The Female Genesis
Creativity, Self and Gender
1. Edition December 1997
272 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
Is creation male, as the Bible seems to suggest? Does creativity
always belong to the male element? Is there no female genesis? This
exciting book argues against fashionable trends in contemporary
feminisms that wish to abandon 'woman' as a flawed and oppressive
term, regarding masculinity and femininity as unwanted binaries
that attempt to subvert gender as oppression. Instead the author
argues for the need to revalue feminine origins, to make room for
the feminine element in creation and explore the predicament of the
female creator.
Nicole Ward Jouve argues for a necessary relation to male and
female, inside and outside, in the creative act and the formation
of a creative sense of self. She sees both being engendered and
engendering, with the attendant figures of the Mother and the
Father, as part and parcel of the ways gender is experienced. The
book explores these themes by drawing upon the work of writers in
French and English, male and female, such as Balzac, Lawrence, de
Beauvoir, Woolf, Carter, Roberts and Plath. The book takes stock of
both French and Anglo-American- feminisms, and debates with
psychoanalysis as well as literature through figures such as Freud,
Jung, Lacan, Winnicott and Milner.
In Father's Lack. .
Part I: Gendering the Female: Good/Bad Daughters. .
1. Balzac's A Daughter of Eve and the Apple of
Knowledge.
2. Maleness in the Act: the Case of the Papin Sisters.
Part II: Masculine/Feminine: The Battle of the Sexes and the
First World War. .
Troublesome Mothers. .
Part III: The Female Creator. .
6. 'Mother is a Figure of Speech...': Angela Carter.
7. 'No One's Mother': Can the Mother Write Poetry?.
Part IV: Creation, Gender and the Imaginary. .
8 Metaphors and Narrative: Of Tongues, Shells, Boats, Oranges...
and the Sea.
Conclusion: New Directions.
9. The Name of the Father.
10 Male and Female Made They Them.
Index.
"This book is ... full of risk-taking and unexpected, often dazzling, turns and connections. It is both erudite and bold ... it is witty, self-aware and often ironic; sometimes it is lyrical and sensuous ... all of these essays ... are gems." Linda Anderson, University of Newcastle
"In her scintillating new collection, Nicole Ward Jouve writes against the grain of much recent feminist thinking in Europe and North America, yet she does so on behalf of a new inclusive feminist awareness. Hers is one of those necessary critical voices. She speaks as a gendered autobiographical subject, yet addresses men as well as women and reminds her readers at every turn of their common humanity. A wise and beautiful book." Malcolm Bowie, All Souls College, Oxford