Book Review: Female Identity in Contemporary Fictional Purgatorial Worlds, ed. Simon Bacon
Vicky Brewster

Simon Bacon opens his edited collection, Female Identity in Contemporary Fictional Purgatorial Worlds, citing the current moment as one that is intrinsically purgatorial due to repetition and a feeling that one has reverted to the same political and cultural position as ten, thirty, even fifty years ago. This is particularly apposite in the realm of women’s rights, and Bacon goes on to describe how even the gains that have been made, the movements that suggest progress, rely on a repetitious retelling of trauma and fighting of battles once thought won (see particularly the overturning of Roe versus Wade in the USA). However, these purgatorial political and ideological events are also presented as battlegrounds for resistance, as “the purgatorial nature of women’s lives within a heteropatriarchal and traditionally conservative society … offer[s] possible strategies for coping and even resisting” (8). Gina Wisker, in her essay, agrees that contemporary texts offer “some form of hope beyond the, seemingly, purgatorial present” (169), demonstrating that while this is a text readily acknowledging the frustration of stasis, it also offers glimmers of hope.

However, the volume’s definition of ‘purgatory’ seems one wide open to interpretation. Erin Giannini and Dawn Stobbart take purgatory in the traditional religious context, or as reference to the second circle of Dante’s Inferno. However, this religious interpretation still allows for a focus on the self, as Pope Benedict XVI is quoted: purgatory is “the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God, and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints” (quoted in Giannini, 117). Wisker further cites testimony, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, as necessary to moving on rather than remaining in a purgatorial stasis. Elsewhere, purgatory is envisioned as a physical place where, for example, people might be in transition (Edrogan) or “the dark subterranean space in mythology” (Gomel, 41). These places are made purgatorial not just by their transitory nature, but as sites “where the fear of the past meets the fear of the future” (Gomel, 45), again reinforcing Bacon’s opening gambit of the current moment as a political purgatory. This is furthered by Cristina Santos and Sarah Revilla-Sanchez’s positioning of the USA-Mexico border as purgatorial in “the very real caged spaces of the ICE detention centres and the cries of families being forcibly separated” (66). These spaces are coded as feminine due to the mothers separated from their children at the border, and the women who dominate the transitory space of the hotel in American Horror Story.

Finally, purgatory is centred as a liminal between-space, “an intermediate state and … a state of suffering” (Young, 103) in a way that perhaps brings all of these purgatories together. The texts analysed bring suffering to the forefront, and particularly female suffering, in some form or other. The liminal purgatory, outside of time and space, is again associated with a loop that must be escaped, where “the trapped protagonist [can] use their accumulated foreknowledge and expanded understanding of the loop to either escape its confines or break the endless cycle altogether” (Edrei, 191). This does, of course, assume enough personal agency to allow an escape of the loop, despite many marginalised women’s experiences “locked in a cycle of poverty and dependence” (Bacon, 7). Perhaps the most interesting interpretation of the purgatorial is Giannini’s description of a place “occupying the margin … between their own narrative and the next” (137), situating the liminal moment as one interlinked with the stories we tell. In all of these interpretations of the purgatorial, there is an assumption of escape as possibility, despite the relentless pessimism of some of the chosen primary texts.

The slightly cumbersome title forefronts purgatory as a distinctly female text, and this is linked closely in several of the examples already given. There are, however, chapters that forget the gendered angle altogether, suggesting purgatory is the stronger focus of this collection. Where femininity is centred, it is often examined around the roles of womanhood – as mother, as wife – where more complicated and/or nuanced examinations of womanhood might be appreciated. This does, however, mean that this text would be suitable for a number of applications in exploring ideas of liminality, borderlands, and mythology without necessarily being only applicable to studies of gender. The approach to femininity is almost exclusively from a cis point of view, with only one essay touching on trans womanhood and no consideration of femininity expressed beyond the binary – a topic which might make for interesting further expansion, considering the border between and outside of genders as its own kind of purgatory. The collection examines popular texts from a number of different media, including novels, video games, film, and television series, as well as news media events of the last twenty years. There is a stronger focus on film than on other types of media, and several chapters are dedicated to the movie Silent Hill in a way that makes the collection feel heavily weighted towards that one intellectual property. The news media featured is almost exclusively North American, again suggesting a bias that is not apparent from the title. The purgatorial being a place outside of space, a more global focus might produce some illuminating further research.

Female Identity in Contemporary Fictional Purgatorial Worlds is a collection that will sit happily on the shelves of academics researching either purgatory or liminality, as the two are treated as reasonably interchangeable. It is accessible enough to be of interest to an undergraduate level or interested lay reader, while providing ample deeper analysis for researchers who specialise in these areas, particularly in terms of applying existing theory to hyper-contemporary texts. There is less reason to suggest this as a general text for gender studies, although some of the topics addressed – particularly Santos and Revilla-Sanchez’s comparison of La Llorona and the separation of mothers from their children on the USA-Mexico border – make compelling reading for a wider gender discussion.

 

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