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A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenWomen Intellectuals and Sexual Specificity

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women: Women Intellectuals and Sexual Specificity [This chapter argues that in The Game (1967), The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and The Little Black Book of Stories (2003), A. S. Byatt constructs and positions intellectual women as mythopoeic forces at odds with the theoretical assumptions limiting women’s unproblematic recognition as intellectuals. I suggest that Byatt’s fiction maintains a particular dialogue with (as opposed to merely ‘inheriting’ and re-using) feminist theory’s late twentieth-century adaptation of Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist ideas, to critique uses of language and representation that maintain the woman intellectual’s subordination as the other of the male. Where that myth is denied, others are made possible, and their discursive authority is given a place, a voice and functions. Byatt’s work shows us that both mythology and theory are tools rather than objects for dogged political commitment—commitment that sets itself up to fail in some way by limiting its own possible uses. The chapter reads Luce Irigaray’s contentious idea of sexual specificity, which presents an alternative to women’s sexual otherness and place within hierarchies of gender, as of pivotal importance to how the woman intellectual is figured in cultural history as the inferior other of the male. Byatt’s three texts explore and ultimately support a view that the woman intellectual is sexually specific in ways related to language, representation and the production of critical discourse because to deny any and all sexual difference is to create a false unity among the genders, a misleading construct. Women intellectuals must make the new, critical/artistic discourse that resists their conventional, specific marginalisation.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenWomen Intellectuals and Sexual Specificity

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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
117 –149
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_4
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[This chapter argues that in The Game (1967), The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and The Little Black Book of Stories (2003), A. S. Byatt constructs and positions intellectual women as mythopoeic forces at odds with the theoretical assumptions limiting women’s unproblematic recognition as intellectuals. I suggest that Byatt’s fiction maintains a particular dialogue with (as opposed to merely ‘inheriting’ and re-using) feminist theory’s late twentieth-century adaptation of Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist ideas, to critique uses of language and representation that maintain the woman intellectual’s subordination as the other of the male. Where that myth is denied, others are made possible, and their discursive authority is given a place, a voice and functions. Byatt’s work shows us that both mythology and theory are tools rather than objects for dogged political commitment—commitment that sets itself up to fail in some way by limiting its own possible uses. The chapter reads Luce Irigaray’s contentious idea of sexual specificity, which presents an alternative to women’s sexual otherness and place within hierarchies of gender, as of pivotal importance to how the woman intellectual is figured in cultural history as the inferior other of the male. Byatt’s three texts explore and ultimately support a view that the woman intellectual is sexually specific in ways related to language, representation and the production of critical discourse because to deny any and all sexual difference is to create a false unity among the genders, a misleading construct. Women intellectuals must make the new, critical/artistic discourse that resists their conventional, specific marginalisation.]

Published: Aug 31, 2022

Keywords: Feminist theory; French feminism; Poststructuralism; Psychoanalysis; The imaginary

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