| dc.description.abstract | A. S. Byatt commented in an interview with Juliet Dusinberre in 1983
that literature was her means of escape from "the limits of being female" (186).
For other artists who are also women, art is seen as a way of escaping the
restrictions imposed by the realities of their social and economic powerlessness
(Spacks 206). Today, literary critical feminists would undoubtedly reverse
Byatt’s statement to show the role of literature in forming those very limits
from which she and many other women feel the need to escape. While Byatt
would, I think, agree with Gillian Beer’s qualification in "Representing
Women: Re-presenting the Past" that gender formation cannot be isolated from
social and cultural forces, that there is no single source of oppression of
women (68), her recognition of the role of narratives in at least partly
determining the limits of being female is readily apparent in her 1990 Booker
Prize-winning novel Possession. | |
