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Rachel Bowlby's Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis is a book—or, let me be current, a text—with many purposes. To appreciate it or enjoy it at all, you will have to be willing to relax while it darts from one purpose to the next, loops back, stops and starts, shifts rhetorical levels, goes from mockery to microanalysis to musing. The text enacts its ideal for female writing—it is free to wander, free to walk where it wants to, free to be clever, witty, subversive, ironic, cute, contemporary.
If you are not willing to relax and wander with the text, you will be aiding and abetting a male project that is described in the first chapter. There you find that certain rules for female wandering, certain strictures on a female passante in the urban streets, have been laid down in the texts of or about well-known male flaneurs—Proust, Baudelaire—and that these constitute a constraint on women and on women's writing. The rules govern a “story that seems to have structured the sexual scene once and for all,” saying what women can do, who they are, what femininity is, why women are not allowed to be flaneurs. Those constraints were breached by Virginia Woolf as she wandered about Oxford musing on the themes of A Room of One's Own, as they were challenged by being ambiguously accepted, or accepted in an ambiguous way (we are now in Chapter 2 of Bowlby's book) by the novelist Jean Rhys.
Finding a rhetoric of one's own, these first two chapters say, has been the key quest of women's writing, but more than fiction is needed for the finding. Theory is needed. But theory, too, has had to contend with male versions of what and who women are. There is an image of the female passante implicit in Lacan's writings and seminars, for example, and she has had to be rescued by feminist