Epilogue

Abstract

Throughout changing constructions of the self, from the Romantic period to today, women novelists have continued to engage in a constant dialectic of selfhood and writing. As we have seen, their fictions have explored woman as subject in both senses: first as a consciousness whose reactions needed inscription, but second as one ‘subject’ to a system of signification, her relationship to which has been marginal. Marginality has been a dominant controlling force in the attempted encoding of female subjectivities.