6 critical 43 digital 165 French 60 sexual 44, 107 rewriting 3–8, 10–11, 16, 20–4, 29–35, 39–42, 45–6, 48–57, 61–2, 64, 66–71, 74–8, 80–3, 85–7, 89–93, 97–9, 101–2, 104–6, 109, 111–14, 118, 120–1, 125, 131–2, 134–5, 138–9, 142–55, 160–2, 165, 167–72, 174, 176, 178, 183n.1–2, 184n.7, 184n.16, 184n.18, 185n.18–19, 185n.6, 186n.10, 188n.11–12, 188n.15, 189n.15, 190n.5, 190n.9, 191n.15, 191n.2



Index 233

Index

rewriting – continued ethics of 114 feminist 8, 23, 40, 135 of history 3 ideology of 164 potential of 4, 74, 89 reading as 59, 61 as remembering 127 as stealing 67, 75 translation as 149–50 women’s 3–12, 16, 20–4, 26, 28–35, 39–45, 49, 53–5, 57–8, 61–9, 83–4, 91–3, 97–100, 102–6, 108–12, 114, 118–19, 121–2, 129–32, 135–6, 138–9, 141, 143–9, 151–5, 159–65, 169, 172, 188n.15, 190n.6, 190n.9 writing as 83 Rewriting (Moraru) 191n.2 rhetoric 58, 76, 184n.9 feminist 43 rules of 71 Rhett Butler’s People (McCaig) 87 Rhys, Jean 7–8, 42, 79, 82, 99, 103, 114–17, 119, 122, 126–7, 186n.17, 187n.17, 189n.17, 190n.5 Good Morning, Midnight 82 Letters 117 Wild Sargasso Sea 7–8, 30, 79, 99, 114–19, 122, 126–7, 188n.15, 190n.5 Rich, Adrienne 5, 29, 34, 39–41, 43–50, 523, 55, 57, 97, 100, 105, 107, 111–12, 131, 135, 146, 148, 159–60, 162, 166 Diving into the Wreck 48–9 On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 107 Will to Change, The 40 Richards, I.A. 93 Philosophy of Rhetoric, The 93 Ricoeur, Paul 42, 61, 189n.19 Time and Narrative 61 Riffaterre, Michael 75 Rigney, Ann 130, 164, 191n.4 Ripley, Alexandra 64, 87 Scarlett 64, 87 Robber Bride, The (Atwood) 148–50

Robbins, Harold 84 Pirate, The 84 Roberts, Michèle 39, 64, 152, 162–3, 169 Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene, The 64 Wild Girl, The 64, 152, 162–3, 169 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 109–10, 113, 175, 177 Robot Spike 176 Rochester, Mr. 8, 42, 114, 119 Roger’s Version (Updike) 103 romance 74, 159 family 72 of feminisim 184n.15 romantic drama 88 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 79 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf) 55, 167 Rootprints (Cixous) 102 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Stoppard) 79 Rosenthal, Bernard 124 Rosset, Barney 78, 186n.13 Roszak, Theodore 57 Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, The 57 Roudebush, Marc 183n.12 Routledge 149 Roz 148 Rules of Art, The (Bourdieu) 91 Runia, Eelco 118, 121, 183n.13 Rushdie, Salman 98–9 Russ, Joanna 101, 170–171 How to Suppress Women’s Writing 101 S (Updike) 79 Sadeian Woman, The (Carter) 31, 168 Sage, Lorna 55, 184n.15 Said, Edward 70, 77, 187n.22 Representations of the Intellectual 187n.22 Saint-Amour, Paul 78, 87, 89 Copywrights, The 86–7 Salem 125 Salem Witch Trails 123, 127 Salmagundi 188n.10 Sanders, Julie 8, 75, 154



234

Sarton, May 51–2, 184n.11 Sartre, Jean-Paul 53 Search for a Method 53 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) 79, 103, 125 Scarlett (Ripley) 64, 87 Schat, Peter 82 science 17 scientificity 163 Scott, Walter 191n.4 Search for a Method (Sartre) 53 Second World War See under World War II Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene, The (Roberts) 64 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 31, 57, 127–8, 146, 168 Touching Feeling 31, 127, 168 self 13, 34, 53, 101–2, 105, 108, 112, 118, 121–2, 124, 127–8, 140, 185n.3 female 54 remembered 97 sense of 19, 26, 50, 109 self-consciousness 107, 129, 173 See also consciousness; streamof-consciousness September 11, 2001 105, 160 sex 107, 138 See also sexuality sexism 146 Sexton, Anne 8 Transformations 8 sexuality 6, 51, 55, 59, 79, 84, 107–8 production of 105–6 See also sex Sexual Politics (Millett) 43 Shakespeare, William 85 Hamlet 23, 79 Romeo and Juliet 79 Shakespearean Negotiations (Greenblatt) 191n.12 Sheherazade 39 shopping 19, 22, 136–7 logic of 19 memory and 23 Short History of Myth, A (Armstrong) 173

Showalter, Elaine 40, 44, 91, 134–5, 137, 139, 180, 183n.5, 185n.6, 187n.4, 190n.5 Jury of her Peers, A 134, 180, 185n.6 Literature of Their Own, A 91 Signs 184n. 9 silence 97–101, 103–8, 110–14, 117, 119–21, 124, 129, 143, 164, 189n.20 and forgetting 97 politics of 99 tradition of 20 of the unconscious 97 women’s 100, 108 Silences (Olsen) 100–1, 187n.1, 188n.13 Simba Information 22 Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2005 22 simultaneity 27–8 Sirens 51 skopos theory 151–2 slavery 88–9, 93, 124, 137, 143–4 abolition of 166 legacy of 89 Smiley, Jane 137–8, 144 Smith, Ali 174 Girl Meets Boy 174 Smith, Barbara Hernstein 130–1, 154 Smith, Valerie 3 Snow White 23 Social Frameworks of Memory, The (Halbwach) 12 socialism 142 social sciences 25 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord) 59 Sontag, Susan 61 Souffles (Cixous) 184n.12 South 88–9 South Africa 110, 188n.7, 188n.12 See also Africa space 28, 40, 43, 45, 54–5, 57, 71–2, 76, 97, 101–2, 118–19, 121, 141–2, 161–2, 164, 180, 189n.21 of consumer culture 34 of mythical memory 33 public 35, 40, 55 of remembrance 97, 129



Index 235

Index

speech 51, 84, 97–9, 101–2, 105–8, 110–12, 114, 120–1, 124, 126, 129, 162, 164–6, 168–70, 177 possibilities of 114 Spencer, Una 134 Spikkers 176 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 97, 105, 111–12, 114–15, 119 Stanford, Ann 184n.11 Star Wars 98 stealing 66–8, 70–5, 84, 93, 179 rewriting as 67, 170 See also flying; larceny; plagiarism Stealing the Language (Ostriker) 73 Steck-Vaughn 23 Stevenson, Robert Louis 7, 104 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 104 Stimpson, Catharine 26 Stone Gods 176 Stone Gods, The (Winterson) 174–9 Stoppard, Tom 79 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 79 Story of Christa T, The 112 Story of My Life 57 storytelling 11, 74, 90, 93, 98, 117, 129, 162, 165, 173–4, 179 art of 174 cultural process of 31 female traditions of 139 male traditions of 162 oral 162 power of 147 women’s 11 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 137–8, 144 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 137–8 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson) 104 stream-of-consciousness 142 See also consciousness; selfconsciousness structuralism 75 Sturken, Marita 7, 10, 32, 131 Tourists of History 10 subjectivity 12, 47, 56–7, 84, 108–9, 119 female 55, 115 feminine 54 Subversive Intent (Suleiman) 184n.12

Suleiman, Susan 21, 184n.12 Subversive Intent 184n.12 supplement 40, 54, 56, 102, 138–9, 144, 147, 154, 163, 165 to history 56, 102 suppression 97–9, 102–3, 116, 118, 124, 127, 129, 139 of experience 118 of voice 120 Suspense and Sensibility (Bebris) 183n.10 Sutherland, John 103–104 Symbolic 73 symbolization 70–1, 110 S/Z (Barthes) 61–2 sžujet 102 See also fabula; plot Tara 88 Taylor, Diana 161 Tech City 175–6 telos 27 temporality 15, 26 See also time Tennant, Emma 22, 57, 91 Adèle 22, 57, 91 Terdiman, Richard 14, 30, 121–2 Terra Australis 176 territorialization 72, 83 theft See under stealing theory critical 127 cultural 191n.1 feminist 46 of influence 185n.3 literary 59, 84 of literary creativity 72, 75 of poetry 72 postcolonial 125 of reading 61 skopos 152–3 translation 153 Theory, Culture and Society 182n.4 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 30 Thomas, D.M. 109 Charlotte 109 Tiffin, Helen 98 Empire Writes Back, The (with Ashcroft and Griffiths) 98



236

time 5, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 26–30, 33, 39, 45, 61–62, 79, 85, 90, 101, 121, 129, 141–2, 161, 167, 170, 176, 181 and consumer culture 61 critique 61 historical 26–9, 122, 161, 175 liquid 12, 29 teleological 27, 178 See also future; past; present; temporality Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 61 Tiresias, Mrs. 8 Tituba 123–129, 189n. 23 myth 124 Tituba of Salem Village (Petry) 124 Tongue Snatchers, The (Hermann) 70 Tönnies, Ferdinand 13–14 Tony 148–149 Toronto Globe 80 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick) 31, 127, 168 tourism 10 Tourists of History (Sturken) 10 trace 16, 28, 117, 161, 167, 180 archival 167 decontextualized 162 material 167 transformation 10, 32, 34, 44, 50, 54, 56, 62, 79, 83, 89, 118, 136, 159, 169, 178–9 cultural 4, 44, 50, 69 of cultural memory 54, 62, 88, 138 social 26 Transformations (Sexton) 8 translation 7, 55, 132, 135, 148–54, 184n.16, 191n.15 as equivalence 150 as feminine versioning 149 practice 149–50 as rewriting 149–50 as a strategy of adaptation 153 See also translation studies translation studies 149 Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (Lefevere) 154

translator 150, 191n.15 female 149 responsibility of 149 trash See under waste trauma 89 trauma studies 122 Tristan 103 Tropic of Cancer (Miller, H.) 186n.13 Troy 140–2, 166 Tsvetaeva, Marina 42 Twain, Mark 134, 137–8 Huckleberry Finn 134, 137–8 Two Lolitas, The (Maar) 186n.14 Ugrešic´, Dubravka 174 Baba Yaga Laid an Egg 174 Ulysses (Joyce) 113 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 137–8 Underground Man 169 United States (America) 8, 58, 78–80, 92, 100, 106, 123, 133, 135, 138, 183n.5, 187n.2, 189n.23, 190n.8 cultural memory of 139 mainstream 89, 92 post-9/11 105 women’s poetry in 73 United States Copyright Act 67 United States Court of Appeals 92 Unmarked (Phelan) 167 Updike, John 79, 102, 109 Gertrude and Claudius 109 Month of Sundays, A 103 Roger’s Version 103 S 79 Uses of Enchantment, The (Bettelheim) 55 utopia 27, 35, 174, 183n.6 Utrecht University 188n.12 van Niekerk, Marlene 188n.12 Fellow Traveller (A True Story), The 188n.12 Van Schoonneveldt, Léon 187n.20 van Vondel, Joost 82 Lucifer 82 Vergil 147, 191n.13 Victorian 85, 108 literature 108



Index 237

Index

Victorian – continued novel 85–6 past 85 women 72 Vietnam 49 Vintage 76, 180 Vintage Fear (Brothers Grimm and Carter) 76 Virgil 11, 39, 147, 154, 191n.13 Aeneid, The 39, 146–7, 154, 191n.13 Virgile, non (Wittig) 146 voice 6–8, 11, 33, 39, 41, 48, 50, 98–9, 101–2, 105, 107, 111, 113–15, 117–20, 122, 124–6, 135, 139, 142, 144, 147–8, 180–1 women’s 41, 57, 63, 104–15 von Lichberg 186n.14 Wallace, Diane 54 Walt Disney Company 22 war 14, 32, 140–2, 175 in Algeria 49 cold 141 nuclear 141 in Troy 140, 186n.12, 188n.15 See also Civil War; World War II; World War III waste 15–18, 161, 175 economy of 171 literature as 20 Watt, Ian 175, 191n.5 Waugh, Patricia 114 Weber, Myles 101 Consuming Silences 101 Weight (Winterson) 171, 173–4, 178–9 Western Canon, The (Bloom) 74, 130, 148 West Indies 42, 115, 123, 126–7 West Side Story 79 Whelehan, Imelda 183n.9 Feminist Bestseller, The 183n.9 Wicked Stepmother 153 Widdowson, Peter 11 Wikipedia 68 Wild Girl, The (Roberts) 64, 152, 162–3, 169

Wild Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 7–8, 30, 79, 99, 114–19, 122, 126–7, 188n.15, 190n.5 Will to Change, The (Rich) 40 Wind Done Gone, The (Randall, A.) 67, 87–9, 92 Windward Islands 115 Winterson, Jeanette 90, 171–80, 187n.19 Boating for Beginners 90 Fit for the Future 187n.19 Lion, The Unicorn and Me, The 173 Midsummer Nights 173 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 90, 173 Passion, The 90, 173 Stone Gods, The 174–9 Weight 171, 173–4, 178–9 Wittig, Monique 146 Across the Acheron 146 Virgile, non 146 Wolf, Christa 6, 8, 42–3, 139–45, 151, 162, 165–7, 180–1, 190n.10 Cassandra 139, 144, 151, 162, 165–7 Kassandra 6, 8 Medea: A Modern Retelling 180–1 Medea: Stimmen 180–1 Wolf’s Tale, The 23 Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Fuller) 137 Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching (Maitland) 74 women’s liberation 47, 107 women’s movement 21, 33, 43, 46–7, 56, 58, 76, 100, 183n.9 international 5, 21, 50 women’s studies 33, 101 Woolf, Virginia 33, 55–6, 81, 100, 138, 144, 167 Mrs. Dalloway 81 Room of One’s Own, A 55, 167 Wordsworth, William 151 World Bank 176 World’s Wife, The (Duffy) 8 World War II 12, 58, 116, 133 See also war World War III 176 See also war Wreck City 175–6



238

writerly text 61–3 See also readerly text writing 3, 20, 26, 40, 44–5, 47–8, 52, 54, 56, 58–9, 61–3, 66–7, 70–7, 81–5, 91–3, 97, 101–103, 8, 111–12, 116–18, 126–8, 131, 140, 142–3, 146–8, 152, 160–8, 173, 182n.2, 184n.18, 185n.6, 186n.17, 187n.18, 191n.2–3, 191n.5, 192n.5 feminine 51, 53, 56–7, 71 feminist 41, 57

new 40, 48, 51 politics of 81 postmodern 39 women’s 6, 21, 30, 48, 54, 57, 70–2, 75, 97, 99–101, 138, 142, 172, 180, 183n.9, 183n.11, 186n.15, 190n.5 writing back 97–9, 109, 119–20, 122, 125–6, 131 Zabus, Chantal 31 Zenia 149



Index 239

Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting

CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMENS WRITING (Postcolonial Literature)

Contexts of Contemporary Nursing (Transforming Nursing Practice)

Literary history womens writing britain

gynecology and womens health

Rewriting History

Rewriting History

Walking in Memories

Scientific american presents womens health

Botanical Medicine for Womens Health

Futures in the Memories Market

Twilight Memories

Memories Revised

Blood Memories

Dying Memories

Hunting Memories

Deadly Memories

Undercover Memories

Dark Memories

Twilight Memories

Twilight Memories

Arousing Memories

Dark Memories

Christmas Memories

Rewriting the Soul

Rewriting Indian History

Rewriting the Soul

Rewriting techniques and applications

Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times

Religion in Development: Rewriting the Secular Script

Transforming Organizations

Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting

CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMENS WRITING (Postcolonial Literature)

Contexts of Contemporary Nursing (Transforming Nursing Practice)

Literary history womens writing britain

gynecology and womens health

Rewriting History

Rewriting History

Walking in Memories

Scientific american presents womens health

Botanical Medicine for Womens Health

Futures in the Memories Market

Twilight Memories

Memories Revised

Blood Memories

Dying Memories

Hunting Memories

Deadly Memories

Undercover Memories

Dark Memories

Twilight Memories

Twilight Memories

Arousing Memories

Dark Memories

Christmas Memories

Rewriting the Soul

Rewriting Indian History

Rewriting the Soul

Rewriting techniques and applications

Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times

Religion in Development: Rewriting the Secular Script

Transforming Organizations

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