The Woman in the Cave: Recent Feminist Fictions and the Classical Underworld
1988; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1208453
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoIn Gloria Naylor's novel Linden Hills, a grim fantasy of wealthy black suburbia with open acknowledgments to Dante's Inferno as well as to a series of classical and Christian underworlds, a lower hell opens below lowest circle Dante imagined: former morgue in a basement where Luther Nedeed, novel's Lucifer, imprisons his wife and their five-year-old son, without food or medicine, to turn her into a wife: that is, to punish her for bearing a child who does not resemble his father as exactly as Nedeed himself replicates his forefathers. Attempting to efface his wife as three generations of previous Luther Nedeeds had effaced their wives, Nedeed embodies a crime neither considered nor punished by Dante: crime of making (or attempting to make) women into disposable machines for replicating men. At end of novel, Willa Nedeed succeeds in giving miraculous birth to herself and to a revolutionary intention: the amber germ of truth she went to sleep with [the truth that she does exist, that she has her own name, and that she can walk up out of basement] conceived and reconceived itself, splitting and multiplying to take over every atom attached to her being.' Her son is already dead, and she too will die by end of novel, but Willa Nedeed's story of resistance and rebirth resonates not only with classical and later Western accounts of successful effacement of women but also with feminist critiques of and resistance to such effacement. This essay will read Linden Hills together with Luce Irigaray's Speculum of Other Woman, a work of political and cultural theory that relies on conventions of fiction to critique androcentric myths of reproduction such
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