Gendering the short-story"Annunciation" by Meridel Le Sueur

Abstract

“Annunciation” is the story of a woman, who is going to have a child, and who writes joyfully about the experience of motherhood. The text also contains a profound feminist critique of patriarchally informed practices. It appears that Le Sueur genders her short-story as feminine and also as feminist. My paper proposes a doubly dialogic-feminist reading of her text. Through a reading of the novelization of the short-story, I hope to expand Bakhtin’s theories, which concentrate on the novel. I intend to remove the masculinism inherent in such theories by using gender as a tool of critical analysis. Categories such as the chronotope gain new insights not imagined before: e.g. the chronotope of pregnancy. Furthermore, if pregnancy has been defined by patriarchy as an illness, Le Sueur (re)writes the pregnant woman as an ethical model of relationships and shows pregnancy as a privileged site of artistic and revolutionary actions. Thus, besides its lyrical character, “Annunciation” contains profound messages and criticisms on which we must reflect, as responsive (feminist-dialogic) readers must do.