Embodied boundaries: Images of liminality in a selection of women-authored courtship narratives

This Comparative Literature dissertation innovatively juxtaposes East and West, ancient and modern, and multiple linguistic communities (i.e., Japanese, French, and English) in order to reveal connections that add to our knowledge of World Literature and the human condition. By closely examining liminality in women's writing from discrete literary traditions, we can observe a meaningful strategy for social comment and protest employed by a broad selection of authors. The careers of characters such as Ukifune in Genji monogatari by Murasaki Shikibu, Guilliadun in Eliduc by Marie de France, Lady Matilda in A Simple Story by Elizabeth Inchbald, and Lily Bart in A House of Mirth by Edith Wharton all stage for the reader a dynamic process leading from marginalization to a form of qualified empowerment, via the paradoxical embodiment of the boundary. This line simultaneously defines the rigid dichotomies that constrain their lives and relationships with others and offers the promise of a "space of preparation" (Bachelard) for eventual subjectivity and agency. My heroines respond to the demands and perils of romance by living literally on the edge, creating a form of refuge and potentiality on, rather than behind or beyond, the limen itself. Whereas either side functions as a hostile "anti-space" (Bronfen), the threshold itself offers, if not "felicitous space" (Freyer), at least the possibility of manipulation and subversion. Anthropologists (Turner, van Gennep) have explained that the liminal primarily serves to reinforce the social structure, but nonetheless remains an unsettling stage of disruption or even threatened destruction governable only by strict adherence to ritual. The act of embodying and extending this normally transient phase allows intelligent, strong-willed heroines to protest their bounded bodies and speak the unspeakable. Employing a feminist critical stance, I demonstrate how certain women authors, despite obvious differences in their respective socio-cultural contexts, employ strikingly (dis)similar liminal images that act in a creative and revolutionary way to destabilize the prevalent centre/margin paradigm and thereby challenge gendered hierarchical practices based on a damaging imbalance of power.