Chapter Six: Consciousness and Freedom: Women's Space in the Twentieth-Century Bildungsroman

In twentieth century, fiction written by and about women ventured into area of novel of development. Appropriating genre of mythic quest for psychological and spiritual renewal previously reserved for protagonists, writers now were forging a new feminist Bildungsroman which female hero undergoes epic journey to gain treasure of wholeness and selfhood. The new heroine refuses to be a captive to any preexisting norms, forging instead new definitions of self and society, and discovering a whole, integrating self, which transcends limiting sex-role patterns (Pearson and Pope 1981: 14). Women who had been trapped collective cultural myths, whether as depicted fairy stories or literature that defines them as selfless domesticated creatures, now struggled beyond this prescribed role to enunciate their strength and independence. Moreover, novels discussed this chapter implicate that feminist search for self involves a move towards discovery and experience of a transcendent quality consciousness, an experience of one undifferentiated state of awareness that lies beyond limited waking consciousness.Patriarchy and women's spaceResponding to sense of being relegated to domestic sphere and denied access to public spaces of employment and commerce, feminists since Virginia Woolf have urged that a woman must have a of her own: room-mental, physical and fiscal-where men were not control. Yet language itself has for centuries been a masculine domain-women have been silenced or excluded from dominant discourse. By 1970's, feminists such as Helene Cixous famously urged, Woman must write woman. She laments that repression of women has been perpetuated. Nearly entire history of writing [...] has been one with phallocentric tradition [...] where woman never has her turn to speak (1976: 879).In context of women's symbolic captivity within patriarchy, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar re-emphasise importance of women's liberation from social and literary confinement both male houses and (1979: 58). Paradoxically, women may be trapped in someone else's space while denied access to some patriarchal spaces of agency, and yet also actively seeking a free from men. Gillian Rose, her evocative article As if Mirrors had bled, argues that sexually differentiated has been defined terms of being or non-real, both literal and metaphorical senses. Women are imprisoned by actual and symbolic patriarchal power, hegemony that limits both creative and dynamic action-a characteristic of real space-and enforces immobility and stasis, which characterize nonreal space (Rose 1996: 59).From viewpoint of a feminist psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray argues that even female is granted by men as the place which is appropriate for need you have of me.. .the place you have positioned me, so that I remain available for your needs (1985: 47). Overall, twentieth century feminism struggled to resolve basic question of how to free women from iconic functions to which centuries of patriarchy had confined them, and how to express a different, positive vision of female subjectivity. Hope of transformation was a key: to create freedoms literal and metaphorical, spatial and spiritual, and ultimately to create alternative agendas to victim-based feminism.The novels this chapter share theme of a quest for an alternative reality terms of space-socially, creatively and spiritually. The age-old problems of women society and desire of women for a true role and meaning life are transformed a variety of ways through expansion of women's consciousness. Some texts express possibility of expanded states of awareness. The female protagonists struggle to overcome seemingly insurmountable problems inherent within patriarchy-with a variety of approaches to self and other, thereby forging new realities and redefinitions of self. …