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inward-looking nature of these spaces is often exacerbated by an absence of windows
and a profusion of mirrors, which dramatize the introspective nature of her fantasy
worlds. The closed space has long been recognised as the privileged space of the
fantastic. According to Rosemary Jackson the fantastic creates 'an additional space'
and 'this space is frequently narrowed down into a place or enclosure, where the
fantastic has become the norm. Enclosure is central to modem fantasy' .41 This pattern
seems to coincide with a large number offemale-authored fantastic texts. With further
depictions ofthe enclosed space as a prison, labyrinth, grave, cave, it has traditionally
been the locus of the female character and rarely a positive one. As such it also
coincides with women's hitherto limited space within literature. The otherness of the
fantastic space suggests that art offers some form of liberation only to present another
set of walls. One of the principal reasons for this is the necessity of using a (literary)
language that always articulates woman as Other. In this analysis ofCapriolo's work I
will explore how this anxiety manifests itself as link between spatial enclosure and the
limitations imposed by literary tradition, and more generally the dominant cultural
text which governs women's lives. Literary tradition may form just one part of that
cultural text but its primary connection to fiction gives it a privileged position in the
symbolic expression ofthat dominance.
The most obvious way in which women are situated differently in relation to
enclosure is through a perception of the female body as imprisoning mechanism. This
perception has been reinforced historically by establishing female worth around the
potential to function as a reproductive tool. Subsequently the enclosure of the body
has been one of the few acceptable ways in which women have been able to access
the sphere of creativity, always on many conditions. Female interiority, which women
writers are at pains to reappropriate in order to gain access to a creative space, is
dogged by its associations with the reproductive space. 42
The protagonist of 'La
Studies, 18 (2000),157-171 (p.159).
41 Jackson,pp.46-7.
42 In Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1981, first publ. 1969, pp.210-219) Kate Millet cites Erik
Erikson's notoriously essentialist study of male/female attitudes towards space, in which he equates
anatomy with destiny. See Erik Erikson, 'Womanhood and the Inner Space' (1964) in Identity, Youth
and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968). Adriana Cavarero suggests that the recent focus in Italian
feminism upon the matemal has provided some attempts to reappropriate the space of female creativity
by expanding our understanding of the matemal. She cites Silvia Vegetti Finzi, who suggests that the
infant desire of the girl child to produce autonomously is channelled by social codes into a desire to
produce a child: 'La sua proposta e cosi la ridefinizione di un campo simbolico che permetta alIa
pulsione generativa femminile di realizzare la propria creativa che ha, da un lato, il vantaggio di unire
in un solo nodo il corpo e il pensiero, e ha d'altro lato, la possibilita di trascendere la generazione
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