Session 2: The Darkness of Our Souls

3rd Global Conference

Saturday 19th September – Monday 21st September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

The Inscription of the Traumatised Body in Women’s Diary Writing of the Second World War
Ravenel Richardson
Department of English, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom

As a private versus a public form of discourse, diaries often illuminate the aspects of life experience that society endeavours to silence and suppress. Often what is repressed in literature is the story of the body. Women in general and women writers in particular have a problematic history with embodiment. Excised from intellectual spheres for centuries for purportedly being incapable of rising above their reproductive function to form an objective opinion, women writers often avoided writing about their bodies when they finally gained their precarious admittance into the intellectual sphere. During the first half of the twentieth-century, many women writers tried to present themselves as neutral, and therefore desexualized, subjects, which involved turning away from the body and focusing on the gender neutral mind. Women’s diaries from this period, however, evidence a different trend. This essay examines the presence of women’s bodies in their private writing during the physically and psychologically traumatizing atmosphere of the Second World War, focusing on the diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov and Marguerite Duras. It explores what diary writing reveals about how human beings experience and memorialise trauma, the role the body plays in recording events, and whether we analyse the world in bodily terms.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

The female vampire movies which proliferated in the early 1970′s has largely been seen as a manifestation of male fears in the face of the women’s liberation movement movement. The female vampire movies in particular are seen as misogynist in that they are mechanisms for demonizing the threats to the social position of the males in the stable patriarchal order and for relieving the fear and anxiety resulting from this threat by restoration of the natural and social order thanks to the ultimate destruction of the female vampire at the hands of a patriarchal figure.

On the other hand, the vampire films of Jean Rollin especially and, to some degree, of Jesus Franco subverting, revise and reinterpret the genre. In all these movies, the vampire is indeed presented as a challenge to the stability of the dominant social order with its institutions and norms, be it patriarchy, monogamy, heterosexuality or nuclear family. However, in these neglected and/or ignored movies, the point of spectator identification is structured to be less with the dominant order and more with the challenge to it. In the end, the lead non-vampiric character, usually initially suffering either from sexual dissatisfaction or some other social frustration, sides with the vampire, either joining her/his or taking her/his place. These movies do not end with the glorious triumph of a patriarchal figure, a vampire hunter beheading the vampire. In cases where the vampire is destroyed (such cases are often cases of intentional self-destruction as in a suicide), it is presented as a tragic event.