“CURATORS OF MEMORY”: WOMEN’S VOICES IN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Wydział Anglistyki Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu “CURATORS OF MEMORY”: WOMEN’S VOICES IN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Edited by: Liliana Sikorska Katarzyna Bronk Marta Frątczak and Joanna Jarząb Poznań 2015 Wydano z finansowym wsparciem Wydziału Anglistyki Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu. Autorzy niniejszego tomu składają podziękowania: Dziekan Wydziału Anglistyki prof. zw. dr hab. Katarzynie Dziubalskiej-Kołaczyk This Monograph has been financed by the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. Cover idea: Marta Frątczak Cover design: Agnieszka Frydrychewicz Cover photos: upper row, from the left: Liliana Sikorska (by permission of the author), Stanisława Strzelczyk (née Piątkowska 1914-1982) (from Liliana Sikorska’s private collection by permission of the owner), Jadwiga Kasprowicz-Przybyszewska (née Gąsowska 1869- 1927) with her daughter Janina Małaczyńska (née Kasprowicz 1893-1980) (from Janina Sikorska’s private collection by permission of the owner), Anna Jarocka (née Kasprowicz 1914-1982) (from Janina Sikorska’s private collection by permission of the owner), Eileen Cox (1918-2014) and Sharon Maas (from Sharon Maas’ private collection by permission of the owner), Eileen Cox (from Sharon Maas’ private collection by permission of the owner) Typesetting by Pracownia Wydawnicza WA UAM Printed by Zakład Graficzny UAM ul. H. Wieniawskiego, 161-712 Poznań http://wa.amu.edu.pl Copyright © 2015 Wydział Anglistyki UAM All rights reserved. ISBN 978-83-938256-6-0 To Our Mothers and Grandmothers CONTENTS Liliana Sikorska and Katarzyna Bronk Introduction, or on women, writers and their work ......................... 9 I ET DIEU ... CRÈA LA FEMME ... AND GOD ... CREATED THE WOMAN… Liliana Sikorska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) Encore des mots toujour des mots: Michèle Roberts’ art of storytelling ...................................................................................... 31 Michèle Roberts Oh you storyteller: On fiction and memoir .................................... 61 Monika Szuba (University of Gdańsk) Playing with mud: Literary ghosts in Michèle Roberts’ prose writing ................................................................................... 75 II RE-MEMBERED THROUGH TEXTS: WOMEN AND WRITING IN ENGLISH LITERATURE Jacek Olesiejko (College of Modern Languages, Szczecin) Gender and representational violence in Old English Judith ......... 93 Giada Goracci (The University of Verona) The birth of a feminist: Gender, religion and silence in Anne Askew’s Trials ................................................................ 113 Katarzyna Bronk (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) “All in a wife is the work of her husband”: William Cobbett’s not-so-incidental advice on finding and recognising the perfect woman .......................................................................................... 129 8 Contents III SUB ROSA: THE COVERT LIVES OF CONTEMPORARY WOMEN IN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Liliana Sikorska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) Telling stories, telling lives: Sharon Maas and her work ............. 149 Sharon Maas The woman who walked the walk ................................................ 167 Marta Frątczak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) Seeking one’s (Guyanese) self: Web of secrets (1996) by Denise Harris and Buxton spice (1999) by Oonya Kempadoo ................. 171 Rula Quawas (The University of Jordan, Amman) Hysterically speaking and resisting: A reading of Fadia Faqir’s sane madness-ism in Pillars of salt .............................................. 187 Rania Reda (Ain Shams University, Cairo) “Female oppression in the name of God”: A reading of Manette Ansay’s Vinegar Hill in relation to new feminist thought ............ 205 Collected bibliography ........................................................................ 219 INTRODUCTION, OR ON WOMEN, WRITERS AND THEIR WORK LILIANA SIKORSKA AND KATARZYNA BRONK In the Polish film Seksmisja [Sexmission] (1983, directed by Juliusz Ma- chulski, screenplay Juliusz Machulski, Jolanta Hartwig and Pavel Hajný) the world in 2043 is deprived of men. Following a nuclear conflict, what was left of the human race moved underground, into the former coal mines and with time created a new society ruled by women only. Like all other totalitarian regimes, of which this one is quite clearly a parody, the Poland of the future also tries to rectify the past. Thus, the new genera- tions of women, born out of tubes and without the presence of men in their lives, are taught that men were intolerable and never-changing op- pressors, violent and dominating. What is more, they are led to understand that Copernicus and Einstein were women. The mishaps and adventures involving two male characters found and revived from induced cryonic sleep are hilariously funny, and the subtext of the movie is that of re- creating men as, once again, part of the human race. The new world women who are afraid of touch and do not know anything about the sen- sual pleasures of eating are predictably depicted as sex starved weaklings, despite all of their power of self-government. Not to mention the fact that her Excellency, the great ruler, is, in fact, a man. If read in the context of 1980s right wing politics, the movie is straightforward anti-feminist prop- aganda. Seen not as an anti-totalitarian but an anti-feminist work, the film is a good example of cultural backlash, very much in the style later de- scribed by Susan Faludi, which just like the earliest anti-suffragette movements, belittles and ridicules the feminist cause. One can be quite certain, that the authors of the screenplay were not familiar with Marilyn Stone’s When God was a woman (1976), a work in which the author searches for the genesis of the mythical Great Goddess of the early matri- 10 Liliana Sikorska and Katarzyna Bronk archal societies and analyses the suppression of women’s religious power, which, incidentally is also the main area of interest of Michele Roberts’ works, especially in The wild girl (1984). Likewise, Mieke Bal’s Lethal love, Feminist literary readings of Biblical love stories (1987) in her read- ing of Genesis shows how mistaken translations rewrote the Biblical story of Creation to give rise to the blatant anti-female sentiments in the centu- ries to follow. As has been mentioned, Faludi’s Backlash (1991) charts the develop- ment of hostile reactions to many forms of feminist movements. Feminist criticism has always been perceived as political discourse, more than a cultural or a critical practice utilized in the struggle against patriarchy and sexism. Concentrated on the study of institutional and personal power re- lations between the sexes feminist criticism was used to analyze symbolic language (psychoanalysis), language (sociolinguistics), as well as litera- ture and culture (literary texts and films). Various feminist authors have seen these areas as subject to patriarchal ideology, as outlined by Gerda Lerner in her Creation of patriarchy (1986) and The creation of feminist consciousness (1993). The early work of Dale Spender’s Man made lan- guage (1980) demonstrates how language encodes the inferior position of women in society, making them victims of their own subordination. Even if for today’s readers, such statements could be read as extreme, Dale’s work was an inspiration for Deborah Cameron, whose Verbal hygiene (1995) and then The feminist critique of language (1998) engage in dis- cussions on ways and methods of controlling language, and like feminist criticism, assume writing from anti-patriarchal and anti-sexist positions. What is more, feminist work on Freud and Lacan, for which one of the milestones was the thought of Luce Irigaray in her Speculum of the other woman (1985), This sex which is not one (1985) and An ethics of sexual difference (1993) interpreted femininity as a patriarchal construct of doc- ile and obedient wives and daughters. Such an approach was buttressed by the demand to equal access to the symbolic order. This assumed bio- logical inequality has been scrutinized by Carol Pateman in her Sexual contract (1988). Pateman used Rousseau’s and Locke’s idea of the social contract and showed its contradictions in reference to contracts involving women, most notably the marriage contract. It has been frequently assert- ed that while “female” and “male” are reserved for purely biological as- pects of sexual difference, the notions of “feminine” and “masculine” are social constructs. Likewise Judith Butler’s Gender trouble (1990) was Introduction, or on women, writers … 11 seminal in understanding the working of gender and gender politics. The differentiation between the tradition of “female” writers as opposed to “feminist” writers is also discussed in the present volume. While Michèle Roberts’ work is decidedly feminist, Sharon Maas’ is more in line with a female tradition of writing. In other words, as in Toril Moi’s definitions: “feminist” writing engages in the analysis of discourses which create and uphold patriarchal structures, “female” discusses the tradition of women’s writing in literature and investigates the question of femininity in litera- ture and culture (Moi 1997: 104-116). The twentieth century tradition of re-claiming women writers has re- sulted in the rehabilitation of previously forgotten and marginalized authors hitherto deemed “minor”, for example, medieval women mystics. As a con- sequence, in fair Poznań where we laid our scene,