"Transcending the "Loophole of Retreat

question of how place female figures as fictional characters becomes crucial for authors (and their audiences) whose immediate ancestors were considered, and treated as, legal property, ancestors who lacked spaces of their not just in metaphoric sense, but who were quite literally not allowed inhabit, let alone own, any physical space. The woman occupies central place only extent that it's place assigned her by logic of masculine desire.' These remarks can serve as paradigm for Feminist awareness of non-place or placelessness which women are relegated in patriarchal culture (in German Ortlosigkeit, neologism that contains curious combination of freedom from and desire for space which cannot be translated precisely). A culture that produces concepts like the lay of or to conquer woman, which are distinguished by their metaphoric equation of woman and land (meaning space, frontier, territory, wilderness, dark continent, but also cultivated or plowed fields, that is, mother earth after conquest or penetration), all but asks for this kind of perception. Virginia Woolf's old demand for a room of one's own appears be more than justified, and on more than one level. Annis Pratt emphatically states that are outcasts in land, that we have neither homeland of our nor an ethnic space within society. task women writers have confront, then, in placing their heroines is twofold: they write against and have break patriarchal pattern of representationwomen = land and they also have try make room for women with and within their script. In (white, Western) feminist discourse, this problem has been discussed at length, however, without considering cultural, material, and legal differences in status of women.3 That black woman since heyday of Victorian ideology and socalled science has had function as embodiment of space/boundary/obstacle4 for white male, as perfect site (and lure) of his transgression, is fact not duly discussed by (white) feminists so far. same holds true for opposition of (en)light(enment) and dark (continent), in which black woman stands for both fascination and terror with all its connotations, and which has been constituting metaphor of our present white culture.5 As black feminist historians have pointed out lately, black woman's predicament has been different from black man's

Art · Genealogy · Sociology · Demography · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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  Jerome De Romanet•1990

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  Kathlene McDonald•The Black Scholar•2000

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