Blau du Plessis

In Writing Beyond the Ending, Du Plessis concerns herself almost entirely with women's writing per se. Her term "beyond the ending" feeds on poststructural associations of ending with fixity and idee fixe. But she does not go into any of this, preferring instead to chat about social aspects of the writing using modes remniscient of Frederic Jameson.

She describes the project of 19th and 20th century women writers (and, by extension, one presumes, her own very interesting, though not always very accessible, verse) as a re-mythologizing. So, very coarsely, in this particular myth, Patriarchal Society has some very binding, closed, limiting set of myths for women. There are few roles, few viable options for female life. These are Marriage, Spinsterhood, Whoredom-and-Death.

To describe how these are re-mythologized and/or broken down -- and she seems to take these two activities for one and the same -- she gives several chapter headings that suggest formal analysis, but does not follow through with said analysis.

Chapters :

1. Endings and contradictions -- she really means disagreements, not contradictions; some would disagree with the way others would define their ends or stories. It's not a matter of aporia.

2. The Rupture of Story and The Story of an African Farm. Again, all she means is that the author attempts to recast women in a different light.

And so on.

She spends two chapters analyzing Woolf and says some interesting things. She sees Woolf as decentering first the romantic couple, and finally atomized-western-individual consciousness, and she does look at the weaving of POV's that make up much of W's narrative style to do that. W's handling does happen to be formally inventive, and formally inventive in ways that do seem to support what Du P does here: W really does re-shape the story to recontextualize actions, roles, and so forth to recenter or redefine femininity and humanity.

These are probably the best chapters of Du Plessis' book.

The analysis of HD's Trilogy bears some interest; HD's re-mantling of the Magdalene story makes for a pretty direct example of what Du Plessis is talking about, and the theory seems to work pretty directly on a key figure of what can really be seen as contemporary mythology in a literal sense -- though in part the comparison may be aided by HD's lifelong comfort with hellenic image and reference.