ABSTRACT
In Spleen, Olive Moore’s textual experimentation and hybridity offer the possibility for “change in the social realm” for women through changes in “the discursive landscape” of the body and of the text. In Fugue, Moore abandons the possibility of changing feminine corporeal inscriptions of body, land, and nation, and, with them, nearly abandons a new conception of female subjectivity at all. Instead of creating new possibilities for women, she reiterates the sites of entrapment for the feminine as delineated in the previous chapters on Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and Spleen. Although much of the female character’s physical circumstances have not changed from Spleen to Fugue—another young woman struggling with her maternity—the attitude towards her has: Lavinia is portrayed by Moore as silly, ignorant, and desperate. As if in response, Fugue is concerned with issues of escape, and escape attempts litter the text of Fugue: characters attempt to escape from relationships, from England, from the feminine abject, and, for the novel’s protagonist, Lavinia, from pre-inscribed female embodiments such as both mother and sexualized object. These escapes underscore Moore’s figurative attempts to escape patriarchal linearity and conclusion through modernist experimentations of narrative and form. 2 Thus, Moore continues to attempt change in the “discursive landscape” in Fugue despite narrative’s apparent ineffectiveness in the “social realm” and the inability to escape the various female embodiments inscribed within society as seen in Spleen.
