Michèle Roberts’s The Looking Glass Essay -- Michele Roberts Looking G

Michle Robertss The Looking GlassThe understanding of taradiddle as a linear and unproblematic narrative, dominated by kings and queens, warriors and heroes, has long been denied by women writers. As Linda Anderson argues, these events take on a diametric meaning, a different configuration when we begin to see through them in both senses to womens concealed existence in the private sphere of family and home (Anderson, p.130). Women have olive-sized place in traditional linear history and have come to deny its authority and question its dominance. Frieda Johles Forman, in her introduction to a 1989 collection of essays on womens temporality, argues that women suffer from a lack of history, an unrecorded past, and that this absence strikes at odd, unsuspecting moments (Forman, p.8). But this absence of history is changing, as women begin to write their birth stories and their own conceptions of the past. Womens time and the political implications for feminism of feminist historio graphy have spawned a wealth of writing in recent years. Even in the academician piece of history, reliance upon major events as the narrative of history has been undermined by the possibility of a narrative of everyday lives, of everyday events and occurrences.1 However, this re-recording and re-making of history is fraught with danger, as Anderson warnsThe reclaiming of history, the discovery of how our foremothers preceded and even anticipated us, can help to assure us that, despite the evidence, we do in fact exist in the world yet if we ignore how that existence is textually mediated we end up simply reconstituting reality as it is. (p.134)Anderson argues that, despite the development of a critique of historys claim to objectivity a... ... and Sowton, Caoran, eds., Taking Our Time Feminist Perspectives on Temporality (Oxford Pergamon, 1989)Heath, Stephen, Flaubert Madame Bovary (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1992)Irigaray, Luce, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gill, G illian C. (New York Cornell University Press, 1993)Michaud, Guy, Mallarm, trans. Collins, Marie and Humez, Bertha (London Peter Owen, 1966)Millan, Gordon, Mallarm A Throw of the Dice (London Secker and Warburg, 1994)Oliver, Hermia, Flaubert and an English Governess (Oxford Clarendon, 1980)Pearson, Roger, Unfolding Mallarm The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford Clarendon, 1996)Roberts, Michle, The Looking Glass (London Little Brown, 2000)Spencer, Philip, Flaubert A Biography (London Faber and Faber, 1951)Steegmuller, Francis, Flaubert and Madame Bovary (London Constable, 1993.