Brave New Girls: Female Archetypes, Border Crashing, and Utopia in Kate Braverman's Palm Latitudes

In Sexual Anarchy Elaine Showalter argues that there were several problematic female archetypes constructed by culture and in literature at the close of the nineteenth century. The archetypes, Showalter argues, were constructed in order to keep women "in their place," an action that the fear and uncertainty of a fin de siècle often produces. This article reads Kate Braverman's contemporary novel, Palm Latitudes, in terms of Showalter's archetypal constructions but argues that at the close of the twentieth century, Braverman is able to use archetypes to crash borders, rather than to maintain them. This notion of border crashing leads to an argument about utopia: that utopia is a place, both textual and geopolitical, that can be made by erasing rather than enforcing linguistic, cultural, gender, sexual, and textual borders. The discussion ends on a note of hope that in the national and cultural borderlands of the U. S. we might indeed make and inhabit that utopia.