Female Subjectivity in Women’s Writing

This volume discusses how Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, and A.S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia” approach the question of female subjectivity and how they relate this question to language and literature. It shows that the conscious intertextuality and genre transgressions in these writings reflect the authors’ awareness of the woman writer’s problematic position in the literary tradition which does not allow woman a subject position. In this discussion, Luce Irigaray’s criticism of language and theory as the producer and ally of the patriarchal order is used as the main reference point. The book reads these in the light of Irigaray’s analyses of how language creates the category of woman. It highlights that Atwood and Carter are more in accord with Irigaray’s insistence on a language that can produce a female subjectivity by acknowledging, representing and symbolizing the desire of, and for, the mother, while Byatt, on the other hand, suffices with deconstructing the male subject without devising a subjective identity for women.