Feminism and Dialogics: Charlotte Perkins, Meridel Le Sueur, Mikhail M. Bakhtin

This book proposes a dialogical feminist reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Meridel Le Sueur and Mikhail M. Bakhtin. The first part is devoted to the short story, considered one of the aspects neglected by Bakhtin. Gender, another of his oversights, is the cornerstone of this research. One of the arguments that the author defends is that the artistic hybrids of Gilman and Le Sueur symbolise the refusal of both to be confined within a single literary or sexual genre. The second part examines how Gilman's deconstructivist saga and Le Sueur's feminist bildungsroman serve to correct and expand Bakhtinian theory. Among other aspects, the female characters studied embody the female speaking subject. The third part evaluates the communities of women created by Le Sueur's and Gilman's fiction and their legacy for feminist and Bakhtinian theories. The paper (in)concludes by proposing a move from "feminist dialogism" to a "dialogic practice of feminism", where all feminist perspectives appear as literary genres/voices in a dialogic dialogue.