Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel to date presents the story of Harriet Burden, a muted artist that is literally burdened with a gender bias inherent in New York’s art world. Crafted as an academic investigation, the narrative accentuates the philosophical significance of phenomenology for feminist projects of cultural and social criticism and their respective takes on gender. As I will suggest, by focusing on the interplay of bodily processes and cultural classification in ordinary experience, Hustvedt’s text joins corporeal feminist positions on embodiment that take issues with the tenets associated with poststructuralist thought, from its bedrock belief in discourse to ‘the body as text’-paradigm. Rather, The Blazing World draws upon phenomenological body-concepts, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodied perception, in order to make explicit what remains implicit in social interaction. In leaving behind a nature/culture dichotomy, the novel carefully investigates the dynamics of embodied experience and social categories. In doing so, it follows corporeal feminists in their attempts to develop a nuanced understanding where notions of agency can be found and at what level (social) change may occur.
