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NEW CULTURAL MODELS IN WOMEN-S FANTASY LITERATURE SARAH JANE GAMBLE SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE OCTOBER 1991 NEW CULTURAL MODELS IN WOMEN'S FANTASY LITERATURE Sarah Jane Gamble This thesis examines the way in which modern women writers use non­ realistic literary forms in order to create new role models of and for women. The work of six authors are analysed in detail - Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Kate Wilhelm. I argue that they share a discontent with the conventions of classic realism, which they all regard as perpetuating ideologically-generated stereotypes of women. Accordingly, they move away from mimetic modes in order to formulate a discourse which will challenge conventional representations of the 'feminine', arriving at a new conception of the female subject. I argue that although these writers represent a range of feminist responses to the dominant order, they all arrive at a s1mil~r conviction that such an order is male-dominated. All exhibit an awareness of the work of feminist critics, creating texts which consciously interact with feminist theory. I then discuss how these authors use their art to examine the their own situation as women who write. All draw the attention to the existence of a tradition of female censorship, whereby the creative woman has experienced, in an intensified form, the repreSSion experienced by all women in a culture which privileges the male over the female. All these writers exhibit a desire to escape such a tradition, progressing towards the formulation of a utopian female subject who is free to be fully creative a project they represent metaphorically in the form of a quest. Finally, I examine how these authors question linguistic and narrative conventions. Using self-conscious forms and techniques characteristic of post modernism, their texts are often overtly experimental, rendering 'truth' a matter of individual interpretation. In this way, I argue, the patriarchal order itself is reconstructed as a fiction which is capable of being rewritten. ACknowledgements: I wish to thank my supervisor, Dr. Bryan Burns. Without his valuable advice and encouragement, it is possible that this thesis might never have been completed. CONTENTS I NTRODUCTI ON 1-37 PART ONE: APPROACHES TO PATRIARCHY Introduction 38-,(,( Chapter One ,(5-83 Chapter Two 8,(-138 Chapter Three 139-182 PART TWO: THE OUEST FOR INDEPENDENCE Introduction 183-192 Chapter Four 193-229 Chapter Five 230-275 PART THREE: TECHNIOUES OF A FEMALE TRADITION Introduction 276-283 Chapter Six 284--324- Chapter Seven 325-370 CONCLUSION 371-381 BIBLIOGRAPHY 382-389 1 INTRODUCTION EroticilM Ind flntlsy bl.~ into my life with the fore. of I typhoon, .rlling III limitltions and turning the known order of things upside down, 1 out of the li. of no risel I truth of ye. (only herself and who illilitably il)~ In her introduction to her study of feminism and science fiction, In the Chinks of the World Machine, Sarah Lefanu writes that: The frudo,. that SF offen froll the constrlints of realiSll has In obvious appell", Its glorious eclecticisl",offers a means of exploring the Iyriad ways in which we are constructed as WOlen, Further, science fiction offers women new ways of writing,'3 Her comment can also stand as an introduction to this thesis, whose purpose is to show how non-realistic literary forms enable women to create new, positive images of and for themselves. Such a potentially revolutionary and subversive act is only made possible by a rejection of mimeticism, which, as such theorists as Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes have demonstrated"', participates in the dissemination of the dominant ideology. While I do not wish to claim that it is only women who benefit from the abandonment of mimetic conventions, or to deny that many male writers use experimental literary forms with the equally strong intention of instigating both personal and social change, in this thesis I am primarily concerned with those who perceive such a project in feminist terms. The comparison of my aims with those of Lefanu needs some qualification, 2 though, for however apt the above quotation may be, we differ in our definition of the term 'science fiction', Lefanu herself acknowledges that this term is problematic, quoting early on in her book an observation made by the editors of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction that "'science fiction" is a label applied to a publishing category and its application is subject to the whims of editors and publishers',- She uses the term in a rather broader sense than I do, for, while I have found her work of particular use in my own research, I would hesitate to categorise the novels we both discuss specifically as science fiction. Instead, I prefer to make what I find a useful distinction between science fiction and the majority of the primary texts around which this thesis is based. As Rosemary Jackson explains, referring to Tzvetan Todorov's diagrammatical representation of the different varieties of fantasy,'" science fiction can be placed in the category of 'pure marvellous', which is characterised by its 'passive relation to history' and 'a minimal functional narrative, whose narrator is omniscient and has absolute authority, It is a form which discourages reader participation',7 Thus science fiction purports to be 'true' by at tempting to be a mimetic representation of future SOCiety, In A Rhetoric of the Unreal, Christine Brooke-Rose also emphasises this pOint, comparing the presentation of information in science fiction and mimetic fiction, Using criteria formulated by the French theorist Philippe Hamon, Brooke­ Rose finds that science fiction and realism share the same features in almost every particular, iii She comments that 'it is clear that traditional SF at least does take over wholesale and unmodified most of the techniques of RF',9 However, Brooke-Rose finds this link with realism an encouraging one, as she sees each genre revitalising the other, claiming that 'in the 'merging' of a certain type of SF with 'serious fiction' .. ,SF reveals its close connections with the mainstream realistic novel in the 'good' sense of the great tradition, undergoing 3 similarly painful and revolutionary transformations'.' 0 As Lefanu, among others, has observed, science fiction does have positive aspects, only one of which is that it 'offers a freedom to women writers, in terms of style as well as content, that is not available in mainstream fiction'." None of the authors discussed in this thesis stays totally within the parameters defined by Todorov and Jackson <parameters Lefanu criticises as 'unnecessarily restrictive'),'2 although it is interesting to note that those whose work conforms most closely to the generic requirements of science fiction are also those who are most conservative in terms both of their feminist politics and their willingness to experiment with literary form. Ursula Le Guin's earlier novels and Doris Lessing's Shikasta series, for example, are self- contained and authoritative representations of the 'future' which the reader is given very little opportunity to question. However, although the other authors I discuss - Angela Carter, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm and Margaret Atwood - may make occasional forays into science fiction, on the whole their work bears more similarity to what Todorov defines as the 'fantastic marvellous' or the 'fantastic uncanny','3 which, as Rosemary Jackson explains, confound elellents of both the urvellous and the lilletic.II.pull[ingl the reader froll the apparent familiarity and security of the known and everyday world into something more strange ...• The narrator is no clearer than the protagonist about what is going on, nor about interpretation: the status of what is being seen and recorded as 'real I is constantly in question. This instability of narrative is at the centre of the fantastic as a mode. 1_ In an echo of the above quotation from Jackson, The Oxford Companion to English Literature applies the term 'magic realism' to 'novels and stories [which] have a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic mingles with the unexpected and the inexplicable, and in which elements of dream, fairy-story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or 1 kaleidoscopic pat tern of refraction and recurrence'. & For the purpose of this thesis, I have appropriated a critical term which is more normally applied to a branch of twentieth-century Latin American literature typified by the work of such Latin American authors as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garc!ia MArquez, and Isabel Allende. Although The Oxford Companion to English Literature also defines the work of such contemporary British authors as Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Emma Tennant as being representative of 'magical realism', I include only one author out of that list - Angela Carter - in my discussion. However, I have adopted the term because it seems to me accurately to sum up the approach of the authors discussed in this thesis, all of whom alternate between the 'magic' of fantasy and mundane 'reality' in order to create a mode in which an audience's preconceptions are teased and subverted. Whereas science fiction narratives, even those written by women. are fixed in a kind of pseudo-realism, magical realist texts are multi-faceted, often contradictory, representations of the impossible. It is this very narrative fluidity, which rejects not only the subject matter, but also the techniques, of realism, which gives women unprecedented opportunities to become the authors of new feminist cultural role models, for the most striking characteristic of this kind of fiction is its immediacy. The pull towards closure and what Catherine Belsey identifies as 'the reinstatement of order'lS in the classic realist text mean that it is generally based around a completed event in the past; while science fiction, sharing an equal desire for resolUtion, is sited in the future.

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