Transforming Memories

Transforming Memories in
Contemporary Women’s Rewriting

Liedeke Plate
Transforming Memories in Contemporary
Women’s Rewriting
Also by Liedeke Plate:
STOF EN AS. DE NEERSLAG VAN 11 SEPTEMBER IN KUNST EN CULTUUR

(edited with Anneke Smelik)
TECHNOLOGIES OF MEMORY IN THE ARTS (edited with Anneke Smelik)

Transforming Memories
in Contemporary Women’s
Rewriting
Liedeke Plate
Assistant Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Palgrave
macmillan
© Liedeke Plate 2011
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For Eline and Louise
in memoriam Matei Calinescu
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Part I Consuming Memories 1

1 Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories:
Contemporary Women’s Rewriting and/as Cultural Memory 3
Contemporary women’s rewriting 5
Producing the past 9
Memory culture 12
The rise of ‘the past’ 13
Instant obsolescence 15
Manufacturing the past 17
Consuming memories 18
Post-Fordist literary marketplace 21
The presence of the past 24
A new historical culture 26
Myth as methodoloy 29
Tactics and strategies of memory 32
Performing cultural memory 34
Part II Fair Use 37
2 En/gendering Cultural Memory: Rereading, Rewriting,
and the Politics of Recognition 39
Rewriting as productive reception 41
Reading and (re)writing: Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ 45
‘Récriture féminine’: Hélène Cixous’s écriture
féminine as rewriting 49
Author-izing women’s writing 54
Reader-oriented approaches and anti-authoritarianism 57
Production and consumption 61
3 Women’s Rewriting as Counter-memory: An ABC
of ‘Stolentelling’ (Authorship, Branding, and Copyright) 66
‘Literary theft’ as a metaphor to live, write, and die by 67
Stealing the language 70
The risk of rewriting 75
vii
viii Contents
Un-author-ized rewriting: Pera’s Lo’s Diary 78

Rewriting and brand management 83
Rewriting in the post-Fordist literary marketplace 89
Part III Cultural Scripts 95
4 Untold Stories: ‘Writing Back’ to Silence 97
Silence and women’s (re)writing 100
Rewriting silence 106
The subject of ‘writing back’ 109
The ethics of rewriting 114
Towards a poetics of silence 120
5 High Infidelity: Tradition, Rewriting, and the Paradoxes
of Decanonization 130
Cultural capitalism 132
Supplementary rewritings of female tradition 138
Suspicion and after 144
Feminine versions: rewriting as a translation
into a (m)other tongue 148
The liveness of the canon: paradoxes of decanonization 154
Part IV Mythical Returns 157
6 Winged Words: Women’s Rewriting as Remythologizing 159
Rewriting in times of ‘secondary orality’ 160
Performing memory 164
Mythical speech 168
Liquid mythologies 171
Remembering the future 174
Myth and memory 177
Multiperspectival memory 179
Notes 182
Bibliography 193
Index 214
Preface
This book proposes an assessment of contemporary women’s rewriting

from the 1970s to the present in the light of its engagement with cul-
tural memory. Women’s rewriting is defined as a genre in which narra-
tives of the past are retold from the perspective of a new, marginal, and
usually female character in the original story. Literally re-membering
and re-calling the old stories differently, contemporary women’s rewrit-
ing engages questions of remembrance and of forgetting in relation to
gendered identity.
Contemporary women’s rewriting emerged in a moment of history
particularly obsessed with memory. Cultural historians agree to locate
a shift in culture’s relationship to the past in the wake of the emanci-
patory movements of the 1960s. The new ‘memory culture’ developed
through the democratization of history and the attendant fragmenta-
tion of History into histories (and ‘herstories’). Viewed as interventions
in cultural memory seeking to generate helpful memories by changing
the way the past is remembered, women’s rewritings ostensibly form a
constituent part of the contemporary culture of memory. In this book,
I therefore ask: How did the literature inspired by the international
women’s movement transform cultural memory and, vice versa, how
did the memory culture that developed through the democratization
of history, in turn, affect the practice of women’s rewriting? By inquir-
ing into the mutually constitutive nature of contemporary women’s
rewriting and the ‘consumer memory culture’ that developed through
the democratization of history and the commoditization of the past,
this book explores women’s rewriting as integral to the dynamics of
contemporary cultural remembrance.
The book is divided in four parts. Part I, ‘Consuming Memories’, sets
the scene: it sketches the contours of the emergent new historical cul-
ture, places the concept of women’s rewriting in its historical context,
and elucidates the relationship between rewriting, cultural memory and
consumerism.
Part II, ‘Fair Use’, explores the specificity of women’s rewriting as
a historically situated literary genre, examining it as mode of literary
production that stands in a particular relation to contemporary debates
about gender, memory and the past. In this part, Chapter 2, ‘En/gendering
Cultural Memory: Rereading, Rewriting, and the Politics of Recognition’,
ix
x Preface
focuses on the emergence of concepts for women’s rewriting in the

1970s. Looking especially into Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ and what
I term Hélène Cixous’s ‘récriture féminine’, the chapter situates rewriting
in the context of second-wave feminism and explores its relationship to
contemporary theories of reading, authorship, and of literary consump-
tion and production. Chapter 3, ‘Rewriting as Counter-memory: An ABC
of “Stolentelling” (Authorship, Branding, and Copyright)’, inquires into
the counter-memorial practice of women’s rewriting as the stealing of
language, particularly as it relates to other forms of literary theft. Taking
two notorious plagiarism cases of the 1990s as its focus – Pia Pera’s Diary
of Lo and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone – it examines the limits
copyright puts on what can be rewritten and demonstrates its ability
to impede the memory-work of rewriting as an intervention in cultural
memory.
Part III, ‘Cultural Scripts’, takes up some important issues contem-
porary women’s rewriting raises about silence, speech, forgetting and
remembering, canonization, and cultural identity. Chapter 4, ‘Untold
Stories: “Writing Back” to Silence’, looks into rewriting in relation to
silence and forgetting to address the vexed relationship of feminism
to postcolonialism. Focusing on what I see as contemporary women’s
rewriting’s metafictional moment, the chapter discusses J.M. Coetzee’s
Foe and Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem as novels
reflecting on the possibilities rewriting offers for the articulation of alter/
native experiences. Chapter 5, ‘High Infidelity: Tradition, Rewriting,
and the Paradoxes of Decanonization’, explores the relation of women’s
rewriting to the past in the light of the canon. Comparing and contrast-
ing recent and older rewritings – Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, Sena Jeter
Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, and Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia on the one hand,
and Christa Wolf’s Kassandra and Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl on
the other – the chapter inquires into issues of canon formation, cultural
identity, and collective memory, identifying strategies of supplementa-
tion and reparation complementing women’s rewriting’s hermeneutics
of distrust.
In the final part, ‘Mythical Returns’, I proposes a re-assessment of
contemporary women’s rewriting in the light of myth. Chapter 6,
‘Winged Words: Women’s Rewriting as Remythologizing’, begins by
situating contemporary women’s rewriting within the market culture of
inscription and of accumulation that is printed book culture. Focusing
on two of Jeanette Winterson’s recent novels – Weight and The Stone
Gods – it proceeds to explore mythical retelling as a means to engage
cultural continuity and change in transforming memory today.
Acknowledgements
In the two years it took me to write this book, I received the support
of many. I here especially want to thank the Faculty of Arts and the
Institute for Gender Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen for a gen-
erous grant and sabbatical leave; the Institute for Research on Women
and Gender and the Center for the Critical Study of Social Difference
at Columbia University, especially Marianne Hirsch, for welcoming me
so warmly in the Spring of 2009; and the Netherlands Organization
for Scientific Research for a teaching replacement grant, enabling
me to complete this project. I here also wish to thank Cary Henson,
Daniel Simon, and Kristine Steenbergh for commenting on early drafts,
Mark Llewellyn for being a charitable (anonymous) reader for Palgrave
Macmillan as well as the members of the Cultural Memory Colloquium
of Columbia University and my colleagues from the Department of
Cultural Studies, the Performances of Memory Research Group, and the
Institute for Gender Studies. I am particularly grateful to Stefan Dudink,
Judith Greenberg, Willy Jansen, Geertje Mak, Nancy Miller, Veronica
Vasterling and Wouter Weijers for their insightful comments; to Kiene
Brillenburg-Wurth, Aleid Fokkema, Susan Gubar, renee hoogland, Dennis
Kersten, Claudia Krops, Sophie Levie, Christian Moraru, Marijke Orthel,
Rigtje Passchier, Ann Rigney, Annelies van Solinge, Martijn Stevens, my
parents, and my fellow board members of the Dutch Women’s Studies
Association for abiding interest in my work and for keeping me on my
toes long after I stopped dancing on them; to Daniëlle Bruggeman for
helping me with the bibliography and to David C. Felts for preparing
the index; and to Anneke Smelik for encouraging me to start on this
project and for reading through the whole manuscript. It is the students
in my MA classes on cultural memory at Radboud University Nijmegen
who first got me thinking about the changing function of contemporary
women’s rewriting in the context of consumer memory culture, and
students elsewhere – in Amsterdam and in Utrecht – who challenged
me to develop these ideas. This book is in memory of Matei Calinescu,
dearly missed interlocutor on the subject of rewriting. It is dedicated
to my daughters, Eline and Louise. It would not have been possible
without the loving support of my husband, Michiel Scheffer.
Nijmegen, April 2010
xi
Part I
Consuming Memories
1
Remembering the Past,
Manufacturing Memories:
Contemporary Women’s Rewriting
and/as Cultural Memory
Rewriting – the act of writing again, literally re-membering the old

stories – is an act of memory. It is an act of re-collection in which the
past is re-called and made sense of in the light of the present. As each
age rewrites the past in its own image, rewriting is the process and
product of cultural remembrance and can thus be viewed as emblematic,
representative, and characteristic of cultural memory conceived as a
‘realm of traditions, transmissions, and transferences’ (Assmann 2008: 110).
Rewriting is marked by a dynamics of storing and retrieving, inscribing
and obliterating, remembering and forgetting, that is productive of
memory as shared and formative of collective, cultural identity.
This book focuses on contemporary women’s rewriting: writing
published over the period 1970 to the present, in which narratives of
the past are retold from the perspective of a female character, often with
the explicit aim to re-member the past differently. In their introduction
to a special issue of Signs on ‘Gender and Cultural Memory’, Marianne
Hirsch and Valerie Smith observe that the ‘explosion of literary and
cultural production by women’ in the past decades has shaped much of
the period’s cultural memory (2002: 3). Contemporary women’s rewrit-
ing partakes in the explosion, directly confronting questions of cultural
memory from the perspective of women. Compiling, in the 1980s, a
dictionary of key terms for his own novels, Milan Kundera includes
an entry for the term ‘rewriting’ in which he notes: ‘Rewriting comme
esprit de l’époque’ – ‘Rewriting as the spirit of the times’ (1986: 178;
1988: 147). This book submits that women’s rewriting, as part of the
period’s ‘democratic rewriting of history’, ‘subjecting it to an agonizing
revision’, as Jean Baudrillard puts it in The Illusion of the End, ‘reviewing
3
4 Consuming Memories
everything, rewriting everything’ (1994: 43; 12), especially embodies

this spirit of the times.
But to speak of the spirit of the times is to obscure the fact of change
(even if, as I shall maintain, change is the current spirit of the age and
the dominant characteristic of our times). Yet it is this change that I want
to chart, tracing four decades of women’s rewriting, from its emergence
as a feminist genre in the 1970s to its contemporary manifestations. To
this end, this book explores the reasons and conditions for the critical,
literary-narratological, political and commercial success of women’s
rewriting since the 1970s. It examines the productivity of rewriting as
a feminist concept in the critical arena, the cultural imaginary and the
literary marketplace. And it illuminates how broad social, political, and
economic trends combine to affect the capacity of women’s rewriting
to transform memory.
The book’s point of departure is my concern with what appears as a
loss of critical purchase on the cultural imaginary that women’s rewri-
ting has recently undergone. This vexing fact can be explained by
placing contemporary women’s rewriting in the context of changing
moments of capitalism. As Nancy Fraser explains in her essay ‘Feminism,
Capitalism, and the Cunning of History’, the cultural changes brought
about by second-wave feminism have been an integral part of the social
organization of capitalism. ‘Aspirations that had a clear emancipatory
thrust in the context of state-organized capitalism assumed a far more
ambiguous meaning in the neoliberal era’, and feminist critiques that
were once emancipatory later served to legitimate new forms of capital-
ism (2009: 108–13). The paradox of women’s rewriting, then, is that
its success in the literary marketplace, signalling the mainstreaming of
assumptions about feminism’s central tenets, indicates its aims have
come to converge with those of capitalism. This in turn means it has
lost its power to unsettle culturally central texts and, with this, its power
to inflame the imagination and set the narrative of further change.
The vicissitudes of women’s rewriting, then, are part of broader social
and cultural transformations. Neoliberal capitalism, postmodernity,
hypermodernity, and consumerism all converge in what Zygmunt
Bauman (2000) has termed ‘liquid modernity’. ‘Liquidity’, I will explain
below, has permeated all dimensions of existence, including people’s
sense of identity, relationship to the past, present, and future, as well
as their affiliations, bonds, and connections with others. Mindful of
an idea of women’s rewriting as promoting change for the better –
a better world, the ‘good society’ – I am ultimately interested in recovering
the emancipatory potential of rewriting. To do so, this book explores
Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories 5
women’s rewriting as a complex emergent phenomenon and takes an

interdisciplinary approach to try and understand what happens to the
idea of rewriting in a consumer society, as it becomes a commercially
savvy publishing strategy and a choice of past. Because it refuses to
submit women’s rewriting to the present forces of inertia and of perma-
nent change, it also explores how rewriting can continue to open up
the present moment to new feminist futures and thus remain an instru-
ment of radical promise.
In the following pages, I explore women’s rewriting as a literary
genre that has much to say about the relationship to the cultural
past. To this end, I illuminate the notion of a contemporary culture of
memory and, placing women’s rewriting in this emergent new histori-
cal culture, situate it in relation to ‘memory’, feminism, and to eco-
nomic developments in the book-publishing industry. Explaining that
rewriting is productive of the past as ‘presence’, I go on to clarify how
it is one of our culture’s central ‘technologies of memory’. The chapter
concludes with the argument that in a culture as obsessed with the
past and as saturated with memories as ours, the very means of cul-
tural memory production is itself affected by this memory surplus.
How memories are produced, shared, passed on, and given meaning
is not stable but changes over time, as both the social frameworks and
the media of memory change too. In particular, I maintain, women’s
rewriting as the re-membering of a culture’s founding texts (as the
repository of cultural memory and source of cultural identity) works
in another way and to a different effect today than it did in the 1970s,
when it was first articulated in programmatic texts of feminism.
Contemporary women’s rewriting
Women’s rewriting came into view as a literary genre and a feminist

praxis as writers affiliated with the International Women’s Movement
and scholars with feminist affinities developed theories about the
relationship of gendered identities to language and to literature. One
of its first theoreticians is the American writer, poet, literary critic, and
feminist activist Adrienne Rich, whose concept of ‘re-vision’ would
energize women writers – initially, especially poets – to respond to
tradition with texts of their own. As she addressed the subject of ‘The
Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century’ at the Modern Language
Association professional meeting in 1971, Rich spoke of the need for
rereading and rewriting the texts of the past from the perspective of
women’s experience. Because literature does not reflect women’s lives
and experiences, she maintained, its effects on women are devastating.

It informs their ideas of themselves as second-class citizens and offers no
‘guides, maps, possibilities’ for the young woman who ‘goes to poetry or
fiction looking for her way of being in the world’ (1972: 21; emphasis in
the original). In contrast, women’s writing was to be a motor of cultural
change and re-writing, a means of opening the past to alternative stories,
which in turn meant opening the future to new possibilities.
Starting in the 1970s, the literary market sees the development of a
genre of women’s writing that is the rewriting of the classics as told from
the perspective of one of the ‘marginal’, usually female, characters from
literary history. These retrospective first-person narrations first occurred
in poetry. It is indeed in poems ‘steeped in the light of Greek myth that is
part of the poet’s heritage’, as Olga Broumas’s award-winning collection
Beginning with O is introduced (Kunitz 1977: ix), that feminist re-vision
is first practised in the 1970s. By the end of the decade, these ‘enact-
ments of feminist antiauthoritarianism’ (Ostriker 1982: 87) opposing
traditional views through poetic personae that speak in the voices of
mythical figures such as Medusa, Helen, Circe, and Eurydice and charac-
ters familiar from fairy tales extend to short stories. In ‘Penelope’ (1978),
Sara Maitland explores the mythical paragon of the faithful wife from a
feminist perspective, explaining her choice for married life in Ithaca as a
choice for a meaningful life, away from the uselessness of her princessly
existence. As Penelope recounts, it was because she enjoyed ‘being part
of a necessary production process’ that she took to ‘weaving and farm-
ing and rearing my own children and administering our community,
creating something real’ (149). Just as Maitland’s Penelope dispels the
myth of her nightly unweaving – she calls it a ‘ridiculous motivation’,
invented to account for her unlikely occupation (ibid.) – so does Angela
Carter counter the myth of women’s sexual passivity in her retellings
of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), recounting
Bluebeard’s young wife’s awakening to her own sexuality, or telling of a
self-assured Little Red Riding Hood who ‘knew she was nobody’s meat’
and freely gives herself to the Wolf (147).
As a literary genre, contemporary women’s rewriting develops in
the 1980s, when rewriting is explored for the possibilities it holds for
telling another story in novels such as Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (1983)
and Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem (1986) – two
retrospective first-person novels that counter received accounts with
alternative accounts of the past – and the ‘playgiaristic’ novels of Kathy
Acker, Great Expectations (1982) and Don Quixote (1986). The genre then
booms in the 1990s – a trend that continues through the first decade of
the twenty-first century, when a host of novel rewritings are published

and republished.
Conceived as a re-writing that inscribes obscured lives into cultural
memory, allowing them equal share in the cultural imagination, rewrit-
ing as ‘re-vision’ is especially invested in whose version of the story we
remember. It thus turns to what Molly Hite has termed ‘the other side
of the story’, which ‘is also, if implicitly, another story’ (1989: 4). Giving
a voice to characters that have been repressed or silenced altogether, the
point of view is frequently that of a well-known figure’s ‘other’ – e.g. Job’s
wife in Andrée Chedid’s La femme de Job (1993) or Mrs. Gulliver in Alison
Fell’s The Mistress of Lilliput (1999). Contemporary women’s rewriting also
features many a mythical character – Lolita and Rebecca of eponymous
fame in Pia Pera’s Diario di Lo (1995) and Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale
(2001), respectively – as well as ‘minor’ or secondary characters from
well-known, mostly nineteenth-century novels, for instance: Jane Fairfax,
the ‘second heroine’ from Jane Austen’s Emma (Aiken 1990), Mary Reilly,
Jekyll-and-Hyde’s maid in Stevenson’s novella (Martin 1990), and Adèle,
Jane Eyre’s tutee in Brontë’s novel (Tennant 2002).
Such rewriting of a classic text from an alternative perspective intervenes
in the production of cultural memory. It affects the way we read and
understand these texts, and it transforms the way we remember them. The
by now classic example of a successful intervention in cultural memory
would be Jean Rhys’s revisionary prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea
(1966). Rhys’s novel, indeed, has so effectively transformed the way we
remember Charlotte Brontë’s nineteenth-century novel of development
that most recent adaptations of Brontë’s novel, whether for television,
stage, or the big screen, and ranging from novels to films to plays and
operas, all include references to it as if it were part of (the subtext of)
Brontë’s novel (see Rubik and Mettinger-Schartmann 2007).1 Producing
both the texts that constitute cultural memory and the sentiments and
ideologies that accompany it, Rhys’s novel is a cogent example of how
women’s rewriting can be successful in opening up literary history to
negotiation over which stories are to be included in it, who is entitled
to define it, and which meanings it holds. Indeed, putting the nineteenth-
century novel together differently, constituting it as it were anew, it has
been especially successful in demonstrating what Marita Sturken sees as
memories’ most valuable insight, which is ‘the stakes held by individuals
and institutions in attributing meaning to the past’ (1997: 9).
As a technology of re-production and re-presentation, rewriting
belongs with adaptation and translation to the techniques at a culture’s
disposal for the transmission and dissemination of texts, into other places
and times, as well as in order to reach new audiences. Participating in the

process of cultural transmission and inheritance, rewriting is a medium
that works to preserve culture – even as it, inevitably perhaps, transforms
it in the process.2 Yet rewriting may also be primarily vested in change.
Julie Sanders speaks of ‘appropriation’ instead of ‘adaptation’: whereas
adaptation ‘both appears to require and to perpetuate the existence of a
canon’, appropriation implies ‘the notion of hostile takeover’ (2006: 8–9).
Its interest, then, is not so much in preserving culture as it is in trans-
forming it. Feminist rewriting, in particular, is concerned with creating
a ‘usable past’, to use Van Wyck Brooks’s phrase (1918). Intent on unset-
tling culture as it is, it re-collects a future-oriented past in view of what
Mieke Bal has termed ‘helpful memories’, seeking to counter the destruc-
tive effects of collective repression and forgetting (1999: xii).
Indeed, what characterizes contemporary women’s rewriting is a
special relationship to the past. Engaging texts from the past and
about the past, it recollects and recalls old texts that hold particular
cultural significance – the ‘classics’, familiar stories that have achieved
mythic status, what Christian Moraru refers to as ‘“identity narratives”:
heavily ideology-laden tales about us as individuals and members of
certain communities’ (2001: xiii). And as it searches for what can be
retrieved from them and made available to sustain alternative identities
and other worldviews, it intervenes in cultural memory, seeking to
transform it. This is especially true in countries with a strong sense
of ‘canon’ as cultural heritage and the repository of shared but con-
tested values: for instance, England, France, Germany (formerly, the
two Germanys), the United States. In these contexts, novels such as
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (1983)
or Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999) participate in tradition as
a dynamic process of actualization and transmission in their bid to be
part of literary history, inscribing the narratives of Rochester’s first wife,
Bertha Antoinette Mason; of the Greek prophetess Cassandra; and of
captain Ahab’s wife within the stories as we used to know them. So do
poems such as Anne Sexton’s retellings of fairy tales in Transformations
(1971) or Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife (1999), a collection which
gives a voice to the wives of famous and infamous ‘great men’ of world
literature and civilization (Mrs. Midas, Mrs. Tiresias, Mrs. Darwin,
Queen Kong, etc.).
Remembering the past differently, women’s rewriting embodies a
feminist approach to the past confident that change is possible and that
it will be brought about by changing the stories which shape cultural
foundation myths and thus human existence. As such, it forges cultural
memory. Focusing especially on the re-inscription of effaced, obscured,

or altogether forgotten lives into literary history, women’s rewriting
exemplifies memory’s reworking of the past to shape identity in the
present. Its concentration on inscription highlights literature’s role as
‘a repository of culture’, as cultural heritage and inheritance (D’haen
2000: 1). Because it is concerned not so much with what is known as
with what ‘can be recovered, re-membered, and brought to the surface’
(Neubauer and Geyer-Ryan 2000: 6), particularly as it can be put to the
service of (re)constructing female identity, its relationship to the past is
complicated, frequently ambivalent, and almost always complex.
Producing the past
The point of departure of this book is the observation that the rela-
tion of contemporary Western culture to the past has recently changed
and that this change, in turn, impinges upon the imagination of the
future. Contemporary culture is obsessed with the past. It has been so
for at least twenty-five years now. Although the end of ‘the era of com-
memoration’, as French historian Pierre Nora (1996) has dubbed the
age, has long been forecast, nothing indicates this fascination is about
to relent. Surprisingly, perhaps, there are (as yet) no signs of ‘memory
fatigue’ (Huyssen 2003: 3), however inevitable it might seem that the
fascination with memory would quickly reach a point of saturation.
In the context of the contemporary culture of instant obsolescence
with its ever-increasing acceleration of history and its ever faster cycles
of innovation, it would indeed be expected that the newness of the old
and the novelty of the past as fashionable interest would soon wear
out. That this is not the case seems instead a tribute to memory as not
just ‘a significant symptom of our cultural present’, as Andreas Huyssen
has it (2003: 3), but as a constituent part of it. Indeed, as new pasts
keep being retrieved, unearthed, and manufactured and as discussions
about national canons and defences of a (traditionally defined) Western
cultural heritage continue being renewed, it becomes increasingly clear
that memory and the past are no passing fad but an abiding concern.
Today, cultural memory – the shared remembrance of the past and its
production as memory in the present – is the central terrain on which to
stake the values we hold most dear. This is because memory provides the
knowledge from which we derive identity, both at the individual and at
the collective level. It is also because of the intrinsic relation between
the production of memory and consumer culture. We need to think of
memory and the memory boom as inextricably linked with consumer
culture.3 Cultural memory and ‘the past’ are produced by a culture in

the interest of particular people in that culture. As the discussion, in
Chapter 3, on the limits copyright imposes on rewriting illustrates, they
are solidly ideological and economic, and are to be examined in both
these terms, especially as they intersect, diverge, or converge.
I am not, of course, the first scholar to remark on the relation of mem-
ory to money. The fascination of late capitalism with the past has been
amply discussed, documented in studies across a variety of disciplines,
focusing especially on heritage and tourism. Its relationship to the
global flows of people, money and goods has been observed; as has its
increasingly commoditized and commercial character (a recent example
is Marita Sturken’s Tourists of History, which explores the intersection of
cultural memory, tourism and consumerism in the United States). But
what is the relationship of feminism to this memory culture? What role
did women’s rewriting play in the production of the past as presence?
And how does women’s rewriting relate to the commodification of the
past? In Present Pasts, Andreas Huyssen observes that ‘[m]emory dis-
courses of a new kind first emerged in the West after the 1960s in the
wake of decolonization and the new social movements and their search
for alternative and revisionist histories’ (2003: 12). Similarly, Pierre Nora
argues that the contemporary concern with memory is attendant upon
‘the “democratization” of history’: the emancipatory atomization of
History into histories, which is ‘the emergence, over a very short period
of time, of all those forms of memory bound up with minority groups
for whom rehabilitating their past is part and parcel of reaffirming their
identity’ (2002: 5). Taking my cue from Huyssen’s and Nora’s observa-
tions, I aim to explore whether women’s rewriting played a part in these
emerging new memory discourses.
It is in the wake of feminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism
that History came to be viewed as one of the grand narratives denounced
as totalizing and negatively associated with public and presumed
objectivity, while ‘memory has become positively associated with the
embedded, with the local, the personal and the subjective’ (Radstone
and Hodgkin 2006: 10). As the narrative means of articulating alter-
native accounts of what happened, women’s rewriting contributed to
the transformation of the ways we think about the past. Particularly
invested in retrieving ‘that which runs against, disrupts or disturbs
dominant ways of understanding the past’, as Radstone and Hodgkin
define the uses of memory today (10), it changed the ways in which
stories, histories, and her-stories are told, enabling the production of
the past as so many small and local narratives.
Yet, setting out to revisit and revise the past in order to project new
futures, did it not, in effect, also work to collapse past, present, and
future? Under the temporal regime of ‘liquid’ modernity, the radical
and transformative potential of women’s rewriting was curtailed.
Whereas the rewriting of the old stories from an alternative, ‘feminine’
perspective constituted a radical challenge to and a fundamental critique
of what Fraser has called ‘the pervasive androcentrism’ of state-led
capitalism (2009: 97), this is no longer so in the context of the neo-liberal
(post)capitalism of liquid modernity, which thrived precisely on the
fragmentation and decentralization of all its narratives. In consequence,
we cannot take contemporary women’s rewriting’s radical promise as a
‘counter-culture of the imagination’ (Widdowson 1999: 166) for granted
anymore. Today, it is simply not true that, as Peter Widdowson writes in
his survey of re-visionary fiction, ‘re-visionary novels almost invariably
have a clear cultural-political thrust’ (Widdowson 2006: 505; see also
Widdowson 1999: 166). There is very little that holds emancipatory
promise in the retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the tutee,
Adèle (Tennant 2002); of Austen’s Emma retold from Jane Fairfax’s point
of view (Aiken 1990); or of Nabokov’s Lolita from Lolita’s viewpoint
(Pera 1995). Also, Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), though giving a
voice to Aeneas’s second wife, ‘mistiest of figures, scarcely more than
a name in a genealogy’, explicitly resists the idea that Virgil should be
blamed for slighting her life and refuses to engage in rewriting as social
criticism (3–4). In consequence, the automatism with which claims
are made that rewriting is change and that this change implements ‘a
saliently political and cultural agenda’ (Moraru 2001: 143) needs to be
resisted and the deep-seated belief in its ‘heartfelt political commitment’
(Sanders 2006: 7) must be held to critical scrutiny.
This is not to say women’s rewriting has lost its capacity for revising
cultural history altogether. Cultural memory continues to interact
with history to produce culturally meaningful narratives. Storytelling,
including literary women’s storytelling, plays a significant role in this.
Yet it is to alert us to the possibility that rewriting may challenge very
little, being actually an integral part of the literary and cultural life of
texts – and hence, of canonicity and marketing. To be alert to these
possibilities, however, does not mean I do not believe this is what
women’s (re)writing should do. On the contrary, I still trust in the
power of feminist narrative to mobilize the imagination and open up
the cultural imaginary to unimagined possibilities, including a better
world and fairer social organization. Yet we need to let go of our knee-
jerk reactions and rethink our key critical concepts in the context of
the present time.4 It is the premise of this book that this time is a liquid
and consuming one, framed by the forces of economic globalization
and troubled by the temporal collapse of past, present, and future.
Women’s rewriting, forming an integral part of these liquid times,
should be thought of in these terms. It is by locating contemporary
women’s rewriting in relation to the culture of memory that its signifi-
cance can best be understood: as a constituent part of the consumer
culture of late capitalism that engages the memories that preoccupy
contemporary culture.
Memory culture
The idea that we are living in a ‘memory culture’ has been maintained by
scholars for some time now. Ours is ‘the era of commemoration’, Pierre
Nora says in his conclusion to his monumental Les Lieux de mémoire
(1984–92), which collects in seven volumes a decade of research done
in France on sites of memory: sites that crystallize what he terms ‘the
new memorial age’ (Nora 1996: 632) and that articulate the historical
shift from history to memory as buttress of identity. The new culture
of memory manifests itself in various cultural domains, subsumes
many different things and takes a variety of forms, ranging from Nora’s
‘commemorative bulimia’ (636) to what Huyssen has so aptly termed
‘the seduction of the archive’: the many ways in which the past is recre-
ated, reread, reproduced, and rewritten at all levels of culture (2003: 5).
As Susannah Radstone puts it, contemporary memory is ‘aligned with
subjectivity, invention, the present, representation, and fabrication’
(2000: 9). Emerging in the West some time after World War II, the new
memory culture combines a distrust of historiography as the scientific
and objective record of times past with a new interest in those bygone
times. Pierre Nora describes this crisis of history well, remarking that
‘[t]oday, the historian is far from alone in manufacturing the past; it is a
role he shares with the judge, the witness, the media and the legislator’
(2002: 8). As he explains, as history lost its ascendancy over the past, the
separation of collective history and private memories into two distinct
categories people had to negotiate individually disintegrated, creating a
new notion: that of a ‘collective memory’, a term first introduced by the
French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1940s and 1950s, and that
recognizes the fundamentally social character of memory. As Halbwachs
pointedly notes in The Social Frameworks of Memory, ‘it is in society that
people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they
recall, recognize and localize their memories’ (1992 [1952]: 38).
Historically, then, memory and history undergo a semantic shift. This

leads to terminological and conceptual confusion. Indeed, in its current
early twenty-first-century use, ‘memory’ has taken on a meaning so
all-encompassing that it also refers to what used to go by the name of
history: the minute reconstruction of the past with the aid of docu-
ments and archives (Nora 2002: 4). I wish here neither to disentangle
the terms nor to take a stance in the history versus memory debate but
simply to signal a fuzziness that is inherent to the memory discourse
whose contours I am sketching here and which is symptomatic of the
memory culture. Whether it is ‘a radical and dangerous shift’, as Nora
has it, I cannot say. Certain is only that it is memory, not history that
so obsesses the cultural imaginary; and that this concern with memory
is linked to a concern with identity, especially as it relates to notions
of continuity, of collective consciousness, and of belonging (Assmann
1995). For if there are historiographical motives for rethinking history
as not simply opposed to or founded on memory – motives internal to
the field of history as an academic discipline and a subject taught in
school – it is mostly due to social consciousness and the consciousness
of a social identity that history and other official (especially national)
versions of the past came under fire and were challenged by ‘memory’.
The rise of ‘the past’
Let me briefly outline these social forces as they came to bear on society
in the course of the twentieth century. Generally, the reasons advanced
for the rise of memory and the emergence of new ways of thinking
about history, memory, and the past are globalization, digitalization,
consumer culture, and the memory of the Holocaust – broad and distinct
phenomena that have altered the ways we conceive of the self and that
anchor memory at the heart of the contemporary world. Briefly put,
migration brings about a concern with place, tradition, and belonging
both for the displaced and for those receiving them in their midst.
The effect of migration on social memory – memory as it is shared,
lived, and transmitted in the community – was already a concern in
the nineteenth century, when urbanization led many people to leave
their homes to move to the cities. The distinction Ferdinand Tönnies
made in 1887 between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft articulates this
nineteenth-century understanding of urbanization as bringing about
forms of social groupings characterized by a different relationship
to the past: on the one hand, the rural communities centred on ritu-
als of shared traditions and memories and, on the other hand, urban
societies that lack such shared knowledge. For Pierre Nora, Tönnies’s
Gemeinschaft refers to what he calls a ‘milieu de mémoire’: the living
environment of ‘real memory’, which is unmediated and present to
itself, ‘a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition’
(1989: 8). Richard Terdiman explains: ‘In traditional societies . . . objects
and people could be said to carry their pasts and their meanings
openly.’ In contrast, the urban population severed from the communi-
ties in which they grew up ‘were involved in an effort of memory that
made the very lack of transparency of the past a conscious focus of
concern’ (1993: 6). That the city thus becomes the environment of a
disrupted relationship to the past (and hence of the past as problem)
is the subject of Walter Benjamin’s imposing Arcades Project (written
between 1927 and 1940), which more than any other study of its time
develops an archeology of the city that revolves around the retreating
past, its remains and memories.
In the course of the twentieth century, however, as war, decolonization,
and world-wide urbanization intensify and diversify this process,
memory increasingly becomes a global problem. The ‘globalization of
memory’, as we might call ‘the world-wide upsurge in memory’ (Nora
2002: 1), not only means that memory becomes a concern through-
out the world; it also means that (some) memories are aspiring to
global rank and lay claim to universalizing status. Digitalization,
the new media, and technologies of communication obviously play
an important role in this process. Not surprisingly, a number of
recent studies have therefore been devoted to those new ‘prosthetic’
memories brought about by the technologies of mass culture such as
film, as well as to how digital media technologies inform memory,
recollection, and remembrance (Landsberg 2004; van Dijck 2007).
The development of the Holocaust into ‘a cipher for the twentieth
century’ and ‘a universal trope’ (Huyssen 2003: 13) and of Holocaust
studies into an essential a part of education and hence of responsible
citizenship (see Hirsch and Kacandes 2004) especially crystallizes the
new discourses on the past, at once investing memory with the idea
of the authenticity of lived experience and confronting its fragility in
the face of death. Time passing, indeed, shows the precariousness of
the past as held in individual memory, proving the need to remember
collectively if one wants not to forget. Cultural memory, then, is this
collective act of remembrance that negotiates between history and
memory, locating itself at their intersection, attempting to formulate
a public discourse that can stand in for the fragility of individual
memory, its unreliability and ephemereality.5
Instant obsolescence
In the West, the problem of memory as articulating a ruptured and

inorganic relationship to the past is compounded by a consumer
culture of instant obsolescence. In Present Pasts, Huyssen recalls how,
wanting to purchase a new computer, he is confronted with a dilemma
we probably all know, for it is one facing anyone who has ever bought
a new camera, computer, phone, television, iPod or car – in short, any
relatively expensive contraption we believe should last us some time
but is always already obsolete, ‘i.e. museal, by comparison with the
imminently expected and so much more powerful next product line’
(2003: 23). The radically shortened shelf life of consumer objects is an
effect of fashion becoming the dominant paradigm, establishing ‘the
axis of the present as the mode of temporality now socially prevalent’,
as Gilles Lipovetsky puts it (2005: 37). Indeed, Huyssen’s purchase of
a two-year-old computer model can be read as an act of triumphant
resistance to the sales personnel’s persuasive powers and to the lures
of the new, allowing instead the sensibility of protestant thrift to pre-
vail (the computer’s price had recently been cut in half, he tells us).
The anecdote serves Huyssen to illustrate the German philosopher
Hermann Lübbe’s idea of the musealization of everyday life. Yet it also
can be seen to point to a close relationship between consumer culture
and memory culture: consumer culture not only destroys the past by
preferring the new over the old, which it then almost immediately
discards as out-of-date, out-of-fashion, or simply no longer needed. It
also produces ‘the past’, manufacturing it ever faster and in ever larger
quantities, for instance in the form of consumer goods that are ‘styled
for obsolescence’ (Strasser 2000: 5), ready to be dumped as trash as
soon as they are produced (waste being what consumer culture pro-
duces above all).
Nora argues that the economic crisis of the mid-1970s is what swept
France into a renewed awareness of its cultural past. As he writes,
‘thirty years of accelerated growth and intensive industrialisation and
urbanisation . . . had mercilessly swept away an entire set of traditions,
landscapes, jobs, customs, and life styles that had long remained
unchanged in France’ (2002: 1–2). The economic crisis, bringing this
development to an abrupt end, caused people to recognize the loss
it entailed: old things first discarded as junk are suddenly viewed to
constitute inalienable patrimony, and ‘la campagne’ remains to this
day imbued with all the mystique of profound, age-old traditions
and ‘natural’, rooted ways of life. But more than as an explanation of
why memory became such an acute focus of concern from the 1970s
onwards, it is Nora’s point about the connection between economic
growth and the destruction of the past as it used to be known that
interests me here. The relations between modernity and tradition
have always been strained. Radical modernisms such as Marinetti’s
Futurism, for instance, even explicitly called for the destruction of
museums and libraries (Marinetti 2006 [1909]). Recently, the Dutch
scholar Marita Mathijsen published a pamphlet in which, ostensibly
going against the general view that the Netherlands in particular and
the West in general are witnessing a resurgence of interest in history,
she laments ‘the absence of the past’ (as her title goes). Mathijsen
decries the contemporary lack of interest in all things historic, rang-
ing from knowledge of national history to the photograph albums of
one’s forebears to the houses of celebrated nineteenth-century writers,
claiming it is precisely the fashionable drive for the new that governs
the contemporary relationship to one’s living environment. In her
perspective, it is to keep up with the Joneses that the Dutch remodel
both individually and collectively the places they inhabit so as to
retain no traces of their past and earlier inhabitants. Striving not to be
outdone by the neighbors in all manner of things both material and
symbolic of social standing, people are encouraged permanently to buy
the newest model or fad and to discard the old.
There is, of course, much to disagree with in Mathijsen’s polemic
and much with which to take issue. Surely not everything that is old
is worth keeping? Also, does not the new, in some cases, constitute a
real improvement on the old?6 What is worth retaining from it from
the perspective of this argument is the link it illuminates between a
consumer culture of instant obsolescence and the production of ‘the
past’. This link is a feature of contemporary, consumerist material cul-
ture and, as such, also applies to literature understood in its material
dimensions, as a product bought and sold on the literary market. As I
argue in Chapter 2, women’s rewriting produces narratives about the
past that increasingly fall under the regime of ‘production and rubbishing’
(Assmann 1996) – of letters as litter. It is, indeed, one of the ironies of
women’s rewriting that it ends up feeding a conception of literature
as product ruled by the logic of consumer culture. Whereas rewriting
can be viewed as a kind of productive reception engaging the reader’s
critical and creative faculties, the materialization of it as a book to be
sold on the increasingly commercial literary market also turns it into
a commodity subjected, like any other commodity, to the logic of
capital and fashion.
Manufacturing the past
As we discard ever faster all kinds of things, replacing them by the newer
and better, we also produce things old and historical ever faster.7 The
so-called ‘acceleration of history’, Nora explains, basically means ‘an
accelerated precipitation of all things into an ever more swiftly retreat-
ing past’. Time passes faster and faster as change occurs increasingly
rapidly, making change ‘the most continuous or permanent feature of
the modern world’ (2002: 4). Instant obsolescence is the application of
this principle to the world of production. Accelerating obsolescence does
not only produce litter to be disposed and processed; it also produces
‘the past’. And this past it produces is not just material culture, but
also immaterial, consisting of sounds and smells, of movements,
gestures and other incorporated practices, all of which are substituted,
displaced and replaced by new ones, as well as narrative – memories
recollected, memoirs and personal accounts, stories and histories. The
forces of modernity and consumer culture, however destructive they
may be of the old ways of life, are also productive of them as vanishing
or already vanished, yielding nostalgic poems such as Baudelaire’s ‘The
Swan’ (1857), memorably observing that ‘Old Paris is no more (the form
of a city / Changes faster, alas! than a mortal heart)’ (2006: 115), or the
equally nostalgic photography of Eugène Atget and Robert Doisneau, to
remain with the example of Paris, attempting to capture the last remains
of a world and a lifestyle in the process of disappearing. In our times, it
produces heritage trails, retro-fashion, 1950s innocence, and surveys of
national canons – all those things that I have subsumed under the name
of ‘memory culture’ above.
The so-called memory boom, then, is not about to recede, for the
production of the past is inextricably linked with consumer culture.
Memory culture is an integral part of consumer culture because ‘the
past’ is just like trash consumer culture’s main yet unintended output,
its ‘side effect’, as it were. ‘Modern societies are increasingly ruled
by the unwanted side effects of their differentiated subsystems, such as
the economy, politics, law, media, and science’ (Klein 2004: 4). One of
the unexpected side effects of consumer culture is the production of the
past. This ‘side effect’ ‘cannot be handled with the codes of the systems’
(4); it necessitates other discourses. This, then, is the methodological
function of Western memory discourses, which can thus be likened to
user information leaflets warning about the side effects of consumer
goods. As they articulate the contemporary fascination and concern
with ‘the past’, they in effect document its potential outcomes, both
adverse and beneficial. The meaning of so-called side effects, it is well

known, depends on the frame of reference and the expected outcome:
an effect unintended in one context can be turned into a desired
effect in another. The same may be said of trash/patrimony. Because
‘trash is a dynamic category’ (Strasser 2000: 3), it can easily be embed-
ded in instantaneous and capricious ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm
1983). This means that ‘the past’ is consumer culture’s main product,
located just a few steps beyond the store-door. It also means that the
past which Western cultures value as their inalienable ‘heritage’ or
‘patrimony’ is the same as their alienable junk. This is a fact that is well
known to archeologists, whose digging-sites are traditionally located
on the dumping grounds of earlier cultures. It is also, of course, akin
to pointing to the intrinsic relationship between remembering and
forgetting. Jorge Luis Borges, whose story ‘Funes the Memorious’ tells
about a character who remembers everything, already established this
connection when he had Funes say, ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage
heap’ (2007 [1942]: 64).
Consuming memories
The suggestion that ‘the past’ is garbage by another name and from the
perspective of some other conceptual framework is not simply a provo-
cation aiming at ‘épater les bourgeois’. It illuminates how consumer
culture articulates a particular relationship to the past and to the future.
Indeed, choosing which pasts to value and which ones to discard, which
ones to burn and which ones to retrieve and recycle, consumer culture
has an instrumental and sometimes fickle view of the past, conceiving of
it only from the perspective of the present, as a choice in the interest of a
selected lifestyle, a chosen sense of community, or an anticipated future.
Producing the past as choice, consumer culture also produces different
views on it. On the one hand, it enables the liberal disenfranchising of
the present from the past and from the future, putting the burden of
choice on the individual. On the other hand, it produces a fundamen-
tally conservative perspective, believing society is, in Edmund Burke’s
words, ‘a partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are
dead, and those who are to be born’ (2009 [1790]: 96), a contract that
requires the present to value its past, to endorse it, and to improve on it,
ultimately to pass it on to the future. Whereas in less affluent societies,
there is no such choice, and the past is present simply because that is all
there is and one cannot afford anything new – including ways one may
wish it were not so, for instance, in the form of broken tools or crockery
one has to make do with – consumer culture produces the past as choice
product of economic modernity and as perspective on the relationship
to time it engenders.
Seen in this light, consumer culture commands a liberal perspective as
it works towards the total disenfranchising of the present from the past
and from the future, leading to living solely in the present, ever faster,
with an increasing acceleration of the cycles of consumption. The accel-
eration of time signifies the temporal collapse of past, present, and future
into a permanently fluid and changing present. As the titles of Bauman’s
recent books suggest – Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid
Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006), and Liquid Times (2007a) – the consuming
present is characterized by ‘liquidity’. Life is fluid, our jobs imperma-
nent, and our relations volatile. Redrawn as a sphere of consumerism
where subjects are addressed primarily – indeed, are produced – as
consumers, liquid modernity signifies both changing subjectivities and
senses of self and altered relations to virtually everything, ranging from
others to politics to narrative. In this redrawn public sphere where sub-
jects are reconstituted as shoppers and as consumers, citizenship and
identity, the cornerstones of the emancipation movements of the 1960s,
are dissolved through the scattering forces of consumer culture. Indeed,
with everything a matter of choice, shopping around becomes our prime
activity: scanning, surveying, comparing, and remaining ever on the
alert for new possibilities, other opportunities, better offers. Scattering
attention, energy, but also individual and collective identity into frag-
mented and individualized components without unifying mobilizing
strength, consumer culture makes that instability and insecurity, change
and movement become the prime constituents of existence.
What I am arguing, then, is that just as the world becomes a myriad
possibilities, so does the past. Increasingly conjured up for its own sake,
‘the past’ becomes a matter of choice, retrieved and recovered not for its
exemplary value, but for what Gilles Lipovetsky terms ‘the emotional-
memorial value associated with feelings of nostalgia’ (2005: 60).8 This
extension of the logic of shopping to our relationship to the past implies
that ‘the past’ gets caught in the cycle of newness, subjected to market-
ing and consumption, evidently no longer capable of structuring life.
‘The more we summon up historical memory and dramatize it, the
less it structures the elements of ordinary life’, Lipovetsky explains (61).
This loss of capacity to structure life also applies to women’s rewrit-
ing of ‘the old stories’, that vast corpus of stories that make up the
cultural imaginary and that is stored and passed on in ‘the classics’,
‘the canon’, and the books of myths. If the stories that shape one’s life
were once given, this changes with the advent of the freedom to select
one’s identity. Whereas rewriting as the telling anew of ‘the old stories’
initially served the purpose of offering an alternative to the few stories,
scripts, and identities available to women, with the rise of what Bauman
terms ‘the supermarket of identities’ (2000: 83), this alternative becomes
one out of many. Whereas it is one of the distinguishing features of ‘the
old story’ to be told and retold, the publishing culture in which retell-
ing takes place transforms it into a product subjected to the system of
consumption. Thus, rewriting becomes linked to the fluidity of identity
conceived not as a radical challenge to a constricting inherited identity
but, in the context of neoliberal capitalism, a means of selling more.
Within the context of the publishing industry, the story told
again takes a variety of forms, ranging from reprints to re-editions to
rewritings. These ‘retellings’ in published print differ significantly, of
course. Yet they respond in kindred ways to the ‘fashionable’ pressure
of producing literature as litter, that is, to discard the old and produce
it anew. In Chapter 6, I discuss Canongate’s series The Myths in this
light, as a major and global publishing venture – it involves some forty
publishers worldwide – that takes retelling as its innovation strategy. As
the series’ general introduction reads, The Myths aims ‘to bring together
some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in
a contemporary and memorable way’. Canongate’s commissioning of
contemporary retellings of myth and dissemination across the globe
thus combines the selling of a unique product created for a global
market with the creation of a market for such a product. Likewise, ‘the
classics’ get repackaged again and again, sometimes accompanied by
a new introduction or critical apparatus, yet always with a new cover.
Thus, in 2003, Penguin relaunched its seventy ‘flagship classics’ as ‘an
exciting opportunity to rethink the classics’, as it reads on its Penguin
Classics website. To invite readers – the general public, students, and
academics – to rethink the classics by presenting them with the texts
‘repackaged’ and rejacketed, however, is tantamount to inviting them
to buy the new books.
To locate rewriting within the culture of continuous renewal and
identify it as a form of innovation that emerges in response to market
pressures has far-reaching implications for our understanding of women’s
rewriting as an intervention in cultural memory. In the 1970s and early
1980s, the motives for writing and publishing women’s rewritings were
mostly political and ideological. Designed to counter a tradition of silence
and alleged misrepresentation, rewritings were viewed as instrumental
in changing the future, for by opening the past to alternative stories,
they would also open the future to new possibilities. As summarized by

Susan Suleiman in a chapter on feminist intertextuality: ‘Not the same
old story, to be sure, or if the same old story, then rewritten, rewritten’
(1990: 169). Those were the years, then, when, energized by the interna-
tional women’s movement, women writers set out to rewrite the classics
of world literature as part of ‘the struggle to alter gender asymmetries
agreed upon for centuries’ (Purkiss 1992: 441) and to participate in the
production of new stories for women to live and think by.9 By the 1990s,
however, it is not only writers who value rewriting, but also the publish-
ing houses that are to bring out these books, albeit not necessarily for the
same reasons. As rewriting’s potential for selling books becomes increas-
ingly apparent, its feminist political, ideological, and cultural necessity is
co-opted by a market that increasingly recognizes women as dominating
the book-buying business. Indeed, whereas for women writers, rewriting
is a literary form that combines narrative strategy with feminist praxis,
for publishers, it is a means of responding to a presumed audience
demand for strong female characters and sell books with low risk and
low marketing costs.
Post-Fordist literary marketplace
To understand this development, it is useful to recall that the period that

saw the development of women’s writing I’m charting in this book is
also one that saw the commercialization of the book-publishing indus-
try. This means that the success of women’s rewriting in the literary
marketplace at the turn of the millennium is not only to be viewed in
relation to the changes, both ideological and economic, brought about
by feminism and the women’s movement. It is also to be linked to
changes in the book-publishing industry. In fact, developments attend-
ant upon the second feminist wave – especially, the increasing participa-
tion of women in the public sphere and in the professions – converge
with economic developments due to the globalization of capital to
cause the fin-de-millénaire boom in women’s rewriting. In the 1970s, the
financial success of a publishing house depended on a large publishing
list, which was achieved through economies of scale and a high gross
margin due to printing a large number of copies in one print run. In the
1980s, capitalism shifted to a model of short turnover cycles of capital:
short lead times with a small number of copies, low stocks, and regular
reprints (Harvey 1989).
One of the most visible effects of this global shift is that publishers
rely increasingly on front lists, generating more and more of their overall
sales from fewer books and fewer authors. As the executive summary of
Simba Information’s Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2005 report
states: ‘Given a choice, publishers would rather release a new title from
a bestselling author with a proven customer base than take a chance on
a title written by an unknown author’, adding wryly, ‘The reasons are
pure economics’ (2). There is, of course, nothing really new to publish-
ers trying to cash in on bestselling authors. As the very term ‘bestseller’,
which dates from the late nineteenth century, indicates, large sales
through immediate popularity have been around for as long as printed
books have been mass produced. Yet the tendency among publishers
to try and quickly recover expenses becomes more widespread under
the pressures of the planned obsolescence that is built into the system
of consumption. Today, publishers and booksellers increasingly prefer
books that sell quickly.
It is in this post-Fordist economic context governed by the logic of
‘forgetting as planned obsolescence’ (Connerton 2008: 66) that rewriting
emerges as a literary genre that allows for feminist literary and politi-
cal aims to be realized in a commercially viable form. On the literary
market, rewritings take up a special position, for they are products with
a short life cycle which derive value from the accumulated symbolic
capital of products with a substantially more durable lifetime: the texts
they rewrite. This can be seen clearly in the strategies devised to sell
women’s rewritings on the basis of the prestige that is to be gained
from their being associated with canonical names, as when Aiken’s Jane
Fairfax (1990) is dubbed ‘a companion volume to Emma by Jane Austen’
and Emma Tennant’s Adèle (2002) is given the subtitle Jane Eyre’s Hidden
Story.10 As such, contemporary women’s rewriting participates in the
logic of the short production cycle by exploiting both market fashions
and accumulated symbolic capital.
In the consumer culture of the end of the millennium, the retelling of
well-known stories from alternative points of view becomes part of the
shopping. An example from The Walt Disney Company, which has been
at the forefront of commercial rewritings and adaptations throughout
the past century, will illustrate my meaning. When, in November 1992,
Disney released its thirty-first ‘Animated Classic’ Aladdin, it did not
just issue the film. Among the merchandising paraphernalia there was
also Disney’s Aladdin: The Genie’s Tale (Kreider 1993) and, later, Disney’s
Aladdin: Jasmine’s Story (Elder 1997). These two books exemplify the way
in which rewriting has become an integral part of product marketing and
a matter of personal choice, defining the field in which women’s rewrit-
ing operate. As bedtime approaches, parents turn to their offspring and
ask: whose story do you want to hear tonight? Aladdin’s? Jasmine’s? The
Genie’s? In fact, the Upside Down Tales series and Steck-Vaughn’s ‘Point
of View Stories’, both of which were started in the early 1990s, similarly
offer children such a choice of perspectives. After reading the classic tales
of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, or of Little Red Riding Hood, the
reader is invited to flip over the book and read the story again as told
from the point of view of the stepmother, the witch, or the wolf (Black
1991; Rowland 1991; Heller 1995). ‘I know you’ve heard the story of
Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf who eats her and her granny’, The
Wolf’s Tale begins. ‘Well, I’m the wolf. William is my name, and I’m going
to tell you the real story’ (Rowland 1991: 1). Just as Margaret Atwood does
in short stories such as ‘The Little Red Hen Tells All’ and ‘Gertrude Talks
Back’, both in Good Bones (1992), which, as their titles indicate, offer the
Little Red Hen’s version of the events in the folk tale and Gertrude’s ver-
sion of what happened in Hamlet, these books take the feminist adage
that ‘there is another side to every story’ to the letter and adroitly adapt
the narrative technique of rewriting to produce new stories, which then
combine with the old ones to sell as a packet of choice.
The children of the 1990s to whom these stories were read are the
(young) adults of today. Growing up knowing there is always another side
to every story, they take a pragmatic approach to the past. The possibility
to shop for alternative versions has far-reaching consequences for cultural
memory. It also has consequences for feminist rewriting and its impact on
the cultural imaginary. The availability of many rewritings, from a variety
of perspectives and with different foci of attention, creates a sense of the
past as present, multifarious, and polyvalent. Transforming the relation-
ship to tradition and to the founding myths of culture, it also undermines
the possibility of projecting the future – of representing the future as
project. Whereas rewriting has long been a powerful political and ideo-
logical tool in the shaping and reshaping of collective memory, its critical
effectiveness in a literary marketplace that increasingly works according
to the logics of consumption is transformed. Today, indeed, memory and
shopping are linked, not only because consumerism is an integral part of
contemporary commemorative practices but also because memories and
memorability are central to a society of consumption that has embraced
experience as its key marketing concept.11 In their handbook of business
strategy and innovation, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every
Business a Stage, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argue that ‘Experiences
represent an existing but previously unarticulated genre of economic
output’ (1999: ix). Attempting to convince companies that they ought to
‘script and stage compelling experiences’, as the blurb on the book’s front
flap reads, they write, ‘In the emerging Experience Economy, companies
must realize that they make memories, not goods’ (100). An economy
that is geared toward producing memories should certainly make us wary
of the kind of memory into which we are buying. Producing competing
memories as consumer goods, it is also an economy that puts rewriting
and retelling at the heart of economic culture and consumerism at the
centre of rewriting as a memory practice.
The presence of the past
Many scholars have recently reflected on the presence of the past in

contemporary culture: on the sense in which the past seems present
today – even omnipresent. One of them is the German philologist
Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, who refers to the present production of the
past as a ‘production of presence’ (2004). In his analysis, the many and
diverse pasts actualized in the present create a sense of the presence of
the past in the present. This presence of the past designates a material
and spatial relationship to it: it is about the impact of the world and its
objects on the body and the senses.
‘Presence’ is a contemporary phenomenon that signals an emergent
new historical culture – one that, Gumbrecht maintains, ‘has little, if
anything to do with the traditional project of history as an academic
discipline, with the project of interpreting (that is, reconceptualizing)
our knowledge about the past, or with the goal of “learning from his-
tory”’ (2004: 121). Instead, what he terms ‘the presentification of past
worlds – that is, techniques that produce the impression (or, rather,
the illusion) that worlds of the past can become tangible again – is an
activity without any explanatory power . . .’ (2004: 94). Aiming neither
at interpreting and understanding the past, nor at learning from it,
‘presentification’ (Vergegenwärtigung) in Gumbrecht’s analysis is about
‘the possibility of “speaking” to the dead or “touching” the objects of
their world’ (2004: 123). As he explains, ‘Short of always being able to
touch, hear, and smell the past, we certainly cherish the illusion of such
perceptions. This desire for presentification can be associated with the
structure of a broad present where we don’t feel like “leaving behind”
the past anymore and where the future is blocked’ (2004: 121).
As Gumbrecht describes it, the presentification of the past emerges in
reaction to an overly Cartesian environment, one that is ‘metaphysical’
in that it always wants to go beyond the physical. Instead, presence focuses
on ‘what meaning cannot convey’, as Gumbrecht’s subtitle goes. Its
function is to help ‘us to recuperate the spatial and the bodily dimension
of our existence’ (2004: 116). ‘Presence’ is a memory discourse suggesting

that the contemporary culture of memory as it manifests itself in practices
of cultural remembrance is driven by a desire to make the past present in
reaction to the cultural primacy of the mind over the body and the virtuali-
zation of everyday life. As such, its emphasis on lived experience and affect
ties in with concurrent developments in the humanities and the social
sciences, which increasingly seek to explain human behavior and cultural
practices in non-rational, emotional or intuitive terms (e.g. Damasio
1994). It also ties in with contemporary notions of a post-capitalist ‘experi-
ence economy’ that increasingly revolves around the selling of emotions
(Pine and Gilmore 1999). Promulgating a different kind of knowledge
that is not so much concerned with meaning as with affect, Gumbrecht’s
presence centres on a sensory knowledge that cares not for what one can
learn from experiencing the past. Whereas traditionally, the uses of his-
tory included deriving lessons from the past and seeking in it solutions to
current problems, today, Gumbrecht asserts, ‘nobody relies on historical
knowledge in practical situations anymore’ (1997: 411).
And indeed, one might ask, what is there to learn, cognitively,
strategically, about how the past feels affectively and somatically, except,
as Gumbrecht suggests, to ‘enjoy the moment’? The problem for femi-
nism, though, is the question what emancipatory force is to be extracted
from Gumbrecht’s ecstatic ‘feeling of being in synch with the things of
the world’ (2004: 117; his emphasis). Or, to quote some of the questions
that drive Wendy Brown’s investigation into these same issues in Politics
Out of History, ‘how do we conjure an emancipatory future within a lib-
eralism out of history? . . . on what do we pin our hopes for a more just
society? And without belief in progressive history carrying liberalism
toward whatever this reformulated aim might be, what is the engine of
historical movement that would realize these hopes?’ (2001: 14).
From my brief outlining of its main tenets, it seems clear that we ought
to be suspicious of Gumbrecht’s advocacy for ‘presentification’. Especially
the ways in which his ‘production of presence’ resonates with Pine and
Gilmore’s bestselling retailing handbook The Experience Economy should
worry us: while there is nothing necessarily wrong with tapping into
the same desires consumer culture taps into, Gumbrecht’s discourse of
memory does little to counteract it. Yet as an analysis of the transformed
spatio-temporal dimensions of contemporary culture, Gumbrecht’s words
nonetheless ought to be taken seriously. They have diagnostic value and
resonate productively with key analyses of the politics of memory, past
and future in the cultural present (Bauman and Tester 2001; Brown 2001;
Jameson 2002; Huyssen 2003; Jameson 2005). In particular, it seems to
me that we should heed Gumbrecht’s advice to ‘respond seriously to a

situation in which the claim that “one can learn from history” has lost
its persuasive power’ (1997: 411). The implications of the claim that
whatever one does with history, it has very little to do with learning, are
simply too far reaching and therefore need to be examined carefully for
what they imply for a politics and a tactics of memory such as the rewrit-
ings by women that is the subject of this book, structured as they are by
the temporality of modernity’s narrative of progress. Located in-between
past and future, women’s rewriting as re-vision belongs to historical
time conceived as a progressive sequence of events. Its ‘understanding
that change is possible and that narrative can play a role in it’ (Greene
1991: 2) predicates social transformation on a notion of progress – of
the present as a moment marked by change resulting from the unfold-
ing of time, out of the past and into the future. The sense of identity it
sustains is one that builds on an idea of ‘[c]onsistency of consciousness
and a sense of continuity between the actions and events of the past, and
the experience of the present’ (King 2000: 2). To achieve this new sense
of self, it trusts in the value of historical knowledge: the belief that one
can learn from the past and put such knowledge to productive use, ‘to
imagine a future that serves women better’, as Catharine Stimpson puts
it in ‘The Future of Memory’ (1987: 263). Writing about feminist fiction
in the early 1970s, Margaret Drabble observes, ‘Many people read novels
in order to find patterns or images for a possible future – to know how to
behave, what to hope to be like. We do not want to resemble the women
of the past, but where is our future? This is precisely the question that
many novels written by women are trying to answer’ (1983 [1973]: 159).
By the end of the century, however, times had changed. Huyssen con-
firms: ‘One learned from history. That was the assumption. . . . This model
no longer works’ (2003: 1–2).
A new historical culture
What, precisely, has changed? And what are the implications of this new
relationship to the past? To begin with, the ‘acceleration of history’ spells
the end of historical time and the end of the future imagined as progress.
Progress, indeed, is the temporal horizon of modernity. It structures
modernity as out of a past conceived of as regressive, and into a future
conceived of as improvement. Wendy Brown explains:
A fundamental Enlightenment precept, the thesis that humanity is

making a steady, if uneven and ambivalent, progress toward greater
freedom, equality, prosperity, rationality, or peace emerged in a

variety of explicit formulations in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century. Today, however, it is a rare thinker, political leader, or ordi-
nary citizen who straightforwardly invokes the premise of progress.
(2001: 6).
Harking back to some blissful illo tempore, conjuring a variety of imagined

pasts, contemporary culture is more immersed in a past it frequently
imagines as better than the present than it is invested in a future that
would hold betterment (however conceived). That we no longer turn to
history for lessons about how to act in the present and the future is then
a symptom of the end of historical time.
Second, as the contemporary focus on the past as imagined coincides
with the emancipatory project of retrieving, uncovering, or recovering
the many pasts it contains, encodes or obscures, it forms a horizon
of experience consisting of ‘present pasts’ (Huyssen 2003). Bringing
Bauman’s and Gumbrecht’s analyses together, we might say that the
‘liquid’ present characterized by permanent flux and constant change
broadens out, swelling to incorporate both the past and the future,
which become as it were present in the present. Such a ‘broad present’,
Gumbrecht writes, can be seen to herald a new historical culture: one
in which the past is present and where one no longer learns from it.
Marked by the end of historical time, it is also one in which our linear
models of understanding time no longer apply.
Third, attempts to resist the broadening present by endeavouring to
retain a sense of telos in the face of consumer culture’s ‘nowism’, to use a
recent coinage, appear to maintain a conservative perspective onto time,
tapping into the forces of the past and of the future. Indeed, choosing to
trust in some sense of preordained destiny imposed by the past onto the
future, or viewing it as imposing itself retrospectively, from the perspective
of some anticipated future – Burke’s ‘to be born’ no less than socialist and
utopian visions of the ‘good society’ – is to reassert historical time itself as
a solid value in ‘liquid times’. From the perspective of a liquid present, the
idea of historical, teleological time appears a desperate life-vest thrown in
the sea of change that characterizes the contemporary moment, hopelessly
resisting the timelessness of ‘liquid modernity’, its fluidity, impermanence
and constant fickle change. Instead, new and less linear models of under-
standing time are called for to grasp the temporal sea change that the
liquid modernity of consumer culture brought upon us.
In fact, ‘accumulating different past worlds and their artifacts in a
sphere of simultaneity’ (Gumbrecht 2004: 121–2), can this ‘presentist’
historical culture not be viewed to herald a totally new environment of

memory? In his introduction to the monumental project Les Lieux de
mémoire (1984–92), Pierre Nora posits a distinction between memory
and history, and locates his object of study, the ‘lieu de mémoire’
(the memory site), as firmly wedged between memory and history.
According to Nora, the current obsession with remembering, remem-
brance, and the fear of forgetting points to a loss of ‘real memory’. ‘We
speak so much of memory because there is none left’, he writes, adding,
‘There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer
milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory’ (Nora 1984: xvii;
Nora 1989: 7).12 Nora has been, rightly, criticized for his romanticized,
nostalgic representation of a time prior to the fall into history as re-
construction and re-presentation. There is no doubt that his image of a
pre-industrial prelapsarian peasant culture living within a memory that
is organic, immediate and unmediated, unself-conscious and present to
itself, is romantic, reflecting a nostalgia for an imagined lost realm of
authentic ‘real’ and ‘true’ memory that we have learned to suspect as
‘metaphysics of presence’ (see Frow 1997). Yet, as a term that describes
a way of dealing with the past that differs fundamentally from that of
modernity, does Nora’s ‘milieu de mémoire’ not have heuristic value?
To begin with, it can be seen to provide a background for Gumbrecht’s
‘presence’ as living (in) memory. Also, as I wish to propound, it consti-
tutes an instrument for understanding the new historical culture that is
in the process of emerging today and that forms the context in which
to situate contemporary women’s rewriting.
An important challenge posed by the emergent new historical culture
is how to think its temporalities and temporal dimensions. Historical
time, linearly unfolding as past–present–future, no longer applies. How
then to conceptualize this new historical time of simultaneity? Nora’s
‘milieu de mémoire’, inscribing a mythical relation to time that refers
the present to the past and to the future while eluding the causal lin-
earity of historical time, suggests a possible answer.13 The ‘milieu de
mémoire’ Nora describes is an environment in which remembrance
functions as ‘a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradi-
tion, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time
of heroes, origins, and myth’ (1989: 8). In Nora’s analysis, traces of
this earlier form of memory are today still to be found ‘in gestures and
habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inher-
ent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories’ (13).
In short, in all those forms of incorporated memory that are not marked
by separation, whether in time or in space, and therefore lacking the
distance that would require re-presentation. This ‘memory entwined

in the intimacy of a collective heritage’ (8) has clear physical and spa-
tial dimensions. It constitutes a knowledge that is shared, based on
familiarity, habit, and repetition, and without conscious control; a tacit
knowledge that is ‘as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms’, to use
Michel de Certeau’s evocative phrase (1984: 93; see Polanyi 1967), and
that ‘presentifies’ time in a way that can be defined as ‘mythic’.
Myth as methodoloy
In a context where historical time as the linear unfolding of time,

out of the past and into the future, no longer applies, Nora’s ‘milieu
de mémoire’ thus provides a conceptual apparatus to think the new
temporalities of the contemporary memory culture in its narrative
dimensions. Myth can be taken as a non-linear mode of understanding
liquid time. As a narrative form, myth brings the past into the
present in a movement that remains open to a future in becoming.
Characterized by cyclical return (Eliade 1969), myth is traditionally
defined as an oral story whose distinguishing feature is that it presup-
poses retelling: it needs to be told and retold to achieve the status of
myth (Kirk 1974). Myth works according to the principle of repetition
with a difference. This built-in reproduction mechanism makes that
myth is never fixed but is in permanent flux, changeable and chang-
ing with every telling, part of ‘a long tradition of borrowings and
mendings’ (Sellers 2001: 7). Does this make myth particularly suited to
the spirit of the present, ‘liquid’ age? I would suggest so: the narrative
dynamics of mythical retelling appear adapted to its fluid character,
resonating with the sense of a memory culture as marked by a ‘second-
ary orality’, as Walter Ong suggested in Orality and Literacy (1982). In
the final part of this book, I therefore explore the radical potential of
myth for a time structured as a broad present in which increasingly
many pasts impinge upon the present.
Here, I want to draw out the theoretical implications of the conceptual
shift this book proposes. How might mythical retelling prove a
productive successor to earlier concepts of women’s rewriting? To begin
with, the shift from Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ to contemporary myth-
remaking reveals a change of perspective on what rewriting can do that
reflects received ideas about the past, its place, and role in culture. It
shows rewriting as a ‘technology of cultural memory’ that changes as
culture itself, in its relationship to the past and in its understanding of
that past, also changes. Rewriting is a ‘modality of our relationship to the
past’ (Terdiman 1993: 7). As the process or procedure by means of which

cultural remembrance – what a culture remembers – is produced, rewrit-
ing is a ‘technology of memory’: it is one of the ways ‘through which
memories are shared, produced, and given meaning’ (Sturken 1997: 9;
see also Landsberg 2004); and it determines both what and how a culture
remembers, ‘the things and the ways in which a culture remembers’
(Plate and Smelik 2009: 1).
As I have argued above, Western culture’s relation to the past has
changed. This change means that not only, as Richard Terdiman writes,
‘memory has a history’ (1993: 3), but its technologies change too.
How memories are produced, shared, passed on, and given meaning
is not stable but changes over time, as both the social frameworks and
the media of memory change too. In particular, women’s rewriting as
the remembering differently of a culture’s so-called classics in order to
project a feminist future does not work in the same way and to the same
effect as it did forty years ago, when the notion of women’s writing as
re-vision was first articulated. This is because the context for rewriting
has changed. In the memory culture of liquid modernity, rewriting is
a technology of cultural memory that is implemented to affect and so
to transform cultural memory; it no longer works as a tactics to redress
and reform wrongful representations so that out of the revised past new
futures can emerge. For instance, Wide Sargasso Sea is now part of the
literary canon alongside Brontë’s Jane Eyre, much like Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart is appended to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a
text it rewrites. In this way, the countermemorial rewritings of the femi-
nist and postcolonial emancipation movements that stood at the heart
of the so-called canon wars, serving to challenge the authority of the
canon and the legitimacy of the colonial perspectives it was frequently
seen to embody, have affected cultural memory and achieved a place in
literary history. As I discuss at more length in Chapter 5, they have not,
however, succeeded in doing away with the idea of canonicity itself.
Myth presents us with a method to understand this evolution and
apparent failure. To begin with, it emphasizes how rewriting also serves
to repeat, transmit, and literally re-present the past as it adapts it to
present concerns. This conservative dimension of myth is inherent
to rewriting – even to those rewritings aiming at remembering differ-
ently, as critics have been pointing out (e.g. de Lauretis 1984; Purkiss
1992; Sellers 2001). It is crucial to the production of cultural memory
as memory shared yet contested: the rereading and rewriting of texts is
one of the central ways in which culture builds its literary heritage. This
‘heritage’, however, is not simply a corpus of texts inherited, received,
and passed on. Rather, it is to be understood as a field of negotiation, an

arena of dispute and contest over the texts’ meanings and their eventual
place in literary history.
Second, it enables us to distinguish between two different modes,
or orientations, of rewriting: one directed towards the past it seeks to
correct, ‘re-righting’ wrong, as Chantal Zabus puts it (Zabus 2001; Zabus
2006; see also Connor 1994), another oriented towards the future as
opened up by the promise of further retellings. These two modes of
rewriting are related to the distinction Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick draws,
in her book Touching Feeling (2003), between a critical mode driven
by a hermeneutics of suspicion and a reparative impulse. They can
also be mapped onto the distinction Laurence Coupe draws between
demythologizing and remythologizing (1997: 106–10). The difference
serves to distinguish the women’s rewritings of the 1970s that I refer
to as ‘feminist re-vision’ from those of the turn of the millennium
and early twenty-first century that I have termed ‘mythical retelling’.
As such, it identifies one of the major changes that has occurred as
residing within the very discourse on memory, from memory as inscrip-
tion and feminist remembering as re-inscription to cultural memory as
a dynamic process of amnesia and anamnesis, of forgetting, recovery,
and reconstruction.
The difference can be explained as follows: feminist re-vision, seek-
ing to inscribe another (woman’s) story within the storehouse of tradi-
tion, operates in the mode of allegory, which works towards closure:
allegory’s two senses, the literal and the allegorical, link the provisional
to the projected as its ‘only “true” significance’ (Preminger and Brogan
1993: 32). It appropriates the story it rewrites for alternative ends,
explaining it away and substituting another, particularizing story for
the one we used to know. Because its main aim is to demythologize
what it rewrites, feminist re-vision can be viewed to be driven by sus-
picion, converging feminist ideas with a Barthesian denaturalizing of
myth. Angela Carter, for instance, affirms: ‘I’m in the demythologizing
business’. As she explains, myths are interesting to her ‘just because
they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree’ (1983: 71).
They are ‘consolatory nonsenses’, as she puts it in The Sadeian Woman
(1979: 5). In contrast, mythical retelling taps into myth’s radical poten-
tial for open-endedness and ultimately is ‘additive and accretive’, as
Sedgwick writes of the desire for a reparative impulse (2003: 149). As
an oral story that presupposes retelling, myth remains open to further
appropriation. Never a myth’s final telling, mythical retelling is merely
a moment in a cultural process of storytelling that is ongoing. This makes
it particularly amenable to the cycles of consumer culture, literally

buying into the fluid, mobile, and protean character of the liquid mod-
ern condition. The negative picture of myth as the narrative equivalent
of a contemporary liquid modernity capable only of assimilating more
pasts into its ever broadening present should not, however, make us
forget that its never-endingness also harbors a sense of futurity and
resources for renewal, resistance, and transformation, to be enacted
or performed in the act of reading and of further rewriting, both indi-
vidually at the level of the private imagination, and collectively in the
cultural imaginary. Mythical retelling is also the fluid encounter of
the individually lived life with the told story, inscribing the individual
with the collective – or, alternatively, allowing the collective and cul-
tural memory to be impacted by the individual.
Tactics and strategies of memory
The term mythical retelling captures the historical changes that occurred
within memory conceived as a discursive formation that inscribes a
specific understanding of the relationship to the past, shifting from
a predominantly antagonistic, ‘paranoid’, and suspicious attitude to
one seeking to draw sustenance from it. These changes that can be
traced in the way women’s rewriting functions in cultural memory in
the period since 1970 can further be understood in terms of tactics and
strategies of cultural memory. Michel de Certeau’s distinction between
strategies and tactics presents a useful conceptual pair to comprehend
rewriting as a technology of memory, inviting to distinguish between
the technologies produced by institutions that partake of hegemonic
power and those produced to counter sanctioned memory. As defined
by Marita Sturken, cultural memory is ‘a field of cultural negotiation
through which different stories vie for a place in history’ (1997: 1).
This means that stories do not simply add up to constitute cultural
memory. Instead, they compete and clash, and are thus all part of the
power dynamics that define cultural memory as contested and even
altogether counter-memorial. Therefore, we need to recognize that
these stories as technologies of memory are also unevenly implicated in
the production of cultural memory. Certeau’s ‘tactics’, which he defines
as ‘an art of the weak’ (1984: 37), is a kind of guerilla warfare waged by
individuals to generate space for themselves in environments defined
by ‘strategies’, that is, by ‘the calculation (or manipulation) of power
relationships’ effected by institutions and power structures. Tactics
and strategies are different ways of engaging in power struggles: not
only from different places, but also with distinct utilizations of time.
Strategies are devised from places of power and have clear spatial
dimensions; tactics are emergent procedures that rely on the chance
offerings of the propitious moment (34–9).
The many retellings of well-known, culturally central texts show
rewriting to be a tactics that has proved a powerful political and
ideological tool in the reshaping of cultural memory. Over the past
four decades, histories have been retold and canonical texts rewrit-
ten, not through any concerted effort of a league of women writers,
but through many individual acts of rewriting. The proliferation of
counter-narratives yields multiple counter-memories that co-exist in
the broad synchronous space of mythical memory. Today, indeed, it
sometimes seems there is hardly a story left that has not been turned
over and told from another perspective, and from The Journal of
Mrs Pepys (George 1998) to novels about Captain Ahab’s wife (Naslund
1999), Scarlett O’Hara’s mulatto half-sister (Randall 2001), or Proust’s
beloved fugitive, Albertine (Rose 2001), women’s rewritings have
enriched our repertoire of stories with accounts of untold ‘lives of the
obscure’, as Virginia Woolf phrased it (1984 [1925]).
Yet, tactics may give way to strategy. Indeed, multiplying the perspec-
tives on literary history and our so-called cultural heritage, women’s
rewriting also can be seen increasingly to be part of a feminist strategy
devised from a place of relative power. No longer mere ad-hoc tactics
seizing the opportune occasion, women’s rewritings are also strategic
representations that rejoin the goals of women’s history more gener-
ally, to wit: ‘to restore women to history and to restore our history to
women’, as Joan Kelly phrased it (Kelly-Gadol 1976: 809). Feminist art,
literature, and scholarship have been defined as ‘a means of redressing
the official “forgetting” of women’s histories’ (Hirsch and Smith 2002: 4).
Their methods, like those of feminist re-vision, have been described as
a ‘re-membering’ of women’s histories (Lourie et al. 1987: 3), while
their purpose has been identified as the undoing of the hegemonic and
authoritative version of History (and his story). A form of ‘counter-
memory’, women’s studies as a whole is a movement that has always
more or less directly engaged issues of cultural memory. In this context,
the distinction between women’s rewriting as a tactic or as a strategy of
memory hinges on the rewriting’s relation to feminism, women’s studies
and the women’s movement. It is also a historical development that can
be likened to that undergone by a guerilla movement that gains a place
in national parliament, where it continues to engage in power struggles
yet has a legitimate place and voice.
The transformation of women’s rewriting from a tactic into a strategy

of memory shows rewriting to be a technology of cultural remembrance
that has changed not only the ways in which stories, histories, and her-
stories are told, but also how the past is conceived. As a tactic levelled
at transforming the memory of the past, women’s rewriting has enabled
the production of the past as a multiplicity of stories and perspectives.
Now a strategy used not only by writers with feminist inclinations
but by publishing houses such as Canongate to sell books, it has also
contributed to the transformation of our relationship to the historical
and cultural past. In the years that saw the development of Rich’s term
into a feminist imperative, cultural critics and philosophers like Jean-
François Lyotard observe the atomization of History into histories, of
grand narratives into petits récits (Lyotard 1979). Women’s rewriting,
I submit, played a vital role in this process. Indeed, the imperative to
re-vision that became the rallying cry of feminism in the 1980s served
not only as a catalyst for many rewritings and from many different per-
spectives. It also helped to usher in new uses of the past, contributing
to making the past one of our prime commodities, sold on the cultural
market for consumption and profit.
Performing cultural memory
Consumer culture is a fact that we cannot ignore anymore, for

consumerism is the driving force of society today and its logic has
spread to all domains of social and cultural life. In consequence, its
role needs to be taken into account in any study of cultural production
and reception. Yet to acknowledge the centrality of consumerism to
contemporary society is not the same as to say all and everything abide
by the laws of the market. The society of producers may have trans-
formed into a society of consumers whose purpose is directed at the
commoditization of the consumer (Bauman 2007b); nonetheless, there
still are different ways of assuming the role of the commoditized sub-
ject, of making the self into a sellable commodity and of bringing it to
the market. The art of life, as Bauman (2008) has termed the imperative
to chose how to construct and narrate one’s life trajectory, inevitably
plays itself out within the space of consumer culture. Reminding us that
all art involves choices, struggle with the resistance of the materiality
of the medium, and vision, Bauman’s art of life also reminds us that if
consumerism conditions life, it certainly does not determine it.
To reformulate consumption as (artistic) production and an act if not
of creation, then of art as craft, may not immediately strike one as a very
radical gesture. Yet it allows us to see that even a system as all-engulfing

as consumerism cannot control everything that falls within its purview,
but continues to leave room for alternative uses. It also enables us to
see that while today, the long-term (life) project as a durable work has
given way to short-term projects as continuous re-assemblages pertain-
ing to the realm of the ephemeral and the performance, it is precisely
on these terms, as performance of cultural memory, that the utopian
potential of women’s rewriting can be recovered. Ultimately, it is not
as narratives and trajectories leading to a clearly defined and identified
destination that women’s rewriting is especially valuable today, but
rather as enacted presence, meaningful precisely because it embod-
ies choice – artistic, social, and political choice – yet remains open to
further and new choices. As I detail in the final chapter of the book,
rewriting as the performance of cultural memory and reading as its
enactment moves women’s rewriting out of the domain of the archive
and into that of the repertoire (Taylor 2003), refocusing attention on its
intervention in public space. Indeed, seen as mediation of the memories
that preoccupy contemporary culture, women’s rewritings turn out to
be consuming memories not only in the sense of manufactured memo-
ries (re)produced for consumption. Instead, producing the literary past
in the present as a kind of event, they are mediations of memory that
engage feminist discourse in such a way as to remain of consuming
feminist interest.
Part II
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2
En/gendering Cultural Memory:
Rereading, Rewriting, and the
Politics of Recognition
In the 1970s, rewriting emerges as a privileged mode of feminist textual

production. Feminist activist writers such as Adrienne Rich in the United
States and Hélène Cixous in France develop concepts for it and feminist
writers and writers’ collectives explore the possibilities rewriting affords
them to convey their understanding of existence. The resulting stories,
Sara Maitland explains apropos of her ‘Penelope’, speak of ‘experience at
large. Not only as it is but as it might be’ (1978: 114). Rewriting from the
woman’s perspective inscribes this possibility of change within cultural
memory: ‘Our whole history and the structures of consolation (myths) that
we have built for ourselves need to be and can be transformed’ (114).
There is nothing intrinsically new about women’s rewriting in the
1970s. Rewriting has functioned as a motor force of literature since time
immemorial. The history of Western literature can be told as a history of
rewriting, with Virgil’s Aeneid as a Roman rewriting of Homer’s ancient
Greek epic poems, Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Divine Comedy
as rewritings of Virgil, Cervantes’s Don Quixote rewriting Dante, and so
forth.1 Also, much postmodern writing in the early 1970s consists of
rewriting – think of John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), retelling the canonical
Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf from the perspective of the monster, or of
John Barth’s retellings of myth from the perspectives of Bellerophon,
Perseus, and Sheherazade’s sister, Dunyazade, as collected in Chimera
(1972).2 As this last example shows, the rewriting from the standpoint of
the female characters of literary history is not new either. In the Heroides,
the Roman poet Ovid already gives a voice to mythological figures such
as Penelope, Dido, and Medea in letters addressed to the famous lovers
who abandoned them. These Ovidian epistles have yielded a rich tradi-
tion of rewritings and adaptations running to this day.3 Michèle Roberts’s
‘Hypsipyle to Jason’ (2000), for instance, can be traced to this tradition.
39
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In this short story, Hypsipyle, rather than berating Jason, accusing him of
infidelity and eventually pronouncing a terrible curse, relishes her time
alone and the pleasures of waiting, longing, and writing the letter his
absence occasions.
What, then, is new about contemporary women’s rewriting? In my
view, its specificity resides in the uses to which rewriting is put at the
time. The meaning of rewriting, in other words, is not transhistorical,
but is bound up with the particular social and cultural context in which
it operates. In this chapter, I submit that women’s rewriting emerges as
a privileged feminist genre in the 1970s because it embodies second-
wave feminism’s emancipatory promise – its ‘will to change’, as Elaine
Showalter puts it in her recent literary history of American women writ-
ers, referring to Adrienne Rich’s landmark 1971 poetry collection The
Will to Change (2009: 441). As Showalter explains, by the late 1960s,
women writers were ‘calling for a new kind of writing that would aban-
don the masks of feminine decorum and tell the whole truth about the
gender and the nature of things’. In the 1970s, the mood was generally
one of ‘optimism and determination about the possibilities for change in
relations between women and men, and women and society’ (439–41).
Women’s rewriting embodies this will to change literally. Rewriting is
not only about change; it is change. It transmutes the stock of narratives
that serves to shape cultural identity and allows women writers to carve
a space for the expression of female experience within literary tradition
that they can legitimately claim their own. Challenging the authority of
traditional representations (of the past, of women, of their roles in the
past), it enables female authorship, facilitating women’s access to print
while satisfying their desire to supplement or correct the texts of the
past. By the mid-to-late 1980s, however, as women became increasingly
part of the professions, including the literary professions, rewriting loses
its feminist sense of urgency and of transformative potential. Although
it continues to form a mainspring of literary creativity, and although its
necessity as a strategy of intervention and a tool for social change is at
times reasserted in novels and short stories published during the ensuing
decades, on the whole, rewriting changes function and status. Perhaps
because it so unabashedly asserts a feminine identity in public space,
women’s rewriting from the 1980s onwards is expressive either of a con-
tinued commitment to feminism, or of its writer’s deliberate assumption
of her identity as a woman writer speaking to feminine concerns.
Because the feminist rewriting of the 1970s envisions new possi-
bilities for the future in the revision and rewriting of the past, it can be
understood as engaging primarily with culture as memory, that is, with
En/gendering Cultural Memory 41
cultural memory as the social and cultural process of remembering,

forgetting, misremembering, or distorting the past. It is, indeed, because
the lost voices and forgotten women were considered a legacy that had
been withheld, ‘an inheritance that had been denied us’, as Nina Baym
phrases it (2001: 21), that so much second-wave feminist writing, both
scholarly and artistic, was directed towards the retrieval and reinscrip-
tion of women’s voices. Partaking of the feminist ‘salvation project’ that
seeks to resurrect past women’s lives (Beizer 2009), rewriting is a practice
by means of which women writers and readers ‘unlearn submission’, as
Alicia Ostriker defines one of the purposes of feminist fiction (1982: 87).
Women’s rewriting teaches readers to be critical of tradition, inducting
them in the art of suspicious reading, to paraphrase Rita Felski (2009: 28).
Articulating feminism’s sense of gender injustice in texts that rewrite the
old stories from the newly-found perspective of ‘woman’, it ‘author-izes’
writers to voice female concerns within the public sphere.
In retrospect, its aim to transform culture and the social organization
of gender it inscribes notwithstanding, women’s rewriting appears an
intervention in the cultural memory of the late twentieth century that
unwittingly engendered consumer memory culture. This is because,
in the context of the rise of neo-liberal capitalism, the feminist goal
of women’s rewriting to generate a usable past is put to economi-
cally productive use. In this chapter, I therefore look at how women’s
rewriting, embodying feminism’s emancipatory promise, defined a
feminist project that, with hindsight, can be seen to have contributed to
creating the condition for the emergence of consumer memory culture.
To understand this development, I scrutinize two concepts for women’s
rewriting that have proved particularly influential and productive:
Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ and Hélène Cixous’s ‘écriture féminine’.
Placing them in the context of developments in the material reality and
the literary-theoretical conceptualization of reading, I argue that their
articulation of a new (resisting, anti-authoritarian, non-submissive)
relationship to tradition not only enables women’s rewriting to intervene
in cultural memory but opens it up to commoditization.
Rewriting as productive reception
Rewritings tell stories of reading. As a form of ‘productive reception’,

rewritings embody a reaction to the texts they rewrite. They speak
of how their writers ‘received’, understood, and interpreted what
they read. Inviting a double, comparative reading, they also stage
a particular scene of reading, one in which readers are encouraged
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to look again at the rewritten text, and to look at it in the light of

the new text. In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton defines the
object of the study of the social formation of memory as ‘those acts
of transfer that make remembering in common possible’ (1989: 39).
Rewriting is such an act of transfer in which texts from the past are
re-produced and passed on. In particular, contemporary women’s
rewriting constitutes an act of transfer through which a feminist
memory is established.
Rewriting is an act of transfer triggered by reading, born in the inter-
stices of another text, in that complex act of actualization and meaning-
making that is ‘the act of reading’ (Iser 1976). Many rewriters locate the
genesis of their text in the reading of another one. For instance, in her
letters, Jean Rhys records her resistance to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane
Eyre, her being ‘vexed at her portrait of the “paper tiger” lunatic, the all
wrong creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr Rochester’
(1984: 262). Rhys, it is worth recalling, originated from the West Indies.
Her conviction that Brontë’s representation of the West Indian Bertha
is flawed rests on a sense of misrecognition – of a distorted image,
‘a legend’, as she puts it (271). ‘I’ve never believed in Charlotte’s luna-
tic’, she claims, adding, ‘that’s why I wrote this book’ (296). Similarly,
Christa Wolf says she set out to tell the story of Cassandra to correct
what she cautiously terms ‘a “mistake” on Aeschylus’s part’ (1984: 150).
In her account of how she came to conceive of her novel, she reports
reading Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon and thinking, ‘Never would she
[Cassandra] have said this: “Inside as well as outdoors I can/Mourn
Agamemnon’s fate.” . . . Not if I knew her as well as I thought’ (150).
What Rhys and Wolf share is first of all an engaged experience of
reading. Their reading is implicated and their response to the text com-
bines cognition with emotion and affect (cf. Pearce 1997). The texts
are ‘identity narratives’ in Moraru’s sense of the term (2001: xiii); they
hold special personal and cultural significance: Wolf turns to Aeschylus
in preparation for a trip to Greece and with Jane Eyre, Rhys tackles a
novel she had read often and that was long been part of any young
woman’s education – ‘that indispensable tabletop reference work of all
our mothers and grandmothers’, as the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva
puts it (1980: 319).
In women’s rewriting, distrust, disbelief, anger, and a desire to
set things right converge to give shape to a reader’s response in the
productive reception of literature. Women’s rewriting is marked by
what Paul Ricoeur has termed the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. It mis-
trusts and resists those texts it views as the embodiment of oppressive
power and authority – the Bible, the classics, texts seen to embody
patriarchal, heteronormative and/or colonial worldviews – and uses
‘interpretation as a tactic of suspicion and as a battle against masks’
(1970: 26). This hermeneutics of suspicion, Alicia Ostriker explains
in her discussion of feminist Biblical revisionism, intersects with a
hermeneutics of desire (1993: 66). It is filtered by what Adrienne Rich
has termed, as the title of her poem goes, ‘the phenomenology of
anger’ (1973: 25).
Because it refuses to submit to culture as it is, women’s rewriting
is a practice in which women ‘unlearn submission’, in Ostriker’s for-
mulation (1982: 87), learning to become ‘a resisting rather than an
assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of
exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us’, as Judith
Fetterley writes in The Resisting Reader (1978: xxii). This response is
informed by the women’s movement and what Rita Felski has termed
‘the feminist public sphere’, i.e. ‘an oppositional public arena for the
articulation of women’s needs in critical opposition to the values of
a male-defined society’ (1989: 166). It is facilitated by the advent of
feminist criticism, that is, by the ‘critical revolution’ brought about
by the insight that ‘women readers and critics bring different percep-
tions and expectations to their literary experience’ (Showalter 1985: 3).
Women’s rewriting is part of the discursive space of second-wave
feminism, drawing on its sense of identity and of gender-based oppres-
sion. According to Wolf, Cassandra ‘prefigures what was to be the
fate of women for three thousand years: to be turned into an object’
(1984: 227). Wolf not only deploys a feminist rhetoric, but draws on
a sense of a shared female experience to claim she knows Cassandra
better than Aeschylus. Ultimately, it is because of feminism’s recog-
nition of women’s experiences as source of knowledge and hence
of authority that she can set out to retell her story as seen from her
own perspective. In this light, women’s rewriting can be seen to
articulate something about women’s reading and women’s relation
to what is given to read or is available to women for reading – to
culture as memory.
Women’s rewriting first emerges as a quest for a female language
and literature that ‘reflects’ the woman reader’s experience.4 Starting
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminist criticism, both within and
outside the universities, is drawing connections between women’s lives
as they are lived and women’s lives as they are represented.5 The find-
ings of feminist criticism are widely available, in non-fiction bestsell-
ers such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), which first combined
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literary and cultural criticism to analyze the role of literature in the

transformation of culture – conceived by Millett as a sexual revolution
that is also a cultural, social, political, and psychological revolution – and
in resisting such a radical transformation. Women’s rewriting has clear
links with feminist criticism. Syntagmatically, it is a writing that is also
a (re)reading, like feminist criticism seeking to expose structures of
sexual oppression and repression as they are formulated in representa-
tive texts. (The notion of ‘critical rewriting’, as used by Marcel Cornis-
Pope and André Lefevere, for instance, establishes the same analogy
between literary criticism and creative rewriting by other means.) The
artistic and creative articulation of a reading fermented in a mind sensi-
bilized by feminist thinking about women’s oppression, misogyny and
male chauvinism, and sexual politics, women’s rewriting is a literary
genre that grew out of a feminist insight into the effects of stories on
the imagination and, consequently, on lived experience – life as it is
lived and experienced.
Taking gender as its fundamental category of analysis, the feminist
criticism of the late 1960s and early 1970s first focused on the stereotyped
images of women in literature, which cast woman as, in Adrienne Rich’s
words, ‘a terror and a dream’ (1972: 21). Concerned with the exclusion
of women’s experience from literature, it also turned its attention to the
exclusion of women writers from literary history. Diagnosis went hand in
hand with suggestions for remedy. Change in the condition of literature
was in the hands of writers – especially, of women writers. They were to
explore this newly emerging terrain and develop a language and imagery
adequate to it.
From the onset, reading in its feminist critical sense was linked to
writing: a production of text that would not reproduce literature’s
exclusions and misrepresentations, but find alternative modes of
writing; ‘to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, . . .
to call experimentally by another name. For’, Rich adds, ‘writing is
re-naming’ (1972: 23). This alliance between feminist criticism and
women’s (re)writing developed under the auspices of the women’s
movement. Subsequently theorized by Elaine Showalter as ‘feminist
critique’ and ‘gynocriticism’, the dual focus of feminist criticism on
the woman as reader and the woman as writer is not only a division
into distinct varieties of criticism, with different objects of study and
different theoretical concerns (1979: 25). The two orientations also
complement one another in the task of transforming consciousness,
looking critically to the past and anticipating hopefully on a promised
‘herland’ of feminist vision.6
Reading and (re)writing: Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’
The double orientation of feminist criticism, towards the past in its

practice of reading literature as the study of ‘the sins and errors of
the past’ (Heilbrun and Stimpson 1975: 64) and towards the future
in its practice of writing literature as the imagining of alternatives
and a better society, coalesce in the practice of women’s rewriting.
In rewriting, looking back to the past and looking forward to the future
come together. This is literally inscribed in the morphology of the
word: whereas the verb ‘to write’, meaning to form (letters, symbols,
words) on a surface, implies a movement forward, advancing in time
and space, the prefix ‘re’, meaning ‘again’ or ‘back’, on the contrary
implies a movement backwards, of returning, of looking back, and of
repetition. The dual orientation of rewriting is most clearly articulated
in Adrienne Rich’s concept of ‘re-vision’, a concept she takes from
Henry James in, to use James’s own words, an ‘infinitely interesting
and amusing act of re-appropriation’ (2009: l; emphasis James’s).7
Re-vision even better than rewriting articulates the double-directed
look: its hyphen, crucially releasing the word’s polysemy, gives us
a ‘revision’ that is a looking back or again, implementing a change
designed to correct or improve, yet also contains the power of vision,
that is, the ability to imagine the future. Not surprisingly, Rich’s words
defining re-vision became the locus classicus of feminist criticism and
of women’s rewriting:
Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of

entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more
than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we
can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we can-
not know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman,
is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the
self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of
literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as
a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been
led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as
liberated us; and how we can begin to see – and therefore live –
afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we
are not going to see the old political order re-assert itself in every
new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know
it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition
but to break its hold over us. (1972: 18–19)
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Often quoted, Rich’s words are worth pondering for what they tell us
about women’s reading and (re)writing. Emphasizing the necessity of
a radical feminist critique of literature momentous in its potential for
change, Rich defends a novel perspective that is first of all a new, femi-
nist theory of reading. The ‘new critical direction’ of feminist criticism
puts literature in a new light, thus constituting a re-reading of the texts
from the literary tradition. To return to the old texts and to approach
them from a feminist perspective is to see them illuminated differently
and from a new critical viewpoint, with the ‘fresh eyes’ of feminist
vision. The perspective takes into account the broader cultural context
of the literary work, relating it to ways of thinking about and of being
in the world, linking the reading of literature to life as it is lived. Thus,
it is also a perspective that explicitly distances itself from New Criticism
and its ‘new critical’ emphasis on the text as an autonomous entity –
on ‘what the poem says as a poem’, in Cleanth Brooks’s well-known
formulation (1947: xi).8 Instead, the ‘new critical’ direction propounded
by Rich turns a page of literary history. Emerging from the historical
moment of the women’s movement, re-vision is a new procedure of
reading that also marks a defining moment in literary and cultural
history. Although Rich says it is ‘more than a chapter in cultural his-
tory’, her phrase rhetorically implies it is also precisely that: a chapter
in cultural history that is also a stage in literary history.
From the perspective of second-wave feminism, this stage is pivotal:
it is to revolutionize the course of history. Speaking of what a feminist
critique of literature ‘would’ do, Rich describes the consequences of
re-vision as an event that can be imagined but has yet to happen. In her
view, however, it is imperative that it should take place: re-vision is ‘an
act of survival’. As the title of the essay, taken from Ibsen’s play, indi-
cates, not to do it means if not physical death, then social and psycho-
logical death. ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ is about
the awakening of a feminist consciousness. The collective awakening
of women to their reality is to yield self-knowledge – a self-knowledge
that is essential, part of women’s search for identity: it is to gain insight
into ‘how we live’ and ‘how we have been living’, how conscious-
ness is shaped, the imagination curtailed and the real construed. This
knowledge, in turn, forms the basis for social change: it is through an
understanding of these mechanics that women’s collective resistance
to what Rich identifies as ‘the self-destructiveness of male-dominated
society’ is to be achieved – what she would gloss, in a later version of her
essay, ‘a fatalistic pessimism as to the possibilities of change, whether
societal or personal’ she finds in the work of her male contemporaries
(1979: 49). ‘We all know that there is another story to be told’, Rich
writes in a sentence that was deleted in subsequent versions of the essay
(1972: 25). ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what
remains is its self-generating energy for destruction’ (1979: 49). Possibly
‘the price of masculine dominance’, this self-destruction can only be
remedied through ‘a change in sexual identity’, which implies altered
consciousnesses for both men and women: ‘just as woman is becoming
her own midwife, creating herself anew, so man will have to learn to
gestate and give birth to his own subjectivity . . . women can no longer
be primarily mothers and muses for men: we have our own work cut
out for us’ (1972: 25).
There is a discernibly prescriptive strand in the ‘new critical direction’
proffered by feminist criticism, as there is an imperative tone to Rich’s
essay. The urgency and necessity of what Sandra Gilbert would call ‘the
revisionary imperative’ is made possible by a feminist ethics articulat-
ing a clear sense of right and wrong, of what needs to be left behind,
and of where humanity needs to be heading to. Indeed, the feminist
understanding that ‘we must redo our history, . . . review, reimagine,
rethink, rewrite, revise, and reinterpret the events and documents that
constitute it’ (1980: 32) was based on a firm idea of what re-vision
was to achieve. This sense of re-vision’s purposefulness underwrites
its importance for the feminist project it initiated. It also allowed for
the formulation of criteria for ‘good conduct’. Literature that was to
receive its stamp of approval was to meet feminist standards of ‘good
literature’. The critique of the texts that failed to meet these standards
entailed the writing of new ones that did meet them. In her ‘American
Feminist Literary Criticism: A Bibliographical Introduction’, Cheri Register
identifies this prescriptive strand, explaining, ‘It can guide authors who
are writing literary works from a new feminist perspective, as well as
those critics who are analyzing existing literature’ (1975: 2).
The criteria by which to judge literature were set by its value to the
women’s movement, the way(s) in which it served the cause of women’s
liberation. Register puts it this way:
To earn feminist approval, literature must perform one or more of

the following functions: (1) serve as a forum for women; (2) help
to achieve cultural androgyny; (3) provide role-models; (4) promote
sisterhood; and (5) augment consciousness-raising. (18–19)
These are criteria worlds apart from the academically dominant criteria
of the New Critics, who valued literary works for their intrinsic qualities,
48 Fair Use
for paradox, ambiguity, and irony, and who practiced close reading to
come to the best and fullest interpretation of them – certainly not for
their effect on readers, raising their consciousness, or providing them
with models to emulate. Such emotive meaning, indeed, the New Critics
discounted as ‘the affective fallacy’, that is, as ‘a confusion between the
poem and its results (what it is and what it does)’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley
1954: 21; emphasis in the original). In contrast, feminist criticism and
the new writing by women distrusted the New Critical isolation of the
text from its cultural context, putting its performative meaning at the
heart of their critical practice.
In the light of 1970s feminist criticism, the meaning of a text is precisely
what it does, its ideological and political effects on male and female read-
ers. The diagnosis of the effects of the existing literature as mostly nefari-
ous, providing neither positive role-models nor realistic representations
of relations between women but requiring of the female reader she iden-
tifies against herself, led to the development of two related activities. On
the one hand, it led to the formulation of alternative modes, tactics, and
strategies of reading – for instance, Fetterley’s ‘resisting reading’, advo-
cating a re-reading of literature ‘from a point of view which questions
its values and assumptions’, as she puts it in The Resisting Reader (1978:
xx). For as she argues, ‘While women obviously cannot rewrite literary
works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality, we can
accurately name the reality they do reflect’ (xxiii). On the other hand,
it led to the articulation of a female language and literature, a new kind
of women’s writing that tries precisely to reflect ‘our reality’ and that
sometimes takes the form of actual rewriting.
Adrienne Rich’s essay ‘When We Dead Awaken’ is permeated by the
sense of a need for a female language and literature, from her search
for ‘guides, maps, possibilities’ (1972: 21) to her quest for a ‘non-male’
style, voice, for ways in which, for women as for men, ‘the energy of
creation and the energy of relation can be united’ (23–4). Not surpris-
ingly, her own literary production as a poet is similarly engaged in this
quest for a female language, most notably in the award-winning Diving
into the Wreck, a collection of poems published in 1973 and containing
a poem entitled, like her essay, ‘When We Dead Awaken’. Reviewing
the book for the New York Times, Margaret Atwood qualifies it as
‘extraordinary’, observing, ‘If Adrienne Rich were not a good poet, it
would be easy to classify her as just another vocal Women’s Libber, sub-
stituting polemic for poetry. . . . But she is a good poet, and her book is
not a manifesto, though it subsumes manifestoes; nor is it a proclama-
tion, though it makes proclamations.’ As Atwood proceeds to explain,
Diving into the Wreck is ‘a book of explorations, of travels. The wreck

she is diving into . . . is the wreck of obsolete myths, particularly myths
about men and women’ (1993 [1973]: 280). In the title poem, the poet
is a reader who, ‘having read the book of myths’ and equipped herself
with proper diving-gear, journeys to the depth of the sea ‘to explore the
wreck’; ‘the wreck and not the story of the wreck/ the thing itself and
not the myth’ (1973: 22–3).
Through its vivid imagery, the poem explores issues akin to those
addressed in Rich’s prose. The diver ‘carrying . . ./ a book of myths/ in
which/ our names do not appear’, exploring the place and discovering
treasure concealed inside rot, is obviously a figuration of the feminist
reader ‘entering an old text from a new critical direction’. Finding her
way ‘back to this scene’, the diver probes the depths of the sea, investi-
gating mythologies of gender, of women and men, and of the relations
between them, realizing she is part of the wreckage, one of its ‘half-
destroyed instruments’. Examining, as it were, ‘the assumptions in which
we are drenched’, the poem partakes of the quest for self-knowledge
that is Rich’s journey to self-discovery in poetic language. As Rich writes
in the poem, ‘The sea is another story’, meaning it is another element,
where different rules and principles apply. Echoing her claim, at the close
of her essay, that ‘We all know that there is another story to be told’, it
also suggests Diving into the Wreck is an attempt to tell this other story.
As such, it is an exploration of the linguistic conditions and literary
possibilities for the telling of this other story. Questing for the truth
behind the myth, seeking to recover the reality of the wrecked lives, it
defines rewriting as a restorative gesture that is animated by suspicion
yet is directed at salvage.
‘Récriture féminine’: Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine

as rewriting
Writing in the same years, on the other side of the Atlantic, Hélène
Cixous addresses similar issues in her work. The context, of course,
is different, as are the terms of reference. For the French feminist,
the crucible of a bankrupt masculinity is the war in Algeria rather
than in Vietnam and the bogeyman is the psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan rather than writers like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Yet
the stakes are comparable, Cixous’s concerns with another story and
another language echoing with Rich’s in resonant ways. In fact, the
literal echoes of Rich’s words in Cixous’s, suggesting some transatlantic
pollination, point towards an international feminist public sphere in
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which rewriting functions as a central concept in thinking women’s

way out of the historically oppressive past and into a better future.
As discussed above, in Rich’s view, ‘re-vision . . . is an act of survival’
because it leads to help autonomy and self-determination. By identify-
ing sources of oppression and charting their mechanics of reproduction,
re-vision was to help retrieve a female sense of self that was not defined by
patriarchal society. Its revelation that there is nothing natural about the
stories that sustain social organization and its gendered division of labour
was to rescue women from the confines of an identity defined primarily
in terms of domesticity. Indeed, its revelation that they are stories to begin
with, myths that are passed off as timeless truths but that can be told dif-
ferently, was considered the first step in the process of emancipation that
was to lead, through the stages of consciousness-raising and political
action, to the radical transformation of the public sphere. Hélène Cixous
voices views analogous to Rich’s when she asks, in her contribution to
The Newly Born Woman, what would happen if the myths that sustain
the patriarchal order were to be demystified and claims, ‘Then all the
stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable,
the historical forces would change, will change hands, bodies, an other
thought still unthinkable will transform the functioning of every society’
(Cixous 1977 [1975]: 66; see also Cixous and Clément 1986: 65).9
Throughout her writings in the 1970s and early 1980s, Cixous’s con-
cerns are with the ways literature and philosophy function as edifices
for maintaining male supremacy and legitimating the social dominance
of men over women. As she submits, a serious challenge to this social
order entails the retelling of its central stories, which is exactly what she
sees happening around her:
Now, we are living through precisely that age when the conceptual
foundation of a millenary culture is in the process of being undermined
by millions of a kind of mole [taupe] which is as yet unrecognized.
When they awaken from among the dead, from among the words,
from among the laws. (ibid.)
Cixous’s words resonate intertextually with Rich’s, reprising the phrase

taken from Ibsen to signify women’s collective awakening to their social
condition as ‘the second sex’, to use Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark
expression, unfolding it across the domains of language and legislation.
And as they echo the title of Rich’s essay and poem, they assert the
centrality of re-vision to the transformation of culture envisaged by the
international women’s movement.
The importance of re-vision to second-wave feminism is underscored

by the use of rewriting in Cixous’s best-known essay, ‘The Laugh of the
Medusa’ (1975). This essay is a polemic against Lacan, whom Cixous
sees as the descendant of a long tradition of what she terms ‘phallologo-
centrism’, a word that yokes logocentrism with phallocentrism together
in solidarity, thus signifying the way the social order that privileges its
male members is produced in and through language (logos). Among
Cixous’s first texts to be translated in English and her most frequently
anthologized one, it opposes especially key psychoanalytical notions
such as the death-drive, lack, castration, and separation.10 Instead, it
‘hysterically’ proclaims woman as the source of life, the plenitude of her
body, breath, speech, promulgating another conception of (bi)sexuality
that brings about ‘multiplication of the effects of the inscription of
desire’ (1976: 884).
‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ is a manifesto propounding feminine
writing (écriture féminine). It encourages women to write themselves,
explores women’s relation to language, and attempts to project new
futures out of the dismantled past. Cixous’s rewriting of the myth
of the Medusa illustrates the new writing. Putting the theory into
practice, the laughing Medusa articulates feminine writing as a power-
ful intervention that disrupts the reproduction of the phallologocentric
order. In the brief passage evoking the Greek mythological figure that
gives the essay its title, Cixous apparently reverses the values tradition-
ally ascribed to Medusa. In Cixous’s account, Medusa is no longer the
monster she is traditionally held to be, turning to stone whoever looks
upon her, the ‘symbol of horror’ that signifies castration in Freud’s
analysis (1955: 273). ‘You only have to look at the Medusa straight on
to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing’
(1976: 885). Immediately following her assertion ‘that women aren’t
castrated, that they only have to stop listening to the Sirens (for
the Sirens were men) for history to change direction and meaning’,
Cixous’s beautiful and laughing Medusa embodies her refusal to listen
to the dangerous song of men. As such, it echoes May Sarton’s poem
‘The Muse as Medusa’ (1971), a poem that builds on a tradition of
women poets finding poetic inspiration in the myth of Medusa and
whose opening lines run,
I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone.

I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold.
I was not punished, was not turned to stone –
How to believe the legends I am told? (107)11
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Resting, like Sarton’s poem, on a hermeneutics of suspicion and of

disbelief, Cixous’s Medusa owes its textual existence to two related
linguistic strategies: on the one hand, the denial of her traditional form
(she’s not deadly) and, on the other, the affirmation of her new one (she
is beautiful and she is laughing). These two linguistic threads form as it
were the warp and woof of the myth’s intertextuality, weaving a positive
and a negative strand into its fabric.12 They also articulate rewriting’s
dual methodology as rereading and as writing, oriented towards the
past it revises and the future it envisions.
To affirm life over death in her reweaving of the myth of Medusa’s
textual fabric, Cixous rescues from oblivion a thread of the narrative
that is often forgotten. In Ovid’s version of the myth, in Book 4 of
Metamorphoses, Perseus, having given his hosts an account of how he
slew Medusa, is asked why she wears snakes mingled with her hair.
He replies:
That, too, is a tale worth telling.

She was very lovely once, the hope of many
An envious suitor, and of all her beauties
Her hair most beautiful – at least I heard so
From one who claimed he had seen her. One day Neptune
Found her and raped her, in Minerva’s temple,
And the goddess turned away, and hid her eyes
Behind her shield, and punishing the outrage
As it deserved, she changed her hair to serpents . . ..
(trans. Rolfe Humphries [1955: 106])
Cixous’s rewriting of the myth as the celebration of the beautiful

Medusa can thus be seen to counter myth with myth, substituting for
the version that blames the victim of rape one that restores her to her
condition prior to her violation by the sea god. As such, it is a restorative
reading that dives as it were ‘into the wreck’, to use Rich’s metaphor,
mining the past for knowledge it can put to productive use, trying to
undo a mythology built up through centuries of artistic representa-
tions.13 In particular, Cixous resists Freud’s interpretation of Medusa as
the embodiment of a femininity that is both fascinating and terrifying,
divided by the decapitation that relegates femininity to the realm of the
unknown and of the unknowable, linking the terror she inspires to that
of the threat of castration.14
Restoring Medusa beautiful, alive, and laughing to tradition, Cixous
acts instead as a midwife to ‘the newly born woman’, as she and
Catherine Clément refer to the subject of feminine writing (1986

[1975]). This task she performs through the dual operation of a
deconstructive reading, on the one hand, and a reconstructive
rewriting, on the other. As she explains, ‘what I say has at least two
sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unfore-
seeable, to project’ (1976: 875). This récriture féminine, as we may call
Cixous’s practice of revisionary rewriting, has much in common with
Rich’s re-vision. Knowing a dual orientation like Rich’s re-vision,
Cixous’s feminine rewriting is grounded in the rereading of the old
texts from a new, feminist perspective and mines them for insights
into how women have been defined and femininity constructed,
using this knowledge of the literary tradition not to pass it on, but to
break its hold over the contemporary imagination: ‘to project’, as she
puts it – a term that needs to be understood in Sartrian terms, mean-
ing as a gesture that is at the same time regressive and progressive,
a ‘past-surpassing’ determined both in terms of the present reality it
negatively attempts to surpass and a future reality it positively tries to
bring into being. At once ‘a refusal and a realization’, as Sartre puts it
in his Search for a Method (1968: 92), Cixous’s explanation why ‘woman
must write her self’ evokes reasons akin to those Rich advances in
‘When We Dead Awaken’:
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that
the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by
repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent
of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is
imperative. (Cixous 1976: 875)
Conceiving of her project in terms of midwifery, of giving birth and

re-birth, Cixous employs a feminine metaphorics that yet again echoes
Rich’s, whose original version of the essay ‘When We Dead Awaken:
Writing as Re-Vision’ closes with the claim that ‘woman is becoming
her own midwife, creating herself anew . . . women can no longer be
primarily mothers and muses for men: we have our own work cut out
for us’ (1972: 25). In the same way, Cixous calls on women to write
themselves, asserting ‘It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old
by coming to know her’ (1976: 878). Women’s rewriting, thus defined,
is to achieve self-knowledge for women through an act of birthing. It is,
indeed, ‘en la connaissant’, as Cixous’s polysemic punning text reads,
that the New Woman is to come into being: by knowing her and by
jointly giving birth to her (1975: 41).
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Author-izing women’s writing
The emergence of women’s rewriting as a privileged feminist genre

needs to be seen in the light of its ambition to transform society through
a transformation of its cultural memory. Looking back – possibly in
anger, always with suspicion – and looking forward in a gesture of
reparation, women’s rewriting works from a vision of a future where
women have equal share in power, money, and the right to speak (and
publish, teach, . . .) towards the realization of that vision through the
transformation of the narratives that sustain the cultural and social
imaginary. Thus, it articulates feminism’s emancipatory promise in
texts that join recognition for feminine subjectivity with the struggle
for redistribution of power, rights, and capital – symbolic, cultural, and
economic. To this end, the old, traditional and canonical texts consti-
tute a privileged locus for women’s rewriting. These texts and traditions
not only constitute the cultural heritage of a culture, shared and passed
on as part of processes of national and individual identity formation.
Because they also function to sustain gender injustice in the domains
of culture, politics, and economics, from the perspective of second-wave
feminism, the stories of masculine domination they tell need to be
corrected, supplemented, or changed.
Intervening in cultural memory by shifting the points of view and
filling the gaps of literary history, women’s rewriting is a practice that
asks for women to be recognized as subjects of and for cultural memory.
It does so by laying claim to narrative space and asserting women’s
rights to tradition. A practice that literally author-izes women’s writing,
it enables female authorship in a writing constructed as a legitimate
space for the expression of female experience. Women’s rewriting occurs
as it were between the lines, in the interstices and the margins of the
texts of the past. This could easily be claimed women’s writing space: a
space most certainly ‘liberating in its very emptiness’, as Diane Wallace
has argued apropos of the woman’s historical novel, which like its fic-
tional counterpart leaves much to write that has not been written before
(2005: 169), but also a space to all appearances ‘reserved’ to women
and limiting precisely for this reason: ‘feminine’ by virtue of its initial
silence, and now for women to fill with accounts of women’s histories
and experiences from within. As such, rewriting defines a certain kind
of writing as women’s writing: confessional, centred on the female self,
giving her perspective and view of things.
The answer rewriting formulated to the question of cultural legiti-
macy so crucial to the woman writer in the 1970s is then ambiguous.
Rewriting gave women access to a narrative and poetic space they

could legitimately claim their own and enabled them to explore mat-
ters of female subjectivity and sexuality within its designed space.
Thus Angela Carter, for instance, recently returned to England after
a three-year stay in Japan and needing to reclaim her place in the
London literary scene, ventures into the interstitial space of rewriting
to find a niche culturally defined as properly women’s yet concordant
with feminist ideals.15 In 1977, shortly after the publication of Bruno
Bettelheim’s award-winning The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning
and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), Carter publishes The Fairy Tales of
Charles Perrault, a translation of the seventeenth-century French contes
into contemporary English that is already a kind of rewriting of the
tales in that it gives the female characters more agency than they have
in Perrault’s text and because it appears to eschew words and situations
that seem needlessly denigrating to them (see Plate 1995: 221–7).16
In The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) she then rewrites Perrault’s
fairy tales, retelling ‘Bluebeard’ from the perspective of his youngest
wife in the title story and exploring young women’s sexual awaken-
ings and complicit relationships in rewritings of Belle and the Beast
and of Little Red Riding Hood, among others. In the following year,
she publishes ‘Black Venus’s Tale’ (1980), a rewriting of the cultural
myth of the poet Charles Baudelaire and his mulatto mistress Jeanne
Duval, re-imagining the story of the poet and his muse from the latter’s
perspective. In Carter’s case, rewriting literally afforded her entry into
public space, enabling her to tell her own stories. As Lorna Sage writes,
the rewritings in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories enabled Carter
‘to read in public with a new appropriateness and panache, as though
she was telling these stories’ (1994: 40; Sage’s emphasis).
At this historical juncture, women’s rewriting authorizes women to
write by laying claim to cultural legitimacy for them both in terms of
traditional femininity and in the light of new feminist conventions.
This two-track approach comes to the fore in Virginia Woolf’s well-
known words on the subject in A Room of One’s Own – words which
were penned half a century earlier than Rich’s and Cixous’s but which
retain relevance for understanding contemporary women’s rewriting.
Addressing the female students of Oxbridge on the subject of women
and fiction, Woolf says:
It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about

the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students
of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though
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I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lopsided;

but why should they not add a supplement to history, calling it, of
course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure
there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them
in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, con-
cealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. (1993:
41–2; ch. 3)
Woolf’s advocacy for discretion and the use of caution especially are
telling. Wishing to encourage women to rewrite history, Woolf suggests
they should ‘add a supplement’ and give it ‘some inconspicuous name’
so as not to offend propriety and call no attention to themselves –
to operate in the shadows as it were, stealthily, under cover and under-
ground. Raising issues of legitimacy and propriety, Woolf’s words
serve as a reminder that behaviour was still strongly codified in the
1960s, the transformation of what constitutes proper and legitimate
female behaviour being part of the changes of which feminism and
the women’s movement partook. For Cixous, this question of legitimacy
is an integral part of her analysis of feminine writing. It is addressed in
‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, for example, when she calls upon women
not to let themselves be held back by feelings of inadequacy or any
other form of auto-censure and self-censorship, nor by what she calls
‘the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the
crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy
that works against us and off our backs’ (1976: 877). As she claims,
‘I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the
age of twenty-seven.)’, explaining this is because they believe writing
is not for them, ‘reserved for the great – that is, for “great men”’ (876).
Or when she describes woman’s public speaking as ‘the torment of
getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words,
ground and language slipping away – that’s how daring a feat, how great
a transgression it is for a woman to speak – even just open her mouth –
in public’ (880). In the light of conventions about woman’s place and
women’s internalized sense of propriety, rewriting appears a relatively
innocuous activity linked to subjectivity and the privacy of one’s own
mind – a kind of reading, really, and therefore legitimate and proper:
a private activity that is gendered as feminine (in contrast to original
writing, which is construed as masculine).
The possibility of being construed as properly feminine and therefore
as not indecorous, even when the subject matter was in reality quite
immodest, thus can be viewed as part of the appeal of rewriting in
the early days of second-wave feminism. This possibility also renders the
meaning of rewriting ambiguous, generating an ambivalent space for
women’s writing. On the one hand, rewriting is a feminist imperative;
on the other, it is also a means of textual production that reinscribes
traditional notions of femininity. This doubleness presents opportuni-
ties for women’s voices to be heard; it also makes women’s rewriting an
uncanny form of textual production, capable of being adapted to unex-
pected functions, eventually yielding versions ‘it can neither simply
embrace nor wholly disavow’, to evoke Fraser’s argument on ‘feminism
and its doubles’ (2009: 114): on the one hand, rewritings such as Emma
Tennant’s Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002), which in its retelling of
Brontë’s novel from the perspective of Jane Eyre’s pupil accrues detail
but does not radically challenge its memory;17 on the other hand, male-
authored rewritings such as Theodore Roszak’s Memoirs of Elizabeth
Frankenstein (1995), for instance, or Arthur Japin’s narrative of Giacomo
Casanova’s first love, Lucia, reworking the eighteenth-century adven-
turer’s Story of My Life as the story of her life in In Lucia’s Eyes (2005;
originally, Een schitterend gebrek, 2003). Such late-twentieth-century
rewritings are evidently feminism’s offspring. They cannot, however, be
seen to intervene in cultural memory as part of a movement intent on
social change.18
Reader-oriented approaches and anti-authoritarianism
Central to the emergence of women’s rewriting as a privileged genre

of second-wave feminism is the theorization of rewriting as a form of
productive reception, and hence, as an act of transfer in which the
relationship between past, present, and future is negotiated and culture
transformed. As I have shown, both Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’ and
Hélène Cixous’s ‘écriture féminine’ articulate rewriting in ways that link
new concepts of feminine/feminist writing to practices of (re)reading.
In their analyses, (re)reading and (re)writing are complementary activi-
ties that work together to transform cultural mythologies, inscribing a
critical practice oriented towards suspicion and a creative one that is
‘reparatively’ oriented, to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms.
This understanding of rewriting emerges from the recognition of the
role of social facts in shaping the experience of reading. At the heart of
the reader-oriented theories of literature stands attention to new subjects
and to new forms of subjectivity as they relate to established authority.
Serving the theoretical emancipation of the reader from the one to the
many, the practical emancipation of the reader resulting from, among
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other, an increase and diversification of school and student population

cannot but recognize the social facts of class, gender, and of cultural-
ethnic background as informing the act of reading. The novel ways in
which reading is conceptualized in the course of the second half of the
twentieth century accounts for the emphasis on the literary-theoretical
relationship between women’s rewriting and reading.
The ‘return of the reader’, as Elizabeth Freund (1987) refers to the
critical shift of focus from work to reader, then, is not only the return
of the repressed of literary discourse. In actuality, the subject of read-
ing is part of a democratization process that developed in the wake of
World War II – one that encompasses better schooling and increasing
welfare for many. The literary-theoretical interest in the role of the
reader marks an epistemological shift brought about by what may be
called the democratization of literature, which by and large refers to
two major trends: the democratization of the classroom (boys and
girls from a broader social spectrum going to high school and to the
university) and the democratization of the book (most notably, the
cheap paperback). Both democratization processes entailed changes in
the practices of reading. With less of a shared social and cultural back-
ground, more of the classroom’s emphasis is put on how to read, and
the study of literature becomes reading instruction rather than writing
instruction (rhetoric). Meanwhile, critical reflection on these transfor-
mations inquires how consensus can nonetheless be achieved in the
heterogeneous classroom. With books increasingly widely and cheaply
available, reading outside the classroom becomes less the intensive
rereading of a few books and more the extensive reading of many titles
(see Calinescu 1993: esp. 79–90).
These changes are particularly pertinent to a women’s movement
intent on female empowerment. They form the material base of cultural
and ideological change and interact with it. In the United States and in
England, the democratization of literature would crystallize through the
New Critical methods of ‘close reading’. Aiming at educating readers,
New Criticism was a democratization movement in that its basic stance
was that every reader could, with a little effort, do it. New Criticism was
a pedagogical practice that focused on the text itself. To read poetry as
poetry meant all one needed was a good poem and an inquiring mind;
it did not require vast knowledge of history and of authors’ biographies,
the cultural baggage that came with good breeding. The methods, in
fact, could be learned; with a little cognitive effort and mental concen-
tration, every reader in the classroom could read the poem as a poem.
A reading, in the New Critical perspective, is ‘the fullest realization of
the symbolic structure that is the poem’ (Brooks 1947: 238). It is to

actualize the text, to make it happen. Refusing to limit the meaning
of literature to its historical context, New Criticism thus opened the
way for a reader-centred approach to literature. Yet because it refused
to open literature to what it says about life, culture, and society, it also
remained too mired in aesthetic considerations to really speak to the
concerns of an emerging body of readers that identified themselves in
terms of gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Asserting social difference and recognizing the role of experience,
reader-oriented theories formulated a critique of traditional authority
that was crucial to feminism and provided an attractive avenue for
women’s writing. This critique of authority entered literary theory
through the identification of reading with writing. From the 1970s
onwards, theories of reading proclaim the equivalence of reading and
writing. Claiming that, as A.S. Byatt would put it in Passions of the Mind,
‘Writing is reading and reading is writing’ (1991: 2), such theories not
only trope reading and writing as a chiasmus that takes them appar-
ently into opposite directions – with reading becoming a production
and writing converting into decoding and decomposition, taking apart
what it reads. Instead, they go counter what the terms are habitually
taken to mean. Setting up a dynamics between the activities of reading
and writing that shows them to be mutually implicated and already
present in each other, they undermine their distinctiveness and, with
that, the authority of authorship.
As is well known, the critique of the paternal/patriarchal authority of
authorship found its most radical statement in Roland Barthes’s 1968
pronouncement in ‘The Death of the Author’. In this essay, Barthes
proclaims the death of the author is necessary for the emancipation
of the reader. To allow the latter to ascend to the place of production
and ‘give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth’,
Barthes asserts; ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death
of the Author’ (1977: 148). Barthes’s polemical theories of reading
as (re)writing are particularly interesting in the context of this book.
Working to decentralize power, knowledge, and authority from the
single author to a plurality and diversity of readers, his proposed shift
‘From Work to Text’ announced by the birth of the reader is an enact-
ment of anti-authoritarianism that is also an instance of anti-capitalist
critique. Importantly for my present concerns, in the context of the
late 1960s and early 1970s in France, it is to be understood as part of a
critique of the rise of consumer culture (also denounced in, for instance,
Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle).
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Barthes’s dethroning of the author, indeed, is a revolutionary gesture

targeting a cultural system that reacts to debates about the ‘droit
d’auteur’ as they were first settled in the Law of 1957 – ‘the right of
the author’, i.e. French copyright law. Barthes is especially critical of
the debate’s focus on economic interests. Denouncing this conception
of authorship as ‘the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology’
(1977: 143), Barthes evokes the spirit of the revolution to make his
point. Thus, in ‘Writing Reading’ (first published in the magazine Figaro
littéraire in 1970), he implicates the publishers by speaking of an ‘exor-
bitant privilege’ – the term ‘privilege’ evoking its former meaning as
publishers’ rights as they were abolished under the French Revolution
in favour of a legal recognition of authors’ rights over their work –
saying it determines ‘a very special (though an old) economy: the
author is regarded as the eternal owner of his work, and the rest of us,
his readers, are simple usufructuaries. This economy obviously implies
a theme of authority: the author, it is believed, has certain rights over
his readers . . .’ (1987: 30).
As copyright historian Anne Latournerie explains, the law that was
passed in 1957 and that forms the basis for subsequent laws (1985,
1992, 2006) seeks foremost ‘to reconcile the interests of the author
with the demands of capital’ (Latournerie 2001). Whereas in the past,
the debate included reflection on the relationship between private and
public interest – the interest of the individual (the author, but also the
citizen and the user) and the interest of society, the collectivity – in
the years leading to the passing of the new law, the focus of the debate
is on the market: how to balance the economic interests that oppose
authors, the public, and the intermediaries who produce and diffuse
the works. The publishers play an especially important role in this
debate. It is, indeed, modern publishers like Bernard Grasset who
inaugurate the new economy of literature, making literary authorship
dependent on the publishing business and thus radically transforming
the writer’s trade as well as public status and image. As Grasset sees
it, the publishing business creates ‘value’. Combining new marketing
techniques with large print runs and making the authors’ income
(their financial rights) dependent on the commercial success of the
work, publishers not only play an important role in mediating between
writers and readers. Rather, the publisher is a ‘creator of value’, a manu-
facturer of the author as this figure is understood in the traditional,
nineteenth-century sense of the term (Latournerie 2001).
Seen in this light, Barthes’s championing of ‘the reader’s rights’
(1977: 148) takes explicit stance within the public debate in France.
His theories of reading as rewriting are integral to his criticism

of the rising commodification of culture and serve the cause of
social criticism: critique of consumption, of consumer society. As he
explains in S/Z, to all appearances taking issue with Grasset’s notion
of the publisher’s ‘creation of value’, ‘the value of a text’ is linked
to the practice of writing: ‘What evaluation finds is precisely this
value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the
writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as
work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of
the text’ (1974: 3–4).
Production and consumption
Reading is ‘the true place of the writing’, Barthes claims (1977: 147); for
it includes that which happens when we lift our eyes from the written
page, when we pursue the text’s ‘flow of ideas, stimuli, associations’
and happen ‘to read while looking up from [our] book’ (1987: 29; Barthes’s
emphasis), Barthes’s reading as mental rewriting, then, ‘at once
insolent . . . and smitten’ (ibid.), describes what we might call (after
Susan Sontag) an ‘erotics of reading’: a ‘desiring reading’, as he puts
in his essay ‘On Reading’, that identifies the reader with the amorous
subject (1987: 39). Deploying the discourse of love, Barthes’s theory of
reading as rewriting defines the real reader as ‘he who wants to write, to
devote himself to an erotic practice of language’ (1985: 999; emphasis
Barthes’s). Truly an amateur (in the etymological sense of the word), the
reader who practices reading as rewriting is the better (real, true) reader;
as a lover of literature, s/he devotes time and loving attention to it.
The discourse of love is not only a typically French myth that Barthes
enlists here for the cause of the reader’s rights. It also introduces the
question of time into the argument, making a critique of time as
colonized by the metaphorics of Benjamin Franklin’s ‘time is money’ –
the commodified relationship of time to consumer culture – part
of the reading-as-rewriting bid for preeminent literary value. Time,
indeed – time that can be measured, time as duration; the ‘lived time’
Barthes refers to as ‘amorous time’ in his Lover’s Discourse and that
he distinguishes from the ‘lost time’ of reading (1978: 63 and passim;
217) – is as crucial to the discourse of love as it is to that of litera-
ture (as analyzed, for instance, in Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume Time
and Narrative). It is also post-capitalism’s scarcest good, dividing the
world into those who have too much of it and those who have too
little of it, as Lipovetsky reminds us in Hypermodern Times (2005: 51).
62 Fair Use
Taking the time (to interrupt the flow of the narrative and lift the eyes
from the page, mentally writing between the lines, as it were) is to resist
the book’s abolition through its rapid consumption (its being devoured,
as the expression goes) by rereading passages, or reading it again alto-
gether. It is also to resist the logic of consumption. For as Barthes remarks
in ‘On Reading’, the book is ‘traversed by a mediation which has nothing
particularly clean about it: money; we have to buy it, which means not
having bought others’ (1987: 38).
In fact, Barthes’s distinction, first elaborated in The Pleasure of the
Text, between the text of bliss ( jouissance) and the text of pleasure, is
similarly to be read as an assault on consumer culture as it increasingly
dominates the discourse of literature and what he calls ‘the pitiless
divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer
of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its
author and its reader’ (1974: 4). In Barthes’ view, ‘contemporary civili-
zation tends to flatten reading by turning it into a simple consumption,
entirely separated from writing’ (1985: 999). ‘In our society, a society
of consumption and not of production, . . . lovers of writing are scat-
tered, clandestine, crushed by thousand – even internal – constraints’
(1987: 41). In this context, the two kinds of texts command two different
modes of reading. The text of pleasure is a ‘readerly’ text of reading as
consumption, calling for a rapid reading that goes for the plot: a quick
and easy pleasure. In contrast, the text of bliss is a ‘writerly’ text of
reading as production, requiring a slow and participative (re)reading
that attends to the production of a proliferation of meanings: the
labour of (re)writing. As he explains in his most sustained attempt to
put the theory to practice, S/Z, ‘Rereading, an operation contrary to the
commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have
us “throw away” the story once it has been consumed (“devoured”),
so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book . . .’
(1974: 15–16).
It is the paradox of women’s rewriting that whereas Barthes’s views
on reading as rewriting were meant as a jamming of the capitalist
machinery, women’s rewriting as cultural production ironically ends
up feeding a conception of literature as product for consumption.
Seeking to effect social change through the transformation of cultural
memory, women’s rewriting was understandably interested in reaching
a broad audience so that this transformation could be if not collective,
then at least wide-ranging. The possibilities print offer, both in terms
of diffusion as well as in terms of status, combine with the medium’s
purchase on duration (Rigney 2004). It is because women’s rewriting
was emphatically directed at having an impact on the archive as the

culturally sanctioned repository of cultural memory that it became
caught in the dynamics of consumer culture as ruled by the logic
of cycles of capital, fashion, and identity as product. By taking as its
medium of operation that of writing and especially of print, women’s
rewriting as the reinscription of women’s voices, histories, and experi-
ences within literary history becomes subject to the logic of print as it
unfolds under the post-Fordist capitalist regime.
Women’s rewriting turns Barthes’s notion of the ‘writerly text’, as
designed to transform the reader ‘not into a consumer, but into a pro-
ducer of text’, on its head. Indeed, rather than jamming the capitalist
machinery, rewritings actually allow it to run evermore smoothly. And
instead of resisting the commercial and ideological habits of contem-
porary society as Barthes’s rereading had us do, contemporary women’s
rewriting actually partakes in it. Women’s rewritings are ‘readings’ that
can be purchased. By the 1990s, they are made into products for con-
sumption redesigned by publishers for obsolescence: to be discarded
once they have been consumed, ‘so that we can then move on to
another story, buy another book . . .’, as Barthes puts it (1974: 15–16).
The so-called Austen industry illustrates this particularly well. Of Jane
Austen’s hand, there are only six completed novels, yet within the past
three decades, more than fifty rewritings, sequels, and completions
of her small oeuvre have been published. This remarkable and much
remarked-upon fact (see, for instance, Terry 1986; Latkin 1993; Breuer
1999; Spillman 2006), Margaret Drabble explains, results from the fact
that there are so few novels by Austen: ‘It is simply a regret that there
was no more. One would have wanted more of the same’ (qtd in Terry
1986: 74). Because the chances are slim an unknown manuscript of
Austen’s may yet be discovered, Drabble says, ‘readers will have to satisfy
themselves with re-reading her six masterpieces’ (1974: 7) – or, alterna-
tively, turn to the rewrites. In other words, instead of finding satisfaction
in the rereading of Austen’s handful of novels, Austenites increasingly
define themselves through the consumption of what amounts to new
Austen products, substituting the fashionable pastime of buying, read-
ing, and discarding novel ‘readings’ for the anti-consumerist activity of
rereading the same old texts.19
In fact, even when rewritings invite their readers to return and reread
what they rewrite, it is often in the form of a new book – the commer-
cial possibilities afforded by the double marketing of text and rewrite
going both ways. Indeed, it is not just rewritings that derive prestige
from their association with canonical names – as when Joan Aiken’s
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Jane Fairfax is given the subtitle ‘Jane Austen’s Emma, through another’s
eyes’ in its American edition, or when Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl
(1984) is reissued as The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene (2007) to tap
the popular interest in the figure of Magdalene that was fostered by Dan
Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code (2003) and its 2006 film adapta-
tion. In the bookstores, text and rewrite are juxtaposed or presented in
boxed sets – Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and its (authorized)
sequel, Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett (1991); Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca
and Susan Hill’s Mrs. de Winter (1993); and Angela Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber and Grimm’s Fairy Tales (2007). These presentations, under-
scoring the connection between text and rewrite, serve not only to
market new or relatively unknown writers on the basis of their book’s
connection to the known product that is the classic text it rewrites.
It also sells the classic again.
Women’s rewriting forms a genre that fits the shift from Fordism
to post-Fordism in the literary marketplace particularly well. As
capitalism moves to a model of short turnover cycles of capital and
publishers increasingly prefer books with a proven customer base,
women’s rewriting appears a particularly interesting genre, at once
responding to the increasing demand for women-identified literature
and fitting the requirements of ever shorter turnover cycles of capital.
The rewriting of a classic can be marketed according to the mechanics
of branding. Because they have an existing readership to whom they
can be sold as part and parcel of that which they rewrite, rewritings
require the launching not of a new and unknown author (which often
entails costly publicity and marketing expenses) but of a product that
belongs to the prestigious predecessor. Publishers of contemporary
women’s rewriting thus capitalize on the ways in which the canoni-
cal work or author functions as a brand name, happily exploiting the
canonical name’s wide recognition and its function as guarantee of
a standard of quality and of certain aesthetic or narrative pleasures.
Whereas for feminist writers in the 1970s and 1980s, rewriting was
a literary form combining narrative strategy with feminist praxis, for
publishers confronted by the need to adapt to the new economy, it
soon revealed itself as a means of selling books with low risk and low
marketing costs.
The market forces that combined to turn a feminist narrative
strategy into a commercially successful product in the post-Fordist
literary marketplace did not simply spell feminism’s success. With the
advent of neoliberal capitalism, the claims for recognition that women’s
rewriting inscribed ceased simply to assert the political and social will
to change. Instead, the narrative fragmentation of the grand stories of
the past into a plurality of histories and ‘herstories’ helped to bring
about the social fragmentation of culture into subcultures forming
niche markets. Transforming cultural memory not just in content, but
also in form, women’s rewriting thus unwittingly engendered consumer
memory culture.
3
Women’s Rewriting as
Counter-memory: An ABC
of ‘Stolentelling’ (Authorship,
Branding, and Copyright)
‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’, T.S. Eliot said in a renowned
aphorism (1928 [1920]: 125). Eliot’s distinction between imitation and
theft identifies rewriting as a highly ambiguous practice that stands at
the heart of the art and craft of writing: it is at once what writers do
and should not do, or should not be seen to be doing, or do not want
to acknowledge as having done. Pointing to a complex relationship
between rewriting and plagiarism, Eliot’s aphorism suggests the distinc-
tion may be less obvious and tenable than its pithiness implies, trou-
bling the opposition between good and bad, mature and immature.
Considering its role in authorizing discourse and the high financial or
symbolic profits one stands to gain or lose by it, it is decidedly disturbing
to find the distinction between imitation and stealing to be really far from
crystal clear, evidence that, as Marilyn Randall puts it, ‘plagiarism is, above
all, a matter of opinion’ (2001: vii). Whereas copyright lawyers and liter-
ary critics persist in understanding plagiarism as ‘a failure of the creative
process’ (Stearns 1999: 7), recent studies have shown that plagiarism is
neither a feature of the text nor a failed or fraudulent authorial act but an
act of reception: ‘plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder’, ‘“constructed”
by the reception of authoritative readers’, Randall convincingly argues in
Pragmatic Plagiarism (2001: vii; viii).
Obviously, the gender dynamics of plagiarism redefined as an act of
reception are not to be underestimated. They play an important part in
the literary power struggles of which accusations of plagiarism are such
significant indicators. In the light of women’s rewriting as an intervention
in cultural memory, challenging cultural narratives and the versions of
the past they sustain, intellectual property law appears a major factor.
66
Women’s Rewriting as Counter-memory 67
Evidently, those who wield the power to ‘call’ plagiarism – or, more
precisely, those who are authorized to wield that power – hold definitional
power in the context of the field of cultural remembrance conceived as
an arena of struggle over versions of the past. In this chapter, I therefore
take my point of departure in the notion of plagiarism as an act of recep-
tion and explore women’s rewriting through the lens of the metaphorics
of theft. Rewriting as stealing is, indeed, a commonly used metaphor that
serves both to name the process of creativity and to protect its product.
Between condoning the act and condemning the thief, however, the
stakes are undeniably high. In this chapter, I therefore scrutinize the
implications of the ‘writing is stealing’ metaphor for women’s rewrit-
ing, looking into how it informs both its production and its reception
and examining how the uses of the metaphor engage the language(s) for
creative work as contrasted with the processes of creation.
To explore the issues of property and legitimacy women’s rewriting
raises, I look especially into the reception of women’s rewriting as ‘deriva-
tive work’ (both in the dictionary sense of ‘unoriginal’ and in the legal
sense of a work ‘based upon one or more preexisting works’, as the United
States Copyright Act defines it). Focusing on two recent cases of alleged
plagiarism – Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary (1995), which retells the story of Lolita
from her perspective, and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001),
rewriting Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind from the perspective of
a plantation slave – I discuss the reception of women’s rewriting, espe-
cially by readers who have a particular stake in them: gatekeepers, stake-
holders, and other ‘professional’ readers (e.g. literary critics). The fact
of copyright, sine qua non of the two cases is revelatory of contextual
and cultural issues central to women’s rewriting. Presumably adding the
insult of unearned profit through copyright infringement to the injury
of plagiarism as the violation of the author’s moral rights,1 the novels
by Pera and Randall illustrate how women’s rewriting operates in a field
that is structured by economics as much as by artistic or political and
ideological interests. Seen in the light of cultural memory, these interests
are revelatory of the forces that intersect to licence certain rewritings and
hinder others.
‘Literary theft’ as a metaphor to live, write, and die by
The recurrence of the metaphor of writing as stealing suggests it is

a conceptual metaphor – a metaphor ‘we live by’, to use Lakoff and
Johnson’s phrase. As they explain in their seminal study Metaphors We
Live By (1980), such metaphors structure our experience of the world
68 Fair Use
and define reality. Dictating how creativity is thought of and dealt with,
the theft metaphor is a metaphor writers write by and become authors
by. However, it is also a metaphor writers can die by, meeting a literary
death as lethal and definite as the physical end of life. This is the case
of the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, who was accused of plagia-
rizing Graham Greene, among other writers. His entry on Wikipedia
states that ‘Ouologuem turned away from the Western press as a result
of the matter, and even today remains reclusive’ (see also Wise 1998).
It is also the case of the Italian Pia Pera, who seems to have abandoned
further aspirations as a literary author after her dispute with Vladimir
Nabokov’s son over her rewriting of Lolita.2
In the light of the power of literary life and death it wields, it is
astonishing to find the metaphor of theft to be so unstable, inscrib-
ing a central paradox: ‘stealing’ is an intrinsic part of the creative
process yet is also immoral and punishable by law. This paradox is
well known and the conundrum it poses is generally resolved by the
assumption that the difference between ‘stealing’ as the labour of crea-
tion and ‘stolen’ as the apparent nature of a work is both fundamental
and evident. In other words, that theft and its cognate, plagiarism,
are features of the text. This view, however, no longer goes without
saying. In her research on plagiarism in France, Hélène Maurel-Indart
demonstrates that literary critics, public opinion, and the judges in
court are more tolerant of the ‘plagiaristic’ activities of some authors
than others (1999; 2007). As she illustrates, accusations of plagiarism
are value judgments about the writers. They are a priori assumptions
about their supposed ‘talent’, fame, and greatness – criteria external to
the text that prove Randall’s thesis that the belief it is possible to dis-
tinguish between imitation, borrowing, plagiarism and literary grand
theft is ‘fraught with presuppositions about originality, ownership and
authorship of discourse’ (2001: xiv). They raise the question, central
to Randall’s analysis and crucial for understanding contemporary
women’s rewriting: Why does literary repetition sometimes become
plagiarism and other times great art?
In her ground-breaking study Pragmatic Plagiarism, Randall sug-
gests this question can only be answered by shifting the burden of
proof away from the text, focusing instead on the production of pla-
giarism as a performative and pragmatic category and looking into
its discourse and its socio-cultural conditions. This shift is in line
with the currently received notion that ‘the literary’ is not a feature
inherent in the text, but an attitude and way of reading brought to
it (Zwaan 1991; Widdowson 1999). The idea that ‘the literary’ and its
opposite, plagiarism, are judgments imposed on texts is an important

insight. It moves the focus of analysis away from the text, requiring
the study not of the formal ways in which a rewriting recasts another
text, but of its context of reception. In consequence, this chapter’s
leading question is: How are these products valued as instances of
literary repetition?
As I wish to show, the metaphor of theft that governs the production
of women’s rewriting as a counter-memorial project functions differ-
ently in its reception in the context of the literary market. This has far-
reaching consequences for contemporary women’s rewriting conceived
as an intervention in cultural memory. Its reception as fraudulent in
what Assmann (1995) has identified as ‘communicative memory’ – that
is, the early, living phase of cultural memory, when memory is the
subject of everyday communication and hence of negotiation over its
forms and meanings – is likely to affect its impact negatively, thereby
hindering the transformation of culture. Quite simply, works which are
censored are literally excluded from the cultural heritage and hence,
from the archive of cultural memory. More importantly, the exclusion
of certain types of revisionary discourses from the communicative
phase of cultural memory effected by intellectual property law shapes
cultural memory in ways that can be at odds with the public interests
the rewritings serve.
In Chapter 2, I pointed out that the development of women’s rewrit-
ing as a privileged feminist genre is contemporaneous with the redrawing
of copyright laws to protect the commercial interests of authors and
especially their publishers. Although the motives and intentions of
women’s rewriting differ fundamentally from those of artistic postmod-
ernism, in terms of literary history, the genres do develop concurrently.
Rewriting – whether as pastiche, parody, quotation, or intertextuality – is
postmodernist fiction’s main narrative technique of (re)production and
‘perpetual rewriting’ is, as Lyotard says in his essay ‘Rewriting Modernity’
(1991: 28), its central epistemology. Claiming everything has been said
already, the ‘literature of exhaustion’ (Barth 1967) endorses the burden
of the past as a poetics of belatedness, promoting the endless vary-
ing of repetition, especially in a ludic mode. ‘For PLAGIARISM / read /
also / PLAYGIARISM’, Raymond Federman bids his readers in his essay
‘Imagination as Plagiarism’ (1976: 565). Increasingly taking a place of
prominence in the aesthetic production of the late twentieth century,
postmodern rewriting demonstrates Fredric Jameson’s thesis that by the
1980s, ‘aesthetic production has become integrated into commodity
production generally’, as he argues in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic
70 Fair Use
of Late Capitalism (1991: 4). There may, indeed, be good reasons why
in the course of the twentieth century, ‘the writer thinks less of writing
originally, and more of rewriting’, as Edward Said submitted in his essay
‘On Originality’ (1983: 135). These reasons include ‘the logic of con-
sumer capitalism’, which postmodernism as an aesthetics ‘replicates or
reproduces – reinforces’ ( Jameson 1983: 125). In fact, ‘the image of writing’
that Said sees changing ‘from original inscription to parallel script’ appears
within the context of a consumer society driven by the production of the
new at ever more frantic rates of turnover. In this chapter, I therefore read
rewriting as an aesthetic agenda and a literary position engaging literature
as productive of cultural memory within consumer culture: as a reflection,
a critique, and a tapping of literature’s reproductive system.
Stealing the language
It is in a spirit of contestation, protesting notions of ownership and of

literary property, that feminist writers first deployed the metaphor of
stealing the language, not to dodge accusations of plagiarism, but to
contest dispossession. ‘La propriété, c’est le vol,’ the French anarchist
Proudhon famously wrote, and the feminist writers of the second
wave appear to agree: literary property, too, is theft. It is appropriated
discourse, taken away and turned into goods caught up in a masculine
economy of ownership, of profit and loss, and of symbolizations and
exchanges between men.
Thus Claudine Hermann’s Les voleuses de langue (The Thieves of
Language; translated as The Tongue Snatchers, 1990), for instance,
called for women’s reappropriation of language. Published in 1976
with the recently founded feminist publishing house Des femmes, the
book took its title from a metaphor for women’s writing that enjoyed
currency among the ‘new French feminists’ of the day (Marks and
de Coutivron 1981: 87). Meaning both ‘to fly’ and ‘to steal’, the
verb voler came to embody this ‘feminine’ reclaiming of writing, its
polysemy and the feminist refusal to be limited: its meaning is at
least double and thus does not let itself be pinned down or reduced
to any single one, let alone The One (psychoanalytically speaking, the
Phallus, the Law of the Father).
In her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous elaborates on
the significance of the metaphor for women’s writing:
Voler [to fly/to steal] is woman’s gesture – flying in language and

making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous
techniques; for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only

by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired,
narrow passageways, hidden crossovers. It’s no accident that voler has
a double meaning, that it plays on each of them and thus throws
off the agents of sense. It’s no accident: women take after birds and
robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They (illes) go
by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in
disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things
and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning
propriety upside down.
What woman hasn’t flown/stolen? (Cixous 1976 [1975]: 887)
Central to the use of the metaphor for women’s writing is the sense that
language is the language of men. It is not only that men developed the
rules of rhetoric and of grammar. More importantly, they imbued all
language and inscribed all forms with their ways of thinking. The idea
of a language colonized by a masculine way of thinking, seeing, and
being in the world motivates the development of alternative ways of
writing and of speaking: a feminine writing, a writing that gives expres-
sion to sexual difference. It also provides ground for the moral right
to steal. Indeed, in the light of women’s unjust expropriation, stealing
becomes a reclaiming of what ought to be to theirs by right: the human,
inalienable right to language and symbolization.
Framed as an act of civil disobedience, women’s stealing of the
language serves to reveal how language and its uses are not neutral but
thoroughly invested in the social organization of gender. The metaphor
of theft designates women’s writing as an act of resistance to the gen-
dering of language as masculine and its upholding of a phallocentric
worldview and bolstering of a gendered configuration of practices.
It also points to the relationship between its social institutions and the
conception of language as private property protected by law.
Rewriting highlights the close ties between authorship, ownership,
and an economic system of cultural production regulation. Although the
notion of plagiarism has existed for as long as literature itself – it was first
used by the first-century Roman poet Martial in his Epigrams – the view
of language as belonging to someone takes on specific meanings in the
context of the literary market that is predicated on the material base pro-
vided by the invention of print. Printing enables – indeed, author-izes –
a new conception of language: one that constitutes an appropriative act
of staking out a claim to it, which in turn is supported by institutions,
(inter)national conventions and laws. Codified as copyright under the
72 Fair Use
Berne Convention (1886; rev. 1979), this author’s right comes auto-
matically to the author: without any other act than that of creation, the
author of so-called ‘literary and artistic works’ holds exclusive rights to
them when ‘they have been fixed in some material form’ (Art. 2).
This conception of authorship revolves around the notion of paternity:
the author is both owner and father, progenitor of his work. Paternity is
already inscribed in the idea of plagiarism, a word which derives from
the Latin plagirius (kidnapper) and plagium (kidnapping), meaning the
abduction of another’s child or slave. Etymologically identifying literary
theft with the stealing of a human being considered as somebody’s prop-
erty, plagiarism situates the literary progenitor in the place of the father
and lawful owner. This explains why plagiarism is considered the worst
crime a writer can commit: it is not just a matter of larceny; it is also to
usurp a masculine position of authority and entitled ownership.
This idea Harold Bloom developed as the agonistic relationship
between writers and their precursors in his The Anxiety of Influence
(1973). Linking priority and property to paternity in what is probably
the single-most influential twentieth-century theory of literary creativity,
Bloom describes poetic influence as ‘the labyrinthine affections of . . .
the “family romance”’ (27). Although he refuses to acknowledge the
‘politics of commerce’ or the ‘dialectics of theft’ that are involved in the
process – these are petty issues for ‘economists of spirit’, he claims (78) –
his idea of ‘strong’ poets who ‘clear imaginative space for themselves’ ‘by
misreading one another’ (5) evidently revolves around a kind of linguistic
territorialization that is also the basis for copyright – a language rush
which, like the nineteenth-century American land runs, is founded on
a first-come principle. Bloom’s model, indeed, places the emphasis on
priority, for as he explains, ‘for the commodity in which poets deal, their
authority, their property, turns upon priority. They own, they are, what
they become first in naming’ (64).
‘Poetry is property, as politics is property’, Bloom writes as he empha-
sizes ‘the only authority that matters, property or the priority of having
named something first’ (78). Replicating authorship as a masculine
preserve, Bloom’s model presents a much criticized patrilineal theory
of poetry. In their landmark study of Victorian women’s writing The
Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out the
patriarchal bias of Bloom’s Oedipal model yet suggest it has diagnostic
force as ‘an analysis of the patriarchal poetics (and attendant anxieties)
which underlie our culture’s chief literary movements’ (2000 [1979]: 48).
Indeed, as they ask the question ‘Where, then, does the female poet fit
in?’ (47), they also reveal Western literary history to be so intensely
patriarchal it cannot conceive of any other female role but that of the
Muse upon whom the poet must engender himself.3
Women’s (re)writing as the stealing of language emerges as a deliberate
and self-confident feminist strategy in resistance to such conceptions of
literary creativity as excluding the female poet. Illuminating the connec-
tions between the ideas of priority, property, and male prerogative – what
might be seen as a manifestation of Connell’s ‘patriarchal dividend’,
that is, the benefits that accrue to men in a patriarchal society (2005) –
feminist writers like Hélène Cixous evoke notions of expenditure to undo
the entanglement of this view of language with men’s interests, suggesting
woman as subject for history ‘un-thinks the unifying, regulating history’:
‘Elle dé-pense l’histoire unifiante, ordonnatrice’, she writes, releasing the
French verb’s potential for thinking through this relationship between
financial and gender economies by hyphenating dé-penser to make it sig-
nify both ‘to spend’ and ‘to un-think’ (1975: 45; 1976: 882).4
In its rebellious spirit of contestation, resisting the forces of the
market and contemptuous of accumulated wealth and property,
the stealing metaphor belongs especially to the spirit of the radical
feminism of the 1970s, its interests in ‘“another” commerce’ and a
‘feminine economy’ (Irigaray 1977; Cixous and Clément 1986 [1975]).
Nonetheless, the metaphor would continue to enjoy popularity among
feminist writers in the decades that followed, serving to identify
women’s narrative and poetic strategies as they proceeded to explore
the possibilities for working across different economies of writing.5
Thus, ten years after Hermann’s Les Voleuses de langue, Alicia Suskin
Ostriker echoes her title in her study of women’s poetry in America,
Stealing the Language (1986). Her chapter ‘The Thieves of Language:
Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’ in particular explores
revisionist mythmaking in women’s poetry as ‘a vigorous and various
invasion of the sanctuaries of existing language, the treasuries where
our meanings for “male” and “female” are themselves preserved’ (1986:
211). Ostriker’s use of the word ‘treasury’ is, of course, not coincidental.
It identifies cultural heritage as treasure and as highly valuable. It also
refers to patriarchy as a symbolic system invested in this treasury and
to men as having a controlling interest in this business and getting ben-
efits from it – a metaphorics referring to, for instance, Cixous’s view of
the Symbolic as a system that demands women ‘deposit [their] lives in
their banks of lack’ (1976: 884) and resonating with the financial meta-
phors informing the analyses of patriarchal reproduction of sociologists
such as Bourdieu (social capital) and Connell (masculine interest, the
above-mentioned patriarchal dividend).
74 Fair Use
Ostriker’s belief in the transformative potential of rewriting also

informs the fictions of Sara Maitland, whose short stories explore a
feminine imaginary shaped by feminism as it intersects with ‘the old
stories’ – cultural narratives and generic tales such as the romance (in
‘An Un-romance’), or specific myths and fairy tales such as those of
Cassandra, Daphne, Rapunzel, or the early Christian martyr Perpetua.
Maitland compiled a number of her rewritings under the title Women
Fly When Men Aren’t Watching (1993), thus drawing not on the steal-
ing part of Cixous’s voler metaphor, but on its winged, fabulous,
and fabulist part symbol of freedom and liberation. Evoking Cixous’
‘What woman hasn’t flown/stolen?’ and referencing Erica Jong’s ‘key
book’ of the 1970s, Fear of Flying (1973), Maitland’s title is a reminder
that what women do when they fly/steal is not just to operate in the
margins of the man-made laws of what is permissible. It is also to
practise what Cixous terms ‘the art of flying’: ‘flying in language and
making it fly’.6
This art of flying might be referred to as the winging of
words. Indeed, the expression ‘winged words’ means both language
performed (as Homer’s formula e’′pea pteróenta suggests; see Létoublon
1999), as well as quotations which have passed into common usage
and thus lost their sense of belonging to an originary author
(as Georg Büchmann’s nineteenth-century collection of quotations
Geflügelte Worte: Der Citatenschatz des deutschen Volkes implies). The
winging of words is thus a procedure akin to that of stealing the
language, yet works in a different linguistic register and according
to a different logic. The semantic double meaning of voler suggests
that to steal words and to give them wings, allowing them to take
flight and to move from writer to writer and from context to context,
actually refer to kindred procedures, yet function within different
systems, with logics and reasonings of their own. On the one hand
is the logic of the fixity of print, which enables the staking of claims
to authorship and the drawing of the benefits that accrue from it.
On the other hand is the logic of language itself, and of poetry-making
and storytelling in particular, which is the logic of winged words:
words repeated and performed anew, and thus passed on, generating
knowledge in their utterance.7 Authorship as defined in Western cul-
ture today operates on the cusp between the two, adroitly navigating
both systems. As Bloom repeats in his introduction to The Western
Canon, ‘Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism . . . The
originals are not original, but . . . the inventor knows how to borrow’
(1994: 11).
The risk of rewriting
Notwithstanding the spirit of contestation, there are also clear dangers

involved in deploying the metaphor of women’s writing as stealing.
This is not just because the cultural moment has changed, and that like
much leftist activism of the 1970s and 1980s, the reclaiming of literary
territory through overt rewriting as a kind of ‘guerilla plagiarism’, to use
Randall’s term (2001: 218ff), is now often regarded with some embarrass-
ment.8 The risk is also to be taken at face value, as ‘mere’ rewriting, copy,
imitation, derivative product. There is, after all, a distinguished tradition
of viewing rewritings not as art but as mere exercises – the Argentinian
Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, speaks of ‘parasitic books’ and ‘useless
carnivals’ (2007: 39).9 To flaunt rewriting – to assert one is stealing the
language through texts that make their nature as rewriting explicit, for
instance in the title – is to risk plagiarism in the sense of risking being
received as such. For as it is generally agreed, plagiarism is no literature;
it is not art; it is also not the product of an author; and it is, ultimately,
not worth anybody’s while. While overt rewritings invite a comparative
reading, comparing the relative merits of the ‘original’ and its rewrite
and evaluating the changes effected by the latter, they also present
themselves in relation to what they rewrite. Obviously lacking autonomy,
they are irremediably lacking uniqueness in at least some respects.
Confidence in rewriting as a trustful gauge of a writer’s artistry
remains central to a number of critical practices dealing with literary
repetition, ranging from theories of intertextuality, adaptation, and appro-
priation. Thus Structuralist critics such as Michael Riffaterre and Gérard
Genette, as well as theorists of adaptation such as Linda Hutcheon and
Julie Sanders, insist on the need to account for the creative import of the
author and recognize (re)writing as an intentional act that includes being
identified as writer/author. Writers confirm their desire to measure up,
and be measured up, to their predecessors. Pia Pera, for instance, speaks
of her rewriting of Lolita as accepting Nabokov’s ‘implied invitation to a
literary tennis match’ (Dobnik 1998). This element of literary competi-
tion to which rewriting ostensibly attests is also central to Harold Bloom’s
agonistic theory of literary creativity and authorship.10 His claim, quoted
above, that ‘originality’ is a matter of knowing how to borrow amounts to
saying that ‘great writing’ is a matter of skill that can be measured. Indeed,
indicating the difference between what might be called ‘weak’ and
‘strong’ rewritings, the difference between knowing how to borrow
and not knowing how to do it is a distinction that pertains to the process
of creative production, differentiating between masterful (re)writing and
76 Fair Use
inchoate writing, which is defined as immature and imitative rewriting.

It can thus be understood as distinguishing the master and the apprentice.
This is, of course, no absurd or senseless distinction. After all, the arts
of language are arts of repetition and of performance, and the art of
writing is, like all art, learned and mastered through acts of imitation
and repetition. One of the ways in which fledging writers learn to forge
their own style is through the time-honoured tradition of rewriting
well-known texts, as pastiche and as parody. As Borges writes in ‘The
Writer’s Apprenticeship’ (but I could have quoted many another writer
here to the same end), the young writer ‘should begin, of course, by
imitating the writers he likes’ (1994: 164). For women writers wishing
to demonstrate their artistic talents, skills in composition and rhetoric,
and creative imagination, rewriting therefore appears to present an
interesting arena.
Commanding a comparative reading, overt rewriting opens a space
in which new authors can literally in-scribe themselves, writing them-
selves into a body of texts, displaying their familiarity with it, showing
(off) their dexterity in handling the language, plot, or characterization.
This it did for Angela Carter, for instance, whose rewritings of fairy
tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories were received as exuberant
reworkings of the traditional tales as told by Grimm and Perrault.
Carter’s collection of short stories was published by Gollancz in 1979,
as the women’s movement was at its height. They were commissioned
for its Fantasy Collection by Liz Calder, who was determined to get
more women writers on Gollancz’s male-dominated list, publishing
‘a lot of overtly and inherently feminist fiction reflecting on women’s
lives’, as she later would tell a journalist (Jaggi 2005). Carter’s stories
were not only valued by second-wave feminists for their re-inscription
of strong women within the traditional tales. They were also admired
for their artistic bravura, linguistic wit, and baroque style, phrasing
and rhythm, continuing to engage their readers in debate about their
meanings (Bristow and Broughton 1997; Munford 2006). Critics such
as Lucie Armitt have cogently argued that Carter’s short stories ‘are
not fairy tales at all’ (1997: 89). Yet their reception (including, in fact,
Armitt’s essay) always refers to them as retellings of fairy tales. This
is indeed how the stories are presented, on the front flap of the first
edition and on the backcovers of re-editions, in reading guides, and in
the recently issued Vintage Classic Twin Vintage Fear, which collects
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm and Angela Carter’s
‘groundbreaking reworking of these stories’ in a limited edition gift
pack (Grimm and Carter 2007). Although Carter’s stories can also be
read as more, or other, than fairy tales, significantly, it is in this context
that they are presented, received, and read: in conjunction with the
traditional tales, in a dual comparative reading that creates a context
of reception designed to highlight her inventiveness, which then sig-
nifies her authorship, for her signature style authenticates her unique,
individual author-ity.11
As illustrated by Carter’s short stories, overt rewriting returns art to
a question of craft and artistry that calls for the study of literature as
performance, that is, of art considered as a how rather than a what. Thus
conceived, literary writing is, indeed, like literary reading, a doing (and
a re-doing): by focusing on the ‘act’ of writing, attention inevitably
goes to it as re-writing. Such a conception of literature constitutes a first
step towards countering the improbable romantic ideology of original-
ity that still holds sway and that is raised in the cultural market to the
status of highly valuable good and protected under the current author’s
rights and copyright laws.
However, because it suggests the rewriting’s unbiased evaluation
solely occurs on the basis of its artistic merits, this model does not
adequately account for the context of reception as a field of dynamic
and subjective forces. Phenomenologically, it is well known, original-
ity belongs to whichever of two writers or texts one discovers first;
it is, therefore, a quality arising from what Said calls ‘impressions of
novelty and force too subjective for sustained analysis’ (1983: 138).12
In consequence, to flaunt one’s own work as a rewriting of another
text is to risk being seen not as a skilful artisan reworking the material
of language, but as a plagiarist producing derivative work. In other
words, it is to risk calling plagiarism upon oneself. The risks are con-
siderable, for plagiarism is the epitome of ‘bad’ writing: writing that is
bad in the artistic as well as in the moral sense, the product of writers
both incompetent and wicked, and receiving particular salience in the
case it trespasses yet another boundary: that constituted by copyright.
Concretely, since plagiarism is considered the most odious crime a
writer can commit, this means: ignominy for the person of the writer,
who is seen as less than a writer, for s/he lacks the talent to be an
author (Randall 2001: 17); and exclusion of the text from the domain
of literature, for as Randall rightfully observes, plagiaristic texts ‘are
rarely studied . . . precisely because their qualification as plagiaristic
automatically excludes them from the domain of appropriate objects
of literary attention’ (4).
78 Fair Use
Un-author-ized rewriting: Pera’s Lo’s Diary
This is arguably what happened to Pia Pera’s Diario di Lo (Lo’s Diary), her
rewriting of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita from the eponymous character’s
perspective. First published in Italian in 1995 and subsequently issued
in a Dutch translation in 1996, it was licensed to five other countries
before being blocked from publication in France, England, and the
United States. Pera’s publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United
States and Macmillan in England, dropped the book from their list when
Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov’s son and executor of his estate,
claimed copyright infringement. Subsequently, maverick publisher of
Grove Press fame Barney Rosset took it upon himself to challenge Dmitri
Nabokov and negotiated a deal with him that resulted in the case being
settled and the book published with Rosset’s publishing house Foxrock
together with a preface by Dmitri Nabokov and on the condition half
of Pera’s royalties would go to PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, and
Novelists). The book is currently out of print yet available through used
bookstores. A French edition never materialized. The text is also largely
absent from university syllabuses, where it is not taught as part of courses
on literature. In academic books, apart from the passing reference to it
as a case of rewriting (Capozzi 2003: 222–3; Stam 2004: 29; Sexton 2006:
217; De la Durantaye 2007: 92; Vickers 2008: 208–11), it only occasion-
ally features as a case-study in discussions of plagiarism and copyright
(e.g. Samuels 2000: 149; Saint-Amour 2003: 216–17 and 266n.37).
Yet its lack of literary merit is not immediately evident. In a special
issue of his journal Evergreen Review, Rosset recounts how, after learning
about Pera’s novel through the newspapers, he asked to read the
translation and decided to publish it: ‘I liked it very much, as obviously
had the American and English editors before me. It seemed to me that
a grave injustice would be committed on the reading public, let alone
the author, if publication of Lo’s Diary did not take place’ (Rosset 1999).
Rosset’s words are telling. As he explains to the journalist of The New
York Observer, his interest in Pera’s novel was raised not just by its con-
nection to Lolita, a novel for which he had tried to acquire the American
rights of some forty years earlier, but because, as he says,
it had been bought by Macmillan, Knopf was also involved, I believe,

and then Farrar Straus – and then all three walked away from it.
That was very intriguing, because I had respect for all three com-
panies and their editors. I couldn’t believe they had decided to do
a book that was inferior just to exploit its name – and then to walk
away from it! It amazed me. So I decided I better find out about it.
(Manus 1999)13
What these words reveal is that Pera’s novel changes from being viewed
as a book worth publishing to ‘a very bad book’, as Nabokov’s lawyer
puts it (Manus 1999). Although the text itself has not changed, the way
it is judged has, and this change has everything to do with Nabokov’s
judgment of Pera and her novel. The view that Lo’s Diary is ‘vulgar, and
badly done’ is, indeed, Nabokov’s; he is the one who succeeded in con-
vincing publishers and other readers that ‘the allusions to sexuality in
Nabokov’s Lolita are eloquent and brilliantly written, the parallels in the
Pera are lewd and tawdry, stripped of the elegance of Nabokov’s prose.
It’s cheap and crass’ (Manus 1999).
Crucial to the whole case is, of course, the copyright to Lolita. First
published in the United States in 1955, Nabokov’s novel is under
copyright there until the year 2050. Only then will it fall into ‘the
public domain’, as intellectual property law calls that which is ‘public
property’. It is because ‘Lolita isn’t in the public domain, and won’t
be until well into the next millennium when its copyright expires’,
as Nabokov wryly observes, that so much is made of Pera’s rewrite
(1999: viii). Nabokov dismisses the idea that Pera’s novel belongs to
‘the catalogue of such “transformative” works as My Fair Lady, West Side
Story, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Updike’s S, Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea’ on the grounds that, as he puts it, ‘Pygmalion, Romeo
and Juliet, Hamlet, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre – all had been safely tucked
into the public domain when the “transformations” were penned’ (viii).
Yet if the case is about profit both financial and symbolic that is judged
to be unearned, this is also because Pera is seen as undeserving of the
benefits that may accrue from the publication of her book. ‘[D]eclin[ing]
to acknowledge that Lo’s Diary is a derivative work’ (viii), Pera implicitly
declines to acknowledge the superiority of Nabokov’s ‘original’. The
perceived presumption of this is part of Nabokov’s defensiveness, as is
his fear of her expanding field of influence: ‘When Lo’s Diary journeyed
beyond its original Italian bailiwick, into Finnish, Dutch, then . . . into
English translation, time came to put a stop to it’, Nabokov says, thus
making clear that his wish to impede the progress of Pera’s novel is
linked to its widening international scope (ix). That Nabokov begrudges
Pera any form of success also transpires from his characterization of
her as ‘one Pia Pera (henceforth “PP”), an Italian journalist, author of
some stories that I have not read and of a translation of Eugene Onegin
into Italian which I have, decided to seek inspiration, fortune and fame
80 Fair Use
from a book called Lolita’ (vii). Condescending in its tone and choice
of words, refusing to recognize her as an author by referring to her as
a journalist and a translator, Nabokov’s description of Pera fits well
enough into what has been identified as ‘a significant strategy in con-
structing plagiarism’: ‘to construe the potential plagiarist as something
other than an author’, that is, as a literary upstart, untalented yet bent
on success, and ‘achieving fame – or notoriety – by virtue of a genius to
which he can, however, only pretend’ (Randall 2001: 161).
There seems, indeed, a parti pris on Nabokov’s part about the
superiority of his father and his celebrated book on the one hand, and
the evident inferiority of ‘Madam Pera’ (ix) on the other.14 This parti
pris works as a presupposition framing Pera’s rewriting as not art but
a derivative work plagiarizing Nabokov and constituting copyright
infringement. Conforming to the received reception of Nabokov’s Lolita
as a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Nabokov’s accusation
constitutes an act of reception that wields enormous power, poten-
tially taking the writer and her publisher to court, ‘spending years and
millions on trials and appeals’, as he points out (x). It is easy to see
why publishers would feel hesitant about publishing a novel to which
such risks attach, preferring to go ‘on to more productive matters’, as
Nabokov phrases it (x). Whereas there is no doubt Lo’s Diary contains
some form of reprise of Lolita, the issue was never the fact of repetition,
but interpretations of the nature of the act of repetition performed in
the rewriting – legal or illegal, transformative or derivative, with motives
that are noble (‘literary’) or base (‘seeking fortune and fame’) – as well
as prejudices about the context of reception: apparently, it matters
less in the context of Italy, Finland, or the Netherlands than it does in
the context of England, France, and the United States, countries with
potentially much larger readerships and hence much larger spheres of
influence. The fact of Nabokov’s accusation, however, has significant
effects, amounting to censorship calling for self-censorship, and damag-
ing to the reputation of the author and her novel. Today, Lo’s Diary is
read primarily in the context of discussions about copyright and thus
as plagiaristic. This reception of the text in turn reflects negatively upon
the author. As Pera tells the reporter of the Toronto Globe, ‘People are still
in doubt whether I am a villain or not’ (Gill 1999).
Although one always stands to lose when engaging in competition,
Pera’s losing is framed as dishonourable. In rewriting and thus engaging
Nabokov’s Lolita, she did not simply meet her better. Risking rewriting,
she lost authorship. For contemporary women writers, as Mary Eagleton
argues in her book on the figure of the woman author, there is a clear
necessity ‘to claim cultural legitimacy through authorising themselves’

(2005: 2). Rewriting may then be a way to author-ize oneself; it may
also jeopardize one’s chances to authorship. Instead of being recog-
nized as a highly talented author, as for instance happened to Michael
Cunningham, whose The Hours supposedly ‘draws inventively’ on the
life of Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway, revealing him ‘one
of the most gifted writers of his generation’ (the quotes are from his
official website), the rewriter as plagiarist is viewed as laying illegitimate
claims to authorship, and hence as fundamentally undeserving of the
credit, fame, or money that derive from it.
Pera’s rewriting exemplifies this loss of authorship and literariness:
in the section on ‘New Women Writers’ of The Cambridge Companion to
the Italian Novel, Lo’s Diary is referred to as ‘Pera’s postmodern fictional
rewrite of Nabokov’s Lolita’ and is said to have ‘won her notoriety in
the editorial world’ (Capozzi 2003: 223). She is not categorized as part
of the ‘New voices of Italian fiction’, the next section in the Companion’s
survey of ‘The New Italian Novel’ – a section, one might observe, that
covers the same period and starts with postmodern ‘remakes or revisita-
tions of classic narratives’ such as Luigi Malerba’s Itaca per sempre (Ithaca
Forever, 1997), a rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey that similarly ‘exploits the
usual postmodern devices of founds manuscripts and intertextual paro-
dies’ by featuring Penelope as she takes her returned husband to task
for having taken so long to return home. Malerba’s novel, in contrast,
is reported to be ‘a most enjoyable metafiction’ (223).
Rewriting the classics, it has been argued, is a way for women writers
to claim cultural legitimacy, enabling them to inscribe themselves in
the tradition, demonstrate familiarity with it, and derive literary status
from dealing in high literary stuff rather than writing ‘personally’ or
‘confessionally’ (Ostriker 1982: 73). Yet this claim may be contested and
legitimacy refused to the rewriter by various gatekeepers: guardians of
literary estates such as Dmitri Nabokov, literary critics and university
professors, or potential publishers deterred by legal aspects of publish-
ing a rewriting of a text that is still under copyright. The rewriter is then
barred from her vision on the grounds that she has come too late: the
writing has already been done, and it has been done better than any
rewriting of it could ever do. As a politics of writing and a poetics that
inscribes the aesthetics of repetition characteristic of postmodernism in
artistic terms, belatedness can thus backfire and be read as a failure of
artistic timing and hence of artistry tout court. Functioning as an instru-
ment for gauging the artistic merits of a work, belatedness then serves
to defend staked-out terrain. The president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux
82 Fair Use
explains why the publishing house decided not to publish Lo’s Diary:
‘It’s poaching on someone else’s territory’ (qtd in Manus 1999).
Reception, I have argued, using the case of Pia Pera’s rewriting of Lolita
to illustrate my point, is the central act that determines the status of the
rewriting, recognizing it as masterful metafiction or disqualifying it as
belated plagiarism. Because its initial authoritative reception determines
the text’s subsequent reception and hence, the text’s fate, it is of para-
mount importance. Crucially, it is also an act of reception that may occur
under such conditions that the rewriting is not recognized as such. Indeed,
if plagiarism is a paramount risk of rewriting, for women writers, writing
always involves the risk of not being taken seriously: of being viewed as
part of that ‘damn mob of scribbling women’, as Nathaniel Hawthorne
once infamously said. Instead of being judged in terms of its reworking of
earlier material, the text is then taken to be (auto)biographical, the writer
writing straight out of her personal life or, worse, out of that of others.15
Thus, throughout the 1980s and even beyond, the term ‘intertextuality’
was generally reserved for the literary production of contemporary male
rewriters, who then formed the canon of postmodernism; women who
rewrote were viewed to produce either derivative work, or genre fiction
(cf. Barr 1992).16 This is comparable to the long misrecognition of the
dense intertextuality of Jean Rhys’s Parisian novel Good Morning, Midnight
(1939), for instance; the novel, indeed, is generally read as a fairly straight
autobiographical story.17 A similar fate befell Connie Palmen’s Lucifer
(2007), a Dutch novel whose title references a whole literary tradition,
including Milton’s fallen angel, novels by the brothers Klaus and Thomas
Mann, and the Dutch tragedy Lucifer by Joost van Vondel, which is one
of the Netherlands’ most important Renaissance poets. Lucifer’s reception
at the time of publication was dominated by controversy over its fiction-
alized reworking of the mysterious death of the wife of the late Dutch
composer Peter Schat (1935–2003). In contrast to Pera’s novel’s reception
as plagiaristic, in Palmen’s case, the fact of literary repetition is totally
ignored, with literary critics in effect refusing to acknowledge the novel
is dealing in serious literary material, made of the stuff of Real Literature.
Palmen herself has commented on this reception. In a public apology for
her novel that was subsequently published in one of the major Dutch
newspapers, she responded to this critical oversight by drawing attention
to the literary aspects of her novel and its reworking of a classic theme,
pointing out that ‘Lucifer is called Lucifer for a reason’ (2007: 27).
To conclude, then, the risks of rewriting are plenty: by rewriting the
classics of Western literature, one stands to win or to lose literariness
and, with that, authorship. Clearly, the symbolic gains of rewriting are
potentially immense: true artistry being recognized in the masterful

rewriting of the established classic work and resulting in recognition for
the rewriter and her text. Yet, as the dominant aesthetic of repetition
and quotation, self-consciously reflecting on the conditions of narrative,
in effect reveals the mechanisms of writing as rewriting, its potential
losses are equally formidable, in some cases leading to literary death:
dishonour to the writer labeled plagiarist, disappearance of the rewriting
that is viewed as mere ‘derivative’ product.
Rewriting and brand management
As my discussion of Pera’s rewriting of Lolita illustrates, plagiarism

especially becomes an issue when the plagiarized work violates not
only the moral rights of the author but also copyright. ‘It may be that
aesthetic uses of plagiarism may now only be potentially revolutionary
in the event that they risk infringing copyright’, Marilyn Randall writes
in Pragmatic Plagiarism (2001: 229). As she suggests, it is when it risks
being taken to court for copyright violation that the rewriting truly
challenge the interweaving of authorship, ownership, and the territori-
alization of language that limits the life of literary language and serves
commercialism and masculinist protectionism. Illuminating the politics
of rewriting, texts accused of plagiarizing copyrighted work help to
contextualize its production and reception by posing questions not just
about the what and the how of rewriting, but also about its social, cul-
tural, and economic context. Such contextualization is crucial to under-
standing women’s rewriting not as a trans- or a-historical process of
textual transformation, but as part of the commoditization of culture of
which the confusion between ownership as a category of property rights
and authorship as a moral category is itself a symptom. Rewritings of
works under copyright can thus be seen to highlight processes that are
always at play in the rewriting of a ‘classic’, whether ‘modern’ or not: at
issue in Pera’s rewriting of Lolita was never the fact of repetition – there
is no doubt about that – but of the perceived unearned and undeserved
benefits that would accrue to Pera. Because she sought inspiration from
a book under copyright, Pera was seen as trying to achieve a fortune
and fame that was not hers to get, but that lawfully belongs to the
Nabokovs, father (the fame) and son (the money).
There is a sense, indeed, in which contemporary women’s rewriting
is a literary genre ‘that always achieves a part of its meaning in rela-
tion to intellectual property law’ (Saint-Amour 2003: 215). One writer
acutely aware of this was the late Kathy Acker. Inscribing her work in
84 Fair Use
the emergent tradition of women’s rewriting as a stealing of the plots

of precursors, she appropriated texts and rewrote them as a means
of exploring the nature of feminine identity and subjectivity. In her
experimental novels Great Expectations (1982) and Don Quixote, Which
Was A Dream (1986), she used ‘plagiarism’, as she came to name her
method of textual production, to address woman’s relation to language
and literature. Opening with an almost literal repetition of Dickens’s
first sentences, Great Expectations weaves autobiography with purloined
texts to literally ‘recall’ her story, at once remembering and renaming
it. In Don Quixote (1986), she rewrites Cervantes’s epic novel to work
through complex issues of woman’s relation to her body and sexuality,
having her endure trials such as an abortion ‘(so that she could keep
having adventures)’, as she puts it (15). As she states on the title page
of ‘The Second Part of Don Quixote’, ‘Being Dead, Don Quixote could
no longer speak. Being born into and part of a male world, she had no
speech of her own. All she could do was read male texts which weren’t
hers’ (1986: 39).
Acker’s strategy to identify her literary practice as plagiaristic and hence
as an aesthetic choice rather than motivated by fraudulent intent may
be the result of a hard-learned lesson, when following the publication
of her novel The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec: By Henri Toulouse Lautrec
(1978), Harold Robbins’s publisher demanded she withdraw her book
from publication for plagiarizing Robbins’s best-selling novel The Pirate.
In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Acker recalls the incident and
denies the accusation, saying ‘I’m not guilty of plagiarism’ (1991: 12).
As she explains, she did not ‘represent somebody else’s material as [her]
material. . . . I have been very clear that I use other people’s material. . . .
I’ve always talked about it as a literary theory and as a literary method.
I haven’t certainly hidden anything’ (12–13). Although the distinction
between fraudulent intent and literary theory and method invoked here
is obviously relevant, artistic motivation is not sufficient to absolve the
writer from plagiarism. In fact, unlike other work of Acker’s, The Adult
Life of Toulouse Lautrec was not published in England – a form of ban-
ning, as she points out (1991: 12).
Openly flaunting the plagiaristic character of her writings, Acker is
well aware of the contradictions inherent in her practice as writer and
her business of writing. She said to Lotringer: ‘If I had to be totally hon-
est I would say that what I’m doing is breach of copyright – it’s not,
because I change the words – but so what? We’re always playing a game.
We earn out of the stupid law but we hate it because we know that’s a
jive.’ Continuing to explain that this is ‘one of the basic contradictions
of living in capitalism’, she told him, ‘I sell copyright, that’s how I make
my money. . . . That’s how writers make their money’ (12).
If the business of writing is to sell copyright, is the business of re-writing
then to fence copyright, selling stolen goods ‘with guilty knowledge’, as
the OED puts it? The cases against Acker’s and Pera’s ‘plagiarisms’ certainly
suggest so, implying that to know ‘how to borrow’ is to know what can be
taken, where and when, and what can be done with it. Making clear that
literary uniqueness is predicated upon material appropriated in such a
way that indebtedness is not visible, T.S. Eliot already stated, ‘A good poet
will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or
diverse in interest’ (1928 [1920]: 125). Echoing the received wisdom that
‘the originality of a piece of work is directly proportional to the ignorance
of its readers’ (qtd in Randall 2001: 235), Eliot’s description of the methods
of the ‘good poet’ reads as a piece of wise advice to any writer who wants
to avoid being accused of plagiarism or charged with copyright infringe-
ment. Suggesting there is pragmatism in the choice to rewrite texts that
are in the public domain, it also hints at the ways in which copyright is a
determinant force in the production of rewritings.
This throws a new light on the current vogue for historical fiction.
Much has been written about the contemporary popularity of the
nineteenth-century, neo-Victorian, ‘hystorical’ novel. As critics remark
on the ‘Victorian afterlife’ (Kucich and Sadoff 2000) and the wealth of
English-language rewritings dealing especially with ‘Victoriana’ (Kaplan
2007), their speculations as to why this period is so favored tends to
focus on the (historical) parallels between then and now, suggesting, in
the words of Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, that ‘The postmodern
mindset shares important aspects with the Victorians, in particular a
belief in its own modernity and the crisis of all categories’ (2004: 142–3).
Frequently, criticism focuses on postmodernist conceptions of time,
opening up the past to the present, ‘to prevent it from being conclusive
and teleological’, as Linda Hutcheon writes (1988: 93); or, alternatively,
it emphasizes the ineluctability of the past (Heilmann and Llewellyn
2004), looking into its engagement with the processes of historiography
(King 2005; Heilmann and Llewellyn 2007).
What none of these writers points out, however, is that the Victorian
past is such a productive terrain for rewriting because, like Shakespeare,
the Biblical or the mythical, it is fair game. If, as Heilmann and
Llewellyn maintain, ‘the Victorians are history at its closest’ (2004: 142),
then their Victorian novels are historical fiction at its closest. That is,
they are the most contemporary historical novels in the public domain
and can thus be re-produced without risking copyright infringement.
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Distant enough in time to be public property, yet close enough to

be still living memory, they are also on the brink of becoming objec-
tified culture stabilizing the memory of the period. According to Jan
Assmann, one can distinguish between two phases in cultural memory.
Communicative memory is based on everyday communications and
has a ‘limited temporal horizon’, extending to no more than ‘eighty
to (at the very most) one hundred years into the past’ (1995: 127).
Memories in this communicative phase are in flux, subject to dispute,
negotiation, and contention. Beyond the temporal horizon of three
or four generations, memory becomes fixed in what for Assmann is
cultural memory proper, ‘cristallized in the forms of objectivized cul-
ture’ (128). In terms of cultural memory, Victorian novels are poised
on the threshold of the communicative and its cultural objectification.
Because they are also novels that continue to bind their readers to
nineteenth-century ideas of gender and sexual difference through their
plots and their continued affirmation as cultural capital, rewriting them
is a particular urgent task.
The rewriting of these novels, then, occurs at the junction of two fields
of power crucial in the formation of cultural memory. On the one hand is
time as it passes, receding to a temporal distance that eventually stabilizes
memory and removes it from the sphere of everyday communication and
negotiation. On the other hand is copyright law, which takes the text
out of the public domain and thus away from certain forms of rewrit-
ing during the communicative phase of cultural memory, fixing it in
the very phase when it might be most open to being transformed. In the
last decades of the twentieth century, Victorian novels are located at this
junction when communicative memory is still active yet copyright has
lapsed, forming a window of opportunity for writers and their publishers,
who can then engage with their stories and the forms of cultural iden-
tification they sustain without risking a lawsuit for copyright infringe-
ment. In this light, it is worth noting the effect of the harmonization of
European and American copyright law in the 1990s. This GATT agree-
ment extended copyright from fifty to seventy years after the death of the
author, safeguarding the latter’s legacy for another twenty years. Surely,
it is not incidental this harmonization happened at a time of intensify-
ing globalization that is also characterized by increased life expectancy
for the more affluent inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere? As a
higher life expectancy extends the temporal horizon of communicative
memory for members of socially and economically dominant groups, the
extension of copyright law in effect facilitates the commemorative work
of these groups. In The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary
Imagination, Paul Saint-Amour remarks on this articulation of copyright

with memory, observing, ‘postmortem copyright has been held to be
coterminous with memory and the lapse of copyright to be a desecration
or annihilation of memory’ (2003: 202).
The law that protects copyright, giving its holder the exclusive
right to exploit the work and license derivative products, performs its
commemorative function by limiting the kind of rewriting it licenses.
What Pera’s alleged copyright infringement case reveals is that rewritings
work according to the logic of branding. Like branded products, they
are works that sell on the basis of their being associated with what they
rewrite, building on expectations raised by it, tapping its promises. Brand
recognition manifestly plays an important role in the marketing of Lo’s
Diary. This is most visible on the book’s cover, which consists of a black-
and-white picture of a young girl’s face, her lightly eye-lined eyes wide
open and her lips half parted in an air of youthful innocence, covered
by a semi-translucent dust jacket bearing the book’s title and its author’s
name, as well as a pair of pink-rimmed sunglasses and red lips covering
the girl’s face. This image evokes Stanley Kubrick’s iconic representation of
Nabokov’s heroine in his 1962 film adaptation, with her red heart-shaped
sunglasses and red lollypop-sucking lips. Although different enough to
eschew further accusations of copyright infringement, the cover is similar
enough to make clear it is evidently, perhaps even defiantly, designed to
visually reinforce the book’s link with the iconic Lolita.
Copyright holders who manage their rights well do so through what
might be described as careful brand management: authorizing or not
copies, adaptations, and other derivative products, they build brand
identity and recognition, and they create and maintain value. To illus-
trate, when Margaret Mitchell’s estate authorized the publication of
Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to Gone With the Wind, Scarlett (1991) and,
more recently, Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People (2007) but sued
Alice Randall for retelling it from the perspective of the protagonist’s
mulatto half-sister in The Wind Done Gone (2001), it made choices
designed to maintain a certain image of the novel. Literary estates,
of course, exist to maintain – regulate, administer, and protect – an
author’s cultural legacy: they are commemorative institutions, ‘ori-
ented around the commemoration and consecration of an author’s
work’, as Saint-Amour puts it (2003: 211). In the case of the Mitchell
trusts, their commemorative work revolves entirely around Margaret
Mitchell’s only but world-renowned novel – a novel, it is worth not-
ing, that has sold more than 28 million copies since publication
(Goldenberg 2007).
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Taking its point of departure in Mitchell’s racist representation of the

plantation slaves as blithe ‘darkies’, as they are referred to in the novel
(1936: 6 and passim), The Wind Done Gone rewrites Gone With the Wind
to address and redress its race politics. As Alice Randall explained to a
group of reviewers, ‘Where were the mulattos on Tara? Where were the
people in my family history?’ (Sachs 2001). In The Wind Done Gone,
Randall therefore seeks ‘to redeem the text’ (ibid.) and, telling the story
from the perspective of Cynara, daughter of Mammy and of Gerald
O’Hara and thus Scarlett’s half-sister, transforms the reader’s experi-
ence of its fictional-historical world. Referring to Scarlett as ‘Other’,
to Rhett Butler as ‘R’, and to Tara as ‘Tata’, she withdraws the reader’s
emotional investment from the protagonists of Gone With the Wind,
seeking instead to draw her readership into the concerns, feelings, and
emotional worlds of her African-American characters.
For Mitchell’s heirs, it is obviously of paramount importance they
succeed in maintaining the novel’s identity, which is key to its mar-
ket position: its image as romantic drama creates more value and is
likely to lead to more sales than its association with slavery. From
the perspective of the copyright holder, then, careful brand manage-
ment is crucial: whereas the right kind of associations can boost the
novel’s value, the wrong ones may negatively affect it and reduce
its attractiveness and, consequently, demand. Because unauthorized
rewritings play a role in its brand image yet are not part of its offi-
cial management, as managers of the brand, copyright holders are
not only keen to see their rights honored and dues paid, but also to
control the image. To this end, the Mitchell trusts have established
‘certain ground rules for licensed sequels’, including a prohibition on
‘interracial or homosexual sex’ and on ‘the death of Scarlett O’Hara’
(Saint-Amour 2003: 210). As the inclusion of Gone With the Wind in
the list of Time’s 2005 hundred ‘best English-language novels’ sug-
gests, to this day, their policing of the Mitchell brand has proven
successful, showing control over the brand image to be instrumental
in maintaining best-seller success.
In policing Mitchell’s legacy, however, Mitchell’s heirs also police its
representation of the antebellum South. Defending the legacy of a white
Southerner of privilege, they effectively preserve its racist image of the
Old South. Its commemorative work, in other words, is in maintaining
a memory of racism that is also a traumatic memory and ‘rememory’,
as Toni Morrison calls it (1987), of the African-American community.
As such, it prevents the transformation of cultural memory, resisting
change in the way the past is represented and remembered. As a group
of writers and scholars put it in their letter of support of the publication

of Randall’s Wind Done Gone,
The discussion of the painful legacy of slavery is ongoing among

American citizens across the nation. Because of the extraordinary
popularity of Gone With the Wind and its unique mythic status,
Mitchell’s novel has become a prime source of knowledge about
plantation life for much of mainstream America. Now is the time
for the American public to hear another perspective on this legend.
(www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall_url/)
The brand management of Mitchell’s novel demonstrates the high

stakes that are involved, effectively enabling the working-through of
collective trauma or keeping the memory beyond its reach, unavailable
for the transformative potential of rewriting. Revealing the tension
between Gone With the Wind’s status as private property and what
Saint-Amour has termed its ‘public status in the national imaginary as
a myth about compliant slaves, benevolent masters, and an Old South
whose demise Scarlett O’Hara famously deplores’ (2003: 212), it also
demonstrates the impact of intellectual property law on the production,
distribution, circulation, and consumption of texts and how it affects
cultural memory.
Rewriting in the post-Fordist literary marketplace
The entanglement of literary borrowing with the publishing economy

has become all the more inextricable as the recent transformations in
the book-publishing industry, submitting it to the strictures of the mar-
ket, have put increasing pressures on publishers to sell books according
to the logic of the market. Ironically, as the aesthetics of a postmodern
déjà-vu and déjà-lu come to dominate the literary and cultural land-
scape, and as technologies of reproduction proliferate, the entangle-
ment of literary theft as artistic practice and of literary theft as artistic
malpractice seen as the infringement of intellectual property becomes
increasingly complex. In addition to considering the context of produc-
tion and reception as shaped by the interests of the book-publishing
industry, there is a growing need to acknowledge how the forces of pro-
duction and consumption affect the material conditions under which
writers produce books. Issues of plagiarism and copyright infringement
may be increasingly complicated in the contemporary digital world
(Lessig 2005), where cases of real or alleged plagiarism abound – in
90 Fair Use
the worlds of music, of film, and of student papers, most notoriously.

The so-called plagiarism plague is certainly facilitated by the new
digital technologies of reproduction. Yet the ease with which things
can be copied – and the actuality of copies being made when reading
online – should not obscure the fact that the predominance of the copy
as an aesthetics is also in the interests of a competitive literary market
where writers are pressurized by their publishers to ‘write something’ to
respond to the demand of the public (Maurel-Indart 1999: 55).
The increasingly short life-cycle of books, reducing the time between
the publication of one book and the next one, effectively curtails the
time writers are given for their composition. Although not all writers
give in to their publisher’s requests for a new book sooner than ready –
or give them something that was still sitting in a drawer – there is
no doubt that, as Maurel-Indart’s analyses indicate (1999; 2007), the
acceleration of turnover times is a significant cause for undue pres-
sure on writers.18 This may lead to sloppiness on the part of the har-
ried writers and their assistants and collaborators, explaining a rise in
plagiarism cases. Rewriting, in this light, is also a manner of literary
(re)creation that requires little inspiration and that can be composed
within relatively little time. To know how to borrow then becomes to
know how to employ rewriting efficiently, as a means to producing a
new book rapidly.
This is what Jeanette Winterson suggests when she acknowledges
having written her parodic rewriting of the story of Noah’s Ark, Boating
for Beginners (1985), ‘for money in 6 weeks’. Setting the record straight
on her website, Winterson recalls it was published three months after
her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit had come out. It is because
she was young and needed money that she accepted the offer ‘to do
something funny’ (www.jeanettewinterson.com).19 In Winterson’s
perspective, Boating for Beginners is fun, but should not be taken too
seriously. It is not a major work in her oeuvre, but rather a kind of liter-
ary entremets – not something in which to sink one’s teeth, but simply
to enjoy for its entertaining value, while waiting for the next major
piece (which would be The Passion [1987]). It is interesting, then, to
note that Winterson’s first two novels both use rewriting as a means of
literary production, rewriting the books of the Bible to tell new stories.
Yet whereas Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) is pervaded which a
sense of rewriting as a subversive and transgressive gesture, potentially
dangerous and explosive, Boating for Beginners exploits her newly-
achieved freedom from the strictures of the old stories and plays with
its generative potential to explore its possibilities for storytelling.
Rewriting as ‘plagiarism’, risking copyright infringement, reveals the

forces of the market at work in the production, distribution, and reception
of literature as cultural memory: market forces, and the system of protec-
tion of the market in the form of copyright law, play a significant part
if not in creating, then in defining ‘great’ or, more simply, ‘interesting’
art. Just as the modern literary field, as Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal study
The Rules of Art (1996 [1992]) has shown, includes the critics and the
publishers as stakeholders whose motives and interests may combine
or clash with those of the writers individually and collectively, so does
cultural memory constitute a field with contending forces and agents
vying for the recognition of their version of the story.20 Therefore, rather
than solely putting the burden of proof on the producer, we need to ask
how the writer comes to rewrite some texts and not others, as well as
inquire into the role editors and publishers, among other co-producers of
the literary work, play in its production as discourse on the past. This is
not to say the writer has no agency at all. As the rewritings discussed in
this chapter show, women’s rewriting is no monolith category of literary
work, but takes up different and even opposed positions on the issue of
writing’s relation to capitalism.
On the one hand, women’s rewriting may confirm the ideology of
the subject of writing through an affirmation of its aesthetics by literally
buying into its politics of authorship. Thus, to the large constituency of
women readers with a disposable income, women’s rewritings sell women-
centred stories by offering known stories with a twist. Tapping into
such popular modes as the mystery revealed – as, for instance, in Emma
Tennant Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002) – publishers of rewritings
perfect the commercial art of brand management, marketing them as ‘a
companion volume’ and offering them in boxed sets.21 Book covers and
flaps more or less explicitly refer to the rewritten text, while layout, letter-
ing, and illustration reinforce the connections between the ‘original’ and
its rewriting. This is something completely different from the ‘continuity
with the women of the past’ Elaine Showalter identified in A Literature of
Their Own, which she saw reasserted by contemporary women writers in
their rewritings of nineteenth-century feminine literature (2009 [1984]:
302). Indeed, if there is continuity here, it is in selling books with an
explicitly woman-centred content to a proven customer base.
On the other hand, women’s rewriting may also go counter to the
ideology of authorship as ownership, seeking to redefine the nature
of writing. The overt aspect of rewriting is a constitutive element of
women’s rewriting as studied in this book: it is central to the text’s
meaning that it be seen, recognized, and read as a rewriting of an other
92 Fair Use
text, for only then does its new perspective yield comparatively new
insights and reveal literary history to be changeable, impermanent,
reversible.22 Yet within a literary market protected by copyright law,
such overt rewriting is perforce limited to works in the public domain.
Copyright puts limits on what can be rewritten (and how) – limits
which are imposed by rules and conventions external to the text yet
productive of it. Overt rewritings of works that are still under copyright
show how those impositions limit what can be said and challenge their
authority by questioning their right to enforce obedience. Thus, in the
public debate over the Lolita case, journalists joined with Pera to ask
to whom Lolita belongs, claiming the iconic heroine has transcended
the intellectual property of Nabokov and become common ground,
‘part of contemporary language and mythology’ (Gill 1999). Similarly,
writers defended Alice Randall’s ethical and political right to redeem
Margaret Mitchell’s novel on the basis of Gone with the Wind’s ‘unique
mythic status’ in American culture, pointing to its public status as ‘a
prime source of knowledge about plantation life for much of main-
stream America’. In Randall’s case, it may be worth noting, the United
States Court of Appeals recognized that the status of Mitchell’s novel as
private property collided with its public significance and overturned
the injunction against Randall, thus releasing The Wind Done Gone for
publication. Randall’s first novel would go on to become a New York
Times bestseller and Randall to be a successful novelist and songwriter.
Truly risking what writing is, women’s overt rewritings of works under
copyright invite reconsideration of what writing does, not just in the
sense of which stories are told and remembered, as all rewritings do, but
also what its social and financial effects are and who is to gain (most)
from it. They expose the gender dynamics of what Randall terms ‘the
complex nexus of power relationships that are simultaneously aesthetic,
political, cultural, social, and economic’ (2001: 229), showing precon-
ceived ideas about women to influence the reception of their writing
and disclosing how value judgments about the nature of the rewriting
in turn, serve to (en)gender rewritings as strong and authoritative, or as
weak, immature, and imitative. Most importantly, such rewritings also
show the forces that clash in shaping cultural memory, revealing the
interests various types of memory-work serve.
Since the notion of women’s rewriting as derivative reproduction,
guarding the realm of production as the realm of men, essentially
returns women to the domain of reproductivity, it may be useful to go
back to the term and observe that the word ‘plagiarism’ etymologically
means the abduction of another’s child or slave. Plagiarism is, in other
words, a metaphor: ‘a transaction between contexts’, as I.A. Richards

defines metaphor in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1965 [1936]: 94), apply-
ing the idea of stealing to a new domain, from one kind of property
(children and slaves) to another (authored texts). The ground of this
metaphor, to use Richards’s terminology, is the tenor’s (stealing texts)
and vehicle’s (stealing children/slaves) shared understanding of the
object of theft as property (117; 96). Plagiarism as metaphor identifies
the author as father/owner of his literary offspring/slave. The meta-
phoric origins of the word plagiarism are now mostly forgotten. The
word has long entered common language, and most people using the
term would not know whence it comes. Yet the associations of the con-
text of origin continue to attach to it: writing is not only thought of
in terms of stealing. The activity is understood and performed in terms
of property theft representing the most odious crime a writer can com-
mit. This is also because the theft poses a challenge to male power as
ultimate authority and rightful ownership. Yet, has not the ground of
the metaphor shifted? Does plagiarism as the stealing of offspring con-
ceived as property not continue to re-inscribe ideas about authorship
that are long past their use-by date? Today, children are no longer their
father’s property and slavery has been abolished (if not everywhere in
reality, then by law). Does this emancipation of the object of theft then
not also apply to its tenor? Clearly, new metaphors are needed – new
ways of talking of rewriting neither as plagiarism nor as property and
as stealing.
‘The most important task for feminist theorists is to help envision
a future that provides alternatives to the way intellectual property is
conceptualized and legally protected’, Debora Halbert maintains (1999:
118). Halbert answers to her own call for an alternative feminist vision
on creative work by emphasizing ‘the relational aspects of creation’ as
well as its ‘communitarian aspects’ (119). As I discuss in Chapter 6, it is
to this task that women’s rewritings of myth seem particular devoted.
Free from the strictures of copyright, rewritings of myth are free to
explore the possibilities of storytelling for alternative futures. In the
context of the literary market, they ‘sell copyright’, as Kathy Acker puts
it, enabling living writers to make if not their living, then at least some
money. Yet because they cannot claim exclusive property rights for
themselves for, say, Medea or Penelope, women’s rewritings of myth are
positioned differently in the literary marketplace and invite different
acts of reception. The possibilities of mythical retelling are explored in
the final part of this book.
Part III
Cultural Scripts
4
Untold Stories: ‘Writing Back’
to Silence
‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak crucially asked (1988),

answering that since the subaltern woman cannot speak within existing
discourses, the conditions that would allow her to do so need to be
created. The silence of the subaltern poses important questions for the
feminist project of rewriting as an intervention in cultural memory.
Can rewriting be a means of knowing ‘the silent, silenced centre’, and
does it constitute a journey into representation as remembered self, or
is rewriting rather what Pierre Macherey termed ‘a sort of journey to
silence’? Insisting it is not enough to speak to be heard, Spivak’s analysis
of the subaltern’s silence as discursively produced both reminds us of
the importance of the context of reception, as discussed in the previous
chapter, and invites us to see rewriting as the locus of a complex and
ambiguous relationship of language to cultural memory and power.
Silence is a topos in women’s writing. It is a motive for writing and for
rewriting. A central theme of feminist criticism, it is also a key issue for
cultural memory. Because remembrance is predicated upon communica-
tion, silence and forgetting are linked: silencing is a tool of forgetting,
and amnesia, Rich writes, ‘is the silence of the unconscious’ (1995
[1979]: 187). Women’s rewriting, on the contrary, aims to remember:
by voicing the silent and the silenced, it seeks to propel them into the
space of representation that is also the space of remembrance. Seeking to
‘know the past’ differently, women’s rewriting ‘writes back’ to silence in
an effort to generate usable pasts, answering it with stories of its own.
Countering the forces that silence, rewriting transmutes silence into
speech. Voicing the silenced and telling the other side of the story, how-
ever, rewriting can also be seen to suppress speech. As political scientist
Wendy Brown writes in ‘Freedom’s Silences’, ‘silences in discourses of
domination are sites for insurrectionary noise’ and ‘corridors to be filled
97
98 Cultural Scripts
with explosive countertales’ (1998: 314). ‘When silence is broken by

speech, new silences are fabricated and enforced’ (313). Brown’s essay
questions the implicit equation between freedom and speech and suggests
it is ‘possible to make a fetish of breaking silence’ (314). As she points out,
breaking silence may articulate experience in ways that are not also true
for others. Certain ‘traditions of breaking silence’ have adverse effects in
privileging some modalities of speech over others while incessant speech
‘not only overwhelms the experience of others, but overwhelms alterna-
tive (unutterable, traumatized, fragmentary, or inassimilable) zones of
one’s own experience’ (321).
Brown’s observations have important implications for women’s
rewriting. Does women’s rewriting break silence in the interest of a
particular perspective? Does it privilege one type of storytelling, so
that other stories cannot be heard, in effect suppressing other voices?
In particular, does the concept of ‘writing back’ to silence implicate the
subject of rewriting in acts of silencing in the very act of responding
to silence with speech? Whereas silence holds all possibility of speech,
rewriting breaks the silence frequently to voice only one silenced story.
Meanwhile, myriads of stories remain unheard.
First developed as a term for postcolonial rewriting in the 1980s,
‘writing back’ has recently become increasingly contested as a defining
concept for postcolonial literature. Alluding to the title of the popular
Star Wars episode The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the phrase ‘writing
back’ derives from an article by Salman Rushdie entitled ‘The Empire
Writes Back with a Vengeance’ (1982). It was subsequently brought to
critical prominence by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
in their seminal study The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Postcolonial Literatures, in which they claim that ‘the rereading and
the rewriting of the European historical and fictional record is a vital
and inescapable task at the heart of the post-colonial enterprise’
(1989: 196). Although scholars continue to assert the importance of
rewriting to the postcolonial project (e.g. Brydon and Tiffin 1993;
Edwards 2008), critics have also questioned the limitations inherent
in the view of postcolonial literature as a counter-discursive practice
‘writing back’ to the colonial centre: it situates the postcolonial text
in relation to an ‘original’ even when it is ‘disputing the very ground
on which any such encounter might take place’ or demonstrates ‘no
obvious interest in engaging the canon in battle’ (Thieme 2001: 5; see
also Caminero-Santangelo 2004).
In this chapter, I explore rewriting as ‘writing back’, not just to the
colonial centre, but to the silences and absences it produces. Whereas
Untold Stories 99
Rushdie’s phrase suggests that to write back is to strike back and, hence,
to respond to violence with violence, this definition relates rewriting
to the violence of (self-)censorship and suppression and to a politics
of silence as suppressed voice. Designating a mode of textual produc-
tion that is counter-memorial and counter-cultural, the conjunction of
women’s rewriting as ‘writing back’ and as a ‘voicing of the silenced’
or a ‘telling of the other side’ inscribes a central paradox: while silence
as suppressed speech is a cause for rewriting, to speak, in its turn, is
to suppress other voices. This paradox is captured in the notion of
‘untold stories’, by which I mean both stories that are not told – that
are suppressed or otherwise ‘silenced’ – and stories too numerous to
be counted. The paradox clearly becomes a problem when rewriting
reveals itself an instrument of suppression, obliterating voices rather
than amplifying them, inscribing oblivion, not memory. This means
that one of the tasks at hand is to conceptualize women’s rewriting as
not simply oppositional, as critics of the postcolonial model of inter-
textuality suggest we do, yet retaining a sense of rewriting as a feminist
project: capable of projecting a sense of feminist possibilities.
This chapter is an exploration of the complicated and historically
changing relationship of women’s rewriting to silence. First, I look at
silence as a topos of women’s writing, examining the relationship of
rewriting to the reclaiming of voice and the retrieving of the silenced.
Then, I turn to women’s rewriting as a coming to speech that overwhelms
other voices, focusing on the vexed relationship of feminism to post-
colonialism. The dynamics of gender, ‘race’, and rewriting that informs
the politics of women’s rewriting I see illustrated by J.M. Coetzee’s Foe
(1986), which I read as a metafictional novel about women’s rewriting.
Examining rewriting as it relates to representation, I inquire into the
possibilities of rewriting as ‘writing back’ for the postcolonial subject,
as well as the limitations it imposes. Finally, following suggestions
that postcolonial intertextuality be rethought ‘beyond “writing back”’
(Caminero-Santangelo 2005), I discuss the haunting texts of Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba . . . (1986) to pro-
pose a poetics of silence that recognizes silence as a complex emergent
phenomenon requiring rewriting be reconceptualized, not as a giving
voice to or breaking of silence, but as a putting into discourse of silence.
In its proposition rewriting be conceived metonymically rather than
metaphorically, this chapter evokes ‘presence’ as a memory discourse to
insist that the question of what can be heard is at least as important as
that of what can be said, and that both are crucial in determining who
and what can be remembered.
100 Cultural Scripts
Silence and women’s (re)writing
Silence is a topos of women’s writing. It was brought to critical attention

by Tillie Olsen’s book Silences (1978) and was subsequently turned into
a crucial concept in feminist literary and cultural analysis. Silence is the
central motive for identifying women’s writing as different from men’s.
In the terms laid down by second-wave feminism, it is also the prime
motive for women to write and to rewrite. It is because woman’s experi-
ence is excluded from the literature of the past, because her lifeworld
remains unarticulated in language, that twentieth-century feminist
theorists from Virginia Woolf to Hélène Cixous have encouraged
women to write. And to rewrite. As I discussed in Chapter 2, in its early
theorizing, women’s rewriting is presented as a remedy to women’s
silencing. To recall the figurative language of Rich’s poem ‘Diving into
the Wreck’, women writers are divers submerged in the sea of words,
searching for the vestiges of female experience that can be recovered
from it, ‘carrying . . . a book of myths / in which / our names do not
appear’ (1973: 23). Rich’s acute sense of muted lives leads to a call to
action that is also a call to replenishment: there is a need for those
stories, which can be retrieved, recovered, re-written.
As a politics, women’s rewriting is predicated on the recognition of
women’s silence as enforced both through regulatory discourses and
repressive practices. The insight into their own condition as silenced,
that is, as imposed upon them and hence, as a form of oppression,
is part of the legacy of the women’s movement. It is, indeed, in the
context of the consciousness-raising activities and effects of the femi-
nist movement that a sense of shared experiences of oppression are
identified as structural and gender based, leading to the understanding
of silence as a condition that needs to be resisted and consequently, to
the political imperative to speak, write, or otherwise break the silence.
As discussed in Tillie Olsen’s Silences (1978), silence is distributed
unequally across class, ethnicity, and gender. ‘Literary history and the
present are dark with silences’, she writes (6). Maintaining that these
silences ‘are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to
come into being, but cannot’ (6), she proceeds to identify them as the
product of culture, habit, and social convention – as gendered, that
is – as well as due to material circumstances and psychological forces.
Olsen’s book helped change the way women in the United States and
outside read and write, putting issues of creativity, the creative process
and its material conditions on the academic research agenda, as well
as stimulating new critical and creative writing (Fishkin 2003 [1994]).
Untold Stories 101
Although recently challenged by Myles Weber, who argues in Consuming

Silences that Olsen’s admirers are misled and that her career is a
mystification – he contends that her thesis that women are hindered in
their writing aspirations is at odds with the fact that Olsen herself was
generously provided with ‘the resources necessary to continue writing
nothing full-time’ (2005: 10) – there is no doubt but that her work
helped shape the burgeoning field of women’s studies and that she was
an important inspiration and personal mentor to many, energizing a
generation of women and spurring them on to write.1 Thus the anni-
versary commemorations of Silences are occasions to evaluate not only
the impact of Olsen’s work, but also the continued relevance of the
concepts of silence and silencing, across time, generations, and place.
In Listening to Silences (1994), a collection of essays edited by Elaine
Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, feminist literary critics explore the
dynamics of silence and silencing about feminism, multiculturalism,
and the literary canon. Earlier, Joanna Russ developed some of Olsen’s
ideas in her How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983). More recently,
Ritu Menon’s ‘The Structured Silences of Women: Culture, Censorship,
and Voice in a Globalised Market’ (2004) reasserts the continued rele-
vance of Olsen’s concepts, discussing the gender dimensions of ‘the
business of silencing’ of what she terms market censorship and arguing
these are only new forms of the centuries-old issue emerging anew in
the context of the World Wide Web and market.
The understanding that silence is woman’s condition under patriarchy
leads not just to an analysis of its circumstances. It also instigates the
reclaiming of voice as the feminist assertion of the self, ‘bearing witness
to what was (and still is) being lost, silenced’, as Olsen puts it in her
epigraph to Silences. One of the ways in which this bearing witness
to the silenced takes place in women’s writing is through the telling
of the other side of the story: the unknown, unheard, silent part of
it – what was passed over in the current and official histories. Conceived
as the opposite of speech and as unrealized selfhood, silence is put
into discourse as repressed speech, an oppression and (self-)censorship
that must be overcome. ‘Write! Writing is for you’, Hélène Cixous
admonishes her readers in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976: 876).
For as she explains, ‘Women should break out of the snare of silence’
(881). The discursive and social fact of silence becomes a motor force
for rewriting from the new critical perspective of the woman-identified
woman writer. Opening a feminine space within literary history and the
literature of the past, it turns pockets of silence into arenas for feminist
discourse. Because it bears witness to silence and silencing, women’s
rewriting is testimony, testifying to the power of speech and of writing,

and to the powers that silence. As the retelling of the old stories from a
new feminine perspective, women’s rewriting typically takes the form of
first-person retrospective narratives. Autobiographical, it fills the space
of confession with stories of the self in the process of becoming story,
to evoke Shoshana Felman’s definition of women’s autobiography as ‘a
story that is not a story but must become a story’ (1993: 17; emphasis in
the original).
The feminist imperative for women to tell their own stories finds
a particularly productive site for the narrative production of the self
in rewriting as a ‘supplement to history’ that inserts itself within the
interstices of the text. Filling, as it were, the spaces between the lines,
such supplement is inevitably ‘dangerous’, as Derrida had it (1997
[1967]), predictably spilling over onto the main text. Narratologically,
gaps, silences, and blank spots are a constituent part of texts. They
form as much a part of texts as words do, and together they form the
narrative (or the poem, for this equally applies to poetry). After all, to
tell a story is to select, and this principle of selection which governs
both literary and non-literary language in turn implies that in a very
basic sense, any telling of the story inevitably always suppresses other
stories. As Cixous puts it in Rootprints, ‘all narratives tell one story in
place of another story’ (1997: 178). This basic principle of selection and
substitution has many names: it is the poetic function in Jakobson’s
scheme, famously projecting ‘the principle of equivalence from the
axis of selection into the axis of combination’, as he cryptically puts
it in ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ (1960: 358); it is also the plot (sžujet) of
the Russian Formalists, distinguishing the form from the content, the
discourse from the story (fabula).
Although contested, the narratological distinction between fabula
and sžujet, story and plot, is useful in this context. Of course, the
fabula does not exist as such: it is a reconstruction based on the actual
telling, which is all there really is, so that plot as the artistic ordering
of the raw material, of the events as they chronologically happened,
in reality coincides with the telling. Yet it allows us to understand
every telling as the suppression of yet another telling, as a more or less
deliberate choice, releasing the possibility of alternative tellings – in a
different style, with another voice, from an alternative perspective. This
notion is central to the Western understanding of literature, leading to
experiments such as Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (1947), in
which he retells the same anecdote in ninety-nine different ways, or
John Updike’s ‘Four Sides of One Story’ (1965), in which he tells the
Untold Stories 103
story of Tristan and Isolde from the perspective of its four protagonists
(and thus anticipates his so-called Hawthorne trilogy, which rewrites
The Scarlet Letter from the perspective of its main characters: Arthur
Dimmesdale [A Month of Sundays, 1975], Roger Chillingworth [Roger’s
Version, 1986] and Hester Prynne [S., 1988]). Reflecting on the narrative
conditions of her revisionary prequel to Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys expresses
the principle succinctly when she has her character Antoinette say,
‘There is always the other side, always’ (Rhys 1999 [1966]: 77; pt. II).
In The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary
Feminist Narrative, Molly Hite similarly points out that ‘the other side
of the story is also, if implicitly, another story’, observing that ‘when
construed as repressed or suppressed stories of the Other, these other
stories become the enabling conditions for the writing and reading of
feminist narrative’ (1992 [1989]: 4).
In the sense that women’s rewriting is a filling-in of the gaps, it is
the actualization of one of the possibilities of the narrative. Supple-
menting the old stories with accounts of the silenced and unheard,
replenishing it by telling what was passed over, women’s rewriting
does what the text commands yet does so in at least initially unan-
ticipated ways. Compositionally, semantically, pragmatically, and
rhetorically speaking, silence produces effects and has meaning. Thus
Brontë’s silence, in Wuthering Heights, about what Heathcliff did dur-
ing the three years he disappeared, before he returns transformed and
in all appearances a gentleman, is an integral part of his characteriza-
tion as mysterious and is, as such, crucial to the novel as gothic tale.
The enigma he poses incites speculation about his deeds and wherea-
bouts during the missing years both within and outside the narrative.
Just as Nelly Dean and Lockwood do within the novel, so do readers
wonder what he was up to in their reflections on the novel, as when
John Sutherland asks ‘Is Heathcliff a murderer?’ (1996). Silence thus
functions as an invitation to the reader to perform certain activities –
activities which theorists of reading have described in terms of actu-
alizing and concretizing the text, of filling its gaps, blank spots, and
indeterminacies (e.g. Ingarden 1973, Iser 1976; see also Kivy 2006);
and which less theoretically inclined readers take up as puzzles to be
pondered, mysteries to be investigated, and enigmas to be solved,
in what Matei Calinescu has termed ‘reading for the secret’. For as
he observes, whereas the novel in general follows the pattern of the
‘mystery revealed’ narrative, the novelist’s art includes ‘the skilful use
of techniques of “enigmatization” of narrative information and plot
construction’ (1993: 240).
Enigmatizations, silences, and omissions form invitations that are

directed at specific readers, shaping the relationship between author,
text, and reader. In our time, these silences and omissions have been
taken up as invitations to (re)write. Brontë’s silence about Heathcliff’s
mystery years has yielded several rewritings, most notably Jeffrey Caine’s
Heathcliff: The Missing Years (1977; new edition in 1993) and Lin Haire-
Sargeant’s H., subsequently titled Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering
Heights (1992, 1993).2 Reading Humbert Humbert’s observation, in
Lolita, that ‘it struck me . . . that I simply did not know a thing about
my darling’s mind’ (Nabokov 1991 [1955]: 284), Pia Pera interprets this
major ‘blank spot’ in the novel as designating Lolita’s mind as unchar-
tered terrain.3 Similarly, it is the silence of Stevenson with regard to the
women of the servant class that motivates Valerie Martin’s retelling of
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the perspective of the maid in
Mary Reilly (1990); and it is the silence of the Bible about the lives of the
women that motivate retellings such as Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent
(1997), in which Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, tells her life story
and so recalls female customs and traditions now long forgotten. These
novels exemplify women’s rewriting as replenishment, filling in the
blank spots of literary history and making audible the voices of silenced
women. Their authors’ motives are made clear in a variety of ways, both
within and outside the texts. Recounting how she came to write Mary
Reilly, Martin explains she told the story to solve the mystery posed by
a crying maid in Stevenson’s novella: ‘I always thought that I’d like to
know why that servant was crying’, she tells her interviewer (Graeber
1990: 7). In contrast, Diamant thematizes rewriting within her novel as
the redressing of a wrong done to her protagonist by having the char-
acters comment upon remembering and forgetting within the narrative.
In a passage that can be read as metafictional commentary, the device is
then motivated, as the Russian Formalists used to say, explicitly linking
rewriting with remembering. Towards the end of the narrative, as Dinah
asks her brother Joseph about their father, he answers, ‘He said nothing
of you. Dinah is forgotten in the house of Jacob’ (1997: 273). In the
house of Jacob, the silence about Dinah works to disremember her. In
contrast, opposing the work of silencing as forgetting, rewriting enacts
remembrance, putting together the character and a memory of her in
the process of letting her tell her story.
Supplying stories of the texts’ silences, women’s rewriting yields narra-
tives as the result of the productivity of silence: it ostensibly responds to
the text’s invitation to its readers actively to participate in the production
of the text. Pondering what John Sutherland maintains to be ‘perfectly
Untold Stories 105
good question[s]’ (1996: ix), such responses to Rich’s call for re-vision as
a kind of ‘information retrieval in these silenced areas’, to use Spivak’s
phrase (1988: 295), are then at least double, both acquiescing in what the
text wants them to do, and providing such alternative readings as have
been termed ‘resisting’ (Fetterley 1978). I have already discussed how
rewriting, as a materialization of the productivity of reading, in effect
becomes production in the most basic sense of the term, producing texts
to be sold on the literary market. This context, I have argued in the pre-
vious chapters, shapes women’s rewriting as remembering, in-forming
what can be produced, marketed, and sold in the contemporary literary
market. In this chapter, I suggest that the market also combines with
ideology to authorize certain forms of ‘breaking the silence’. In particular,
the first-person retrospective perspective privileged by women’s rewrit-
ing has led to the assimilation of the ‘autobiographical’ with the idea of
an authenticity of voice and of self that becomes most problematic in
the context of so-called postcolonial literature. As ideology critics have
been telling us for some time now, what can be said at a given time and
in a given place is subject to regulation, through law, social convention,
cultural understanding. Such regulation also applies to what can be read
and, we might add, to what can be written and rewritten.
As we all know, to speak is not necessarily to be heard. If the silences
depend on shared conventions to be understood – as memorably repre-
sented in Susan Glaspell’s short story ‘A Jury of her Peers’ (written in
1917; first published in 1927), in which the women recognize the signs of
another woman’s despair while the men remain unable to comprehend
the mystery – speech equally needs to be framed in such a way that it can
be heard.4 What can be said and what can be heard is limited – framed,
as cognitive science puts it. Judith Butler has recently discussed the
situation in post-9/11 America in terms of ‘what we can hear’, arguing
that in those days and months, a frame for understanding the events of
11 September 2001 and their aftermath emerged, ‘and that the frame
works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of his-
torical inquiry, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation’
(2003: 4). Frames are discursively produced. Shaping thought and action,
they determine speech and silence, and the meanings that attach to
them. As suggested by Foucault’s analysis of the discursive production of
sexuality, which he similarly unpicks in terms of silence and censorship
(repression, prohibition, and silencing), women’s rewriting is a historical
response to literary silences and the silencing of women’s voices in litera-
ture made possible by the identification of silence as central to women’s
experience and the authorization to speak about it.
Rewriting silence
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault reflects extensively on the questions

of silence and silencing in Western culture. He writes,
Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name,

the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the
absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by
a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things
said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and
what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways
of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot
speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized,
or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one
but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that
underlie and permeate discourses. (1990 [1978]: 27)
Foucault’s reflections are important for thinking through the relation-

ship of women’s rewriting’s to silence and silencing. They demand
that what is traditionally thought of in terms of opposition – silence
and speech – be rethought as not simply mutually exclusive, but
as mutually constituent, integral, and integrated, part of the same
discursive formation. Thus, they invite a reconsideration of language,
writing, and rewriting as not just ways of saying things but also as
a manner of ‘not saying such things’, articulating the told and the
untold jointly and requiring attention be paid not just to who is
allowed to speak and who is not, but also to the type of discourse
that is and is not authorized. As such, they can be taken to formulate
a programme for the study of women’s rewriting as a putting into
discourse of women’s silence.
In addition to providing an analytical framework, there are also
historical reasons why Foucault’s analysis of the discursive produc-
tion of sexuality provides a useful context from which to approach
the question of women’s rewriting’s complex relationship to silence
and silencing, language and power. The first volume of his History of
Sexuality was published in France in 1976 (with an English transla-
tion following in 1978); subsequent volumes would follow in 1984
(with translations appearing, posthumously, in 1985 and 1986). In the
preceding chapters, the late 1970s have already been identified as the
heydays of second-wave feminism in England and the United States;
Untold Stories 107
these are also the years when ideas about women’s (re)writing as a
response to silence and silencing emerged. Telling is indeed the fact
that between the first and a later version of her essay ‘When We Dead
Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, which is included in the collection
symptomatically entitled On Lies, Secrets and Silences and contain-
ing essays from the period 1966–78, Rich reformulates the purpose
of feminist activism by adding ‘and silenced’ to the qualities of the
lives to be changed: so as to ‘help to change the lives of women
whose gifts – and whose very being – continue to be thwarted and
silenced’ (1995 [1979]: 38). My point then is that ideas about silence
and silencing as repression are very much in the air; they are, like
speech as transgression and the breaking of taboo, part of the doxa of
a culture marked by the influence of what Rita Felski has termed the
‘feminist public sphere’ (1989: 9). Although they are clearly directed
at the breaking of the silence on sex and sexuality, Foucault’s remarks
on what he terms ‘the repressive hypothesis’, in the opening chapter
of The History of Sexuality, can be seen to be concurrently addressed
to related transgressions. After all, the sexual revolution took place at
the same time and in concert with the movement for the liberation of
women; they were facilitated by the same social, cultural, economic,
and technological conditions. As Maroula Joannou has argued, ‘the
fiction written at a time when feminist ideas were hegemonic is likely
to reflect and mediate [its] impact’ (2000: 10–11). This is equally true
for non-fiction.
In ‘We “Other Victorians”’, his opening chapter, Foucault does not
question the nature of sexual repression, but asks ‘Why do we say . . .
that we are repressed?’ (1990 [1978]: 8–9). Chastising his contemporaries
for ‘speak[ing] verbosely of [their] own silence’ (8), Foucault suggests
there is something gratifying to the definition of sex and sexuality as
repressed: ‘If sex is repressed,’ he writes, ‘that is, condemned to prohibi-
tion, non-existence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking
about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression’ (6). Speaking
of this discursive production of sex and sexuality as repression in term
of ‘the speaker’s benefit’, he goes on to explain it as a pose involving a
high degree of self-consciousness. In Foucault’s analysis, when we speak
about sex,
we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice

shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure
away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened
by the contribution we believe we are making. Something that smacks
of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law,

slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. (6)
Is there a sense in which Foucault’s sniping is also directed at feminists

here?5 Does the speaking of women’s experiences as silenced similarly
constitute a putting into discourse engaging not only the position but
also the pose of the seer, re-visionary prophetesses of feminist futures?
And is the name of ‘other Victorians’, which Foucault derives from Steven
Marcus’s study of sexuality and pornography in mid-nineteenth-century
England, The Other Victorians (1975), to designate pockets of tolerance
where sexuality can be expressed, not also applicable to women’s rewriting
which, I have pointed out in the previous chapter, has a predilection for
the Victorian age? There is certainly an ‘economic factor’ that is opera-
tive in the discursive re-production that is women’s rewriting of Victorian
literature – Victoriana, neo-Victorian literature, Victorian ‘afterlife’ or
‘retrofit’ – and this economic factor has everything to do with the ‘discourse
in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the
proclamation of a new day to come, and the promise of a certain felicity
to come are linked together’ that is the object of Foucault’s concern (7).
Importantly, Foucault links this to confession and the obligation to con-
fess, which he identifies as central to modern Western society, ‘inscribed
at the heart of [its] procedures of individualization by power’ and one of
its ‘most highly valued techniques for producing truth’ (58–9).
Susannah Radstone has recently challenged the ubiquity and cultural
dominance of confession in contemporary culture, arguing that
the Western world is witnessing a shift from confession to memory.
While I concur with her that ‘an injunction to remember appear[s]
to be becoming at least as compelling as the imperative to confess’
(2007: 2), it seems to me that confession as it becomes conflated with
autobiography – that is, a writing of the self as involving a quest for the
truth about the self that is inevitably a putting into discourse of the self
in accordance with what can be said and heard – is very much a part of
the contemporary memory culture, one of the ways – and arguably the
dominant way – in which women can remember themselves.6 Putting
into discourse women’s silence as repression according to the confes-
sional form, women’s rewriting is a technology of cultural memory
that breaks the silence that presides over forgetfulness by producing
subjectivity as speech in a way that feeds a particular ideology of the
subject. Because it finds its expression within the mazes of the existing
text, this subjectivity is inevitably shaped and regulated by it, thereby
undermining its own project of re-vision as in-sight.
Untold Stories 109
The subject of ‘writing back’
In his analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, Derek Attridge argues that its
protagonist Susan Barton’s quest to have her story told represents a quest
for legitimacy as the ‘assertion of her unique subjectivity’ (2004: 76).
Foe (1986) tells the story of one Susan Barton, shipwrecked on the island
with Robinson Crusoe and a tongueless Friday. Back in London, and
following the death of Cruso (as he is called in Coetzee’s novel), she tries
to get her story novelized but fails to convince the author Daniel Foe to
make a novel out of her account of her sojourn on ‘Cruso’s island’ because
her tale does not fit the requirements of genre. The story is, Susan is made
to understand, ‘Better without the woman’ (1986: 72). For as Foe explains
to her, ‘It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery;
beginning, then middle, then end. . . . The island is not a story in itself. . . .
We can bring it to life only by setting it within a larger story’ (117).
For Attridge, Susan’s failure to get her discourse author-ized is a matter
of canon and canonization, broadly conceived as legitimation through
‘group approval’ (75). As he submits, Coetzee’s novel engages with the
vexed issue of the representation of (female) experience not just in the
narrative but through its ‘chiseled style’, ‘to reinforce the awareness that
all representation is mediated through the discourses that culture pro-
vides’ (74). Crucial to his interpretation of Foe is a sense of the systemic
cultural conventions that structure the stories we tell about ourselves,
and which he explains in Foucauldian terms, as of a process of can-
onization that compels and constrains our representations, to ourselves
and of ourselves, ‘in such a way as to have it accepted and valorized
within the body of recognized narratives’ (75).
In my analysis, Coetzee’s Foe is an important text for women’s rewrit-
ing, not because it is women’s rewriting, but because it reflects on it. Foe
is a putting into fiction of the discourse of women’s rewriting as it has
established itself by the mid-1980s. It is not simply a male co-optation
of a successful female genre, as might be said of books such as John
Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000), telling of Hamlet’s mother’s life,
D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte (2000), rewriting Jane Eyre, or Claude-Henri
Buffard’s novel about Emma Bovary’s daughter, La fille d’Emma (2001).
Instead, it partakes of the genre – it rewrites Robinson Crusoe from the
perspective of a marginal female character – to offer, in rewriting, a
representation of women’s silencing as produced discursively, through
narrative procedures of literary conventions.
Foe dramatizes the woman’s quest for representation, linking her
wish to be heard and have her story told with a sense of self as having
‘substantiality’. The novel relies on its readers’ knowledge of Defoe’s

Robinson Crusoe for its effect, in particular, the awareness that there is
no mention of Susan Barton in it. Telling the story of a female character
so effectively silenced by literary history that until Foe came along, no
one had heard of her, Coetzee represents novel-writing not just as the
plotting of a story, but as a plot against women. In its proposition that
Robinson Crusoe is constructed on the exclusion of Susan Barton, Foe
stages the dynamics of speech and silencing discussed above. Bearing
witness to silencing as produced through social institutions and literary
conventions, it appears to validate women’s rewriting as a legitimate
and worthy endeavour. In Susan’s recurrent efforts to make Friday’s
silence speak, however, it simultaneously poses crucial questions about
its project and possibilities.
Friday’s silence, indeed, is an important theme in the story, and his
silence resists interpretation ‘doggedly’ (to use Coetzee’s term), both
within and outside the fictional world of Foe. From the moment Susan
is first made aware of Friday’s lack of tongue to its closing scene, the
novel repeatedly returns to the matter of Friday’s silence. And so have
critics done, most notably Derek Attridge in his thoughtful analysis of
the novel, in which he reads Friday’s silence in Foucauldian terms, as
‘both motivating and circumscribing’ Susan’s story (2004: 81). Friday’s
lack of tongue is, of course, a crude symbolization of the violation of
slavery. This ‘mut(e)ilation’, as one reader refers to it (Donig 2009),
marks the difference between Coetzee’s perspective on the master-slave
relationship and that of Defoe – a profound difference which also
reflects on the long tradition of uses of the Robinson-Friday relationship
including, most notably, Hegel’s lordship and bondage dialectic and its
life-and-death struggle that is to lead to freedom in universal history
in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Marx’s reinterpretation of it
in Capital (1867). It can be read as an indirect comment on politics in
South Africa.7 ‘[W]ould it not have lightened your solitude had Friday
been master of English? You and he might have experienced, all these
years, the pleasures of conversation; you might have brought home to
him some of the blessings of civilization and made him a better man’
(1986: 22), Susan tells Cruso, thereby evoking Defoe’s infamous scene
of civilizing instruction, where Robinson Crusoe is said to have ‘made
it my business to teach him [Friday] every thing that was proper to
make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak,
and understand me when I spake . . .’ (Defoe 2003 [1719]: 166). As she
recounts to Foe, ‘Cruso would not teach him because, he said, Friday
had no need of words’ (56).
Untold Stories 111
Within the text, Friday’s lack of tongue serves to demarcate different

perspectives on silence while suggesting there are yet many more. From
her early question, ‘What benefit is there in a life of silence?’ (121),
Susan counters Cruso’s embracing of it in stubborn reticence and instead
queries silence. For her, Friday’s speechlessness signals differences among
silences. As she tells Foe, ‘You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish
between my silences and the silences of a being like Friday’, explaining
his is ‘a helpless silence’ while hers is ‘chosen and purposeful’ (121–2).
For Foe, Friday’s silence is the mystery that must be revealed: ‘We must
make Friday’s silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday’
(141). In contrast to Foe’s repeated wish to find a way of giving voice to
Friday’s silence, Susan, who has been living with it, first on the island,
then in London, where she has been ‘listening to the silence of Friday, a
silence that rose up from the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black
smoke’ (118), sees it rather as something that needs to be listened to:
‘It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it holds: silence,
perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear’ (142).
There are many clues, scattered throughout Coetzee’s text, that lend
support to my reading of Foe as a novel about women’s rewriting and
its effort to ‘voice the silenced’. For instance, when Susan tries to teach
Friday to write, she tells Foe that ‘He is writing, after a fashion. . . .
He is writing the letter o’ (1986: 152). To which Foe replies, ‘It is a
beginning’, thus echoing the title of Olga Broumas’s collection of poems
rewriting mythological themes from a lesbian perspective, Beginning
with O (1977). Also, we might see the letter H in the novel, which Spivak
reads as ‘the letter of muteness itself . . . the failed echolalia of the mute’
(1991: 170), as a reference to Hélène Cixous and what I have termed her
récriture féminine: in The Book of Promethea, which focuses on writing,
authorship, and the relationship to the other, the figure of the author
in the text is split into I and H so as to allow her ‘to be slightly two, or
slightly more, slightly unsettled’ (1991 [1983]: 11).8
More importantly, there is the novel’s ending, which I read, as others
have done, as a figuration of reading and, hence, as a mise-en-abyme
of the novel as a metafiction about women’s rewriting. In the closing
chapter, an unnamed and unidentified narrator enters a house marked
with a plaque that reads ‘Daniel Defoe, Author’ (155), finds Susan Barton’s
manuscript and, starting to read it, ‘slip[s] overboard’ to discover the
‘wreck’ that holds the dead bodies of its author and her lover, as well as
a breathing but speechless Friday. The narrator’s movement of immer-
sion literalizes the metaphor of reading as being immersed in a book; it
is also a figuration of Adrienne Rich’s ‘Diving into the Wreck’, the poetic
equivalent of her essay on re-vision in which she allegorizes the need for
women to enter old texts from a new critical perspectives and query them
for the experience of femininity that has been buried within its plot.
In Coetzee’s novel, Rich’s allegory of women’s rewriting as a practice
that revisits the literature of the past to recover women’s experience is
represented as an exploration of the wreck that ends with the discovery
of Friday: ‘In the last corner, . . . I come to Friday. . . . But this is not a place
for words’, we’re told. ‘This is a place where bodies are their own signs.
It is the home of Friday’ (157). Friday, then – and Friday’s silence – is
here held up as the limit of discourse, ‘the wholly other’, as Spivak puts
it (1991: 157 and passim). Beyond or within Susan’s story is the story
that cannot be told, at least not in the same register of language. The
discontinuities between the feminist project and the postcolonialist one
that Coetzee’s novel thus stages are surely to be read as a warning not to
make a fetish of breaking silence; signalling how speech produces silence
in the process of breaking it, it also suggests other means are needed for
re-presenting the untold.
My allegorical reading of Foe as metafictionally reflecting on women’s
rewriting as a mode of textual production and writing of the self finds
further support in Coetzee’s subsequent self-fictionalization as Elizabeth
Costello. Elizabeth Costello functions as a kind of alter-ego for Coetzee.
As critics have observed, the writer and his character share a number of
traits, ranging from vegetarianism and a concern for animal suffering to
their hailing from Australia, Coetzee’s adopted home since 2002.9 Not
unimportantly, it seems to me, Elizabeth Costello is first introduced, in
the Princeton Tanner lecture that would be published first in The Lives of
Animals (1999) and later as part of Elizabeth Costello (2003), as a rewriter.
In ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’, Coetzee writes,
Elizabeth Costello is best known to the world for The House on Eccles
Street (1969), a novel about Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom,
which is nowadays spoken of in the same breath as The Golden
Notebook and The Story of Christa T as pathbreaking feminist fiction.
In the past decade there has grown up around her a small critical
industry . . . (16)
Featuring early in the first lecture of The Lives of Animals, this passage
is moved forward to the first page of Elizabeth Costello, where it appears
in slightly revised form. This underscores the importance of rewriting
to who she is:
Untold Stories 113
Elizabeth Costello made her name with her fourth novel, The House
on Eccles Street (1969), whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of
Leopold Bloom, principal character of another novel, Ulysses (1922),
by James Joyce. In the past decade there has grown up around her a
small critical industry . . . (1)
I shall not dwell here on the differences between these two passages,
which seem above all dictated by a different implied audience.11 My
point is merely that rewriting is emphatically central to Coetzee’s
characterization of his protagonist and thus is integral to her mean-
ing, which I take to include a metafictional comment on the feminist
project of re-vision and its reception, as well as on his own reception
as a writer who has rewritten another novel, Robinson Crusoe.12 In her
lectures, Elizabeth Costello talks not of literature, but about animal
suffering – suffering of which she says we have chosen to close our
hearts, preferring ‘willed ignorance’ (20) to acknowledging shared
liveness. Costello’s shift in interest parallels Coetzee’s, whose ethical
trajectory similarly seems to move through questions of representation
to questions of attentiveness. Is it then too far-fetched to read the
figure of Elizabeth Costello as signalling the complex relationship of
rewriting to silence and silencing, bearing witness to the voices that
remain unheard as the white woman struggles to have her story told
within the frame of existing discourses? Costello herself draws an
analogy between the possibility for experiencing sympathy, a faculty
she defines as allowing us ‘to share at times the being of another’,
including animal beings, with her proven capacity ‘to think [her] way
into the existence of Marion Bloom’: ‘Marion Bloom was a figment of
James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence
of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the
existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom
I share the substrate of life’ (Coetzee 1999: 35). The point is debatable,
of course, and Coetzee’s own novels seem to disprove her claim that
‘There is no limit to the extent to which we can think our way into the
being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination’
(ibid.; see Durrant 2006). But does not the continued trust of Elizabeth
Costello in the power of the sympathetic imagination speak of femi-
nism’s trust and commitment to its limitlessness? Costello then speaks
not Coetzee’s own position, but a position that is in sympathy with
that of the feminist rewriter whose aim it is to imagine alter/native
ways of relating to the other.
The ethics of rewriting
Coetzee’s Foe, then, is not only a didactic aid in the ethics of reading
(e.g. Spivak 1991; Attridge 2004). It also addresses the ethics of rewriting.
Foe teaches about the ways in which the telling of one story – the story
of Susan – is predicated on the silencing of other stories: the story of
Friday, who cannot speak, for he has no tongue, but also the story of his
mother, since he must have had one, unacknowledged, unremembered,
altogether disremembered. Susan says of Friday that ‘He is the child of
his silence, a child unborn, a child waiting to be born that cannot be
born’ (122). Engendered by silence,13 Friday is the offspring of silence – of
pregnant silence, that is, since he is not yet born in language – of a
silence that is ‘full of meaning’, then, since that is the first meaning of
the adjective ‘pregnant’ according to the OED.14 The child of a silence
that contains many more possibilities than the one(s) actualized in the
interruption of speech, Friday thus gestures towards the plurality of
possibilities of speech and modalities of meaning inscribed in the scene
of language and of which he is but one: stories we cannot hear within
the discourse as it comes to us, stories like and unlike Friday’s, of which
Susan says it ‘will not be heard till by art we have found a means of
giving voice to Friday’ (118) and to which Spivak pointedly retorts by
asking, ‘Where is the guarantee for this?’ (1991: 169).
Coetzee’s understanding of women’s rewriting as articulated in Foe
is clearly indebted to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and its critical
reception. Indeed, by the time Coetzee published Foe, in 1986, Rhys’s
novel had become a central text of feminism, inscribing rewriting
at the heart of the feminist project as it is formulated in the 1980s.
Critics seem agreed that the emergence of women’s rewriting as a
feminist project directed at ‘voicing the silenced’ is to be traced to Wide
Sargasso Sea.15 In this slim novel, Rhys recounts the events that precede
those narrated in Jane Eyre, the widely read classic novel of ‘rebellious
feminism’, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call it in their landmark
study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979; 2000: 338), from the perspective
of Rochester’s mad Creole wife. Thus, she gives a voice to the silenced
and incarcerated character of Brontë’s novel. Although there is no men-
tion of Wide Sargasso Sea in their book on nineteenth-century women
writers – a fact that is brought to critical light in Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s important 1985 essay ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism’ – Gilbert and Gubar do refer to it in the sequel, No Man’s
Land (1988: 113; 208), and call it ‘the paradigm for many other works’
in another piece (1984: 257). More recently, Patricia Waugh refers to
Untold Stories 115
Rhys’s novel as ‘prophetically and proleptically [catching] what would

come to be the dominant literary concerns of the next twenty-five years’
(1995: 203). These concerns were ignited by Spivak’s above-mentioned
essay, whose reading of Wide Sargasso Sea as a novel denouncing the
links between feminist individualism and the imperialist project chal-
lenged received ideas about feminism and its emancipatory project of
female subjectivity and sparked the critical industry that has developed
around this novel since.16
Rhys’s novel can be read as a de-enigmatization of Jane Eyre that
gives a life, story, and voice to its central, fearful and unknown, other.
As can be derived from her letters, there is much personal investment
in this novel and Rhys, who was born in Dominica in 1890, was keen
on setting Brontë correct, not just about ‘the “paper tiger” lunatic’
and ‘the all wrong creole scenes’ (Rhys 1984: 262) but also, more
generally, about her misrepresentation of the West Indies. Seeking
to redress Brontë’s treatment of the Windward Islands by writing her
‘poor Creole lunatic’ (296) a life, Rhys in effect demystifies Brontë’s
gothic machinery. In Wide Sargasso Sea, it is what occasions Jane’s
frights – the ‘horror [which] shook all her limbs’ (Brontë 2000 [1848]:
176; ch. 20) – which is explained and what seemed ‘like some strange
wild animal . . . covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled
hair, wild as a mane’ (250; ch. 26) which is made human. Dispelling
the sinister connotations Brontë attached to the region by offering
explanations for what are the prime gothic elements of Jane Eyre,
Rhys’s narrative exorcises the myths about the Caribbean that haunt
the English imagination. In Brontë’s novel, when Jane announces
the appearance in Thornfield Hall of a stranger who ‘comes from the
West Indies; from Spanish Town, in Jamaica’, this leads to her beloved
master’s reiteration of ‘Mason! – The West Indies’ and to his growing,
‘in the intervals of speaking, whiter than ashes’ (173; ch. 19). This
first association of the Caribbean with mysterious and frightful forces
beyond the master’s control establishes the place as an evil one from
which danger originates. The sinister connotations are further rein-
forced by the unwelcome guest’s triggering of the heart-rending cry
that shatters the night. Jane’s first real gothic fright takes place on the
night when she first hears Bertha’s ‘peculiar and lugubrious’ murmur
above her head and then her step and laughter outside her room – a
‘marrow-freezing incident’ that ‘chilled [her] with fear’ (126; ch. 15).
Yet she experiences the full-blown gothic horror on the occasion of
the deadly struggle between Mason and Bertha, when the latter reacts
to her so- called brother’s nightly visit with ‘a savage, a sharp, a shrill
sound’, a ‘fearful shriek’ that makes Jane’s pulse stop, her heart stand
still, and paralyzes her limbs (175; ch. 20).
As critics have pointed out, historically and sociologically, the context
for Wide Sargasso Sea, which was written over a period of twenty-one
years, from 1945 through its publication in 1966, is the dismantling
of the British empire in the wake of World War II and ‘the arrival in
Britain of the first major influx of immigrants from the Caribbean in
the 1950s’ (Joannou 2000: 147). The novel can therefore be read in this
context, its subject matter ‘a response to the changing racial composi-
tion of post-war Britain’ (148).17 A historical novel that addresses, in the
words of Sandra Drake, ‘the transition – or failed transition – to some
other set of social relations that would constitute a viable Caribbean
identity’ following the abolition of slavery in Britain and its colonies
(1990: 97), Wide Sargasso Sea is above all a novel about the stories that
haunt other stories. A ghost story, then – and we may recall that an
early version was called Le Revenant (Angier 1990: 371) – it tells of the
untold stories that inhabit the story’s gaps and silences: the story of
the ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Jane Eyre, of course; Jane Eyre’s other,
the ‘first Mrs. Rochester’ (as a working title of Rhys ran), whom Brontë
names Bertha and Rhys renames Antoinette Cosway Mason. But also
the story of the other of British imperialism and of liberal feminism,
for ‘That’s only one side – the English side’, Rhys writes in one of her
letters (Rhys 1984: 297); as well as the story of how all these stories are
connected, jointly weaving a network of stories capturing social form
and identity yet allowing others to escape through its mazes. ‘There
is always another side to every story’, I have already quoted Rhys as
having said – a statement that we can read as a reminder not only of
the logic of narrative as always suppressing other stories, but also of
the haunting presence of the stories’ other sides: their plural, silent
(‘untold’) side, Olsen’s ‘what struggles to come into being, but cannot’,
the story that is no story, Coetzee’s ‘child unborn, a child waiting to be
born that cannot be born’.
That these two aspects of ‘the other side of the story’ were connected
in Rhys’s mind can be ascertained from her painstaking attention to her
text, of which Judith Raiskin writes in her introduction to the Norton
Critical Edition: ‘What read in the final version as simple, perfectly
crafted descriptions, interior monologues, and dialogues, begin in exer-
cise books and on loose pieces of paper as repetitions of key words
and phrases worked in slightly different combinations, highlighted by
slightly different tenses, word order, and the deletion or addition of
adjectives’ (1999: x). One is reminded of writing (and rewriting) as the
Untold Stories 117
selection of one way of telling that occludes other stories and other
ways of saying things, which is also a choice for not saying things.
As her Letters attest, Rhys is a writer who is immensely preoccupied with
the precision of her language, and Wide Sargasso Sea did not come easy:
‘really what a devil it’s been’, she repeats several times (1984: 296; 297;
emphasis Rhys’s). One of the ways in which she deals with the difficulty
of it not ‘clicking’, as she puts it, is to write poems, which come to her
much quicker and less laboriously than prose and enable her to work
on language from the inside, as it were – from within the perspective
of a specific character or mindset. Rhys’s worries over her wording are
evidence of her awareness of the stakes of her literary choices, while her
writing technique proves her to be haunted by the untold – the many
stories present in the silence that surrounds the words, stories never
completely filtered out or kept at bay, however careful the principle of
selection may be applied to the narrative’s arrangement.
The idea of storytelling as haunted by untold stories is best elucidated
through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and monologism, which
he associates with the novel and poetry, respectively. As he explains in
‘Discourse in the Novel’, words remember the contexts in which they
have been; they carry the ‘taste’ of these contexts, are shot through with
the intentions and accents of others. Distinguishing between the work
of the poet and of the novelist, Bakhtin submits it is the task of poets to
strip the word of these contextual overtones: ‘Everything that enters the
[monologic poetic] work must immerse itself in Lethe, and forget its previous
life in any other contexts’ (2004 [1981]: 297; emphasis in the original). In
contrast, novelists employ the diversity and stratification of voices – the
words’ heteroglossia – to achieve their purpose, carefully orchestrating
the echoes of the words’ previous contexts to resonate in the novel, turn-
ing it into a meeting-place for these voices – a chronotope, in Bakhtin’s
terminology.18
However untenable Bakhtin’s distinction between the work of the
poet and that of the novelist ultimately may be, it does alert us to the
voices that linguistic utterances tag along and thus provides us with
the means of understanding why Rhys writes poems to get to her prose,
for as she says, ‘Then all traces of effort must be blotted out’ (Rhys 1984:
271). Conceptualizing these voices in terms of memory, Bakhtin defines
the work of literary and poetic writing as a work of deliberate forgetting:
the pure monologic poem is to forget ‘its previous life’ and all other
contexts in which it has been used so as to convey only the poet’s inten-
tion; the dialogic novel is to stage dialogues between the words’ voices,
echoes, and past lives, accenting them in specific ways (299). In Bakhtin’s
understanding of literary labour, the principle of selection governing all

utterances and constitutive of narrative becomes specified as the singling
out of the willed voice(s) and the erasure of unwilled echoes, banishing
them from the space of the text in an obliterating gesture. That the writer
may seldom be completely successful in achieving this forgetfulness is
evident from the ways in which the literary work continues to carry other
voices, unwittingly, like stowaways, to use Eelco Runia’s evocative term
for the presence of the past in historical narratives (2006). Yet this defini-
tion of literary labour as the subjection of voices ‘to one’s own intentions
and accents’ and their transformation into ‘the private property of the
speaker’s intentions’ (294) points to an essential trait of the narratives
in the realist tradition to which women’s rewritings adhere, and that is
the centrality of silencing to writing: literary writing, conceived as the
subjection of language to the writer’s will, is an act of suppression. Only
by suppressing other voices can the singular emerge from the many, the
individual from the collective, the discrete from boundlessness.
As story and self fall in line – the self finding its story, the story giving
shape to the self19 – this definition of writing also highlights the centrality
of the particular concept of identity that this view of literary labour
undergirds, showing individuation to be a process, not a condition.
To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one might say that ‘one is not born a
self; one becomes a self’, and this process of becoming an individual self
occurs through a kind of streamlining of the manifold possibilities real-
ity actually holds. Building on the analogy with linguistic sound, which
is perceived as discrete because of learned conventions of abstracting
sound systems from the environment,20 the anthropologist Maria-Luisa
Achino-Loeb glosses identity as ‘the selective suppression of experience’
and hence as an essentializing activity (2006: 3). As she explains, ‘we
are always attempting to eliminate the echoes of other possibilities . . .
identity, any identity, would not exist but for the silencing of potential
otherness’ (2006: 43). In ‘Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as
Cultural Memory’, Jens Brockmeier makes clear what the relevance is
for cultural memory. Describing these muting practices as the centrip-
etal forces of ‘mnemonic selection’, he suggests this function is fulfilled
above all by narrative, thus reasserting the relationship between writing,
memory and forgetting (2002: 22).
Because Wide Sargasso Sea tells the other side of the story of Brontë’s
novel of female emancipation by giving a voice not just to Antoinette,
but also to other characters, it is an important site for the definition
of what reading, writing, and rewriting as technologies of memory can
do. While it takes Brontë’s mad Creole as its starting-point, much of the
Untold Stories 119
median part of the novel is told from the perspective of Mr. R. (Rochester)
yet also includes the voices of others such as Christophine, the black slave.
The third part, which takes place in England, adds the subaltern voices
and points of view of Leah the cook and Grace Poole, Antoinette’s keeper.
The effect of these frequent and abrupt shifts in centres of consciousness
is of non-unitary subjectivity. It is arguably because it does not counter
one story in a singular voice (Jane Eyre is, as the subtitle on the first edi-
tions indicates, ‘an autobiography’) with another singular story in the
autobiographical mode that Wide Sargasso Sea most effectively challenges
the ideology of the Western subject as autonomous, presenting conscious-
nesses that appear porous to one another and ‘leak’ into each other, to
evoke Trinh Minh-ha’s suggestive term (1989: 94). Telling the other side
of Jane Eyre’s story in a form that has been qualified as a ‘writing back
together’ (Haliloglu 2009), Wide Sargasso Sea orchestrates the life-story as
a network of voices that combine, echo, and interrupt one another.
This plurality of voices and the possibilities it presents for affirming a
de-essentialized subjectivity, however, has not always been recognized.
In the debate they fought over the issue now many years ago, Benita Parry
takes Spivak to task for her reading of Wide Sargasso Sea as voicing merely
the white Creole’s perspective and not pursuing the text’s representations
of Creole culture, focusing on it as a ‘novel which rewrites a canonical
English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of
the white Creole rather than the native’ (Spivak 1985: 253; Parry 1987:
37). As Parry observes, Spivak’s a priori assumption that a story such as
Christophine’s is irremediably tangential to Wide Sargasso Sea prevents her
from hearing her voice as it is articulated in Rhys’s text. She concludes,
Spivak’s deliberate deafness to the native voice where it is to be

heard, is at variance with her acute hearing of the unsaid in modes of
Western feminist criticism which, while dismantling masculinist con-
structions, reproduce and foreclose colonialist structures and axioms’.
She thus restricts if not eliminates altogether ‘the space in which the
colonized can be written back into history. (1987: 39)
The juxtaposition of these two perspectives, Spivak’s and Parry’s, is illu-

minating on the issue of women’s rewriting and silence. Confronting
the question of who can be written back into which history and on
which terms, it reframes the question not as the inevitable failing of a
project blind to its silencing effects in the very process of voicing the
silence, but as a matter of the difference between speaking and being
heard. As I have pointed out, referring to Judith Butler’s work, to speak
is not the same as to be heard. Whereas silence depends on shared con-

ventions to be understood, speech equally needs to be framed in such a
way that it can be heard. It is not just what can be said that is socially,
culturally, and discursively limited; this also applies to what can be
heard. Both what can be said and what can be heard are framed, then;
and frames, too, are produced through discourse, determining speech,
silence, and the meanings that attach to them.
It is on this point, then, that the feminist project of rewriting proves
most valuable. For if it is true that, as Coetzee’s Foe implies, women’s
rewriting silences in the process of giving voice, it is also true that, as the
novel demonstrates, it can instruct us to listen to silence. We can learn to
hear silences even if we do not comprehend them, and we can learn to
attend to them – not break them. And this lesson rewriting can teach by
re-framing silence, which is not the same as its voicing, or breaking, but is
a putting into discourse of silence that neither repeats nor repeals it, but
re-presents it in the sense of making it present and available to conscious-
ness (some would say, ‘mediate’ it). Silence is plural and multivalent.
In its ‘eloquent’ form, it conveys information, expresses emotions, and
performs direct and indirect speech acts (Ephratt 2008). It is pragmatic,
its meaning dependent on its context of production and reception: a
silence can be comfortable or not, reassuring, enervating, or infuriating.
It can be conformist or subversive, shared or debilitating. Silence, then, it
is not just the limit of discourse and what needs to be put into discourse.
Instead, it is always already discourse, and as such needs to be attended to
as integral to it, conveying meaning even as it does not speak.
Towards a poetics of silence
Substituting speech for silence and freedom for oppression, rewriting is a

‘writing back’ to silence performing the emancipatory gesture of the prise
de parole in resistance to the suppression of voice. In potentiality if not
in effect, however, it can also be an instrument of silence, mut(e)ilating
untold stories. The selective forgetting effected by (re)writing, foregoing
resonances, echoes, and linkages to tell the specific and essentialized
story of the narrative’s subject, privileges substitution and emphasizes
the principle of selection as constitutive of narrative individuality.
Re-presentation, whether in its literary or in its political sense, partakes
of the metaphorical dimension of narrative. In contrast, to think of
and attend to silence as integral to discourse requires shifting attention
from Jakobson’s axis of selection to that of combination, focusing on
metonymy, not metaphor: as modalities of each other, speech and silence
Untold Stories 121
also exist in relations of contiguity and it is as co-present that silence

articulates the untold within discourse.
In his essay ‘Presence’, the Dutch historian Eelco Runia breaks a lance
for a new philosophy of history that, shying away from representa-
tionalism as a mode of historical practice too exclusively centred on
meaning, turns to metonymy as the trope of the past’s presence in the
present. Metonymy, Runia writes, is a ‘“presence in absence” not just
in the sense that it presents something that isn’t there, but also in the
sense that in the absence (or at least the radical inconspicuousness)
that is there, the thing that isn’t there is still present’ (2006: 20). In this
capacity, it enables the study not just of historical continuity, but also of
discontinuity and of their interweaving: ‘metonymy is a metaphor for
the entwinement of continuity and discontinuity’, he writes (6).
The discourse on ‘presence’ is a memory discourse that puts a strong
emphasis on its spatial dimensions (121).21 As Gumbrecht explains, ‘the
techniques of presentifying the past quite obviously tend to empha-
size the dimension of space – for it is only in their spatial display that
we are able to have the illusion of touching objects that we associate
with the past’ (2004: 123). Because of the linkages between speech
and presence, silence and absence, ‘presence’ provides a useful frame
not just for the analysis of silence as coextensive with speech, but for
rethinking the relationship between rewriting, remembering, and for-
getting. Traditionally, silence is thought of as absence – the absence of
sound, the absence of speech. This conception of silence, I have argued
above, leaning on the work of linguists and anthropologists, does not
do justice to the complexities of silence. Moreover, it shows what is
ultimately a limited view of what women’s rewriting can do, which
cannot just be the voicing of a subject’s story in the liberal feminist
mode of individualism, but ought to continue providing readers with
the means of imagining alternatives to it. It is because this chapter
tries to reconfigure an understanding of silence, not as absence and
hence the negation of speech, but as a modality of speech (and speech
a modality of silence), that the discourse on presence is most useful: it
points to silence as a kind of speech, present in space and time, the site
of alternative modes of articulating the self as impossibly essentialized
but always relational; it also points to silence as enmeshed with speech
and to speech as dialogically interacting with silence within the space
of the text.
The discourse on memory traditionally focuses on representation –
indeed, equates memory with representation. For instance, Richard
Terdiman, one of its early and key theoreticians, writes, ‘Whenever
anything is conserved and reappears in a representation, we are in the

presence of a memory effect . . . memory is the present past’ (Terdiman
1993: 8; emphasis in the original). For Terdiman, the equation of
memory with representation hinges on the relationship to absence:
they both have absent referents. In his analysis, ‘the referents of
memory are always absent. The past is gone. But then, so is virtually
everything else’ (8). In contrast, many scholars of memory have argued
for the presence of the past not just as re-presentation, re-presenting
the past, but as sheer presence. As trauma studies scholars insist, in
a psychological sense, the traumatic past is not gone. It is present
in a very real sense, never receding into the past according to the
chronological unfolding of historical time, but eternally present in the
here-and-now of consciousness.
The psychological understanding of memory, not as representation
but as presence, can best be understood in terms of haunting. In the dic-
tionary sense of the term, to haunt is to be about or to visit some place
habitually or frequently. It is said especially of unseen and immaterial
visitants – ghosts who make their recurrent or continuous presence and
influence manifest, beings who stay or remain usually in a place. And
indeed, it is as haunting presence that the otherness that inheres in the
self and sleeps in the words we use to give it shape manifests itself. This
otherness Western culture is wont to try to master in its attempts to
form the individualities upon which its cultural, political, and financial
economies depend. It features prominently in postcolonial rewritings
of Western classics, ‘writing back to the centre’, then, not only in
the sense of responding to the (neo-)colonial representation from its
other-perspective, but also ‘writing back’ as a continuous dialogue of
voices, acknowledging the haunting presence of otherness in language,
including that of the past and of the dead. I have already discussed
Wide Sargasso Sea as a story about ghosts. Ghosts indeed are important
to Rhys’s novel, from the acknowledgement of their existence – to her
husband’s suggestion that ‘We are letting ghosts trouble us’, Antoinette
replies ‘Christophine knows about ghosts too, but that is not what
she calls them’ (1999 [1966]: 82; pt. II) – to the scene at the end of
the novel, when fearful of ‘that ghost of a woman who they say haunts
this place’ (111; pt. III), Antoinette eventually sees her reflection in a
mirror but does not recognize herself in the image taken from Brontë’s
novel: ‘her – the ghost. The woman with streaming hair’ (111–12; pt. III).
Ghosts are also central to another important woman’s rewriting which
has now reached something of canonical status: Maryse Condé’s Moi,
Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem (1986; translated as I, Tituba, Black
Untold Stories 123
Witch of Salem, 1992), published in the same year as Foe and hence, part
of the same international ‘feminist public sphere’.
Written in French and published with a major Parisian publishing
house, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem was an initiative of Simone
Gallimard, director of Mercure de France, who suggested to Condé she
write ‘a story about a woman from the Caribbean’ (Clark and Dehany
1989: 129), ‘a book about a heroine from my region’ (Pfaff 1996: 58).22
The book, which would win the jeweller Alain Boucheron’s ‘Grand Prix
Littéraire de la Femme’ in 1986, was conceived in the United States where
Maryse Condé was on a Fullbright fellowship at Occidental College in
Los Angeles, at a time when she was preparing her return, after many
years first in Africa, then in France, to the West Indies and especially
to her native Guadeloupe. It is in the United States, Condé recalls,
that she first heard of Tituba and started researching her subject. This
context is important to the book and to the choices she makes in her
telling of Tituba’s story. The biography points to a personal investment
in her heroine’s trajectory and explains the critique of contemporary
American racism in a novel generally geographically identified as
French Caribbean. Her husband and translator Richard Philcox recalls
‘watching her pine like Tituba for her lost island while she endured
her “long solitude in the deserts of America”’ (2001: 279). Condé says,
‘I could not have written the book if I had not been in America, because
I had to breathe the American air, understand what white American soci-
ety is, and look at white faces to portray some of the characters in Tituba’
(Clark and Daheny 1989: 129–31). Thus, the personal investment of the
writer experiencing racism in the United States and longing to return
to her native island meets that of the commercially savvy publisher
who solicited the ‘postcolonial exotic’ novel, as Graham Huggan (2001)
has referred to the commodification of cultural difference in the book-
publishing industry, culminating in the creation of Tituba as ‘a sort
of female hero, en epic heroine, like the legendary “Nanny of the
maroons”’ (Scarboro 1992: 201).
In I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Condé tells the story of Tituba Indian
as the autobiographical first-person narrative of a black slave born in
Barbados, the offspring of an African slave raped by an English sailor
during the passage from Africa. In the historical and judicial records,
little reliable information can be found about her. Tituba is one of the
first persons accused of practising witchcraft during the Salem Witch
Trials, in 1692. Her confession unleashed the witch-scare that would
lead to over one hundred and fifty people being arrested and nineteen
being hanged, permanently affecting the Puritan community. After her
arrest, she presumably remained in a Boston prison. What happened to

her after her release in 1693 is subject to speculation.
Giving her ‘a childhood, an adolescence, an old age’ (Scarboro 1992:
201), Condé reinvents Tituba as a black woman, ignoring historical
evidence that ‘Titiba an Indian Woman’, as she is consistently referred
to in the seventeenth-century records, is an American Indian – in all
likelihood an Arawak woman captured and brought to Barbados, where
she was sold into slavery (Hansen 1974; Breslaw 1996). Instead, Condé
inscribes her narrative in the tradition of what Bernard Rosenthal has
termed ‘the Tituba myth’ (1998: 194), which, starting in the nineteenth
century with Longfellow’s Giles Corey of the Salem Farms (1868) and
continuing in the twentieth century, most notably with Arthur Miller’s
award-winning play The Crucible (1953) and Ann Petry’s children’s book
Tituba of Salem Village (1964), identifies Tituba as African.23 Condé’s
obliteration of the historical Tituba in what for her is emphatically ‘not
a historical novel’ but ‘just the opposite of a historical novel’ – as she
says, ‘I was not interested at all in what her real life could have been’
(Scarboro 1992: 200–1; see also Pfaff 1996: 64) – is, of course, seriously
problematic, especially in the context of a novel born out of outrage at
the injustice of the historical and imaginative ‘eclipse of Tituba’s life’
(Scarboro 1992: 199). Whereas Condé claims she ‘wanted to offer [Tituba]
her revenge by inventing a life such as she might perhaps have wished it
to be told’ (ibid.), she in effect does precisely what she condemns: eclipse
the life of the Indian woman Tituba. In interviews, Condé has explained
her choice for a black character in terms of identity, elucidating it as
‘searching for one’s self, searching for one’s identity, searching for one’s
origin in order to better understand oneself’ (Scarboro 1992: 203–4).
In her foreword to the English edition, Angela Davis endorses the novel
as ‘the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers’, expressing
her gratitude to Condé ‘for having pursued and developed her vision of
Tituba, Caribbean woman of African descent’ and dismissing criticism
as divisive of black and Native American women. ‘This is one possible
version of Tituba’, she writes, adding that what really matters, is that it
‘remind[s] us all that the doors to our suppressed cultural histories are
still ajar’, sometimes hiding ‘clues about the possibilities ahead’ (Davis
1992: ix; xi).
Significantly, such eclipsing of voice is inscribed in the novel’s
original French title. Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem powerfully
evokes the coming to speech out of silence and the assertion of self
as subject of and for history. It also iconically represents breaking the
silence as the overwhelming of alternative stories. Indeed, indicating
Untold Stories 125
a pause, the ellipsis following the prise de parole parodic of Paul Guth’s
historical novel Moi, Joséphine, impératrice (1979) shows a hesitation
prior to the revelation of her racial identity, which then both indicates
the other possibilities lying dormant in the ‘points of suspension’, as
the dots are called in French, and signifies the violence of confessing her
identity.24 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem thus illustrates the way rewrit-
ing as the voicing of the silenced and the filling of the gaps in history
mutes other voices. Yet it does so self-consciously, in a text that both
seems to anticipate its critical reception and to enter into dialogue with
it. Dawn Fulton has argued that Condé’s novels stage ‘a sustained dia-
logue with the critical discussion surrounding her work’, reflecting ‘on
the productive and critical limits of postcolonial theory’ (2008: 2–3). I
would add that such reflection in I, Tituba is especially directed at the
limitations of ‘writing back’ as mode of production and reception for
postcolonial literature.
In the history books, it is Tituba’s confession that sparks the Salem
witchcraze. In Condé’s novel, this confession is done at the instigation
of the self-avowed white feminist Hester Prynne, whom she befriends
in jail. In a deliberately anachronistic episode, Condé has Tituba
meet the protagonist of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century classic The
Scarlet Letter (1850), sentenced for adultery in a novel similarly set in
seventeenth-century Puritan Boston and purportedly found, as its nar-
rator explains in the introduction, in the custom-house of the town of
Salem. The encounter can be read as a comment on the relationship of
‘race’ to feminism, and on the forms black feminism is to take. Reframing
Tituba’s historical words – in the chapter that ensues, Condé re-presents
the ‘Deposition of Tituba Indian’ as it can be found in the archives –
it can also be read as metafiction, commenting on the novel’s own
condition and mode of existence. In prison, Hester teaches Tituba ‘to
prepare [her] testimony’, advising her, ‘Make them scared, Tituba! Give
them their money’s worth! Describe him as a billy goat with an eagle’s
beak for a nose . . . Tell them about the witches meetings, where they
all arrive on broomsticks . . .’ (1992: 97–8). In other words, the prise de
parole of the subaltern woman in the confessional form is here modelled
by the self-professed feminist. It is identified as a narrative mode that
gives its audience what it wants to hear, for as she tells Tituba, ‘give
them an element of doubt and, believe me, they’ll know how to fill in
the blanks’ (1992: 100). Because the historical Tituba, as she emerges
from the transcripts of her deposition, spoke of the devil in terms her
confessors could easily reformulate to conform to their own ideas about
evil, the scene of feminist instruction can be seen as a mise-en-abyme of
the novel and its reception by its own ‘confessors’ – those demanding
Tituba speak what they want to hear, which is the feminist trap of ‘the
desire for a first-person narrative by a strong Third World woman’, as
Jane Moss has put it (1999: 5; see also Fulton 2008: 49).
In Condé’s novel, Tituba introduces the episode in prison by saying
she ‘fell into the trap of making friends’ with Hester Prynne (1992: 95).
Ostensibly prompted by Prynne’s suicide and the resulting sense of
abandonment, Tituba’s friendship as trap can also be viewed to apply
to the trap of trusting her advice. In the courtroom, Tituba speaks in a
confessional mode solicited by a white woman who knows what the audi-
ence wants to hear. Though her speech is successful in its effect on the
audience and grants her attention, Tituba speaks not on her own terms.
Thus interpreted, the encounter in the novel shows ‘writing back’ to be
a mode of literary production conforming to the expectations of Condé’s
readership and inviting a particular – and particularly reductive – reading,
which is then projected onto the text. To perform such reading is then
to repeat the gesture of the Puritans, who took what they wanted to hear
from Tituba’s confession but let her disappear from the record, so that she
cannot be known. In the same way, to read I, Tituba as the voice of the
subaltern woman is to apply preconceived notions about the voicing of
the silenced indiscriminately to all postcolonial women’s literature.
The critique of ‘writing back’ as the mould that shapes all postcolonial
women’s rewriting indiscriminately can best be identified through a com-
parison with Wide Sargasso Sea. Like her precursor Jean Rhys, a writer she
has declared to love (Rody 2001: 186), Condé gives a disremembered and
misrepresented woman from the West Indies a life-story which at once
corrects the (American) historical record and moves beyond it, writing
of life before, after, and coterminous with it. And like Rhys’s Antoinette,
whose final words indicate that since the novel is a first-person retrospec-
tive narrative in the autobiographical mode, she must be speaking from
somewhere beyond the realm of the living, so does Condé’s Tituba tell her
story as one that ends not in death: ‘My real story starts where this one
leaves off and it has no end’, Tituba says in the novel’s epilogue, which
concludes the bitter story of her life yet allows her to live on as a ghost,
a healing spirit ‘hardening men’s hearts to fight . . . nourishing them with
dreams of liberty.’ She claims, ‘I have been behind every revolt. Every
insurrection. Every act of disobedience’ (175). In contrast to the historical
records, which remain silent about what happened to Tituba following
her release from prison, Condé’s novel tells of a Jewish merchant who
buys her and eventually sets her free, allowing her to return to Barbados,
where she initiates a slave revolt before being hanged. In this way, Condé
Untold Stories 127
gives Tituba not only an identity and ‘an ending of my own choosing’
(183) but turns her into ‘a folk heroine of the West Indies’ (Clark and
Daheny 1989: 129) who lives on, literally inspiring social change.
The parallels, both profound and superficial, between Condé’s
novel and that of Rhys, should not obscure the fact that there are also
important differences, most notably in the tone and attitude towards
the autobiographical novel as the textual realization of the self that
writes itself into being. Whereas Wide Sargasso Sea, I have argued above,
re-presents the problematic nature of Western self-realization as an
inevitably failed individuation, tragic in being capable of being achieved
only through the willed severance of the connections to others that are
nevertheless always there, Condé takes a much more tongue-in-cheek
approach and presents Tituba’s narrative project of writing herself into
literary existence as both self-reflective and full of irony. This dual ori-
entation, towards both seriousness and parody, causes Condé’s novel
to belong to the same self-reflexive feminist moment as Coetzee’s Foe.
As Tituba’s thought she ‘was gradually being forgotten’ attests, feeling
that she ‘would only be mentioned in passing in these Salem witchcraft
trials about which so much would be written’, but ‘There would never,
ever, be a careful, sensitive biography recreating my life and its suffer-
ing’ (110), I, Tituba is, like Foe, fully aware of the discourse on gender,
‘race’, and rewriting as remembering in which it inscribes itself yet
keeps a certain ironical distance from it.
Condé’s novel therefore requires alternative reading strategies if one
wants to retain a sense of feminist purposiveness: the demystifying
moment of Wide Sargasso Sea, inviting its readers to reread the classics for
suppressed stories of the colonial other, is here shown to have become
orthodoxy and therefore holding no real critical purchase anymore. In
Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick therefore argues for a reparative
reading, a positionality whose practices of knowing can be found in, for
instance, queer camp and intertextuality. Arguing against the herme-
neutics of suspicion and paranoia that structure much critical theory
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Sedgwick suggests its methodological
faith in exposure and demystification has led to ‘a certain disarticulation,
disavowal, and misrecognition of other ways of knowing, ways less
oriented around suspicion, that are actually being practiced, often by the
same theorists and as part of the same projects’ (2003: 144). Sedgwick’s
suggestion that critics explore paranoid and reparative practices as they
interact within the same text solves a longstanding problem for readers
of Tituba, whose parodic nature is such that the novel is both to be taken
seriously and not. In interviews, Condé has insisted on the parody in
the novel, emphasizing its importance to the novel’s meaning (Scarboro

1992: 212; Pfaff 1996: 60). The parody therefore cannot be disregarded,
yet the reading of parody as subversive and demystifying evidently does
not do fully justice to the novel. In interviews, Condé has explained that
for her, ‘laughing is a way of looking matters square in the face, of not
dramatizing things or falling into a victimization complex or total despair’
(Pfaff 1996: 30). Using Sedgwick’s terms, I submit that Condé, hesitating
‘between irony and a desire to be serious’ (201), writes a novel that is both
paranoid and reparative. As a writer who is widely read and fully conver-
sant with contemporary theory and practice, Condé can, of course, only
write in the paranoid mode if she is to be taken seriously as an author in
the late 1980s. At the same time, the impulse to give Tituba a life-story
is a reparative impulse, wanting ‘to assemble and confer plenitude on an
object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self’ (Sedgwick
2003: 149). Navigating the difficult strait between the Scylla of critical
paranoia and the Charybdis of black female nurturance, Condé writes
a novel that provides comfort and sustenance, speaking through the
parody of a desire for literature as reparative practice. Indeed, if I,Tituba
is, as I have argued above, a novel about contiguity and the connections
figured by the trope of metonymy, this close proximity of alterity is
expressed in the weaving of campy intertextuality.
It is, indeed, the parody that makes Tituba’s life-story particularly
porous to the meaning of others, whose words literally inscribe hers.
Throughout the novel, echoes of various discourses haunt her text, as
when she recalls Samuel Harris threatening her with hanging, adding,
‘What a magnificent fruit swinging from the trees of Massachusetts’ in a
self-consciously anachronistic echo of Billie Holiday’s ‘strange fruit hang-
ing from the poplar trees’ (75; see also 172). Self-reflection on parody as
complicit with the status quo is contained in the novel’s representation
of Tituba’s husband John Indian, whose strategy of survival is mimicry:
‘Let’s play at being perfect niggers’, he tells her as he enjoins her to join in
the revelry that is in the order of things, for ‘[t]hey expect niggers to get
drunk and dance and make merry once their masters have turned their
backs’ (32); ‘I wear a mask’ (74). Yet in all of these references of Condé to
contemporary critical discourses, there is an excess that makes them not
just lacking in subtlety, as some critics have suggested (e.g. Bécel 1995:
612), but also exuding exuberant pleasure and life-affirming fun. ‘I split
my sides laughing while writing the book’, Condé confides to her inter-
viewer (Pfaff 1996: 60). And indeed, sheer fun repeatedly emanates from
the writing (and its translation), the winking at the reader supposed to
recognize the allusion. Take, for instance, the reference to Fanon in John
Untold Stories 129
Indian’s telling to Tituba not to ‘put on such a face, or my friends will . . .

say your skin is black, but you’re wearing a white mask’ (32); or when
he comforts her with the words, ‘What will become of the world if our
women are afraid? Things will fall apart!’ (59).25 Or take the scene at the
heart of the novel, when Tituba is thrown in jail and finds herself in
the same cell as Hester Prynne, a fictional character from another novel
and another time. What all of these intertextual references share is their
over-the-top quality expressive of delight in the play of language and the
disorienting anachronisms, mixing (up) registers of discourses, as in the
use of the inaugural ‘Crick? Crack!’ of West Indian storytelling to give an
account of her life-story (99), or when Hester replies to Tituba’s objection
to her dream of ‘a model society governed and run by women’, ‘You’re
too fond of love, Tituba! I’ll never make a feminist out of you!’ (101).
In this sense, Tituba is the postmodern answer to Antoinette’s tragic
self-consciousness, similarly traversed by manifold connections to others,
yet feeling not undone by it but empowered. Tituba finds sustenance in
the connectedness she feels with the spirits, whose invisible presence
she acknowledges, not suppresses. Whereas the New England Puritans
demonize such connections with the spirits, calling them evil and accus-
ing her of witchcraft, she welcomes their ‘silent presence’ (64) and even
reveals it to others, as when she allows her Jewish master to speak to his
dead wife. The spirits enable her to survive while in New England and
welcome her back when she returns to her island; and when she becomes
a spirit herself, in her ‘real story’ which has ‘no end’, she becomes song
and in ‘constant and extraordinary symbiosis’ with her island, both
material and immaterial, recognizable to those who have ‘learned to
recognize my presence in the twitching of an animal’s coat, the crackling
of a fire between four stones, the rainbow-hued babbling of the river,
and the sound of the wind as it whistles through the great trees on the
hills’ (175–9). These sounds of silence revealing the presence of other-
ness gesture towards silence as a modality of speech and of presence,
marked by proximity and contiguity. In this perspective, Condé’s spirit
of Tituba points to ways in which postmodern subjectivities might
open themselves to ordinary otherness, to seeing and feeling its silent
presence rather than shroud themselves in ‘invented absence’.26 As her
créolité becomes the emblem of a capacious intertextuality that resonates
with the manifold untold stories that exist behind and beside the
spoken words, it also suggests contemporary women’s rewriting can be
a counter-memorial discursive practice that inscribes untold narratives
within the space of remembrance, re-presenting the untold not as
absence or disremembering, but as presence.
5
High Infidelity: Tradition,
Rewriting, and the Paradoxes of
Decanonization
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the canon is ‘A body of literary

works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy
of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established
as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics.’ This
definition marks the canon as a collected body of knowledge, the core
curriculum of what is read and taught in schools, ‘what everyone should
know’. It also suggests the canon has close ties with cultural memory.
In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom identifies ‘the Canon . . . as identical
with the literary Art of Memory’ and equates the canonical with ‘com-
munal or societal memory’ (1994: 17–18). Aleida Assmann concurs: ‘The
canon stands for the active working memory of a society that defines and
supports the cultural identity of a group’ (2008: 106).
Such a definition of the canon as memory is not simply metaphorical:
it follows from the understanding of cultural memory as collected and
achieved through acts of remembrance involving specific procedures
of selection, valuation, and re-presentation. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney
point out that the discussions about canon formation can ‘be revisited
as exemplifying the ways in which societies squabble over which foun-
dational texts deserve commemoration or not’ (2006: 112). Signalling
its role in the formation of (cultural) identity, the definition of the
canon as a collection of representative and enduring works designated
as worth remembering also points to the fact of agency: works do not
simply endure, but their endurance is a function of the activities and
interactions, as well as the institutions, that make it endure. The canon
embodies the values of dominant social groups. As Barbara Herrnstein
Smith writes in ‘Contingencies of Values’, ‘since those with cultural
power tend to be members of socially, economically, and politically
established classes . . . , the texts that survive will tend to be those that
130
High Infidelity 131
appear to reflect and reinforce establishment ideologies’ (1984: 34).

In consequence, John Guillory maintains, it is important to recognize
that what the canon is really about is ‘the constitution and distribution
of cultural capital’; specifically, its unequal distribution and regulation
of access (1993: ix). This role as instrument of power makes the canon
an integral, active, and not uncontested part of cultural memory as a
‘field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for
a place in history’, to recall Marita Sturken’s definition of cultural
memory (1997: 1).
This chapter explores contemporary women’s rewriting in its relation-
ship to the canon, as part of a live and embodied memory-in-the-making
functioning to define what is worth remembering and rereading. The
canon is vital to the functioning of women’s rewriting as an interven-
tion in cultural memory, as is canonicity: the quality or fact of being
canonical. Women’s rewriting challenges the view that the existing
canon is worth remembering, or that it is worth remembering as such.
Its corrective memory-work is part of the critique of authority embed-
ded in the so-called canon wars that raged on American campuses and
in the American media through the 1980s and 1990s. Influencing the
reading and teaching of literature worldwide, this critique was integral
to the fragmentation of History into histories and ‘herstories’, substitut-
ing small localised first-person narratives – Lyotard’s ‘petits récits’ (1984
[1979]) – for the grand narratives of legitimation. As discussed in Chapter
2, it is because women’s experience is excluded from the ‘great texts’ des-
ignated as forming culture’s literary heritage that second-wave women
first set out to rewrite them. To recall Adrienne Rich’s notion of re-vision:
‘We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than
we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold
over us’ (1972: 19). Defined as ‘an act of survival’, the battle feminist
writers and critics waged on the canon was a battle over recognition and
the representation of femininity: over women’s inclusion in cultural
memory, but also over inclusion on their own terms – ‘how a woman is
remembered is critical’ (Chedgzoy 2007: 217; emphasis in the original).
Yet rewriting is not only an oppositional gesture, challenging the
ideology of canonical texts and the perspectives they embody by ‘writing
back’ to it, as I have argued in the preceding chapters. It is, paradoxically,
also a counter-memorial discursive practice that activates canonicity.
Rewriting keeps the canon alive, as well as the idea of the canon. This
feature of rewriting is not a mere undesirable side effect but is key to
the functioning of contemporary women’s rewriting. Ideologically, it
is indeed essential to contemporary women’s rewriting that the texts
it rewrites be of canonical status, representative texts of the Western

cultural heritage, the embodiment of what it holds as important. Its
strategy of denunciation requires the recognition of the rewritten text
as part of culture’s core cultural mythology and expressive of its central
values. It almost goes without saying that the texts are worth rewriting
because they matter. Culturally insignificant texts do not command the
same political and ideological need for rewriting; or if they do, it is from
a perspective that challenges their exclusion from the body of culturally
significant texts, showing them to be really of cultural significance.
Either way, women’s rewriting entails the recovery of women’s stories,
which is a strategy of replenishment that brings them within the scope
of the canon’s will to remember.
This chapter explores contemporary women’s rewriting’s complex rela-
tionship to canonicity. Focusing on the canon’s relationship to identity
and to cultural memory, it looks into women’s rewriting as a form of
cultural recall that is directed at remembering differently, challenging the
canon yet re-inscribing it. To understand how contemporary women’s
rewriting keeps the literary past present, it identifies strategies of supple-
mentation and reparation complementing the hermeneutics of distrust
and discusses rewriting as a form of translation into a feminine/feminist
language. Rewriting is a form of adaptation that guarantees the liveness
of the canon. Proving rewriting to be at once part of the process of canon-
formation and of the breaking-up of collective cultural memory into
niche markets, this chapter explores what I have termed, borrowing from
the historian Maria Grever, the paradoxes of decanonization as a process
that takes place at the level of everyday communicative memory.1
Cultural capitalism
As part of the body of knowledge collected to be shared and passed

on, the so-called classics that constitute the canon play a key role in
collective, social, and cultural identity. They embody what the cultural
elite holds as important and wishes to transmit as tradition, serving to
define its values and designate what individuals within the collective
ought to value for them to coincide with the collective and be identi-
fied with it. As is well documented, the canon plays an important role
in the ‘memory-nation nexus’ (Olick 2003: 2). It is central to the idea of
the nation as ‘imagined community’ and has played a crucial role in the
nationalizing projects of imperialism and colonialism.2 This role shows
the canon to regulate the distribution and access to cultural capital as
a means of enlisting individuals in the collective imaginary that forms
High Infidelity 133
its cultural memory and sustains its identity. Not surprisingly, it is

especially in the context of debates over national cultural identity that
‘cultural capitalist’ notions of the canon and of tradition have recently
been harnessed in the interest of an idea of culture that is envisioned as
capable of providing social cohesion.
Exemplary of the way in which the canon comes to symbolize, desig-
nate, and re-present the values of a culturally dominant social group is
the Great Books of the Western World collection which the Chicago-based
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. first published in 1952. Conceived in a
time of cultural insecurity, its presentation as the wellspring of contem-
porary culture in the 1950s United States can be seen as a reaction forma-
tion, responding to the American post-World War II sense of uncertainty
with its proposition of timeless and eternal values: Great Books of the
Western World claims to represent ‘the essential core of the Western
literary canon’ – the founding texts formative of modern civilization,
articulating the most important ideas and ‘the fundamental questions
of humanity’, as the sales pitch for the sixty-volume collection reads on
Britannica’s website.
Great Books elicited virulent reactions precisely because its concept
of what is canonical and ‘a classic’ was so enmeshed with cultural
power. Initially designed to fill a perceived cultural lacuna, Great Books
served the purposes of liberal education as formulated by Mortimer
Adler, a philosopher and educator who made it his mission to instruct
Americans in what he viewed as the fundamental concepts and uni-
versal truths and who co-founded the Great Books educational pro-
gramme to this end. Adler’s aims were the formation of a collectively
shared knowledge of the past, which then would form the basis for a
Western sense of American cultural identity. His canon was to do so
by speaking to individuals and interpellating them, as Althusser would
say, into ‘the perspectives of history’s supreme thinkers’. Adler’s canon
presents itself as authoritative in that it provides not just the important
issues worth pondering – what Adler terms ‘the great conversation’, in
which all ‘great books’ participate – but also the stock of narratives,
characters, and plots from which individuals derive their identity.3
Designed to stop the work of cultural forgetting in a context in which
the remembering of the classics did not go without saying, Great Books
is a site of memory in Nora’s definition of the term: ‘material, symbolic
and functional’ and driven by ‘a will to remember’ (1989: 19). Not sur-
prisingly, then, it is precisely on these grounds that criticisms continue
to be levelled at what is now commonly referred to as ‘the canon’:
its being the embodiment of a will to remember some authors and
their perspectives, as well as of a will, or willingness, to forget – evade,

side-step, or obliterate – those deemed unworthy of recollection.
A recent example illustrates canonical rewriting as counter-memorial,
showing it to be driven – and still driven, after all these years – by a will to
remember differently that is also a will to undo the canon’s double work
of remembering and forgetting. In 1999, Sena Jeter Naslund published
to critical acclaim her rewriting of Moby-Dick from the perspective of
Ahab’s wife. Ahab’s Wife: or, The Star-Gazer draws upon the few references
Ahab makes to his wife and child in Melville’s classic to tell the story of
the whaler’s spouse. The story of Una Spencer, as Naslund calls her, is an
eventful tale in which he is no more central than she is in his – ‘a looking-
glass version of Melville’s fictional seafaring one’, as the reviewer for The
New York Times Book Review put it, ‘ruled by compassion as the other is by
obsession, with a heroine who is as much a believer in social justice as the
famous hero is in vengeance’ (D’Erasmo 1999). Asked about the novel’s
genesis, Naslund responds,
I thought about how Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick are often

described as the great American novel, so I asked myself what these
books have in common. They’re both quest stories, quests over water,
in fact. Both deal with friendships between men of different races.
These are great subjects. But neither book had any important women
characters in it. This made me suspicious of the canon. It implied that
if you’re going to write the great American novel, you’re going to have
to leave out women, an unsettling idea. (Naslund 2004: 159)
As Naslund explains it, she set out to rewrite Moby-Dick because it ‘irked
me a bit to be aware that the two candidates for the title “Great American
Novel” (Melville’s and Twain’s) had almost no women in them. Half the
human race ignored, yet these two authors’ vision was considered among
the most complete, the greatest!’ (Naslund 2005: 8). Another reason she
gives is that it made her ‘sad that there wasn’t any great woman character
in the book’ that her daughter, who loved the novel and effortlessly recited
Ahab’s speeches, ‘might identify with and whose speeches she could recite’
(Naslund 2004: 159). Thus, the suspicion that something was awry with
the canon combined with the reparative desire to provide her daughter
with female characters to impersonate are what led to her ‘rewriting the
Great American Novel’, as Elaine Showalter puts it in A Jury of her Peers
(2009: 502). Although ‘in the most nonaggressive way’, D’Erasmo writes
in her review, Naslund is in fact ‘rewriting American history, revising
American literature and critiquing traditional masculinity’ (1999).
High Infidelity 135
The will that motivates Naslund’s rewriting, then, is the 1970s ‘will to
change’ which Adrienne Rich so confidently proclaimed in her book of
poems of that title and of which re-vision was to be the central means.
That a will to change the heritage – the inheritance Naslund’s daughter
comes into – still drives rewriting at the close of the twentieth century
is tribute both to feminism’s success and to its continued relevance
to contemporary culture. Its daring feat of tackling one of America’s
sacred monsters, and of getting support for it from the publishing
industry – according to a CNN report, no less than six major publishing
companies bid for rights to Ahab’s Wife and The New York Post speaks
of ‘a fierce bidding war followed by a high six-figure advance’ (Allen
1999; Giltz 1999) – confirm Showalter’s thesis that at the turn of the
millennium, women are free to write anything they want, including
rewriting the great American novel.
But does the novel’s success in the literary marketplace attest to the
success of feminist rewriting as a means of changing cultural memory?
And does it transform the canon so that women’s lives, voices, and per-
spectives are included in the cultural heritage? Ahab’s Wife received many
enthusiastic reviews and, backed up by massive promotional efforts on
the part of the author and her publisher, Morrow-HarperCollins, sold
many copies: 80,000 in the first year, followed by many more in several
ensuing paperback issues and reprints (110,000 in 2000, then more in
2005, and a new paperback edition in the Spring of 2009, not to speak
of audio cassettes, CDs, downloads, and Kindle editions).4 The high
sales, however, do not directly seem to have affected the place and
status of Melville’s classic. Judging from Amazon’s customer pages (but
other bookstores show similar trends), it would indeed appear that if it
is possible to speak of women’s rewriting as transforming cultural mem-
ory, this is only in the sense that women are encouraged to develop
another body of cultural references by reading and buying another set
of books than men. That a society harbours several and competing cul-
tures of memory is certainly not a new insight. Yet the relative immu-
nity of those memories to one another and the lack of porosity of the
various memory cultures give pause to think, especially in the context
of increasing cultural exchange between social groups. Whereas people
participate in different cultures of memory, the commercially induced
reification of identity categories is cause for worry, especially as it may
hinder real and desirable social change.5
The translation, in the literary marketplace, of the cultural notion
of difference into the marketing concept of target or niche market
has far-reaching consequences for the idea of culture, as well as for
cultural memory as creative of a shared sense of identity. Exploiting

the commercial possibilities inscribed in the notions of diversity,
pluralism, and hybridity, niche marketing tailors products to meet
the presumed needs of the targeted market segment. The recognition
of women as consumers and, hence, as a target audience, is thus of para-
mount importance, effectively paving the path for separate memory
cultures. Whereas women had long been identified with shopping
and as book readers, in the 1990s, they were publicly recognized to
dominate the market (Showalter 2009: 495).6 The feminization of
the literary market led the industry to specifically cater to women’s
presumed readerly needs, as distinguished from those of men. With
its female centres of consciousness, women’s rewriting appears
to satisfy these needs, offering seemingly endless possibilities for
women-centred narratives.
This is what Fraser identifies as feminism’s ‘“dangerous liaison” with
neoliberalism’ (2009: 114).7 In this liaison, market forces embrace
feminism’s claims for recognition and use its identity politics for niche
marketing. The affirmation of gender difference that constituted a chal-
lenge to the androcentric norm in the 1970s is given new meaning in the
context of neo-liberal capitalism. This transformation of a feminist
narrative strategy into a commercially successful product in the post-
Fordist literary marketplace can be seen as the happy marriage of femi-
nism and capitalism, with women writers literally capitalising on its
possibilities for ‘detraditionalization’, to use Ulrich Beck’s term (1992;
see also Heelas et al. 1996). Yet it did not unambiguously spell femi-
nism’s success. Giving legitimacy to the language of recognition, it also
provided crucial elements for the refunctioning of identity as motor
force of consumer culture.
Identity, once something one was born into, becomes under the
influence of feminism an individual project, to be achieved, for instance
in ‘becoming woman’ on one’s own terms. Simone de Beauvoir’s
oft-quoted phrase, ‘on ne naît pas femme, on le devient’, does not only
define gender as a social construction; it also defines (gender) identity
as a project. Yet as identity becomes a construction and a perform-
ance, an individual task and responsibility, under the pressures of the
consumerism of liquid modernity, it also increasingly becomes ‘an
attribute of the moment’, ‘devoid of a direction determined once and
for all’, impermanent, bought and sold on the market, and requiring
continuous assemblage and re-assemblage (Bauman 2008: 13).
One of the effects of the identification of gender, diversity, and
hybridity as productive of niche markets is that the canon remains
High Infidelity 137
unaffected. Indeed, in this scheme the canon remains the canon, and
whereas it is not surprising that no reader who bought Ahab’s Wife is
referred to Moby-Dick – it might, after all, be construed as redirecting
the reader to the ‘real’ thing – it certainly is disappointing from a
feminist viewpoint to find that neither does the Moby-Dick page on
Amazon.com refer to Naslund’s rewriting. In fact, the package the
online bookstore proposes consists of the American triumvirate Moby-
Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby while actual customer
behaviour reflects shopping patterns that look like those of students of
some ‘great books’ course.8
The feminization of the book market, then, has led to the recognition
of women’s wishes as readers, including ‘an audience demand for strong
women characters from authors of both sexes’ (Showalter 2009: 495).
It has not led to men sharing in this audience demand, but instead,
has been deployed as a strategy of increasing diversification, where the
multiple facets of contemporary identity become as many targets for
marketing. As Showalter rightly observes, the success of women writers in
the marketplace and the accompanying freedom to write anything they
like did not come with the recognition of women’s writing as part of the
heritage. Neither in the marketing and retailing strategies of the book
business nor in the pedagogies of the literary gatekeepers are the stories of
women marked as memorable for posterity in the same way as men’s.
Yet Ahab’s Wife aimed at reweaving the structure of American cultural
memory, returning the issue of slavery to the nineteenth-century experi-
ence, as well as courageous, intelligent, and feminist women. Naslund,
indeed, has her heroine meet Margaret Fuller, a contemporary women’s
rights activist and author of the feminist Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
as well the Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. As she explains, she
pulled in these historical women because she wanted ‘to show that there
were strong, smart, independent women back then’ (2004: 160). The
mixing of the historically real and imaginary functions to ‘meet credibil-
ity issues’ she felt might arise about her protagonist. Reminding her readers
that there were such women back then, it also draws these women within
the purview of cultural memory.
Naslund was keen to include the issue of slavery, which she felt
was wrongly omitted from Melville’s novel. In this, Naslund’s novel
is much like Jane Smiley’s notorious 1996 Harper’s Magazine essay in
which she denounces the canonization of Huckleberry Finn, arguing
Twain’s so-called masterpiece ‘has little to offer in the way of great-
ness’ and suggesting it would have been better for American culture
if American literature had grown out of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. Like earlier critics of the American canon, Smiley denounces
the canonization of Huckleberry Finn for ‘misrepresenting our liter-
ary life’ and limiting the range of subjects worthy of serious literary
attention. She adds, ‘The real loss, though, is not to our literature but
to our culture and ourselves, because we have lost the subject of how
the various social groups who may not escape to the wilderness are to
get along in society; and, in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the hard-
nosed, unsentimental dialogue about race that we should have been
having since before the Civil War’ (1996: 66). Likewise, Ahab’s Wife
re-represents the nineteenth-century and, constructing an alternative
genealogy for American literature and culture, attempts to transform
its memory by changing its canon. It is certainly telling that in the
paratextual ‘P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . ’ that frames the novel
in its HarperPerennial edition, Twain is not included in Naslund’s
list of ‘Fourteen Books That Influenced the Creation of Ahab’s Wife’
while Uncle Tom’s Cabin is mentioned second after Melville’s Moby-Dick
(Naslund 2005: 13). Suggesting an alternative set of memorable texts,
Naslund evidently makes a serious effort to reorient the ‘great conver-
sation’ that is the canon as it was first defined by Adler, and which
still does not include Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel among its ‘500
Classics in 60 Beautiful Volumes’. Making the meaning and relevance
of Melville’s novel subject of everyday communicative memory, Ahab’s
Wife effectively lays the foundations for a radical transformation of
American cultural memory.
Supplementary rewritings of female tradition
From Virginia Woolf’s cautious suggestion women re-write history

as a supplement in which women might figure without impropriety
to Naslund’s bold rewriting of the great American novel, the status
of women’s rewriting has changed considerably. This is undoubt-
edly due to the changed position of the women writer in the literary
marketplace. Whereas Woolf writes at a time when ideas about femi-
ninity circumscribed women’s writing lives by gendered norms and
expectations, today, it seems, women of the Western world can write,
in Annie Proulx’s memorable phrase, ‘about anything they want, any
sex they want, any place they want’ (qtd in Showalter 2009: 494).
This ‘anything’ would appear to include, in the context of the United
States, ‘the Great American Novel’ – that deeply nationalist concept of
some quintessentially American novel rooted in ideas about cultural
distinctness that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century.
High Infidelity 139
Referring to novels that presumably perfectly embody the American

culture and spirit, it is crucially linked to the notion of an American
literary canon.
For Naslund to rewrite the great American novel is then to exercise
her right as a woman of her time to write about whichever subject
she wants.9 Yet, if the position of women writers has changed and if
the industry has backed Naslund in her project, the novel’s effect on
cultural memory will remain marginal unless it becomes part of what
Showalter has termed ‘the vigorous public debate of a critical trial’
(2009: xii). It is too early, of course, to say whether Ahab’s Wife will
have a lasting impact on the cultural memory of America. This will
depend upon its further reception. What can already be said is that
as long as it remains confined to a domain of women’s literature read
by women individually and discussed in women’s book clubs, it will
continue to be construed as speaking to women’s concerns rather
than to those of culture at large. In this sense, women’s rewriting
often forms a supplement, a swelling yet separate ‘tiny rivulet’ flow-
ing ‘alongside the river of heroic songs’, as Christa Wolf’s Cassandra
puts it (1984: 81).
One of the paradoxes of women’s rewriting, then, is that while
it directs itself to destabilizing ‘the canon’ – or, only slightly more
modestly, a canonical ‘great text’ – it draws on processes of canonization
to affirm the values of another social group than the culturally domi-
nant ones apparently seen reflected in it. From the 1980s onwards,
women’s rewriting is aware of this paradox, self-consciously reflecting
on female traditions of storytelling as separate from male hegemonic
ones. Especially the idea of a split social memory, separating a domi-
nant, socially valued and canonized one from marginalized or other-
wise suppressed traditions of experience, is the subject of sustained
reflection in novels that, ranging from Wolf’s Cassandra (1983) to Anita
Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997), can be identified as ‘supplementary’
rewritings of female tradition. So Diamant’s Biblical rewriting opens in
the voice of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, who starts to recount
her story with the words, ‘We have been lost to each other for so long’,
thus seeking to re-establish the severed connection between teller and
reader and found a line of narrative descent that is also a line of female
knowledge. As Dinah continues to explain,
My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not

your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was
broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no
way of knowing. This is why I became a footnote, my story a brief

detour between the well-known history of my father, Jacob, and the
celebrated chronicle of Joseph, my brother. (1997: 1)
In the same way, Wolf’s Cassandra speaks of ‘all-important things’ that

go unrecorded and so are not transmitted to posterity: ‘No one will
learn these all-important things about us. The scribes’ tablets, baked in
the flames of Troy, transmit the palace accounts, the records of grain,
urns, weapons, prisoners. There are no signs for pain, happiness, love.
That seems to me an extreme misfortune’ (1984: 78).
Whereas the aims of these two rewritings differ significantly, the one
inscribed in the Jewish tradition of midrash and giving the biblical text
relevance to women readers today, the other one telling of a distant
and mythical past to speak of concerns of contemporary relevance for
the then East German writer, they share the sense of severed female
traditions of knowledge interrupted by male traditions of epic writing.
This is formulated especially clearly in Wolf’s Cassandra, an interior mon-
ologue in which the Trojan princess looks back on her life as she awaits
her death in front of the gates of Mycenae, the home of Agamemnon,
the warlord returned triumphant from the war in Troy with Cassandra as
booty. Cassandra recalls the women’s lives on the margins of the bloody
events, remembering that while the men were waging war, the women
were occupied with activities directed at the continuation of daily life.
Their main thoughts, however, were for the future:
But more than anything else we talked about those who would come
after us. What they would be like. Whether they would still know
who we are. Whether they would repair our omissions, rectify our
mistakes. We racked our brains trying to think of a way we could leave
them a message, but did not know any script to write it. (132–3)
What is represented in these novels as the narrator’s desire to have her

story remembered is, of course, a projection from the present onto the
past. The interrupted line of descent is a disjunction between past and
present as perceived from the perspective of the present. Likewise, the con-
cerns expressed by the women in the past about their future memory is in
reality a concern about the present, namely that having lost the memory
and the knowledge it contains, it has also lost a treasure-trove of wisdom.
In her book on women’s biography, Janet Beizer speaks of such projec-
tions as ‘bio-autography’, ‘the writing of a self through the representation
of another’s life’ and, as such, inscribing a ‘transferential relationship’
High Infidelity 141
akin to that of psychoanalytic therapy (2009: 3; 31). Beizer rightly criticizes

‘bio-autography’ for its imposition of ‘another consciousness – the sensi-
bility of another age – ’ (63) onto the past. Women’s rewriting, whether
of the story of a historical or a fictional forebear, cannot simply ‘resurrect’
and re-present her. It cannot be taken as the truth of the past. Instead, it
speaks of the present and needs to be read as a story of desire – for the
‘lost mother’, the lost maternal tradition, and the loss of the fullness of
memory.
In Wolf’s Cassandra, mourning loss is social criticism and remembering,
a way of re-imagining the future. Wolf’s Cassandra is a tale of desire for
a more hopeful future than the one projected by 1980s militarism and
atomic armament. Using the time-honoured device of speaking of places
distant in space and time to voice criticism of the present, Wolf’s novel
shows memory loss to have particularly far-reaching consequences by
establishing a parallel between the situation in Troy and that in Europe
in the early 1980s and suggesting there is a causal relation between the
two. Christa Wolf, it should be noted, is a writer whose allegiance to
her country’s socialist regime was tinged by a feminist commitment to
pacifism and environmentalism. Especially concerned at the time with
the threat of a nuclear war and the situation of the German Democratic
Republic in the wake of the cold war, she writes about Troy to warn
about the dangers of rearmament, because, she explains in a conversa-
tion about the novel, ‘I could say even more about our culture when
she stayed in her time’ (Reck et al. 1984: 106). In her analysis, Troy was
defeated because it compromised its integrity and opted for conformity
to the militaristic mentality to which it was introduced by its Achaean
enemies. It is because the Trojans had become self-estranged as a result of
the implementation of a new regime marked by an insistence on prop-
erty and hierarchy and the gradual exclusion of women from the public
sphere that Troy, which had in effect already capitulated to the Achaeans’
way of thinking, lost the war. In this way, Wolf ascribes alienation not to
the evils of industrialization, as the GDR’s Marxist policy was wont to do,
but suggests it finds its roots in the beginnings of Western civilization,
when the social fabric was rewoven without the women and a utilitarian
pragmatism replaced knowledge and self-knowledge with a polarizing
and hierarchical militarism.
Writing about the past to speak of the present, Wolf casts herself
as a modern Cassandra whose warnings, like those of the mythical
seeress who was given the gift of prophecy but was cursed not to be
believed, go unheeded. The identification of the writer with Cassandra
is suggested through the novel’s framing paragraphs, which bookend
Cassandra’s stream-of-consciousness narrative with an account of the

narrator standing before Agamemnon’s gate looking onto the same
stone lions that looked at Cassandra, making her way into and out
of the mind of the Trojan seeress. It is repeated in several texts Wolf
wrote and spoke about the same time, suggesting a trust in, and a
failure of, learning from the past (e.g. Wolf 1981).10 Thus the rewriting
takes on the quality of teachings from the past that went unheeded.
However, for Wolf to cast her words of warning as those of the priestess
doomed not to be believed – is that not to pre-empt the possibility of
them ever being heeded, thus in effect marking them as were they the
beginning of the end of learning from the past? Whereas feminism,
as Gail Finney has argued, can be seen to represent ‘the culmination
of the humanistic rethinking of socialism that motivates Wolf’s entire
oeuvre’ (1999: 87), this feminism is also cast as a world marginalized
in a patriarchal culture that values heroism, war, and aggression and
that objectifies women.
Wolf’s Cassandra presents the failure of learning from the past as a fact
of history, the direct consequence of a gendered division of memory
with its exclusion of women and the nitty-gritty of daily life and love
from the written record and its focus on male heroism and rivalry
instead. Whereas the epic, like ancient history, contains the records of
its leaders’ ‘great’ deeds, this archive of writing as memory-keeping is
contrasted with the memorializing traditions of women’s oral transmis-
sion of knowledge. Thus Cassandra imagines addressing Agamemnon’s
wife, Clytemnestra, imploring her,
Send me a scribe, or better yet a young slave woman with a keen

memory and a powerful voice. Ordain that she may repeat to her
daughter what she hears from me. That the daughter in turn may
pass it on to her daughter, and so on. So that alongside the river of
heroic songs, this tiny rivulet, too, may reach those faraway, perhaps
happier people who will live in times to come. (1984: 81)
In the series of lectures that culminates in Cassandra, Christa Wolf reflects

on the conditions of the narrative and observes that there is such a
thing as women’s writing precisely because ‘women, for historical and
biological reasons, experience another reality than men do’ (1984: 259).
The consequence of a sexual division of experience – of labour, space,
association, etc., in fact, of virtually everything and hence, also of time –
this difference is represented by Wolf as founded by the systems of
patriarchal values and institutions brought to Troy by the war with the
High Infidelity 143
Greeks, which disrupted and marginalized a community characterized

by sexual equality, love, and care. Like Cixous, Wolf reads the Oresteia
as marking the advent of patriarchy and returns to Aeschylus’s plays
to understand its mechanisms of division and marginalization, as well
as the reasons behind the existence of different bodies of writing com-
memorating different cultures of social interaction. In this way, her
rewriting also serves the purposes of identifying an alternative to the
present, which is here, as in other women’s rewritings, located in some
faraway mythical past.11
The unheeded lessons of the past articulated in Wolf’s Cassandra
contrast with the teachings of Diamant’s The Red Tent, on the one hand,
and with those of Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, on the other. Both novels tap
into the separate cultures of women’s reading and writing that emerged
in the 1990s with the feminization of the literary market. Yet they
address these cultures differently, formulating different answers to the
question of women’s relation to literary tradition, collective memory,
and the canon. A book that initially went unnoticed but that is now
a bestseller thanks to the efforts of its author, who bought the remain-
dered copies and distributed these widely in an attempt to find a reader-
ship, The Red Tent tells of the female-centred world of Jacob’s four wives
and their many children, and of their religious rituals and practices of
daily life, from within. Evoking the strength and resilience of Dinah
and her mothers, The Red Tent speaks to its readers in a way which has
been described as ‘at once intensely personal and deeply relational’ as
well as ‘hopeful and uplifting’, offering possibilities of identification
as well as models for sociality. As the author of the study guide Inside the
Red Tent puts it, ‘The Red Tent is hopeful and uplifting because it offers
an alternative view of what many Bible readers have often imagined was
the lonely and miserable life of biblical women. . . . Even when events
result in the most tragic consequences, these women survive, discover
new support networks, and live on to see another joyful day’ (Polaski
2006: 2). Suggesting the novel may not only yield knowledge and pleas-
ure but also offer insights applicable to the reader’s own life, she goes
on to attribute therapeutic value to it, emphasizing the possibilities it
provides for gaining strength and finding support through female com-
munities: ‘If you are a woman reading this book with other women,
your experience of the book may spur you to create or rediscover rituals
that celebrate your life together as women’ (4).
In contrast, Ahab’s Wife seems to want to make up for the loss that the
exclusion of courageous and intelligent women and their spiritual quest,
as well as the silence about race and slavery, form for contemporary
culture. In her notorious Harper’s piece, Jane Smiley argued that the
exclusion of a range of subjects from the ‘great conversation’ that forms
the canon constitutes an important loss for society. In particular, she
maintained that when Stowe’s voice ‘fell silent in our culture and was
replaced by the secretive voice of Huck Finn, . . . racism fell out of the
public world and into the private one, where whites think it really is but
blacks know it really isn’t’ (1996: 67). Much like Smiley proposed in her
article, so does Naslund return slavery to the nineteenth century. ‘One of
the things that Melville didn’t do in Moby-Dick was deal with the slavery
issue.’ Therefore, Naslund explains, ‘I thought that if I was going to write
an epic novel of this historic period, I couldn’t not deal with the issue
of slavery. Melville was an abolitionist. His heart was in the right place,
but slavery wasn’t an important issue in Moby-Dick. I wanted to include
the slavery issue . . . ’(2004: 160). Rewriting Moby-Dick for a richer sense
of cultural and intellectual life – in fact, suggesting Ahab’s single-minded
obsession with the whale is misconceived masculinity – Naslund’s novel
engages tradition as canonized to open it up to subjects forgotten or
repressed, bringing them within the purview of canonization as cultural
remembering. As such, it does not merely represent a supplement to
literary history in Woolf’s sense of the term but offers itself as a narrative
of recovery for a culture whose prime mechanism of cultural remem-
brance, canonization, has caused its failure of being a better society.
Thus, it stands closer to Wolf’s conception of women’s rewriting as a tiny
rivulet that is ultimately to flow into the sea of cultural memory than to
Diamant’s The Red Tent with its explicit evocation of a shared sphere of
female experience and deliberate cultivation of a female memory.
Suspicion and after
Central to the emergence of contemporary women’s rewriting, I have

argued in Chapter 2, is a sense of suspicion of the canon. This suspicion
has proved immensely productive, leading to the retrieval of facts and
fictions about women’s lives and yielding, in Virginia Woolf’s words,
‘a mass of information’ (1993: 41; ch. 3). As the past is revisited to
include the perspectives of women, surely the question of women’s
relation to tradition is to be reformulated? In the 1980 diary entry that
opens her third lecture on her novel Cassandra, Christa Wolf notes, ‘The
literature of the West (I read) is the white man’s reflection on himself. So
should it be supplemented by the white woman’s reflection on herself?
And nothing more?’ (1984: 225). How is women’s rewriting to generate
a usable past?
High Infidelity 145
Reflecting on what women’s rewriting is to do, Wolf mulls over its

potential of a corrective to the male tradition that is not merely a
reversal of it. This is imperative, she opines, for as she writes,
It is not merely a dreadful, shameful, and scandalous fact for

women that women were allowed to contribute virtually nothing
to the culture we live in, officially and directly, for thousands of
years. No, it is, strictly speaking, the weak point of culture, which
leads to it becoming self-destructive – namely, its inability to grow
up. (1984: 260)
As Wolf’s words indicate, the suspicion of the canon that leads to the
rewriting of its key texts is founded on the notion that not only is the
canon not whole, it is also not wholesome. Misrepresenting the past,
the canonized classics of Western literature are not only damaging to the
female mind. Their deleterious effects extend to society at large, which
is denied a fundamental tool of self-knowledge and self-understanding –
of growing up and achieving maturity, in Wolf’s terminology. Therefore,
she submits, an ‘aesthetic of resistance to it all’ has to be developed
(236). The narrator of Sara Maitland’s ‘An Un-romance’ explains why:
The old stories do not lie; that is their rule. . . . But although they do
not lie, they omit. They tell us about the frog turned into a Prince,
but they never tell us about the Prince turned into a frog; though the
divorce statistics uphold the frequency of this version. They do not
tell us about the women who prefer dragons to knights; nor about
the ones who prefer cottages to palaces, honest independent work to
silk gowns. (1993: 72–3)
In The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief, Clayton

Koelb coins the term lethetic to describe a mode of reading, and of
rewriting, which is forgetful, ‘a deliberate ignoring of what the author’s
intention may be’ (1984: 143). This mode of textual (re)production he
contrasts with alethetic reading, which, following from the etymologi-
cal understanding of aletheia as meaning both truth and ‘that which is
not forgotten, . . . that which is remembered’, ‘assumes that the text
essentially tells the truth’ (1984: 36; 1988: 304). Koelb’s terms are useful
to distinguish between attitudes towards the rewritten text. In fact, they
could be applied to the procedures of contemporary women’s rewriting as
a literature of forgetting grounded in disbelief, were it not that Koelb does
not account for the possibility, voiced by Maitland’s protagonist, that
while the old stories do indeed basically tell the truth, they do not tell the
whole truth. Koelb believes reading ought to be a matter of submitting
to the authority of the text. In contrast, contemporary women’s rewrit-
ing grew out of the belief it is necessary to read without assenting to the
text – to read ‘resistingly’, as Judith Fetterley advocated (1978), ‘to know
the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known
it’, in Rich’s oft-quoted words (1972: 19). Challenging rather than sub-
mitting to the authority of the canon, contemporary women’s rewriting
finds its motto in the nineteenth-century American poet Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps’s poem ‘Atalanta’, which tells the reader ‘Distrust you the fable
of old’ for, as the fourth stanza begins, ‘The fable was twisted! I plant a /
Firm foot of assurance on this’ (1875: 73–4). This, then, is not to forget
the story altogether, but to remember it differently. Returning to the same
old stories in some kind of Freudian working-through, contemporary
women’s rewriting tries to transform the canon’s gesture of compulsive
repetition into a meaningful memory to create a usable past.
As women’s rewriting becomes an established genre of feminist and
feminine fiction, re-membering and re-calling take on new forms. The
productivity of suspicion as a method for teasing stories out of the canon’s
silences, gaps, exclusions, and misrepresentations shows women’s rewrit-
ing to generate new memories and alternative genealogies. Revealing the
canon’s resilience to repeated attacks, it also re-establishes its centrality
to the idea of the past. The sense of the canon’s continued relevance in
upholding a particular concept of cultural identity was already addressed
by Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999). It is brought to productive centrality
in Ursula Le Guin’s recent rewriting of The Aeneid, Lavinia (2008). The
novel contrasts sharply with earlier treatments of the classics in women’s
rewriting, bringing it within the purview of Koelb’s alethetic mode of
relating to the literary past. As the negation in the title of Monique
Wittig’s rewriting of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgile, non (1985; trans-
lated as Across the Acheron, 1987), for instance, indicates and her text
substantiates, if women return to the classics in the late 1970s and early
1980s, it is frequently in a spirit of contestation, contesting the guiding
role given to them and rejecting their universalizing claims in the name
of sexual difference. Protesting the exclusionary conventions of gender
and the traditional representations of women, women’s rewriting forms
a literature of disbelief whose aim is to expose the sexism of the literary
canon and its construction of cultural memory as ‘false’. Such ‘paranoid
project of exposure’, Eve Sedgwick has explained, is historically specific
and dependent on a particular cultural context (2003: 139–40), part of
the cultural moment of ‘suspicion’ that is presently past.
High Infidelity 147
Le Guin’s Lavinia underlines how much the exclusive focus on suspicion

involves what Segdwick describes as ‘a certain disarticulation, disavowal,
and misrecognition of other ways of knowing’ (144), and reveals, instead,
how rewriting can help extract sustenance from its ‘conversations with
the dead’.12 Lavinia gives a voice to the daughter of Latinus, king of
Latium, who in Virgil’s Aeneid is given in marriage to Aeneas because their
union is destined to found the Roman empire. Although she is not incon-
sequential, in Virgil’s poem, Lavinia has no words of her own, and her
character is not fleshed out. As she says in Lavinia, the life the poet gave
her was ‘a long life but a small one’, ‘dull’, ‘colorless’, ‘conventional’ (4).
While this may be cause for grief, in Le Guin’s novel, it is not cause for
blame. In her account, Virgil only came to know Lavinia when he was
dying. In consequence, ‘He’s not to blame. It was too late for him to make
amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought
imperfect’ (3). Le Guin explains, ‘Virgil didn’t have time for little Lavinia’,
adding, ‘I didn’t feel I was correcting Virgil, but here was something he
didn’t have the time to do, and I did’ (Crossen 2008: W5).
In the encounter the novel stages between Lavinia and Vergil, as
Le Guin spells his name, the Roman poet acknowledges he did Lavinia
wrong, knowing little and thinking even less of her: ‘what I thought I
knew of you – what little I thought of at all – was stupid, conventional,
unimagined. I thought you were a blonde!’ (58).13 Expressive of a new
relationship to the past and to the gender relations it inscribes, Le Guin’s
move to having Vergil recognize his shortcomings in the writing of The
Aeneid is, admittedly, befitting her rewriting’s position of rearguard in
relation to women’s rewriting, as well as her own status as a recognized
major author confident in her own power of storytelling. Indeed, the
gentleness with which she handles Vergil, representing him as a kind,
soft-spoken man ‘sensitive to every suffering’ and speaking of him as ‘a
trustworthy man to follow’ (39; 274), talks eloquently of the necessity,
also for feminists, to move beyond suspicion, developing ‘more compel-
ling and comprehensive accounts of why texts matter to us’, as Rita Felski
puts it in ‘After Suspicion’ (2009: 34). Felski therefore calls for analysis of
‘the multilayered interplay of affect and expectation, of habitual sche-
mata, cultural training, and idiosyncrasies of individual histories, that
shapes what and how we read’ (31): ‘Critique needs to be supplemented
by generosity, pessimism by hope, negative aesthetics by a sustained
reckoning with the communicative, expressive, and world-disclosing
aspects of art’, she writes (33). In Lavinia, Le Guin provides precisely such
a generous reading of the Aeneid. The rave reviews it received, with critics
unanimously expressing their admiration and delight, confirm it caught
the new spirit of the ‘postcritical’ age especially well as she speaks in the
voice of a woman who ‘wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose
[her] man and [her] fate’ (2008: 4).
‘I am not the feminine voice you may have expected’, Le Guin’s
Lavinia says, distancing herself from feminist traditions of rewriting.
‘Resentment is not what drives me to write my story’ (68). Evoking the
so-called ‘school of resentment’, Harold Bloom’s term for those ‘who
wish to overthrow the canon in order to advance their . . . programs for
social change’ (1994: 4) – ‘writers who offer little but the resentment
they have developed as part of their sense of identity’, as he puts it in
The Western Canon (7) – Le Guin’s statement implicitly asserts aesthetics
over politics. Yet the position is not simply reactionary, reasserting the
eternal values of the classics. It is, she says, because she cannot bear ‘that
dim loitering about, down in the underworld, waiting to be forgotten
or reborn’ that she breaks out of ‘the splendid, vivid words [she has]
lived in for centuries’ to tell her own story (4). A felicitous metaphor
for memory, the image of the Underworld as the realm where the dead
dwell, leading a shadowy existence, evokes the canonical text’s archival
status as an institution ‘of passive cultural memory . . . situated halfway
between the canon and forgetting’ (Assmann 2008: 102). As such, it sug-
gests its possibility for returning into circulation and having renewed
substantiality or, alternatively, remaining on the other side of Lethe, the
river of forgetfulness that intersects the Underworld. With this image,
the grounds for Lavinia’s act of remembrance have shifted. Speaking
of the contingency of all performances of memory, Lavinia’s prise de
parole is informed by a will to remember that remains subordinate to
the possibilities of the classic, canonical text as repository of cultural
memory. Writing herself into existence, Lavinia is active communicative
memory, ‘as I write and as you read it’ (4). The subject matter of new
communications about the past and about cultural memory, Lavinia
models women’s rewriting beyond distrust.
Feminine versions: rewriting as a translation into a

(m)other tongue
One of Sena Jeter Naslund’s motives for writing Ahab’s Wife, rewrit-
ing Melville’s Moby-Dick from a female point of view, is to give her
daughter women-centred speeches to memorize and strong female
characters with whom to identify: a literature from which she might be
able to draw sustenance. It is, indeed, the frequently voiced complaint
that ‘Literature’ contains so few strong female characters which makes
High Infidelity 149
rewriting such an important means of feminist literary production,

central to Hélène Cixous’s notion of a feminine rewriting no less than
to Adrienne Rich’s concept of re-vision. This complaint is nowhere
heard as loudly as in the context of the Bible – a canonical and foun-
dational text of Western civilization if there ever was one – leading to
a rich tradition of women-centred rewritings that both challenge and
offer themselves as alternatives to the literary and theological canons.14
Rewritings of this type may be termed ‘versions’ in acknowledgement of
the fact that Bible translations are thus called – e.g. The Revised Standard
Version and The Authorized King James Version – following the custom
of referring in this way to vernacular translations.15 In this section, I
therefore discuss women’s rewritings as ‘feminine versions’ in the sense
of a translation into the language of (feminist) women – a (m)other
tongue, punning on the notion of a language that is at once gendered
feminine and other, a maternal first language. Such versions, I argue,
are integral to the feminist project of rewriting. Yet they are less the
product of suspicion than of its reparative counterpart and as such, vital
to the unmasking and repairing of the ‘original’ text’s reinforcement of
masculine values and norms.
The gesture of translation as feminine versioning is basic and familiar
to anyone who has ever read to young girls, as Margaret Atwood’s Tony
discovers when she offers to read to her friend Roz’s twin daughters:
‘The Robber Bridegroom’, reads Tony. . . . ‘One day a suitor appeared.

He was . . . ’
‘She! She!’ clamour the twins.
‘Alright, Tony, let’s see you get out of this one’, says Roz, standing
in the doorway.
‘We could change it to The Robber Bride’, says Tony. ‘Would that be
adequate?’
The twins give it some thought, and say it will do. (1995 [1993]: 331)
The novel in which this scene occurs is called The Robber Bride, a title that
is derived from Grimm’s fairy tale. It explores femininity as represented by
its robber bride, Zenia, and her former friends, in its more malignant and
complicitous aspects. Atwood is ostensibly using here the technique of
mise-en-abyme, representing the procedure of the novel within the novel
and traditionally employed to reflect on it, to comment on the practice
of contemporary women’s rewriting as a translation into the feminine.
Rewriting and translation are, of course, kindred activities. In fact, transla-
tion is nowadays generally defined as a rewriting in another language.
The OED speaks of translation as ‘a version in a different language’. In their

General editors’ preface to Routledge’s path-breaking series on translation
studies, Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere state, ‘Translation is, of course,
a rewriting of an original text’ (Lefevere 1992: vii).
The 1990s, in fact, saw not only the increased theorizing of translation
as rewriting, but also the rise of an interventionist feminist translation
practice that is, in truth, a rewriting in the feminine. On the one hand,
feminist translation scholars studied early female translators and their
role in history, looked to the correlation between the historical and
ideological construction of translation, famously dubbed the ‘belle
infidèle’ – the beautiful but unfaithful woman – with that of femininity
as ‘submission, reproduction and loyalty’, and addressed the issue of
translating gendered language both of the unwittingly sexist and of the
experimental feminist variety (Hermans 2009: 100). On the other hand,
they confronted the issue of the translator’s responsibility when faced
with gendered language much as Atwood’s Tony is forced to do, devel-
oping a feminist translation practice that aims, in the words of its most
outspoken proponent, the Canadian Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood,
‘to make the feminine visible in language so that women are seen and
heard in the world’ (1991: 112). In Chapter 2, I have already referred to
Angela Carter’s practice of translation, carrying Perrault’s seventeenth-
century moralist and misogynist language into late twentieth-century,
post-feminist English in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977). Here
I want to draw the implications of such a practice for conceptualizing
women’s rewriting. Because language is never neutral, de Lotbinière-
Harwood explains, quoting Luce Irigaray, ‘[t]he expression “rewriting
in the feminine” alludes to two registers of translation: from source
language (or SL) to target language (or TL), and from masculine to femi-
nine’ (100).
This ‘kind of literary activism’ (Simon 1996: viii), deliberately manip-
ulating texts and reconfiguring their tenor, is understandably a vexed
issue. This is because, despite all evidence to the contrary, translation
continues to be understood as a secondary kind of speaking, faithfully
subordinate to the ‘original’ source text and capable of substituting
for it in its absence, or when it cannot be accessed. Whereas transla-
tion is theoretically acknowledged to be an act of creative rewriting,
and sometimes actually recognized as such, for instance in the case of
poetry, this fact is not easily reconciled with the ideal of translation as
equivalence that still informs most everyday translation practices. But
what if, rather than looking at translation as a kind of rewriting, one
looks at rewriting as a kind of translation? Although the term is surely
High Infidelity 151
too fuzzy to have real methodological import, it might nonetheless

be useful conceptually, helping us to think through women’s rewrit-
ing as the action, process and product ‘of turning from one language
into another’, as the OED puts it. Translation is a term that invites us
to bracket the question of language. It asks to theorize rewriting as a
mode of engaging with texts that challenges the neutrality of the male-
gendered universal and to consider the extent to which social groupings
such as those of gender speak different languages. Pulling attention
towards the wider implications of the claim that the intralingual
rewording that is rewriting is, in reality, what Roman Jakobson calls
‘translation proper’ (Munday 2009: 6), it requires recognition of the
fact that in this scheme of things, women are always already translators.
As de Lotbinière-Harwood puts it, ‘all women are bilingual’ (1991: 93).
Fundamental to the understanding of rewriting as translation is the
notion of equivalence. Translation aims at equivalence. This equiva-
lence is traditionally conceived as a formal correspondence between
source text (ST) and target text (TT), focusing on the text itself, its form
and content. Recently, it has been rethought in terms of a functional
equivalence, seeking ‘to create the same response in the TT readers
as the ST created in the ST readers’ (Munday 2009: 8). Rewritings
substituting masculine forms for feminine ones adhere to the idea of
formal correspondence, a literal translation in the etymological sense
of the word. Such she-word-for-he-word translation informs most
rewritings discussed in this book, from rewritings in which the main
protagonist is converted into a female one – for instance, Kathy Acker’s
Don Quixote – to rewritings providing the female version of the story –
e.g. Penelope’s account of the events, in Maitland’s short story
‘Penelope’ or in Atwood’s novel The Penelopiad – to rewritings recount-
ing the women’s worlds that exist outside the ambit of the canonical
men’s worlds of foundational texts such as the Bible or the classics –
e.g. Diamant’s The Red Tent and Wolf’s Cassandra. In its ‘pure’ form, it
can be found in scholastic exercises such as the ones Su Reid assigns
to her students in her ‘Feminist Reading and Writing’ class in the
late 1980s, rewriting classics such as Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to Lyrical
Ballads’ in the feminine:
What is a poet? To whom does she address herself? And what lan-
guage is to be expected from her? She is a woman speaking to women:
a woman, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthu-
siasm and tenderness, who has great knowledge of human nature,
and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common
among womankind; a woman pleased with her own passions and

volitions, [etc.]. (Reid 1989: 115)
The exercise is illuminating, to be sure, exposing the ways in which

texts inscribe familiar assumptions and cultural conventions about
gender. As instructors of creative writing know well, re-writing teaches
about ‘the nature of the text in its initial moment of production’ (Pope
2003: 106). Yet because the strategy is limited to the rendering of the
masculine noun ‘man’ and its pronoun in the feminine, it does little
more than reveal that Wordsworth’s manifesto serves neither the inter-
ests nor the purposes of women. Not surprisingly, this kind of reversal
has been criticized. In ‘The Wicked Stepmother’s Tale’, Sara Maitland
has her protagonist say:
There’s this thing going on at the moment where women tell all the
stories again and turn them inside-out and back-to-front – so that
the characters you always thought were the goodies turn out to be the
baddies, and vice versa, and whole lot guilt is laid to rest: or that at least
is the theory. I’m not sure myself that the guilt isn’t just passed on to
the next person, intacta so to speak. . . . All I want to say is that it’s more
complicated, more complex, than it’s told, and the reasons why it’s told
the way it is are complex too. (1987: 157–8)
More interesting than the notion of formal equivalence for mapping the
strategies of contemporary women’s rewriting, then, is the concept of
functional equivalence: the idea that translation should be directed at cre-
ating an equivalent effect in the target-text reader, drawing an equivalent
response from her. ‘Skopos theory’ is such a target-text-oriented approach
that shifts attention to the target text’s cultural role and gives priority to
its purpose and function in the target context (Munday 2009: 227). Its
concerns resonate with those of contemporary women’s rewriting, which
are similarly occupied with pragmatics, purpose and intention rather
than with some kind of formal equivalence with or loyalty to the source
text. For instance, Naslund’s desire to provide her daughter with women-
centred speeches to memorize and strong female characters with whom
to identify can be construed to signify that contemporary women’s rewrit-
ing is a purpose-oriented form of translation that is directed at providing
women with an ‘equivalent’ reading experience – an equivalence that is to
be defined in terms of a range of rhetorical, functional, and translational
criteria but that include the pragmatic and affective ones of identification,
recognition, and reassurance.
High Infidelity 153
This purpose can also be found in Roberts’s The Wild Girl (1984),
which takes its cue from and elaborates on the only Christian gospel
written in the name of a woman to provide women with a gospel of
their own. In the little known and fragmentary Gospel of Mary, which
already presents ‘a radical interpretation of Jesus’ teachings as a path to
inner knowledge’ (King 2003: 3), Roberts finds material for her vision of
an alternative Christian faith that recognizes the legitimacy of women
as disciples and leaders. By reworking this material, in effect rewriting
both the theological canon and tradition and its rediscovered addition,
Roberts creates a feminist version offering new possibilities of religious
identification and affective response. For not only does Roberts’s account
tell of Jesus and Mary’s love story, making her the Lord’s lover, but by
having him speak of the fullness of God as the joining of the mascu-
line and the feminine, the light and the darkness, the spiritual and the
fleshly, it also challenges its gender-based exclusions and changes his
teachings to value the feminine as equivalent to the masculine: ‘Men
have forgotten the feminine and the darkness, and praise only the mas-
culine and the light’, Roberts’s Jesus explains. ‘The children of Ignorance
are the adversaries of God because they prevent the man and the
woman from living out the fullness of God. The children of Ignorance
perpetuate a false creation, a world in which one side of knowledge is
stifled, in which barriers are set up between man and woman, body and
soul, civilization and nature’ (1984: 82).
Central to skopos theory are the notions of audience and of a target
culture; how these are conceived of determines the translation strategies
employed. In this book, I have similarly looked at women’s rewriting in
terms of intended purpose, which I have identified as transforming cul-
tural memory. As discussed in Chapter 3, the reception of contemporary
women’s rewriting, focusing on the formal (derivative) relation of the
rewriting to the source text, contrasted with its purpose as formulated in
the more programmatic texts of feminist re-vision. The present framing
of the issue of women’s rewriting in terms first of suspicion and of sup-
plementation, then of translation, identifying its strategies as subordi-
nated to a particular purpose and audience design, further underscores
rewriting is an act of communication directed at achieving a particular
effect with a particular intended audience. Such translations ostensibly
rely less on criteria of formal fidelity to the source text than on adapta-
tive ones of situation, purpose, and cultural context. In this way, trans-
lation theory shows women’s rewriting to be in effect a form of textual
adaptation, producing divergent forms in different environments.
As the action or process of modifying the source text so as to suit new
linguistic, social, and cultural conditions, translation is the means by

which the text becomes adapted to its environment. Contemporary
women’s rewriting embodies this notion of translation as a strategy
of adaptation most eminently in the way its adaptive strategies of
translation construe its audience of women readers as a market segment
in the very process of identifying it as its target culture.
The liveness of the canon: paradoxes of decanonization
Audre Lorde warned, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s
house’ (1984: 123). It is the oft-noted central paradox of women’s rewrit-
ing that it reinforces what it aims to challenge and strengthens what it
aims to weaken. However much rewriting may seek to compromise the
authority of a text that is culturally central, it can never simply deny it.
Steve Connor, coining the term ‘fidelity-in-betrayal’ to describe this para-
doxical and ambivalent character of rewriting, explains, ‘the rewritten
text must always submit to the authority of an imperative that is at once
ethical and historical’ (1996: 167). In narrative terms, this imperative
connects to the notion of a pre-scribed plot, as Margaret Atwood’s Wicked
Stepmother, complaining of her bad reputation and lack of popularity,
states: ‘You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you
like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river,
but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t you
ever forget it’ (1992: 30).
If women’s rewriting inevitably reasserts the centrality of the canonical
text it rewrites, does this then mean that rewriting is an ineffective tool
for challenging the canon? That, as Julie Sanders submits, rewriting
is ‘an inherently conservative genre’ (2006: 9), in effect remembering
the values and beliefs by which it was shaped in the first place? Does it
propagate them rather than disremember or forget? It is the argument
of this book that contemporary women’s rewriting aims at transforming
memory and the argument of this chapter that by rewriting canoni-
cal texts, it brings them within the purview of cultural communicative
memory, returning them to that phase when memories are still in flux,
subject to negotiation over the forms they are to take and the meanings
they hold. Supplementing the canon with accounts of female experience,
translating it into a (m)other tongue, rewriting brings its texts within
the scope of everyday communicative memory ultimately to alter the
meaning of those texts from which a culture derives its sense of iden-
tity. Reconfiguring the values it inscribes, it also gives the canon new
relevance as it makes it speak to a new readership.
High Infidelity 155
Looked at in the light of canon formation, as a translation that

adapts the old text to a new social environment, women’s rewriting
appears a necessary and integral part of canonicity. Canonical texts
retain their privileged position and continue to fulfil their culturally
central role precisely because they are read, taught, discussed, analysed,
interpreted, and the object of public debate, even controversy – in short,
because they are actively and communicatively remembered, reaffirming
in the process the centrality of the values of the socially dominant
groups who hold definitional power and the means of distribution. The
processes of recollection that ensure their continued relevance are those
that ensure their continued existence – keeping them alive, as it were,
both in and as memory. Like those other, more broadly defined forms
of rewriting André Lefevere identifies, in his Translation, Rewriting, and
the Manipulation of Literary Fame, as crucial to the survival and fame –
indeed, ‘canonization’ – of literary texts – translation, anthologization,
criticism, editing – women’s rewriting participates in the evolution of
literature as the repository of cultural memory.
In her essay ‘Contingencies of Value’, Barbara Herrnstein Smith
describes the processes of canonization as ‘a series of continuous inter-
actions among a variably constituted object, emergent conditions, and
mechanisms of cultural selection and transmission’, adding, ‘These
interactions are, in certain respects, analogous to those by virtue of
which biological species evolve and survive’ (1984: 30). Taking my cue
from the discourse of cultural evolution evoked here, I can redefine
women’s rewriting as a factor of literary life conceived as the reproduc-
tion of ideas, beliefs, and texts. On the one hand, women’s rewriting
appears to be an act of reproductive cultural memory that invites rituals
of cultural remembrance, for instance the rereading of canonical texts, as
Le Guin’s Lavinia invites the rereading of Virgil’s Aeneid, as many review-
ers have acknowledged. In this way, it functions as object mediating the
ritual of cultural remembrance that is canonization, for as Bloom puts it,
‘the Canon is the true art of memory’ (1994: 34). On the other hand, it
functions as the action and process of remembrance itself, allowing the
old story to adapt and evolve to new contexts and new conditions.16
Performing co-memorative work, it carries the old story across into
a(m)other culture, embodying literary life as the continued existence
ensured by the adaptative processes of variation, mutation, competition,
and inheritance.
Part IV
Mythical Returns
6
Winged Words: Women’s
Rewriting as Remythologizing
Central to Nancy Fraser’s argument in ‘Feminism, Capitalism, and

the Cunning of History’ is her claim that rather than offering a radical
challenge to neoliberal capitalism, second-wave feminism may actually
have fed it, supplying key ingredients in the form of cultural critiques
it could resignify. For instance, feminism’s critique of androcentrism is
currently re-elaborated as a ‘new romance of female advancement
and gender justice’ that serves to increase participation in the capital-
ist machinery, not advance the cause of women (2009: 109–11).1 As
I have argued throughout this book, the transformation of feminist
ideals into fuel for capitalism can also be seen operating in women’s
rewriting: what started as ‘an act of survival’, as Rich dramatically put
it, was recuperated by the publishing industry as a cheap means of
book production and a trick to be reproduced, turning a critique of how
culture remembers its past into a commercially successful genre. Thus,
the criticisms of society contemporary women’s rewriting formulated
and the radical challenges it offered to collective and cultural memory
also fed a conception of the past as product to be consumed, ushering
in the age of memory as consumer good. Consumer memory culture,
in this perspective, is the unexpected outcome of a feminist politics of
recognition resignified for capitalist productivity.
This, however, need not be the end of the story. As Fraser concludes,
rather than the end of feminism, now is the time to think big and
reclaim its best ideas, reintegrating the critiques of redistribution,
recognition and representation in a comprehensive critique of injustice
that is also a critique of capitalism (2009: 116–17). This claim Fraser
couches – rather interestingly, I would say – in a language evocative,
in its use of words starting with ‘re’, of that of the feminist activism
of the 1970s she wishes to reanimate. It may well be that the grounds
159
160 Mythical Returns
for her optimism, which in some ways recalls the optimism about the
possibilities of a new start on sexual politics after 9/11, may soon van-
ish in the face of capitalism’s extraordinary resilience. Yet the prospect
of a more just world to which literature contributes should not be
dismissed beforehand. To the extent that a culture is its memory, this
cultural memory remains vital in shaping ideas about self and other,
justice and equality.
This chapter explores what might be termed ‘the new re-visionary
imperative’, seeking to reconnect women’s rewriting to social change
in ways that resist easy resignification by neoliberalism and refunction-
ing by capitalism, reimagining it in ways that reactivate its emancipa-
tory promise. It does so by exploring the mythopoetic potential of
women’s rewriting – that is, its capacity for mythmaking, substituting
oral traditions of retelling for the conceptual apparatus of ‘rewriting’.
Contemporary culture, indeed, is not only characterized by consumption.
Equally important are the new information and communication
technologies which facilitate it, forming the technological base for the
contemporary consumer culture of memory. ‘Liquid modernity’, as
Bauman has termed the moment of neoliberal capitalism, is so light, fast,
fickle, and fluid because of the new digital technologies, which enable
the almost instantaneous travel of vast amounts of data, new mobilities,
and novel ways of communicating. Displacing writing, computation,
and digitalization have permeated contemporary culture and society at
every level in ways that sustain what Walter Ong has referred to as a ‘sec-
ondary orality’ (2004 [1982]: 3). It is this orality, then, substituting new
forms of writing for face-to-face oral communication, which forms the
basis of my reassessment of contemporary women’s rewriting in the
light of myth.
Rewriting in times of ‘secondary orality’
To begin with, a brief reflection on terminology is apposite. To speak of

rewriting in times of orality may sound like a contradiction in terms,
collapsing divergent cultures and systems of inscription, transmission,
and storage. It poses questions about the appropriateness of the term
‘rewriting’, asking whether it is chosen advisedly among competing
terms – Rich’s ‘re-vision’, to start with; but also ‘hypertextuality’ (Genette);
‘refraction’ or ‘diffraction’ (Lefevere); or, more generally, ‘recycling’,
‘retelling’, ‘adaptation’.2 Obviously, there are connotations that cling to
these terms which make them signify in specific ways, emphasizing one
or the other facet of the process or product ‘rewriting’. Thus, ‘recycling’
Winged Words 161
emphasizes re-use and the relationship to waste; ‘adaptation’, on the

contrary, stresses its affinity with life: in the realm of biology, adaptation
designates the capacity of organisms to adapt to their changing environ-
ment or circumstances and thus to survive. Because the term ‘rewriting’
evokes a specific technology of language and of the intellect by invoking
a particular technological apparatus – pen, pencil, paper, ink, print are all
technologies of writing – it also asks questions about its implicit under-
standing of the relationship between word, self, and other on the one
hand, and between individuals, social life, and the historical moment on
the other – in short, about the perspective it implies on its episteme, its
praxis and its mode of intervening in the world.
Orality and literacy work differently as technologies of language,
managing knowledge and cultural memory according to different
systems and logics. In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton dis-
tinguishes between incorporating and inscribing memory practices,
explaining that ‘[t]he transition from an oral culture to a literate culture
is a transition from incorporating practices to inscribing practices’
(1989: 75). These incorporating and inscribing memory practices can
be identified with what Diana Taylor has termed, in her book subtitled
Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, the repertoire and the archive
(2003). To elaborate: orality is performative. It belongs to the order of
the repertoire, enacting a memory that is embodied, requires presence,
and typically, despite claims to the contrary, does not remain the same.
In contrast to this memory that transforms as it keeps, literacy produces
‘archival memory’, which is an inscribing memory that is assumed to be
resistant to change and which, ‘separating the source of “knowledge”
from the knower’, ‘works across distance, over time and space’ (Taylor
2003: 19–20). The differences in how oral and literate cultures remem-
ber, store and transmit information, as well as those that follow from
the shift from print to digitalization, are crucial to the conceptualiza-
tion of contemporary women’s rewriting.3 To think of the genre under
scrutiny as rewriting, indeed, is to evoke a whole conceptual apparatus
and a particular (and Western) conception of language and its rela-
tion to memory and experience: ‘The writing = memory/knowledge
equation is central to Western epistemology’, Taylor points out (24).
It is because contemporary women’s rewriting attempts to enter cultural
memory through the literary market that I write about it as rewriting:
its field of operation is the print culture of book publishing, which is
a market culture of inscription and of accumulation that relies on the
trace and the archive to unfold in historical time. This choice of term
is not just a matter of ‘medial haunting’, then, with new media being
thought of in terms of older ones out of habit or lack of imagination

(Sloane 1999; see also Bolter and Grusin 1999). Rather, it is because it
has descriptive force. As I have argued throughout this book, the logic
of contemporary women’s rewriting can be identified as that of writing
as objectified speech: of language in a material form capable of being
‘transmitted over space and preserved over time’ (Goody 1968: 1), of
being staked out, owned, stolen, packaged, and marketed, and also, of
being ‘rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication’ (ibid.).
Contemporary women’s rewriting, in other words, is archive-bound.
It functions within writing as an archival system of transfer: it relies on the
archival dimension of writing for the performance of re-vision – its ‘act of
looking back’, as Rich phrases it – and aims to be integrated within the
archive. This orientation towards the archive means women’s rewriting
accepts, even reasserts and reinforces, the implicit hierarchy between writ-
ing and speech that stands at the heart of Western culture. It is indeed a
topos of women’s rewriting that it in-scribes women’s stories in masculine
traditions of writing and storytelling. This is because the male traditions
of storytelling – canons of literature, literary history, history tout court –
are equated with remembrance whereas women’s stories are identified
as forgotten. ‘It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why,
I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing’, Dinah says in the prologue
to Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997: 4). Contrasting women’s traditions of
oral storytelling and transmission with masculine ones of writing and
historiography in narratives that speak of the evanescence of the former as
opposed to the enduringness of the latter, novels such as Wolf’s Cassandra,
Roberts’s The Wild Girl and Diamant’s The Red Tent all metafictionally refer
to their own narrative procedure as an intervention in cultural memory
that moves forgotten stories of women into the domain of remembrance.
Implicit in these novels is that it is because writing and rewriting can
enter the archive, and thus become part of that institutional repository
of things designated as worth remembering, that women rewrite the old
stories. Rewriting is thus defined as an act of inscription that implies a
reordering of the archive. This connection to the archive is crucial, for
the archive is more than ‘the paradigmatic institution of passive cul-
tural memory’, a site for the unintentional accumulation of memories
as decontextualized traces, ‘halfway between the canon and forgetting’,
to recall Aleida Assmann’s phrase (2008: 102). It is a specific dimension
of cultural memory in literate cultures, where it functions to legitimate
certain statements and de-legitimate others. The archive is an instru-
ment of power and repression, active in its archival impulse, produc-
tive of the past as paper, document, and record, founding of history as
Winged Words 163
a mode of memory that claims objectivity and scientificity yet forgets

methodically. As such, it is not just that the archive is ‘the law of what
can be said’, in Foucault’s well-known phrase (1982: 127). It is also
that it can be returned to, which is what enables the building of it as
culture’s ‘reference memory’ (Assmann 2008: 102): the repository of
culturally sanctioned memory, what is designated as ‘memorable’, that
is, as ‘worth remembering’.
This function of the archive, and of writing’s archival dimension, is
recurrently thematized in contemporary women’s rewriting. Explicitly
engaging with the biblical archive, Dinah’s address to her reader in the
prologue of Diamant’s The Red Tent frames her tale as an intervention
in cultural memory metaphorized as objectified language that can be
kept and passed on. In her account, it is because the female tradition of
knowledge was not retained in writing but relegated to the margin of the
written text that it fell out of the archive and out of the public domain of
common knowledge. In The Wild Girl, Michèle Roberts similarly asserts
the preponderance of the written over the spoken word. Invoking the
materiality of writing and the special authority derived from language
objectified, the novel confirms the ideology according to which writing
is more durable and, consequently, more authoritative, than speech,
which is seen as ephemeral. Presented as the recovered gospel of Mary
Magdalene, found in the parched soil of Provence, The Wild Girl explic-
itly evokes the trope of the book to grant authority to her story, referring
to itself as a book both in name and in form – an object buried in a
stone jar, ‘dug up’ and ‘uncovered’, as well as ‘copied’ and ‘passed on’
(1984: 180–1). In the novel, the tangible materiality of the found book
functions as guarantee of its reality and hence, attests to its veracity.
Whereas the novel’s opening address rhetorically testifies to the book’s
truth – ‘here begins the book of the testimony of Mary Magdalene’, it says,
adding, ‘She wishes you to know that everything she sets down here is the
truth, as she experienced it and as she remembers it. She has been, and she is, a
witness to that truth’ (11; italics in the original) – at the close of the novel,
this declaration is supplemented with a testimony to the book’s material
reality. The invocation of writing and its archival possibilities to lend
legitimacy to her book of revelation reasserts writing’s epistemological
preponderance: ‘She who dug up and found and copied this book is the
daughter of the daughter of she who wrote it. . . . We have uncovered and
copied and passed on what she wrote in her book, as we have passed on
by word of mouth the stories and songs that came from her’ (181).
Throughout these rewritings, the topos of the evanescent tradition
of female memory passed on by word of mouth is expressed in and
countered by written and published texts. This is no mere irony. Nor is

it simply the result of the fact that speech, in writing, is always already
writing. It is because contemporary women’s rewriting is directed towards
the recuperation of writing, clearing literary space for female authorship
and reclaiming the space of print and of the archive for women’s stories.
The topos of women’s rewriting as a voicing of the silenced, discussed
in Chapter 4, confirms this ideology of (re)writing: referring to what
speaks not in writing – what Derek Attridge has termed ‘the silence of
the canon’ (2004: 65ff.) – this silence is not the performative silence
that is integral to speech, but a metaphor for the unwritten.
Performing memory
To use the term contemporary women’s rewriting, then, is to stress that

much of its emancipatory force resides in it as inscription and as an
intervention within print culture. It is in the Western, ‘first-world’ con-
text of books conceived as objects for keeping, affordable and capable
of changing lives, that contemporary women’s rewriting emerged. By
publishing their retellings of the old stories, writers and their publish-
ers lay claim to these stories while re-circulating them, making them
available for reading, for sharing and for passing on, as well as for
keeping – in libraries, on bookshelves. However, as turnover cycles get
shorter and shorter and books are remaindered ever faster, does not the
archival role and status of writing as print change? The book’s sense of
permanence, already affected by the rise of the mass-market paperback
with its inexpensive and rapidly discolouring and disintegrating paper,
decreases and, with that, its status as (fixed) point of reference. In
addition, digitalization and the e-book put an end to the principle of
scarcity that ruled the traditional archive: the digital archive is not a ref-
erence memory but one to which the principle of ‘the long tail’ applies.
In retail, the concept of ‘the long tail’ means that instead of – or rather,
alongside – selling large volumes of a small number of items – the
strategy of bestsellers – businesses such as Amazon sell ‘less of more’:
countless niche markets selling small quantities of a large number of
unique items (Anderson 2006). This principle also applies to the digital
archive, which is (still) an amorphous mass from which information
can be retrieved and memories can be selected, thereby allowing for a
customized and individualized memory.
In contrast, wide availability of the same text is a central characteristic
of literature as ‘portable monument’, to use Ann Rigney’s suggestive
term: the literary text as part of the canon, ‘preserved as a recognized
Winged Words 165
part of a cultural heritage’ and ‘susceptible to being relocated’ (2004: 383).4

This availability is facilitated by the fixed and protected character of
the textual monument, which not only functions as a guarantee for
remembrance, its durability turning it at least potentially into a site
of memory to which one can return for the purpose of remembering,
but also enables dissemination, the transportation into new sites and
situations.5 The printed book’s capacity as public medium, enabling
representation in the public sphere, is certainly part of what makes the
published rewriting a particularly interesting tool for social change. Yet
if this constituted a strength of women’s rewriting, enabling it to func-
tion as a successful means of transforming cultural memory, this success
came at a price. Monuments that are portable, to spin the metaphor,
can be alienated; they can be turned into marketable commodities, sold
as souvenirs of invented pasts. On the literary market, women’s rewrit-
ing transforms into a commodity like any other and signals the triumph
of capitalism, not of feminism.6
Yet it would be wrong to simply assimilate writing to the archive,
identifying the mediation of storytelling with the medium’s storing
capacities. Indeed, if writing, in Western culture, has long functioned
as supplement to oral communication, the so-called digital revolution
brings a fundamental change to the relationship between the oral
and the written. Multiplying in form and function, writing no longer
serves primarily or exclusively to record and keep what is designated
as memorable. Instead, the digital revolution completes the work
initiated by the invention of printing and especially the mechanical
printing press, which in turn enabled the so-called ‘paperback revolu-
tion’ and the attendant democratization of reading. Severing writing’s
connection to the archive, digitalization effectively transforms writing
from foundational supplement (as Derrida had it) into a form of speech.
As such, it signals the emancipation of writing. Writing, indeed, does
not only partake of an archival system of memory and transfer, but is to
be understood as a form of mediation that operates on the cusp of the
archival and the performative.
Although women’s rewriting is archive-bound in its concern with
reference memory, it is also concerned with the much more elusive
circulating memory, engaging with stories as they are remembered
and as they circulate in the domain of active, communicative cultural
memory. This is illustrated by Wolf’s Cassandra, whose opening and
closing paragraphs complicate the distinction the novel sets up between
oral and written, female performance and male archive. The novel
begins and ends with an impersonal narrator standing in front of the
ruins of the fortress that ‘was the last thing [Cassandra] saw’, gazing onto
the same stone lions under the same blue sky (1984: 3). This framing of
Cassandra’s reminiscences about her life in Troy by a present-day nar-
rator remembering the mythical seeress ‘on location’ highlights Wolf’s
feminist desire to remember the past differently. It also implies memory
is embodied and performed, re-experienced in the present of the one
who does the remembering.
The medium of the novel is, of course, writing. But it is writing
representing consciousness, and as such, it is writing that appears to be
bracketing off the problem of how it came to be writing.7 Yet because the
novel engages with the opposition between writing and speech at other
moments, as discussed above, it seems more appropriate to read the
narrator’s act of identification at the site of memory as integral to the
novel’s understanding of how memory works. In Cassandra, it is through
identification that the past is summoned up and knowledge is transmit-
ted: the narrator’s act of remembrance is triggered by the act of looking
at the same sight and thus seeing what Cassandra saw. Identification
suggests that the locus of remembrance is the (female) embodied mind.
The narrator recalls Cassandra, literally re-members her story, by identi-
fying as her. This identification is marked in the text by an ‘I’ that first
refers to the narrator, then to Cassandra. ‘Keeping step with the story,
I make my way into death’, the text reads, abruptly shifting from the
narrator’s to Cassandra’s consciousness: ‘Here I end my days . . .’ (3).
Representing the act of remembering as the narrator’s movement into
the past, the novel suggests a line of knowledge transmission at the site
of Cassandra’s death that can be read in several ways. First, it can be
read as a story of reading, the reader immersing herself in Cassandra’s
story much as happens in Rich’s poem ‘Diving Into the Wreck’. Coetzee’s
reworking of Rich’s poem at the close of his novel Foe, as discussed in
Chapter 4, is then also to be read as weaving Wolf’s Cassandra, published
just a few years earlier, into its web of intertextual references. Second,
it can also be read as a performance of memory, with the novel self-
consciously reflecting on its own act of remembering. This reading is
supported by the fact that the novel was initially the fifth lecture in a
series Wolf gave in 1982 under the title ‘Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen’
(Frankfort Lectures on Poetics), subsequently revised and expanded for
independent publication. The novel’s genesis lies in Christa Wolf’s ques-
tions upon reading Aeschylus’s play: ‘Exactly how did she experience the
collapse of all her alternatives? How is it that she has only this one way
left open to her . . . ?’ (150). Its answer is to go to the place of Cassandra’s
last sight. At the site of memory, it engages in an act of remembrance
Winged Words 167
that is also an act of identification, the result of which is the narrative

of the novel. Thus the novel self-consciously represents the quest for the
lost figure of Cassandra as a quest for self-knowledge through identifica-
tion with imagined precursor lives. However much such an identification
may be a contemporary projection – the projection, it has been argued,
of a misguided feminism incapable of getting over the loss of the missing
woman in culture (Beizer 2009: 35) – this is how stories are lived: ‘per-
formance’s only life is in the present’, Peggy Phelan writes in Unmarked:
The Politics of Performance (1993: 143); and this, indeed, also applies to
the performance of memory, whose only time is the (broad, all-engulfing,
liquid) present.
The novel’s way of remembering, performing memory through iden-
tification, suggests a line of knowledge transmission that construes
memory as an incorporated memory whose locus is the female body.
Memory in Cassandra is not simply equated with what is stored and
kept in an archive. It is conceived as a performance of identification
that takes place in the acts of writing and of reading, connecting the
present to an imagined past in such a way as to create the longed-for
sense of tradition. With her claims to knowing Cassandra grounded in
a sense of shared knowledge, of an understanding between women that
exists in spite of the differences that separate them across time and
space, Wolf represents female memory as passing through the embod-
ied mind and continuing to be transmitted even when the details of
Cassandra’s life have long been forgotten – like vases communicating
across generations, as it were. This wordless memory, however, only
reaches the level of consciousness, of words and of narrative, when
triggered through external stimuli – words, stones, material traces.
Wolf’s ‘tiny rivulet’ of female memory does not only flow ‘alongside
the river of heroic songs’ in parallel yet separate traditions that are gen-
dered in content and in form. Rather, both ‘river’ and ‘rivulet’ debouch
upon the sea of contemporary cultural memory, where they mix in ways
that contradict their neat polarization in female-oral performance and
male-written archive. Requiring the cue of archival traces – traces to
which Diamant’s Dinah refers as ‘voiceless cipher in the text’ (1997: 1),
and which can be identified as the stone lions in Wolf’s narrative – the
memory embedded in a female lineage evocative of Virginia Woolf’s
famous claim, in A Room of One’s Own, that ‘We think back through our
mothers if we are women’ (1993: 69; pt IV), eventually resurfaces in its
interface with these traces.
It is this performative dimension of rewriting that I wish to elaborate
upon in the rest of this chapter, as a raiding of the archive for the
re-activation and re-circulation of a memory that was always passed

on by word of mouth but that now employs writing as its technology.
Writing is not just the opposite of speech in a binary that has been
proven untenable; it is a kind of speech, and functions both as archive
and as repertoire within contemporary culture. This is especially true of
rewriting conceived as an instrument of change. Instead of thinking of
rewriting as looking backwards, then, inviting comparison with a pre-
cursor text, and thus functioning within an archival system of transfer,
I propound: might it not be more productive to consider rewriting as
performance and act in the present? Such reframing of rewriting invites
rethinking it not as a kind of after-writing (re-writing implying some
kind of repetition and secondariness) but as the life of writing itself:
storing as it stories, transforming as it keeps and transmits, and so,
preserving while allowing change.
Mythical speech
One way of thinking about the performative possibilities of rewriting

is through the lens of myth. A myth is a story told and retold. It is
also a story ‘everyone knows’, part of a culture’s circulating memory,
and possessing no fixed or authoritative form (except when versions
selected as memorable are preserved in the archive, where they acquire
referential status). Traditionally identified as ‘word’ or ‘speech’, in the
West, myth is also a false belief, a widespread but untrue story, a mis-
representation. It is this identification of myth with what is not rational
and hence as a misconception that has led to its bad press. ‘Myth deals
in false universals’, Angela Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman (1979: 5).
Her definition of myth as ‘consolatory nonsense’ Carter derives from
Roland Barthes, whose Mythologies (1957) modelled a practice for cult-
ural criticism by convincingly demonstrating that myths need to be
demystified and de-mythologized.
I have already discussed how, in Touching Feeling, Eve Sedgwick
confronts the New Historicist-feminist faith in exposure characteristic
of the hermeneutics of suspicion of which Barthes’s Mythologies is such
a supreme example. She argues, ‘Some exposés, some demystifica-
tions . . . have great effectual force. . . . Many that are just as true and
convincing have none at all, however, and as long as that is so, we
must admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside
somewhere else than in their relation to knowledge per se’ (2003: 141).
For Sedgwick, this means the project of exposure needs to be seen
as historical. It is also to be viewed as ‘a possibility among other
Winged Words 169
possibilities’, not a categorical methodological imperative (124–5).

But what if it has no effectual force, not only because of historical
change, but also because such a hermeneutics trusts in reason – in
fact, assumes rational behaviour will follow from the revelations and
disclosures? What if demythologizing leads to no action and becomes
an end in itself?8 What if it leads to no social change and brings
about no political transformation? In a recent essay on the failure of
Enlightenment thinking to account for the rise of nationalism and
identity politics in Europe, the Dutch journalist Bas Heijne remarks
upon the streak of unreasonableness that holds people in its thrall,
observing with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man that there is no guar-
antee that rational behaviour is to follow upon understanding. Instead,
consciousness may lead to ‘inertia – a conscious sitting down with
folded arms’, as Dostoevsky writes in Notes from Underground (1992
[1864]: 18). More radically, basing himself on recent findings in the
neurosciences, cognitive scientist George Lakoff breaks a lance for
revising how the role of reason is conceptualized in politics. Observing
voters do not vote their interests but ‘allow bias, prejudice, and emo-
tion to guide their decisions’, he argues, ‘Enlightenment reason does
not account for real political behavior because the Enlightenment view
of reason is false’ (Lakoff 2009: 8).
‘Demythologizing’, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory
explains, is ‘to expose the production of meaning, to critique cultural
myths, to “unlearn” orthodox social values or doxa, and to establish more
pluralistic perspectives’ (Slethaug 1993: 529). Contemporary women’s
rewriting, as I have pointed out in the first chapters of this book, is a
demythologizing, at once exposing the exclusion of women from the litera-
ture of the past, critiquing its gender ideology, and reconstituting its
stories in a more inclusive way. But this is not all it is. As Michèle Roberts
puts it in her author’s note to The Wild Girl, ‘I wanted to dissect a myth;
I found myself at the same time recreating one’ (1984: 7).
If rewriting-as-demythologizing trusts it implies social change, is
this not because rewriting is also remythologizing? Myth, Barthes says,
is ‘a type of speech’: ‘speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is
restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought
back, it was not put exactly in its place. It is this brief act of larceny, this
moment taken for a surreptitious faking, which gives mythical speech
its benumbed look’ (1972 [1957]: 109; 125; emphasis in the original).
Barthes’s definition of myth is useful for understanding contemporary
women’s rewriting as a form of remythologizing. It puts theft at the
heart of the procedure in a way that resonates suggestively with the
conceptualization of women’s (re)writing as a stealing of language as

discussed in Chapter 3; and it enables the conceptualization of rewrit-
ing as performance: as a kind of speech that changes even as it appears
not to. In the myth as an act of larceny, a subterfuge takes place. This is
its mystifying moment. It is also where its mythologizing power lurks.
Mythologizing is a trick by which myth appears eternal: unchanged
and always there. But appearances are misleading: myth only appears
frozen in time. It may look ‘benumbed’ – Barthes speaks of ‘l’aspect
transi de la parole mythique’ (1957: 211) – yet in reality, myth changes;
indeed, is changed, since the act of larceny, of stealing and restoring,
involves an agent.
For Barthes, it is the misleading appearance of myth that needs to be
uncovered: its look of inevitability – of seeming always to have been
there. The revelation of false consciousness breaks the power of the
ideology it asserts, freeing subjects to think for themselves. Taking our
cue from the critique of Enlightenment reason, it becomes clear that
from the perspective of cultural memory, the gesture of demythologiz-
ing may be little more than a laying bare of the device. It reveals how
the transmission of knowledge is mediated and transformed, yet has no
real or significant effect upon social behaviour. This is because, Lakoff
explains, demythologizing does not reframe what it demystifies. In fact,
demythologizing not only leaves the frame intact; it actually inscribes
it deeper in the mind. In cognitive terms, it activates the conceptual
frames that are instantiated in the synapses of the brain.
In contrast, the act of larceny that is mythical speech may present
a more effective instrument of remembrance and forgetting. It has
long been observed that the power of myth resides on the political
Right (Barthes 1957; Lakoff 2009). This is not because of some intrin-
sic connection between myth and politics. Instead, it is a historical
development, and there is no reason why myth should not be used
to sell another ideology. Indeed, if rewriting is about change, if its
aim is change, is this change not best achieved in the act of changing
while preserving? Seen in this light, mythical speech is a performative
technology of memory that enables the reframing of the stories that
structure our understanding of the world. As such, it is transformative,
not conservative.
Before proceeding to examine in what ways myth is particularly
adapted to the contemporary liquid condition, there is an objection
to myth that needs to be addressed in this context. This is the notion,
propounded by Joanna Russ and defended by Teresa de Lauretis, that
myth is Oedipal and propagates a male perspective. ‘Women cannot
Winged Words 171
write – using the old myths’, Russ notoriously ends her essay ‘What
Can A Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write’ (2007 [1972]: 211).
Feminist scholars who take myth seriously have long known this is not
the only story. In addition, as Rita Felski observes in her critique of de
Lauretis’s influential discussion of the myth of Oedipus as the basis for
Western narrative and plot, ‘what could be more authoritarian than
insisting that every story is really that same old story . . . ?’ (2003: 105).
Clearly, we need a more sophisticated understanding of myth than this:
one that does not simply pit it against a rational view of the world; one
that does not see it as telling the same story over and over again; and
one that allows for it to have real world effects.
Liquid mythologies
Myth’s continued repetition with a difference, replicating consumer

culture’s ‘new and improved’ versioning of consumer products, accords
well with the cyclical rhythms of consumer culture. Because myth, by
its very nature as oft-told tale, implies retelling, it provides a model for
inscribing literature in the present-day economy of waste and instant
obsolescence, where long-term commitments make way for short-term
projects, which are directed at immediate returns.
This can be illustrated by the publication project of the independent
British publishing-house Canongate entitled ‘The Myths’. The series
was launched at the 2005 Frankfurter Buchmesse as a global publishing
venture with plans for the worldwide publication, over the next three
decades, of a hundred myths retold ‘in a contemporary and memorable
way’ by authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Chinua
Achebe, and A.S. Byatt. To advertise the series on the publishing firm’s
website, Canongate’s owner, Jamie Byng, used as a motto the phrase ‘We
want to tell the story again’. This phrase he derived from Winterson’s
inaugural rewriting of myth for the series: ‘I want to tell the story again’
is the leitmotif of Winterson’s Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles,
a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles from the perspective of
Atlas. The novel can be read as programmatic for the series. In the
introduction, Winterson explains the choice of subject as one that
imposed itself on her: ‘When I was asked to choose a myth to write
about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up
the world . . . was waiting to be written. Re-written. The recurring
language motif of Weight is “I want to tell the story again”’ (2005: xiv).
In the context of the marketing of The Myths as a new and innova-
tive product – Canongate is founding member of a global alliance of
publishers that prides itself on, among other things, ‘innovation in

marketing and commercial success’ – the phrase inevitably also means
‘we want to sell the story again’. The sales pitch reveals retelling to be a
retailing strategy. In effect, it promises ever new and improved reading
experiences – much like any other consumer experience.
In the context of the post-Fordist literary market, myth thus appears
to form a mode of retelling the old stories that lends itself particularly
well to cooptation by consumer culture. In this sense, it is no different
than rewriting. As I have argued apropos of women-identified first-
person retrospective rewritings (but the same might be said of other
types of niche rewritings such as the prequel, sequel or inquel), texts
that retell well-known stories form easily marketable products, selling
recognizable ‘branded’ products, not unknown writers or unfamiliar
plots.
Yet, if myth is easily adapted to the cycles of consumption, does this
mean it is inevitably shaped by it? Is consumer culture so all-devouring
that it also incorporates myth, or is myth bigger than that? Riding the
waves of ever-shorter innovation cycles, myth allows for permanent
adaptation to new conditions, as well as to new futures. This puts adapt-
ability at the heart of the definition of myth: myth is a highly adaptable
form. Myths, G.S. Kirk writes in his influential study The Nature of Greek
Myth, are stories that ‘have succeeded in becoming traditional’ (1974: 27;
emphasis in the original). The dialectic relationship that exists between
myth and its social environment implies that they are interdependent.
Myth depends on its environment, using it while suiting itself to it. It
fits itself to the new condition yet also incorporates it to ensure its own
survival – to succeed in becoming traditional, as Kirk puts it. To the
extent that adaptation is a modification generated by a change in its
context of existence, myth thrives on change: permanent stasis implies
the death of all life-forms. And as it retains a sense of futurity in its
implication of ever further retellings, myth also opens up to the future.
Jeanette Winterson’s recent fiction presents a useful source for the
analysis of the possibilities myth embodies for women’s rewriting
in the present. To be sure, this fiction is not feminist in the sense of
engaging with reconfigurations of individual or collective identity
through feminist positions. It may therefore be worth recalling here
that Winterson has long disengaged herself from any association with
feminism her early work still allowed, and that readers who came
to women’s writing as an emotionally vested field of inquiry in the
years of Winterson’s appearance of the literary scene have learned to
recognize and acknowledge this disengagement. This does not mean
Winged Words 173
Winterson’s fiction cannot be seen to speak to issues that are also issues
for feminism and women’s (re)writing. After all, myth and the retell-
ing of myth are central to Winterson’s conception of her writing and
her novels frequently rework culturally central texts. As a matter of
fact, starting with her self-representation as a little girl ‘just beginning
to enjoy a rewrite of Daniel in the lions’ den’ with Fuzzy Felt in her
first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985: 12–13), Winterson’s
narrators regularly show a concern with storytelling that is foremost a
concern with mythical retelling.
This self-consciousness serves to draw attention to how she applies
oral techniques of storytelling to the writing of literature and delib-
erately brings oral traditions together with literary ones. Phrases like
the haunting ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me’ of The Passion (1987: 5)
and the above-mentioned leitmotif from Weight, ‘I want to tell the
story again’ are evidence that the novels are self-consciously engaged
in storytelling as re-telling. ‘My work is full of Cover Versions’, she
acknowledges in the introduction to Weight (2005: xiv). In fact, all
of Winterson’s recently published books are retellings. These books
include stories for children and ‘to be cherished by families’, as
Winterson pitches the illustrated Christmas story The Lion, The Unicorn
and Me (2009) on her website, as well as stories derived from operas:
Midsummer Nights (2009) is a collection of short stories written by con-
temporary British authors that Winterson published on the occasion of
the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival. It is
based on the principle ‘take a story and shift it’, as she explains in the
Introduction: ‘Why not take an opera and shift it? All the stories in this
collection have done exactly that; found a piece of music and worked it
into a new shape’ (2009: 1).
Retelling is central to Weight. The novel not only retells the myth of
Atlas and Heracles, but also takes retelling as its theme. Its leitmotif,
as I have pointed out, is the phrase ‘I want to tell the story again’,
and this ‘recurring language motif’, as Winterson calls it (2005: xiv),
speaks of narrative desire as desire for re-narration, for repetition and
myth’s return. Canongate published Weight concurrently with Margaret
Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), a retelling of the myth of Penelope
and Odysseus from the perspective of Penelope, and Karen Armstrong’s
meta-mythical A Short History of Myth (2005), which sets out a pro-
gramme for what the Daily Mail dubbed Canongate’s ‘ambitious act of
mass story-telling’. In fact, the three books are also sold as The Myths
Boxset (2005), a presentation that underlines the books’ programmatic
nature and suggests a collectability that has been frustrated by the
shift from ‘lovely hardbacks’ to paperbacks (as readers have expressed

on Canongate’s website). An inaugural rewriting in Canongate’s series
The Myths, then, Weight explicitly reflects on myth’s relationship to
history and the individual life, countering the view of myth as destiny
with myth as multiple telling and choice. In this context, it is interest-
ing to observe that Winterson did not pick a female myth to retell – as
Margaret Atwood did with the myth of Penelope in The Penelopiad
(2005), Ali Smith with the myth of Iphis in Girl Meets Boy (2007) and
Dubravka Ugrešić with the story of Baba Yaga, the old witch-like char-
acter from Slavic mythology who lives in a house built on chicken legs
and kidnaps small children, in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009). Instead,
Winterson picks the male, even masculine myth of Atlas burdened with
carrying the world because it enables her to explore the themes of ‘lone-
liness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom’ (2005: xiv).9
Mythical retelling is also central to Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007).
The novel chronologically follows upon the publication of Weight.
It can thus be read as following up on the inquiry into the power of
mythical retelling carried out in Weight, tapping the same source of
storytelling, exploring other avenues, and applying any insights her
meditation on myth at Canongate’s invitation may have generated. The
Stone Gods explicitly relates retelling to remembering, invoking a lost art
of storytelling as an ars memoria – an art of memory. This connection
Winterson explains in an interview: ‘Art began as a memory-system.
Before we knew how to write, the oral tradition allowed important
events to be preserved . . . we are in danger of losing continuity with the
past’ (Andermahr 2009: 125). The novel compellingly poses the ques-
tion of our responsibility towards the future, showing it to be inscribed
in the present rather than to be reached for out of the past. Framing the
obligation to remember and to retell in terms of oral traditions of story-
telling and mythmaking, it suggests mythical retelling as a technology
of memory fitting to the liquid present condition.
Remembering the future
How does The Stone Gods articulate the moral imperative of cultural
remembrance today? And how does it help to understand myth as an open
form of retelling connected to social change, capable of escaping resigni-
fication by capitalism, and responding at once to the need to remember
and to the necessity for an engagement in a dialectic of past and future,
ideology and utopia? In The Stone Gods, the future is perpetually on the
horizon. First represented in the world of Orbus, a seemingly near-future
Winged Words 175
of rampant consumerism, technological advance, total state control, and

impending ecological catastrophe, it then returns in the apocalyptic post-
atomic world of Wreck City, the surplus world of Tech City that resembles
Orbus but takes place 65 million years later. Both Orbus and Wreck City
are dystopian worlds satirizing our own. Their resemblances suggest that,
as Karl Marx notoriously had it, ‘History repeats itself’.10 They also sug-
gest that history as progress is a myth, caught in the cyclical return of
‘the same old story’. Speaking of the future as one of our own making,
these worlds also represent futures resulting from a failure to learn from
the past and an inability to imagine the future as other than more of the
present. Shown to be the consequence of a cultural lack of appreciation
for books, literature, history, and the imagination, the repeating worlds
of The Stone Gods formulate a scathing critique of contemporary culture –
a critique Winterson also articulates in texts written (and spoken) about
the same time, for instance in her Belle van Zuylen lecture entitled ‘The
Cup, the Knife, the Coat, the Remedy’ (2007). They also present a pow-
erful intervention in myth’s relationship to historical time and in the
dynamics of the present to the literary past and to imaginable futures.
Winterson’s The Stone Gods is ostensibly about ecological disaster
resulting from consumerism, warfare, our formidable capacity for pro-
ducing waste, and the lure of technology as instrument of domination.
It is also, and perhaps foremost, about the stories – indeed, the myths –
that sustain contemporary society. One of these myths is Robinson
Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century novel of a shipwreck who
by dint of his labour survives for twenty-eight years on a desert island,
the last four years in the company of Friday, the native who becomes
his servant. Robinson Crusoe is usually read as a myth of civilization as
progress, fuelled by radical individualism, a Protestant work ethic, and
the accumulation of capital. In Robinson Crusoe, the potentialities of the
individual find their realization in the conquest of the environment
and in the subjugation of the native subject.
In The Stone Gods, Winterson echoes, rewrites, and recreates the very
male and masculinist myth of Robinson Crusoe, a novel that, Ian Watt
pointed out half a century ago, ‘seems to fall . . . naturally into place
with . . . the great myths of our civilization’ (1951: 95). Allowing the
myth to interact with the narratives of history, The Stone Gods both
repeats the myth and remythologizes it, tapping into myth’s radical
potential for open-endedness. Mythical retelling is the fluid encounter
of the individually lived life with the told story, the liquid memory
inscribing the individual with the collective – or, alternatively, allowing
the collective and cultural memory to be impacted by the individual.
How, then, does Winterson’s The Stone Gods model rewriting as

remythologizing? As I have already pointed out, The Stone Gods revolves
around repetition: the repetition of the same mistakes – or, as one of
the characters puts it, ‘A repeating world – same old story’ (2007: 49).
A fictional world made of possible worlds, the novel is, in fact, itself
a repeating world. It is divided in four parts, each situated in a dif-
ferent time and place, yet each leading to ecological disasters, all of
them caused by a culturally sanctioned masculine drive to domination,
colonisation, and conquest. These parts are linked through repetition,
citation, and recurrence, and by centring on a protagonist of the same
name (though not always of the same gender). In the first part, entitled
‘Planet Blue’, Billie Crusoe is a recalcitrant female citizen of Orbus,
interested in history, the past and the natural life, living on a farm, and
refusing to subject herself to the high-tech life of Orbus with its ‘womb-
free’ births and ‘genetically Fixed’, forever young-looking people.
Because of her recalcitrance, Billie is put on the starship that is sent off
to explore the newly discovered Planet Blue that is to present humanity
with a second chance and the possibility of beginning again. On this
ship, called Resolution in remembrance of the one commanded by the
British explorer James Cook, Billie falls in love with an artificially intelli-
gent and stunningly beautiful robot named Spike. Their story comes to
an end as Planet Blue is prematurely destroyed by the miscalculations of
the crew’s captain, who meant to kill the dinosaurs but ruined the entire
planet. This, we eventually learn, was 65 million years ago.
In the second part, entitled ‘Easter Island’, Billy Crusoe, now male,
is shipwrecked on Easter Island in 1774, left behind during Captain
Cook’s second voyage of discovery in search of the mythical Terra
Australis. On Easter Island, ecological disaster results from trying to
appease and worship the island’s Stone Gods. As the last of the trees is
felled, leading to the total destruction of the island and its inhabitants,
Billy falls in love, this time with a Dutch maroon named Spikkers. The
third part takes place ‘Post 3War’ – post-World War III. In the imagined
near-future of an apocalyptic post-atomic world that follows ‘the brutal,
stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of twenty-first century world’
(164), Billie is now an employee of MORE-Futures (MORE is the name
of the global company that rules the post-Third World War) working
on the Robot Spike (now only a head). Walking out of the gardens of
MORE-Futures with Spike in a sling, Billie get lost in Wreck City, a kind
of Blade Runner-like final frontier on the edge of Tech City. There they
are taken in by Friday, a former economist with the World Bank, who
offers them shelter in his book-lined shack. Eventually, on a disused
Winged Words 177
Lovell telescope, they pick up a signal from the past that turns out to be
the chronicle of the first Billie Crusoe’s arrival on Planet Blue, a planet
described as ‘strikingly similar to our own planet, sixty-five million
years ago, with the exception of the dinosaurs, of which we have no
record on Orbus’ (202).
Crucial for Winterson’s treatment of the Robinson Crusoe theme is
that she evokes the myth and the worldview it sustains but does not
actually go back to the myth itself to set it correct. Neither looking back
nor entering the old text from a new critical direction, Winterson’s The
Stone Gods does not simply demythologize Robinson Crusoe to show it to
be about colonialism, capitalism, and conquest. One reason for this may
be that this is received knowledge: it has been repeated often enough for
all to know that already. Another may be that this knowledge changes
very little. Winterson then demonstrates her awareness that mythical
speech can achieve more to transform consciousness than demytholo-
gizing can ever do. Instead, she challenges the myth’s place in contem-
porary culture – its ways of sustaining the contemporary worldview,
its function as dominant ideology – a challenge to the present way of
treating the world she frames as a repetition of the hubris of Robinson
Crusoe and his likes. In other words, rather than working in terms
of closure or as the fulfilment of a (feminist) promise, The Stone Gods
addresses re-narration as possibility. Formulating a feminist critique of
contemporary culture, the repeating worlds of The Stone Gods also show
history as teleology and as progress to be itself a myth, caught in a cycle
of repetition and return. Instead of buying into the myth of history as
leading to more (and ‘MORE’), the novel seems to suggest, we need to
‘trust . . . in the very power of myth to change and, in the process, to
change us’, as Laurence Coupe puts it, ‘to maintain the interaction of
myth and history’ (189), starting with the interaction of myth with our
personal histories.
Myth and memory
Myth, then, is not only about its ‘eternal return’, as Mircea Eliade had it,
its coming back, again and again, whether in the same or in a different
form. Nor are its literary uses confined to what T.S. Eliot once called
‘the mythical method’, which he defined as ‘simply a way of control-
ling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’
(1923: 483). In contrast to such a retrospective use of myth as ‘manipu-
lating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’
and thus attributing an archetypal, unchangeable quality to the (fic-

tional) world it literally inscribes, myth here is taken to be defined by
its capacity for change, for adaptation and transformation. Already in
Weight, Winterson explored the possibilities of mythical retelling by
weaving her personal story into the fabric of the myth. This, of course,
is how myths are lived; in many oral traditions of storytelling, myths
are told in the first person. As used in The Stone Gods, myth is not about
its meaning for the individual, but for collective, cultural identity. As a
technology of cultural memory, myth here is not simply about repeat-
ing worlds and repeated stories. Instead, it is about its being set back in
cultural orbit, its being put back in circulation. And in this re-circling
and recycling, what matters is its encounter with the individual sub-
ject’s life-story.
This movement of myth’s return as rewriting is explicitly stated in
what may be called ‘the book within the book’ episode in Winterson’s
novel. The episode is based on a true event.11 On the London Tube, a
reader finds the manuscript of The Stone Gods and starts to read it. The
anecdote, which Winterson works into her subsequent version of her
novel, connects the individual lived life to the return of myth. For as
she weaves the story of her own adoption into this line of The Stone
Gods, Winterson also brings in the reader as rewriter and re-teller. It is by
picking up the text and reading it that the fictional world is actualized,
potentially to be inscribed with one’s own story, for as Billie points out,
‘The pages are loose – it can be written again’ (203). As the interfacing
of the personal story and the returning myth, reading, retelling, and
rewriting constitute the encounter or intervention that is to prevent
the world repeating itself. The writer, however, can only try and create
the conditions for this encounter to happen. As Billie explains, it was
she who left the manuscript there, ‘A message in a bottle. A signal. But
then I saw it was still there . . . round and round on the Circle Line.
A repeating world’ (203).
The metaphor of the myth on the Circle Line, orbiting London’s
metropolitan life and waiting to be picked up and actualized in reading,
retelling, and rewriting, suggests myth is a story that holds the possibil-
ity of change. Retelling myth temporarily opens up the narrative to a
new future as potentiality while linking up to the past as already there.
In this way, mythical retelling enables the thinking of change outside
of historical teleological time. This is evidently not the same as to say
that every new retelling becomes assimilated to some mythical origin
or merely repeats it. Instead, what I here propose is not to conceive of
myth as oriented towards a past it (re)actualizes, but rather to see it as
Winged Words 179
a particular kind of story and storytelling that, by its very nature and
definition, implies change and transformation in and through retelling.
As Coupe points out, ‘All myths presuppose a previous narrative, and in
turn form the model for future narratives. Strictly speaking, the pattern
of promise and fulfilment need never end; no sooner has one narrative
promise been fulfilled than the fulfilment becomes in turn the promise
of further myth-making’ (1997: 108).
Myth as ‘permanent possibility’, to use Coupe’s expression (1997: 100),
is in fact repeatedly underscored by Jeanette Winterson. In Weight, for
instance, she develops the metaphor of ‘the book of the world’, speaking
of ‘all the stories [being] here, silt-packed and fossil-stored’ (2005: 6). This
thought is echoed in the last sentence of The Stone Gods, a self-quotation
that reads, ‘Everything is imprinted for ever with what once was’
(2007: 207). There is a difference of emphasis, to be sure, between the
notion, central to Weight, that the stories are there, ‘waiting to be written.
Re-written’ (2005: xiv) and the notion, central to The Stone Gods, that ‘the
universe is an imprint’ (2007: 87). Indeed, in The Stone Gods, this imprint,
this already written – and written on the body of the universe – is con-
ceived in terms of memory and forgetting – of forgetting the lessons of
history, yet of remembering that there once was a pristine place. As Billie
muses, ‘Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes’ (2007: 87). And
there is a change of scale, moving from myth-making as world-making
to the retelling of myth as constituting a universe, that is, as constituting
an entire system of worlds. It is, then, in this shift of emphasis and this
change of scale, in the self-reflective movement of mythical retelling as
the remembering of myth and the forgetting of history, that The Stone
Gods most powerfully intervenes in the discussion about what retelling
can do in liquid times. The repeating worlds inside the novel evidently
prove myth to be a narrative mode particularly appropriate to the fluid
and ever-shifting mixture of history, memory, and fiction that pres-
ently make up our various versions of the past and of the future. At the
same time, the universe totalling all these repeating worlds represents
a conceptual system that seems the fictional equivalent of that con-
temporary liquid modernity capable only of assimilating more pasts into
its ever broadening present.
Multiperspectival memory
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, as liquidity

more and more comes to define the sociocultural aspects of late moder-
nity, calls for the remythologizing of culturally significant memories
for women become increasingly pressing. This need for retelling as a

means for keeping memory alive and part of everyday communication
and debate is expressed particularly forcefully in Elaine Showalter’s
recent history – ‘celebration’, as the Vintage paperback edition reads – of
American women writers, A Jury of her Peers (2009; 2010). In this study,
she constructs a history that is also a canon with the express aim to
establish ‘what literary historians call “a definitive, unmistakable, and
powerful heritage”’, so that women writers would no longer be forgot-
ten or left in obscurity (511).
Showalter’s bold defence of a canon of women’s writing reasserts
the importance both of communicative memory and of inscription
in the archive as it insists on the need to discuss, comment, and cri-
tique the heritage it establishes. As such, it also reasserts the necessity
both for active remembrance and for sustained ‘presence’. Indeed,
if a technologically driven presentification of the past, for instance
through the digital availability of a wide corpus of texts, changes the
way contemporary culture remembers the past, this cultural memory
through ‘presence’ still necessitates the (human) agency of active
remembering. The transformative potential of Winterson’s myth on
the circle line is only realized in its reader’s act of re-membering the
future. Likewise, Le Guin’s Lavinia speaks of herself as a figure ‘able
to remember my life and myself’ (2008: 3), yet her nominal presence
in literary history, while guaranteeing her survival both as trace and
as presence, requires her prise de parole for her actually to re-enter cul-
tural memory. ‘If I must go on existing century after century’, LeGuin
has Lavinia say, ‘then once at least I must break out and speak’ (4).
Allowing Lavinia’s voice to be heard, Le Guin joins the storyteller’s
active act of remembrance to the memory as mere presence, image of
a present past.
Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice so that it will mingle and resonate
with the manifold voices, and silences, of literary history. As such, her
ambition is not to correct her misrepresentation, nor to fill a narrative
blank, but simply for her to get some ‘room’ and some ‘air’ (4) – some
space within a cultural memory that is necessarily plurivocal, for every
retelling of necessity adds not only a perspective, but also a voice to
the canon of texts to which people refer themselves for a sense of iden-
tity and of belonging. This multiperspectival and plurivocal character
of mythical retellings was already emphasized by Christa Wolf, when
in her Medea: Stimmen (1998) – literally, Medea: Voices but translated in
English as Medea: A Modern Retelling (1998) – she told Medea’s story
not just in the voice and from the perspective of Medea, but also gave
Winged Words 181
the accounts of her husband, Jason, of her pupil Agameda, of King

Creon’s astronomers, Akamas and Leukon, and of his daughter, Glauce.
Wolf’s aim was no doubt to juxtapose these voices, showing events to
hold different meanings for different people. Yet she also intended what
she refers to as ‘achronism’: the ‘interpenetration’ of epochs (1998: vii),
which can be identified as the presentification of the past, and which
she conceives of as the meeting point of present and past (1).
The interpenetration of time and of echoing voices in Christa Wolf’s
Medea, like the conversation with the dead that occurs in Le Guin’s
Lavinia, speaks of the nature of contemporary cultural memory as capa-
cious and many-voiced, no longer limited to ‘the characteristic store of
repeatedly used texts, images and rituals in the cultivation of which each
society and epoch stabilizes and imports its self-image; a collectively
shared knowledge of preferably (yet not exclusively) the past, on which
a group bases its awareness of unity and character’, as Jan Assmann
defined it (1988: 15). Instead, the liquid condition of late modernity,
fostering a fluid sense of time and of identity, encourages participation in
the production of tradition and of a sense of belonging through multiple
acts of cultural remembrance, remythologizing myths old and new as
the means to self-assertion, self-determination, and self-creation. The
freedom this implies is immense, as are the possibilities for the future.
For by putting the burden of the past on individual choice, tradition,
identity, and belonging become responsibilities that cannot be taken
lightly in view of the futures they may project or disremember.
Notes
1 Remembering the Past, Manufacturing Memories

1. A notable exception to this trend is Bertha’s treatment in Classical Comics’
Jane Eyre: The Graphic Novel (Brontë and Corzine 2008).
2. Much has been written on writing as a medium of remembrance, and schol-
ars have been discussing literature as cultural memory for some time now,
exploring the specificity of literature as a medium for cultural memory
(e.g. Rigney 2004; Grabes 2005; Erll and Rigney 2006).
3. In fact, we may also need to think the preoccupation with identity as linked
with consumer culture. Cultural critics have convincingly argued that identity-
categories such as adolescence, for instance, have been produced as an identity
to be targeted as a market (Buhler 2002). Recently, Bauman (among others) has
remarked on ‘the liquid modern reprocessing and recycling manipulation of
identity’ (2008: 13).
4. In this I align myself with feminist thinkers like Elizabeth Grosz, who has
similarly broken a lance for moving beyond received feminist thought to
project what feminist thinking could and should be. See also Brian Morris’s
‘What We Talk About When We Talk About “Walking in the City”’, in which
he suggests ways in which key concepts of cultural studies could be usefully
rethought. More generally, the journal Theory, Culture and Society has been
keeping track of the major conceptual overhaul that is upon us in a number
of special issues. See, for instance, its Special Issue on Problematizing Global
Knowledge edited by Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Ryan Bishop, and
John Phillips (vol. 23, nos 2–3, May 2006).
5. Among recent work on the Holocaust and the globalization of memory, one
wants to note especially Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s The Holocaust and
Memory in the Global Age (2006 [2001]) and Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional
Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009).
6. Mathijsen’s talk of ‘the natural place for the kitchen’ (2007: 9) as something
historical that has gone lost is a case in point. Have feminist studies of
environmental planning not demonstrated that there is no such thing as
a ‘natural’ design for homes, and that this design inscribes power relations
which have nothing ‘natural’ about them? Surely, there are also good
reasons for destroying some of the old . . .
7. Not all things, surprisingly: we tend to buy a new washing machine only
when needing one because the old is broken. Unlike cars, which are very
much part of how people identify themselves to others, bicycles for instance
are much less caught in the cycles of innovation that drive accelerated obso-
lescence for objects like (cell)phones and televisions.
8. This ‘emotional-memorial value’ is, of course, central to the so-called experi-
ence economy – an economy that is geared, its theorists Pine and Gilmore
(1999) have argued, towards producing not goods and services, but memorable
experiences.
182
Notes 183
9. For the complex and sometimes ambivalent relationship of women’s writing

to the women’s movement, see for instance Sara Maitland’s ‘Novels are Toys
not Bibles, but the Child is Mother to the Woman’, in which she discusses
‘feminist novels’ and what, as a writer, she sees and experiences as the ‘exor-
bitant demands’ that are being laid on writers identified as ‘feminist’ (1979:
206–7). Imelda Whelehan’s The Feminist Bestseller (2005) is a sustained effort
to elucidate the impact of feminism on popular women’s fiction.
10. In an ironic twist of the rewriting as recovery paradigm, rewritings are
increasingly marketed as revealing hidden secrets. Thus, a reprint edition of
Jane Fairfax provides a new tag that emphasizes the ‘mystery revealed’: The
Secret Story of the Second Heroine in Jane Austen’s Emma (1997). Jane Fairfax is
presented as part of Joan Aiken’s Jane Austen Entertainment series, which
also include Mansfield Revisited (1984) and Lady Catherine’s Necklace (2000).
Stephanie Barron is the author of a whole Jane Austen Mystery series, includ-
ing Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (1996) and Jane and the
Barque of Frailty (2006). There is also a Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mystery series,
authored by Carrie Bebris, with titles such as Pride and Prescience (2004),
Suspense and Sensibility (2005), and North by Northanger (2006).
11. Witness also the increasing popularity of women’s writing from the Global
South and their marketing as ‘feminist’ and ‘political’ (Hogan 2008).
12. I have adapted Marc Roudebush’s English translation of Nora slightly, to
make it a more literal translation.
13. The historian and psychologist Eelco Runia suggests ‘metonymy’ as another
model (Runia 2006). I pursue this idea in Chapter 4.
2 En/gendering Cultural Memory

1. In fact, I have done so myself, in classes of world and comparative literature
taught at Indiana University and James Madison University between 1992
and 1997. For a discussion of rewriting as a concept in literary history, see
Fokkema (2003).
2. For a discussion of American postmodern fiction in the light of rewriting, see
Moraru (2001).
3. See, for instance, the poetry collections Ovid in English (Martin 1998) and
Ovid Metamorphosed (Terry 2001).
4. There are, of course, antecedents, for instance in the writings of the late
twelfth-century poet Marie de France or in those of Christine de Pisan, writ-
ing the beginning of the fifteenth century.
5. In her introduction to The New Feminist Criticism, Elaine Showalter recalls
that ‘In the United States, feminist criticism was created by literary and aca-
demic women’ while in Great Britain, it had its institutional bases ‘outside
the universities, in radical politics, journalism, and publishing’ (1985: 5–8).
6. The reference is, of course, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian novel
Herland.
7. The quotation is from James’s preface to the (revised) New York Edition of
The Golden Bowl (1909), in which he also writes, ‘To revise is to see, or to
look over, again – which means in the case of a written thing neither more
nor less than to re-read it. I had attached to it, in a brooding spirit, the idea
184 Notes
of re-writing – with which it was to have in the event, for my conscious play
of mind, almost nothing in common. I had thought of re-writing as so diffi-
cult, and even so absurd, as to be impossible – having also indeed, for that
matter, thought of re-reading in the same light. . . . What rewriting might be
was to remain – it has remained for me to this hour – a mystery. On the other
hand the act of revision, the act of seeing it again, caused whatever I looked
at on any page to flower before me as into the only terms that honourably
expressed it . . .’ (2009: lii).
8. For feminist critiques of New Criticism, see for instance Millett (1970: xii)
and Heilbrun and Stimpson (1975: 62).
9. I have selected the translation of Cixous’s text as published in Diacritics
in 1997 because it captures more fully the 1970s rhetoric. See Cixous and
Clément (1986) for a translation of the full text of La jeune née.
10. It first appeared in English in the journal Signs in 1976, in a revised version
of an essay published the previous year in a special issue of L’Arc on Simone
de Beauvoir and the feminist movement, edited by Catherine Clément.
11. Sarton’s poem proceeds to posit anger as a feeling to explore as she recognizes
the ‘frozen rage’ she sees on Medusa’s face as her own and concludes, ‘This
is the gift I thank Medusa for’. This anger is also explored in Ann Stanford’s
‘Medusa’ (1977), a poem which retells the myth from Medusa’s perspective.
Recalling her rape and the anger that turned her hair to serpents, Stanford’s
Medusa ultimately finds herself alone, prisoner of herself and her feeling.
It is worth noting that earlier in the twentieth century, both Louise Bogan
and Sylvia Plath found poetic inspiration in the myth of Medusa. Bogan’s
‘Medusa’ (1921) is a poem in which the encounter with the mythological
figure gives way to a ‘dead scene’ in which ‘Nothing will ever stir’; in Plath’s
‘Medusa’ (1962), a poem about her mother, the encounter leads to the
conclusion that ‘There is nothing between us’. All poems are included in
Marjorie Garber’s The Medusa Reader (2003).
12. In Subversive Intent, Susan Suleiman speaks of Cixous’s novel Souffles as
weaving a negative and a positive intertextuality (1990: 129).
13. For surveys of artistic representations of Medusa, see Siebers (1983) and
Garber and Vickers (2003).
14. See also her essay ‘Le Sexe ou la tête?’ (1976), translated as ‘Castration or
Decapitation?’ (1981).
15. This also explains the romance of feminism with Angela Carter from The
Bloody Chamber and Other Stories on. For as Sage reminds us, the relations
between Carter and feminism were long strained, ‘since her insistence on
reclaiming the territory of the pornographers – just for example – set her
against feminist puritans and separatists’ (1994: 40–1).
16. In an interview with John Haffenden, Carter explains that ‘some of the
stories in The Bloody Chamber are the result of quarrelling furiously with
Bettelheim’ (1985: 83). I discuss the relationship between rewriting and
translation – translation as a kind of rewriting in another language and
rewriting as a kind of translation – at more length in Chapter 5.
17. It may be interesting to observe that when she died, in 1992, Angela Carter
left the synopsis of a novel about Adèle with her publishers (Clapp 1993: x).
18. Another instance of uncanny doubling is the rewriting of feminist classics
from the male point of view; for instance, Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway
Notes 185
(1999), rewriting Virginia Woolf’s novel from Richard Dalloway’s perspective.

No longer confined to writing about women or from a female point of view,
women writers from the 1990s onward feel free to write about anything they
want (Showalter 2009: 494). This includes rewriting female-authored classics as
in Janet Aylmer’s Darcy’s Story (1996) and Mr. Darcy’s Diary: A Novel by Amanda
Grange (2005), to give two examples from the growing body of ‘Darcyiana’.
19. Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) is a novel that is inter-
esting in this context, for it explicitly connects rereading and rewriting,
which it identifies with the bringing to market of new Austen products
designed to feed the desire of the Austenite for more Austen.
3 Women’s Rewriting as Counter-memory

1. Plagiarism and copyright infringement constitute distinct forms of violation:
plagiarism is an offence against the author’s moral rights; copyright infringe-
ment is the unauthorized use of works covered by copyright law and consti-
tutes a violation of the rights of a copyright holder.
2. Pia Pera can be found on the Internet. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as
‘Independent Writing and Editing Professional’ from the Prato Area and
states she is interested in ‘consulting offers, new ventures, expertise requests,
reference requests, getting back in touch’ (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/
a/483/28a).
3. It matters little, I think, that Bloom claims he has ‘never been able to recog-
nize [his] theory of influence when it is under attack’ (1994: 7). His defence
of ‘the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary
soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate
inwardness’ (10), constitutes sufficient evidence of his own wilful refusal to
consider the social, economic, and ideological dimensions of literature.
4. In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous says something similar, when she writes
that the logocentric project has always been about founding and funding
phallocentrism (1986 [1975]: 65).
5. This analysis tallies with Mary Eagleton’s reading of 1980s figurations of the
woman writer as differing from men in terms of the drive to gain wealth and
fame, being instead, ‘in varying degrees, excluded from, indifferent to and sus-
picious of literary production as it is conventionally understood’ (2005: 139).
6. In A Jury of her Peers, Showalter writes, ‘All the feminist critics looking at the
1970s agree that Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying . . . was a key book of the decade’
(2009: 443–4). Because the novel deliberately eschews ‘all the conventional
endings for intelligent women in fiction who aspire to be artists’, it can be
said of Jong that ‘she was writing feminist metafiction, rewriting the endings
and revising the plots of the past’ (445).
7. It is worth noting that ‘performance as such is not regulated as a cultural
commodity under copyright’ (Auslander 2008: 129). In Liveness, Auslander
examines the ontological status of performance ‘within a cultural economy
dominated by reproduction’, suggesting copyright is the ideal context for
such an analysis, since ‘copyright law itself is a direct result of the develop-
ment of technologies of reproduction and consequent economic changes’
(147). Although Auslander is concerned with very different things than the
186 Notes
ones that occupy me here, the premises on which our studies depend have
significant points of contact.
8. Maroula Joannou makes a similar point when she observes that to contem-
porary readers, ‘the very novels which empowered and helped to politicise a
generation of women may appear lacking in subtlety, formally conservative,
and sometimes even hectoring in tone’ (2000: 106).
9. Lise Gauvin points out that the reverse is also true: if to write is always also
to rewrite, then to rewrite is also to write in the first degree, reinventing
literature and its models (2004: 27).
10. Another model is homage – as Kundera, for instance, writes apropos of his
rewriting of Diderot’s Jacques and his Master, ‘to remain in the company
of Jacques and his master as long as possible, I began to picture them as
characters in a play of my own’ (1985: 1).
11. ‘These glittering stories . . . are not so much retellings of fairy tales as medita-
tions on the imaginative content of such tales’, it reads on the first edition’s
dust jacket’s front flap. Although negated, the idea of The Bloody Chamber and
Other Stories as retellings of fairy tales is activated and thus frames the text.
For as we know from cognitive science, ‘when we negate a frame, we evoke
the frame’ (Lakoff 2004: 3).
12. To illustrate: in Palimpsests, Gérard Genette reports that in 1670, in his
treatise De l’histoire, Father Pierre Le Moyne ‘could state without turning
a hair that “The Iliad of Homer, as everyone knows, is practically a copy
in verse of what Dares and Dictys wrote in prose about the Trojan Wars.”’
He comments, ‘This is the hypertext made hypotext, and the original epic
read in reverse as a derivative versification. Shades of Borges’ (Genette 1996
[1982]: 221).
13. Rosset, obviously, had his own reasons to want to publish Lo’s Diary – reasons
which may include making up for the missed chance with Nabokov’s novel
and continuing to publish controversial works with sexually explicit content:
his Grove Press had issued Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch,
and an uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
14. In his Lolita und der deutsche Leutnant, translated as The Two Lolitas (2005),
Michael Maar argues that Nabokov’s famous novel is itself a reprise of
another tale of Lolita, which appeared in 1916 under the pen name of von
Lichberg, and asks probing questions about the character of this repetition.
Reviewers of Maar’s book tend to concur that although ‘the staggering
similarities between the plots of the two stories demand an explanation’,
‘Humbert’s story belongs to Nabokov outright’ (Demers 2005).
15. On the tendency of critics to read women’s writing as (auto)biographical,
see, for instance, Meijer (2009).
16. In Feminist Fabulation (1992), Marleen Barr argues that what is called ‘feminist
science fiction’ is, in fact, metafiction about patriarchal fiction, making a strong
argument for revising the idea of postmodernism so as to accommodate the
previously excluded form she terms ‘feminist fabulation’.
17. In her recent biography of Jean Rhys, Lilian Pizzichini acknowledges this inter-
textuality by referring to the novel’s ‘distortion of Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s
version of a modernist masterpiece’ and adds, ‘Jean did not parade her liter-
ary allusions, acquaintances, or associations. They bled into her writing. This
makes her writing all the more subversive – an ironic echo, a passive-aggressive
Notes 187
swipe at the masters’ (2009: 224). However, she does not unpack this pervasive
intertextuality and reads Rhys’s work autobiographically.
18. In addition, publishers increasingly demand of their writers they contribute
to their books’ placement and send them on book presentation tours, thus
reducing contemplative writing time even further.
19. In fact, she also wrote a fitness book in the early years of her writing
career, Fit for the Future (1986). ‘Again, money’, she writes on her website
(http://www.jeanettewinterson.com).
20. For the notion of cultural memory as a field I am indebted to Léon van
Schoonneveldt (2006).
21. Joan Aiken’s Jane Fairfax (1990) was first subtitled ‘A Companion Volume to
Emma’ (1996). In a later edition, it is dubbed ‘The Secret Story of the Second
Heroine in Jane Austen’s Emma’ (1997).
22. Much, of course, has been written about the intellectual advantages of a
comparative perspective. A key text remains Edward Said’s ‘Intellectual Exiles:
Expatriates and Marginals’ in his Representations of the Intellectual (1994: 35
and passim).
4 Untold Stories
1. Many feminist writers and critics have acknowledged the influence of
Olsen’s Silences on their work and thought. For a complete survey see
Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s thoroughly researched assessment of Olsen’s impact
in ‘Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The Lessons Silences Has Taught Us’
(1994; 2003).
2. Although the 1978 paperback edition announces that Caine’s novel is ‘soon
to be a TV series’, the series, which was optioned by the late producer Herb
Jaffe, was never made. A defunct webpage of the London-based literary
agency MBA Literary Agents reports that the option is now expired. (http://
www.mbalit.co.uk/pages/writers/caine.html, found through Google’s cached
links, 4 March 2009.) It is worth observing that all these rewritings are not
single-edition publications. Thus, Caine’s Heathcliff was first released in
hardback both in England (with W.H. Allen, 1977) and in the United States
(Knopf, 1977; Random House, 1978), then in paperback by Allen as a Star
Book (1978), a mass market paperback (Fawcett Books, 1979), and finally a
new paperback edition (Grafton/Fontana, 1993), also released in other coun-
tries (e.g. Canada, via HarperCollins, 1993). This publication history can be
taken to mean the book continued to interest readers and publishers over a
significant period of time. The date of the last edition, coinciding with the
appearance of Lin Haire-Sargeant’s version (by 1993 retitled Heathcliff, like
Caine’s), suggests the books were competing titles on the literary market.
3. Silence, in fact, can be subject to copyright and copyright infringement: in
2002, British composer Mike Batt was accused of plagiarizing John Cage’s
1952 silent composition 4’33” in a classical rock album that included a track
entitled ‘A One Minute Silence’. See also Weber (2005: 1).
4. For Elaine Showalter, Glaspell’s story represents the need for women to
‘constitute themselves as a jury of her peers’ (2009: x), giving its title to her
history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.
188 Notes
5. It might be worth recalling here that in the early 1970s, Foucault works
together with Hélène Cixous on his Prison Information project, the Groupe
d’Information sur les Prisons, putting on blitz performances in front of prisons
(Cixous 1997: 210–11).
6. Radstone criticizes the conflation, especially in literary studies, of confession
and autobiography (2007: 21–7).
7. My reading is informed by Susan Buck-Morss’s groundbreaking rereading of
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) and,
as such, is totally anachronistic (since her insights were first published in
2000). This does not invalidate my suggestion that Coetzee’s novel comments
on the politics of South Africa in the light of Hegel’s concept as developed out
of history. For more on Coetzee’s reading of Marx, see Spivak (1991).
8. The references, in fact, are many. See also my ‘“I come from a woman”:
Writing, Gender, and Authorship in Hélène Cixous’s The Book of Promethea’
(Plate 1996).
9. Critics, of course, differ on the subject of Coetzee’s investment and distance
from Elizabeth Costello. See Graham (2006: 217–18) for a short overview of
commentators’ views.
10. Here it is part of the first lesson, entitled ‘Realism’, which was initially given
as ‘What is Realism?’ at Bennington College in November 1996 and was
subsequently published in Salmagundi. The text of ‘What is Realism?’ varies
yet again slightly, for here, we are told ‘She has been widely honoured, at
home and abroad. There has even come into existence an Elizabeth Costello
Society, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which puts out a quarterly
Elizabeth Costello Newsletter’ (1997: 60–1).
11. On might indeed surmise the modifications are not those of a writer revising
his text for ‘polishing’, but rewriting it for a less academic audience than that
of his public university lectures.
12. It might be worth noting that the South African novelist Marlene van
Niekerk, when asked to lecture on the subject of ‘the position of the novel-
ist in post-Apartheid South Africa’ in her inaugural address as professor to
the Africa Chair of the University of Utrecht, delivered a story The Fellow
Traveller (A True Story) in which she lets Elizabeth Costello die. Considering
the topic of the lecture, this death of the rewriter seems to include a(n ironic,
tongue-in-cheek) comment on rewriting as a means of postcolonial textual
production. See Niekerk (2008).
13. Is Friday also engendered by Silences? Olsen writes of silences as ‘the unnatural
thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot’ (2003 [1978]: 6).
14. The OED first lists as a definition for pregnant: ‘Of the mind, language,
behaviour, etc.’: ‘1. a. Full of meaning, highly significant; suggestive, imply-
ing more than is obvious or stated’. It came as a surprise to me that in the
OED, ‘pregnant’ only in second instance refers to the female body. Under the
heading ‘II. Of the body or physical phenomena’, it says: ‘3. a. Of a woman
or other female mammal: having offspring developing in the uterus. Also of
the womb (obs.). Freq. with with (the offspring), by (the male parent)’.
15. There is always a certain arbitrariness to beginnings, as well as ideology. Why
not refer women’s rewriting to its beginning with H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, a
book-length retelling of the Trojan war from Helen’s perspective, written and
published prior to Wide Sargasso Sea? It is, of course, part of the argument
Notes 189
of this book that though a transhistorical mode of literary production,

rewriting needs to be examined in its context of production and reception,
for the meanings that attach to it differ over time.
16. See Gilbert and Gubar’s introduction to the second edition of The Madwoman
in the Attic (2000: xxxv–xxxvi).
17. This applies not only to the novel’s composition, but also to its reception. As
Joannou points out, ‘Jean Rhys was rediscovered in England at about the same
time as the race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill in London’ (2000: 147).
18. It might be worth recalling that Bakhtin’s dialogism is the source for the
notion of intertextuality as formulated by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes,
which is, in the latter’s formulation, the citation of texts that are ‘anony-
mous, irrecoverable, and yet already read’ (Barthes 1986 [1971]: 60), thus
defining intertextuality itself as a mnemonics and a technology of memory
and of forgetting.
19. The reference is to Ricoeur’s essay ‘Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator’ (1986).
20. Compare John Cage’s piece 4’33”, which offered the audience four minutes
and thirty-three seconds of silence divided into three movements. The point
of Cage’s piece was that there is no such thing as silence: silence is con-
structed, as is meaningful sound.
21. See also Nora’s concept of the lieu de mémoire, which can be viewed to herald
a spatial historiography: a new kind of historical endeavour that takes place
in space (cf. Runia 2006).
22. Memory is, of course, notoriously unreliable. In one interview, Condé
recalls, ‘I accepted immediately’ (Clark and Dehany 1989: 129); in another,
she says, ‘I was not interested in the topic’ (Pfaff 1996: 58).
23. Although not unchallenged, today, the consensus is that the historical
Tituba is Arawak (Breslaw 1996; Linder 2009; but see Hoffer 1996 and
Tucker 2000). Confusion about Tituba’s racial identity seems to arise from
the racial politics of mid-nineteenth-century America, which initiate the
change of her race ‘from Indian, to half-Indian and half-Negro, to Negro’
(Hansen 1974: 3). Tituba’s alleged racial identity can be seen to speak of
contemporary concerns (Rosenthal 1998: 203) and the debate itself as a
typically contemporary concern fueled by ‘a belief in the existence of race as
a functional category of identification’ and a desire to ‘fix’ Tituba aimed at
solving the problem of how to read her (Fulton 2008: 47).
24. The intertextual parodic relation with Paul Guth’s bestseller that is estab-
lished by the novel’s title serves to highlight crucial differences between the
daughter of a wealthy white Creole plantation owner from Martinique who
would become the first Empress of the French and that of a slave on just
such a plantation.
25. While all these allusions can be found in both the French text and its English
translation, this last example is to be put on the account of Condé’s translator-
spouse Richard Philcox: the phrase ‘Il s’effondrera le monde! (1986: 97)
does not have the same evocative power for a French-speaking audience
that ‘Things will fall apart’ (1992: 59) has for the English-speaking one. For
discussions of Philcox’s role in the production of Condé’s texts, especially
his production of them for a broader readership, see Philcox (2001), Fulton
(2008: 143–50), and Veldwachter (2009).
26. I borrow the expression ‘invented absence’ from Achino-Loeb (2009).
190 Notes
5 High Infidelity
1. Grever researched the paradox that, despite a clear de-canonization trend,
the canon continues being recycled in history textbooks and public presen-
tations (see Grever and Stuurman 2007).
2. See for instance, Viswanathan (1989), Olick (2003) and Goff (2005).
3. It is worth noting that for Adler, ‘the difference between great books and
good books is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind’. The
criterion is whether or not the great conversation about the great ideas
occurs (Adler 1997).
4. With the exception of the 2002 German Ahabs Frau, at the time of its ten
year anniversary there are no published translations.
5. In this light, it is worth noting that the one rewriting that has most signif-
icantly affected the canonization of its precursor text is Rhys’s revisionary
prequel to Jane Eyre. Because Wide Sargasso Sea re-visions – and, as such, is
a kind of rewriting of – a feminist classic, the ‘vigorous public debate of a
critical trial’ which Elaine Showalter claims is necessary for women’s writ-
ing to be included in the cultural heritage took mostly place within the
confines of women’s writing/feminist criticism (2009: xii). If Rhys’s novel
contributed to maintaining the popular interest of Jane Eyre, it did so by
reasserting the novel’s relevance from the perspective of (a history of)
gender and of feminism, which is a matter construed as of special interest
to women.
6. In an article it recently ran on women in the workforce, The Economist
claims, ‘The economic empowerment of women across the rich world is one
of the most remarkable revolutions of the past 50 years’ (2 January 2010: 49).
It concludes its discussion of the consequences of the feminization of
markets attendant upon this revolution by stating, ‘The West will be strug-
gling to cope with the social consequences of women’s economic empower-
ment for many years to come’ (51). In my discussion of women’s rewriting
as cultural memory, I identify one such social consequence.
7. The above-mentioned article from The Economist identifies this relationship
when it states, ‘The landmark book in the rise of feminism was arguably not
Ms Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” but Daniel Bell’s “The Coming of the
Post-Industrial Society”’ (2 January 2010: 50).
8. It may be worth remembering that there are many colleges and universities in
the United States, but also elsewhere, that offer ‘Great Books’ programmes.
9. The emergence of a new type of rewriting, retelling a woman-centred clas-
sic from the male point of view, is a recent development that needs to be
viewed in this context, as part of women’s assertion of their right to write
about whatever they want. Indeed, this kind of revision is increasingly
proving a rich source for women’s rewriting, as Amanda Grange’s series of
diaries proves. Since the successful publication of Mr. Darcy’s Diary: A Novel
in 2005, she has published Mr. Knightley’s Diary (2006), Captain Wentworth’s
Diary (2007) and Colonel Brandon’s Diary (2008).
10. As Wolf writes in a diary entry in ‘Conditions of a Narrative’: ‘Now you no
longer need to be “Cassandra”; most people are beginning to see what is
coming’ (1984: 239).
Notes 191
11. In this, rewriting forms a counterpoint to science fiction, which locates the
alternative in the future. See also the discussion of Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia
further on in this chapter.
12. The moment of ‘suspicion’, it is worth noting, is also the moment of New
Historicism, a critical practice that memorably began, as Stephen Greenblatt
put it in Shakespearean Negotiations, ‘with the desire to speak with the dead’
(1988: 1). Clearly, then, this is a moment of ‘convergent procedures of
demystification’ (Ricoeur 1970: 34).
13. In his days, the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, author of The Aeneid
among other works, was called Vergilius. While Latinists still tend to prefer
Vergil as the more correct abbreviation of his name, Virgil is its more common
(mis)spelling in the English-speaking world. In this book, I use Virgil to refer to
the Roman poet, reserving the name Vergil for Le Guin’s character in Lavinia.
14. See Ostriker (1993) and A. B. Brown (1999).
15. In French, ‘A translation is called a version when the target language is the
translator’s mother tongue. It is called thème when the source language is her
native tongue and she is rewriting into her non-native tongue’ (Lotbinière-
Harwood 1991: 92). From the OED entry for the noun ‘theme’ it would
seem the same was true in English at least through the nineteenth century.
This would suggest its definition of ‘version’, unsupported by the quotations
provided, is erronous and cannot be ‘A translation from English into Latin
prose done as a school or university exercise; a piece of English prose set for
translation into Latin’.
16. For the distinction between literature as object and as medium of remem-
brance, see Erll and Rigney (2006).
6 Winged Words
1. Terry Eagleton makes a similar argument in After Theory (2003), suggesting
cultural theory more generally served the interests of capitalism.
2. For further adepts of the term, see Calinescu (1997) and Moraru (2001). In
the opening chapter of Rewriting, Moraru clears his conceptual ground and,
distinguishing rewriting from a number of related practices, explicitly states
that ‘rewriting and retelling are not synonyms’ and links rewriting to writing
and print culture (2001: 17; emphasis Moraru’s).
3. It is worth remembering that these differences have become apparent follow-
ing the advent of the electronic age: it is precisely because print is no longer
the sole or dominant medium that writing could become visible as such – a
specific technology of language.
4. It is not incidental that Rigney develops this notion of the portable monu-
ment in the context of her discussion of Walter Scott’s bestselling Waverley
Novels. The bestseller’s monumentality, indeed, is crucial to the formation
of a shared memory, as Pine and Gilmore (1999) would no doubt confirm.
5. Of course, the relationship of writing to memory has always been contested.
Plato already knew that writing is ‘elixir not of memory but of remind-
ing’ (2005: 62). As Goody and Watt have argued in their landmark essay
‘The Consequences of Literacy’ (1968), the fixity of print does not only turn
192 Notes
books into sites of memory in Nora’s sense of the term, blocking the work
of forgetting, but also fosters a historical and a critical sense: because writing
can be returned to, it can be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that fosters
critical inquiry. Also, in the return to source it can be found to be different
from how it is remembered.
6. The neo-colonial uses of intellectual property law, which defines and limits
how cultural products are produced and distributed, suggests this ‘triumph’
is imperialism by other means. See also Saint-Amour (2003: 218).
7. The issue is briefly addressed in the opening pages of Le Guin’s Lavinia, when
she poses the question of language, asking how it came the Trojan Aeneas
spoke in fluent Latin and how it is ‘that you understand me, who lived
twenty-five or thirty centuries ago? Do you know Latin?’ (2009 [2008]: 5).
For an extensive analysis of narrative modes for presenting consciousness in
fiction, see Cohn (1978).
8. In the preface to the volume of new mythologies published on the occasion
of the fiftieth anniversary of Barthes’s Mythologies, Jérôme Garcin comments
on the paradox of the commemorative effects of Barthes’s de-mythologies:
‘Barthes mythifies so well what he denounces’, he writes, ‘that his subversive
encyclopaedia can be read today with tranquil nostalgia’ (2007: 9).
9. For an interesting discussion of men identifying as Atlas, see Vincent
(2006: 256–7).
10. Marx’s famous aphorism is in fact a misquotation. The opening sentences of
‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ actually reads, ‘Hegel remarks
somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it
were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as
farce’ (1978: 594).
11. The event was reported in a BBC News story on 8 March 2007: http://news.
bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6430775.stm.
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Index
absence 40, 98, 121–2, 129, 150 affect 25, 42, 147
invented 129, 189n.26 See also emotions
of the past 16 Africa 123
presence in 121 See also South Africa
See also presence After Theory (Eagleton, T.) 191n.1
acceleration 17, 90 Agameda 181
of consumption 19 Agamemnon 42, 140, 142
of history 9, 17, 26 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 42
Achebe, Chinua 30, 171 aggression 142
Things Fall Apart 30 Ahab 8, 33, 134, 144
Achino-Loeb, Maria-Luisa Ahabs Frau 190n.4
118, 189n.26 Ahab’s Wife (Naslund) 8, 134–5,
Acker, Kathy 6, 83–5, 93, 151 137–9, 143, 146, 148
Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Aiken, Joan 22, 63, 183n.10
The 84 Jane Fairfax 22, 64, 183n.10,
Don Quixote, Which Was 187n.21
A Dream 6, 84, 151 Lady Catherine’s Necklace 183n.10
Great Expectations 6, 84 Mansfield Revisited 183n.10
Across the Acheron (Wittig) 146 Akamas 181
activism Aladdin 22
leftist 75 Albertine 33
literary 149 Albuquerque 188n.10
feminist 107, 159 Algeria 49
adaptation 7–8, 22, 39, 75, 87, allegory 31, 112
160–1, 172, 178 Althusser, Louis 133
film 87 Amazon 135, 137, 164
form of 132 America (United States) 8, 58,
textual 153 78–80, 92, 100, 106, 123, 133,
theorists of 75 135, 138, 183n.5, 187n.2,
strategy of 153 189n.23, 190n.8
Adèle 7, 11, 184n.17 cultural memory of 139
Adèle (Tennant) 22, 57, 91 mainstream 89, 92
Adler, Mortimer 133, 138, 190n.3 post-9/11 105
Great Books of the Western women’s poetry in 73
World 133 amnesia 31, 97
Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, The anamnesis 31
(Acker) 84 anarchy 70, 177
Aeneas 11, 147, 192n.7 androcentrism 11, 136
Aeneid, The (Virgil) 39, 146–7, 154, feminism’s critique of 159
191n.13 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom) 72
Aeschylus 42–3, 143, 166 appropriation 8, 31
Agamemnon 42 re- 45, 70
Oresteia 143 Arawak 124, 189
214
Index 215
Arcades Project (Benjamin) 14 Auslander, Philip 185n.7

archive 13, 63, 125, 161–5, 167–8, 180 Liveness 185n.7
of cultural memory 69 Austen, Jane 7, 11, 22, 63–4,
digital 164 183n.10, 185n.19, 187n.20
domain of the 35 Emma 7, 11, 22, 64
male 165, 167 Australia 112
seduction of the 12 authority 43, 57, 59–60, 72, 93–3,
traditional 164 153, 163
of writing 142 of authorship 59
See also repertoire of the canon 30, 146
Armitt, Lucie 76 critique of 59, 131
Armstrong, Karen 173 of the text 146
Short History of Myth, A 173 of traditional representations 40
art 34, 68, 75–7, 80, 103, 114, 147 authorship 60, 68, 71–2, 74–5, 77,
commercial 91 80–3, 93, 111
as craft 34 authority of 59
feminist 33 female 40, 54, 164
of flying 70, 74 ideology of 91
of life 34 politics of 91
of memory 130, 155, 174 autobiography 82, 84, 105,
of storytelling 174 108, 119, 123, 126–7, 187n.18,
of suspicious reading 41 188n.6
of the weak 32 women’s 102
of writing 66, 76 See also bio-autography;
Ashcroft, Bill 98 biography
Empire Wrikes Back, The (with availability 23, 164–5, 180
Griffiths and Tiffin) 98 Aylmer, Janet 185n.18
Assmann, Aleida 130, 162 Darcy’s Story 185n.18
Assmann, Jan 69, 86, 181
Atget, Eugène 17 Baba Yaga 174
Atlas 171, 173–4, 192n.9 Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Ugrešić) 174
Attridge, Derek 109–10, 164 Bakhtin, Mikhail 117, 189n.18
Atwood, Margaret 23, 48–9, Bal, Mieke 8
148–50, 153, 171, 173–4 Barbados 123–124, 126
Good Bones 23 Barr, Marleen 186n. 16
Penelopiad, The 150, 173–4 Feminist Fabulation 186n.16
Robber Bride, The 148–50 Barron, Stephanie 183n.10
audience 125–6, 152–3, 189n.20, Jane and the Barque of
189n.25 Frailty 183n.10
academic 188n.11 Jane and the Unpleasantness at
broad 62 Scargrave Manor 183n.10
demand 21, 137 Barth, John 39
design 153 Chimera 39
implied 113 Barthes, Roland 31, 59–63, 168–70,
intended 153 189n.18, 192n.8
new 8 Lover’s Discourse, A 62
target 136 Mythologies 168, 192n.8
Augustine 39 Pleasure of the Text, The 62
Confessions 39 S/Z 61–2
216 Index
Barton, Susan 109–11 Blade Runner 176

Bassnett, Susan 149 blank spots 102–104
Batt, Mike 187n. 3 Bloody Chamber and Other Stories,
Baudelaire, Charles 17, 55 The (Carter) 6, 55, 64, 76,
Baudrillard, Jean 3 184n.15–16, 186n.11
Illusion of the End, The 3 Bloom, Harold 72, 74–5, 130, 148,
Bauman, Zygmunt 4, 19–20, 27, 34, 155, 186n.3
160, 182n.3 Anxiety of Influence, The 72
Liquid Fear 19 Western Canon, The 74, 130, 148
Liquid Life 19 Bloom, Leopold 112–13
Liquid Love 19 Bloom, Marion 112–13
Liquid Modernity 19 Bloom, Molly 186n.17
Liquid Times 19 Bluebeard 6, 55
Baym, Nina 41 Boating for Beginners (Winterson) 90
BBC News 192n.11 Book of Promethea, The (Cixous) 111,
Beast 55 188n.8
Beauman, Sally 7 Borgan, Louise 184n.11
Rebecca’s Tale 7 Borges, Jorge Luis 18, 75–6,
Bebris, Carrie 183n.10 186n.12
North by Northanger 183n.10 borrowing 29, 68
Pride and Prescience 183n.10 literary 89
Suspense and Sensibility 183n.10 Boston 124–5
Beck, Ulrich 136 Boucheron, Alain 123
becoming 29 Bourdieu, Pierre 73, 91
woman 136 Rules of Art, The 91
Beginning with O (Broumas) 6, 111 Bovary, Emma 109
Beizer, Janet 140–1 brand 64, 87–8, 172
belief 11, 25–6, 68, 74, 85, 146, management 83, 87–9, 91
153–4, 189n.23 name 65
false 168 recognition 87
See also disbelief Brockmeier, Jens 118
Belle 55 Brontë, Charlotte 7, 30, 42, 57,
Bellerophon 39 103–4, 114–16, 118, 122
Benjamin, Walter 14 Jane Eyre 7, 11, 30, 42,
Arcades Project 14 79, 103, 109, 114–16,
Bennington College 188n.10 119, 190n.5
Beowulf 39 Brooks, Cleanth 46
Berne Convention 72 Brooks, Van Wyck 8
Bettelheim, Bruno 55, 184n.16 Brothers Grimm 64, 76, 149
Uses of Enchantment, The 55 Fairy Tales 64
Bible 43, 90, 104, 148, 151 Vintage Fear (with Carter) 76
readers 143 Broumas, Olga 6, 111
translations 148 Beginning with O 6, 111
bio-autography 140–1 Brown, Dan 64
See also autobiography; biography Da Vinci Code, The 64
biography 123, 127 Brown, Wendy 25–7, 97–8
women’s 140 Politics Out of History 25
See also autobiography; Büchmann, Georg 74
bio-autography Geflügelte Worte 74
Index 217
Buck-Morss, Susan 188n.7 neoliberal 4, 20, 41, 65, 136,

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal 159–60
History 188n.7 post- 11, 25, 61
Buffard, Claude-Henri 109 social organization of 4
La fille d’Emma 109 Captain Wentworth’s Diary
Burke, Edmund 18, 27 (Grange) 190n.9
Burroughs, William S. 186n.13 Caribbean 115, 116, 123
Naked Lunch 186n.13 French 123
Business of Consumer Book Publishing identity 116
2005 (Simba Information) 22 Carter, Angela 6, 31, 55, 64, 76–7,
Butler, Judith 105, 119 150, 168, 184n.15–17
Butler, Rhett 87–8 Bloody Chamber and Other Stories,
Byatt, A.S. 59, 171 The 6, 55, 64, 76, 184n.
Passions of the Mind 59 15–16, 186n.11
Byng, Jamie 171 Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault,
The 55, 150
Cage, John 187n.3, 189n.20 Sadeian Woman, The 31, 168
4’33” 187n.3, 189n.20 Vintage Fear (with Brothers
Caine, Jeffrey 104, 187n.2 Grimm) 76
Heathcliff: The Missing Years Casanova, Giacomo 57
104, 187n.2 Cassandra 8, 42–3, 74, 139–2,
Calder, Liz 76 166–7, 190n. 10
Calinescu, Matei 103 Cassandra (Wolf ) 139, 144, 151,
Cambridge Companion to the Italian 162, 165–7
Novel, The 81 castration 51–2
Canada 187n. 2 censorship 80, 99, 101, 105
canon 8–9, 19, 30, 98, 101, market 101
109, 130–9, 143–6, self- 56, 80, 99, 101
148, 152, 154–5, 162, 164, Cervantes, Miguel de 39, 84
180, 190n.1 Don Quixote 39
authority of 30 Charlotte (Thomas) 109
of cultural heritage 8 chauvinism 44
of postmodernism 82 Chedid, Andrée 7
See also canonization; canon wars; La femme de Job 7
decanonization Chillingworth, Roger 103
Canongate 20, 34, 171, 173–4 Chimera (Barth) 39
canonization 109, 137–8, 144, 155, Christophine 119, 122
190n.5 chronotope 117
process of 109, 139, 155 Circe 6
See also canon; canon wars; Circle Line 178, 180
decanonization Civil War 138
canon wars 30, 131 See also war
See also canon Cixous, Hélène 39, 41, 49–53,
Capital (Marx) 110 55–7, 70, 73–4, 100–2,
capitalism 4, 11, 64, 85, 91, 159–60, 111, 143, 148, 184n.9,
165, 174, 177, 191n.1 184n.12, 185n.4,
consumer 70 188n.5, 188n.8
feminism and 136 Book of Promethea, The 111, 188n.8
late 10, 12 La jeune née 184n.9
218 Index
Cixous, Hélène – continued false 170

Newly Born Woman, The (with feminist 46
Clément) 50, 185n.4 -raising 47, 50, 100
Rootprints 102 social 13
Souffles 184n.12 of a social identity 13
class 58–9, 100, 104 See also self-consciousness;
Clément, Catherine 53, 184n.10 stream-of-consciousness
Newly Born Woman, The (with construction 136, 146
Cixous) 50, 185n.4 masculinist 119
closure 31, 177 plot 103
CNN 135 social 136
Coetzee, J.M. 99, 109–14, 116, 120, of translation 149
127, 166, 188n.7, 188n.9 See also reconstruction
Elizabeth Costello 112 consumerism 4, 10, 16, 19, 23–4,
Foe 99, 109–12, 114, 120, 123, 34–5, 175
127, 166 anti- 63
Lives of Animals, The 112 centrality of 34
cognitive science 105, 186n.11 of liquid modernity 136
Colonel Brandon’s Diary Consuming Silences (Weber) 101
(Grange) 190n.9 consumption 19, 34–5, 61–3,
colonialism 132, 177 89, 160
See also postcolonialism critique of 61
commercialism 83 cycles of 19, 172
commodification 41, 123 logic of 23, 62
of the consumer 34 reading as 62
of culture 61, 83 society of 23, 62
of the past 10 system of 20, 22
Condé, Maryse 6, 99, 122–9, contiguity 121, 128–9
189n.22, 189n.25 continuity 13, 26, 91, 121, 174
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem historical 121
99, 122–3, 125–7 See also discontinuity
Moi, Tituba, sorcière … noire de Cook, James 176
Salem 6, 122, 124 copyright 10, 66–7, 69, 71–2,
confession 54, 81, 108, 123, 77–81, 83–8, 91–3, 185n.1,
125–6, 188n. 6 185n.7, 187n.3
space of 102 American 86
Confessions (Augustine) 39 French 60
Connell, R.W. 73 infringement 67, 78, 80, 83,
Connerton, Paul 42, 161 85–6, 89, 91, 185n.1,
How Societies Remember 42, 161 187n.3
Connor, Steve 153 Copywrights, The (Saint-Amour) 86–7
Conrad, Joseph 30 Cornis-Pope, Marcel 44
Heart of Darkness 30 Costello, Elizabeth 112–13,
consciousness 44, 48, 119–20, 188ns9–10, 188n.12
122, 136, 141, 166–7, counter-memory 32–3, 66, 69, 99,
177, 192n.7 129, 131
altered 47 rewriting as 134
collective 13 See also memory
consistency of 13 Coupe, Laurence 31, 177, 179
Index 219
creativity 68, 100 democratization 58

literary 40, 72–3, 75 of the book 58
process of 67 of the classroom 58
See also innovation of history 10
criticism 44, 61, 85, 124, 133, 141, of literature 58
155, 159 of reading 165
cultural 44, 168 demythologize 31, 168–70,
feminist 43–8, 97, 119, 183n.5, 177, 192n.8
190n.5 See also remythologize
literary 44 de Pisan, Christine 183n.4
social 11, 61, 141 D’Erasmo, Stacey 134
See also gynocriticism; New Derrida, Jacques 102, 165
Criticism Des femmes 70
Crucible, The (Miller, A.) 124 Diacritics 184n.9
Cruso 109–10 dialectic 172
Crusoe, Billie 176–7 master-slave 110, 188n.7
Crusoe, Robinson 109–10, 177 of past and future 174
Cunningham, Michael, of theft 72
Hours, The 81 dialogism 117, 189n. 18
Cynara 88 See also monologism
Diamant, Anita 104, 139, 143–4,
Daily Mail 173 151, 162–3, 167
Dalloway, Mrs. 190n.9 Red Tent, The 104, 139, 143–4,
Dalloway, Richard 185n.18 151, 162–3
Daniel 173 Diario di Lo (Pera) 7, 78
Dante 39, 146 Dickens, Charles 84
Divine Comedy 39, 146 Diderot, Denis 186n.10
Daphne 74 Jacques and his Master 186n.10
Darcy’s Story (Aylmer) 185n.18 Dido 39
Darwin, Mrs. 8 digitalization 13–14, 161, 164–5
Da Vinci Code, The (Brown, D.) 64 Dimmesdale, Arthur 103
death-drive 51 Dinah 104, 139, 143, 162–3, 167
de Beauvoir, Simone 50, 118, disbelief 42, 52, 145–6
136, 184n.10 See also belief
Debord, Guy 59 discontinuity 121
Society of the Spectacle, The 59 See also continuity
decanonization 130, 132, 154, discourse 14, 17, 31, 66, 68–70, 91,
190n.1 97, 99–102, 106, 108–9, 112–14,
See also canon; canonization; 120–1, 127–9, 155
canon wars feminist 35, 101
de Certeau, Michel 32 literary 58, 62
Defoe, Daniel 110–11, 175 of love 61
Robinson Crusoe 109–10, 113, memory 10, 17, 25, 99, 121
175, 177 public 14
de France, Marie 183n.4 Disney’s Aladdin: Jasmine’s Story 22
de Lauretis, Teresa 170–1 Disney’s Aladdin: The Genie’s Tale 22
De l’histoire (Le Moyne) 186n.12 disobedience 126
de Lotbinière-Harwood, civil 71
Susanne 149–50 dispossession 70
220 Index
diversity 136 England 8, 55, 58, 78, 80, 84, 108,

of readers 59 119, 187n.2, 189n.17
of voices 117 feminism in 106
Divine Comedy (Dante) 39, 146 Enlightenment 27, 169
Diving into the Wreck (Rich) failure of 169
48–9 reason 169–70
Doisneau, Robert 17 environmentalism 141
domination 50, 175 Epigrams (Martial) 71
discourses of 97 epistemology 69
drive to 176 Western 161
masculine 54 equivalence 150, 152
Don Quixote (Cervantes) 39 formal 151–2
Don Quixote, Which Was A Dream functional 150–1
(Acker) 6, 84, 151 principle of 102
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 169 of reading and writing 59
Notes from Underground 169 translation as 150
Drabble, Margaret 26, 63 Erll, Astrid 130
Drake, Sandra 116 eternal return 177
Duffy, Carol Ann 8 ethics
World’s Wife, The 8 feminist 47
du Maurier, Daphne 64 of reading 114
Rebecca 64 of rewriting 114
Dunyazade 39 ethnicity 100
Duval, Jeanne 55 Eugene Onegin 79
Europe 141
Eagleton, Mary 80, 185n.5 identity politics in 169
Eagleton, Terry 191n.1 Eurydice 6
After Theory 191n.1 Evergreen Review 78
Easter Island 176 exclusion 44, 69, 77, 110, 132, 144,
e-book 164 146, 153
economics 22, 54, 67 of women 141–3, 169
Economist, The 190ns6–7 of women’s experience 44
écriture feminine 41, 51, 57 of women writers 44
See also récriture feminine Exercices de style (Queneau) 102
editors 78, 91 Experience Economy, The (Pine and
English 78 Gilmore) 23, 25
Een schitterend gebrek ( Japin) 57 Eyre, Jane 7, 57, 116, 119
Eliade, Mircea 177
Eliot, T.S. 66, 85, 177 fabula 102
Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee) 112 See also story; sžujet
Emma (Austen) 7, 11, 22, 64 Fairfax, Jane 7, 11
emotions 25, 120 fairy tale 6, 8, 55, 74, 76–7,
See also affect 149, 186n.11
Empire Strikes Back, The 98 Fairy Tales (Brothers Grimm) 64
Empire Writes Back, The, (Ashcroft, Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault,
Griffiths, and Tiffin) 98 The (Carter) 55, 150
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 133 fame 68, 79–81, 83, 155, 185n.5
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Fanon, Franz 128
Theory 169 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 81
Index 221
father 72, 93 Fetterley, Judith 43, 48, 146

See also Law of the Father; Resisting Reader, The 43, 48
paternity fiction 6, 107, 109, 146, 172,
Fear of Flying ( Jong) 74, 185n.6 179, 186n.16
Federman, Raymond 69 feminist 26, 41, 76, 112
Fell, Alison 7 genre 82
Mistress of Lilliput, The 7 historical 85
Fellow Traveller (A True Story), The Italian 81
(van Niekerk) 188n.12 postmodernist 69, 183n.2
Felman, Shoshana 102 re-visionary 11
Felski, Rita 41, 43, 107, 147, 171 science 186n.16, 191n.11
feminine 54, 56, 70, 148–52 women and 55, 185n.6
concerns 40 women’s 183n.9
decorum 40 Figaro littéraire 60
fiction 146 film 7, 14, 90
identity See under identity Finland 80
imaginary 74 Finn, Huck 144
language 132 Finney, Gail 142
literature 91 first person 6, 102, 105, 123, 126,
metaphorics 53 131, 178
perspective 11, 102 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher 101, 187n.1
rewriting 53, 148 Listening to Silences (with
space 101 Hedges) 101
subjectivity 54 Fit for the Future (Winterson) 187n.19
versions 148 flying 70–1, 74
writing 51, 53, 56–7, 71 art of 70, 74
See also masculine See also larceny; plagiarism;
femininity 52, 149 stealing
experience of 112 Foe (Coetzee) 99, 109–12, 114, 120,
notions of 57 123, 127, 166
representation of 131 Foe, Daniel 109–11
traditional 55 Fordism 64
feminism 4–5, 10, 21, 25, 33–4, post- 21–2, 63–4, 89, 136, 172
40–1, 43, 56–7, 59, 64, 73–4, forgetting 3, 8, 18, 31, 41, 97,
99, 101, 114–16, 125, 135–6, 104, 118, 120, 133–4,
142, 148, 159, 165, 167, 162, 170, 179,
172–3, 183n.9, 184n.15, 189n.18, 192n.5
190n.5, 190n.7 deliberate 117
black 125 fear of 28
and capitalism 136 of history 179
promise of 54 literature of 145
second-wave 4, 40, 43, 46, 51, 54, of women’s histories 33
57, 100, 106, 159 formalism 102, 104
Feminist Bestseller, The Foucault, Michel 105, 106–8,
(Whelehan) 183n.9 163, 188n.5
Feminist Fabulation (Barr) 186n. 16 History of Sexuality, The 106–7
feminist ideals 55, 159 4’33” (Cage) 187n.3, 189n.20
Feminist Revision and the Bible Fowler, Karen Joy 185n.19
(Ostriker) 191n.14 Jane Austen Book Club, The 185n.19
222 Index
Foxrock 78 Genette, Gérard 75, 160, 186n.12

frame 105, 113, 120–1, 170, 186n.11 Palimpsests 186n. 12
France 8, 12, 15, 39, 59–60, 68, 78, Geflügelte Worte (Büchmann) 74
80, 106, 123 German Democratic Republic 141
Frankfurter Buchmesse 171 Germany 8
Franklin, Benjamin 61 Gertrude 23
Fraser, Nancy 4, 11, 57, 136, 159 Gertrude and Claudius (Updike) 109
fraudulence 66, 69, 84 Gilbert, Sandra 47, 72, 114, 189n.16
freedom 20, 27, 90, 98, 110, 120, Madwoman in the Attic, The (with
137, 174, 181 Gubar) 72, 114, 189n.16
promised 108 No Man’s Land (with Gubar) 114
symbol of 74 Giles Corey of the Salem Farms
Freud, Sigmund 51–2 (Longfellow) 124
Freund, Elizabeth 58 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 183n.6
Friday 109–12, 114, 175–6, Herland 183n.6
188n. 13 Gilmore, James 23, 25, 182, 191n.4
Fuller, Margaret 137 Experience Economy, The (with
Woman in the Nineteenth Pine) 23, 25
Century 137 Girl Meets Boy (Smith, Ali) 174
Fulton, Dawn 125 Glaspell, Susan 105, 187n.4
futility 177 Glauce 181
future 4, 6, 8, 11–12, 18–21, 23–31, globalization 12–13, 21, 86
40, 45, 50–4, 57, 59, 93, of memory 14, 182n.5
107, 140–1, 172, 174–6, Global South 183n. 11
178–81, 191n.11 Glyndebourne Opera Festival 173
feminist 5, 30, 108 Golden Bowl, The ( James) 183n.7
imagination of the 9 Golden Notebook, The 112
projecting 23 Gollancz 76
See also futurity; time Gone With the Wind (Mitchell,
futurism 16 Margaret) 64, 67, 87–9, 92
futurity 32, 172 Good Bones (Atwood) 23
Fuzzy Felt 173 Good Morning, Midnight (Rhys) 82
Goody, Jack 191n.5
Gallimard, Simone 123 Gospel of Mary 152
gaps 102–3, 116, 146 grand narratives 10, 31, 131
garbage See under waste Grange, Amanda 185n.18, 190n.9
Garber, Marjorie 184n.11 Captain Wentworth’s Diary 190n.9
Medusa Reader, The 184n.11 Colonel Brandon’s Diary 190n.9
Garcin, Jérôme 192n.8 Mr. Darcy’s Diary 185n.18, 190n.9
Gardner, John 39 Mr. Knightley’s Diary 190n.9
Grendel 39 Grasset, Bernard 60–1
GATT agreement 86 Great Books of the Western World
Gauvin, Lise 186n. 9 (Adler) 133
gender 21, 41, 43–4, 58–9, 66, 71, Great Expectations (Acker) 6, 84
73, 86, 92, 99–101, 136, 146–7, Great Gatsby, The 137
151, 153, 159, 176 Greece 42
ideology 169 Greenblatt, Stephen 191n.12
injustice 41, 54 Shakespearean Negotiations 191n.12
mythologies of 49 Greene, Graham 68
Index 223
Grendel (Gardner) 39 Heathcliff: The Missing Years

Grever, Maria 132, 190n.1 (Caine) 104, 187n.2
Griffiths, Gareth 98 Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering
Empire Writes Back, The (with Heights (Haire-Sargeant) 104,
Ashcroft and Tiffin) 98 187n.2
Grosz, Elizabeth 182n.4 Hedges, Elaine 101
Groupe d’Information sur les Listening to Silences (with
Prisons (Prison Information Fishkin) 101
project) 188n.5 Hegel, G.W.F. 110, 188n.7, 192n.10
Grove Press 78, 186n.13 Phenomenology of Spirit, The 110
Guadeloupe 123 Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
Gubar, Susan 72, 114, 189n.16 (Buck-Morss) 188n.7
Madwoman in the Attic, The (with Heijne, Bas 169
Gilbert) 72, 114, 189n.16 Heilmann, Ann 85
No Man’s Land (with Gilbert) 114 Helen 6, 188n. 15
Guillory, John 131 Helen in Egypt (H.D.) 188n.15
Gulliver, Mrs. 7 Heracles 171, 173
Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich 24–8, 121 heritage 10, 17–18, 135, 137, 180
Guth, Paul 125, 189n.24 collective 29
Moi, Joséphine, impératrice 125 cultural 8–9, 33, 54, 69, 73, 132,
gynocriticism 44 135, 165, 190n.5
See also criticism literary 30, 131
poet’s 6
H. (Haire-Sargeant) 104 Herland (Gilman) 183n.6
Haffenden, John 184n.16 Hermann, Claudine 70, 73
Haire-Sargeant, Lin 104, 187n.2 Les voleuses de langue 70, 73
H. 104 Tongue Snatchers, The 70
Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering hermeneutics 169
Heights 104, 187n.2 of desire 43
Halbert, Debora 93 of suspicion 31, 42–3, 52,
Halbwach, Maurice 12 132, 168
Social Frameworks of Memory, Heroides (Ovid) 39
The 12 heroism 142
Hamlet 109 male 142
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 23, 79 heteroglossia 117
Hansel and Gretel 23 hierarchy 141, 162
HarperCollins 135,187n.2 Hill, Susan 64
Harper’s 137, 144 Mrs. de Winter 64
Harris, Samuel 128 Hirsch, Marianne 3
haunting 115–17, 122, 128 historiography 12–13, 162
medial 161 processes of 85
texts 99 spatial 189n. 21
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 82, history 10–14, 16, 24–8, 30, 32–4,
103, 125 39, 46–7, 51, 55–6, 58, 73,
Scarlet Letter, The 79, 103, 125 85, 88, 110, 119, 124–5, 131,
H.D. 188n. 15 133, 138, 140, 142, 149, 162,
Helen in Egypt 188n.15 174–7, 179–80, 187n.4, 188n.7,
Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 30 190n.1, 190n.5
Heathcliff 103–4 acceleration of 9, 17, 26
224 Index
history – continued possibilities of 143

American 134 religious 153
collective 12 identity 4, 9–10, 12–13, 19–20, 26,
crisis of 12 40, 43, 45–6, 50, 54, 63, 88,
cultural 11, 45–6 116, 118, 124–5, 127, 130, 132–3,
democratization of 10 135–7, 181, 182n.3, 189n.23
literary 6–9, 30–1, 33, 39–40, Caribbean 116
44, 46, 54, 63, 69, 72, 92, collective 19, 172
100–1, 104, 110, 144, 162, cultural 3, 5, 40, 130, 132–3,
180, 183 146, 178
philosophy of 121 female 9
rewriting of 3 feminine 40, 84
supplement of 56, 102 fluidity of 20
women’s 33 narrative 8, 42
History of Sexuality, The politics 169
(Foucault) 106–7 racial 125, 189n.23
Hite, Molly 7, 103 sexual 45, 47
Other Side of the Story, The 103 social 13
Hodgkins, Katharine 10 ideology 91, 105, 131, 163, 170,
Holiday, Billie 128 174, 177, 188n.15
Holocaust 13–14, 182n.5 of authorship as ownership 91
Holocaust studies 14 capitalist 60
Homer 39, 74, 81, 186n.12 gender 169
Iliad, The 186n.12 of originality 77
Odyssey 81 of (re)writing 164
Hours, The (Cunningham) 81 of the subject 108, 109
House on Eccles Street, The 112 Iliad, The (Homer) 186n. 12
How Societies Remember Illusion of the End, The (Baudrillard) 3
(Connerton) 42, 161 imaginary 137
How to Suppress Women’s Writing collective 133
(Russ) 101 cultural 4, 11, 13, 19, 23, 32
Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 134, 137–8 feminine 74
Huggan, Graham 123 national 89
humanities 25 social 54
Humbert, Humbert 104, 186 imagination 4, 11, 44, 46, 53, 76,
Hutcheon, Linda 75, 85 113, 162, 175
Huyssen, Andreas 9–10, 12, 15, 26 cultural 7
Present Pasts 10, 15 English 115
hybridity 136 of the future 9
hypermodernity 4 private 32
See also modernity sympathetic 113
Hypermodern Times (Lipovetsky) 61 imitation 66, 68, 75–6
hypertextuality 160 imperialism 115, 132, 192n.6
Hypsipyle 40 Incredulous Reader, The (Koelb) 145
Indiana University 183n.1
Ibsen, Henrik 46, 50 individualism 121
identification 59, 105, 136, 141, feminist 115
152, 166–8, 189n.23 radical 175
act of 166–7 industrialization 15, 141
Index 225
In Lucia’s Eyes ( Japin) 57 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic

innovation 20, 27, 172 of Late Capitalism 69–70
See also creativity Jane and the Barque of Frailty
inscription 3, 7–9, 28, 31–2, 39, (Barron) 183n.10
41, 45, 57, 65, 68, 71–2, 81, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave
83, 99, 108, 114, 124, 127–9, Manor (Barron) 183n.10
136, 140, 147, 151, 154, 161, Jane Austen Book Club, The
164, 170–1, 174–5, 178, (Fowler) 185n.19
180, 182n.6 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 7, 11, 30, 42, 79,
act of 162 103, 109, 114–16, 119, 190n.5
culture of 161 Jane Eyre: The Graphic Novel 182n.1
of desire 51 Jane Fairfax (Aiken) 22, 64, 183n.10,
original 70 187n.21
systems of 160 Japan 55
See also reinscription Japin, Arthur 57
Inside the Red Tent 143 Een schitterend gebrek 57
intellectual property See under In Lucia’s Eyes 57
property Jason 39–40, 181
intertextuality 50, 52, 69, 81–2, Jesus 152
127–9, 166, 184n.12, 187n.17, Joannou, Maroula 107, 186n.8,
189n.19, 189n.24 189n.17
feminist 21 Job 7
postcolonial 99 John Indian 128–9
theories of 75 Johnson, Mark 67
intervention 51, 150, 175, 178 Metaphors We Live By (with
in cultural memory 7, 20, 41, 66, Lakoff ) 67
69, 97, 148, 162–3 Jong, Erica 74, 185n.6
within print culture 164 Fear of Flying 74, 185n.6
in public space 35 Joseph 104, 140
strategy of 40 jouissance 62
Iphis 174 journalism 183n. 5
Irigaray, Luce 149 Journal of Mrs Pepys, The 33
Isolde 103 Joyce, James 113, 186n. 17
Itaca per sempre (Malerba) 81 Ulysses 113
Italy 80 junk See under waste
Ithaca 6 Jury of her Peers, A (Showalter) 134,
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem 180, 185n.6
(Condé) 99, 122–3, 125–7
Kassandra (Wolf ) 6, 8
Jacob 104, 139–40, 143 Kelly, Joan 33
Jacques and his Master King Creon 181
(Diderot) 186n.10 Kirk, G.S. 172
Jaffe, Herb 187n.2 Nature of Greek Myth, The 172
Jakobson, Roman 102, 120, 151 Knopf 78
Jamaica 115 Koelb, Clayton 145–6
James, Henry 45 Incredulous Reader, The 145
Golden Bowl, The 183n.7 Kristeva, Julia 189n.18
James Madison University 183n.1 Kubrick, Stanley 87
Jameson, Fredric 69 Kundera, Milan 3, 186n.10
226 Index
labour 142, 175 Lefevere, André 44, 149, 154, 160

of creation 68 Translation, Rewriting, and the
division of 50 Manipulation of Literary
literary 118 Fame 154
Lacan, Jacques 49, 51 legitimacy 30, 56, 67, 81, 109, 131,
lack 51, 73 136, 152, 163
Lady Catherine’s Necklace cultural 54–5, 81
(Aiken) 183n.10 Le Guin, Ursula 11, 146–8, 154,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover 180–1, 191n.11, 191n. 13,
(Lawrence) 186n.13 192n.7
La femme de Job (Chedid) 7 Lavinia 11, 146–7, 154, 181,
La fille d’Emma (Buffard) 109 191n.11, 191n.13, 192n.7
La jeune née (Cixous) 184n.9 Le Moyne, Pierre 186n.12
Lakoff, George 67, 169–70 De l’histoire 186n.12
Metaphors We Live By (with Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora) 12, 28
Johnson) 67 Les voleuses de langue (Hermann)
language 5, 44–5, 49–51, 56, 61, 70, 73
67, 70–7, 83–5, 92–3, 97, 100, lethetic 145–6
102, 106, 112, 114, 117–18, Letters (Rhys) 117
129, 136, 149–51, 159, 161–3, Leukon 181
171, 173, 184n.16, 188n.14, Lion, The Unicorn and Me, The
191n.15, 192n.7 (Winterson) 173
female 43, 48 Lipovetsky, Gilles 15, 19, 61
feminist 132 Hypermodern Times 61
gendering of 71 Lippincott, Robin 185n.18, 190n.9
otherness in 122 Mr. Dalloway 185n.18, 190n.9
poetic 49 Liquid Fear (Bauman) 19
as private property 71 liquidity 19
of men 71 Liquid Life (Bauman) 19
stealing 70–1, 73–5, 170 Liquid Love (Bauman) 19
technology of 161, 191n.3 liquid modernity See under modernity
women’s reappropriation of 70 Liquid Modernity (Bauman) 19
L’Arc 184n.10 Liquid Times (Bauman) 19
larceny 72, 169–70 Listening to Silences (Hedges and
See also flying; plagiarism; Fishkin) 101
stealing literacy 161
Latinus 147 See also orality
Latium 147 literariness 81–2
Latournerie, Anne 60 literary, the 68
Lavinia 147–148, 180 literary estate 78, 81, 87
Lavinia (Le Guin) 11, 146–8, 154, literary labour
181, 191n. 11, 191n.13, See under labour
192n.7 literature 5, 9, 16, 33, 39, 42–8,
Law of 1957 60 50, 58–62, 64, 70–1, 75, 77–8,
Law of the Father 70 80, 82, 84, 91, 100–2, 112–13,
Lawrence, D. H. 186n. 3 128, 131, 138, 145–6, 148, 155,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover 186n.13 160, 162, 164, 171, 173,
Leah (the cook) 119 175, 182n.2, 185n.3,
Leah (and Jacob) 104, 139 186n.9, 191n. 16
Index 227
American 134, 137–8 Maar, Michael 186n.14

comparative 183n.1 Lolita und der deutsche
democratization of 58 Leutnant 186n.14
of exhaustion 69 Two Lolitas, The 186n.14
feminine 91 Macherey, Pierre 97
as litter 20 Macmillan 78
postcolonial 98, 105, 125 Madwoman in the Attic, The (Gilbert
theories of 57 and Gubar) 72, 114, 189n.16
Victorian 108 Mailer, Norman 49
Western 39, 82, 130, 144–5 Maitland, Sara 6, 39, 74, 145, 150–1,
women in 44 183n.9
world 8, 21 Women Fly When Men Aren’t
women’s 126, 139 Watching 74
Literature of Their Own, Malerba, Luigi 81
A (Showalter) 91 Itaca per sempre 81
litter See under waste Mammy 88
Little Red Hen 23 Mann, Klaus 82
Little Red Riding Hood Mann, Thomas 82
6, 23, 55 Mansfield Revisited (Aiken) 183n.10
Liveness (Auslander) 185n.7 Marcus, Steven 108
Lives of Animals, The (Coetzee) 112 Other Victorians, The 108
Llewellyn, Mark 85 marginalization 139, 142–3
logocentrism 51, 185n.4 Marinetti, F.T. 16
logos 51 market 20–2, 34, 60, 64–5, 73, 77,
Lolita 7, 11, 67, 79–80, 87, 92, 104, 89, 91, 101, 105, 132, 135–8,
186n.14 153, 161, 182n.3, 185n.19,
Lolita (Nabokov, V.) 11, 68, 75, 190n.6
78–83, 104 literary 4, 6, 16, 21–3, 64, 69, 71,
Lolita und der deutsche Leutnant 89–90, 92–3, 105, 135–16, 138,
(Maar) 186n.14 143, 161, 165, 172, 187n.2
London 109, 111, 178, 187n.2, niche 132, 135–6, 164
189n.17 pressures 20
literary scene 55 marketing 11, 19, 21–3, 60, 63–4,
London Tube 178 87, 91, 105, 135, 137, 162,
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 124 171–2, 183n.10–11
Giles Corey of the Salem Farms 124 costs 21, 64
long tail 164 innovation in 172
Lorde, Audre 153 niche 136
Los Angeles 123 product 22
Lo’s Diary (Pera) 67, 78–82, 87, techniques 60
186n.13 Martial 71
loss 70, 109, 138 Epigrams 71
Lotringer, Sylvère 184 Martin, Valerie 104
Lover’s Discourse, A (Barthes) 62 Mary Reilly 104
Lübbe, Hermann 15 Martinique 189n.24
Lucia 57 Marx, Karl 110, 175, 188n.7, 192n.10
Lucifer (Palmen) 82 Capital 110
Lucifer (van Vondel) 82 Mary Magdalene 64, 152, 163
Lyotard, Jean-François 34, 69, 131 Mary Reilly (Martin) 104
228 Index
masculine 56, 150, 152 86, 88, 91–2, 97, 108, 118,
authority 72 130–3, 135, 137–9, 144, 146,
dominance 47, 54 148, 152, 154–5, 159–63, 165,
drive to domination 176 167, 170, 175, 178, 180–1,
economy of ownership 70 182n.2, 187n.20, 190n.6
interest 73 culture 10, 12–13, 15, 17, 29–30,
language as 71 41, 65, 108, 135, 159
myth 174 culture as 40, 43, 135
traditions of writing 162 female 144, 163, 167
values 148 as inscription 31
way of thinking 71 liquid 175
See also feminine; masculinity mythical 33
masculinity 49, 134, 144 politics of 26
See also masculine site of 133, 166
Mason, Antoinette Cosway 116 surplus 5
Mason, Bertha Antoinette 8 technology of 5, 30, 32, 118, 170,
Mathijsen, Marita 16, 182n.6 189n.18
Maurel-Indart, Hélène 68, 90 Western 17
McCaig, Donald 87 See also counter-memory
Rhett Butler’s People 87 Menon, Ritu 101
Medea 39, 93, 181 Mercure de France 123
Medea: A Modern Retelling 180 metafiction 81–2, 111,
Medea: Stimmen 180 125, 186n.16
mediation 35, 62, 165 feminist 185n.6
of storytelling 165 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 52
Medusa 6, 51–2, 184n.11 metaphor 52, 67–71, 73–5, 93, 111,
myth of 51 121, 164–5, 178–9
representations of 184n.12 See also metonymy
Medusa Reader, The (Garber) 184n.11 Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and
Melville, Herman 134–5, 137–8, Johnson) 67
144, 148 metonymy 120–1, 128, 183n.13
Moby-Dick 134, 137–18, 144, 148 See also metaphor
memoirs 17 Midas, Mrs. 8
Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, Midsummer Nights (Winterson) 173
The (Roszak) 57 militarism 141
memorability 23 Miller, Arthur 124
memory 3–5, 9–10, 12–17, 19, Crucible, The 124
23–26, 28–32, 34–35, 41–42, Miller, Henry 49, 186n.13
57, 69, 86–89, 99, 104, Tropic of Cancer 186n.13
108, 117, 121–2, 130, 132, Millett, Kate 43–4
135, 138–43, 146, 153, Sexual Politics 43
159, 160–1, 163–8, 174, Milton, John 82
179–80, 182n.5, 189n.22, Minerva 52
191n.5, 192n.4–5 Minh-ha, Trinh 119
collective 12, 23, 131, 143 misogyny 44, 150
communicative 69, 86, 132, 138, misrepresentation 20, 44, 146,
154, 180 168, 180
cultural 3, 5, 7–11, 14, 20, 29–35, of the West Indies 115
39, 41, 54, 57, 63, 65–7, 69–70, See also representation
Index 229
Mistress of Lilliput, The (Fell) 7 of Penelope 173–4

Mitchell, Margaret 64, 67, 87–9, 92 return of 178
Gone With the Wind 64, 67, 87–9, 92 Mythologies (Barthes) 168, 192n.8
Mitchell, Maria 137 Myths Boxset, The 173
MLA (Modern Language
Association) 5 Nabokov, Dmitri 78–81, 83
Moby-Dick (Melville) 134, 137–8, Nabokov, Vladimir 11, 68, 75,
144, 148 78–81, 83, 87, 92, 186n.13–14
modernity 16–17, 19, 26, 28, 85 Lolita 11, 68, 75, 78–83, 104
late 181 Naked Lunch (Burroughs) 186n.13
liquid 4, 11, 19, 27, 30, 32, 136, Naslund, Sena Jeter 8, 134–5, 137–9,
160, 179 143–4, 146, 148, 152
See also hypermodernity Ahab’s Wife 8, 134–5, 137–9, 143,
Modern Language Association 146, 148
(MLA) 5 Nature of Greek Myth, The (Kirk) 172
Moi, Joséphine, impératrice (Guth) 125 neoliberalism 136, 160
Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem See also capitalism
(Condé) 6, 122, 124 Neptune 52
monologism 117 Netherlands 16, 80, 82
See also dialogism neuroscience 169
Month of Sundays, A (Updike) 103 New Criticism 46–7, 58–9, 184n.8
Moraru, Christian 8, 42, 191n.2 See also criticism
Rewriting 191n.2 New England 129
MORE-Futures 176 New Feminist Criticism, The 183n.5
Morris, Brian 182n.4 New Historicism 168, 191n.12
Morrison, Toni 88 Newly Born Woman, The (Cixous and
Moss, Jane 126 Clément) 50, 185n.4
(m)other tongue 148, 154 New Mexico 188n.10
Mr. Dalloway (Lippincott) 185n.18, New Woman 53
190n.9 New York Observer, The 78
Mr. Darcy’s Diary (Grange) 185n.18, New York Post, The 135
190n.9 New York Times, The 48
Mr. Knightley’s Diary (Grange) 190n.9 New York Times Book Review, The 134
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 81 9/11 See under September 11, 2001
Mrs. de Winter (Hill) 64 Noah’s Ark 90
multiculturalism 101 No Man’s Land (Gilbert and
Muse 73 Gubar) 114
music 90, 173 non-fiction 43, 107
Mycenae 140d Nora, Pierre 9–10, 12–17, 28–9, 133,
My Fair Lady 79 183n.12, 189n.21, 192n.5
myth 6, 20, 29–32, 39, 49, 52, Les Lieux de mémoire 12, 28
61, 89, 93, 160, 168–75, North by Northanger (Bebris) 183n.10
177–80, 184n.11 nostalgia 17, 19, 28, 192
of Atlas 171, 173–4 Notes from Underground
Greek 6, 51 (Dostoevsky) 169
of Heracles 171, 173 novelist 103, 117
of Medusa 51–52 novelty 9, 77
of Odysseus 173 See also originality
of Oedipus 171 nowism 27
230 Index
objectivity 10, 163 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 85,

Occidental College 123 114, 130, 150–1, 188n.14,
Odyssey (Homer) 81 191n.15
OED (Oxford English Dictionary) 85,
114, 130, 150–1, 188n.14, pacifism 141
191n.15 Palimpsests (Genette) 186n.12
Oedipus 72, 170–1 Palmen, Connie 82
O’Hara, Gerald 88 Lucifer 82
O’Hara, Scarlett 33, 87–8 Paris 17
Olsen, Tillie 100–1, 116, parody 69, 76, 127–8
187n.1, 188n.13 Parry, Benita 119
Silences 100–1, 187n.1, 188n.13 Passion, The (Winterson) 90, 173
One, The 70 Passions of the Mind (Byatt) 59
Ong, Walter 29, 160 past 3–20, 23–35, 40–2, 45, 50–4,
Orality and Literacy 29 57, 60, 65–7, 69, 85–6, 88, 91,
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 97, 100–1, 112, 121–2, 131–3,
(Rich) 107 140–8, 159, 162, 165–7, 169,
oppression 42, 50, 100–1, 120 174–1, 185n.6
sexual 44, 108 absence of the 16
shared experiences of 100 as choice 18–19
women’s 44 cultural 5, 15
orality 160–1 as presence 5, 10, 23–4, 118,
secondary 29, 160 121–2
See also literacy manufacturing the 12
Orality and Literacy (Ong) 29 See also time
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit pastiche 69, 76
(Winterson) 90, 173 paternity 72
Orbus 174–17 See also father
Oresteia (Aeschylus) 143 patriarchy 47, 73, 101, 143
originality 68, 75, 85 patrimony 15, 18
See also novelty PEN 78
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin 41, 43, 73–4 Penelope 6, 39, 81, 93, 150, 173–4
Feminist Revision and the Penelopiad, The (Atwood) 150, 173–4
Bible 191n.14 Penguin 20
Stealing the Language 73 Pera, Pia 7, 67–8, 75, 78–80, 82–3,
other 103, 111, 113 85, 87, 92, 104, 185n.2
otherness 122, 129 Diario di Lo 7, 78
haunting presence of 122 Lo’s Diary 67, 78–82, 87, 186n.13
ordinary 129 performance 35, 48, 68, 76, 161,
potential 118 164–5, 167–8, 170, 185n.7
Other Side of the Story, The (Hite) 103 of cultural memory 35
Other Victorians, The (Marcus) 108 female 165
Ouologuem, Yambo 68 of identification 167
Ovid 39, 52 literature as 77
Heroides 39 of memory 148, 166–7
Metamorphoses 52 of re-vision 162
ownership 67, 70–72, 83, 93 rewriting as 168, 170
authorship as 91 Perpetua 74
Oxbridge 55 Perrault, Charles 55, 76, 149
Index 231
Perseus 39, 52 Politics Out of History (Brown, W.) 25

Petry, Ann 124 Poole, Grace 119
Tituba of Salem Village 124 pornography 108, 184
phallocentrism 51, 71, 185n.4 postcolonialism 10, 99, 112
Phallus 70 See also colonialism
Phelan, Peggy 167 postmodernism 10, 70, 81–2,
Unmarked 167 186n.16
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart 146 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Phenomenology of Spirit, The Late Capitalism (Jameson)
(Hegel) 110 69–70
Philcox, Richard 189n.25 Pragmatic Plagiarism (Randall, M.)
philosophy 50 66, 68, 83
of history 121 presence 24–5, 28, 35, 99, 116,
Philosophy of Rhetoric, The 121–2, 129, 161, 180
(Richards) 93 in absence 121
Pine, Joseph 23, 25, 182, 191n.4 metaphysics of 28
Experience Economy, The of otherness 122, 129
(with Gilmore) 23, 25 of the past 24, 118, 121–2
Pirate, The (Robbins) 84 past as 5, 10
Pizzichini, Lilian 186n.17 production of 24–5
plagiarism 66–72, 75, 77–8, 80, See also absence
82–5, 89–93, 185n.1 present 5, 11–12, 14–15, 18–19,
See also flying; larceny; stealing 24, 26–9, 32, 35, 57, 107,
Planet Blue 176–17 117, 120–2, 140–1, 166,
Plath, Sylvia 184n.11 174–5, 180–1
Plato 191n.5 liquid 27, 167
Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes) 62 memory in the 9
plot 62, 76, 84, 86, 102, 110, 112, past as 23
113, 154, 171–2, 186n.14 See also time
pluralism 136 presentification 24–5, 180–1
poet 5, 48–9, 51, 55, 66, 72–3, 85, Present Pasts (Huyssen) 10, 15
117, 147, 151 Pride and Prescience (Bebris) 183n.10
heritage of 6 print 20, 40, 62–3, 74, 161, 164,
poetry 6, 48, 58, 72, 74, 102, 117, 150 191n.3, 192n.5
theory of 72 culture 161, 164
women’s 73 invention of 71
politics 17, 19, 26, 54, 72, logic of 63
169–70, 183n.5 space of 164
of authorship 91 printing 71, 165
of commerce 72 printing press 165
feminist 159 priority 72–3, 152
identity 136, 169 Prison Information project (Groupe
of memory 26 d’Information sur les
race 88, 189n.23 Prisons) 188n.5
of rewriting 83, 99–100 production 6, 17, 22, 34, 44, 48, 57,
sexual 44, 160 59, 62, 67–70, 75, 82–5, 89–92,
of silence 99 102, 104–5, 107, 112, 120,
of South Africa 110, 188n.7 125–6, 148, 151, 159, 169, 181,
of writing 81 185n.5, 189n.15
232 Index
production – continued Radstone, Susannah 10, 12,

cultural 3, 62, 71 108, 188n.6
of memory 5, 7, 9, 30 Randall, Alice 67, 87–9, 92
of the past 10, 16–17, 24, 34 Wind Done Gone, The 67, 87–9, 92
reading as 62 Randall, Marilyn 66, 68, 75, 77, 83
rewriting as 105 Pragmatic Plagiarism 66, 68, 83
See also reproduction Rapunzel 74
profit 34, 70, 79 readerly text 62
symbolic 66, 79 See also writerly text
unearned 67 reading 32, 35, 41–6, 48, 52–3,
progress 26–7, 175, 177 56–59, 61–3, 68, 75–7,
history as 175 90, 103–5, 111–12, 118,
promise 31, 87, 108, 177, 179 126–8, 131, 135, 143,
emancipatory 11, 40–1, 54, 160 145–7, 152, 164, 166,
radical 5, 11 172, 178
property 67, 72–3, 83, 93 democratization of 165
intellectual 66, 69, 79, 83, ethics of 114
92–3, 192n.6 feminist theory of 46
literary 70 suspicious 41
private 71, 89, 92, 118 women’s 43, 46, 143
public 79, 86 See also rereading
protectionism 83 reality 46, 48–9, 56, 68, 93, 102,
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 70 142, 148, 163
Proulx, Annie 138 future 53
Provence 163 material 41, 163
proximity 129 present 53
of alterity 128 Rebecca 7
Prynne, Hester 103, 125–6, 129 Rebecca (du Maurier) 64
public domain 79, 85–6, 92, 163 Rebecca’s Tale (Beauman) 7
publishing 20–21, 76, 79–80, 89, re-calling 4, 146
135, 161, 164, 171, 183n.5 reception 34, 66–7, 69, 76,
culture 20 80, 82–3, 89, 91–2, 113,
house 21, 34, 56, 70, 78, 82, 120, 125–6, 139, 152,
123, 171 189n.15, 189n.17
industry 5, 20–1, 60, 89, 123, act of 66, 80, 82, 93
135, 159 authoritative 82
strategy 5 context of 69, 77, 80, 97
Pygmalion 79 critical 114, 125
productive 16, 41–2, 57
Queen Kong 8 reconstruction 31, 102
Queneau, Raymond 102 history as 28
Exercices de style 102 of the past 13
quotation 69, 83 See also construction
récriture feminine 53, 111
race 59, 134, 138, 143, 189n.17, See also écriture feminine
189n.23 Red Tent, The (Diamant) 104, 139,
politics 88 143–4, 151, 162–3
racism 88, 144 Register, Cheri 47
American 123 Reid, Su 151
Index 233
Reilly, Mary 7 literature’s 70

reinscription 9, 31, 41, 57, 63, 76, mechanics of 50
93, 132 technologies of 89–90, 185n.7
See also inscription See also production
remembering 3, 5, 8–9, 18, 28, 30, rereading 5, 30, 44, 52–3, 57,
41–2, 84, 104, 121, 129–34, 62–3, 98, 131, 155, 184n.7,
140–1, 146, 153, 162–3, 165–7, 185n.19, 188n.7
174, 179–80 See also reading
feminist 31 resistance 15, 32, 34, 42, 46, 73, 120
the future 180 act of 71
rewriting as 127 aesthetics of 145
of women’s histories 33 Resisting Reader, The (Fetterley) 43, 48
remembrance 9, 14, 28, 97, 104, Resolution 176
130, 155, 162, 165–6, 170, 176, retelling 11, 20, 22, 24, 29, 31, 39,
180, 182n.2 43, 50, 55, 57, 67, 87, 102, 104,
cultural 3, 25, 30, 34, 67, 155, 124, 160, 164, 171–4, 178–80,
174, 181 184n.11, 188n.15, 190n.10,
space of 97, 129 191n.2
remythologize 31, 159, 169, 175–6, of fairy tales 6, 8, 76, 186n.11
179, 181 of myth 20, 39, 179
See also demythologize mythical 29, 31–2, 93, 173–5,
re-narration 173, 177 178–80
repertoire 33, 35, 161, 168 re-vision 5, 7, 11, 26, 29, 34,
See also archive 42, 45–7, 50–1, 53, 57,
repetition 29, 45, 69, 76, 80, 105, 108, 112–13, 131,
83–4, 146, 168, 171, 173, 135, 148, 160, 190
176–7, 186n.14 centrality of 50
aesthetics of 81, 83 feminist 6, 31, 33, 152
art of 76 performance 162
with a difference 29 writing as 30
literary 68–9, 75, 82 revisionism 10, 43, 73–4
replenishment 100, 103 revolution 44–5, 60, 190n.6
rewriting as 104 critical 43
strategy of 132 digital 165
representation 12, 28–9, 30, 33, 40, French 60
42, 87–8, 97, 99, 109, 113, sexual 44, 107
120–2, 128, 130, 140, 159, 165 rewriting 3–8, 10–11, 16, 20–4,
of femininity 131 29–35, 39–42, 45–6, 48–57,
of Medusa 184n.13 61–2, 64, 66–71, 74–8, 80–3,
racist 88 85–7, 89–93, 97–9, 101–2,
realistic 48 104–6, 109, 111–14, 118,
space of 97 120–1, 125, 131–2, 134–5,
technology of 7 138–9, 142–55, 160–2, 165,
of women 146 167–72, 174, 176, 178,
See also misrepresentation 183n.1–2, 184n.7, 184n.16,
Representations of the Intellectual 184n.18, 185n.18–19, 185n.6,
(Said) 187n.22 186n.10, 188n.11–12, 188n.15,
reproduction 29, 51, 73, 92, 150, 189n.15, 190n.5, 190n.9,
185n.7 191n.15, 191n.2
234 Index
rewriting – continued Robbins, Harold 84

ethics of 114 Pirate, The 84
feminist 8, 23, 40, 135 Roberts, Michèle 39, 64, 152,
of history 3 162–3, 169
ideology of 164 Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene,
potential of 4, 74, 89 The 64
reading as 59, 61 Wild Girl, The 64, 152, 162–3, 169
as remembering 127 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 109–10,
as stealing 67, 75 113, 175, 177
translation as 149–50 Robot Spike 176
women’s 3–12, 16, 20–4, 26, Rochester, Mr. 8, 42, 114, 119
28–35, 39–45, 49, 53–5, Roger’s Version (Updike) 103
57–8, 61–9, 83–4, 91–3, 97–100, romance 74, 159
102–6, 108–12, 114, 118–19, family 72
121–2, 129–32, 135–6, of feminisim 184n.15
138–9, 141, 143–9, 151–5, romantic drama 88
159–65, 169, 172, 188n.15, Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 79
190n.6, 190n.9 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf)
writing as 83 55, 167
Rewriting (Moraru) 191n.2 Rootprints (Cixous) 102
rhetoric 58, 76, 184n.9 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
feminist 43 (Stoppard) 79
rules of 71 Rosenthal, Bernard 124
Rhett Butler’s People (McCaig) 87 Rosset, Barney 78, 186n.13
Rhys, Jean 7–8, 42, 79, 82, 99, Roszak, Theodore 57
103, 114–17, 119, 122, Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein,
126–7, 186n.17, 187n.17, The 57
189n.17, 190n.5 Roudebush, Marc 183n.12
Good Morning, Midnight 82 Routledge 149
Letters 117 Roz 148
Wild Sargasso Sea 7–8, 30, 79, 99, Rules of Art, The (Bourdieu) 91
114–19, 122, 126–7, 188n.15, Runia, Eelco 118, 121, 183n.13
190n.5 Rushdie, Salman 98–9
Rich, Adrienne 5, 29, 34, 39–41, Russ, Joanna 101, 170–171
43–50, 523, 55, 57, 97, 100, How to Suppress Women’s
105, 107, 111–12, 131, 135, Writing 101
146, 148, 159–60, 162, 166
Diving into the Wreck 48–9 S (Updike) 79
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 107 Sadeian Woman, The (Carter) 31, 168
Will to Change, The 40 Sage, Lorna 55, 184n.15
Richards, I.A. 93 Said, Edward 70, 77, 187n.22
Philosophy of Rhetoric, The 93 Representations of the
Ricoeur, Paul 42, 61, 189n.19 Intellectual 187n.22
Time and Narrative 61 Saint-Amour, Paul 78, 87, 89
Riffaterre, Michael 75 Copywrights, The 86–7
Rigney, Ann 130, 164, 191n.4 Salem 125
Ripley, Alexandra 64, 87 Salem Witch Trails 123, 127
Scarlett 64, 87 Salmagundi 188n.10
Robber Bride, The (Atwood) 148–50 Sanders, Julie 8, 75, 154
Index 235
Sarton, May 51–2, 184n.11 Showalter, Elaine 40, 44, 91, 134–5,
Sartre, Jean-Paul 53 137, 139, 180, 183n.5, 185n.6,
Search for a Method 53 187n.4, 190n.5
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) 79, Jury of her Peers, A 134, 180, 185n.6
103, 125 Literature of Their Own, A 91
Scarlett (Ripley) 64, 87 Signs 184n. 9
Schat, Peter 82 silence 97–101, 103–8, 110–14,
science 17 117, 119–21, 124, 129, 143,
scientificity 163 164, 189n.20
Scott, Walter 191n.4 and forgetting 97
Search for a Method (Sartre) 53 politics of 99
Second World War tradition of 20
See under World War II of the unconscious 97
Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene, women’s 100, 108
The (Roberts) 64 Silences (Olsen) 100–1, 187n.1,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 31, 57, 188n.13
127–8, 146, 168 Simba Information 22
Touching Feeling 31, 127, 168 Business of Consumer Book Publishing
self 13, 34, 53, 101–2, 105, 108, 112, 2005 22
118, 121–2, 124, 127–8, 140, simultaneity 27–8
185n.3 Sirens 51
female 54 skopos theory 151–2
remembered 97 slavery 88–9, 93, 124, 137, 143–4
sense of 19, 26, 50, 109 abolition of 166
self-consciousness 107, 129, 173 legacy of 89
See also consciousness; stream- Smiley, Jane 137–8, 144
of-consciousness Smith, Ali 174
September 11, 2001 105, 160 Girl Meets Boy 174
sex 107, 138 Smith, Barbara Hernstein 130–1, 154
See also sexuality Smith, Valerie 3
sexism 146 Snow White 23
Sexton, Anne 8 Social Frameworks of Memory, The
Transformations 8 (Halbwach) 12
sexuality 6, 51, 55, 59, 79, socialism 142
84, 107–8 social sciences 25
production of 105–6 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord) 59
See also sex Sontag, Susan 61
Sexual Politics (Millett) 43 Souffles (Cixous) 184n.12
Shakespeare, William 85 South 88–9
Hamlet 23, 79 South Africa 110, 188n.7, 188n.12
Romeo and Juliet 79 See also Africa
Shakespearean Negotiations space 28, 40, 43, 45, 54–5, 57,
(Greenblatt) 191n.12 71–2, 76, 97, 101–2, 118–19,
Sheherazade 39 121, 141–2, 161–2, 164,
shopping 19, 22, 136–7 180, 189n.21
logic of 19 of consumer culture 34
memory and 23 of mythical memory 33
Short History of Myth, A public 35, 40, 55
(Armstrong) 173 of remembrance 97, 129
236 Index
speech 51, 84, 97–9, 101–2, 105–8, Suleiman, Susan 21, 184n.12
110–12, 114, 120–1, 124, 126, Subversive Intent 184n.12
129, 162, 164–6, 168–70, 177 supplement 40, 54, 56, 102, 138–9,
possibilities of 114 144, 147, 154, 163, 165
Spencer, Una 134 to history 56, 102
Spikkers 176 suppression 97–9, 102–3, 116, 118,
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 97, 105, 124, 127, 129, 139
111–12, 114–15, 119 of experience 118
Stanford, Ann 184n.11 of voice 120
Star Wars 98 Suspense and Sensibility
stealing 66–8, 70–5, 84, 93, 179 (Bebris) 183n.10
rewriting as 67, 170 Sutherland, John 103–104
See also flying; larceny; plagiarism Symbolic 73
Stealing the Language (Ostriker) 73 symbolization 70–1, 110
Steck-Vaughn 23 S/Z (Barthes) 61–2
Stevenson, Robert Louis 7, 104 sžujet 102
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and See also fabula; plot
Mr. Hyde 104
Stimpson, Catharine 26 Tara 88
Stone Gods 176 Taylor, Diana 161
Stone Gods, The (Winterson) 174–9 Tech City 175–6
Stoppard, Tom 79 telos 27
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 79 temporality 15, 26
Story of Christa T, The 112 See also time
Story of My Life 57 Tennant, Emma 22, 57, 91
storytelling 11, 74, 90, 93, 98, 117, Adèle 22, 57, 91
129, 162, 165, 173–4, 179 Terdiman, Richard 14, 30, 121–2
art of 174 Terra Australis 176
cultural process of 31 territorialization 72, 83
female traditions of 139 theft See under stealing
male traditions of 162 theory
oral 162 critical 127
power of 147 cultural 191n.1
women’s 11 feminist 46
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 137–8, 144 of influence 185n.3
Uncle Tom’s Cabin 137–8 literary 59, 84
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of literary creativity 72, 75
(Stevenson) 104 of poetry 72
stream-of-consciousness 142 postcolonial 125
See also consciousness; self- of reading 61
consciousness skopos 152–3
structuralism 75 translation 153
Sturken, Marita 7, 10, 32, 131 Theory, Culture and Society 182n.4
Tourists of History 10 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 30
subjectivity 12, 47, 56–7, 84, Thomas, D.M. 109
108–9, 119 Charlotte 109
female 55, 115 Tiffin, Helen 98
feminine 54 Empire Writes Back, The (with
Subversive Intent (Suleiman) 184n.12 Ashcroft and Griffiths) 98
Index 237
time 5, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 26–30, 33, translator 150, 191n.15
39, 45, 61–62, 79, 85, 90, 101, female 149
121, 129, 141–2, 161, 167, 170, responsibility of 149
176, 181 trash See under waste
and consumer culture 61 trauma 89
critique 61 trauma studies 122
historical 26–9, 122, 161, 175 Tristan 103
liquid 12, 29 Tropic of Cancer (Miller, H.) 186n.13
teleological 27, 178 Troy 140–2, 166
See also future; past; present; Tsvetaeva, Marina 42
temporality Twain, Mark 134, 137–8
Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 61 Huckleberry Finn 134, 137–8
Tiresias, Mrs. 8 Two Lolitas, The (Maar) 186n.14
Tituba 123–129, 189n. 23
myth 124 Ugrešić, Dubravka 174
Tituba of Salem Village (Petry) 124 Baba Yaga Laid an Egg 174
Tongue Snatchers, The (Hermann) 70 Ulysses (Joyce) 113
Tönnies, Ferdinand 13–14 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 137–8
Tony 148–149 Underground Man 169
Toronto Globe 80 United States (America) 8, 58,
Touching Feeling (Sedgwick) 31, 78–80, 92, 100, 106, 123, 133,
127, 168 135, 138, 183n.5, 187n.2,
tourism 10 189n.23, 190n.8
Tourists of History (Sturken) 10 cultural memory of 139
trace 16, 28, 117, 161, 167, 180 mainstream 89, 92
archival 167 post-9/11 105
decontextualized 162 women’s poetry in 73
material 167 United States Copyright Act 67
transformation 10, 32, 34, 44, United States Court of Appeals 92
50, 54, 56, 62, 79, 83, Unmarked (Phelan) 167
89, 118, 136, 159, Updike, John 79, 102, 109
169, 178–9 Gertrude and Claudius 109
cultural 4, 44, 50, 69 Month of Sundays, A 103
of cultural memory 54, 62, Roger’s Version 103
88, 138 S 79
social 26 Uses of Enchantment, The
Transformations (Sexton) 8 (Bettelheim) 55
translation 7, 55, 132, 135, 148–54, utopia 27, 35, 174, 183n.6
184n.16, 191n.15 Utrecht University 188n.12
as equivalence 150
as feminine versioning 149 van Niekerk, Marlene 188n.12
practice 149–50 Fellow Traveller (A True Story),
as rewriting 149–50 The 188n.12
as a strategy of adaptation 153 Van Schoonneveldt, Léon 187n.20
See also translation studies van Vondel, Joost 82
translation studies 149 Lucifer 82
Translation, Rewriting, and the Vergil 147, 191n.13
Manipulation of Literary Fame Victorian 85, 108
(Lefevere) 154 literature 108
238 Index
Victorian – continued Wild Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 7–8, 30,

novel 85–6 79, 99, 114–19, 122, 126–7,
past 85 188n.15, 190n.5
women 72 Will to Change, The (Rich) 40
Vietnam 49 Wind Done Gone, The (Randall, A.)
Vintage 76, 180 67, 87–9, 92
Vintage Fear (Brothers Grimm and Windward Islands 115
Carter) 76 Winterson, Jeanette 90, 171–80,
Virgil 11, 39, 147, 154, 191n.13 187n.19
Aeneid, The 39, 146–7, Boating for Beginners 90
154, 191n.13 Fit for the Future 187n.19
Virgile, non (Wittig) 146 Lion, The Unicorn and Me, The 173
voice 6–8, 11, 33, 39, 41, 48, Midsummer Nights 173
50, 98–9, 101–2, 105, 107, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
111, 113–15, 117–20, 122, 90, 173
124–6, 135, 139, 142, 144, Passion, The 90, 173
147–8, 180–1 Stone Gods, The 174–9
women’s 41, 57, 63, 104–15 Weight 171, 173–4, 178–9
von Lichberg 186n.14 Wittig, Monique 146
Across the Acheron 146
Wallace, Diane 54 Virgile, non 146
Walt Disney Company 22 Wolf, Christa 6, 8, 42–3, 139–45, 151,
war 14, 32, 140–2, 175 162, 165–7, 180–1, 190n.10
in Algeria 49 Cassandra 139, 144, 151, 162, 165–7
cold 141 Kassandra 6, 8
nuclear 141 Medea: A Modern Retelling 180–1
in Troy 140, 186n.12, 188n.15 Medea: Stimmen 180–1
See also Civil War; World War II; Wolf’s Tale, The 23
World War III Woman in the Nineteenth Century
waste 15–18, 161, 175 (Fuller) 137
economy of 171 Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching
literature as 20 (Maitland) 74
Watt, Ian 175, 191n.5 women’s liberation 47, 107
Waugh, Patricia 114 women’s movement 21, 33, 43,
Weber, Myles 101 46–7, 56, 58, 76, 100, 183n.9
Consuming Silences 101 international 5, 21, 50
Weight (Winterson) 171, 173–4, women’s studies 33, 101
178–9 Woolf, Virginia 33, 55–6, 81, 100,
Western Canon, The (Bloom) 74, 138, 144, 167
130, 148 Mrs. Dalloway 81
West Indies 42, 115, 123, 126–7 Room of One’s Own, A 55, 167
West Side Story 79 Wordsworth, William 151
Whelehan, Imelda 183n.9 World Bank 176
Feminist Bestseller, The 183n.9 World’s Wife, The (Duffy) 8
Wicked Stepmother 153 World War II 12, 58, 116, 133
Widdowson, Peter 11 See also war
Wikipedia 68 World War III 176
Wild Girl, The (Roberts) 64, 152, See also war
162–3, 169 Wreck City 175–6
Index 239
writerly text 61–3 new 40, 48, 51

See also readerly text politics of 81
writing 3, 20, 26, 40, 44–5, 47–8, postmodern 39
52, 54, 56, 58–9, 61–3, 66–7, women’s 6, 21, 30, 48, 54, 57,
70–7, 81–5, 91–3, 97, 101–103, 70–2, 75, 97, 99–101, 138,
8, 111–12, 116–18, 126–8, 131, 142, 172, 180, 183n.9,
140, 142–3, 146–8, 152, 160–8, 183n.11, 186n.15, 190n.5
173, 182n.2, 184n.18, 185n.6, writing back 97–9, 109, 119–20, 122,
186n.17, 187n.18, 191n.2–3, 125–6, 131
191n.5, 192n.5
feminine 51, 53, 56–7, 71 Zabus, Chantal 31
feminist 41, 57 Zenia 149

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Transforming Memories in

Contemporary Women’s Rewriting

STOF EN AS. DE NEERSLAG VAN 11 SEPTEMBER IN KUNST EN CULTUUR

TECHNOLOGIES OF MEMORY IN THE ARTS (edited with Anneke Smelik)

Part I Consuming Memories 1

Un-author-ized rewriting: Pera’s Lo’s Diary 78

This book proposes an assessment of contemporary women’s rewriting

focuses on the emergence of concepts for women’s rewriting in the

Nijmegen, April 2010

Rewriting – the act of writing again, literally re-membering the old

everything, rewriting everything’ (1994: 43; 12), especially embodies

women’s rewriting as a complex emergent phenomenon and takes an

Contemporary women’s rewriting

Women’s rewriting came into view as a literary genre and a feminist

and experiences, she maintained, its effects on women are devastating.

the twenty-first century, when a host of novel rewritings are published

and times, as well as in order to reach new audiences. Participating in the

memory. Focusing especially on the re-inscription of effaced, obscured,

Producing the past

culture.3 Cultural memory and ‘the past’ are produced by a culture in

Historically, then, memory and history undergo a semantic shift. This

The rise of ‘the past’

In the West, the problem of memory as articulating a ruptured and

Manufacturing the past

adverse and beneficial. The meaning of so-called side effects, it is well

they would also open the future to new possibilities. As summarized by

Post-Fordist literary marketplace

To understand this development, it is useful to recall that the period that

The presence of the past

Many scholars have recently reflected on the presence of the past in

of our existence’ (2004: 116). ‘Presence’ is a memory discourse suggesting

me that we should heed Gumbrecht’s advice to ‘respond seriously to a

A new historical culture

A fundamental Enlightenment precept, the thesis that humanity is

freedom, equality, prosperity, rationality, or peace emerged in a

Harking back to some blissful illo tempore, conjuring a variety of imagined

historical culture not be viewed to herald a totally new environment of

distance that would require re-presentation. This ‘memory entwined

In a context where historical time as the linear unfolding of time,

past’ (Terdiman 1993: 7). As the process or procedure by means of which

and passed on. Rather, it is to be understood as a field of negotiation, an

it particularly amenable to the cycles of consumer culture, literally

Tactics and strategies of memory

The transformation of women’s rewriting from a tactic into a strategy

Performing cultural memory

Consumer culture is a fact that we cannot ignore anymore, for

radical gesture. Yet it allows us to see that even a system as all-engulfing

In the 1970s, rewriting emerges as a privileged mode of feminist textual

cultural memory as the social and cultural process of remembering,

Rewriting as productive reception

Rewritings tell stories of reading. As a form of ‘productive reception’,

to look again at the rewritten text, and to look at it in the light of

literary and cultural criticism to analyze the role of literature in the

Reading and (re)writing: Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-vision’

The double orientation of feminist criticism, towards the past in its

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of

To earn feminist approval, literature must perform one or more of

Diving into the Wreck is ‘a book of explorations, of travels. The wreck

‘Récriture féminine’: Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine

which rewriting functions as a central concept in thinking women’s

Cixous’s words resonate intertextually with Rich’s, reprising the phrase

The importance of re-vision to second-wave feminism is underscored

I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone.