She wanders outside the ambit of civilization : discourses of nomadism in twentieth-century women's writing.

Abstract

This paper extends the sociologically-related term ‘nomadism’ to a literary analysis. It will figuratively map out nomadism along the twentieth-century, across notable women writers such as Muriel Spark, Jeanette Winterson and Djuna Barnes. Nomadism, conventionally tied to migration patterns of people who move from pastures to pastures, often cyclically and repeatedly trespassing similar paths, is figuratively skewed in relation to the nomad and her wanderings alongside the nomadic amalgamation of narratives, subjectivities, forms and categories. It is noteworthy that most sociologists and travel journalists are inclined to define nomadism as a convenient alternative to civilization. Nomadism’s avocation of liminality, processes and in-between craves and grants a creative space for autonomy and individuality that the twentieth-century woman has been deprived of. More than a mere opposition and substitution of civilization, nomadism goes beyond the subverting of patriarchal hegemony and aims to puncture all power structures that stifle and restricts. This paper will delineate how texts are manipulated with the absence or contrivance of the narrator and protagonist to actualize the nomadic quality of accommodating multiplicity and alternatives to traditional, civilized story-telling. It will then address how diversity, fusion and mediation in nomadism create a liminal and creative space that despite transience, offers the trapped and stifled twentieth-century woman the only means to a world outside the patriarchal, regimented and stigmatized society.