Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women

Echoes of the Past

Miriam Borham-Puyal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781032175904
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000029635
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the concept of liminality in the representation of women in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, as well as in contemporary rewritings, such as novels, films, television shows, videogames, and graphic novels. In particular, the volume focuses on vampires, prostitutes, quixotes, and detectives as examples of new women who inhabit the margins of society and populate its narratives. Therefore, it places together for the first time four important liminal identities, while it explores a relevant corpus that comprises four centuries and several countries. Its diachronic, transnational, and comparative approach emphasizes the representation across time and space of female sexuality, gender violence, and women's rights, also employing a liminal stance in its literary analysis: facing the past in order to understand the present. By underlining the dialogue between past and present this monograph contributes to contemporary debates on the representation of women and the construction of femininity as opposed to hegemonic masculinity, for it exposes the line of thought that has brought us to the present moment, hence, challenging assumed stereotypes and narratives. In addition, by using popular narratives and media, the present work highlights the value of literature, films, or alternative forms of storytelling to understand how women's place in society, their voice, and their presence have been and are still negotiated in spaces of visibility, agency, and power.

1 Introduction

Liminality, Feminocentric Narratives, and the Polytemporality of the New Woman

In the middle of the night a young woman stares ahead with worry. She is surrounded by darkness, suspended in a black nowhere. She dresses humbly; she seems cold and wraps a shawl firmly around her, crossing her arms protectively. In the background it is possible to distinguish some lights and a windmill overlooking the water—the only reference to where this scene takes place. She is the unnamed factory girl in Annie Swynnerton’s painting The Tryst (1880). The setting is Peel Park Lake in Salford, with its landmark windmill and its surrounding textile factories. Inspired by a local legend, Swynnerton does not portray a couple’s romantic encounter, but focuses instead on the girl’s lonely wait. According to tradition, she would then drown herself after discovering that her lover had been sent away by his wealthy parents to prevent their union. He would subsequently commit suicide and a regretful father would preserve their trysting place, the windmill (Herrington and Milner 44).

In Swynnerton’s piece, the miller’s daughter stands at a liminal place in time and space. She is in a moment of transition between night and the approaching morning, between despair and hope. Preliminally, she has separated from her family, leaving her sanctioned place in the home, and stands with her back to the factories, inhabiting a heterotopic space of subversion and possibility, created by the lovers’ meetings. Her narrative is also liminal, standing at a crossroad, the intersection of two genres, two modes, romance and reality: the story of two lovers’ tragic forbidden love and a nineteenth century narrative of the working class, with the background of an industrial world and increasingly separated social strata. Suspended, frozen, the miller’s daughter remains liminal, like Schrödinger’s cat alive and dead in the different possibilities facing her. Will she drown? Will she choose to escape or return home? Will this female liminal figure reintegrate into society and change it with her experience at the limen, or will she have become too marginal, seeking death as the ultimate subversion?

A suffragist and a representative of the New (professional) Woman, Swynnerton portrayed many women in such liminal positions, reflecting the transformative moment in British history in which society was being forced to change by the pressure of these female liminars. In The Dreamer (1887) her knitting woman stares at the viewer from in-between past—with classical references and a traditionally silent feminocentric occupation—and future—for it is set in the Isle of Man, where unmarried women had recently won the right to vote in a general election. The dreamer of the title, then, like the classical Fates, could imagine the possibility of determining her own destiny (Herrington and Milner 64). Other paintings, such as The Sense of Sight (1895), Illusions (1902), New Risen Hope (1904), or even The Southing of the Sun (1911), present female figures halfway between earth and heaven, realism and allegory, speaking of a new hope for women’s freedom. A hope in progress, still liminal in its transgression of societal norms, not yet fully assimilated for social change. A liminal stage toward revolution for which the New Woman stands as an emblem, an in-between identity that detaches herself from old tenets and circumscriptions to write new possibilities. Swynnerton herself would become such a figure, challenging conceptions of women artists and supporting their work, traveling and experimenting when propriety in Britain did not allow her to grow as an artist, and finally acquiring her place in the Royal Academy, opening the path for Laura Knight and other later artists. The centrality given to her female figures represents those new roads envisioned for women from the artist’s vantage point on the threshold between an old and a new world, between the prescribed exemplars of feminine passivity and the agency of the creator which challenges such ideals.

In fact, her female portraits could have been painted a hundred years before, at the turn of the previous century, when Mary Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries were fighting to advance women’s rights. When writer and philosopher Mary Hays described herself as an “alien being,” a liminal subject, for her hope in progress and women’s advancement. Or they could have been created a hundred years later, in an era also determined by a feminist hope for change, seen in the vindication of exocanonical women —left on the fringes of history—by scholars in the 1970s, or in current movements such as #MeToo, Reclaim the Night, or the Women’s March, which retrieved lost voices or dangerous spaces and have moved from peripheral to mainstream actions.

Swynnerton’s work then serves as a perfect illustration for the premises explored by this book. First, the relevance of the concept of liminality understood in its classical sense of transition toward, in-betweenness, or ambiguity when addressing feminocentric narratives that challenge gender, and often genre, conventions. Liminal women will be proven to stand at the threshold between an old order and a new one, transforming their own story but also threatening to alter their environment. In this sense, some of these figures will, in early narratives, move from the limen to the margins: denied the possibility of reintegration, they will remain cautionary figures that do not fulfil their potential as social reformers. Second, Swynnerton’s art proves a product of its time, gaining relevance for the liminality of the historical moment: at the turn of the century the old world is giving way to a new one in which these liminars might find their space. Yet the atemporality of Swynnerton’s feminist representation of the hope for change evinces that history can be understood as a succession of “transitions toward,” of ideological and aesthetic limens, in which these female figures appear to embody either the fear of or the hope for renovation, or even both. Especially in the case of women’s historical struggle for equality this will be made apparent in the recurrent presence of these liminal women in four hundred centuries of cultural objects. Finally, Swynnerton’s powerful imagery not only reflects or challenges her audience’s ideological stance but also shapes it, highlighting the wide-reaching influence of artistic artifacts and their role in the construction of a social collective consciousness.

Following the aforementioned considerations, this publication consists, first, of this chapter, an introduction, which delimits the discussion of liminality to those dimensions that are relevant for subsequent analysis. Furthermore, it expands on this concept to engage with other relevant notions, such as the idea of trace or temporal and spatial orientation, to further offer a theoretical background for a polytemporal concept of feminist history that solidly links these past and present narratives together. The main body then revolves around four liminal female figures with a recurrent presence in eighteenth and nineteenth century narratives, namely vampires, prostitutes, quixotes, and detectives, understood as acts of embodiment of those New Women who inhabit the fringes of society and from there also populate its narratives to comment on the past and advance the future.

Liminality and Feminocentric Narratives

Liminality is ubiquitous in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, psychology, economy, geography, and literature, and the rich engagement of recent scholarship with the notion of the “liminal” proves both its relevance and its polysemy. Its employment in a myriad of academic and nonacademic contexts has contributed to its becoming a popular concept, often detached from its original meaning and used to celebrate the transgression or challenge posed by the liminal identity, or conceived erroneously as a synonym for “marginal” (Thomassen 7). Given the centrality of the concept for the present work, it seems advisable to undertake a brief review of both the term and how it applies to the study of women in literature as emblems of social change.

From the Latin limen or “threshold,” but tracing back to the Egyptian and Greek words for “port” (Joseph 138), liminality denotes a site of passage from one space to another, from one room to the next, from sea to land and vice versa. These roots explain why it is a boundary concept, whether literally or figuratively. Anthropologists Arnold van Gennep (1909) and Victor Turner (1969) built on this original meaning, and employed “liminaire” and “liminality,” respectively, to describe a transitional stage. Turner’s now famous definition states that liminal entities “are neither here nor there” for “they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arranged by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (The Ritual Process 95). The key, then, as Thomassen has aptly indicated, is the notion of “transition” between two points, one of departure and another of arrival. In fact, both anthropologists conceived liminality as a three-stage rite of passage that included a preliminal or separation phase, a liminal or transitional one, and, finally, a postliminal phase or incorporation (Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid” 56–57). Therefore, in its original conception, the liminal figure was marked by its differentiation from the community, by a loss of status, and a phase of experimentation, transgression, or growth in which usual “ties” are undermined or broken (59). The liminars are “temporarily undefined, beyond the normative social structure,” which makes them more vulnerable but also “liberates them from structural obligations” (59), leading Turner to employ the concept of “anti-structure” to define this stage (60). Yet it also comprises a final return to a “new, relatively stable, well-defined position in the total society” from which they had become separated (57), to a new societal status. This is illustrated, for instance, by the rites of passage for adolescent or young males in the different tribes under study in Gennep’s and Turner’s pivotal works, later developed in the traditional Western plot of the bildungsroman.

More importantly, change not only befell the liminal subject or “initiand,” but the community itself was transformed by the reintegration of the transgressive subject, as meaning is generated by “cultural sub-systems” only to be “institutionalized and consolidated at the centers of such systems” (“Liminal to Liminoid” 72–73). In fact, for Turner the liminal is read under a conservative light: it is encouraged as a “ritual of reversal,” inverting rather than subverting the status quo, returning to order as the better alternative for chaos, something for him reflected in the “pseudo-liminal” genre of satire (72). This can be perceived in many of the eighteenth and nineteenth century narratives revolving around a liminal female figure. However, Turner also acknowledges the power of art and literature to be more subversive, to parody and lampoon the central values of society (72), also a constant in many of the analyzed works that often provide a dual satire or a parody/satire which de-stabilizes the message of easy transition and return to one’s place within society. Therefore, for Turner the liminal “can never be much more than a subversive flicker,” asserting that

It is put into the service of normativeness almost as soon as it appears. … a kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social developments, of societal change, in a way that the central tendencies of a social system can never quite succeed in being, the spheres where law and custom, and the modes of social control ancillary to these, prevail. Innovation can take place in such spheres, but most frequently it occurs in interfaces and limina, then becomes legitimated in central sectors. (“Liminal to Liminoid” 76)

However, this seed of social development takes precedent in modern processes of “revolution” or “insurrection” or what Turner terms “romanticism in art,” in which cultural transformation, discontent with the status quo, and social criticism have become “situationally central” and lastingly subversive (76). Turner then distinguishes the liminal from this more permanent transformation, which he will label the “liminoid.” More liberated and liberating from the aforementioned sociocultural necessities then is Turner’s postindustrial and leisure-oriented concept of the “liminoid,” more individualistic and focused on social criticism, more a “choice” and a “commodity” than a necessity (85–86), which apparently loses its characteristic transitional nature and becomes associated with the “antistructural” forces of art and literature (Achilles and Bergmann 8–9; Thomassen 84). Although general and vague, Turner’s distinction might explain the differences found in the narratives of liminal women, in which the required rite of passage culminated in marriage or asexual spinsterhood for eighteenth century women, while the nineteenth century sees changes brought by the liminal New Woman. It also contributes to the centrality of the transgressive vampires, prostitutes, quixotes, and detectives in contemporary culture, in which liminality is now the norm, the praised individual experience at the center of modernity (Thomassen 11–12, 14)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Liminality, Feminocentric Narratives, and the Polytemporality of the New Woman
• 2 Female Vampires: On the Threshold of Time, Space, and Gender
• 3 Good and Bad, Private and Public: Prostitution as Liminal Identity
• 4 Between Madness and Rebellion: Rewriting the Female Quixote
• 5 To Be and Not to Be: Female Detectives between Old and New Women
• Afterword
• Index