Women Writers and the Elusive Urban Sublime

Coming to this city, and its literature, as an outsider, it is sometimes hard not to feel sorry for “Manchester, England” (Haslam).1 Despite the fact that, since the 1980s, Manchester has enjoyed the reputation of being one of the great music capitals of the world, successive waves of grass-roots creativity—what Dave Haslam has identified as its unique “DIY” culture (xxvii)—has not translated into many positive literary representations of the city and its environs as a place of residence. This would seem to be especially true of the women writers associated with the city although—as will be seen—wealth, educational attainment and mobility remain crucial variables in determining our relationship with where we live (Kaplan 1996: 89). What urban literatures—and the theories associated with them—have revealed, however, is that socio-economics alone is not enough to explain how, and why, in Avtar Brah's words “a place of residence becomes home” (1996: 1); inasmuch as the city is an imagined, as well as a material space, complex psychological processes are also at work (Highmore 2005: 18): processes that assist, or obstruct, what Edward Said refers to as “affiliation” (Marangoly George 1996: 16). In this essay, I shall be using the writings of a selection of female authors from the Greater Manchester area to investigate the more elusive dimensions of urban home and belonging: the alienation that many of the textual subjects (both male and female) appear to feel in relation to their surroundings, together with the conditions that, occasionally, enable affiliation to take place. Related to these processes is the further—somewhat old-fashioned—question of what causes writers, and their textual subjects, to find beauty—or, indeed, the sublime—in city space? According to the theorists, the city enjoys a long tradition of aestheticization (Wilson 1991: 20–5); why, then, do so few of Manchester's women writers appear to share in it? What viewpoints do they lack—or resist

Aesthetics · Alienation · Art · Object (grammar · Political science · Relation (database · Reputation · Residence · Social science · Sociology · Sublime · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Urban Planning and Governance · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

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