“I am a teacher cleaving a track through the undergrowth of method. I am a bird”: Teaching as a site of female subversion in Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Spinster

The aim of this paper is to scrutinise the influence of teaching on the female identity of Anna Vorontosov, the protagonist of Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Spinster. Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic and the symbolic is referenced to argue that the work of a teacher enables the heroine to transcend the patriarchal model of experience, predicated on rationality, self-restraint and stability. Through teaching, Anna renews her bond with the semiotic, surpassing the bounds of a unitary and fixed self. After providing an overview of Ashton-Warner’s own career in education, the paper analyses the tensions inherent in the role of a female teacher as represented in the novel and explicates them in Kristevan terms. Subsequently, detailed attention is paid to how the peculiarities of Anna’s teaching method contribute to her enhanced experience of the semiotic and shape her female self.anna.orzechowska@student.uw.edu.plAnna Orzechowska is a PhD candidate at the Institute of English Studies of the University of Warsaw. Her academic interests include New Zealand women’s literature, feminist studies, in particular psychoanalytic feminism, feminist existentialism and motherhood studies.University of WarsawAshton-Warner, S. 1986. Spinster. New York: Simon & Schuster.Ashton-Warner, S. 1963. Teacher. New York: Bantam Books.Durix, C. 2008. Sylvia Ashton-Warner: Portrait of an artist as a woman. World Literature Written in English 19.1: 104-110.Grosz, E. 1989. Sexual Subversion. Three French Feminists. Boston: Allen and Unwin.Gurewitz, S. C. 2016. Key words. In: D. Couchenour & J. Kent Chrisman (eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Contemporary Early Childhood Development, 779-781. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications.Hood, L. 2008. Sylvia!: The Biography of Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Auckland, N.Z.: Penguin.Keltner, S.K. 2011. Kristeva: Thresholds. Cambridge: Polity Press.Kristeva, J. 1977. About Chinese Women. New York: Urizen Books.Kristeva, J. 1997. Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini. In: K. Oliver (ed.), The Portable Kristeva, 303-330. New York: Columbia UP.Kristeva, J. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press.Oliver, K. 1993. Unravelling the Double-bind: Reading Kristeva. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.McAfee, N. 2004. Julia Kristeva. New York / London: Routledge.Mercer, E. S. 2016. Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s ‘strange cadences’: Rereading Spinster and Incense to Idols. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51.3: 1-19.Middleton, S. 2012. Putting Sylvia in her place: history, geographical theory and the ‘New Education.’ Paedagogica Historica 48.2: 263-282.Richards, I. (n.d.) Spinster as a work of art. No Frills New Zealand Literature, www.angelfire.com/nofrillsnzlit/Spinster.html (accessed August 2019).Robertson, J P. & McConaghy, C. 2006. Provocations: Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Excitability in Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.Smith, A.-M. 1998. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable. London: The Pluto Press.Tallon Russel, H. 2009. Irigaray and Kierkegaard: On the Construction of the Self. Macon: Mercer University Press.Tamboukou, M. 2000. The paradox of being a woman teacher. Gender and Education 12.4: 463-478.Thompson, N. S. 2000. Reclaiming personal meaning in literacy teaching. The English Journal 89.3: 90-96.Woolbright, M. 1992. The politics of tutoring: feminism within patriarchy. The Writing Centre Journal 13.1: 16-30.26 (3/2019)475