What Fantasy Can Do for Her: A Critical and Creative Exploration of Secondary and Fractured Worlds

In making a distinction between secondary and fractured worlds, we can begin to determine the possibilities that fantasy literature, as a wider subject, holds for female characters and for feminine themes. These two areas of fantasy represent very different possibilities for women and the feminine, as a result of their approaches towards the presentation of ideology and authority. These approaches find their root most clearly in the creation of a story’s place and time, a fact I will explore through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope.” For, though both high fantasy and the fantastic question the real, representing, as Rosemary Jackson writes, a “dissatisfaction with what ‘is,’” they undermine the structure of that reality to very different degrees, with one mode seeking out a stabilizing transcendence, while the other revels in an ambiguous immanence. The creative response to this critical exploration will both imaginatively reflect on and practically test the initial questions posed and arguments made, in an effort to more personally understand how each tradition does or does not make room for women and the feminine