Abstract
Jane Auer Bowles, born in New York in 1917 of Jewish-Hungarian family, spent half her life in Tangier and died in a psychiatric institution at Malaga in 1973. She was a nomadic writer, in some ways a typical American intellectual, like — and at the same time unlike — other occidental women writers who, in the first half of this century, went to Europe, and particularly Paris, in search of their art and themselves.
[F]or me fiction is the stitch masking the wound, the gap between two shores. (Leila Sebbar)
Every journey conceals another journey. (Jeanette Winterson)
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Notes and References
H. Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in R. R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl (eds), Feminisms — An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 340.
See P. Bowles, Conversations, ed. G. D. Caponi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), pp. 79 and 104.
T wanted it to be about writing: the act of writing and creating something that is dangerous to you’: Chris Rodley (ed.), Cronenberg on Cronenberg (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1992), pp. 164–5.
W. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (London: Corgi Books, 1969), pp. 37–8. That pimp and trombone player (probably Mexican) must be a Western obsessive image for the white woman’s seducer. It moves from high to popular culture as well as across genres. Italian consumers of both popular journalism and television saw ‘the monster’ resurrected in the recent case around the disappearance of a young Italian tourist, Ylenia Carrisi, in Spring 1994 — only this time it was New Orleans and he was Jamaican. His image filled Italian screens with a.frequency similar to that of O. J. Simpson on U.S. screens more or less at the same time. In this case the uproar was linked to her being the daughter of the quite famous (at least in Italy) pop music couple, Al Bano and Romina Power (the Hollywood actor’s daughter), and the accusations were prompted by her father first of all.
P. Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (New York: Vintage Books, 1977; first published 1949), p. 190.
‘The Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien’: Edward Said, Orientalism (Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 270.
Quoted in M. Dillon, A Little Original Sin. The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (London: Virago, 1988), p. 286.
Malek Alloul in The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) observes that the Oriental look is always neglected. The book collects the postcards representing Algerian women, sent by the French from Algeria during 30 years of colonial presence, and underlines the absence of photographic traces of the gaze of the colonised.
There is the feeling that it is all decided for her, even the way she must invariably accept men’s approaches; men are for her a threat that cannot be avoided, like the rumble of thunder or a low dark cloud getting close: ‘she felt for one desolate moment that the whole thing had been prearranged and that although she had forced herself to take this little trip to the mainland, she had somehow at the same time been tricked into taking it by the powers above …. She noticed with a faint heart that the man had lifted his drink from the bar and was coming towards her’: J. Bowles, Two Serious Ladies, in The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, with an introduction by Truman Capote (New York: The Noonday Press — Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), p. 144. All references in the text are to this edition.
King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences. Hisave Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 4.
I. Chambers, ‘Signs of silence, lines of listening’, in I. Chambers and L. Curti (eds), The Post-Colonial Question — Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 57–8.
See H. K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
Yegenoglu, ‘Supplementing the Orientalist Lack’, p. 54. It is strange that, in referring to Derrida’s notion of the supplement, she does not consider that rather than compensate for a lack in phallogocentrism it overloads and swamps its logic. The knowledge of what is ‘hidden behind the veil’ is not an indifferent addition and may be upsetting to the Orientalist vision. On the ambivalence of the veil see Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Not You/Like You: Post-colonial Woman and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference’, Inscriptions, 3/4 (1988), p. 73.
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© 1998 Lidia Curti
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Curti, L. (1998). Alterity and the Female Traveller: Jane Bowles. In: Female Stories, Female Bodies. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26207-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26207-6_6
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