A different path: marginality, resistance and Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy

Focusing on Drusilla Modjeska’s fictionalised biograghy, Poppy, and making use of a range of contemporary feminist resources, this paper has three main goals. First, to highlight the ways in which the text highlights the impact of “being a woman” in a world where women’s bodies are discursively constructed in narrow and limiting ways. Second, to emphasise the ways in which Poppy works to make explicit the constructed nature of the meanings associated with “Woman” and thereby highlights the potential for the term—and all it stands for—to be understood outside phallocentric logic. Third, to outline some of the ways in which the text demonstrates that specific forms of embodied subjectivity can be challenged and creatively re-written. The emphasis throughout is on the transformative potential of narratives such as Poppy that work to render problematic and move beyond traditional and normative understandings of Woman, towards representations of post- “Woman” women.