ABSTRACT
In 1966, Julia Kristeva, a young Bulgarian student, arrived in Paris to pursue her studies. She is now, forty years later, an internationally known figure, regarded as the French intellectual par excellence – except, as she has frequently pointed out in interviews, in France where ironically she remains a foreigner and a dissident. In Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable, Anne-Marie Smith sees foreignness as central to Kristeva’s intellectual identity and she elaborates on Kristeva’s paradoxical position in French cultural life:
In Nations without Nationalism Kristeva speaks of her experiences of living in a nation not her own and defines her position as one which cuts across cultural boundaries: ‘I have, against origins and starting from them, chosen a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries’ (Kristeva, 1993, 16). In Strangers to Ourselves, writing out of personal experience, she speaks of the foreigner’s feelings of loss, insecurity, loneliness and nostalgia for the motherland. In discussing this theme of the foreigner, we must also bear in mind Kristeva’s arguments that women are often marginalized within the nation and that because of their otherness to the public life of the nation, women find themselves better able to embrace the otherness of strangers. In an interview given in 1985, Kristeva argues the case for regarding ‘woman as an irrecuperable foreigner’ (Gubermann, 1996, 45). Kristeva’s portrait of the foreigner has particular relevance for Irish women’s writing since the experience of being a foreigner in an alien culture was one shared by a fair proportion of Irish women in the twentieth century. As we saw in chapter one, poverty, lack of employment or simple inability to fit into the prevailing ethos of their nation, forced many Irish women to emigrate during the course of the century. The Irish woman obliged to seek domestic work abroad features in short stories by writers as disparate as Norah Hoult and Maeve Brennan.
