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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. 1 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. 2 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.

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