Pilgrimage de Dorothy Richardson ou l’art du dé-place-ment et de la dérive comme réponse à l’appellation

• Main Author: Florence Marie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2014-06-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: a room of one’s own; drifting; feminine writing; gender identity; labelling; London
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1154

Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson (the article focuses on the first six volumes of the thirteen volumes of the work) can be read as the narrative of the different positions (which are not necessarily strictly chronological) of the main protagonist, Miriam Henderson, who chooses not to abide by the law of the ‘assignation à résidence’ (to be under house arrest—Derrida) to which she is condemned when she is labelled as a middle class woman at the turn of the twentieth century. This labelling is all the more lethal as it goes hand in hand with the notions of hierarchy and opposition. In the course of the article, we will evoke Miriam’s different answers to this labelling: feminist inveighing, misogyny, choosing not to choose, a choice which according to Jean Radford indicates ‘that gender identity is represented not as simple or fixed, a matter of biology or social conditioning, but as a complex series of provisional positions’. Deciding not to choose is in keeping with Miriam’s decision to settle in London, a town where drifting is a way of life, just as it is the main characteristic of the kind of writing that appeals to her. Indeed, Miriam’s refusal to be in a fixed position as a result of any form of labelling is reflected or anticipated in the writing of Pilgrimage, a kind of writing which values the mixing of genres, the instability of the subject, the active participation of the reader and the absence of a conclusion. All this means the reader is bound to question the label ‘feminine writing’ often attributed to Dorothy Richardson and to wonder whether ‘the writing of the feminine’ would not be more adequate.