Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Edward J. Ahearn

Critical Essay by Edward J. Ahearn

SOURCE: Ahearn, Edward J. “Visionary Women: Wittig's Guérillères and Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River.” In Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age, pp. 136-59. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Ahearn provides feminist interpretations of At the Bottom of the River and Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères.

The [chapters of Visionary Fictions] have traced a remarkably persistent tradition of writing, though one with a variety of permutations. In one way or another, all of our authors are visionary in that they reject the apparently solid world of reality in which most of us seem to exist. Both Blake and Aragon use the word visionary itself to describe their effort to transcend or dissolve the perceptual experiences that we take to be true. Blake's fourfold vision and Swedenborgian “Memorable Fancies”; dreams, imagination as “magic idealism,” the fantastic form of the Märchen in Novalis;...
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