On Female Wilderness

Women have always been a mystery to the world and men in it. Since prehistoric times and the appearance of the first written documents, myths, legends, and since the period of the writing of the Bible, we come across number of female characters that intrigue, catch attention and enrapture interest with their mystical, wild personality - "the female otherness " becomes a reality and epithet, not just a part of the negative male rhetoric, present both in everyday life but in literature as well. Women as "the dark continent", as "a wild zone" where male foot does not dare to thread are a topic for analysis of many scientific research papers and feminist theories. However, the most thorough and probably the most daring analysis of such theory was done by the feminist Elaine Showalter, and the two anthropologists, the spouses Shirley and Edwin Ardener, whose literary critical theories are directed towards the female specificity and mysteriousness. In this book, the female "wild zone" is analyzed through several mysterious, wild, unusual distinctive female characters present in works of two prominent contemporary American female writers, Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich.