History and Space in
Contemporary North American Women's Fictions
Kate Liu Spring 2002

" Who are you?" said the caterpiller.

" Alice replied rather shyly, 'I -- I hardly know, Sir, just at present -- at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.'"(Alice in the Wonderland)

     If Alice just experiences changes of her body, contemporary feminist writers have to deal with not only rapid changes in familial relationships and society, but also conflicting constructions of their selves by histories, social spaces and information technologies.  What does it mean, then, to be a feminist writer in contemporary North America, a world which Alice could never have imagined a century ago? What kind of subjects do they construct in their novels to resist what kind of patriarchy?  What novelistic strategies do they use? 

      For contemporary North American female writers, writing stories about women's selves is necessary, important but difficult.  It is necessary and important because, under the influence of the Women's Movement in the 60's, as well as the long history of feminism, far more women feel the need to resist patriarchal control and have their own voice and lives.   It is difficult not only because women have multiple selves, but also because these selves are situated in the increasingly complicated postmodern world and conflicting discourses, among others, of feminisms, postmodernism and postcolonialism.  Self-Construction(narration), in other words, means also construction of a certain history (familial, ethnic, national, or global) and/or a certain space (home, city, margins, etc.), but then neither history nor space can be assumed to be pre-given or natural, not to mention the idea of self. 

      With the awareness of both the necessity and difficulties (if not impossibilities) of self-constructions, North American women writers resort to strategies such as Irony, double-talking, fantasy, metafiction and intertextuality.  Through these strategies, they,on the one hand, critique patriarchal constructions of femininity and gender roles (e.g. of mother and reproduction) which are further complicated by their different racial backgrounds, and, on the other, construct more liberated female selves in different communities set in different times and spaces.   The questions we raise in our course, therefore, are: 

  • How do these women writers critique patriarchy? 
  • What kind of "selves" do they construct, fulfilling what desires? 
  • How are their "alternatives" estalished temporally and spatially, and how are they related to the present reality? 
       To address the issues mentioned above, this course chooses six North American feminist novels which construct different kinds of time/space to locate their (female) subjects of different ethnic backgrounds.  Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson 1980) , first of all, sets patriarchy adrift by refusing to keep its "house."  The next two novels, Beloved (Toni Morrison 1988) and Disappearning Moon Cafe (SKY Lee 1990), look backward at a racial history of Afro-Americans and Chinese-Canadians respectively--both represented spatiallly--as resources for the characters' identity  politics at the present time of the novels.  Woman on the Edge of Time (Marge Piercy 1976) and The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood 1985), then, project a future, utopian or destopian, to comment on the present patriarchal society. Dawn (Octavia Butler 1987) leaves human society completely under the hands of the extraterrestrials.   While focusing on the various time/space constructions and identity politics of these novels, we hope to have a general, though provisional, understanding of the major concerns and strategies of postmodern North American feminist novels. 

Requirement

1. Two reports: 1. text analysis; 2. setting the chosen text in a larger (theoretical or historical or literary) context; 
2. Final paper