ABSTRACT
The tensions between the reality of imperialism’s consequences for women and the possibilities of new stories beyond imperialism’s gaze posed by Virginia Woolf in The Waves herald the tensions that Olive Moore poses in Spleen between the realities of female identity and embodiment essentialized in maternity, and the possibilities of new hybridized identities and embodiments through physical and textual (re)production. 1 Moore extends Woolf’s refiguring of the feminine and the text in an attempt, as my title suggests, to re-conceive of the ways in which the feminine body and text are both imagined (or conceived) and created (or reproduced). In each re-conception, Moore presents a complex, conflicted, and critical position on the feminine as located in women’s bodies, feminized land and nations that serves to both expose the essentialized identifications of the feminine and the contrary positions that the modern woman must then embody and perform. Moore also proposes, in a near reversal of her critique, new hybridized identities of body, land, and text that seek to undermine the essentialized notions of the feminine by incorporating them within traditionally masculine conceptions of intelligence and literary production, moving from an image of a headless woman to a text which, I suggest, embodies both feminine and masculine textual experimentations. Moore complicates this position of possibility through her subtle and vitriolic critiques of women’s lives and their complicity with maternity and patriarchy, as well as through her protagonist, Ruth, who is an ambiguous and uneasy representative of Moore’s attempts at a gender identity hybridization that incorporates both the male sphere of the mind with the female sphere of the body. In doing so, Moore (ex)poses—or both presents and reveals—the tensions between her criticism of female embodiment and its consequences of maternal servitude, and her creation of a new modernist textual embodiment that operates beyond gender identifications and inscriptions. Her critique of the new modern woman belies any attempt at utopian fantasy. Instead, the narrative refuses to offer any substantive possibility of new identities for women outside of that of an author’s (Moore’s) own textual experimentation.
