| Cultural geographers have examined the various conditions that have defined the spaces women occupy, from home and factory to prison and harem. Because their lives are so frequently constrained by their literal place in the world, the writing that emerges from such conditions---both real and fictive---carries the traces of all the forces that produce not only the women's places, but also the apparently unconstrained lives of men as well. That is, constraint provides the specific conditions of a literature that disrupts the very stories that constraint would seem intended to conceal. Women Out of Place examines the creative production of women in The Scarlet Letter, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Heart of Darkness, Orlando, and To the Lighthouse, and in stories including Sarah Grand's "The Undefinable," Ada Radford's "Lot 99," Mabel E. Wotton's "The Hour of Her Life," and Elizabeth Bishop's "In Prison" to argue for the creative value of spatial constraints in women's art and writing. |
