'Towards the new writing': Écriture féminine and women's twenty-first-century modernism

Abstract

This thesis examines the legacy of écriture féminine and Joycean modernist aesthetics in the work of a number of contemporary women writers. In particular, it explores the continuing influence of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) on contemporary women's writing.

Despite appearing in some ways as a masculinist text, exploring a day in the lives of two male protagonists, Ulysses has had an enduring impact upon feminist aesthetics, with Hélène Cixous identifying it as an inaugural example of écriture féminine (feminine writing). For Cixous the ‘Penelope’ episode that closes Ulysses develops a style of writing that presents a new understanding of women’s experience and psychology uncircumscribed by the economy of patriarchal discourse. In her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), Cixous urged writers to follow Joyce in devising innovative styles of writing that explore the myriad forms and possibilities of women’s experience. This thesis argues that, in responding to Cixous's demand by developing new works of écriture féminine that reimagine the singularity and multiplicity of women’s experience, several key contemporary women writers continue to engage (directly and indirectly) in a creative dialogue with Joyce's modernist novel. Chapter One examines the development of the Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), Ducks, Newburyport (2019) by Lucy Ellmann and Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (2020). Chapter Two focuses upon women’s day-in-the-life and life-writing projects to explore the feminist reworking of Joycean forms and styles in Rebecca Watson’s little scratch (2021), Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2021), and Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet (2016-20). Chapter Three explores the refinement and redetermination of the Joycean mythic method in Circe (2018) by Madeline Miller, Pleasure Beach (2023) by Helen Palmer, and Demon Copperhead (2023) by Barbara Kingsolver.

Each chapter aims to show both how contemporary women's writing promotes new understandings of Joycean modernism and the ways in which twenty-first-century feminist writers have transformed Joyce’s proto-feminist literary practice.