Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part One Agency
- Part Two Sexuality
- Introduction to Part Two
- Chapter Four Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women Loving Women
- Chapter Five Patterns of Innocence: The Rescue of the Female Child
- Chapter Six Lesbian Existence: Impossible Dreams of Exteriority
- Part Three Indeterminacy
- Notes
- Primary Bibliography
- Secondary Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Novels and Short Stories by Joanna Russ
Chapter Four - Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women Loving Women
from Part Two - Sexuality
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part One Agency
- Part Two Sexuality
- Introduction to Part Two
- Chapter Four Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women Loving Women
- Chapter Five Patterns of Innocence: The Rescue of the Female Child
- Chapter Six Lesbian Existence: Impossible Dreams of Exteriority
- Part Three Indeterminacy
- Notes
- Primary Bibliography
- Secondary Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Novels and Short Stories by Joanna Russ
Summary
I stopped loving men (‘It's just too difficult’) and in a burst of inspiration, dreamed up the absolutely novel idea of loving women—Russ (‘Not For Years But For Decades’, 28)
Women as a group have been denied a public voice and access to discursive authority. The ways in which women have submitted to and written against their confinement to ‘private’ discourses (for example, the epistolary mode) has been explored by feminist literary scholarship. The feminist narratologist Susan Sniader Lanser in Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voicegoes back to the mid–18th century, when both the novel and modern gender identity emerged simultaneously:
Certainly taboos against women's public writing, along with the practice by which novels were presented as the ‘true’ histories of their narrating protagonists, discouraged the presence of the author's name on a novel's title page. In this way, just when, according to Foucault, individual authorship is becoming the ground of textual validity, the dominant female identity in eighteenth–century fiction becomes not the author's but the character's. (33)
Thus, even though women were serious competitors in the economics of narrative production from the eighteenth century onwards, literary histories consistently erased their contributions. Women writers as a class were separated from the androcentric literary canon and separated from each other by making every woman writer an exception to the rule that ‘women can't write’. ‘Essentialist’ feminist discourses confront patriarchy's definition of the woman as the ‘eternal’ non–writer by constructing a femaleliterary tradition on the basis of a shared biology (which had also been the basis of the exclusion). Russ participates in this discourse in her essay collection How to Suppress Women's Writing, but also throughout her fictional work. Reconstructing women as authors and characters of fiction is a significant factor in the sexual politics particularly of Russ's explicitly feminist texts. Rewriting images of the woman as author and as character, Russ tackles the ‘anxieties of authorship’, which Part One discussed from the angle of agency, also from the perspective of sex.
Mother–lines: Linking ‘Female’ Literature
The power of the word and the pleasures of the female body are intimately related. (Marks, 287)
From the point of view of the need to shape a female literary tradition, the implicit references to Charlotte and Emily Brontxë and to Frankenstein in Russ's short story ‘My Dear Emily’, which I discussed in Part One, take on additional significance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Demand My WritingJoanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction, pp. 99 - 129Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999