SOURCE: Froula, Christine. “The Daughter's Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History.” Signs 11, no. 4 (summer 1986): 621–44.

In the following essay, Froula considers the impact of female autobiographies—such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker's The Color Purple—on literary tradition and modern culture.

A still, small voice has warned me again to postpone the description of hysteria.¹

[Freud to Fliess, January 1, 1896]

I felt sorry for mama. Trying to believe his story kilt her.²

[Alice Walker's Celie]

In her speech before the London/National Society for Women's Service on January 21, 1931, Virginia Woolf figured the woman novelist as a fisherwoman who lets the hook of her imagination down into the depths “of the world that lies submerged in our unconscious being.” Feeling a violent jerk, she pulls the line up short, and the “imagination comes to the top in a state of fury”:

Good heavens she cries...