Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space

Teresa Gomez Reus and Aranzazu Usandizaga (eds.), Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Space (Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York: 2008), 364 pp.There is great importance in understanding the various ways in which women negotiate, subvert and appropriate public and private spheres. Grasping these ways from a historical perspective can bring new insights and evaluations on how women experience different spaces in current times. The purpose of the book under review is to challenge the dichotomy between public and private spaces and to shed light on how women, especially women writers, negotiated the boundaries that separated domestic and public spaces in the nineteenth century and up to the middle of the twentieth century.Drawing from the pioneering work of Janet Wolff's (1985) The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the literature of Modernity and from Griselda Polock's (1988) work on impressionist women painters. Modernity and the Space of Femininity. this collection of essays attempts to further explore dominant definitions of modernity and gendered spaces and widen the scope of discussion on them. These explorations are crucial for understanding the exclusion of women artists from the canon of modern art. as well as for bringing them to the center of inquiry and examining the unique paths by which they tread public and private spaces. Ironically, the lack of canonical feminine art becomes an advantage when seeking to uncover various texts written by women without being framed by patriarchal and traditional thinking. Thus, the articles move between a variety of forms of discourse that include letters, diaries, journalism, poetry, fiction and essays. The scholars read these women writers and try to analyze the function of their social agency, as reflected in the writers' interpretation of the new spaces.In that sense, the journey through the various essays in the volume takes us from the inside out. into various spaces that have not been accessible to women in the past. At the same time, there is movement from the outside in. when we read the different ways in which women interpret and negotiate the new spaces that they conquer, from their personal points of view and within their limitations as women living in patriarchy.The book is divided into sections organized under six loosely defined headings. However, various connections exist between the essays that go beyond the structure of the volume, providing an opportunity to make different journeys through the volume on axes of time, space and genre, generating diverse frames of discourse. The volume thus provides different possible ways to make a reading- flânerie through it. from intimate domestic sites to public spaces and back, from the city to wild nature and back, from civilian sites to war zones and back, and from periphery to center and back.The first section. Early Escapes into Public Spaces. provides unique readings of three forbidden territories for women in the nineteenth century, all of which are spaces between private and public, allowing the women relative power in their limited position. In Falling Over the Banister: Harriet Martineau and the Uneasy Escape from the Private. Lucy Bending analyzes a unique space called the sick room and shows how Martineau writes about it as a complex space which creates a paradoxical experience. The writer is a prisoner of the room, yet her struggle for freedom allows her to dominate it as she sets its rule and boundaries. Thus, she discovers power within her weakness. The notion of discovering one's power within limited circumstances appears in several essays throughout the book and designates women as agents in their own world even when they enter forbidden spaces. In Private Rituals and Public Selves: The Turkish Bath in Women's Travel Writing. Efterpi Mitsi explores how European women travelers enjoy relative freedom of movement and esthetic expression when they go beyond their boundaries traveling to the Orient and write about their experiences of the Turkish bath {hammam). …