Consciousness in the Feminist Novel

Abstract

The feminist novel specifically celebrates the triumph of the individual consciousness in all of its sensory, emotional, cognitive, and imaginative activities-as an authentic source of reality and of wisdom. In the process of the feminist narrative, the protagonist typically emerges into consciousness, asserting the validity of her own sensory data and perceptions over the established social structures of thought. Her new awareness surfaces when its conventional antithesis becomes unbearably incongruous with her own experiential and perceptual data or when the social modes of thinking threaten to destroy her. In order to bring the unconscious contents into consciousness, to extricate herself psychologically from the socializing forces, which are judgmental, restrictive, and inauthentic in essence, the feminist protagonist employs her own experience, introspection, investigation, memory, and fantasy.