Mapping the North as a Female Space in Aritha Van Herk's Geografictione Places Far From Ellesmere
0
Citation
4
Reference
20
Related Paper
Abstract:
Places Far From Ellesmere has been brought forth in an innovative garb by van Herk which she calls a Geografictione, a new genre which has emerged out of the fusion of geography and fiction in the literary panorama. Aritha van Herk has brilliantly interwoven a logical pattern from some unconventional constituents unexplored so far in this remarkable Geografictione. A well orchestrated plot of this artistic creation immensely suits her explicit objective through which she successfully explores an exclusive domain for women bereft of male chauvinist interventions. By resorting to inter-textuality, van Herk has endeavoured to subvert and reinterpret the views of Tolstoy in presenting Anna Karenina and ensured for her a secure place where she may establish her independent identity without being bruised by the male counterparts. In order to counter the male dominated West, van Herk has justifiably projected the concept of North that may be identified by an attribute of female discourse. The geografictione comprising one hundred and forty-three pages is an exploration for a different woman’s space distinct from that of male which is symbolically depicted in the exploration of landscape. It is divided into four parts comprising four exploration sites: Edberg, coppice of desire and return; Edmonton, long division; Calgary, this growing graveyard; and Ellesmere, woman as island. The narrator in the process of her descriptive narrative describes the search for a place, her ‘Home’ from Edberg through Edmonton and Calgary which ends in Ellesmere. The text begins thus,Keywords:
Textuality
Panorama
Cite
Cite
Citations (0)
Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-1881), born Creole mother and Scottish father in Kingston, Jamaica, was celebrity in England because of service the British army as nurse during the Crimean War. Seacole is the first Black British woman write an autobiography. Her significance, however, has only lately been applauded, over century later, as the result of the republication of eponymous autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), in 1984 and again in 2005. Seacole negotiates identity in the autobiography around complex relationships between black and white, between the West Indies and Britain, making for fascinating example of postco-Ionial self-narration. This paper examines how Mary Seacole employs strategic liminality transgress the boundaries of and gender; it also addresses how Seacole's autobiography sheds light on the discursive patterns of nineteenth-century constructions of identity. Evelyn O'Callaghan emphasizes the non-stereotypical representations of Seacole as Black West-Indian woman. She says, Seacole's narrative [does nor] concern itself with constructions of the West Indies. A brief sketch of parentage, and young womanhood in Jamaica takes up the first one and half chapters and then, apart from an eight- month sojourn in the island in 1853, the entire narrative is set abroad. (170). Indeed, Seacole makes plain aims and states, It is not my intention dwell at any length upon the recollections of my childhood (11). Sara Salih posits that The absence of Jamaica in Wonderful Adventures has been explained in number of ways: Simon Gikandi suggests that Seacole disinvests herself of Jamaican Creole identity in order reconstruct herself as English. ... critics concur with his view that Seacole evades the problem of race and lives in denial of blackness. (xix) In the opening pages of Seacole's autobiography, the reader is initiated into the world of ambivalent personality. Hippolyte explains liminal presence in terms of narrative strategy designed to circum vent charges of unfeminine conduct, and avoid confirming constructed images of the black woman as Other in order shape textual persona that is both proud of difference and acceptable the white British audience at whom book is targeted (qtd. in O'Callaghan 171). O'Callaghan elaborates: her solution [to liminal position] is place herself firmly within mid-Victorian ideal of Englishness by valorizing its codes--self-help, bravery, hard work, moral restraint, public duty Further, adventures ... align with European civilization (172). Rather than nostalgically yearning for home, Seacole, as colonized subject in the service of the British Empire, sympathizes with Englishness yet opens feminized space for herself as Jamaican Creole. Sandra Pouchet Paquet argues that Seacole's writing [brings] into sharp focus the conflicts and contradictions of identity, authority, and freedom built into the relationship between Europe and the Americas, seat of empire and dependent colonies, master and slave, men and women. ... The fundamental freedom articulated in narrative is the freedom be subject of the British Empire and be celebrated as unique individual who challenges the boundaries of race, gender, and privilege within the parameters of that Empire. (651) Seacole's account of life experiences demonstrates the way in which colonized subjects engage with the genre of autobiography. In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson affirm that a growing number of post-modern and postcolonial theorists contend that the term autobiography is inadequate describe the extensive historical range and the diverse genres and practices of life narratives and life narrators in the West and elsewhere around the globe (4). …
Cite
Citations (2)
Lowenthal, Cynthia. Performing Identities on Restoration Stage. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. 270 pages. ISBN 0-8093-2462-8. $40.00.By combining theories of scholars such as Michel Foucault, Peter Stallybrass, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas, Norbert Elias, and Allon White with analyses of a virtual who's who list of recent critics and then providing her own close readings of a varied selection of known and lesser-known plays staged between 1656 and 1707, Cynthia Lowenthal addresses what she calls constant manipulation of signs of that was taking place on London stage during second half of 17th century (4). By breaking her analysis into four distinct categories-Imperial Identities, Identities, Discursive Identities, and Monstrous Identities-Lowenthal situates body as locus for creating and distorting cultural notions of nation, gender, and status More specifically, these four categories examine savage bodies in contrast with British colonialism, unruly European national bodies in contrast with British mercantilism, discursive female bodies unable to represent desire, and female bodies controlled through acts of sexual assault. Moreover, Lowenthal investigates ways in which numerous playwrights, both male and female, disrupted, displaced, and transgressed a host of comfortable and commonplace assumptions about stability of (4), concluding that concepts of nationhood, gender, and status are interinflected, each with its own early modern distinction but serving to support and contain others (19).Chapter One, introduction, places Lowenthal's argument in context with existing scholarship and outlines her methodology. She notes all possible avenues that previous research makes available to her and situates herself within previous discourse in a methodical and logical way. For a young student of Restoration stage and Early Modern England, this positioning is necessary and exceptionally informative, and as I noted above, it details a virtual who's who of important scholars in field. Such meticulous positioning, however, may become tedious for an advanced academician already familiar with scholarship. Here and throughout book, Lowenthal weaves her argument so fluently with those of other scholars that her own ideas sometimes lack distinction they deserve, but such a demonstration of depth of her research is certainly not grounds for finding serious fault with her argument.In Chapter Two, Imperial Identities: Encounter, Conquest, and Settlement, Lowenthal draws an analogy between conquering of New World lands and conquest of native women. Using Dryden's Indian Emperour (1665) as her base text, Lowenthal illustrates how native women whom she labels the contested woman and the specular woman contribute to their own colonization by falling in love with a representation of proper English gentleman. She sees this as wooing of New World women by 'proper' Old World suitors (29). Lowenthal then traces evolution of conquest narrative as romance into a plot that fears miscegenation and attempts to reinforce English national identity. In tracing this development, Lowenthal offers insightful readings of William Devenant's The Cruelty of Spaniards in Peru (1656), Lope de Vega's Discovery of New World by Christopher Columbus (-1590), and most significantly, Aphra Behn's Widow Ranter (1689).Chapter Three, National Identities: Merchants on and off Restoration Stage, continues to explore ways in which concepts of an essentialist English national identity are depicted and manipulated on stage. Concentrating on Behn's Dutch Lover (1673), Wycherley's Gentleman Dancing-Master (1673), and Mary Fix's Adventures in Madrid (1706), Lowenthal demonstrates how dictates for appropriate English male behavior are reflected through negative representations of European male otherness. …
White (mutation)
Argument (complex analysis)
Cite
Citations (0)
“Looking South”:Envisioning the European South in North and South Lindsay Wilhelm (bio) Stricken with the flu and acutely disappointed by the negative reviews and controversies swirling around Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell in 1852 wrote wistfully to a friend of a fanciful “long sail along the Mediterranean, slowly and lazily floating” away from “this England full of literal and metaphorical nipping east wind” (Letters 224).1 It was with notes of defeat, even bitterness, that she swore she would “never get that,” and her hopes that her correspondent might one day embark on such a journey only just tempered her tacit acrimony. She was, happily, wrong. In the spring of 1857, five years after confessing her Mediterranean fantasies, Gaskell and her husband traveled to Rome by boat from Marseilles, staying for approximately a month among old friends. Though in the interim she had published the well-received North and South (1855), her enthusiasm very much harkened back to the demoralized author of Ruth, uncertain of her literary reputation and dependent on dreams for solace. Announcing her intentions to Evelyn Story, she wrote: “We are really truly coming to Rome!!!!!!…I don’t believe it. It is a dream! I shall never believe it, and shall have to keep pinching myself” (Letters 445). Gratuitous exclamation points aside, Gaskell’s correspondence demonstrates not only an academic interest in the southern latitudes, but also a sincere emotional investment in their regenerative, or at least escapist, capacities. In keeping with its dichotomous title, I intend to read North and South in a transnational register organized along latitudinal rather than longitudinal lines.2 Furthermore, I limit my critical scope primarily to Europe while simultaneously expanding the term to include the liminal Mediterranean: literally medius + terra, or middle-land (OED). Like the author herself—who at the time of writing had yet to travel to Rome—Gaskell’s heroine Margaret Hale experiences southern Europe (i.e., Cadiz, Corfu, and the northern Mediterranean) from a twofold remove. The possibility of an immediate, first-person engagement (or “really truly coming to Rome!!!!!!”) is consistently referenced but continuously deferred, subsumed [End Page 406] instead under Margaret’s correspondence with her cousin Edith, lately moved to Corfu with her military husband. Margaret must therefore envision the European south, imaginatively constructing it based on epistolary description. Given this epistemology, Margaret’s Corfu continually shifts from dot on a map to escapist fantasy, a ruminative space rather than a political entity with its own social, cultural, and economic reality. Just as Margaret’s Grecian fantasies eclipse Corfu’s obliquely-referenced status within contemporary geopolitics, her nebulous idea of the southern Spanish city of Cadiz (the adopted home of her seafaring brother, Frederick) at first obscures its distinct cultural and linguistic identity under the veneer of quaintness and charm. In North and South—and in “Modern Greek Songs,” a Household Words article Gaskell penned in 1854— this slippage between consciousness of the south as both a real geographic location and a reservoir for reflection bears on temporal as well as spatial conceptions of the relationship between northern and southern Europe. I would suggest that, in both works, Gaskell constructs a geographic teleology, aligned along a north-south axis, that repositions the south as a preservative echo of the north’s past; this temporality, in turn, carves out the south as a figurative site for nostalgia and recollection. At the same time, this supposedly dehistoricized and apolitical European south exerts extant cultural influence on North and South’s English transplants, who return to their homeland bearing the marks of partial assimilation. With this specter of “going native,” Gaskell ironizes Margaret’s (and perhaps her own) romanticized notions of the Mediterranean, threatening northern ideas of southern Europe as purely regenerative—a transparent landscape onto which English men and women could effortlessly graft themselves. To this end, I will begin with North and South’s secondhand representation of Corfu, and the ways in which Edith and Margaret, as writer and reader, drain the Mediterranean of its sociopolitical, cultural, and economic content, leaving only an empty space for leisure and nostalgia. I then discuss the ways in which Greece’s representation in “Modern Greek Songs” bears on Gaskell...
Aside
Cite
Citations (0)
As a self-styled 'female Columbus', E. Catherine Bates took a transcontinental journey across North America with a woman companion in the late 1880s and, on her return to England, published A Year in the Great Republic . This paper, following critical theory approaches to the study of travel writing, explores the ways in which several of Bates's many-layered social identities as a woman of the British e lite class came to the fore in her travel narrative. I argue that Bates constructed her narrative primarily around her shifting gender identities- as 'feminine' and 'feminist'- and suggest that imperialistic writing was less apparent because she was travelling to a place that had an 'empire-to-empire' rather than a 'colony-to-empire', relationship to Britain during its 'Age of Empire'. In this paper I am searching for a middle ground between what I have termed 'modernist' interpretations of women's travel writing and the more recent post-structural interpretations. I make the case that Victorian women travellers' revisionist commentary on gender roles, as well as their observations of domestic scenes, should remain in focus as we continue to mark them for historical study.
BATES
Travel Writing
Cite
Citations (7)
The world of story is not a simple one. Every story is a story of something imagined or real, experienced or narrated, personal or political, and, mythic or modern. Issues such as nation, nationality, identity, home, country, being and belonging enter the arena of creativity whenever a writer pens his or her story from the margins. For the voices from north east India every story, every reading creates a new meaning- a new construct. They create, rewrite and share their identity through collective culture, shared history or ancestry very often. Such one writer who contemplates in her works within these frameworks and boundaries from the point of an individual and the community is Temsula Ao. Hailing from the region, she delivers an extremely sensible and almost firsthand experience of the happenings in the region in her writing that is so evocative at the same time.
The present paper aims to explore the short stories by Temsula Ao from her Sahitya Academy Prize winning collection Laburnum for My Head (2009) from the perspective of both written and oral account of emotional identities and aspects of showing multiple ways of being, becoming and belonging.The Northeast has long been on the fringe of mainstream literary consciousness, edged out by its complex socio-politics, crisis of identity and the prolonged rule of the gun. Temsula, through her narratives,has expressed a strong political awareness to interrogate the violence that has ravaged the Northeast region as a whole and the 'Naga nation' in particular due to the tussle between the insurgents 'underground extortionists or rebel forces'and the Indian government in complex ways.
Mainstream
Political consciousness
Cite
Citations (0)
Exoticism
Alterity
Cite
Citations (0)
In the early part of the nineteenth century, the American frontier typically was associated with male adventurers like James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo and the Davy Crockett of popular almanacs. In the national imagination, the West was closely tied these lone white males' conquests of stock enemies such as mountain lions, bears, and Indians. However, the writing by white women who moved West as settlers brings different perspectives bear on this region. As Annette Kolodny, Judith Fetterley, and others have argued, the rhetorical competition between male adventure stories and female domestic narratives in defining the meaning of the American West is at the heart of Caroline Kirkland's first book A New Home, Who'll Follow? Or Glimpses of Western Life. Written under the pen name, Mary Clavers, this book presents thinly fictionalized chronicle of two of the years (1837-39) Kirkland spent with her husband and children in rural Michigan. In response genteel fears that the West had be yielded up as breeding ground for social degeneration and extremist individualism, Kirkland insists on the reclamability of this region for domestic values. She aims domesticate the West by making case that the central drama of the region is the settlement of families and, in the words of her title, the construction of new homes. Through her many books, articles, and sketches, Kirkland would go on establish herself as talented western writer and early realist. Indeed, her primary objective in A New Home is challenge popular representations of the West as kind of playground for white male adventure. As Elizabeth C. Barnes has shown, Kirkland thought of her writing as camera-like in its accuracy and as corrective lens replace the magic glasses used in the promotional material of real estate developers. Contemporary readers such as Edgar Allen Poe recognized Kirkland's portrait as being particularly lifelike, detailed, and unique among western literature in its focus on the home. In The Literati of New York, Poe writes, to Mrs. Kirkland alone we were indebted for our acquaintance with the home and home-life of the backwoodsman (460). Kirkland claims her veracious of this region is intended correct distortions. Nathaniel Lewis points out that her claim of authenticity is only unexceptional, but de rigueur for western writers of the time. However, her emphasis on the details of western home life is strikingly innovative. Through detailed description and analysis of everyday events in western households, Kirkland insists on her adopted region's devotion what, in the doctrine of separate spheres, were considered female values--domesticity, community, and morality. For Kirkland, realistic western protagonist is someone like her book's narrator, Mary Clavers: moralistic white woman engaged in reinventing her home life on her own terms in new, developing town. In addition attempting re-dedicate the West domestic, moral values in A New Home, Kirkland aims unmask the romanticization of individualistic male adventure in the popular literature of her time. Kirkland argues that the primary form of male adventure in the western territories is not actually hunting or trapping, but the ignominious practice of land speculation, which is both rampant and anathema the author's sense of morality and home. In the years preceding Kirkland's publication of A New Home, literary representations of the frontier abounded with male heroes: trappers, hunters, scouts, riverboat men, and explorers, whose primary characteristics are self-reliance, individualism, nomadic lifestyles, and scorn of social norms and traditions usually associated with women. In the 1830s, the western male hero was recognized cultural type, understood be a man who was lawless, ignorant, rough mannered, strong, heavy drinker, and ferocious fighter (Blair and Meine 23). This lone male figure has long history in American literature, but, as Richard Slotkin asserts in Regeneration Through Violence, it seems take particular form with John Filson's literary creation of the frontier hero Daniel Boone in 1784. …
Frontier
White (mutation)
HERO
Cite
Citations (5)
Liang Zhongxian. Between Margin and Center-Semiological Significance in Elizabeth Jolley's Fiction. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2009. 30 CNY ISBN 978-7-5446-1372-9Professor Liang Zhongxiang's Between Margin and Center is the first semiological study of Jolley's work anywhere and the first monograph on her and her fiction to be published in China. It was undertaken from what might seem an unlikely source. Liang, an established Australianist, is Vice President of Mudanjiang University in north-eastern China, 200 kilometres north-east of Vladivostok which stands at the end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. She is about as far removed from Jolley's suburban Perth as could be imagined, although it should be said that she was a Visiting Scholar in Asian Studies at La Trobe University in 2004.Nevertheless, she has produced a capable and at times enlightening survey of Jolley's major fiction, at least some of the value of which resides in the different socio-cultural perspective it presents. Developed from Liang's PhD thesis, her intention is to use 'the semiological method to analyze Jolley's fiction,' declaring at the outset that her conclusion will focus on Jolley's intention 'to break through the boundary of universal cultural ideology, which the Western world holds traditionally, and to endow with it with a more diversified cultural color in favor of the marginalized people' (9). In other words, the task she sets herself is an ambitious one of presenting a view of Jolley's fiction that breaks it free of the localised and suburban readings that have often been imposed on it.In her attempt to do so, Professor Liang leaves no theoretical (or indeed ideological) stone unturned. As she announces in her Introduction, 'Jolley's themes are often interwoven with the feminist and postmodernist concerns: the Other, otherness, the self, identities, land, exile, migration, estrangement, alienation, loneliness, margin, displacement, nationalism, internationalism, and feminism' (7). Her thesis is that the joints of that long chain are 'marginalism and displacement' (7). Liang locates the source of Jolley's preoccupation with the marginalisation in her difficult childhood that lefther suspended between the worlds of her aspirational atheistic Austrian mother and her pacifist-preacher-teacher father. It was always likely to be a volatile mix, but in the political maelstrom of mid-20th century Europe it leftthe young Jolley bereftof a secure identity.Liang brings a different theoretical perspective to the fore in each chapter. There are several advantages to this approach in that, firstly, it introduces readers to critical perspectives they might not be well acquainted with; and, secondly, it effectively demonstrates how Jolley and her work can be scrutinised from various theoretical positions. …
Margin (machine learning)
Cite
Citations (2)
Nikky Finney, a native of South Carolina and a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, is a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Appalachian poets of African descent who incorporate into their work themes of regional as well as transnational identities, local as well as global communities. Although she hails from South Carolina and not the geographical region traditionally associated with Appalachia, Finney, along with other members of the group, including writer Gurney Norman and adopted member Nikki Giovanni, focus on the intersection of history and culture that is central to the vast region called Appalachia. Finney's perspective on being Affrilachian is a global one. In Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers, Finney writes of "the geographical evolutionary theory," which contends that, at one point in time, all land masses were one. She explains that if one were to "pull all the countries of the world in together" one would discover "how the Appalachian mountain range melds perfectly into the long green valleys of Africa like one single sacred ground." Finney sees the same connection between the coastal Palmetto State of her birth and the continent of her ancestors. However, she laments in her Introduction to the collection Rice (1995) that "South Carolina has disregarded much of its African heritage." Through her poetry, Finney seeks to remedy that neglect by examining what melds the sandy land of South Carolina [End Page 134] to the continent of Africa—the tradition of planting and harvesting rice. 1
Appalachia
Cite
Citations (0)