From “Having it all” to “Away from it all”: Post-feminism and Tamara Drewe

This paper focuses on Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel Tamara Drewe (2007) as a post-feminist text that negotiates the contradictions of the eponymous heroine’s desire to get “away from it all” in order to “have it all.” Despite its twenty-first century concerns, Tamara Drewe also alludes to nineteenth-century forms in its loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) and Simmonds’s mimicry of Victorian landscape painting for the background of her text. This anachronistic approach enables Tamara Drewe to resist the totalizing efforts of the “post” and dismantle the singularity implied by “feminism.” Specifically, Simmonds exploits the graphic novel’s scopic regime to critique the presumed irrelevance of issues coded as “feminist,” such as “the gaze” to post-feminist culture. Finally, Tamara Drewe represents the experience of feminism as itself necessarily anachronistic, consisting of simultaneous and often conflicting histories.