ries, challenging their status as necessary figurations. By accepting her own aggressive desires a modern Emily might help to defuse the charged metaphor linking sexuality to war.
Neither childbearing nor chastity, conception nor contraception, have meanings in themselves. No more does war, or the war text. All are elaborately socialized, constructed forms of human interaction that we must struggle to see together, like the entangled remains of Achebe's girl and soldier. To see how women and men have constructed war texts out of cultural data is not to recanonize those texts but rather to unload the can[n]on.
Achebe, Chinua. "The War Girls." In Girls at War and Other Stories. London: Heinemann, 1972.
Barrett Elizabeth Browning. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Edited by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke. 6 vols. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1900. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1973.
_____. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Edited by Frederic C. Kenyon . 2 vols. New York: Macmillan Co., 1897.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by F. N. Robin son . 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957.
-23-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Arms and the Woman:War, Gender, and Literary Representation.
Contributors: Helen M. Cooper - Editor, Adrienne Auslander Munich - Editor, Susan Merrill Squier - Editor.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press.
Place of publication: Chapel Hill, NC.
Publication year: 1989.
Page number: 23.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
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