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Transcending the "Loophole of Retreat": Paule Marshall's Placing of Female Generations

The question of how to place female figures as fictional characters becomes crucial for authors (and their audiences) whose immediate ancestors were considered, and treated as, legal property, ancestors who lacked spaces of their own not just in the metaphoric sense, but who were quite literally not allowed to inhabit, let alone own, any physical space. "The woman occupies a central place only to the extent that it's a place assigned to her by the logic of masculine desire."' These remarks can serve as a paradigm for a Feminist awareness of the "non-place" or placelessness to which women are relegated in a patriarchal culture (in German Ortlosigkeit, a neologism that contains a curious combination of freedom from and desire for space which cannot be translated precisely). A culture that produces concepts like "the lay of the land" or "to conquer a woman," which are distinguished by their metaphoric equation of woman and land (meaning space, frontier, territory, wilderness, dark continent, but also cultivated or plowed fields, that is, mother earth after conquest or penetration), all but asks for this kind of perception. Virginia Woolf's old demand for "a room of one's own" appears to be more than justified, and on more than one level. Annis Pratt emphatically states that "we are the outcasts in the land, that we have neither a homeland of our own nor an ethnic space within society." The task women writers have to confront, then, in placing their heroines is twofold: they write against and have to break the patriarchal pattern of representationwomen = land and they also have to try to make room for women with and within their script. In (white, Western) feminist discourse, this problem has been discussed at length, however, without considering cultural, material, and legal differences in the status of women.3 That the black woman since the heyday of Victorian ideology and socalled science has had to function as the embodiment of "space/boundary/obstacle"4 for the white male, as the perfect site (and lure) of his transgression, is a fact not duly discussed by (white) feminists so far. The same holds true for the opposition of (en)light(enment) and dark (continent), in which the black woman stands for both fascination and terror with all its connotations, and which has been a constituting metaphor of our present white culture.5 As black feminist historians have pointed out lately, the black woman's predicament has been different from the black man's