Nicky Hallett

Did Mrs Danvers warm Rebecca's pearls? significant exchanges and the extension of lesbian space and time in literature

abstractThis article is concerned with the ways in which literary spaces can become sexualized by the transfer of objects between women, as well as by the ways in which bodies themselves touch. It discusses how lesbian desire changes both spatial and temporal structures, via a consideration of the use of pearl imagery. In particular, it analyses the link between sexual, class and bodily construction in two texts: Daphne du Mauriers novel Rebecca (1938) and Carol Ann Duffys poem ‘Warming Her Pearls’ (1987). These texts encode contrasting ideas about the lesbian body, ideas that are discursively textured by the periods in which they were written and by the relative ideological resistance of their writers. While du Mauriers novel establishes a concept of spatial and temporal enclosure, Duffys poem creates an unconfined and unstable lesbian body-text. Within this, the pearl can be seen as a subversive device, destructuring and stretching the parameters of lesbian desire.

Imagining Women's Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800

To continue the spatial preoccupation at the heart of this study, reading it is rather like looking at a square garden through a round window: very revealing though a little constraining at times. The book sets out to study ‘the relationship between women’s convents as architectural and social institutions and their depiction in early modern French literature’ (5); ‘not to analyze the works chosen as so-called reflections of historical conditions, but to discover how they dance around, diverge from, even contradict, those conditions’ (6). The author expresses an interest in ‘Kantian’ space; not just material but mental structures that shape perception (10). Hence, architecture and geography (place) is considered alongside, but less acutely, than social and subjective conditions (space). Woshinsky proposes ‘a metonymic framework’ (6) with a series of focus points and ‘four main moments’. Chapter 1 examines gender, body and retreat in three allegorical works from the earlier period; chapter 2 studies the writing and impact of Bishop Jean-Pierre Camus and ‘the allegorical and apologetic thrust of the Catholic Reformation’ (38); chapter 3 focuses on thresholds in work by women writing in different genres; chapters 4–7 study in turn Parlours, Cells and Tombs. Woshinsky introduces the term ‘feminotopia’ to describe ‘a community wholly or largely composed of and/or governed by women’ (3); female utopic space she refers to as ‘feminutopia’ (chapter 3). Space is discussed (inter alia) in terms of the dichotomy between retreat and prison that occupied contemporary discourses around the convent as a cultural concept. Although the author is concerned to complicate the polarity (that either/or of contemplation or incarceration: 161), she often relies upon it so that refuge/refusal remains rather a hinge on which to turn between positive and negative attitudes in early modern literary conventual representation. Although she does not set out to examine the ‘real’ lives of religious women, on occasion she might usefully have drawn on studies that do. Ideas of cloistered seclusion are challenged when we appreciate the scale of the nuns’ political engagement (exposed by Caroline Bowden and Claire Walker, among others). Fictional depiction played a propagandist part in encouraging or curtailing such behaviour. Woshinsky’s interesting observations can be reviewed in this light. For instance, she claims that representation of ‘situational’ sexuality in the 1719 version of Vénus dans le cloı̂tre which refers to lesbian love as ‘une faible image’ of heterosexual were ‘added by a different, probably Protestant, author’ (242). Given the nuns’ real roles in effecting change across private and public spheres, we can assume that some early modern authors sought to reify