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The Bitch is Back
$35.00
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| 5 + | $26.25 |
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Description
Although the “bitch” has always commanded a prominent spot in popular culture—television, movies, art—she virtually disappeared from the work of the second wave of feminist writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now, announces Sarah Appleton Aguiar, the bitch is back, returned once more to cultural center stage in the world of serious literature.Feminist writers such as Mary Gordon and Alice Walker, to name only two, felt obligated to subvert literary misrepresentations of females as dimensionless, to refute preconceptions of objectified characters, and, of paramount importance, to create memorable women full of complexity and character. They wanted to create a subjective reality for their protagonists. And they succeeded admirably.But along the road to subjectivity, that vital woman, empowered with anger, with ruthless survival instincts—the bitch—was banished from the pages of feminist fiction. The village gossips, calculating gold-diggers, merciless backstabbers, sinful sirens, evil stepmothers, deadly daughters, twisted sisters, hags, bags, and crones—all had vanished from the fiction written by women. Ubiquitous in other forms of media, the bitch was noticeably absent from the feminist literary canon.Aguiar, however, points to indications in contemporary culture that the season of the bitch is fast approaching. Contemporary feminist writers and theorists are making substantial reevaluations of the archetypal bitch. Focusing on the traits and the types of guises usually associated with this vital character, Aguiar discusses such characters as Zenia in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Ruth Patchett in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Sula in Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Ginny in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres.
Sarah Appleton Aguiar is an assistant professor of English at Murray State University, where she teaches women’s literature and contemporary literature.
“Not only is Aguiar’s title intiguing, but her text reveals that the bitch never left. She reveals what is different and more complex in today’s image by examining the variations in and perceptions about women from biblical texts onward. Undergraduate students of literature will particularly enjoy all the examples Aguiar scrutinizes; the variation of Aguiar’s reading clarifies why readers can respect the much-maligned tough female often dismissed as ‘a bitch.’”—Choice
“Aguiar accurately perceives that contemporary women writers are reclaiming and celebrating a figure that both literary history and conventional literary criticism have regarded as negative: the woman who is willfully and unapologetically ‘bad’ by societal standards and who, in her opposition to conventional approved female behavior, manifests an individual strength which she can share with others.” —Nancy A. Walker, author of The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition
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| Dimensions | 1 × 6 × 9 in |
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