The shallow grave: archetypes of female experience in African fiction

Abstract

Reading the writing of women from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte to Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath, we were surprised by the coherence of theme and imagery that we encountered in the works of writers who were often geographically, historically, and psychologically distant from each other. Indeed, even when we studied women's achievements in radically different genres, we found what began to seem a distinctively female literary tradition, a tradition that had been approached and appreciated by many women readers and writers but which no one had yet defined in its entirety. Images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors?such patterns recurred throughout this tradi? tion, along with obsessive depictions of diseases like anorexia, agoraphobia, and claustrophobia. (ix)

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