Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference

Landscapes of Girlhood: Forest Space in A Russian Childhood and The Tragic Menagerie

landscapes of Girlhood: Forest Space in A Russian Childhood and The Tragic Menagerie Jane Costlow "Oh, it is good to be your age," Anna continued. "] remember that blue haze, like the haze on the mountains in Switzerland. That haze which envelops everything at the blissful time when childhood is just corning to an end and its huge merry circle narrows to a path which one treads gaily yet with dread into life's corridor, bright and splendid as it appears... Who has not been through it?" Anna Karcnina A woman's mind is a darkling wood. Traditional Russian Proverb Over a generation ago, Ellen Moers helped to inaugurate the study of women 's literary traditions by discussing the metaphors of space that were, as she saw it, distinctively female. Quoting Freud on the "complicated topography of the female genital parts" and their frequent representation as landscapes, Moers went on to claim that "female landscape knows no nationality or century," and that"guilty pleasure and renunciation are two of the themes with which women writers set off the landscape of female self-indulgence; others are ecstasy, even of a mystical nature; and freedom, and independent assertion, and fear." I Moers's discussion touches on Willa Cather, George Sand, and Kate Chopin, all of whom, she claims, prove that "certain lands have been good for women ... open lands, harsh and upswelling, high-lying and undulating, vegetated with crimped heather or wind-swept grasses, cut with ravines and declivities and twisting lanes" (262). Such landscapes were not the primary focus just a few years later of Moers's contemporaries in pioneering feminist criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The topography of women's lives is of equal importance for these critics of women's writing, but their argument hinges instead on landscapes of constraint and enclosure. For Gilbert and Gubar the attic of their title (drawn from Bronte's Jane Eyre) is the paradigmatic space of women's ex1 Moers, Literary Womel1, 254, 255. Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference. Hilde Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2008, 113- 31. 114 JANE COSTLOW perience. "[F]rom Emily Dickinson's haunted chambers to H. D.'s tightly shut sea-shells and Sylvia Plath's grave-caves, imagery of entrapment expresses the woman writer's sense that she has been dispossessed precisely because she is so thoroughly possessed-and possessed in every sense of the word.,,2 Women's writing in their analysis is marked not by landscapes of freedom but by the enclosures of domestic architecture; the natural landscapes they focus on are cave-like spaces whose role in women's writing is so often to evoke the womb, and the body as "tomb" of spirit. Nineteenth-century women writers, in their reading, subvert the cultural processes that would bury them alive, but they do so by reclaiming the cave as space of fertility and power, rather than painting open-ended terrain. Both of these enormously influential texts of feminist criticism take polemical aim at Erik Erikson's claims about women's psychology and their experience of space: Gilbert and Gubar refer to him directly, noting his"controversial theory of 'inner space'" as an attempt to "account for little girls' interest in domestic enclosure.,,3 Moers is less explicit but more sarcastic: her claim is that women's "brilliant landscape writing ... should give pause to the next critic who wants to pronounce all literary women housebound, and the next psychologist with a theory about "inner space.,,4 These polemics with Erikson work different angles of a possible argument: Gilbert and Gubar accept the notion of women writers' concern (even "obsession") with domestic space, but suggest that their treatment of that space is subversive, grounded in an experience of its severely debilitating effects. Moers, on the other hand, aims to crack the walls of Erikson's claim with her extensive quotations from women's writing about "wide open spaces." She too notes women's use of "enclosed space" in their descriptions, but their space is geologic, not domestic , and evokes for Moers the pleasures of sexuality and the liberation of the senses. These two critical works serve as useful starting points for an investigation of the role of landscape in the autobiographical writing of two late nineteenth-century Russian women, Sofya Kovalevskaya and Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal. The epigraphs above, from Tolstoy and the anonymous but authoritative Russian proverb, suggest powerful cultural (as well as literary ) associations of...