ABSTRACT

In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous declares that writing entails ‘the very possibility of change, that space can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’. 1 Cixous clearly grants literature a utopian function: literature not only reflects on, but ultimately initiates social change. The utopian impulse of writing creates a poetic space where woman becomes ‘at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process’ (250). I have suggested that women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have clearly embraced this transformational potential of writing. Not only have women writers of the period under investigation established poetic spaces where woman has become ‘the taker and initiator, for her own right’. Since Christine de Pizan’s pivotal text The Book of the City of Ladies, women writers have been particularly aware of the relevance of space for ‘the production and reproduction of masculinist societies’. 2 Recognizing that identity and space are interdependent, women writers have questioned contemporary politics of space and have developed diverse strategies of resistance which liberate them – at least in their utopian imagination – from specific gendered social maps. Of course, they themselves devised new ones that equally set up paradigms of femininity and masculinity. These strategies are diverse and range from the symbolic recoding of representational spaces to the invention of an innovative architectural practice. Convents, academies, palaces, harems and country estates were the dominant locations of utopian visions in women’s literature of the time. They are the contested sites women’s literature is experimenting with. What is at stake in these utopian narratives are discourses of gendered domesticity. The castle, the convent, the academy, the harem and the country house are ambivalent domestic spheres, enclosing and confining on the one hand (thus the release for Wroth, Langer and Leapor is the ‘unwalled’ Paradise), but emancipatory on the other, as they enclose female communities in the absence of a patriarch. The representations of these recoded spaces during this period overlap. When Lord Byron in his satire on the Oriental romance equated the harem with the salon and denounced Lady Hester Stanhope, the ‘Queen of the Desert’ as ‘that dangerous thing – a female wit!’, he inserts himself into a long satirical tradition that has targeted the femme forte, the learned woman, the Amazon and, last but not least, the Bluestockings: They cannot read, and so don’t lisp in criticism; Nor write, and so they don’t affect the music Were never caught in epigram or witticism, Have no romance, sermons, plays, reviews, – 156In harems learning soon would make a pretty schism! But luckily these beauties are no ‘blues’ … 3