The Salvage from Postmodernism: Nomadic Subjectivity in Contemporary Women’s Poetry in the British Isles Carmen Zamorano Llena The nomad’s identity is a map of where s/he has already been; s/he can always reconstruct it a posteriori, as a set of steps in an itinerary. (Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjectivity 14) “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” This is the quote from Virginia Wolf’s Three Guineas (1938) that Adrienne Rich decided not to use in a talk given at a “Conference on Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980s” held in Utrecht, Holland, but which she argues she would have certainly used some years earlier. This apparent self-denial raises the question of what had changed in Rich’s sense of feminist identity in the period between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s. An analysis of her talk, which is published as “Notes toward a Politics of Location” (1984), belies that the change that Rich describes epitomises the paradigm shift in feminism that started to take shape in the early 1980s and that emerged out of the controversy between postmodernism and feminism over the issue of subjectivity.1 In the context of the re-emerging feminism of the late 1960s, Rich would have argued against the common oppression of women around the world and would have spoken of a common bonding that would unite all women in their resistance against patriarchal power structures. Women would thus be united by the same suffering and common struggle under the banner of a unified gender identity, which would surpass national, racial, ethnic, cultural, class, sexual and age differences. In this context, Virginia Wolf’s words would gain full significance and validity and the whole globe would become for women a single nation united by a female gender identity. However, in the mid 1980s, feminism had already started to show signs of crucial changes. Like in the case of many other feminists, Rich realised thanks to the relationship of feminism with other anti-foundationalist movements that this all-inclusive feminism had reproduced the same mistakes that it criticised in modernist/foundationalist tradition. In its desire to move the female “I” from the margins to the centre, feminism had marginalised not only the male “I” but also all those women that would not accord with the category of Woman implicitly defined as white, middle-class and heterosexual. According to the postmodern feminist critics Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, the dialogical relationship between postmodernism and feminism enabled that “unitary notions of woman and feminine gender identity [were replaced] with plural and complexly constructed conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others.” (34-35) However, not all feminist critics have praised the apparent benefits of postmodernism for feminism. Various feminist critics regard the relationship with postmodernism as specially problematic because one of its main claims, that of the death of the subject, comes at an untimely moment for the development of feminism. As Patricia Waugh argues in “Postmodernism and Feminism: Where Have All the Women Gone?”:2 1 A similar change is admitted by Cora Kaplan in her essay “Speaking/Writing/Feminism,” where she argues that she now writes for women and not against men. At the same time she also refers to the controversy she has engaged in with other feminists, precisely due to her shift in feminism: “I write for women, rather than as in my early work, constructing a polemic directed against men. And I have noted a change in the content and direction of my work which is a bit worrying […] These days I have moved away from mildly eulogistic projects, and instead have engaged in a series of fairly heavy debates with other feminists and other feminisms, historical and contemporary.” (60-1) She does not overtly explain why this change is “worrying,” but the fact is that this change is symptomatic of the modification in understanding of feminism occurring at the time. See also her definition of “full subjectivity” which is so closely related to the postmodern feminist sense of identity or of “nomadic subjectivity” understood as being unstable and fluctuating, be it for men or for women. 2 Apart from Patricia Waugh (1989), other feminist critics that have explicitly pointed to the problematic postmodernist claim about the “death of the subject” are Rosi Braidotti (1987), Jane Flax (1987), Nancy Hartsock (1987, 1990), and Christine Di Stefano (1990). 93 Zamorano Llena, Carmen. “The Salvage from Postmodernism: Nomadic Subjectivity in Contemporary Women’s Poetry in the British Isles”. EREA 2.2 (automne 2004): 93-101.<www.e-rea.org> At the moment when postmodernism is forging its identity through articulating the exhaustion of the existential belief in self-presence and self-fulfilment and through the dispersal of the universal subject of liberalism, feminism (ostensibly, at any rate) is assembling its cultural identity in what appears to be the opposite direction. […] As male writers lament its demise, women writers have not yet experienced that subjectivity which will give them a sense of personal autonomy, continuous identity, a history and agency in the world. (6) Admittedly, there are differences between postmodern and feminist understandings of subjectivity which might apparently move these currents in “opposite direction[s].”3 However, Seyla Benhahib’s Situating the Self (1992) is one of the best examples of postmodern feminist attempts to show the possible beneficial relationship with postmodernism for the (re)construction of women’s subjectivity. Like Waugh, Benhahib is also fully aware of the annihilating contradictions to which feminism might be led by a tout court acceptance of posmodernist epistemology. However, she also provides the solution to this controversy: instead of accepting what she calls a strong version of postmodernist theories, she argues that only a weak version can be incorporated into feminist criticism. Applying this strong vs. weak version of postmodernist tenets to the “death of the subject” means that, instead of accepting that Man is only “another position in language” in which his subjectivity dissolves into the chain of significations (214), the subject is situated in and, thereby, constructed by the socio-historical, discursive and linguistic context in which it is located. Consequently, subjectivity is not unified and stable, but dialogical, free-floating, unfixed and always under construction. Location. The position of the subject. Situating the self. The radical situatedness of the subject. (Benhahib 214) A politics of location. All these are words and phrases that have recurrently appeared in this article so far and which point to a second major concern that has been dominant since the mid 1980s, not only in postmodern feminist theory, but also in the fields of literary criticism and among women poets in the British Isles. After accepting the validity of the claim for the existence of a female subjectivity, the main concern becomes the need to redefine the location of this female subjectivity. For the purpose of this article, I have decided to focus on the poetry of Fleur Adcock, Eavan Boland and Carol Rumens because I would argue that their poetry is doubly enticing: firstly, because their work is representative of the paradigm shift within feminism that was occurring in the mid 1980s specifically in the British Isles, secondly, for the redoubled efforts as women and poets that they had to make to locate themselves in literary tradition. These three poets started to write in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a moment in time in which the literary and publishing world were still virtually male-controlled.4 They were among those women poets who had to open new ground with their work and to struggle in order to find a place for their agentive writerly selves in a British literary tradition that had relegated women to the passive role of muses, objects of desire or hatred, or nationalist emblems.5 As representatives of women’s 3 Despite these apparently “opposite direction[s],” as Susan Hekman (1990) notes, the similarities between postmodernism and feminism − especially in placing the modern episteme at the centre of their critique − allow for an interpretation of their differences as entering into a constructive dialogic relationship that leads towards a coherent articulation of postmodern feminism. 4 A thorough analysis of the difficulties of women poets to work in the British literary and publishing context of the late 1960s- early 1970s is found in Claire Buck’s article “Poetry and the Women’s Movement in Postwar Britain” (1996). Some of the most telling events are, for example, the fact that no woman poet was included in A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (1962), an anthology in which he aimed to give his idea “of what, that really matters, has happened in the last decade,” (17) an all-male view that was still maintained in the 1966 revised edition. It was not until the late 1970s that anthologies of women poets started to be published in Britain, even though they mainly focused on American women poets. Only in the early 1980s did British women poets start to gain ground in the literary world: the first anthologies focusing on British women poets saw the light and publication of individual volumes was possible, especially thanks to the work of women presses, such as Virago, Playbooks 2 or Onlywomen Press; women literary journals like Spare Rib; or the help of collectives in publishing, such as the Women’s Literature Collective (Buck 85). 5 Other coetanous women poets who expressed their sense of isolation in a male-controlled literary world are Libby Houston, Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor, whose views of the position of women poets in the late 1960s-early 1970s are reflected in the volume On Gender and Writing (1983) edited by Wandor.