In her bones: second wave “women’s time” in Tanith Lee’s The Winter Players

Abstract

During feminism’s second wave (circa 1960‒1980) a particular approach to time gained ground and was explored by many cultural feminist activists, thinkers and writers. This feminine time was conceived of as cyclical and organic rather than masculine, mechanistic and linear and developed out of the essentialist celebration of “Woman” that dominated cultural feminism during this period. These cultural feminists called for an embracing of “women’s time” which, they argued, would liberate women whose identities had been limited by the expectations of a patriarchal Western world and the patrilinear temporality it prescribed. Although their terms are considered problematically essentialist today, this remains an interesting moment in both feminist history and debates regarding temporality. This paper discusses fantasy author and feminist, Tanith Lee’s evocation and exploration of second wave cultural feminism’s “women’s time” in her 1976 novella The Winter Players. In this novella Lee’s protagonist is doomed to repeat a static, limited role for all time and in order to break free, steps into an alternative cyclical women’s time that undoes the authority of the paternalistic his-story that traps her. Once in this temporal space, she draws on both her own magical power and that of a female continuum of priestesses to reweave patrilinear time, in so doing empowering the women of her world to claim their right to public space/ time.