feminist revision of canonical narratives by contemporary women writers amy s

257 Pages·2015·1.72 MB·English

ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY

RE-CHARTING THE PRESENT: FEMINIST REVISION OF CANONICAL
NARRATIVES BY CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS

AMY SUZANNE CRAWFORD

A thesis in partial fulfilment of the
requirements of Anglia Ruskin University
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Submitted: 14 February 2015
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Sarah Annes Brown and Dr. Tory Young,
for their guidance during my research and thoughtful, thorough critique of my writing.
Thanks also to Dr. Leah Tether for her helpful comments regarding translation and
adaptation, Dr. Jeannette Baxter for her guidance and support, and Zoë Bennett for taking
an interest in my project and providing me with invaluable resources.
I would also like to thank my fellow PhD candidates who were dialogue partners and peer
reviewers at different stages of the writing process, specifically Dr. Ellie Crouch, Dr.
Claire Nicholson, Stev White, Kirsty Harris, Tiffani Angus and Louise Ells.
I wish to thank Anglia Ruskin University for financial assistance which enabled me to
attend conferences as well as the staff of Anglia Ruskin University Library, Cambridge
University Library, and the British Library. I am also grateful to student advisor Edna
Johnson without whom I would not have been able to remain in the UK as an international
student.
Most importantly, I thank my parents Ray and Margena Crawford for their unwavering
encouragement and my partner Paul Grant for his practical support. Thanks to my dear
friends Gabby Carpenter Leavitt and Ali Watson Girgis for their words of reassurance and
inspiration.
ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY
ABRSTRACT

FACULTY OF ARTS, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

RE-CHARTING THE PRESENT: FEMINIST REVISION OF CANONICAL
NARRATIVES BY CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS

AMY SUZANNE CRAWFORD
14 February 2015

In this thesis, I explore the textual strategy of feminist revision employed by
contemporary women writers. After investigating Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a
prototype of feminist revision, I focus specifically on Angela Carter’s “The Bloody
Chamber” as a revision of Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” Michèle Roberts’s The Book
of Mrs Noah as a revision of the Old Testament Flood narrative, Margaret Atwood’s The
Penelopiad as a revision of Homer’s Odyssey and the Troy narratives, and Ursula K. Le
Guin’s Lavinia as a revision of Vergil’s Aeneid. Through investigating the historical and
literary contexts of each revisioned text, I identify the critical focus of the revision and
analyse the textual effect produced by the revision. In each case, the feminist revision
exposes the underlying ideological assumptions of the source text. By rewriting the
canonical narrative from an alternative perspective, each revision extends beyond the
source text, altering meaning and reinterpreting key symbols for feminist ends.

Key Words: Feminist Revision
Angela Carter
Michèle Roberts
Margaret Atwood
Ursula K. Le Guin
Polyphony
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction:
The Other Side of the Story: an Introduction to
Feminist Revision of Narratives ................……………………………………... pp 1- 39

Chapter 1:
In Defence of Curiosity: Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”
and Metatextual Interrogation ……...……………………………………….... pp 40 – 96

Chapter 2:
The Assertion of Polyphony: Michèle Roberts’s The Book of Mrs Noah
and Palimpsestic Play ………………………………………………………... pp 97 - 146

Chapter 3:
Haunting the Canon: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad
and Alternative Characterization …………………………………………… pp 147 - 184

Chapter 4:
Subverting the Monomyth: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia
and Numinal Epistemology …...…………………………………………… pp 185 - 219

Conclusion:
Re-Charting the Present: Feminist Revision
and Plotting Change…………………………………………………...……. pp 220 - 234

Bibliography ………………………………………………………….…… pp 235 - 248

Appendices
1. Walter Crane, Bluebeard, 1874 …………………………………………………. p 249
2. Pietro da Cortona, Rape of the Sabine Women, 1627-9 ………………………… p 250
3. Piero della Francesca, Madonna del Parto, 1460 ………………………………. p 251
COPYRIGHT DECLARATION

Attention is drawn to the fact that the copyright of this thesis rests with Anglia Ruskin
University for one year and thereafter with Amy Suzanne Crawford. This copy of the
thesis had been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is bound by copyright.
This thesis is dedicated to
my Virgil and Beatrice –

Lynnette and Iain Provan –

guides along the
mysterious path.
The Other Side of the Story: an Introduction to Feminist Revision of Narratives

‘There is always the other side, always.’ – Antoinette Cosway
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 77.

Stories, while engaging the imagination and hinting toward what may be
considered universal principles, are necessarily embedded in historical and cultural
contexts. Stories are constructed, told and retold in different settings and at different
times; they are created, adapted, translated, referenced, echoed and reinvented for new
audiences in unrelenting proliferation. Karl Kroeber goes as far as to assert that stories
are ‘endlessly retold, and told in order to be retold.’1 Yet readers still find parameters to
tales, limits to narrative retelling. Authoritative versions of tales emerge, circulate, and
enter the cultural imagination. Indeed, many texts of the Western canon refer back to
earlier texts, such as the Aeneid to the Iliad, the gospels to each other and to the Old
Testament, Paradise Lost to the Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays to a range of sources.
The retellings of tales may vary in more than setting or cultural specificity, but may
differ in their approach, as well. Retellings may be benevolent or antagonistic toward an
earlier telling. There is, then, a tension latent in all storytelling – the tension of the
potential to perpetuate or subvert a canonical narrative.
To say that the outcome of a retelling – whether it reinforces or challenges the
source narrative – is determined by the gender of the teller/author would oversimplify
the complexities of human existence. However, literary critics can identify patterns of
retellings which emerge along gendered lines. For example, men and women writers in

1 Karl Kroeber, Retelling/Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times (New Brunswick: Rutgers
university Press, 1992), 1.
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Victorian England used ancient Greek and Roman narratives in their texts as images,
allusions, and retellings. Indeed, the use of Hellenism became a cultural marker of
education in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. However, as Isobel
Hurst details in Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer
(2006), men had access to classical education in schools and universities that their
women counterparts did not. As such, women had a different relationship with Greek
narratives and language: as they did not have to memorize Greek and Latin or take
formal examinations,2 their learning was primarily self-motivated (though often
influenced by the encouragement of a father, brother, or male friend).3 This differing
relationship to Greek language and literature affects Victorian the author’s usage.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s use of Hellenic allusion in Aurora Leigh suggests a
different relationship to the tradition than her male counterparts, using both ancient
poetic models and more contemporary Romantic texts in a manner which destabilizes
parameters of genre, gender, and authoritative tellings. For Hurst, Aurora Leigh
demonstrates ‘what a woman with poetic ambitions might feel about her relationship to
the masculine literary tradition.’4
Modernist writer H.D. similarly disrupts canonical narratives in her retelling of
Helen’s journey during the battle of Troy. In Helen in Egypt (1961), H.D. appropriates
apocryphal narratives of Helen residing in Egypt rather than Troy during the infamous
war to write a ‘revisionary epic.’5 In contrast to male Modernist writers such as T.S.
Eliot, James Joyce and, in particular, Ezra Pound, H.D. questions narrative authority and
ideology while highlighting ‘the process of telling and retelling in which Helen and the

2 Isobel Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 12.
3 Ibid., 63-65.
4 Ibid., 105.
5 Robert O’Brien Hokanson, ‘“Is It All a Story?”: Questioning Revision in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt’ in
American Literature, 64.2 (1992): 331.
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poem are engaged.’6 For Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, H.D.’s epic both parallels and
critiques her male counterparts in her use of source materials, refusal to engage a
messianic figure, as well as her alternating employment of prose and poetry.7
Ultimately, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt deviates from other Modernist narratives, especially
Pound’s Cantos, and, in so doing, participates in the gendered pattern of retelling.
This pattern of women rewriting canonical narratives is reaffirmed and further
distinguished by feminist scholar Adrienne Rich. Situated in second-wave feminism in
the United States, Rich asserts that women’s political critique should incorporate a
literary critique which would return to old texts – reread and rewrite them. This return,
Rich termed ‘Re-vision’:
Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of
entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women
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
women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our 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, how the very act of naming has been
till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name
– and therefore live – afresh.8
Rich suggests in this definition that revision will entail incisive questioning of identity
and representation, nomenclature and authority as they are performed in the literary
tradition. Certainly the retellings that predate Rich – such as those by Barrett and H.D. –

6 Ibid., 340.
7 Jeffrey Twitchell-Wass, ‘Seaward: H.D.’s Helen in Egypt as a Response to Pound’s Cantos’ in Twentieth
Century Literature 44.4 (1998): 479.
8 Ibid., 167.
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echo this description of revision. Yet Rich heralds a fresh return to rereading with the
aim to rewrite, revision what has come before. Indeed, her now famous essay ‘When we
Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971) was first delivered at a feminist literary
convention that was organised as a ‘subversive occasion’ against the ‘gentlemanly rites’
of the Modern Language Association convention.9 What may be recognised as a
perennial return to retellings was, at the time, a radical assertion – that women have been
misrepresented in literature, that language has both trapped and liberated women, and
that a new identity and a feminist future can be created through revision. Rich’s call for
survival is not a physical survival, but a survival within cultural history. Revision allows
readers to see how ‘we have been led to imagine ourselves’ and how to shift that vision
to something more liberating. Revision moves beyond rewriting a story – it identifies
how women have been represented and shifts representation, allowing for women to be
seen differently. By constructing alternative representations of women in literature,
feminist revisionists seek to change how women live. As Judith Fetterley writes, ‘To
create a new understanding of our literature is to make possible a new effect of that
literature on us.’10 Distrusting the political vision and ideology latent in traditional
narratives, Rich’s revision is simultaneously a literary and political movement in which
women are urged to commandeer and reappropriate problematic ideological claims. If
we take seriously Louis Althusser’s claim that ideology is a material existence (enacted
by subjects through participation in apparatuses and is reproduced in its re-enactment),
then feminist critics are able to explore reproductions of ideology within the literary
canon.11 This thesis aims to participate in the perennial act of revision by critically

9 Gelpi, 166.
10 Judith Fetterley, ‘Preface,’ The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xix – xx.
11 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’ (1977)
in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 112, 113.
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