thebitterbabe

The purity of the ideology of the Second Wave, I believe, makes us lie about the dividedness and contradictions of our lives for fear of being seen as bad feminists.

[…]

Does literature written by women need to be feminist, or does it need to be honest, to document the cultural reality? Yes, to critique it but also to explore its nuances and perhaps even to subvert it. For sometimes we are destroyed by love. Or we don’t want to get old. These thoughts still haunt many of us. The novels of Rhys address the complexities of both our subjectivity and objecthood, our psychic colonialism, in a way that seems still so modern.

— Kate Zambreno, Heroines, pp. 270-271