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Chen, Ju-yun
July, 2010 Practicing
Feminism: The
Intertextuality of Mira and the Narrator in
The Women's Room
Since Marilyn French's
The Women's Room was published in
1977, the novel has become a feminist bestseller and
has been widely recognized as one of the most influential novels of
second-wave feminism.
Most readers, and Marilyn French herself
as well, consider the work a feminist
fiction. However, its instant popularity brought criticism from some well-known
feminists who think it was too pessimistic
about women's lives to be a feminist work.
For example, the reviewers of mainstream feminist press,
Ms. and
off our backs, disavow the novel's
status as a feminist novel because it does not correspond with
the agenda of feminist activists.
Feminist literary critics
Rosaline Coward and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
also argue that the novel's
confessional form weakens its political potential to
effect social change. Other literary critics,
however, such as Susan Faludi and Maria Lauret,
maintain the
value of the novel as a feminist response to the social context. Faludi
argues that the function of the novel is tantamount
to that of a consciousness-raising group which stimulates sisterhood
between women so as to change their lives. Lauret
confirms the
political effectiveness of
The Women's Room by examining the
writing technique─the confessional form.
She contends that “feminist fiction of subjectivity” is more
efficacious than ordinary “narratives of
conversion” in that it
constructs a “positional” and “provisional”
feminist subjectivity. In this sense, The
Women's Room is seen as a “feminist
fiction of subjectivity,” in which the first-person
narrator is a feminist subject. Inspired by these critics, my paper
mainly engages itself with the feminist debate. I attempt to identify the
novel as a feminist practice in which women are not just victims of patriarchy.
It is through the
reading, re-reading and writing of a feminist novel
that women can be empowered. Based on the
slogan “the personal is political” of
second-wave feminism, I would like to argue
that The Women's Room
falls squarely within feminist practice because it raises
women's gender awareness.
First, I adopt the concept of “intertextuality,” coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966, to analyze the relationship between the author and the protagonist. Intertextuality means that the writer is a reader of texts (in the broadest sense) before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the meaning of works is revealed through references, quotations and influences of every kind. In other words, the meaning of a text is dynamically re-appropriated and re-interpreted by the writer based on her/his historical or social system. In this sense, each woman's life story in The Women's Room can be seen as a text that is read by Mira, the protagonist, and also by the narrator of the story. After reading and re-reading other women's life experiences, Mira is empowered to tell their stories, so she collects those stories and creates a new text out of them. As a writer-protagonist, Mira's narrative functions to raise the gender awareness of contemporary female readers. With the ambiguous relationship between the writer and the reader, Mira achieves a feminist goal not only at the personal level but also at the political level by producing a text which can cause change. As a protagonist, Mira's story may seem like a fairytale. However, it reveals, in Betty Friedan's term, “the problem that has no name” shared by every housewife at that time: American women of the 1960s and 1970s were dissatisfied with being a mother and a wife and living in the “fairyland” constructed by the government. As a narrator, Mira empowers herself and other women by giving voice to the feeling that they want to be more than a housewife or a mother. Basically, the novel can be divided into two parts. The first half of the novel focuses on Mira's life as a traditional housewife and mother of the 1950s and 1960s. At this time, Mira is depicted as a powerless woman. As a suburban housewife, Mira builds a female network with several friends: Bliss, Adele, and Natalie. In that community of housewives, women like her are trapped in endless domestic work, child-caring, and dissatisfied sexuality, etc. Later, the second part emphasizes the awakening of Mira's gender consciousness after she divorces Norm and enters Harvard University. Joining the Harvard group which consists of Val (a radical feminist), Iso (a lesbian divorcée), Kyla, Clarissa, and Ava, Mira starts to involve herself in the Women's Movement. When Mira is a housewife, she has an ambiguous feeling that what happens to her and her friends is wrong but she can not find the truth even in the books she reads. It is not until Mira articulates her life to the Harvard group that she becomes aware of gender issues. When she tells her story, Mira starts a dialogue between her new subjectivity and the old one. According to Lisa Maria Hogeland, feminist fiction can be a substitution for consciousness-raising groups because feminist fiction depicts women's real predicament and the possibility of finding a new self. In consciousness-raising groups, through sharing each other's stories, women come to realize that the problems they encounter are not only personal but political. The Women's Room is characteristic of the same narratives. In the novel, the narrator keeps telling the readers that what she recounts is so true that the story testifies to the suppression of women. There is no doubt that French attempts to send a political message to every woman. By interlacing Mira's life story with her narrative, the novel is conducive to the formation of feminist subjectivity. While re-reading other women's life stories (including her old self), the narrator weaves them into a text that helps women to re-view their own lives and then develop their feminist subjectivity. In this case, feminist writing and reading are empowerment mechanisms that can bring about change.
Works Cited Coward, Rosaline. “Are Women's
Novels Feminist Novels.” The New Feminist
Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. French, Marilyn. The Women's Room. [1977]. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. ---. “Is There a Feminist Aesthetic?” Hypatia 5.2 (1990): 33-42.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Hogeland, Lisa Maria. “‘Men Can't Be That Bad': Realism and Feminist Fiction in the 1970s.” American Literary History 6.2 (1994): 287-305. Lauret, Maria.
Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in
Loudermilk, Kim A.
“From The Women's Room to the
Bedroom: Marilyn French's Feminist Fiction”
Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect
the Movement for Women's Equality. Stevens, Wendy. Rev. of The Women's Room, by Marilyn French. Off Our Backs 28 Feb. 1978: 18-19. Still, Judith and Michael
Worton. Introduction. Intertexuality:
Theories and Practices. By Worton and Still.
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