Rewriting female identity: modern fictions by Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Leonora Carrington and Annie Proulx

Chopin’s “The Awakening”, published in 1899, was subjected to censorship and a barrage of moral outrage at its readiness to explore – with an extraordinary lyricism and narrative fluidity, comparable to Woolf’s own – the taboo subjects of female sensuality, desire, artistic ambition and societal indoctrination. What was it about this quietly spoken, seductively decorous novel that so offended her contemporaries? ‘We are well-satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swims out to her death in the waters of the gulf’.

“Orlando” with its infamously transgendered protagonist is Virginia Woolf’s most precocious, exuberant and fantastical rendering of the possibilities of sexual liberation through time and history. Like “The Awakening” it enjoys iconic feminist status, but how should we rate it as literature?

Carrington’s only novel “The Hearing Trumpet” is breathtakingly idiosyncratic, beyond Surrealism one might say, but scorched in the fire of her experiences “Down Below” in a Spanish lunatic asylum. Its cast of irrepressible old women (the narrator is ninety two) consigned to a doctrinaire Christian retirement home tear up every rule of verisimilitude and leave the very concept of gender barely recognisable.

Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories, on the other hand, and her epic treatment of the immigrant experience across vast tracts of North America, historically and geographically, in“Accordion Crimes”, claim masculinity itself as the plaything of the female imagination. Her women demonstrate they are equal to anything that an uproarious, cow-punching, physically and sexually overbearing world can throw at them.