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within. And, in her efforts to recover her mother, Ginny is able to confront her memory of the father:

The dressing table was beside the window; the closet door was ajar; the yellow paint on the empty chest was peeling; some bronze circles floated in the mirror; a water spot had formed on the ceiling. Lying here, I knew that he had been in there to me, that my father had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts. That was the only memory I could endure before I jumped out of the bed with a cry.

(228)

Ginny’s search for her mother allows her to see her father differently and to transform her relationship to him. Watching him violate her body through this memory, she is abruptly forced to confront the dark corners of her own past, a Hades that contains a terrifying vision of her father attacking her while her mother’s back is turned. As she tells us,

One thing Daddy took from me when he came to me in my room at night was the memory of my body. I never remembered penetration or pain, or even his hands on my body, and I never sorted out how many times there were. I remembered my strategy, which had been a desperate limp inertia.

(280)

Opening up the landscape and seeing herself within it, Ginny becomes a Persephone figure, moving back and forth between surface and subtext, between father and mother. She belongs to both, and to neither completely.

IV Re-visioning the anxiety of influence

In her book, Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing, Elaine Showalter writes about the nature of women’s revisions of male-authored, canonical texts:

The validity of American women’s writing doesn’t depend on Shakespeare’s sister, and it can tolerate no more Dark Ladies. Our brave new world has many women in it, and we must make its myths together or not at all.

(1991:41)

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