By Mary Eagleton
If the writer is "dead," if feminism is "post-," why does the determine of the girl writer preserve showing as a crucial personality in modern fiction? Drawing on a various diversity of up to date authors--including Atwood, Byatt, Brookner, Coetzee, Lurie, Le Guin, Michele Roberts, Shields, Spark, Weldon, Walker--this examine explores the complexity and carrying on with fascination of this determine.
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Additional info for Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction: Since 1970
Sample text
Offred is willing to accept the author and reader as constructed but not as mere linguistic effects. For Barthes the reader is a ‘space on which all the quotations which make up a writing are inscribed’ (148). For Offred with her urgent need for contact the reader must be a precisely realised presence. While Barthes appears to deny the reader an identity only to fill the ‘space’ immediately with a male, generic subject – ‘the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted’ (148) – Offred and the handmaids consciously seek out female readers and find their own clandestine modes of communication.
What can Mrs Brown have to say to Shona McRury? (75) Whatever Mrs Brown says results in a sudden increase in her stock of social and symbolic capital. To Shona the idiosyncrasy of Mrs Brown is not a problem but a bankable asset and her visibility – soon to be evidenced in the exhibition notes, the complimentary magazine interview, the TV appearance – is to be encouraged. As Mrs Brown embarks on the rocky road to possible legitimacy, forms of aesthetic distancing come into play. 27 The move is one of objectification and control and the immediacy of ‘everyday use’ has to be reconstructed if the object is to be worthy of the aesthete’s attention.
Sfax’s Machiavellian tricks indicate another range of meanings, the mask as an active deception, ‘face’ as ‘two-faced’ or, as Banville indicates, the impersonating pronoun. Offred and theories of authorship Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale similarly puts ethical questions to the fore and, again, it is the Professor who is the most ethically suspect. 25 The novel also raises Miller’s question about the political importance of maintaining ‘the woman author’ as an identifiable figure. Considering authorship from Offred’s perspective suggests that the identity of the author is relevant and that the loss of a female signature is a loss of power for women; it reminds us of the significance of the woman author as a material presence and not only, à la Foucault – or Sfax – as an impersonalised function; it indicates that the female author’s relation to authority is structurally different from the male’s and that the controlling authorial position, on which Barthes and Foucault focus, has rarely been the position of the woman author.