Exploration and Colonization: A Survey of Representations of the
Female Body as Land or Territory
Sarah Harste ‟10
As a 21-year-old woman living in the twenty-first century, I am afforded
fundamental rights of which women a century or so ago could not dream.
Unlike my foremothers, I have the right to vote, to own property, and when I
marry, there will be no assumption that my husband is to take a position of
authority over me. But most importantly, I have space – a space in history
where I can be recognized, a space of my own that I am allowed to possess, a
possible space on the bookshelf for a book bearing my name. As a woman
interested in pursuing a future in writing, I will not look onto the bookshelf
containing novels from last 50, or even 20, years and see that barely any
space is afforded to the works of my sex, an experience about which Virginia
Woolf writes in her work A Room of One’s Own (1929). And beyond the
blank pages of a novel, I am allowed to possess and explore the space of my
body: it is a space all my own that is not entitled to any man.
My project deals with themes of space, specifically how men view the space
of the female body, as well as the way in which women view their own
bodies. I recognized these spatial themes in literature spanning over a century
of time and three continents: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an American author
commonly known for her novel The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), writes about a
continent‟s worth of space devoted entirely to women in her utopian works
Herland (1915) and With Her in Ourland (1916); African texts such as
Yvonne Vera‟s novels – Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1997),
and Butterfly Burning (2000) – Tayeb Salih‟s novel Season of Migration to
the North (1969) and Nawal El Saadwai‟s Women at Point Zero (1975, trans. 1983) bring in ideas of colonization, or
when one‟s space is penetrated by another; and in her book Written on the Body (1994), British novelist Jeanette
Winterson creates a virtual space in which gender does not factor into one‟s identity. Moreover, I connected the idea of
space from the female body to geographical space: in the novels I read, I observed a
common metaphor of the female body coming to represent land or territory. Thus,
geographical space became a point of identification for describing the space of the
female body. This metaphor appears in myriad images; descriptions vary from
nations and unexplored terrain to physical soil and vegetation.
This metaphor is important both in terms of female sexuality and the racial context
behind the colonization of Africa. Historically, male discourse about females and
the indigenous people of Africa has categorized each group as the Other, a label
which both alienates and oppresses them. Both females and Africa as a nation, and
by extension as a people, have been represented as a “dark continent” – a place to
discover, penetrate, and civilize. Sigmund Freud first referred to the female body as
a dark continent in his Essay on Lay Analysis (1926), from which he implied that
female sexuality is a mystery to psychologists and males in generali. Helene Cixous,
writing in regards to gender theory more than 50 years later, plays upon Freud‟s
concern about female sexuality by demonstrating the way in which male anxiety has
been imposed upon women. In her essay “The Laugh of Medusa,” Cixous explains
that men call the female body the dark continent so that a woman will not explore
this space without the aid of a man:
"As soon as (women) begin to speak, at the same time as they're taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is
black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. You can't see anything in the
dark, you're afraid. Don't move, you might fall. Most of all, don't go into the forest. And so we have internalized this
horror..." (Cixous 878)ii.
If men teach women that their continent is dark and unexplorable, as Cixous says, then the implication is that only men
can assume the position of exploring that which has not been “discovered”: female sexuality. By telling a woman to be
afraid of her own “dark… forest,” men ironically transfer their own fear about their lack of knowledge about female
sexuality to women – thus, frightening women from obtaining knowledge of their own bodies. Thus, female sexuality is
not a mystery, as Freud pointed out, but a secret – the knowledge of which only men can know.
Yet, another dimension of “discovery” only being a male occupation is the
implication that something is not discovered until a male has discovered it. In his
work “On the sexual theories of children” (1908), Freud demonstrates his belief
that obtaining knowledge is an act of discovery, in regards to a male child
discovering that his mother has a vagina instead of a penis: “For standing in its
way is his theory that his mother possesses a penis just as a man does, and the
existence of the cavity which receives the penis remains undiscovered by him”
(Freud 218)iii. As Freud writes here, it is only once the male child has discovered
“the existence of the cavity” that the mother becomes a woman in the child‟s
eyes. In this way, Freud demonstrates the belief that only male discovery can
bring something into existence: only once a male has obtained knowledge of
female sexuality does female sexuality actually exist.
By relating the female body to a place to be discovered by men, and by referring
to it as a dark continent, female sexuality is linked to the colonial history of
Africa. Like Africa and its inhabitants, the female body is dark; a dark space
suggests that it is both unknown and wild, and that knowledge of it has not yet
been obtained. Mary Ann Doane discusses this link in her book Femmes Fatales:
Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (1991)iv:
“The dark continent trope indicates the existence of an intricate historical
articulation of the categories of racial difference and sexual difference… linking the white woman and the colonist‟s
notion of „blackness.‟ Just as Africa was considered to be the continent without a history, European femininity represented
a pure presence and timelessness” (Doane 212).
In light of Africa‟s colonization, the reasoning behind comparing the female body to territory makes more sense:
believing that the female body is just as indigenous as the dark continent of Africa, males asserted the same logic to a
woman‟s space as they did to this geographical space.
However, all of the texts I‟ve read seem to critique this male-centered view of the female body, as well as attempt to
conceive how a woman‟s space should be viewed: as space for a woman to discover for herself, to possess, and to explore.
Interestingly, the metaphor of exploration doesn‟t disappear; instead, it is reconfigured from an oppressive description to
an approach that allows women to celebrate the space of their own bodies. In this way, my project shows a movement
from one perception of space to another: from the female body as a space possessed exclusively by men to a woman‟s
own space that she may possess and explore.
i
Freud, Sigmund. The question of lay analysis: conversations with an impartial person. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York:
Norton, 1969.
ii
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1
(Summer 1976): 875-893.
iii
Freud, Sigmund. (1908) “On the sexual theories of children,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud 20. London: Hogarth (1950-74).
iv
Doane, Mary Ann. “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,” Femmes
Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.