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A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenMinds and Bodies

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women: Minds and Bodies [A. S. Byatt’s ‘Frederica’ quartet of novels, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002), are primarily the stories of women striving to reconcile their womanhood with their intellectual lives, and this ‘striving’ is inherently mythopoeic, extending as it does tired historical narratives of female existence within patriarchal restraints on their bodies and minds. Their mythopoeia adapts literary realism by way of what Byatt has called the ‘curiously symbiotic relationship between old realism and new experiment’. The novels isolate one of the key reasons why women intellectuals are only ever problematically represented within the twentieth-century cultural epoch in which these novels are set. Byatt’s comments on the issue in interviews and in her non-fiction writing conflate the theme of the mind/body problem as it is experienced in ‘real’ life and as it is represented in literature, linking to Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) statements on ‘the problematic relation of the private person writing to the public’ and the feminist features of fiction that depict actually ‘experienced’ issues. Thus, my reading in this chapter considers Byatt’s achievement in figuring the woman intellectual as distinct from the patriarchal cultural history of the intellectual in terms of the author’s adaptation of experimental realism, as a mode of mythopoeia that tests the purposes of cultural history itself for feminist ends.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenMinds and Bodies

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
ISBN
978-3-031-08670-0
Pages
79 –115
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_3
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[A. S. Byatt’s ‘Frederica’ quartet of novels, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002), are primarily the stories of women striving to reconcile their womanhood with their intellectual lives, and this ‘striving’ is inherently mythopoeic, extending as it does tired historical narratives of female existence within patriarchal restraints on their bodies and minds. Their mythopoeia adapts literary realism by way of what Byatt has called the ‘curiously symbiotic relationship between old realism and new experiment’. The novels isolate one of the key reasons why women intellectuals are only ever problematically represented within the twentieth-century cultural epoch in which these novels are set. Byatt’s comments on the issue in interviews and in her non-fiction writing conflate the theme of the mind/body problem as it is experienced in ‘real’ life and as it is represented in literature, linking to Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) statements on ‘the problematic relation of the private person writing to the public’ and the feminist features of fiction that depict actually ‘experienced’ issues. Thus, my reading in this chapter considers Byatt’s achievement in figuring the woman intellectual as distinct from the patriarchal cultural history of the intellectual in terms of the author’s adaptation of experimental realism, as a mode of mythopoeia that tests the purposes of cultural history itself for feminist ends.]

Published: Aug 31, 2022

Keywords: Metafiction; Historiographic metafiction; Realism

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