Jansen, Sharon L. Reading Women’s Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own
In this compendium, Jansen presents “a book about books, a guide that explores a dream landscape” (ix) created by generations of female authors who-have de signed rooms, gardens, or entire societies that “offer a refuge for women who wish to withdraw from a world dominated by men” (101). This shared desire manifests not as a passive need for escape but rather, Jansen argues, as an “active withdrawal from a [hostile] reality,” a private “liberation” in which each seeker can find “her own reality, her own freedom” (2), either in female company or alone. Looming behind the fantasy is an “ever-present shadow world”; each dream poses the danger of becoming “a nightmare reality” (6) in which-enclo sure can also mean victimization, suffocation, helplessness, and abuse. Jansen looks back over six centuries and sees “these imagined worlds not as a series of isolated, individual dreams but as one continuous-or, perhaps, recurring dream” (5)-language that reveals not just the book's approach, a search for thematic connections that conflates substantially different time periods and cultural differences, but also casts the female search for architectural separati as a tenuous, perhaps ultimately unrealizable quest undertaken in avoidance of patriarchal oppression and inflexible beliefs that make the spaces designed for women by men inhospitable. As rich and informative as the book is, it also leaves much in the margins. Jansen never confronts the subtle essentializing of “woman” that occurs with identifying shared “women's worlds” over the vastly disparate time periods and cultures she covers, from late-medieval France to modern Iran. She delicately sidesteps the question of whether imagining all-female societies as an antidote doesn't ultimately rely on the same stereotypes generated by the surface world,
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presuming, for example, that women in their natural state are relatio-nal, nur
turing, peaceful, and verbose. Jansen provides excellent historical context; she
is gifted at distilling long traditions, as proved in her overview on proverbial
misogyny from Ovid and Juvenal to Shakespeare (43-46), her brief history of
female anger (129-30), or her explanation of Aristotle’s conception of women
as deformed males (111). But she doesn’t take the opportunity provided by
her broad knowledge to outline any historical or figurative evolution in these
worlds she discovers, which visibly progress from the kinds of physica-l seclu
sion recommended by Mary AstellS’esrious Proposal to the Ladies and parodied
by Margaret Cavendish Tinhe Convent of Pleasure to the spiritual, intellectual,
or metaphysical places conjured in Margaret AtwTohoedH’sandmaid’s Tale
and Slavenka DrakuliSċ’:s A Novel about the Balkans, in which the enclosure
turns from a sanctuary to a prison and then into a locus of agency, with each
protagonist reclaiming the figurative “room” as Virginia Woolf defined it, “the
power to think for oneself ” (4).
Jansen’s purpose is not to challenge her texts with hard analysis or critical
interpretation but simply to “put these women dreamers and their texts in
conversation with one another,” tender her “own observations and t-he reac
tions and reflections of [her] students,” “introduce . . . readers to new titles,”
and “help them to read their old favorites in new ways” (8). The result is an
extended meditation in which various interesting observations float free, buoyed
by Jansen’s historical and biographical excavations. Though the methodology is
strictly comparative, the different voices converge on several points, particularly
the need for women’s history, women’s stories, and models of other worthy
women—thinking back through our mothers, as Woolf says (96), a form of
education for which Astell suggests women are the best instructors (151). In this
shared dream space, the most important, rewarding, and intimate relationships
women have are with other women (91, 151). The worlds revealed in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’sHerland andDoris Lessing’sThe Cleft are free of violence only
so long as they are free from men and male influence; self-designed, all-female
sanctuaries are fragile communities that men have the power to infiltrate and
destroy (even if humorously, as in Marjane SatrEampib’sroideries). Aside from
remarking on echoes of Astell in Woolf, however, Jansen spends little-time ex
ploring how later authors have reworked, built upon, or reimagined the spaces
designed by their foremothers, nor does she investigate the provocative question
of why, after six centuries, women are still longing, in substantially the same
ways, for private, uninterrupted, self-designed space.
Instead, the book’s quest for “an alternative story” or “quintessential female
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http://ir.uiowa.edu/mff/vol49/2i/ss
narrative” (41) leads—as the chronological and often cultural distance of the
paired texts necessitates—to broadly thematic, safely tentative, and sometimes
hugely reductionist conclusions. Christine de Pizan and Woolf are bot-h “ (...truncated)