Rewriting the Female Gothic in the Antipodes: Fiona Kidman's <i>Mandarin Summer</i>

Authors

  • Doreen D'Cruz Massey University

Keywords:

Female Gothic, metafiction, tactical feminism, matricide, female madness, (female) sublime

Abstract

This essay makes a case for Fiona Kidman’s recognition within the international feminist canon, giving particular focus to her contribution to feminist metafiction as realised in her redeployment of the Gothic genre in her second novel, Mandarin Summer (1981). In her re-invention of the genre, Kidman departs from the compromises of “victim feminism” that Diane Hoeveler has identified as characterizing the Female Gothic in favour of a tactical feminism which brings about the triumph of female cognitive power  Using the successive contexts invoked here by Kidman’s particular brand of feminism, the Female Gothic tradition, and Mandarin Summer’s textual ancestry in Jane Eyre, the discussion considers how a female epistemic site emerges through the tactical containment and encircling of patriarchal plots. This is partly enabled through the Janus-eyed vision of its central protagonist who rejects patriarchy’s binary divisions between women, and partly through her refusal to be complicit in the symbolic and actual murder of mothers. However, in Kidman’s denouement, the rescuing of women comes at a price, which is not entirely unexpected for the reader.   

 

Author Biography

Doreen D'Cruz, Massey University

Doreen D’Cruz is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. She is the author of Loving Subjects: Narratives of Female Desire (Lang 2002) and co-author with John C. Ross of The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction (Rodopi 2011). Her recent articles have been on New Zealand authors Maurice Gee, Patricia Grace, and Fiona Kidman. She has previously published essays on Kidman’s The Book of Secrets and The Captive Wife. She is currently working on a book-length study of Kidman’s fiction. 

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Published

2017-02-07