The Pink Guitar

"The Pink Guitar" looks at the depiction of women and the uses to which culture has put the female figure; at the same time it asks how a woman artist can make a place for herself among these gender-intensive representations. Starting with the work of William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp, DuPlessis turns to a number of modernist and contemporary women writers (notably Virginia Woolf, as well as Susan Howe and Beverly Dahlen) to explore the possibilities of finding a language, and a set of cultural stances, which would question the deepest-held assumptions about gender. The whole tradition of the writing of poetry and fiction, DuPlessis argues, has colonized female figures, yet women writers have a considerable force; the women writer is a power in her own work, but an artefact in the traditions of meaning on which she draws. "The Pink Guitar" includes the essay "For the Etruscans" along with other work on the gendering of writing practices.