This project examines the portrayal of leftwing female and feminist “terrorists” in English-language realist novels, narrated from an insider perspective, within the social, political, and historical contexts from which the novelists derived their material. The texts under study depict the actions of fictional and historical women who were active participants in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, and other groups that advocated armed struggle against the nation-state and that espoused an international socialist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, cultural nationalist, and feminist ideological platform. Taking a transdisciplinary approach, I draw from narratological, historical, and feminist methodologies to analyze the ways in which such insider realist novels are complicit to varying degrees with the disciplining function of normative standards governing women’s behavior.

The primary novels under study include Henry James’s 1886 Princess Casamassima, Morgan Llywelyn’s quintet of novels about IRA violence, Marion Urch’s Dark Shadows, Susan Choi’s American Woman, Jay Cantor’s Great Neck, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. In using the term realism, I am following the practice of recent theorists who define realism, or realisms, as an evolving narrative mode which adapts to changing historical realities. Deploying Todorov’s concept of verisimilitude and the narratological tool of focalization, I show how the cultural taboo against the representation of feminist violence results in the fictional inscription of appropriately “feminine” maternal and nurturing values onto the female protagonists, leading to a rupture in the underlying structure of the realist form. I argue that politically violent women who engage in what Walter Benamin calls law-making violence are ultimately unnarratable within the formal structure of the realist novel due in part to Hegelian associations of women with familial piety.