Women's departures: Rewriting voyage/rethinking female travel "Recits".
Item
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Title
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Women's departures: Rewriting voyage/rethinking female travel "Recits".
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Identifier
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AAI9630485
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identifier
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9630485
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Creator
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Makowiecka, Maria Hanna.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Fred J. Nichols
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, English | Literature, Slavic and East European | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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The theme of departure has proved useful for many intellectual tasks in various literary contexts. Female travel writing before the twentieth century shows parallels and continuities in its use of the theme of departure into a different sphere, world or convention. From travel into a utopian world where women rule and inhabitants live in harmony, to travel into the private world of subjectivity and poetic inspiration, female heroines venture outside the realities that bind them.;The works discussed, written by Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, Francoise de Graffigny, Claire de Duras and Unca Eliza Winkfield, to Maria Sadowska and Karolina Pavlova, exploit alternate world images to achieve the goals of giving female characters freedom to be independent. Textual displacements of the heroines are used as a subversive trope in sociolects where women's potential for creativity was limited. The dialectic of unusual content and form allows women writers to write themselves as autonomous selves and confront the sexual politics of their time. This playful relationship between gender and genre, where the texts oscillate between fact and fiction, suggests that there is a reason why women writers have to resort to twisting the available form. Conscious of socio-political exigencies of their time, the writers in question acknowledge their transgressions and speak on behalf of women. In accounts written by women, women are the main protagonists and in turn become writers themselves. Writing is depicted as a liberating act of self-expression and self-assertion. Writing is departure.;This work will focus on four uses of the theme of departure: self-creation of identity in early accounts, Native American and African heroines' writing as alternative source of cultural credibility, factual travel accounts as a metaphor of the identity of female subjects--narrators and writers of her own recit de voyage, and departure as a means of exploring and textualizing individual women's experience and a way into the world of women.;Feminine fictitious and autobiographical discourses of departure alike negate the reductive image of woman. They create a feminine literary space from which women emerge as subjects making and writing women's history.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
