Introduction: Women and Fictions of the State

Abstract

Literature in the western canon offers relatively few stories about women and the state. Moreover, if one identifies in any way with the women characters in these narratives, most of them make unsavory reading. In classical Greek drama women who became embroiled with the state usually died. At Aulis and in Thebes, Iphigenia and Antigone showed what could happen to women when the needs of the state conflicted with the bonds of the family. Only in the comic world of Aristophanes did women move to mold state policy to their wills—and even then they succeeded mainly by relying on their sexuality.

[S]ince the dawn of feminism, and certainly before, the political activity of exceptional women, and thus in a certain sense of liberated women, has taken the form of murder, conspiracy and crime.

—Julia Kristeva, Kristeva Reader, 204

[W]hen a subject is highly controversial… one cannot hope to tell the truth. … Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 4

One of the most interesting areas annexed by the post-war novel is the area of the woman’s novel. … Women today, women writers today, are living lives that are very different from those of their nineteenth-century counterparts, more different than the lives of Snow and Amis from the life of Trollope. …

—Margaret Drabble, “Mimesis,” 7

Some people think a woman’s novel is anything without politics in it.

—Margaret Atwood, “Women’s Novels,” 29