Merrill Turner, Washington University in St. Louis
Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring 2020), 105-122

This essay examines Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1995 historical novel The Blue Flower alongside Julia Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time” (1979). By telling the story of the engagement of German Romantic philosopher-poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (later known as Novalis; called Fritz in the novel) to twelve-year-old Sophie von Kuhn in narrative fragments, Fitzgerald proposes a non-linear, non-progressive time scheme for her central figures. The novel thus posits a vision of history that, by notion of its disordered chronology, is non-teleological and therefore feminine in Kristeva’s approximation. The chronology “advanced” by Sophie and eventually by Fritz works against traditional masculine or normative notions of temporality and instead proposes a schema that is plausibly female (cyclical and repetitive), thereby allowing the novel to drift from the Great Men model of history and rethink historical narratives and archives as specifically feminine.