A Different Path: Marginality, resistance and Drusilla Modejeska's Poppy

Focusing on Drusilla Modjeska’s fictionalised biograghy,Poppy, and making use of a range of contemporary feministresources, this paper has three main goals. First, to highlightthe ways in which the text highlights the impact of “being awoman” in a world where women’s bodies are discursively con-structed in narrow and limiting ways. Second, to emphasise theways in which Poppy works to make explicit the constructednature of the meanings associated with “Woman” and therebyhighlights the potential for the term—and all it stands for—tobe understood outside phallocentric logic. Third, to outlinesome of the ways in which the text demonstrates that specificforms of embodied subjectivity can be challenged and creativelyre-written. The emphasis throughout is on the transformativepotential of narratives such as Poppy that work to render prob-lematic and move beyond traditional and normative under-standings of Woman, towards representations of post-“Woman” women.