Abstract
This essay explores the strategies whereby a female fictional historiography intercepts patriarchy's ownership of “sign and time” and alters the configurations of official history. Fiona Kidman's narrative covering three generations of women linked to the diasporic community initially headed by Norman McLeod is deemed to formulate its challenge to received linear history through a dialogic process consistent with Bakhtin's elaboration of this notion. This essay further argues that through its juxtaposition of the emergent counter-history alongside lyric time associated with maternal processes, Kidman's novel rejects the binary opposition between nature and culture, lyric and narrative, which patriarchy has used in order to deny women a place in the cultural continuum. It also contends that the female contestation of history is enabled through places, best exemplified by the house at Waipu, where women can constitute themselves as mothers as well as daughters to mothers. Thus the place of female exclusion and incarceration doubles as a sanctuary and archival resource from where competing feminist constructions are mounted.