ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter asks if wandering takes shapes or paths that match distinctive—or possibly unique—patterns of women’s experience. The experience of women over many centuries is unlikely to match a single trajectory. Significantly, there is no heroine’s journey—no abstract structuralist shape—but many journeys, plural and often unfinished, much more like wanderings than like quests. Two journeys by contemporary women writers receive special attention: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012) and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). Strayed sets out on a journey of “self-rescue.” The pattern is important in its reversal of the chivalric narrative in which a woman—the generic damsel in distress—awaits rescue by a wandering knight in shining armor. Strayed does not wait. She first creates and then becomes her own rescuer. Nelson, in her engagement with libidinal multiplicities, engages in a journey less about self-rescue than about change and self-knowledge. She seeks to understand her experience of pregnancy and motherhood while also on an open-ended joint excursion into distinctively twenty-first century terrain. Her memoir ventures into pathless erotic spaces where gender and identity pose new and ambiguously unsettled questions.
