'Every woman adores a fascist': feminist intervention in elegiac forms

This article is a fictocritical intervention in the patriarchal form of the elegy and a reflection on the expression of grief, anger and subjectivity by women writers. It uses Adrienne Rich’s writing on women’s self-destruction as a feminist methodological framework to explore two specific ideas. First, how we speak of the dead, which concerns the agency, subjectivity and anger with which we express our remembrance and our grief, and second, literary style and feminist interventions in the elegiac form.

Taking a fictocritical approach, the article combines the objective style of the academic mode with a subjective treatment, resulting in a cut-up text that combines analysis and my own reflections. In this, the article is informed by work by Anna Gibbs (1998; 2005) and Ross Watkins (2014). This multivocal approach aims to answer the question: how does the approach to the elegy form employed by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath enable a nuanced representation of grief, mourning and agency, and how can other women writers build on this approach to write to and through each other in the context of a patriarchal literary tradition?