The mother tongue often silenced wakes in embryonic dreams of rebirth. 

Women writers are harnessed with the sentence that is a male construct not suited to women, and a form that although pliable, had distinct codes and conventions of genre and genre is a false constraint. 

Title Quote: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

Feminist Lyric embraced fragmented women’s narratives more suitable to the idiosyncrasies (swerves and awkward breaks) experienced by women writers regardless of space and circumstance.

Josephine Donovan’s inisghtful slant on, “A women’s poetics, therefore, may have to reconceive the notion of plot as a fundamental aesthetic category so that it may be grounded in an idea of temporal order more appropriate to the cyclic experience of women’s lives.” Noteworthy is Donovan’s consideration of a women’s temporality to shape her experience and perspective:

1 – Otherness imposed by patriarchal and andocentric ideologies …

2 – “interruptability” of women’s domestic experience contingent on chance …

3 – making of objects used in the home

4 – physiological experience, menstruation, childbirth, and breastfeeding

5  – rootedness

6 – thought process 

 

Italian words had dropped like wounded animal sounds. Pronunciation integral to communication, plot is a superfluous imposed construct. Realism’s reliance on plot to mimic real life in fiction distorts representation as fate spun out and unraveled like Penelope’s weaving to manipulate the reader with convoluted patterns of cause and effect.

I learn through my literary mothers. Virginia Woolf is seminal to women’s writing (but why gender writing).  A Room of One’s Own, and Modern Fiction, (just to name two) are pivotal texts to liberate the writer from the constraints and constructs of Realism. , I recommend to all writers. Woolf’s prose is a web of associations, an interconnectivity of disparate elements I have set as the bar for my writing. 

The financial freedom to spend days writing, free from the basic concerns of providing food, shelter. 

The freedom to move around, locally and globally, unhampered by financial constraints.

Are there more constraints imposed on women’s writing by patriarchal cultural and literary conventions. 

The first line written is aware of discourse, relationship and communication situated in cultural context of the author. To ignore intertextuality, is to wrongly perceive of the author as originator, and to prove ignorance that the act of writing is anchored in the act of reading. A writing subject who is not a reading subject is a self exiled from the myriad discourses on authorship. To think oneself the creator is to fall into the God-author delusion of subjectivity believing one is imprisoned by one’s own shadow.

The verisimilitude novel as a mirror, a reproduction of desire represented as the Lacanian Real that repairs and restores lost identity through an authorial “I” masterfully plotted from beginning, middle, and an end resolution reflects cultural values of justice to reward and punish. The lyric “I” invites polyphony, fragments language, subverts verisimilitude. It challenges the subjective concept of the author and the conceit of originality and mastery written into the poststructuralist discourse as the “disappearing writing subject.”

The lyric “I” opens a space for the adventurous reader to interact with the text. Authorial subjectivity removed the page opened. The writer is the reader of her own writing able to discover the voices situated in her work.

Two thousand eight hundred years since Aristotle’s Poetics prescribed the rules for Greek tragedy fiction conventions continue to bend to its rules. Greek tragedy is to fiction what a catapult is to the antiballistic missile, the steam engine to the space shuttle, the carrier pigeon to the iPhone, a papyrus scroll to the Internet. Time had forgotten Aristotle’s structure, beginning, middle, end, resolution, until patriarchal constraints enslaving story. Time (plot’s purpose) should have frayed the knot. Although the umbilical cord withered and fell off the writer remains tethered. Although fiction is burdened with Aristotle’s dictum for Tragedy if ever he had laid eyes on his bastard child he would disavow paternity. 

The manifesto’s tone is appropriate to my purpose—to liberate writer, story, and reader from the constraints of convention, and to promote counter-narratives. I cannot imagine why plot continues to encumber fiction. Once-silenced voices have expanded narrative possibilities. All fiction narratives must be given equal consideration (including narratives of destruction) to understand the complexity of shared existence.

Realism creates the illusion of a seamless stream of events. Is the structure of those events that is in question? A reader carries the long ingrained expectation for the storybook narrative. The writer of conventional fictional has some freedom to shake up the sjuzet, even complicate the timeline of events with sub-plots. However the writer must be prepared for the reader to question what is going on. 

Women don’t write plot. Is there a need to explain that statement that came to me through an undergrad workshop advisor? Should I write an expository essay on that statements meaning to me? I have. I wrote a manifesto outlining plot’s historical sources.

The subject is the privileging of conventional narratives.

The reader’s trained expectation for literature to represent Life.

Life, it is hard to shake the concept of universality, a one humanist truth translated to all human behavior everywhere.

The reader’s need for identifiable representation (often stereotypical) with flesh and blood counterparts.

Life is not plotted. Plot is an attempt to make meaning from linear strings of cause and effect. Plot is the literary equivalent of determinism. Determinism as prescribed in dictates of greater forces. Greater forces throughout history, defined in the West as male, some women, most often white, and most often originating from the part of the globe within the latitude and longitude 48° 41’ 27” N / 9° 8’ 26” E. The exceptions to this profile have at certain points of history been conquered by the patriarchal White-Euro/Anglo-Male and andocentric (often privileged) White-Euro/Anglo-Women (this weighted language trope contains obvious limitations). However, it is impossible to escape the impact this one group has had on everyone who does not fit the above description, i.e. the rest of earthly existence. Even liberation is a system of binary contrasts to the established “conventions” of male authority. Anything outside the established “conventions” is burdened with labels, Other, alternative, experimental. 

Literary conventions have historically been subverted. Yet, fiction writing classes, workshops, MFA programs teach (for the most part) the primary pillars of convention, character development, and plot. 

The circuitous path explored, appropriation of any fragment regardless of gender and genre to inform practice, eventually informs liberation from the constrains of patriarchal codes and convention internalized in fiction—particularly genre, plot, and linearity.